Podcasts about Jaws

Episode 715 :  The Outsiders and Superman '78 The Metal Curtain: Sean and Jim are back with a continued look at the Dawn of DC with the new Outsiders series and the first offering of Superman '78 The Metal Curtain. Ted Sikora (Punchline 1-3) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/herotomorrow/violante/description We are on Threads! https://www.threads.net/@ragingbulletspodcast Speeding Bullets : Returns this month Sean is a cohost on “Is it Jaws?” Check it out here : https://twotruefreaks.com/podcast/qt-series/is-it-jaws-movie-reviews/ Upcoming: The Flash, Hawkgirl, Amazon's Attack, Wonder Woman, Superman, more Dawn of DC coverage. Contact Info (Social Media and Gaming) Updated 9/23: https://ragingbullets.com/about/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/401332833597062/ Show Notes: 0:00 Show opening, http://www.heroinitiative.org, http://cbldf.org/,http://www.DCBService.com, http://www.Instocktrades.com, show voicemail line 1-440-388-4434 or drnorge on Skype, and more.   4:25 Outsiders 34:50 Superman 78 The Metal Curtain 56:20 Closing We'll be back in a week with more content.  Check our website, Twitter and our Facebook group for regular updates.

On Tue.'s No Dunks ep., the guys discuss Tyrese Haliburton and the Pacers' coming-out party and Brandon Ingram and the Pelicans' depth overpowering the Kings. That, plus predictions for tonight's two In-Season Tournament quarterfinal games, thoughts on the new IST trophies and medals, MVP frontrunners, things we would change about the tourney, and our first enemies, like, Skeletor, Decepticons, Jaws, and more. --

It's a B-cember to Remember here at Spooky Tuesday! To finish the year in festive fashion, we decided to do one last lil theme month and dedicate December to B horror movies, so of course we had to start with a classic. Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) may have marked the end of the monster movie era, but it laid the ground work for a whole bunch of famous scary movies that followed. Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water is an obvious one — but Steven Spielberg was taking notes for Jaws, too. On our latest episode, we're talking film history, four foot dicks, and lighting things on fire.References:https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/a-brief-history-of-the-creature-from-the-black-lagoon-franchise/https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/from-the-deep-on-the-staying-power-of-creature-from-the-black-lagoonhttps://www.monstersofmakeup.com/2021/02/10/making-up-the-creature-from-the-black-lagoon/https://www.geekslop.com/life/fads-and-trends/fads-and-trends-1900/2010/the-3-d-movie-craze-of-the-1950shttps://www.britannica.com/topic/Creature-from-the-Black-Lagoonhttps://colinmcmahonauthor.com/2020/04/16/why-creature-from-the-black-lagoon-has-become-more-horrifying-with-time/https://filmschoolrejects.com/creature-from-the-black-lagoon-real-designer/

Full commentary available on our Patreon. 

In this episode of Ask Sharky, we close out Sharkvember by going over the shortcuts that we highlighted during the month of November. Listen in as Elizabeth Whitaker shows these shortcuts in action.

Secret Movie Club team members Edwin Gomez and Craig Hammill hash out what really IS the criteria that makes a movie a masterpiece? Although they easily agree on JAWS, they split when Edwin calls AIRPORT 77 and KING KONG 1976 masterpieces while Craig views Ingmar Bergman's WINTER LIGHT and PERSONA as masterpieces. Craig also is concerned that the term "masterpiece" gets used way too much these days. He fears the term is losing its important meaning as an indicator of a movie that truly rises above all others. Is there a fix? Is there a problem? Listen to see where Edwin and Craig ultimately land. We'd love to hear your thoughts. (You can always write us at: community@secretmovieclub.com. We might even read your comments in an upcoming pod!).

