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Author Archives: Josh Millard

Episode 8: Conan Neutron Destroys Our Computer

conan-neutron Right after Let’s Talk Turkey sports radio with Bill Williams, we’ve got an at least semi-rowdy Crapshoot this week, snagging touring San Francisco rock fella Conan Neutron for a bunch of beery basement chatter about music, podcasts, failing effectively, being stuck in traffic, fucking with Karl Rove, wacky morning DJs, guest lists, and loads more.

Also the computer keeps crashing. One has to presume this is the result of Conan’s animal magnetism.

We talk about, along with everything else, Conan’s current band, Victory and Associates (further of which their most recent album, Better Luck Next Life, his previous band, Replicator; Conan’s Karl Rove googlebomb rock compilation stunt, Karl Rove: Courage and Consequence — The Unabridged Audio; and V&A’s rock-music-and-jovial-bullshitting podcast, You Can’t Stop The Signal.

Music this time around: two tracks off of V&A’s recent Better Luck Next Life, For Serious and Everything’s Amazing (Nobody’s Happy).

Episode 7: Lost In Time And Space

This week (right after the 80s sitcom nostalgiacast Whatcha Walken About, Willis), Josh and Jesse sit down sans guest to talk about, among other things: “hipster” as an aesthetic category vs. hipster as an insult, Cold Smoke Scotch Ale from Missoula, Montana, creative freedom and creative paralysis, Josh’s Ferengi Express game project, contemporary free-to-play games as an evolution of 80s arcade coin-guzzler mechanics, Deep Space Nine, the high cost of high warp, the danger of concretizing units in a poorly-fleshed-out sci-fi universe, and a harrowing personal story unfit to even describe here.

Music this time: Josh’s freshly-recorded cover of the difficult-to-attribute youtube mantra It’s Okay To Not Like Things, and an old Aural Times news-song of his called AT&T To Acquire Bellsouth.

Episode 6: Let’s Settle This Over Some Joose

joose-et-al-bw Hot on the tail of The Breaking Styrofoam Hour, this week’s Crapshoot is a special king-sized edition because we just couldn’t stop talking to XOXO conference founder Andy “waxy” Baio, possibly because he got us drunk on some really bad booze. Clever play.

We pick Andy’s brain about all kinds of stuff (it helps that he’s done all kinds of stuff, not least including helping build Kickstarter, creating the interactive fiction community/toolset PlayFic, building the now-sadly-shuttered Upcoming.org, etc, etc), including the incredibly frustrating story of the legal fallout over his wonderful commissioned chiptune Miles Davis cover project, Kind of Bloop. We also talk about XOXO (videos of the talks now up!) and his Creative Mornings talk, and we drink two different flavors of Joose (and one flavor of Sparks).

Music this time out is a couple of excerpts from the aforementioned Kind of Bloop, So What and Freddie Freeloader.

Episode 5: Two Jesses From Ukiah

Jesse Brennan On right after math quiz podcast One In A Million, this is our Jesses From Ukiah special, with our guest this time being Jesse Brennan, a now-Portlander from the same California hometown as co-host Jesse Holden.

We dig into sketchy yardsale recording setups, improvised art, the merits of reaching vs. grasping creatively, Brennan’s Frope, It’s Not Saturday project, dealing with internet comments, computers as consumption vs. creation devices, the torture of remembering that you forgot an idea, post-project depression, pirate radio, and, sure, cloacae, why not.

We also talk about several of Brennan’s creative projects, of which, links: Coffee Critics, an animated short in which Holden briefly appears as well; HANGIN OUT WITH TROUT with Captain Marty; Eggs on America; and the big one, which juuuust finished up its second season between when we recorded this and when we’re posting it, Frope, It’s NOT Saturday!

Music this time out is a couple of Chippy & CuddleBug songs by Brennan: Blood and Vacation Song.

Episode 4: How Many Eggs Is A Deviled Egg?

On right after One, Two, Three, Foooore! Golf For Beginners, it’s our fourth episode of The Crapshoot, with Josh and Jesse kibitzing about a whole cornucopia of topics: being bad at multitasking, delusions of grandeur, accidental Vincent Price impressions, how cats are stupider than people, accidentally racist pre-tweens, pop culture spoilers vs. directors’ cuts, making eggs inside toast holes, corner pocket cup holders, stealing fortune cookies, etc.

Music this time is a couple more short songs from Josh’s old Aural Times project: It’s A Terrible Mistake, Says Pyleva, and Court: Hallucinogenic Tea OK.

Episode 3: Beering it up with Brad “Brad Sucks” Turcotte

bradsucks_bw This time on The Crapshoot (airing right after the debut/finale episode of the Words That Rhyme With Orange podcast), we sit down with an actual Canadian, visiting Ottowan musician Brad Turcotte, who has for years now been making catchy-as-hell music under the moniker Brad Sucks.

