Life Post-GunBlog VarietyCast

People have been expressing various levels of disbelief regarding the sudden cancellation of the GunBlog VarietyCast (that website will be going down at some point in the future; all episodes and show notes are archived at Libsyn and you should be able to listen to the episode on Sean's YouTube channel), and more than a few of you have contacted me by email or private message saying "This is all a joke, right?"

Sorry, it's no joke. The GBVC is no more. It has ceased to be. It is an ex-podcast.

Believe me, I'm as irritated about it as you are. Back in October, about two weeks after I'd been mauled by my dog, Sean told me over the telephone that he was going to cancel the show at the end of the year. (He also reassured me that the cancellation had nothing to do with my injury.)

This was both a disappointment and a relief to me:

Disappointed because I enjoyed doing the podcast and was proud of all the work we'd done. We've made a lot of great friends, interviewed some amazing people, and put together a stellar collection of information for the past three years.

Relieved because the podcast ate a HUGE amount of my time. When I started doing it, I was blogging regularly on this nerd blog and editing BCP while writing once a week for it; doing the podcast just meant doing what amounted to another blog entry. But then I was asked to take over as co-host when Adam left, and that increased my workload substantially: instead of just needing a few hours to write my segment and about an hour to record it (that included driving to a quiet location, setting up, breaking down and driving back), I also needed to record a full show which included

• Creating introductory blurbs (or throws) to the various segments;
• Helping to create and participate in the Main Topic;
• Coming up with Plugs of the Week. 

This effectively doubled the amount of work I needed to do, which all but ate up a day of work for me... and all of this was before the Pulse Massacre and the creation of Operation Blazing Sword, which was another demand upon my time. Since I know that Sean put in even more time on the podcast managing the audio quality, I understood how he could be burnt out. 

So I was sad to see it go, but I welcomed the time it would open up because now I can devote more time to blogging (I've always preferred writing to speaking) and to making OBS a nationally known name.

If I may speak frankly, though, I'm not a fan of how the cancellation was handled. My personal feelings on the matter are that we either should have ended the podcast immediately, perhaps with a farewell episode in November, or we should have been straight up with everyone and announced that the podcast would be ending in two months. I was overruled on this. Ultimately, this was Sean's podcast and not mine, because he paid all the bills on it and I didn't.

By the way: if you joined the podcast FB group in the past two months, you have my sympathies. If you donated to the podcast in November or December, you have my apologies and I hope you're not angry with us. If you are angry, then my advice is that you request a refund. 

So that brings us to today. This is the first week in a long time where I've had nothing podcast-related to do, and it feels weird. I have a large podcast-shaped hole in my schedule right now and while I can definitely find things to fill that hole, none of them fill it perfectly.

For those of you who also have a podcast-shaped hole in your lives right now, I offer you this comfort:  Weerd Beard isn't ready to give up on doing This Week in Anti-Gun Nuttery segments. I suggest you go read his entire post on the subject, but here's the money quote:

Yes I’m planning on starting a new podcast. That’s pretty much all I can say right now, because really that’s just about all I know right now. For fans of the Gunblog Variety Cast, I’ve fallen deeply in love with the “Patented Weer’d Audio Fisk” as Sean called it, so there is a VERY good chance of that being heard again.

Weerd has asked me to be a part of this Podcast To Be Named Later, and I've accepted. I'm not sure what my role in it will be -- given what I said above, I can co-host or I can do a segment but I don't think I can do both on a regular basis -- but I'm happy to be a part of it. About the only other thing I can tell you is that it won't happen soon, because we're trying to get all of our ducks in order first, but I think it will happen around summer-ish. (Don't quote me on that, though.)

So yes, GBVC is dead. But long live its successor!