As the world enters a new calendar year, my personal interactions with the world reach dizzying new heights: having run this blog now for over 100 blog posts it is expanding from visual-only to aural.
Admittedly, I’ve been able to achieve this because it was handed to me on a platter: between my work-for-money jobs I don’t have a lot of time for my work-for-love projects, this blog being one of the latter as I am not yet monetising it (how did that even become a word? asks this English teacher incredulously). I’m delighted, therefore, that the symbiotic relationship between WordPress and Anchor has (reasonably) effortlessly allowed me to expand the sensory reach of my writing from sight to sound, thereby reaching new audiences (which could in fact be the same audiences consuming my content in a different format, but I won’t let that bother me: statistics never lie).
I’m equally delighted to introduce the latest member of my one-person team: the ever-efficient computerbot Remy. The dedication she has shown to my cause is second-to-none: she is a computerbot of fine standing, working tirelessly around the clock to speak to whoever clicks on my podcast no matter what their timezone is: gosh, it’s like she’s a machine, the way she’s waiting in the wings, ever ready, poised to perform at the click of a button. Such dedication to my cause I myself have never been able to achieve, my quest for sleep being rather regular.
I’m particularly in awe of Remy’s diligence to read out everything, and by that I mean E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G, on the script before her. This includes the woefully-long url addresses of my earlier entries – before I learnt how to insert hyperlinks through that groovy little button in the options menu.
Her reading of my occasional glossaries is also noteworthy: reading the superscript numbers within the text as she goes, then later those same superscript numbers reappear seemingly randomly, if the original script didn’t have a heading orientating the listener to the switch from main text to notes – something the reader can see at a glance due to the smaller font and other visual cues. In this way my newest team-member is teaching me to tweak the way I arrange the writing in my posts, so that she can read them with better ease. Not that she ever stumbles – she rarely mispronounces my words (unless you consider her American accent a mispronunciation of the Australian English I write in). She did once mistake “live” the adjective for “live” the verb, so the explanation of the live webcam over the Westgate Bridge sounded more like an aspiration for people to “live as a webcam”, or a direction for the webcam to “become sentient, rise up and take charge” of its life – rather than a description of a “webcam showing footage in real-time”. That was amusing!
WHERE TO FIND MY PODCAST
If you are on any of the seven platforms below, and fancy using your ears to listen to me (well, listen to my computerbot Remy speaking for me) as well as, or instead of, using your eyes to absorb my thoughts, follow these links:
This blog having grown organically, with every blog post being a different length Just Because It Can Be, it follows that each podcast episode is equally organic and differently-timed. There’s excitement in the anticipation that you won’t always know how long you’ll be listening to me for!
Due to the unique nature of the symbiotic relationship between WordPress and Anchor I’m unable to schedule podcast episodes until they have been published on my blog, so I haven’t yet found a way to schedule them every two weeks like I do with my blogs. However, if you choose to follow me you’ll be pleasantly surprised at random times to find numerous episodes arriving simultaneously in your feed. What more could you ask for?
Finally, a shout-out to the musician who intros and outros the verbal content of each podcast episode. Oh wait, that’s me! Well, well done, Annabel, on your gorgeous guitar-playing which seamlessly segueways into and out of Remy’s reading. Don’t we make a great team?
Annabel Harz: Author and Artist 