[BLOG] Flashback: Operation BSU, Where It Started, Where It Went, And Do You Want That Last Piece?

Origins

Once upon a time, in the dark days before YouTube, in the eons before podcasting became mainstream, one young visionary stepped forward to struggle against mediocrity, sanity, and all that was good in the world in order to shatter the preconceptions of man.

The results were – mixed.

From 2005 to 2007, I produced a fully digital, fully online call-in talk show called Squid's Redout: Operation BSU. Hosted on a site called TalkShoe, myself and a rotating crew of 3 to 5 people (Eric the Half a Bee, Bruce Pringlemeir, Mike with the Lecherous Beer Grip, and miscelaneous long-suffering others) attempted to put on an experience for an online community which was only then beginning to manifest. Production was done entirely with what I can cobble together on a desktop of the day, media credentials only backed up by how fast I could talk, and contents that swerved abruptly between cutting edge news and analysis, reviews of the latest video games and horror movies, and interviews with anyone we could get our hands on whether they be local musicians, writers, or makers of plushies for sexual purposes.

(You laugh, but they were some of the nicest people that we ever interviewed.)

I experimented with every kind of production structure that I could learn or figure out how to do, from spreadsheets which shared a minute to minute break down of who was covering what and what words they would used to hand off to the next person, to absolutely free-form every-man-for-themselves insanity. Not surprisingly, the first tended to work a little better than the second, even though I will be the first to admit that the best we ever managed to achieve was community theater at its highest point. The most money I ever made off of the podcast was being able to buy a CD (and if that doesn't tell you the era, I don't know what would) – and I immediately bought a CD full of production beds and sound effects that I could use in the show going forward.

With well over 100 episodes in the can, full of hilarity, insanity, mirth, misery, and fascinating people – we migrated over to YouTube as it became available and turned into a hybrid presentation.

This article isn't about any of that because those episodes no longer exist. The Wayback Machine has the pages that they were linked to but not the MP3s. My personal archives of those episodes are hiding on CDs somewhere in this mad science lab I call home. Not long after we migrated away, TalkShoe itself suffered a serious hardware failure on their storage area network and it turned out that they had not been taking backups on a regular basis as they had promised and all of the work that had been put into the platform for years and years died in electronic screams.

But Operation BSU didn't exist in a vacuum and it didn't disappear without leaving remnants behind. Having been recently reminded that it might be a good idea to document some of these things by the arrival of an entirely unexpected fan letter wondering whether or not the original episodes were still available somewhere, today's agenda got set.

Where did Operation BSU come from? What other projects floated around it? And what are some of the people who were involved up to today?

Let's go find out.

Top Ten Podcast

There is a funny fact about me that you might not know.

I have trouble following rules.

Not just small rules but big rules. I was there on the front lines during the Napster Wars. I've always thought it was more important for bands to be heard than for big labels to take most of their money in exchange for letting them be heard. Radio always struck me as a particularly quaint and annoying means of putting music in front of people and I was really far more interested in DJing via podcast, curating an interesting show, putting that show together, and watching people have a good time. Without the watching part.

Before Operation BSU there was the Squid's Redoubt, a pirate livestream of music from my personal collection, which was truly terrifyingly expansive and hasn't gotten any smaller since. Back in the day, wanting to be a pirate radio DJ was one of the things that cutting-edge geeks really wanted to do as well as had the technology and tools to do. As result, OBSU played a 24 hour seven day a week largely automatically generated (using my own code) pile of music with an early version of a full request system strapped onto the side of the Web server. If you were listening, you can request things. If I was sitting there, I could go live at any moment or record a block and insert it with minimal effort.

It was a good time.

Two things grew out of that early experimentation.

The first was discovering that I could DJ in Second Life, and ironically enough there's quite a number of those sessions that still exist and are available for your listening pleasure, if you're looking for a strange mix of tunes along with a very idiosyncratic DJ who happens to be streaming for a live, interactive audience online long before that was "a thing."