Hey Listeners! Please enjoy this 5 minute sneak peek at the new episode released today exclusively for our Patreon members. If you like what you hear, please head on over to Patreon.com/letstalkturkeys and subscribe today to hear Movie Miss & Drive-in Dave riff on this Christmas film, Jaws the Revenge! We thank you for your continued support! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lets-talk-turkeys/message

As I have always told our guests, our time together is a conversation, not an interview. This was never truer than with our guest this time, Andrew Leland. Andrew grew up with what most people would call a pretty normal childhood. However, as he discovered he was encountering night blindness that gradually grew worse. Back in the 1980s and early 90s, he was not getting much support for determining what was happening with his eyes. He did his own research and decided that he was experiencing retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease that first affects peripheral vision and eventually leads to total blindness. I won't spend time discussing Andrew's journey toward how finally doctors verified his personal diagnosis.   Andrew was and is an incredible researcher and thinker. He comes by it naturally. In addition, he is quite a writer and has had material published by The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, McSweeney's Quarterly, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other outlets. He comes by his talents honestly through family members who have been screenwriters and playwrights. Example? His grandfather was Marvin Neal Simon, better known to all of us as Neal Simon.   This year Andrew's first book was published. It is entitled, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight. I urge you to get and read it.   Our conversation goes into detail about blindness in so many different ways. I am sure you will find that your own views of blindness will probably change as you hear our discussion. Andrew has already agreed to come on again so we can continue our discussions. I hope you enjoy our time together.     About the Guest:   Andrew Leland's first book is The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight. His_ writing has appeared in _The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, McSweeney's Quarterly, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other outlets. From 2013-2019, he hosted and produced The Organist, an arts and culture podcast, for KCRW; he has also produced pieces for Radiolab and 99 Percent Invisible. He has been an editor at The Believer since 2003. He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and son.     Ways to connect with Andrew:   Website: https://www.andrewleland.org/   About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.     Transcription Notes    Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i  capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.     Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset where inclusion diversity in the unexpected meet. And we're gonna get to have a little bit of all of that today. I get to interview someone who I've talked to a couple of times and met a couple of months ago for the first time, I think the first time at a meeting, Andrew Leland is the author of the country of the blind. And he will tell us about that. And we will have lots of fun things to talk about. I am sure he's been a podcaster. He's an author. Needless to say, he's written things. And I don't know what else we'll see what other kinds of secrets we can uncover. Fair warning, right. So Andrew, welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Andrew Leland ** 02:01 Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.   Michael Hingson ** 02:04 Well, I really appreciate you coming. Why don't you start by telling us a little about kind of the early Andrew growing up in some of that kind of stuff? Oh, sure. A lot of times go in a galaxy far, far away. Yeah. Right.   Andrew Leland ** 02:18 planet called the Los Angeles. I was born in LA. Yeah. And my parents moved to New York pretty quickly. And they split when I was two. So for most of my childhood, I was kind of bouncing in between, I live with my mom. But then I would go visit my dad on holidays. And my mom moved around a lot. So we were in New York, just outside the city. And then we moved to Toronto for two years, and then back to New York, and then to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and then to California, Southern California. So I lived a lot of places. And that was all before college. And yeah, what can I tell you about young Andrew, I, you know, I always was interested in writing and reading. And I come from a family of writers. My mom is a screenwriter, my grandfather was a playwright. My aunt is a novelist. And so and my dad, you know, remember when I was a kid, he had a column for videography magazine, and has always been super interested in digital technology, you know, from the earliest days of desktop publishing. And he worked for, like early days of USA Network, you know, so like this kind of shared interest that I inherited from my parents of, you know, creativity and media, I guess was one way you could put it, you know, storytelling and sort of like playing around with electronic