These last two episodes show significant, no, massive improvement over the ones I'd watched previously. SpiralJunkie was clear and understandable almost completely throughout both. He's still gotta watch it when he does interviews, though. There were a few times, but only a few, where he lapsed into that fast-speaking conversational mumblespeak he tends to go into, but otherwise an excellent job. He's clearly making an effort and it shows.
In fact, my only real issues with these two episodes were not with the regular on-air staff or the production values but with the guest experts. Having a business reporter like Benilopax talk about the market and investment is a great idea, but this guy needs those same voice lessons I wanted SpiralJunkie to take. It was a little difficult to understand him just in general, and when the conversation turned to alphabet soup abbreviation references he became almost impossible to follow at points. Also, if this guy wants to wear a tie on the air, that's fine, but then he has to tie the thing right so that he doesn't look like he's just run into the studio after a quickie in the changing room. I also suspect it will improve his look and credibility immensely if he doesn't wear the same shirt and badly tied tie on every show.
Hippoking was very interesting contentwise, but watching him on-camera drove me absolutely batshit. I wanted to reach into the screen, grab him by the collar, and say "Look into the fucking camera, goddammit!!". This guy's eyes were everywhere, left, right, down, everywhere except where they should have been. It was so distracting and annoying at points that it actually became hard to follow what he was saying. He's good and knows his stuff, so if they have him on again they need to sit him down, point his face directly at the camera, and say "See that camera? Pretend it's the screen of your computer. You're in the middle of a pitched battle against BoB forces and you're fighting for your life. If you take your eyes off of that screen for even a second while that little red light is on, your mothership and your pod will be instantly destroyed.".
Really though, that was the worst of it. I'm thoroughly impressed by the level of improvement in this show in so short of a time. It's clear they're really working hard to make this show the very best it can be, and with great success. Therefore, I'll pay this show and the people who create it the very highest compliment I can in that regard:
EvE TV: It's now worth paying for.
*****
*****
I did send my previous post off to both ISD and Valerie "Pann" Massey, the woman who does EvE's PR. I'd contacted her a while back when I did a show about LGBT gamers to get her take on how these issues are dealt with in EvE, so I felt it was a good idea to do so in this case as well. I haven't heard anything from ISD as yet, but Val did get back to me to say she wanted to talk to me about it. I sent her my phone numbers and I expect to hear from her soon. I'm considering taking this topic on again on the air, but I want to see what, if anything, happens as a result before I make any decisions about if or how I'd do that. More on this as I have it.
*****
It's been a hell of a busy time these last few days, so no chance to play a lot. I did jump in for a while yesterday though, did a mission, and had a very interesting conversation about an possible upcoming in-game career move. It's not something I'm prepared to talk about here just yet, but as time goes on I expect it will be. Again, more when I have it.
More soon. Til then, fly safe.
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