The second, and more important for this particular recollection, was an ongoing and evolving thematic playlist of 10 tracks, each selected because of my own personal perverse humor and driven by an all-encompassing need to be seen as a serious creator. Yes, the irony of the desire to be seen as a serious creator while simultaneously making that creation from swaths of derivative work is not lost on me. In retrospect, I'm a lot more comfortable with that than I was at the time, because at this point [fanfic authors have become big business.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_(novel_series) All I needed was to be discovered.

NARRATOR: He was never discovered.

This remains pretty good work, in the main. The songs flow from one into the other without becoming a train wreck at the sections in between, the DJing is cheesy but not too painful – allowing for the significant difference in my writing between then and now. If nothing else, they provide a perfectly acceptable couple of hours now and then to discover musicians you may not have otherwise.

Weeping Cock

Have I mentioned that insanity fascinates me? Anyone that has met anyone that I've dated already knew that, but the concept of engaging with things which are peculiar, distorted, and utterly disconnected from mainstream culture provides an almost compulsive response from me. Imagine how much worse it was when I was but a young EdgeLord.

That was the time of the rise of blogging and blog platforms, and one of the jewels in the crown was LiveJournal. I was there and you can still see the horror of the things that I posted over many years. Some people would try and keep you away from their youthful indiscretion but me? I'm here pushing it in your face. LiveJournal was amazing in its day, full of people who needed to share things and ideas that were stuck in their heads and couldn't get out any other way. It wavered between the intensely personal to the intensely performative and everything on the spectrum in between. These days you see aspects of that in Facebook and Twitter but without the rawness of a new social paradigm.

That fandoms had an early presence in that space isn't news. What might be news to some of you is that very specific kinds of fandom had a strong presence in that space, including fanfic writers – and the meta-community around fanfic writers.

Weeping Cock was – let me just quote from the fanlore page:

Weeping Cock is a community where members post excerpts of funny sex scenes from fan and professional fiction. Posts often contain squicky material, and requests for brain bleach in the comments. While not the primary aim on the community, many people will spork the excerpts in their posts.

If you've come to read sex scenes for Teh Funneh instead of Teh Hawt Sexx0rz, then this community is for you. Here you can share all those ridiculously silly descriptions of copulation that you previously had to giggle over in private.

Entries can be as short as a couple of choice words or as long as a few paragraphs. They can be from any source, professional or fandom or whatever.

The community began its live on Livejournal, and was recently revived on Dreamwidth under new ownership.

It pleases me to no end to know that they didn't and with the mass migration away from LiveJournal after its acquisition. It's even more pleasing to know that the most recent post to the Dreamwidth community was just last month.

I imagine taking some of the most egregious and mind-damaging pieces of content from Weeping Cock and reading them aloud. Now, just to add a little extra spin on that, imagine finding the pure soul-eroding horror of the text itself insufficient and starting to put on exaggerated accents in which to portray it.

Now imagine listening to it.

You know you want to.

The Remnant Interview

It turns out that not everything has disappeared off the face the net. A little extra digging turned up one single example of a live interview that we did with Steve Braun from a band named Ashent in late 2007.

Ashent may not still be with us, but Steve Braun certainly still is. As a singer-songwriter and loan mortgage officer. Well, that's life in the big city.

I have no idea why this was one of the few things that was extracted and put up on Archive.org for posterity. Not that it's a bad interview – quite the opposite. It is 32 minutes of very engaged people having a discussion about music, the music business, and whatever else spun off in the course of things. The audio is about the best we could have managed at the time and I maintain that it still holds up as a piece of entertainment history.

I really miss doing this. Seeking out people who were excited to be talking about their passions. Doing the research to be able to ask interesting questions but not being beholden to anyone to stick to a predefined playbook. Being able to go on as long as the person being interviewed was interested in talking.

In many ways, some of this work was just too early. I flatter myself by saying that we were doing Joe Rogen interviews before there was a Joe Rogen, but now that I say that out loud I feel like that might be giving Joe Rogen too much credit it's possible that simply overt jealousy speaking but I will leave that judgment to you.

