euchriduk

Audio engineer here. Definitely don’t get a directional mic like a shotgun (fuzzy) mic or a cardioid mic (like singers use on stage). These require at least an audio interface, careful placement and multiple mics. For your situation, something like a Zoom H2n will be the best and perhaps cheapest option. It has 5 built in mics, so you’ll be able to capture sounds from all over the lecture hall. Use the 4 channel surround option, or the X/Y or Mid-Side options, and see what works best. It won’t be perfect, but it will be the easiest option to improve audio and simplify recording. Plus, the batteries last for many hours (ideally use the best rechargeable Eneloop Pro AA batteries).

The professional way to do it would require a mixing desk, an expensive DPA, Shure or Sennheisser lavalier mic on the lecturer, at least 2 room mics and possibly a boom operator with a shotgun mic to capture audience questions. (Although this last option could be replaced with room mics or additional fixed mics pointing at the audience). There are various options for room mics depending on the acoustics of the room, and there are no one size fits all solutions for professional quality audio.

But you don’t need professional quality, just the best you can get. With a Zoom H2n, you can put it on a tripod near the lecturer, and it will pick up sound better than average human ears. It will be better on a tripod, because it won’t pick up floor noise as much. To reduce floor noise further, get a decoupler to reduce handling noise and use a mini tripod sitting on a desk or chair. If the lecturer hall is windy (lots of air conditioning or windows and doors open) use a windshield.

You could use any handheld recorder that does X/Y recording and it might be fine. But 4 channel recording might help pick up more from the audience, and you can still boost the lecturer’s audio by keeping the device close to them and having the “mid” mic pointing at them. The recordings can be fiddly to edit at first (especially if you want to boost part of them, like the “mid” or “sides”, but it doesn’t take long to get the hang of it. Use Audacity to edit the audio or any free audio editor you happen to have access to.

Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions, and good luck with it!

The answer to the majority of problems the world is facing is community - we need to rebuild real physical communities, participate in them, and nourish them. We can do this by simply getting more involved in existing ones, staring from things as simple as local gardening groups, litter picking/beach tidy groups, community celebrations, local markets, etc. We need to hold on to, strengthen and rebuild arts groups and help local arts and music scenes to grow.

We can all participate on some level in some aspect of physical community building, and it will enrich us in a way social media never can. (Put on a gig, attend an arts show, donate to a community group, talk to neighbours, support the vulnerable). I believe people feel so isolated and depressed by the way greed has ruined the web, jobs, the economy, etc.that the time is right for many more people to start investing time and effort in real communities.

We need to build and grow communities in a local, regional, national and international spirit. We need to learn how to share, and how to get rid of greed and selfishness in ourselves and in our societies - participating in and building welcoming, non discriminating communities is the path towards this. We need to remove competition in education, arts and science (and ultimately economy), and focus on cooperation and improving things out of the joy of helping yourself and others. Communities can bring this about, and digital communities (as opposed to competitive social media) can support this, too.

Ideally, we want to grow communities in a way where people start thinking first “how does this help my community?” - especially when looking at political and business decisions. We need to feel something positive to stand up for (not old fashioned ideas of ‘country’ or political groups) - we simply need mutually supportive groups (communities) that fight power, greed and selfishness to defend people, animals and nature.

As a fan of transgressive fiction, I’ve read quite a lot of fucked up books. Here’s what I came up with off the top of my head - sorry, it’s quite a long list!

Some different types of fucked up here (horrible fucked up and fun fucked up):

Cows by Matthew Stoke (not very well written, but very fucked up, a sick classic)

Anything by Carlton Mellick III, but especially Aspeshit, which is like Evil Dead on acid (semi literally). But he’s definitely ‘fun fucked up’ not grotesquely nasty without humour. All Bizarro is fucked up and worth checking out.

Apocalypse Culture I and II are both intentionally fucked up compendiums of short pieces and art that will make you sick and angry, but also make you think about a lot of different things. Feral House have plenty of fucked up books that are worth reading.

Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard - experimental writing unlike most other Ballard books, but significantly more fucked up in parts. All Ballard is great and fucked up at some point; High Rise has one of the best opening paragraphs of any book, ever. Crash is probably second to Atrocity Exhibition in fucked-up-ness.

Marquis de Sade - Justine, 100 Days of Sodom. Juliette: (mentioned elsewhere) horrible imagination-run-wild in the worst way, but aimed at antagonising people against the aristocracy and satirising the extreme cruelty and nastiness of those in power, probably including himself.

