One Of Terry's Corners Of the Online World

Occasionally the Interworldwidewebnets still has the capacity to awe me in a good way. As we all know, I podcast. I find it immensely satisfying and a number of other people find my spin on classic cinema to be both worthwhile and entertaining and it keeps me out of Sal's hair one Sunday in three.

After recording and editing the audio to take out all the ums, ahs and the bits where I accidentally call Budd Schulberg Budd Schulberger about ten times (taking out the "er" is easier than you might suspect), I sit on the couch, upload it to the hosting site while watching TCM and knock out some blog postings to announce the latest opus of my ouevre, then when noodling around on the hosting site I patched together this:



It's a planetary map of fifteen hours of downloads of my podcast and I am wowed by it. Moscow! Tallin! Vienna! Paris! Bootle! North fucking Carolina! On a nanoscale I'm a global phenomenon! I remember when you had to send 100K of fanzine for weeks across the ocean encrypted on sheets of photocopied paper and it cost a bloody fortune and there was no way some mec sitting outside an estaminet on the Boulevarde des Italiens was going to listen to it on his i-pod while sipping pernod.

I speak into a microphone and people on the other side of the planet hears it softly in their ears hours later. That's both awe-inspiring and humbling. Those of us who have internet access are just that close these days. We share joys, traumas, interests, enthusiasms, opinions, life-changing events and trillions of pictures of cute little pussycats across the planet. Every three weeks I cast my fatuous utterances to the planetary winds of information and they land in cool and wondrous place. It's scary, but really fucking cool.