Audio Johnapedia 34--Previewing the 2013-14 Academy Awards

0:00--Intros
1:22--Best Picture
14:16--Best Director
21:08--Best Actor
28:22--Best Actress
35:39--Gabe runs down some notable omissions from Picture/Director/Actor/Actress nominations
45:37--Best Supporting Actor
50:25--Best Supporting Actress
56:28--Best Original Screenplay
59:23--Best Adapted Screenplay
1:00:57--Some random Oscar observations (including a conversation about watching Forrest Gump in public schools, for some reason)

This is the longest Audio Johnapedia by a fairly large margin, but it was a fun one to record. Special guests Katie (@kfleming107) and Gabe (@thestlcardsfan4) help to compensate for my lack of knowledge of the 2014 Academy Award nominees.

The End of Grobitch

After 683 days, Grobitch is coming to an end.

It was a fun account to run, and hopefully it was a fun account to follow, but the time has arrived. It probably arrived a few months ago, but in the case of the Twitter account @grobitch20, there seems to be something borderline poetic about hanging on to something for too long. Regardless, it is time for Grobitch to stop.

I would understand somebody who believes that Grobitch is past its prime, though I also disagree. I created Grobitch as a satirical take designed for a specific point in time—it began on April 2, 2012 and it lampooned a college senior. It is now February 14, 2014, and the same things that worked for embodying a student are not necessarily (in fact, they’re not usually) applicable to a young adult who, instead of tweeting about going out, tweets about working long hours. There’s not much to satirize. Even if there were more humor in the current situation, Grobitch has more or less adopted his own character—a character which would be unrecognizable as a take on the personality of @grobot20 in 2014. At a point, Grobitch had to decide to either maintain stringently mocking @grobot20 or to maintain the fairly absurd caricature of a persona it had almost accidentally acquired—the latter was funnier so we went with that. But at that point, the account still made some sense. Now, it doesn’t. And rather than make a radical change or turn into the kind of “parody” account that doesn’t actually resemble the “target” in any actual way, it’s best to retire.

I don’t think anyone affiliated with this account has genuinely enjoyed writing tweets for it for months. Occasionally I come up with a Grobitch tweet organically and am psyched to tweet it because it makes me feel like that’s just one less tweet that I’m forced to miserably squeeze out so that the account wouldn’t die on its own terms. The tweets were always formulaic—brahs, asshats, Bud Selects, ladies, if you’ve read this far you’re probably well aware of all of the familiar tropes—but at least when they were formulaic in 2012, the jokes hadn’t been done completely to death. Now they have.

But I don’t want to attack the product, even after I got kind of sick of it, because a lot of people seemed to enjoy it, and for that, I thank you. I thank you for buying into the concept. I thank you for engaging with the account.

Very soon, the plan is to make the account private. If you want to go back and relive Grobitch’s glory days (I would find this pretty weird, but as somebody who created a parody account of a non-celebrity, I don’t think I have too much room to judge anyone’s Twitter behavior), you will be able to do so. But as the concept has been deemed concluded, so is the account.

Thank you,

John (@johnjf125)

Founder, @grobitch20

Audio Johnapedia 33

Some thoughts on Michael Sam.

Audio Johnapedia 32

A rundown of Super Bowl XXXVIII prop bets.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxmAVgt14jE

Audio Johnapedia 31

Special Grammy Preview Edition!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASJq1NsUDc

An Audio Johnapedia Retooling

As some of you have noticed (some of you have asked about it), Audio Johnapedia has slowed considerably in recent months, to a point where some people probably think I'm done with it for good. Well, that's not necessarily true. At this point, I'm still trying to figure out the direction I want my talking to go. When Audio Johnapedia started in July, I instantly enjoyed doing it, so much so that I was doing it every day for a few weeks. Then it slowed down and gradually slowed to a point where it's in need of a retooling.

I wish I could claim that I've just been really busy and that's why I'm not doing Audio Johnapedia, but that's not true. I've just grown bored with the direction it headed. I have a few half-assed ideas for how to improve things.

Co-Hosts and/or Guest Hosts: This is a big one. It is arguably an integral change. Shows just can't exist with one person talking, at least not long-term. The first few episodes went swimmingly alone but then eventually, the sound of my voice and only my voice became tiring. I don't view people who have asked about this in the past as a reflection on me--they're listening, after all. I view it as the reality of talk shows. Conversation and/or additional insights are invaluable and make for a more engrossing product.