media. And, you know, I grew up I was born in 1980. So by the time I was an adolescent, the internet was just starting to reach its tendrils into our lives. And I remember my dad bought me a modem. And when I was like, I don't know 14 or something. And I was definitely one of the first kids in my class to have a modem and you know, messing around on message boards and stuff. So that was very influential for me. You know, when it was around that time that I started to notice that I had night blindness, and I kind of diagnosed myself with retinitis pigmentosa on that early web, you know, before the days of WebMD or anything like that, but it just there didn't seem to be a lot of causes for adolescent night blindness. And so I kind of figured it out and then sort of just compartmentalized it like kick that information to the side somewhere dusty corner of my brain and just went about my life and then it wasn't until later my teenage years I'd already done a year in college I think in Ohio where I said you know what, this is getting a little more intrusive and then I've that my mom finally booked me an appointment at a at a real deal, you know, medical retinal Research Center and at UCLA. And then, you know, an actual retinal specialist said, Yep, you've got retina is pigmentosa. You'll you Will, you know, maintain decent vision into middle age and then it'll fall off a cliff. Once again, I just carried that information around for, you know, the next 20 years or so. And I'm 4040 How old am I? Mike? 22 years old? Right? Well, I actually I'm a December baby. So we gotta go, Okay, you got a couple of months to go a 42 year old medicine me. You know, and at this point in my life, you know, I had the, you know, I read about all this in the book, but I have a feeling that, like that part of his diagnosis way back when is coming true, you know, and I feel like, okay, it's all finally happening, and like, it's happening more quickly, but then my current doctor is kind of careful to reassure me that that's not actually happening. And that RP, you know, their understanding of it has evolved since then. And there's like, you know, different genetic profiles, and that, in fact, maybe I might have some residual useful vision for many years to come. But one of the things that I really wrestled with, both in the book and just in my life is the question of, you know, how much to claim to that site and how useful that site really is. And, and, and trying to figure out what, what it means to be blind, if I'm blind, you know, certainly legally blind, you know, I've half got about five or six degrees of, of central vision. You know, and so, so, so my so So, I've left your question behind at this point. But I wrote, I wrote this book, in some ways to answer that question of, like, where I, where I fit into this world of blindness? And am I an outsider, or am I an insider? like at what point do I get to be part of the club and all those really tricky questions that were really bothering me as a person, I got to kind of explore in the form of a book.   Michael Hingson ** 06:52 The interesting thing about what you said in the book, however, concerning Are you an outsider or an insider, Am I blind? Or am I not? is, of course a question that everyone wrestles with. And I personally like the Jernigan definition, have you ever read his article, a definition of blindness?   Andrew Leland ** 07:11 Oh, maybe tell me what he says. So what he says   Michael Hingson ** 07:15 is that you should consider yourself blind from a functional standpoint, when your eyesight decreases to the point where you have to use alternatives to vision to be able to perform tasks. Now, having said that, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't use the residual vision that you have. But what you should do is learn blindness techniques, and learn to psychologically accept that from a blindness standpoint, or from a from a functional standpoint, you are blind, but you do also have eyesight, then there's no reason not to use that. But you still can consider yourself a blind person, because you are using alternatives to eyesight in order to function and do things.   Andrew Leland ** 08:00 Yeah, no, I have heard that from the NFB I didn't realize its source was Jernigan. But I really aspire to live my life that way. You know, I think it's, there are some days when it's easier than others. But, you know, I'm here, learning, you know, practicing Braille, using my white cane every day, you know, like learning jaws and trying to try to keep my screen reader on my phone as much as possible. And it's funny how it becomes almost like a moral mind game that I play with myself where I'm like, okay, like, Wow, it's so much easier to use my phone with a screen reader. Like, why don't I just leave it on all the time, but then inevitably, I get to like a inaccessible website, or like, I'm trying to write and write a text message. And I'm like, Oh, am I really going to like use the rotor to like, go back up, you know, to these words, and so then I turn it back off, and then I leave it off. And I'm just like, constantly messing with my own head and this way, and I've heard from, from folks with ARPI, who are more blind than I am, who have less vision. And there is the sense that like, one relief of even though it's, you know, incontrovertibly, incontrovertibly inconvenient to have less vision, right? Like there's there's certain affordances that vision gives you that shouldn't make life easier. But But one thing that I've heard from these folks is that, you know, that kind of constant obsessing and agonizing over like, how much vision do I have? How much vision am I going to have tomorrow? How am I going to do this, with this much vision versus that much vision? Like when that goes away? It is a bit of a relief I've heard.   