End of an era.

Posted on June 30, 2008

This is a really hard post to write. Leaving Lugradio was easy because sticking with it was making my life harder than it needed to be but writing about the whole of lugradio seizing to exist is harder.

For those of you that don’t know lugradio (and I presume that’s a significant number of my current readership) it is/was/(will be forever) a very fine podcast that started before the term podcast was coined. I ’starred’ in all the first series (apart from an election special) then we took a break and during the recording of the first couple of episodes (recorded on a single night due to other commitments) I decided the break wasn’t long enough for me and I wanted to make it permanent. Which upset a few people but in hindsight was a good move for me and the show.

The reasons I left have been relegated to the bottom because they aren’t important to the majority of people reading this what is important are the following things. Everyday I came across a mention of lugradio or any of the cool things that sprung out of the team and fans over the years I burst with pride.

What started as four people behaving as they do normally in each others company and talking about some of the things they find important in software became so, so much more than the sum of it’s parts and I never lost that feeling I was there at the start of something important. I’m not the sort of person who could have stuck it out until the end but two of the guys in that first episode remained regulars until the very last episode and all the other main presenters have made the show what is today.

But (yeah, I can start a sentence with but what of it! :p ) what is more important are the fans. It scared the shit out of me having fans (I left bands for less) because it meant I had responsibilities I didn’t ask for but every single on of the guys from the early days I consider friends even if I don’t keep in touch as well as I should. They really made something out of the very little the presenters offered in those early days.

So every single fan should give themselves a round of applause after listening to that final episode because you helped create something.

After I left I stopped listening to the show on a regular basis because I found it almost impossible to be a passive fan of the show. I wanted to jump in and accuse the presenters of being up their own arses on more than one occasion and every time they said Open Source when they meant Free Software or vice versa or worse said FOSS so I missed lots of the classic moments but whenever I heard them discussed in the wider world I’d grab a copy of that episode and hunt down the bits I’d heard about. It’s hard being a fan of something you used to be a part of, I bet Ecclestone wasn’t glued to his tv on Saturday night :)

For those that want to reminisce and remember me as a presenter of Lugradio may I suggest you listen to season 2 episode 3 because it’s the first one I’m not in as a presenter and features my ‘best bits’ as picked by jono. I honestly cried when I heard it and am touched every time jono relays how he had tears in his eyes (of laughter) when he was editing it. The best episode I’m in is the one I didn’t present and the best episodes overall are to be found my working backwards through the series. I hope in it’s death lugradio finds a whole new set of listeners.

There is one good thing about the end of lugradio I don’t have to terrify people into thinking they have really upset me when they ask if I’m ever going to join the crew for a special only to see me shake my head and walk away with tears in my eyes :) To those dozen or so people who I did this too I appologise and just for you below the fold is an explanation.

Now everybody else raise a toast to lugradio and the community it spawned. You are all fucking awesome guys.

When I choose to leave it all happened pretty quickly for various reasons and I never really got to put in any more than a quiet word for who I wanted to see in my place. As it happens the one of the two names I wanted to see joined the team for the next episode and the other is a member of the line up now. One had no hair and the other an abundance of pop punk spikes so it’s not impossible to tell I was happy about the direction the show took without me. It could get more serious without me fucking things up but still had people I could trust to take the irreverent stance when required and above all be fucking human about it all, it’s only software :)

I can’t remember 100% what I said when I left lugradio but I sort of remember telling people outside the team it wasn’t about any of the team and I still considered them best mates and that it was about me but I feel I can say a bit more about it now the end is nigh and I apologize for the bollocks below but this is me I can live with it so I’m sure others can too.

Sometimes it’s like there are two me’s. One is me naturally and the other is me forced. The natural me says what ever he likes when he wants to and doesn’t give a damn about the consequences. It’s not that I like being a bastard or upsetting people because I don’t and it’s when I notice I’ve done these things the other me comes out. The other me is quiet and hides in his room coding. At LUG meetings the normal natural me was allowed to play. People understood that sometimes I said things out of turn but that was allowed because the natural me is such fun to be around. When I’m with people I feel comfortable the natural me comes out to play.

The problem with my appearances on lugradio where entirely personal. The natural me was being himself with people he trusted but the results where available for the whole world and as it started to get more popular I was more uncomfortable with it. The people I met both IRL and online during that time came to number among my friends and I was comfortable with that but more and more people would appear who knew a little of me but I knew nothing of them and it was getting increasingly difficult.

What made it harder is sometimes I had to fake being my normal self for recording. Some days I would want to stay at home with my partner, our son and my code and not socialise but because we had scheduled a recording that couldn’t happen. The other guys had things they would rather be doing and people they’d rather be with but we had agreed to meet up. Knowing people expected the ‘up’ me to appear on the recordings I couldn’t be the ‘down’ me. The other guys had seen the down me on several occasions (I was at uni with jono for instance) so could spot that I was in a pretty down phase some nights but presumed when the metaphorical red light went on I snapped out of it. But I wasn’t snapping out of it I was getting more and more depressed.

I’m a nice bloke normally but when I’m feeling down but trying to be my natural self I can be spiteful and I hate myself when that happens because it invalidates all the times I’ve said nasty things to people and not meant it. Meaning to be nasty doesn’t come natural and it makes me more depressed which means the normal me retreats further and further away and the quiet me has to pretend even harder which makes me more of a bastard to the people I care for.

I didn’t want to be a bastard to my friends and loved ones more than anything in the world and I hated it when people said they where fans. The guys who listened to the show who I later formed relationships with on irc and irl are friends not fans. At some point it all had to end and I’m glad I pulled myself away from the show before I did anything to damage it. When things disrupt my happiness and comfort zones I normally destroy them and walk away from the ashes as much as I am proud of the guys for carrying on I am proud of myself for walking away when I did. I knew that if I’d turned up to record s2e3 I’d have done something to fuck things up.

It’s taken more than 5 years to finally get an official diagnosis for just what it is that makes me different from other people and why they often misunderstand my intentions and I theirs but late last week I finally got an official diagnosis of Aspergers or other Autisic Spectrum Disorder (exactly what I asked for I didn’t want a small box and the consultant was happy to agree).

If it all happened again. I do it again just slightly differently. I probably wouldn’t appear in so many episodes in series one (this was before the people missed episodes at all) and that might have extended my stay to the middle of series two but I would have had to have left then and passed the bucklegacy on to another.

LugRadio is dead, long live LugRadio.

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