All posts by Murph

Radio Show

This Halloween is something, to be sure

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Well, I was just over on Reclaim Open talking about the radio show and coming to the idea that I don’t need a show website, I just need to put content here.

So let’s do that.

VOID 1680 AM is a solo role-playing game of being a DJ, making a playlist, and taking calls from randomly-generated callers. I don’t follow the rules terribly closely, but I’ve enjoyed creating the character of supernatural advice show host Dr. Jekyll. He took romance questions on Valentine’s Day, and was back for Halloween. Here’s his show:

Between tracks 3 and 4, we took a call from “a young caller going through violent changes.” Here’s that exchange:

Hey Doctor Jekyll. I think aliens are after me. Every month my house gets super hot and bright and loud, and I have this strange desire to get outside and look at the sky. Then I lose the rest of the night and I wake up in a field somewhere, my clothes are torn and I’m dirty with… something .. some of it’s dirt… and I feel like I had an incredible sleep after an enormous workout. What can I do?

Now I’m not saying it’s aliens… actually I’m saying it’s not aliens. In fact that’s kinda racist. Every alien I know finds the whole abduction and probing thing really offensive. Most of them are really serious about consent, and for that matter security clearance. The other ones, well, they just eat ya. But I don’t know any true stories about alien kidnappers.

I think you know what I’m gonna say. You say “every month” but I bet it’s every 28 days. And I bet when you look up at the sky, you don’t see a flying saucer, you see a big round moon. Now the good news is you got about a week before the next full moon; we’re gonna send you some contact information about your local pack. They’re good folks, give them a call. They’ll keep you safe, get you some education, be a good network. You don’t have to go through this alone.

You’re never alone… as long as there’s VOID 1680 radio.

If I’m completely honest, I’d decided that one of these “randomly generated” characters was going to be a werewolf as soon as I heard Neko Case’s new track “Baby I’m Not“.

Imagine my confusion and my horror
As my body said to me as if to another
“Baby, I’m not, mmm-mmm
Baby, I’m not, mmm-mmm
Baby, I’m not a werewolf
But I don’t know about you”

Between tracks 7 and 8, I knew I was going to read a story my friend Tom had published on author Cynthia Pelayo’s Substack. But how fortunate I drew ” hispers from the living or the dead.”

You can read Tom’s story Leaf Pile here.

Between tracks 10 and 11, I got “a young caller with obsession, affection or hatred.” That went this way:

Doctor Jekyll, there’s a girl I’m just fascinated with. I can’t stop thinking about her; she reminds me of someone from long ago and I just end up laying in my coffin thinking about her. But I don’t even think she knows I’m undead. Her friends really really hate me but I just know I have to have her. What can I do?

What you can do, my Transylvanian friend, is get educated. Obsessive relationships are the leading cause of death for vampires aged 35 to 400. Well, OK, technically, stakes and sunlight are the leading cause of death but obsession with a specific mortal is the leading cause of stakes and sunlight. You’ve got eternity ahead of you; go play the field. Get out of the castle, throw on some clothes that are 30 to 40 years out of date but still look cool, meet some people. Check out her friends.

But if you’re not gonna listen to me… maybe she’s a dog person, try walking a wolf. Girls like puppies.

Featured image “Halloween Candy“, by me, CC-BY-NC-2.0

Audio, Biographical, Radio Show

Feed your head

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My friend Tom Witherspoon has been modelling writing to a prompt and having the bravery to post the results. We even talked about it a little bit and the value of sharing those sketches of ideas.

It occurred to me that I do this all the time on my radio show. I’ll drop in a story or two related to a song, or the theme for the night, or whatever. Usually these get a little mental preparation, but a proper written draft would probably make them even better – and why not share those here?

So of course I’m going to cheat on my first one, because this got aired last Friday. But here it is.

It was past sunset and starting to get dark as we exited Fort McAdams. And as we walked towards the ferry, the tall, dark-haired woman walking next to me started to hum the traditional closing song of the Newport Folk Festival, Goodnight, Irene. So I decided I would hum along with her. She smiled.