We managed to snag Brad for some beers and BSing on his very first visit to Portland, in town for the second ever XOXO conference; we ply him for thoughts on his musical career, his coding projects from back in the day, dealing with anxiety through creative work and vice versa, the nature of fandom and fanbases, David Bowie, Robo Taco, where in Star Wars Machete Order the Battle of Endor and other spinoff episodes belong, and just what’s so great about having the higher ground if you’re an angry guy with a laser sword.

Music this time is a couple of tracks from Brad, the classic Making Me Nervous and his recent Bowie cover Soul Love.

Episode 2: Moon men throwing baseballs at the sun

In our sophomore outing (on right after Kent’s Catcast), it’s just your two cohosts, drinking beer and tackling a bunch of life’s tough questions, like: do kids know what a CRT is? What will 30th century anthropologists make of podcasts about Hellraiser? How do you do a mixtape right? What’s the deal with indie video games? And, hey, could a person standing on the moon throw a baseball into the sun?

And a lot more. Remember Myst? We do. We talk about that a bit.

Bumper music this time is a few old shortish weird things Josh has recorded: Have Yourself A Walken Little Christmas, Town in a Lake (a song written by Jessamny West about the time Randolph, VT was misplaced by Google Maps), and the Aural Times non-classic Ernesto! Ernesto! Ernesto!.

The theme song from Kent’s Catcast is, of course, an excerpt of Bach’s Bourrée in E minor that he’s taught his cats to sing.

If you want to check them out, the video games we mentioned included Gone Home, Dear Esther, and Braid, and the podcast episodes on Cabin in the Woods are Jesse’s In the Cut: This Majestic, You Know, Merman and Josh’s We Have Such Films to Show You: Cabin in the Woods.

Episode 1: EAT POOP TEA and other palindromes, with Mark Saltveit


mark-saltveit
 In our debut episode of The Crapshoot, we sit down and bullshit for an hour with local comedian, writer, and world champion palindromist Mark Saltveit about sentences that go backwards AND forwards, his new football philosophy book The Tao of Chip Kelly, what a big screwup Upton Sinclair was, and how none of us seem to know how to pronounce words correctly.

We also workshop a joke, make some questionable “eagle” puns, hear Mark’s palindroming origin story, and develop the first thumbnail sketches of a theory that every great accomplishment  was actually a failed effort to get people to eat more cod.

 

Welcome to The Crapshoot!

Hi there!  Welcome to the website for our new podcast project, The Crapshoot.  We’ve been putting this together over the last several weeks and are really excited to finally toss it out into the world and let people hear what we’ve been cooking up.

“We” being Josh Millard and Jesse Holden (of which more below); we started The Crapshoot out of a mutual love of bullshitting and based on positive experiences with our own respective movie-related podcasts (again, below).  We both like talking, we like talking to/at each other, folks like listening: why not do a bit more of that? And here we are.

But unlike our topic-specific movie podcasts, The Crapshoot is a podcast about nothing in particular, and is comprised of all the interesting things we and our sometimes-guests can think of to say about (and make terrible jokes about) whichever bits of that nothing are on the table that week.

Listen in as we discuss: palindromes! Beer! Mixtapes! Anxiety! Internet anthropology! Additional beer! Filmmaking! Video games! That weird noise that you hear sometimes when somebody’s phone is going off near a speaker! Now maybe some bourbon! And that’s just in the first couple episodes.

Plus we’ll throw in a little bit of music.  And since we’re bad at setting our podcasting tivos you may end up hearing a little bit of the podcasts that are on before ours.

We’ve got a lot of interesting people we’re planning to have on the show, Portlanders and out-of-towners both, and we’ve got a whole grab-bag of nothings in particular to discuss and deconstruct, and, well, here’s Jesse now with a sixpack of something cold and beery, so we’ll get right down to it and hope you enjoy coming along for the ride.

A little more about your hosts

josh-selfie Josh Millard is a musician and misc. creative type who lives in Portland, OR and works as one of the moderators of the community website Metafilter, where he goes by cortex. He currently writes the webcomic Larp Trek, records the fortnightly horror movie kibitzing-and-discussion podcast We Have Such Films To Show You with co-host Yakov Grinberg, and has made a lot of weird stuff on the web like Garkov, Mapstalgia, Previously On The X-Files, and the William Carlos Williams generator. You can yell at him on twitter @joshmillard.

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2e32a08Jesse Holden is just this guy, you know. He hangs out on Metafilter as churl, co-hosts the movie-discussion podcast In The Cut, and makes one hell of a Manhattan.