DarrenConley.com

You know that your blog is gaining a measure of notoriety when you find yourself dealing with comment spam on a regular basis. For the past 2 weeks, I have found at least one instance of comment spam on this blog every day, which, while annoying to deal with, is a good sign that people are actually reading the thing. If anyone here is interested in purchasing viagra or phentermine, let me know, and maybe I’ll let some of the spam sneak through.

Despite having specifically mentioned in this post that I would be more regular in posting, a quick look at the past few post-dates will reveal that I have not stuck to my commitment. I think it’s time that you, my readers, discovered the reason why:

Skies of Arcadia

Yes, I decided to give this video game a try, and it has monopolized my free time for the better part of the past month. To give you an idea of what it’s about, this game is an RPG that was released many years ago for the Sega Dreamcast, and which takes approx. 50 hours to complete. The graphics are pretty, the characters are lovable, and the storyline is genuinely intriguing. I’m very close to finishing the game, so hopefully normal posting will resume soon. At least until the wedding and honeymoon take place (a week from Friday).

Larissa has had a killer time (and I mean this in the bad way) trying to get our phone service up and running at the new apartment. Bell Canada (the default local phone service provider) keeps telling her “It’ll be working sometime in the next 24-48 hours”. Yeah – that was a week ago. In the meantime, she has to drive 60 km to my apartment just to call her sister or check her email (oh yeah, no internet service yet either). Today they had her in tears, and tomorrow we’re going to call them together and make sure things get taken care of. I think I may start the conversation with something along the lines of “Listen, if you really are in the phone business, how about giving us a phone line? Because so far I’m convinced that you’re actually in the annoy the living crap out of people business.

And finally, I lost the tag to my bag of milk which tells you what the expiry date is, so now I’m drinking milk without a safety net. I could wake up one morning, eager to consume a bowl of Maple Nut Oatmeal Crisp, and discover that I’m pouring cottage cheese out of the milk bag instead of wholesome dairy goodness. It would be wasteful to throw out a whole bag of milk in anticipation of its going sour, so I’ve resigned myself to sniffing the milk through the hole in the bag each morning before breakfast.

This is life on the edge, my friends.

There is a word in German which I’d like to introduce to my humble readership: Gestalt

This word refers to the concept of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The idea is that when you combine simple elements in any given scenario, you can end up with a final product which has properties not found in its individual components. Water, for instance, has many properties not found in either hydrogen or oxygen separately.

The same concept applies to groups of people. As individuals, we possess certain character traits, talents, and personality quirks, many of which are never seen unless we find ourselves in the right circumstances, and surrounded by the right people. Joey in the TV show Friends was one of the more popular characters, but that character didn’t have that same appeal in his spin-off series, when he was surrounded by other personalities. Friends as a whole was better than the individual actors.

Seinfeld had much of the same chemistry. Each of the lead actors from that show have tried to go solo with projects of their own, but none of them have had the same “magic” as when you put Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer together in the same room, and let them interact.

In my own life, the Gestalt principle is evident in the Audio Edition podcast that I do with Doug Nagy and John Campea on a weekly basis. When we’re together in John’s apartment recording the podcast, the personality chemistry is there. We’re witty, eloquent, funny, entertaining, and enjoyable. I myself enjoy listening to our recordings, even though I’m a part of them. Yet, strangely enough, outside of recording the podcast, the chemistry isn’t the same. We all have very different lifestyles, and we live according to different sets of beliefs.

These past couple weeks, John has been away, traveling across the country filming interviews for a documentary he’s putting together, so Doug and I have been left to fend for ourselves in the podcast recordings. I was concerned that John’s absence would screw up the group dynamic that has been working so well thus far in the recordings, but luckily (according to our listener feedback), people have enjoyed hearing Doug and myself even without John.

What got me thinking about the group chemistry topic was one of the podcasts that Doug did without me last week. He instead brought on two friends of his from the website Filmjunk. While these two guys know far more than Doug and I about movies, and while they are both longtime friends of Doug, the group dynamic just wasn’t there, and the listener comments for that particular podcast reflect it. There’s something that works when Doug, John, and I are together, and something that doesn’t work when other people are in the mix.

I believe the success that this podcast has enjoyed is not primarily due to the topics we discuss, our knowledge of the subject matter, or the production quality of the recordings. People like to hear a group of guys having interesting conversation, joking with each other, and laughing together. That’s all there is to it.

When you find a winning combination of personalities and circumstances, you don’t mess around with the formula. Seinfeld lucked-out in putting the right people together at the right time, and I believe our podcast shares the same principle. This Gestalt works, and we’ve got to run with it as far as its success will take us.