On the mics again

About 3 people in the world would have noticed that there is a new episode of The Bad Take podcast. On Saturday, Himal and I recorded a conversation about Christopher Nolan’s new film The Odyssey. I edited it over the weekend and published it on Monday. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Spotify for Creators (previously Anchor) had preserved our login credentials. Pushing the episode out to all podcast platforms took no time at all.

We hadn’t planned on doing this on the mics; it was hastily put together. I don’t know if it would happen again. One thing I did notice was how familiar, and easy, it was to get into the rhythm of yapping about something we both had strong opinions on. The cuts and chops on this episode were minimal—they were mostly “errrr”s uttered by yours truly—and the conversation flowed well. I had to move a portion of the chat from the beginning to the middle to make it sound like we had structured it; it was otherwise one of the better episodes of the podcast we had ever recorded, if memory serves. Recording on Zoom, which I had been hesitant to do in the past, didn’t prove to be difficult.

One thing Himal said at the beginning of the chat stuck with me. Do we still stand by the opinions we had expressed in our previous episodes all those years ago? “Do we still take ownership of this stuff we said back then?”, was his question.

I have certainly changed my mind on many things over the years, and so has Himal. Anyone just disovering the podcast archives, either through this website or through dozens of other plaforms where our episodes are syndicated and are still discoverable on, are bound to encounter older opinions we no longer hold.

I had in fact been thinking about this with regards to my blog. It is now more than 12 years old, and having recently gone through all my old posts during the Astro migration, I had had the pleasure of re-acquainting myself with some cringe-inducing output I can no longer identify with. The topic had come up only a few weeks prior in a Web Writers’ Collective conversation, too. I had even considered putting a banner in my older posts (perhaps anything older than 5 years) to declare that I may no longer hold the same opinions currently.

I may be a different person now, but the internet had captured different versions of me and frozen them in time, as frequently as I had cared to share. That doesn’t bother me. I may finally get that banner up on my older posts, but that doesn’t mean I no longer take ownership of what I had written down and committed to the eternal memory of the open web. In fact, one of the reasons I quit all social media silos in favour of posting everything on my website, where they are openly accessible, is because I find it rather freeing. This is my corner, and it my grow and expand in a million different ways, in full view of anyone who stumbles upon this.

We didn’t dwell on this during the recording. It was only a passing remark. But evidently it made me think at length about what it means to leave a digital footprint. I’m convinced the open web is the best place to do it.

Our conversation was a bit rambly, in true Bad Take fashion. If you want a well-researched conversation on The Odyssey, listen to the inaugural episode of That’s soo POP! instead. It’s really quite good. But if you’re in the mood for some grumbling and moaning we’ve got you covered.