Ah those old

Ah, those old Central Illinois winters are back, like the ones from when I was a kid with several snowfalls. Deep, good snow at that. Winnie is enjoying the hell out of the snow, jumping around like an idiot every time I let her outside. And I'm enjoying it too, especially since this last time I didn't get stuck once and work let out early one day to ensure we'd get home safely. Good times, good times.

Anyway, life barrels on. Tonight is my last class, where I hand out a final and sit back and wait for them to turn it in, collecting my paycheck as I leave. I'm coming back next semester to sculpt some more young minds... or something.

And I'd like to waste a few more seconds of your valuable time talking about Horror Junk and what I feel is the future of television and, yes, entertainment.

We've done 8 episodes of the podcast so far, and while I expected the show to get some kind of popularity eventually, I had no idea how quickly it would start coming and how much would start happening for us right away. To date we've received 3 free movies and a DVD with a couple of trailers for us to play on the show, been contacted by a couple of amateur directors, gotten emails from all over the world, including a video made for our show by a guy in England, an offer to appear in another web-based TV show, and an offer to show up at a press screening for a couple horror movies looking for a distributor. It's completely insane how much is happening with our utterly and completely amateur production.

But I truly believe what me and Wolford are doing is participating in the very beginning stages of a movement towards a new kind of entertainment. While I don't believe cable or local TV are "on their way out" or anything like that, I believe these web-shows and podcasts are going to fill in some gaps in the entertainment industry. Once you start looking around, there's amateur produced shows on every subject you can possibly imagine... hell, Wolford and I weren't even the first to do a horror-themed internet TV show. But we are better than the other guys who came first. Anyway.

I think the next big entertainment revolution is going to be this amateur content, produced by people on a shoestring budget but with an intense love of what they're doing. I didn't see the potential in what Wolfie and I were working on until we started working on it, but its pretty incredible. Using the internet we have access to a much wider audience than some obscure cable TV network, and we can access them with no budget and deliver them decent-ish content quickly and easily. I have no doubt in the coming years, people will release set-top boxes to receive these internet shows and let you watch them on your TV at your leisure.

Oh, wait, Apple already released the Apple TV that does exactly that. And more are going to follow their lead.

So Wolfie and I have decided to take an important step and spend some dough to make this show actually worth watching, upping production value and building a set and using "real" lighting and maybe even 2 cameras and a camera man. We're still discussing the specifics, but I can't help but think... if we've gotten this many opportunities and recognition from a shoddily produced amateur effort, what's going to happen when we start putting some "real" work into it? Only good stuff, kids. Only good stuff.