She asked me what my favorite moment of the weekend was. And I said, “Well, I don’t know if it was the best moment, but my favorite of the moment of the weekend was the set from Illiterate Light,” who I am just entirely in the tank for. I thought they put on a great high energy show and I had a soul-feeding good time.”

She said, “You know, I love Josh and Jake. I love they run the bike stage. I love that they bring us terrific acts who play on the bike stage. But their music… I call it cheese grater music. It’s like taking a cheese grater to my brain.”

And in fairness, it is. The band is two guys, drum and guitar and a whole mess of feedback and processing and an immense amount of personal energy. And I really enjoy it, but I can see why somebody’s first reaction to it, especially live, would be “that’s a whole lot, maybe too much”. I feel like somebody else got that reaction at Newport at least once.

This comment stuck with me for a while. I was driving back when it finally occurred to me. Sometimes you need a cheese grater. You want to make a pizza, a quesadilla, a casserole, a fondue… ok, sure, I guess you can use sliced or cubed or crumbly cheese, but that tool exists for a reason. Sometimes it’s good to rip and tear so you can recombine the shreds, even if there’s a little bit of knuckle-skin in there too.

And sometimes I think you need to take a cheesegrater to your brain. Rip off some of the stuff that’s gotten too tough and see what’s underneath, taste the shreds and see how they recombine. And so this is the rock set, featuring Illiterate Light. Please imagine the opening card for The Last Waltz: this music should be played loud.

Featured image is my own picture of the Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge, taken from Jamestown, RI, on the night of July 27th, 2025.

AudioAssignments, Radio Show

Mixxx Cheat Sheet

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I’m going to talk about blogging in 2 hours, better publish a blog post…

One of my friends and listeners is showing some interest in learning how to DJ on #ds106radio and asked me for a “Mixxx cheat sheet.” So of course I dusted off Joe’s Fork of the Mixxx Documentation (Good Bits Version). And eventually realized that’s not a cheat sheet.

And then I realized that there is in fact an “easy button” for getting started with Mixxx. And here it is.

As already described, get a copy of Mixxx and have it ingest your local collection of audio files.

In the left sidebar, go to the Playlists item and right-click to Create New Playlist. Give it a name. (Or accept the New Playlist default; I’m not the boss of you. But if you do this twice you’ll probably want to give it a name. Actually, naming conventions should be a whole nother post.)

Oh, look at that. Right under Create New Playlist there’s an option for Import Playlist. So if your local music player will export an M3U file, the real cheat sheet version is probably “make your playlist in the player you already know, then export it and import to Mixxx.” I have learned that Apple Music and Mixxx don’t handle diacriticals the same way, so you will need to proofread, but it might be less fiddly.

But because I literally just now figured this out, I generally go to the Tracks item in the sidebar and do some combination of browsing and searching to find the tracks I want. You can add tracks to playlists with drag-and-drop or by right-clicking to get the Add to playlist option in the popup menu.

The little headphones-and-play-button icon to the left of each track is a very helpful preview button, as you’re trying to decide which track to pick and how they fit together.

Now here’s the fun part. I love spinning my stacks of wax live, but it’s also where most of the stress and almost all the human error is introduced. For cheat sheet purposes, the next step might be to right-click your playlist and choose Add to AutoDJ Queue. (“Replace” is probably the best cheat sheet option; I’m sure you can figure out how “bottom” and “top” work.)

AutoDJ will handle the mixing for you. If you’re really into DJing, you might set intro and outro cues and really think about how tracks will fade into each other so it sounds awesome. But this is a cheat sheet, so let’s just put that on the “someday maybe” list. What I do is to set AutoDJ to play the Full Track, and set the transition time to -1 seconds. If I’m honest 0 would be fine for making sure tracks don’t overlap in ugly ways, but -1 ensures there’s always a breath between tracks.

AutoDJ Settings

So if your AutoDJ’d playlist sounds good, the last step would be to get the settings for Live Broadcasting from one of your friendly neighborhood DS106ers. (No, I’m not gonna post a screenshot of those here.) Then you tell people to tune in, check for the unlikely event that someone else is using the stream, and hit the On Air button in the upper right corner.

