(79a) Production Notes

Interrupting is difficult. I imagine it’s always difficult, even when everyone is gathered together in a room or on a stage, because when you’re putting on a show you all have your assigned lines and it’s natural to take turns saying them. It’s hard to leave the “You go, now I go” dance and move into listening for the sentence to come close to the interrupt point and start speaking while the other person is still talking. It’s not made any easier when the lines are delivered remotely and there’s no one else around to actually interrupt. In editing I’ve erred on the side of making sure every word is intelligible (as it is when you read them) and never had any voices overlap. I sometimes wonder if that was the right decision.

Interrupting is also a marker of status, and a sign of politeness. McGonagall is very proper and rarely interrupts anyone. Severus is abrasive and interrupts all the time. Most other characters follow social norms and freely interrupt those below them, occasionally interrupt their peers, and almost never interrupt a superior. It’s interesting to note that Harry Potter will freely interrupt anyone he’s talking to when he feels he has something to add. I asked a friend who didn’t like the fanfic what turned her off, and she said it was the way Harry showed disrespect to McGonagall. I was a bit surprised, because I didn’t feel he had (at least not egregiously). But I had been reading under the assumption that Harry was a person, and so him treating McGonagall as a peer didn’t shock me. My conversational partner was a parent, and viewed Harry as a child, and for him to interrupt her or question her was too great a violation.

(78c) Production Notes

Hearing recordings of your own words can make you painfully aware just how much of a disconnect there is between the things you think you’re saying, and the words that are actually coming out of your mouth. Sometimes it’s a simple slip of the tongue – saying “must” instead of “much”. Sometimes it’s a slip of the mind – there has been a lot of times where I’ve said “Draco” rather than “Harry”, or vice versa. While clear communication is certainly primarily the concern of the communicator, I’ve come to realize how important it is to have a charitable audience that helps with the translation. Talking to a hostile audience probably makes inferential distances far worse, as they are no longer working with you to bridge those gaps.

In today’s episode there was a line I simply omitted. An entire line that I thought I’d read out loud, but had instead simply skipped over. How the hell?

When it doesn’t change the meaning of a sentence I’ll generally leave such slips in, but if it’s a noticeable error I have to go back and re-record an entire sentence or paragraph and splice in the re-take. I hadn’t realized that when I started this, but you can’t simply splice in the word that was flubbed. The cadence and rhythm doesn’t match. What’s worse, even redoing an entire line or paragraph, it’s still rarely a good match. A lot of things affect the final recorded sound – distance from the microphone, my energy levels, the posture I’m sitting in, even when I last drew a breath. Over episodes small variations in tempo, tone, and pitch are unnoticed, but a sharp change from one line to the next is jarring. I have to repeat the correct line several times, attempting to manipulate those variables as much as I can to match the original reading, and pick whichever works best. And it still usually doesn’t quite sound right. /sigh

It doesn’t happen as often as it used to, I pay more attention when reading now. Like they say, it saves a lot of time simply doing it right the first time.

But still, how did I overlook a whole dang line?

(78b) Production Notes

It’s been quite a while since I began re-recording the early episodes. After the initial push I haven’t done many more. I’ve decided to stop with Chapter 9 – the episodes from then onward aren’t so bad they need a full redo. Up to the mid-teens they still aren’t that great, but I need to draw a line somewhere. I will, however, be going through and doing some re-editing on everything up to the Azkaban arc, which includes replacing my voice for every role that now has an actor. And because I don’t want this to last for months while I do an episode here or there, I’m planning on taking a week off from work in mid-February to dedicate 8-hours a day to podcast editing.

What this means is that if you’ve been wanting to do the voice of Anthony Goldstein, or Sybil Trelawney, or even just “Fifth-Year Slytherin Girl” – sometime in the next few weeks would be a great time to do that. :) It’ll let me mix it in with the least amount of fuss and you’ll get to hear yourself within a month or so. See the submissions page for lines and tips, and please be sure to contact me first to make sure no one else grabbed the part already.

(78a) Production Notes

There’s a new Madam Longbottom.

When I originally recorded chapter 38 I asked my girlfriend to do Madam Longbottom’s voice. I had already slated her to play Amelia Bones, because my girlfriend is also a tough-ass bitch and she feels perfect for the part. But I didn’t yet have anyone for Madam Longbottom, and it seemed that this was a one-off role which wouldn’t reoccur, and had over a dozen chapters from her appearance to Amelia’s appearance. No problem, right?
Not long after that Taboo Tradeoffs came out, and not only do the two of them appear in the same chapter, they actually speak directly to each other. >.< Epic facepalm.
So I have recruited a new Madam Longbottom. I’ve also gone back and replaced Melissa’s lines in 38 with Sabrina’s, for consistency. Hopefully Lily Potter won’t ever have a conversation with Molly Weasley…

In non-Potter news, The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson is absolutely awesome. It’s got power armor, lightsabers, and an awesome messiah character. It’s full of Capital Letter Ideals and if you like fantasy I highly recommend it. Not strictly rationalist fic, but lots of problem-solving, some research, and at one point the messiah character asks the Fundamental Question of Rationality almost word-for-word.

(77b) Production Notes

I somehow missed in my first read-through that Snape had removed the memory of his presence from everyone who witnessed the Harry-summoning. Which – first of all – holy crap! How did I miss that level of malfeasance? But secondly, makes you consider just what a really powerful and dedicated group of wizards could do with rituals if they really put their minds to it. Might they even be able to nearly-perfectly erase an entire city of out of the world’s memory?

I used a time-rewind-ish sound effect for the Obliviation. I know the repeated Obliviations aren’t actually a time-rewind, but it felt very appropriate given the trail-and-error nature of the attack. Perhaps I’ve played too many video games, but I was reminded of the fail-rewind-try again mechanics of Prince of Persia and Braid immediately, so I jumped right to that.

The Mr Hat-and-Cloak whisper was frustrating. The first time he appeared I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do with his voice, but I wanted something interesting. So I did several different takes of his lines, figuring I’d pick whichever sounded best, and apply some sort of filter. As I was listening to them I thought “Hm… this might sound kinda cool if I just layered one over the other…” I tried it and liked the effect and went with it. Unfortunately I didn’t really have a procedure for what I did, which made replicating it this week darned difficult. I don’t feel that this is quite as good as before, but I don’t have the time to redo it entirely. Hopefully it’s very close, and it certainly won’t have been the first voice to have changed over time.

(77a) Production Notes

Martyrdom has been given a bad name by religion. Not surprising, since religion tends to poison whatever it touches. But at it’s core it is still a noble concept – to give up one’s life for something one deems to be more important for society or humanity. To gain more fulfillment of your utility function by dying to support a goal than could be gained by continuing to live – it is tragic and awe inspiring.

Belief in an afterlife seems to cheapen the whole concept. Jesus didn’t permanently die for anyone’s sins – he was temporarily inconvenienced. As was pointed out in 39, dying isn’t so horrible when it doesn’t end your life. When someone who knows that death is permanent accepts a significant risk of death, giving their life over for good, it feels to me like it means far more. This may be self-serving bias. But I think of Tricia Glasswell as a hard-bitten cop with no delusions of an afterlife, and it makes me want to write a fanfic-fanfic of her story. Facing annihilation when there is no afterlife recourse – that is hard-boiled badassery.