Michael Hingson ** 09:28 Yeah, I mean, if it ultimately comes down to you can obsess over it, you can stress about it. What can I do if I lose this extra vision or not? Is is a question but the other side of it is why assume that just because you lose vision, you can't do X or Y. And that's the thing that I think so many people tend to not really deal with. I believe that we have totally an inconsistent and wrong definition of disability. Anyway, I believe that everyone on the planet has a disability. And for most people, the disability is like dependents. And my case from then my way from making that is look at what Thomas Edison did in 1878. He invented the electric light bulb, which allowed people to have light on demand. So they could function in the dark, because they couldn't really function in the dark until they had light on demand, or unless they had a burning stick or something that gave us light. But the reality is, they still had a disability. And no matter how much today we offer light on demand, and light on demand is a fine thing. No, no problem with it. But recognize that still, without that light on demand, if a if a power failure happens or something and the lights go out, sighted people are at least in a world of hurt until they get another source for light on demand. Mm hmm. I was I was invited to actually Kelly and Ryan's Oscar after party to be in the audience this year. So we went to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, which is fun. I used to go there for NFB of California conventions, a great hotel, man. So we got there about three o'clock on Thursday, on Saturday afternoon, and it was my niece and nephew and I and we were all there. And we just dropped our luggage off. And we're going downstairs when suddenly I heard screaming, and I asked my niece, what's going on. And she said, there's been a power failure in and around the hotel. And I'd love to try to spread the rumor that it was all Jimmy Kimmel trying to get attention. But no one's bought that. But but the but the point is that suddenly people didn't know what to do. And I said, doesn't seem like a problem to me. And you know, it's all a matter of perspective. But we really have to get to this idea that it doesn't matter whether you can see or not. And you pointed out very well, in your book that blindness is not nearly so much the issue psychologically, as is our attitude about blindness? Absolutely.   Andrew Leland ** 11:58 Yeah, I remember I interviewed Mark Riccobono, the current president of the National Federation of the Blind, and he made a very similar point, when we were talking about the nature of accommodations, which is something that I still I'm thinking a lot about is I think it's a very tricky idea. And a very important idea, which I think your your your idea of light dependency gets at, you know, in America, Bono's point was, you know, look, we have the the BR headquarters here in Baltimore, and we pay a pretty hefty electricity bill, to keep the lights on every month, and that, you know, the blind folks who work there, it's not for them, right? It's for all the sighted people who come and visit or work at the at the center. And in some ways, that's a reasonable accommodation, that the NFB is making for the sighted people that they want to be inclusive of right. And so that just even that idea of like, what is a reasonable accommodation? I think you're right, that we think of it as like the poor, unfortunate disabled people who need to be brought back to some kind of norm that's at the center. And there's the kind of reframing that you're doing when you talk about light dependency or that Riccobono is doing when he talks about, you know, his electricity bill, you know, it kind of gives the lie to puts the lie to that, that idea that, that the norm takes precedence. And the reality is that, you know, that we all need accommodations, like you say, and so what's reasonable, is really based on what, what humans deserve, which is which is to be included, and to be, you know, to have access equal access, that   Michael Hingson ** 13:38 ought to be the norm. Jacobus timbre wrote a speech called the pros and cons of preferential treatment that was then paired down to a shorter article called a preference for equality. And I haven't, I've been trying to find it, it's at the NFB center, but it isn't as readily available as I would like to see it. And he talks about what equality is, and he said, equality isn't that you do things exactly the same way it is that you have access and with whatever way you need to the same information. So you can't just say, Okay, well, here's a printed textbook, blind persons that's equal under the law, it's not. And he talks about the fact that we all really