Grand Experiment Archives

A Wonderful Thing Happened – I am a 2019 WDS Foundation Voyager with a Scholarship for Real Life

By Peter | July 3, 2019

Return of the Birds was recognized at the 2019 World Domination Summit , a gathering of creative people living remarkable lives in a conventional world. The WDS Foundation awarded us with a Scholarship For Real Life to help with the production of Return of the Birds. It was amazing. The Foundation’s Board – Jolie, Jessica, Asha, Chris, Sean, Dave and Mo were welcoming, gracious and patient with my thousands of questions.

And please look out for my Voyager Sisters, Keonna Ollison, Yuliya Patsay, and Laura Peña. They’re bringing it, and I am humbled to be included in their group.

44from26: Our New Podcasting Company

By Peter | April 17, 2019

There are 44 sounds in the English language, made from 26 letters (most often A to Z). 44 from 26.

Years of slow, but steady, progress has paid off. 44from26 is our family owned and operated media experiment. Our first project is Return of the Birds, a serialized audiobook podcast of Wake-Robin, by John Burroughs.

Working with the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, we’ve woven dozens of bird songs into the narration to give Burroughs’s book a whole new depth of experience.

Just in case you were interested in our grand little experiment. You can find (and subscribe to) Return of the Birds on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast and Stitcher. You can also click here to listen to the first episode.

Unstalled Part 2: The myth of that one last thing – EXCEPT when there is one last thing…

By Peter | October 31, 2017

Turns out I had one more thing to do. I built a sound booth.

On the occasions I wasn’t in a studio, I’d had been using (intermittently) a janky set up in a spare bedroom clothes closet. Not ideal – the sound was OK, but the setting was uninspiring. Preparing to read Wake-Robin I wrestled with the decision to squeeze into the space to read for an unknown number of days.

After some hemming and hawing, I asked the family and they agreed – particularly my two teenagers, it would be pretty cool to have our own sound booth and recording studio. Six month’s later, we’re all set.

If I never have to hang a slab door again, I’ll be happy.

Unstalled: The myth of that one last thing

By Peter | May 2, 2017

Hey Kids,

Not a hard trap to fall into:

That little inspiration
That tip or tool
That program language, software package
That scrap of insight
That book, white paper, article or post
That perpetuating cycle of seeking rather than doing
- Corollary: The perpetuating cycle of mistaking seeking for doing

These are all distractions (insecurities) to progress. For me to unstall, I go ‘old skool’ with a simple pen and pad of paper. It’s the single most effective way for me to push ahead.

Not sure if it’s universal, but I’m certainly not the only one aware of it.

Launching with No Audience: A Fool’s Brilliant Idea

By Peter | April 23, 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Sounds a bit dimwitted, but I feel certain I’m not the first fool to start the show with an empty auditorium.

Setting a baseline

So what’s the point of documenting zero? To get the most accurate detail of success or failure for the projects.

Let’s take a look at the social distribution channels I’ll be employing. As you will note, there is no vast network built in advance that I will be leveraging.

Twitter:

@majorsecret

@smartskey

Facebook:

Major Secret Agency

Director Morris

Oh, yeah…I forgot one. The big silent kid in the balcony…

Google+

Or maybe not.

Wanna to come along for the ride?

I brought my big spoon. Let’s stir it up.

By Peter | April 2, 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Welcome to the Grand Experiment: To test what I’ve earned making a living producing digital media.

Don’t worry: I’m no expert. And I have no opinion waiting to be ignored. The internet is littered with both. My goal is to build something from scratch. Starting at zero: no established social network, no audience, no outside interest.

Open notebook for my kids

This is my open notebook to show my work for my children to see my mistakes and misadventures. So when I have a full-throttle failure, they might learn from it (Hi kids!).

And if it works, we’ll have a bright spot or blueprint to refer to.

So what am I building?

1. The Major Secret Agency. It’s for young code breakers, cryptographers and enigmatologists who want to solve the mysteries too big for grownups to handle. I began the project 4 years ago. I have a library of print-n-go mysteries I’ve created, but only a skeleton of a site. I’ll admit, I’m happy with the CSS radial gradient I hacked together – about a year ago.

2. Folksy-Name-to-Be-Determined. A pure value play to give my prospective voice over clients a reason to return to hear my special I-don’t-know-what of talking into a microphone. The FNTBD project is all speculation. See, I’m fascinated by Etsy, Welcome to Nightvale, and those folksyartsy ‘house rules’ style posters. So my angle is to develop a Poor Richard’s Almanac, Mark Twain hybrid persona and create back stories for ‘house rules’ style posters. I’ll record and produce the brief folktales to create a catalog of audio and knockout limited-run posters to sell on Etsy. Who could resist?

It sounds less crazy in my head.

So when does the fun start?

It just did.