UK publisher Creation books (and imprint Attack!) did “anti-books” as they called them - some fucked up stuff of all kinds there: from fun stupidity like Raiders of the Low Forehead to some really horrible stuff by Peter Sotos that was unreadable (even to me).

The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices by Brenda Love tells you all you need to know about human beings and a lot you never needed to know (eyeball licking fetishism is a thing, apparently).

Nick Cave’s ‘And The Ass Saw The Angel’ is a wonderful pieces of fucked-up-ness and the reason for my username: a mute hillbilly recounts his sordid, psychotic life while drowning in quicksand, with biblical imagery and references, poetic ‘Deep South’ language, and lots of unpleasantness, especially from his parents. Kind of an ugly sibling to 'The Wasp Factory’s.

Clive Barker’s works can be pretty fucked up - Books of Blood is still his best work, in my opinion.

Supervert’s ‘Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish’ was disappointing, badly written, and fucked up in boring but nasty ways. I’d avoid it, but it’s a long time since I read it, so maybe I forgot a lot about it. I remember being bored and irritated, and little else.

Most Will Self books are pretty to very fucked up, particularly his early stuff.

Harry Crews was a wonderful writer, with some pretty fucked up stuff in Feast of Snakes and A Childhood - The Biography of a Place.

Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, and William Burroughs all have lots of great fucked up work.

House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski is fucked up in terms of layout and typesetting as well as storyline. Some really effective parts, some get a little bogged down in their own cleverness. But very much worth reading. Not fucked up in terms of gore or sex, as far as I remember!

Patrick Suskind’s Perfume is brilliant and fucked up, and possibly the only book that can change your sense of smell.

James Joyce - Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are fucked up in terms of experimental style and language, and are wonderful pieces of writing, despite being notoriously ‘difficult’.

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s biographical books are wonderful and fucked up. ‘The Spiritual Journey’ is one of the best still.

That’s enough for now - I’m sure I’m missing a lot!

William S. Burroughs, not Christopher! Unless that’s I joke I’m missing…

Not FOSS, but Renoise is phenomenal and works on Linux, at least. Made by a very small company. Difficult to get used to if you’re not familiar with trackers, but not that difficult. It’s not Ableton Live, but it’s way up there in terms of professionalism and flexibility. And it’s very cheap, too.

Meditation (as in, observing your thoughts without judgement, allowing them space, cultivating awareness and compassion). You don’t have to sit and focus on a candle or image or get the right breathing techniques or follow any kind of religion. Pema Chodron’s books are a very accessible and easy to read, and you don’t need to be a Buddhist to follow her work.

Look for spiritual sustenance in nature and in compassionate people. I find a lot of reassuring and helpful approaches in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s works, particularly his understanding that cultivating awareness and honest, open observation will increase compassion in yourself and will spread compassion in the world. (It’s more nuanced than that, but that’s an element of his observations). People with something genuinely helpful to say are not selling you anything - neither an idea or a product.

The news is there to sell things - ideas and products. Most news sources are selling a political and/or religious idea and bias as well as literally advertising products. News media is a business, making money from advertising. They don’t make money from selling ideas that life can be satisfying or enjoyable without buying stuff or doing things that make politicians and religious leaders more rich or powerful. Always read the news with a critical eye and look at what isn’t being focused on, not what is. Search for interesting personal stories, not headlines to get a slightly better perspective on the world.

There was a study done a few years ago that found that 60% of social media accounts were fake. That number is probably higher now, and there is more AI, too. The news and media and even federated systems are all manipulated in various ways. Huge congregations of right wing end-times Christians work like bot farms to spread fear and misinformation across all platforms: their goal is to speed up destruction because they believe in an afterlife that is only possible if the unbelievers are destroyed. They spread so much fear around feminism, LGBTQ+ issues, trans debates, flat earth nonsense, climate change denial, pro and anti vaccine arguments, etc. They just use whatever works to stir people up; they will take either side of an argument. The Taliban and Al-Queada worked in the same way, to similar ends. Israel and Russia and China all use these manipulation tactics too, to slightly different ends. The UK and Europe have other methods and goals (destroy threats to capitalism and neo colonialism, be seen as good guys). There are bot farms, hackers and paid accounts for every type of greedy power addict. But they all want destruction of perceived rivals, and they want one group of people to be afraid of another. It’s all lies and manipulation - some of it works, in a way, but a lot of it doesn’t. The fact they are all using these tactics show how desperate and afraid they are. We need to remember just how manipulated news stories and media are, and how the governments and organisations of the world are all trying to fool each other’s populations. Before the internet, you only saw your own country’s propaganda - now you see it all, and the system is falling apart in front of our eyes.