Ta da, you’re a DJ!

AudioAssignments, DS106, Radio Show

when we’re gonna hear that song

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Well, the great Alan Levine left the right comment on the last post. He asked when’s the next one?

So I’m going to dust off a really old draft and find some way to hit publish on it.

I’ve been having a lot of fun DJing on DS106 Radio. (Usually Friday nights, usually 7 PM-ish Eastern US time.) It’s a free-form, live streaming station originally set up to broadcast the audio creations of the DS106 digital storytelling class/community. “Free-form” sounds pretty artistic, but what it really means is that at any given time, someone might be playing tunes, talking with friends, experimenting with different ways to capture and broadcast sound, playing a produced story, or all of the above.

OK, it really really means “we’re making it up as we go along.” One time on Twitter I said that DS106 Radio is kind of like walking down a dorm hall in college and hearing that your friend has a cool album on with the door open. This is the part I like best – the chat about music (or whatever sound or story is going on) that happens on social media while someone’s on the air.

So this is the post where I say some things about how I broadcast. I won’t represent that this is the best way, and it’s certainly not the only way, but it’s the one which works for me, for the purpose of playing music.

Step 1: Have an idea

I think this is the biggest hurdle. You have to believe that you have an idea which, at a minimum, will entertain you for as long as it takes to prepare and play it. My friends seem to like either what I play, or the fact that I’m playing it. But just in case no one tunes in, I might as well be having a good time.

Here’s the good news: anything is an idea. “I want to play this album all the way through” is a nice easy one. “These are some good songs I’ve heard recently” is a good one. Many of my playlists start that way. I have a standing Thursday night card game, and I usually have my iTunes either playing an album or on random shuffle, and whatever song makes me think “oh I haven’t heard that in a while” becomes the tent pole for the show on Friday.

My show doesn’t have a predictable genre, so a genre set is an idea. (My “idea” from Thanksgiving to New Years is “Christmas songs.”) Recent musician birthdays and deaths work well. I’ve had some fun with keywords – I did a St. Patrick’s Day set that was just a search for the word green.

(I have an open challenge from a friend to “rock around the clock” – a set full of songs which reference the time of day. This one has stumped me but I’d welcome your suggestions in the comments.)

Step 2: Get a big collection of MP3s.

Status bar from Apple Music reads "7,485 items, 20.5 days, 51.80 GB"
Mission accomplished

This is not a requirement; it’s just how I do it. I do have a cheap turntable I can use for a “vinylcast”, and I know how to get the audio from a streaming source on the air. But most of my listening is based on digital files on my hard drive, and most of my broadcasting is too.

I know it’s a little weird to talk about virtuous consumption and pirate radio at the same time, but the fact is, artists make a lot more money when we buy their works than when we stream it. So this choice is important to me.

Full disclosure: I do end up spending something between $2 and $20 per show most weeks, depending on whether I’m buying singles or springing for whole albums. (Honestly $20 is rare, but $10 isn’t.) So it’s a little unclear if this is a hobby, or a habit.

Step 3: Get a copy of Mixxx

Why Mixxx? Because it’s free. Yeah, at the end of the day, that was my whole thought process. I didn’t know if this was going to stick, and I didn’t want to spend $70 on Audio Hijack and use it once. Anything Icecast-compatible should work.

Mixxx is imposing to look at. Definitely from the “more buttons is better” school of interface design. Explaining Mixxx is also where this post has consistently ended up in the drafts folder, so maybe I just need to promise that I will do a more specific “here’s how I make Mixxx work” post so I can hit publish on this thing.

If I had one major gripe with Mixxx, it’s that I keep thinking that all those buttons and especially dials would be easier if I bought a hardware controller. (Dials are awesome in analog but really suck with a mouse.) I’ve resisted so far but…

Step 4: Make a playlist

The next step for me is to create a new playlist and start dragging songs onto it. This is technically about the same as doing it on Spotify or Apple Music or probably any other digital music player, and conceptually the same as using a double-deck boombox to make a mix tape.