should be seeking equality and looking for what will give people an equal opportunity in the world. And that's really the issue that we so often just don't face, like we should. The fact of the matter is, it's a part of the cost of business, in general to provide electricity and lights. It's a part of the cost of business to provide for companies a coffee machine, although it's usually a touchscreen machine, but it's there. It's a cost of doing business to provide desks and computers with monitors and so on. But no one views provide Seeing a screen reader as part of the cost of business and nobody views providing a refreshable Braille display or other tools that might give me an equal opportunity to be a part of society, we don't view those as part of the cost of doing business, which we should, because that's what inclusion is really all about. You know, we don't, we don't deal with the fact or sometimes we do that some people are a whole lot shorter than others. And so we provide ladders or step stools, or whatever. But we don't provide cost of doing business concepts to a lot of the tools that say, I might need or you might need. Yeah,   Andrew Leland ** 15:37 yeah, it's one thing that I've been thinking about lately is, is really even just the challenge of understanding what those accommodations are. Because, you know, I think I think, practically speaking in the world, you know, you'll, you'll call up a blind person and say, What do you need, you know, like, we're trying to make this art exhibit or this, you know, business or this, you know, HR software accessible, what do you need, you know, and that one blind person might be like, well, I use NVDA, you know, or that one blind person might be low vision, right. And they might be like, I use a screen magnifier. And it's so difficult to understand, like, what the accommodations are, that would be, that would be adequate to cover, like a reasonable sample. And so just like, it's just so much more complicated than it originally seems, you know, when you have a really well meaning person saying, like, we really value diversity, equity and inclusion and accessibility. And but then like, the distance between that well meeting gesture, and then actually pulling off something that's fully accessible to a wide swath of the whatever the users are, is just, it's just unfair, quickly, huge. So that's something that I'm thinking about a lot lately is like how to how do you approach that problem?   Michael Hingson ** 16:46 Well, and I think, though, the at least as far as I can tell, I think about it a lot, as well, as I think any of us should. The fact is that one solution doesn't fit everyone, I'm sure that there are people, although I'm sure it's a minority, but there are people who don't like fluorescent lights as well as incandescent lights, and neither of them like other kinds of lighting as compared to whatever. And then you have people epilepsy, epilepsy who can't deal as well, with blinking lights are blinking elements on a webpage, there's there isn't ever going to be least as near as I can tell, one size that truly fits all, until we all become perfect in our bodies. And that's got a ways to go. So the reality is, I don't think there is one solution that fits everyone. And I think that you, you pointed it out, the best thing to do is to keep an open mind and say, Yeah, I want to hire a person who's qualified. And if that person is blind, I'll do it. And I will ask them what they need. You know, an example I could give you is, was it three years ago, I guess, four years ago, now actually, I was called by someone up in Canada, who is a lawyer who went to work for a college. And we were talking about IRA, artificial intelligent, remote assistance, a IRA, you know about IRA, you wrote about it. And she said, you know, a lot of the discovery and a lot of the documentation that I need to use is not accessible through even OCR to be overly accurate, because there will be deep degradations and print and so and so I can't rely on that. And certainly, Adobe's OCR isn't necessarily going to deal with all the things that I need. So I'd like to use IRA is that a reasonable accommodation? And I said, sure it is, if that's what you need in order to be able to have access to the information, then it should be provided. Now the laws are a little different up there. But nevertheless, she went to the college and made the case and they gave her iris so she could read on demand all day, any document that she needed, and she was able to do her job. And not everyone necessarily needs to do that. And hear in probably some quarters, maybe there are other accommodations that people could use instead of using IRA. But still, Ira opened up a VISTA for her and gave her access to being able to do a job and I think that we really need to recognize that one solution doesn't fit everything. And the best way to address it is to ask somebody, what do you need in order to do your job, and we will provide it or work it out. And here in the US, of course, given although they try to renege on it so much, but given the definition of what rehabilitation is supposed to do, they're supposed to be able to and help make people employable. They should be providing a lot of these tools and sometimes getting counselors