The news is not the sum total of things that are happening; it’s what is making someone more money or more power. The news doesn’t report all the people who had a pleasant day, or did a little bit better than yesterday - but how can it? Remember that for every horror story in the news, a thousand times more people were doing OK or better.

Do something that brings you actual joy every day. If you are honest with yourself, you find that actual joy is always the simple things - a favourite food, bouncing a ball, sitting under a tree, reading a good story, caring for a pet, holding hands quietly with a loved one, watching the clouds, riding a bike in nature, making music and art, reading a comic… Whatever small joys you can find, do them every day if you can, even if you’re living in a war zone. The small joys are reality, and sometimes you’ll experience big joys, although you don’t need them so often. News and depressive thoughts are not reality, only skewed and biased ways of looking at parts of reality. Moments of small joy are often all of reality that really matters.

Meditation (in whatever form works for you) can help you to experience the sensation that you are not your thoughts. “You” are something that exists with or without thoughts. It is not enough to consider this idea, it is something you need to actually experience, as often as possible. By extension, the world is not the collective thoughts and opinions of people: there is a reality of existence beyond all the nonsense we project on top of it.

Look for humour and go back to things that help you remember that there is always a lot to laugh about in world. Try to avoid cruel, mocking humour and yet be open to finding life-affirming humour even amongst the worst tragedies.

Cultivate compassion for yourself and the world around you. Ultimately aim to do everything out of compassion - not obsession or selfishness, fear or greed. If you need to be alone, be compassionate for yourself and others that need to be alone; if you need to be with other people, be compassionate for them. Don’t look for things in return: it is not a transaction. Compassionate action will not only bring you joy and peace, they will spread it. Practice compassion for everything - plants, animals, yourself, and other people. True compassion is not draining or tiring; it is a letting go of things like prejudice and judgement. It is not easy to do, it is something to work at.

Have positive, achievable goals and work on them whenever you can. You will get setbacks; it’s OK. Life shouldn’t be lived on a flat surface, there should ups and downs. It’s a journey, and a true journey should be interesting, across a changing landscape. When you have downs, recognise that there will necessarily be an up before long. The same us true for people around you, and the world.

Work on things you can change for the better, don’t focus on what you can’t. But actually work on the things you can change. It doesn’t matter how small they are; in many ways, the universe is not interested in big or small; and small things can make big changes anyway, like atoms or bacteria or blood cells (which can all do equally good or bad things, from our human perspective).

There are injustices and tragedies and traumas happening around the world; there are as many beautiful, loving kind things happening at the same time, probably more. The internet, the TV, the newspapers, magazines, books and media are just very small windows for an infinitely large world. We often think we’re seeing everything, but we are seeing very little. Our only reality is when we are not looking at life through these small windows - but we spend so much time looking through them that we forget reality. Do things that take you back to reality. If that reality is painful, approach it with compassion and it will gradually get less painful.

Work in reducing suffering in all forms for yourself and everything around you. Don’t contribute to suffering and don’t dwell on guilt and fear. Acknowledge those experiences, but let them pass. Don’t push bad things away, but don’t give them energy - just observe them, and return to things that create joy and peace, no matter how small. You don’t have to fix things or cure things that are bad, just work on making them a little bit better.

Remember that a lot of bad news is only a matter of perspective. So much of what we hear about - wars, corruption, illness, oppression, greed - are clear signs that the perpetrators of those things are desperate. Desperate people feel as though they are losing; they are doing everything they can to hold on to power, and they are lashing out. But they are losing the fight (most of which is with themselves or each other). Yes, we are the victims of their lashing out, but their viciousness and fear-mongering is because they are losing. They are losing because they have lost compassion and kindness and love. If we don’t cultivate those things, we will join them in desperation and fear; if we do continue to cultivate those things, they can never defeat us, because we are not even trying to win or to fight. We are surviving and growing and living. They can hurt us, but they can’t defeat us, and when they hurt us, they hurt themselves. But when we try to hurt them, we hurt ourselves, too. We end the fight by inviting them (the desperate, the rich, the powerful) to join us in compassion and kindness, by turning away from suffering and from causing suffering. There is no action too small to help make the world a better place.

Thank you for coming to my Wendy’s Ted Talk.

But Dolly Parton really did lose in a Dolly Parton lookalike contest - and the winner was a drag artist (pretty sure it was a drag competition, and Dolly entered it for a laugh).

Grammar leftists?