Mostly, I spend a lot of time previewing the starts and ends of songs to see how they’ll go together. Probably the next thing I could do to get better would be documenting songs that could be shorter – noodley intros and outros, long chunks of applause or banter on live tracks – so I could mix around them.

I also try to keep an eye out for the maudlin section which gets into most of my playlists. Three sad songs in a row is pretty much my limit. Well, it’s not my limit, but it’s the limit of what I want to inflict on my friends and an unsuspecting public. (My friends, really, should know the sentimental fool they’re dealing with.)

Step 5: On the Air

Then, for me, I go live and play it. I like doing this in real time, dragging tracks from the playlists to the decks and deciding when to hit play. I like announcing in real time too. For me, the Friday evening show is a ritual, and I want the focus of the live event.

That said, Mixxx has an “autoDJ” feature which will run through a playlist on its own, and I’ve found it useful when I want to broadcast but also split my attention. And I’m impressed by eLearning Techie, who prerecords her entire shows, and broadcasts them free of technical or verbal flubs.

OK, that’s enough for now. I will try to have the “seriously, how do you make Mixxx work” post together in less than another 3.5 years (which is how long this one sat in draft).

Audio, Radio Show

Like a puppet on a string

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Well, I’ll be danged. This thing is still on.

Animated gif of the 1937 animated Snow White coming into a dirty room full of Disney fauna, with the legend "It's covered with dust"

(I know it’s covered in dust but now I’m wondering if this blog is also covered in chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits and deer.)

The good folks of the Reclaim Hosting Blogging Community of Practice made me feel better about having a neglected blog, and that the difference between having a neglected blog and an un-neglected one is just hitting publish on something so…

I’ve been making bumpers (those little Station Identification messages) for DS106 Radio. This is a fun little audio editing exercise, and a reason to make cheap jokes. And then it occurred to me that I could use oblivion.university to get someone else’s voice involved.

Dr Oblivion Christmas DS106 Radio Bumper

This was the first big experiment with an AI-enabled bumper, in December ’23. The prompt was “Could you make a christmas parody for DS106 radio?” And sure enough, Dr. Oblivion rewrote Jingle Bells in one take. (Note that I didn’t actually specify what to parody!) Then I found a suitable goofy open-licensed copy of Jingle Bells by Mystery Mammal on Free Music Archive, and cut the two together in GarageBand with just a wee little bit of volume adjustment. I picked a copy of the song that was fast enough to almost match Dr Oblivion’s speaking rate; I no longer remember if that was intentional or good luck. I did have to add some breaks to let the music in, but within a line the Doctor doesn’t get too terribly far ahead of the beat.

Partial screenshot of a GarageBand window showing the continuous "Jingle Bells" track above the cut up and synchronized "christmas parody dr oblivion" track

There were a couple of lessons involved here. Maybe the biggest one is that I’d heard that AI can’t be funny, but I think this is funny enough. I did like it better with some of the lines re-arranged from the original, but I didn’t do any re-prompting, just re-ordering. Dr. Oblivion kind of botched the bridge by putting it at the end; I had to splice it between the verses and honestly only half of it was funny, which is why you only get half a bridge.

DS106 Disclaimer – Dr Oblivion and Dr Jekyll

Bryan Alexander was good enough to tell me about VOID 1680, the solo role-playing game where you create a playlist and the rulebook tells you about the callers to your radio station who might be requesting a song or telling you their story. (It feels very Welcome to Night Vale, at least the way I play it.)

Hat tip also to Pilot Irwin who played a game about the radio advice show at the end of the world (called “Long Time Listener, Last Time Caller“) on the Reclaim Hosting/DS106 Radio Summer Camp, which gave me a little more spine about radio roleplaying games.

This bumper was for my Valentine’s Day show, which I decided would be VOID 1680’s romantic advice for the paranormally inclined. In the tradition of the great radio and TV doctors of unclear qualification… I bring you Doctor Jekyll.

