(production notes) Episode 1 (Patreon)

This is where it all started. Let me tell you the story of how Lost Terminal came to be. There's a few things, really, and they all came together and went supercritical in July of 2020.

Let me introduce myself, I'm Tris, the writer, producer, and everything-er of Lost Terminal. In my day job I'm a programmer, at night I write electronic music, my two most recent albums (NAMTAO 1986 and C0AST) are surfing the Synthwave/retrowave surge. But I also write fiction. I've been an avid reader from a very young age, and started writing since I got my first laptop, in my teens.

Do you know about NaNoWriMo? It's a yearly challenge to write a novel in a month. 1600 words a day. I usually crash out half way, but I did once manage to tie up a 22k word novella. If you've no plans in November, try it! 

In 2020 I'd challenged myself to write a music track every week, and I was busily beavering away at that, half covers, half original work, when I wrote a cover of the Portal 2 credits music, Want You Gone by Jonathan Coulton. Look at that video, remind you of anything?

The video was wildly popular (for me), thanks reddit!, Getting 500 views in the first day, DESPITE my dodgy singing! Then two weeks later I used the same technique, refined a little, for the Portal 1 song, Still Alive.

I wrote some simple text scrolling software for these two songs, fed it through a fancy scifi terminal app called Cool Retro Terminal, and recorded the whole thing with OBS. (Now I type this, I realise I was certainly inspired by the music video for Jonathan Coulton's All This Time). Can you tell that JoCo is my hero? He's a programmer-turned professional musician - a man after my own heart! You should check him out.

Anyway, the great reception of my music made me want to get my act together and write more music for fun projects, so I started posting on the Start With This podcast forums, replying to posts from people who had a podcast idea, but no music/audio editing skills. A few of those contacts may yet make good collaborations. But I also wrote a big post about the fancy software I'd written for my music videos, the text scrolling thing from the two Jonathon Coulton songs, and how someone could use it for a sci-fi podcast.

Just before I hit send, I realised that I COULD MAKE THIS PODCAST. I had EVERYTHING I needed:

• I love writing scifi, and could certainly manage a few thousand words a week (I'd done 1600 most days in November for many years!) 
• I write electronic music, and even had an album ready to go (Supervised Learning is the background music you hear in episode 3 onward)
• I can edit audio REAL NICE
• I can make interesting videos of the podcast using the software I developed
• I love the sound of my own voice (kidding/not kidding)

Here's a behind-the-scenes treat for you, the pilot of episode 1. The timing is too slow, and I used a poor-quality mic to record, but you get the idea! After getting feedback from my friends and colleagues, I rewrote it and re-recorded using a broadcast-quality dynamic mic (the RØDE Procaster), and the rest is history.

Oh, I had some excellent advice from a friend, who sat me down (virtually haha covid jokes), and forced me to PLAN all of season one, and I'm so glad he did. In doing this exercise, I realised that's what had stymied my NaNoWriMo efforts in the past, I'd write lots of scenes I was really proud of, but it's hard to tell a story if you don't know where you're going.

I know exactly where this story is going.

So that's MY story! I'm so happy to be here writing this, and I'm so glad you're here too, thank you so much for supporting me, I've got 2 seasons concretely planned, and ideas for many, many more! <3

Tris aka NAMTAO aka the little voice behind the terminal