Payphone Radio<\/a>, after finally amping up the playlist with what is, as far as I can tell, every call I made between 2011 and 2020 that is usable. That’s over 1600 calls and about 63 hours of content. I have no idea how many calls I threw out.<\/p>\nIn revisiting that project I discovered that a cadre of interested listeners has been tuning in, even recording and archiving the streams for hours at a stretch. I chose Shoutcast not because I expected it to prevent anyone from downloading or keeping it, but because of the randomness in not knowing what you will hear when you tune in. That’s a part of the magic of radio, even if the content itself is prerecorded and you tune in to the same stations every day it is always a tantalizing mystery what awaits you.<\/p>\n
What became Payphone Radio was originally called the Voicemail Project. I intended to use any and all kind of phones to record content there. I quickly changed my mind about that, settling on the more evocative and random soundworld of the payphone. I felt a certain charge in doing something that, as far as I know, had never been done before, certainly not on the scale at which I executed it.<\/p>\n
Until recently I kept the calls semi-private. They were on my websites but at URLs you had to know and that you could find without aid of a search engine. I made the sites invisible to commercial search engines, at least I tried. They tried anyway to gobble up my content anyway no matter how explicitly I instructed their bots to go away, there was nothing here for them.<\/p>\n
I did this on account of the sometimes personal nature of the calls. I can be a pretty depressing dude, and after making the calls public I heard from at least two individuals who said they found my comments “concerning” and that they felt like voyeurs for tuning in.<\/p>\n
I would not have made that kind of stuff public if I was not certain I had moved on from the bad times, the thoughts of self-harm, and other thorny brambles of emotional experience that plagued me for some years.<\/p>\n
On listening back to this stuff I’m sometimes surprised at how much I leave out. But it’s not a longform format, and I’ve learned not to invoke references to anyone in my life who might not want to be identified or connected to me, nor I to them. I left out a lot of the brief dalliances with women, especially during 2018 and 2019, when I was screwing around like the playboy I never knew myself to be or even imagined myself capable. That all stopped with the pandemic.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Once in a while I poke around this website, following the related content links to stuff from a decade ago, or from last week. Technically this site has elements of the wasteland that becomes any site after 25+ years. Broken images I hotlinked from old photo gallery installs I had to remove, dead links to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-181-2","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-76Q","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27332"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27333,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27332\/revisions\/27333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}