Also in the tradition of stations that want the attention of a celebrity host but not the legal liability, I figured we needed a disclaimer. I was going to write and record it myself, but then I figured it might sound better to have another voice entirely.

I didn’t screenshot my prompt for this one, though I know I included the part about not being accredited in any “scientific or pseudoscientific” field. (I probably did say accredited; I probably didn’t say “realm”.)

The editing was just finding a suitably spooky track to lay the voice over; “Romantic” by Serge Quadrado fit the bill.

Dr. Oblivion’s Lullaby

This was the week when I just didn’t have any inspiration for a playlist, so I decided to throw an album on. I really enjoy doing whole-album playthroughs; it’s a good reminder that song order isn’t necessarily algorithmically generated and some songs really were intended to be juxtaposed.

My prompt for this one was “Please make a bumper for the Friday Night Tunes show on DS106 Radio. This should be a sarcastic but sympathetic announcement that Joe is too tired or frazzled to do a proper playlist, so tonight’s show is an album playthrough.” Again, the AI plucked the details out of the prompt pretty well. “Sarcastic but sympathetic” seemed to be an emotional target that was easy to hit… it remains to be seen whether that reflects on generative AI or the good folks behind Oblivion University.

Again, the audio was ready to go out of the box, so I just had to pick a nice sleepytime song. Brahms’ Lullaby by Howie Mitchell and Ruth Meyer was just right.

Níl sé in ann Gaeilge a labhairt

I attempted to get Dr. Oblivion to speak in Irish for my St. Patrick’s Day bumper. It attempted to apply English phonetics and failed miserably at producing recognizable Irish, even to my ears only trained on Duolingo. More surprisingly, it complained first about being asked to speak in another language when it has perfectly good English to use. I was ready for the snark but not the ethnocentrism. Presented only as an example of AIs going in unexpected and undesirable ways.

I don’t quite know what, if anything, to make of all this. I think it’s telling that I have little interest in using a generic AI voice. It’s meaningful to me to have Jim Groom’s voiceprint as part of my hobby, even if he didn’t have any relationship to the words coming out of his “mouth”. If I didn’t have some connection to the voice, I’d probably rather figure out how to filter my own into a new “character”.

It’s also fair to say that any of these could have been accomplished with a note to Jim asking him to record something, and (given time and energy) he probably would have done it. Is it cool to use technology to have a parasocial interaction with someone I actually do know? In this case, of course, Jim put the tool out there for use, and he’s liked my Mastodon posts about these bumpers, so yeah, it’s cool. But there’s some point at which this joke would feel old and kind of weird, and it’s not hard to extrapolate out from there.

Featured image “2014/365/351 On The Air At CFBX” by Alan Levine.

Meme of Disney’s Snow White found on Yarn (without credit)

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Just to feel free and be someone

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with thanks to Gregory Pardlo and Pádraig Ó Tuama

The sky is clear, immaculate, and the Big Dipper is as big as I’ve ever seen it.

And it’s not your hand I’m holding. We can’t hold hands anymore anyway.

But the dog holds my hand, her yellow nylon leash taut, as she pulls me on with her snuffling love of scents, with her bounding joy for the running neither of us could do a month ago.

She drags me on, barking at those white-tailed bastards mocking her in the dark.

And I squeeze your hand back, and make a wish for us.

Text, Thoughts and Ideas

Enterprising men quote ’em

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I was joking around on Twitter with Michael Berman, about vendor tweets appearing in a conference stream. You can see the thread, but the point is, he called me a chatbot.

https://twitter.com/amichaelberman/status/1056944712756514816

And that sounded a bit like a challenge.

Specifically, it sounded like a challenge to find something that spit out the buzzwords of educational technology, like I was doing with Michael. And then the Imp of the Perverse whispered in my ear that maybe what I should do is mashup famous quotes with those buzzwords.

And so @EdtechEpigrams was conceived.

