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How could I claim that AI hasn't captured me yet. Look at the latest selection from Rich "Favus" Smith.
As some people have remarked, I weirdly resemble Cheddar Man in one of them.
Livestreaming has got a bit tricky of late. In spite of me packing it away with great care, battling my aversion to the sound of squeaking polystyrene, the new show desk top computer must have taken a bump and is not working (we're hopefully getting it fixed next week) and we have had to revert to using the creaking laptop that we began this live streaming journey with.
It is no longer up to the job and doesn't seem to be able to cope with the OBS system we use to record and stream our livestreams. I wanted to do a Me1 vs Me2 Snooker yesterday afternoon, but the computer kept freezing and spluttering and the appointed time of 4pm (I am trying to stream in the day time as the night time is too busy with putting kids to bed or gigging and as the equipment is now technically in a different building I can't broadcast if Catie is out of the house in case the kids wake up and need me). At the last possibly second the heroic Chris Evans (not that one, or the heroic one) somehow found his way through and an amazing frame of snooker got to exist in the world, to be ignored by nearly everyone who lives here.
I wanted to do a Twitch of Fun this afternoon, but again, the laptop was having none of it. I'd done my minimal prep and chosen some news stories to riff about, with the help of my puppets, who I was relying on to think of some jokes on the spur of the moment. Luckily the theme of this art work is of man, lost and confused, struggling to achieve something pointless that he isn't really able to do and having to cope with the humiliation. It's a Hell of his own making where he is tormented by ghouls that he has dredged up from his own psyche. He wants to create something groundbreaking but is dragged back into the dirt by his one-track mind mind. Ironically unbeknownst to him, because of this additional layer he is actually creating something groundbreaking, but there's then an additional layer on top of that, that means no one really notices that (or watches what he is doing at all) and thus his genius is scattered into the wind and goes unheralded. He is doomed to mow and chatter alone until his early death. He can only hope that the voices of the puppets that sabotage him will be silenced then too, but what if they haunt him into the afterlife? Or through his death become mainstream popular, too late for him to reap any of the rewards.
You may only see a hippo saying "Big wobbling boobies" but that's just due to your lack of respect for the performer and not knowing what art is.
So in the end, rather than waste my minimal research, I decided to do the show on my macbook, without an audience. This would be the first time I did the show with zero people watching. The distinction might seem academic, as for nearly all of them (there were one or two live ones) I have done the show online, to all intents and purposes alone, but there has been some feedback via the chat function (always slightly delayed due to the live stream being seconds behind the actual action) and just the psychological reassurance that I wasn't just a man in an attic (usually) talking to myself for nobody (though even with an audience it was close to being nobody).
The first time I did this show I had to fight against self-consciousness as a part of me was aware that what I was doing was insane, not just because I was talking to myself, but mostly because I was broadcasting an entirely improvised hour of comedy and didn't have anyone else to rely on to be funny if I wasn't. But quickly I realised I did have someone else to rely on. The puppets were that person. They would say stuff that I couldn't think of and would mock me when I was rubbish (on the rare occasions). And those watching (largely) understood the parameters.
But doing one without an audience at all, was weirdly relaxing and comforting. It felt different (though the difference was academic) and it felt fine. I knew there would be an audience in the future (unless my tech let me down) but I wasn't thinking of them. I just did the show for its own sake, for me and my fellow performers and I liked it.
It wasn't any better or worse than usual. It was what it is. I am not ready for episode 100 yet, it's just too much pressure. So this is episode 99b.
You can enjoy/endure it here and my technical team have magically made it appear like I had access to all my buttons and pictures!