I don't really have a Rolodex of contacts or people who I think would be interested, but if you are interested in having some sort of on-air role (if I switch things around to something even close to a full-time co-host, I would change the name of the show, to which I have no particular loyalty), let me know. It doesn't matter if you don't have any experience or you're unsure of how good you'd be--it's an amateur show and there's infinite leeway to experiment. I don't know many specifics about them, but I do know that there are multiple avenues to recording multi-person audio communication (not only would you not have to be in the same location as I am, but since my only microphone is attached to a headset, you'd pretty much have to NOT be near me),

Changing the Production: With the exception of a couple of shows, most were posted to this Blogspot page through a file created by Movie Maker. There are pros and cons to the format, but unfortunately the cons probably create inherent limits to increasing the show's popularity (listener questions were always well-received, but if people aren't listening, the segment is impossible). One easy solution is to put all of the videos on YouTube, but one that I see as having even more potential is iTunes Podcasts. iTunes offers plenty of podcasts and it doesn't appear that it is too terribly difficult to make it onto the iTunes store--it just requires complying with their audio formatting. Unfortunately, I am technologically inept and reading through the specifics is a fruitless endeavor. Any ideas or ability to expand the show would be appreciated.

Developing a Format: At first, the idea of a "format" scared me, because it made things seem more buttoned-down than I wanted. But now I recognize that by applying a format, by the loosest definition of the term, is for the best. Even if the format is something extremely open-ended, like "here is a single segment on a single topic which may be about sports or may be about music or may be about politics depending on how I feel", it makes the show something more than a rambling, incoherent mess. Co-hosting, I think, could solve this problem to an extent because it wouldn't just be me talking about what I know about--I know baseball and football and I know rock music and I know gangster movies, but these aren't the only things that warrant discussion. So, ideally, getting somebody more in tune with areas in which I lack knowledge could create more interesting dialogue.

If you are interested or have any ideas regarding anything I wrote about here, contact me via Twitter, phone, e-mail (johnjf125@gmail.com), however would be most convenient for you.

Five Reasons Nebraska Football is the Worst

Because of the pro-Nebraska sentiments being expressed on Twitter by a "friend", I decided to search on The Google for a comprehensive rundown of the reasons why Nebraska football is just the worst. To my shock and horror, such a list does not exist. But it does now!

1. Nebraska fans are obnoxious and lame: Did you know that Nebraska has sold out every home football game since 1962? Well, if you've ever talked with a Nebraska fan for more than five minutes, you did! Because Nebraska fans like to cite their greatness in going to football games (and, I mean, they live in Nebraska, so it's not like they're showing tremendous football acumen by going to a game instead of watching corn or whatever other crap they'd be doing instead) more than they like to mention how Nebraska won "five" national titles (more on this later). And, in similar lameness to St. Louis Cardinals fans, Nebraska fans like to talk about how classy and nice they are to the opposition. While with Cardinals fans it's cheesy, with Nebraska fans it is actually dumb. In football, fans do have some ability to be disruptive and psychologically rip into opponents. No fan should ever be proud that they aren't doing this. They're decreasing their team's chances of winning.

2. Nebraska wins national titles they don't deserve: In 1970, they won the national title according to one of four polls that anyone cared about. They still cite this as a full national championship even though another school (Texas) won the championship in more polls. In 1994, they won the national title over a Penn State team that included two Heisman finalists and went undefeated in what was a superior conference. In 1997, they split a national title with a team that was so good that a friggin cornerback on their team beat Peyton Manning for the Heisman, and only got the split because they beat Missouri on a last-second touchdown in which a receiver illegally kicked (Nebraska fans and the rulebook disagree vehemently on the legality of the kick) a ball into the air for another receiver to catch. Not to be outdone, in 2001 they made the national title game as the #4 team in the country that didn't even win their own division and was down 34-0 at halftime.

3. Tom Osborne is a sanctimonious hypocrite: Tom Osborne, as head coach of Nebraska, enjoyed a reputation as a saintly figure. This, in spite of the fact that his teams were notoriously law-violating. Noted lunatic Lawrence Phillips was arrested for pushing his (fellow Nebraska student-athlete) girlfriend down a flight of stairs and, because Saint Tom, remained on the team. And Lawrence Phillips is Mother Teresa compared to Christian Peter (you can look up his past on your own time--I don't even want to think about or discuss it). But rather than being seen for what he is--a good football coach who cares more about winning games than running a clean program--Nebraska fans decided to elect Tom Osborne to Congress. In fact, he received 83% of the vote for a U.S. House seat in a district he hadn't lived in for 36 years. He eventually ran for Nebraska governor and almost beat an incumbent in the primaries, which would have solidified Nebraska as an even worse state than South Carolina, which is the worst state in the United States.

4. They fired Frank Solich: After Osborne came Frank Solich, a terrific person who helped to clean up the Nebraska program while maintaining success (maybe they didn't deserve to make the title game in 2001, but they certainly were a terrific team regardless). In 2003, Nebraska went 9-3. Most schools consider this an accomplishment. Nebraska fired Solich and replaced him with Bill Callahan, who several of his own players think purposely lost the Super Bowl for the Oakland Raiders.

5. This guy.