I have a memory that Networked Narratives includes a “make a Twitter bot” activity, so thanks to Alan Levine and Mia Zamora for leaving me that breadcrumb. It took a couple of swings at Google to find something I could quickly make use of, but Katherine Marzinsky’s post about her @nounjective bot fit the bill.

That got me the pointer to Zach Whalen’s SSBot, which is basically a tool for generating random tweets based on a Google Spreadsheet and a provided script. I worked helpdesk long enough to know that I should be skeptical about running code I can’t read… but I went ahead and ran it anyway. It’s a pretty slick tool and configuring it wasn’t too hard. (Except for the part where I got columns and rows confused and generated a whole bunch of gibberish… but I fixed that by just cut-and-pasting the data into the right tab on the spreadsheet.)

Honestly, the complicated part is playing with syntax and grammar. My bot is following a very standard formula of

(witty saying) (ending with a buzzword).

but I was kind of surprised to see what a restraint that is. For starters, it means I have to stick to quotes ending in nouns (or noun forms). It also means that definitions are mostly out, since those would be funniest as

(buzzword) (followed by a witty saying).

Which is kind of a pity, because Bryan Alexander’s Devil’s Dictionary was another inspiration for this project.

(I notice that a later release of SSBot now supports regular expressions. Theoretically, it seems like this ought to allow me to figure out a variable for “put buzzword here”… but this is just a quick cheap laugh and I wasn’t motivated to do it. Maybe someday. )

I’ve currently got enough quotes and enough buzzwords for 1000+ unique tweets. At a tweet every 4 hours… that’s plenty of time for the industry to come up with some more.

 

Biographical, Images, Text

Boychik

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Middle Path crocus patch

I wish it were winter.

I wish it were cold and the wind were biting our cheeks. I’d fix my son’s scarf around his neck and bundle up his coat and tell him that sometimes the rules are stupid, but we follow them anyway. And sometimes the rules are stupid and it’s not that hard to just go around them. We’d sit together at the coffee bar and drink hot chocolate.

But the crocuses are coming up, and our shirtsleeves are poor protection from the wind.

Boy pulling a sled

This little monologue or illustrated poem or whatever it is entered my head last night as I was trying to get to sleep, and it was still there this morning.

 

Both photos are mine, CC-BY-NC, taken on my iPhone and saturation and brightness tweaked in Flickr. The crocus shot was taken just two days ago; I stopped the car to get the shot just before a rainstorm rolled in. The sled shot is from two winters ago.

Biographical, Text

For Matt

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A cup of tea, for Matt

I was part of a Human Library today, as part of the college’s Global Engagement Week. (This is what happens when you invite people to storytelling workshops… they come to understand that you’re a storyteller, and then they ask you to tell stories.)

After struggling for a bit with what my “title” would be, by which people would check out my story, I lit on my story about Kenyon’s rebuilding trip to New Orleans after Katrina and Rita. I shared a rather wooly recounting of the trip with a couple of people. And then in a lull between “readers”, our organizer Marne asked me, very gently, if I had known Matt Huber.

Oh God.

There’s only one reason you’d ask that question that way.

Matt, the slight asthmatic freshman who worked so hard on the job sites?

Matt, the kid on fire in my office a couple of weeks after we got back, struggling with the fact that the job wasn’t done yet?

Matt, the strapping senior with the ponytail, winning the college’s Anderson Cup for his 3 years of organizing rebuilding trips?

Matt, one of the reasons I say this trip is the single moment of my Kenyon experience I’m most proud of?

Yes, I knew him. What a loss, that he should be gone at 29.

Marne and I talked a little bit about what a great guy he was. As she put it, we get to see all the students grow over 4 years, but sometimes we’re privileged to see the watershed moment when things really change.

I sat for a little while, and then I walked back to my office. I started the electric kettle, and listened as the water heated and boiled, giving a thought to the fridge full of beer on my left. I poured the steaming water into my dirty coffee cup, tore open a little green packet of Irish Breakfast tea, and bobbed the bag slowly in the water.

I wiped my eyes and talked to Jason about a logistical matter.

And I walked back to the Human Library, and told my story again. Our story, this story I now carry for one person more.