The YouTube Transition

Near the end, it was clear that the management of TalkShoe was having some issues, not just with the operations of the site but with the underlying hardware and things to a number of policies that came down the pipe and a certain prescient tingling in my squid hindbrain, we moved from streaming there (which was audio only by necessity) and into streaming on YouTube, being among the first wave of those who would do so on a regular basis. That added the additional joy of video to the mix.

I avoid cameras. I want nothing to do with cameras. I would much rather be the guy behind the camera, the guy with the script, the guy with the pen, the guy who works purely in production. Unfortunately for me, I am simultaneously a bit of a power freak and a control freak, so if I'm running the show and my name is on the show, I need to be on the show.

Luckily for all involved, we ended up using Google Hangouts as the mechanism to replace the call in functionality that TS provided. This actually worked out really well for me because screen sharing became possible, and when you can screen share you can put up anything. Graphics. Videos. Video games. Anything that is happening on your screen can be happening on the screen of everybody watching your show.

I'm not saying that I pioneered videogame live streaming – but I could see it from where I was standing.

What I do feel like I had some hand in pioneering was a type of group interaction with media content. MST3k got there first and with a vengeance, but more ephemeral content certainly had its appeal as a group rallying and shareable moment.

As a result, movie trailers, commercials, and all sorts of other cultural ephemera became red meat for the group of mad men and mad women that I kept around me to chew over in public.

But first we had to move to YouTube.

Technically, it was a lot simpler than you might think. Hangouts was a lot easier to manage than the ad hoc technical rat's nest that fed TalkShoe for my desktop. It was a lot easier to get people connected and interacting using Hangouts as well.

There was a certain psychological shift that came with the possibility that people might see faces, that people on the show went from anonymous voices to identifiable people that added a certain edge. It passed quickly and at this point it's probably hard to imagine that transition even existed at all, but at the time it was a big deal.

Overall, I believe that the quality of show went up but by that point I was starting to burn out as a producer.

We had video promos for the show when it was audio only which I had created for YouTube for promotion, and even today they stand up as some of my favorite work. They included snippets of the previous show, custom voiceover to tie it together, some very lo fi graphics work as a bed, and they were just a lot of fun. In retrospect, that should've been my clue that instead of going into more and more technical career path action I should have went into commercial production.

Live and learn, die and forget, unless you're an expert system.

Toward the end of the run it became obvious that what really kept all of us interested was not the news or the interviews (though I really enjoyed them) or anything else – it was the movie trailers, so for this last several shows in the series we moved to purely talking about movie trailers and film in a shorter format, until we finally ran out of steam.

At least for the show.

For many years afterwards I still put together some interesting videos involving a few of the usual crew, but more frequently focused on role-playing games and video games. All that content is still up on the Operation BSU YouTube channel and will be forever, if I have any say in it. I am slowly starting to move content over to LBRY as a sort of distributed backup and multimedia channel. Odds are good that you may read this article over on the Operation BSU LBRY channel.

Today

The Big Leneski and his Lecherous Beer Grip got married and is stuck in the kitchen, just not his kitchen.

Ki fled the country and got married to a lovely girl.

Dawn continued to shoot pictures of things that didn't run away fast enough -- including the Falcons' offensive line.

Bruce is still streaming things though usually building stuff on Twitch.

Eric the Half a Bee still acts as the butt of all my best jokes and sometimes shoots me in the back, as you'd expect of a poorly designed AI.

And me?

Well, I've been writing for StrategyGamer.com for a bit over a year as a freelance games journalist, posting regularly to Steem on subjects as diverse as web of trust mechanisms, cryptocommodity exchange design, the underlying narrative structure of emergent role-playing games, and the best tools for organizing and presenting your creative thoughts. I post to Twitter when I'm okay with demonstrating my political deviance or talk about video game promotion. I get by. I sometimes write free expansions for tabletop wargames if I get inspired (see: The Hungry and Free Trader Beowulf. I'm building a network of stuff on LBRY.

I'm getting by, thank you for asking.

And now you know the rest of the story.

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Thank you for your time.

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