to do that. Just like pulling teeth, I'm sure you know about that. Yeah,   Andrew Leland ** 20:02 I do. I do. I mean, it's interesting because I think in the face of that complexity of saying, like, Okay, we like interviewed a dozen blind people, and we like have this we know, our website is it's compatible with all the screen readers. And, you know, this event, like, you know, let's say you're doing an event, and the website is compatible with every screen reader, and it's got dynamic types. So the low vision users are happy, you know, and then the event starts and you're like, oh, wait, we forgot about the existence of deafblind people, and there's no cart, or captioners. Here. And, you know, and then the question for me another another thing I've been thinking about lately is like, how do you respond to that, you know, like, what is the? What is the response? And even just like on a kind of, like, a social level, like, is it scathing indictment, like you, you terrible people, you know, you have you have like, you don't care about deaf blind people. And so I hereby cancel you, and I'm going to, like, tweet about how terrible you are? Or is there like a more benign approach, but then you don't get what you need. And like, sort of, and I think, I think a lot of this is a function of my having grown up without a disability, really, you know, I mean, like, growing up, my I went through my, my full education, without ever having to ask for an accommodation, you know, maybe I had to sit a little closer to the board a little bit. But you know, nothing, nothing like what I'm dealing with now. And I think as a result, I am just now starting to wrap my head around, like, how when self advocates and what styles are most effective. And I think that's another really important piece of this conversation, because it's easy, I think, to walk into, you know, cafe x, or, you know, I just did it the other day, yesterday, last night, I saw this really cool looking new magazine about radio, which was an interest of mine, like great for radio producers. And it was print only, you know, and I wrote like, Hey, how can I get an accessible copy of this cool look in new magazine? And they're like, Oh, actually, we're, we're putting our resources all it were kind of a shoestring operation, all our resources are going into the print edition right now. You know, and then, so then I had a question before me, right? Like, do I say, like, Hey, everybody, like, we must not rest until you agitate for these people to make their accessible thing, or I just sort of wrote a friendly note. And I was like, there's a lot of like, blind radio makers out there who might find your stuff interesting. And I like, affectionately urge you to make this accessible. And then, you know, their hearts seems to be in the right place. And they seem to be working on making it happen. So I don't know what's your what's your thinking about that? Like how to respond to those situations.   Michael Hingson ** 22:34 So my belief is whether we like it or not, every one of us needs to be a teacher. And the fact is to deal with with what you just said, let's take the radio magazine, which magazine is it by the way? Oh, I   Andrew Leland ** 22:51 didn't want to call them out by name. Oh, I'm   Michael Hingson ** 22:52 sorry. I was asking for my own curiosity, being very interested in radio myself. So we   Andrew Leland ** 22:57 give them some good and bad press simultaneously. It's called good tape. Okay, it's brand new. And at the moment, it's as of this recording, it's print only. And,   Michael Hingson ** 23:06 and tape is on the way up a good tape. No, that's okay. Anyway, but no, the reason I asked it was mainly out of curiosity. But look, you you kind of answered the question, their heart is in the right place. And it is probably true that they never thought of it. I don't know. But probably, yeah, they didn't think of it. I've seen other magazines like diversity magazine several years ago, I talked with them about the fact that their online version is totally inaccessible. And they have a print version. But none of its accessible. And I haven't seen it change yet, even though we've talked about it. And so they can talk about diversity all they want, and they talk a lot about disabilities, but they don't deal with it. I think that it comes down to what's the organization willing to do I've, I've dealt with a number of organizations that never thought about making a digital presence, accessible or having some sort of alternative way of people getting to the magazine, and I don't expect everybody to produce the magazine and Braille. And nowadays, you don't need to produce a braille version, but you need to produce an accessible version. And if people are willing to work toward that, I don't think that we should grind them into the ground at all if their hearts in the right place. And I can appreciate how this magazine started with print, which is natural. Yeah, but one of the things that you can do when others can do is to help them see maybe how easy it is to create a version that other people can can use for example, I don't know how they produce their magazine, but I will bet you virtual Anything that it starts with some sort of an electronic copy. If it does that, then they could certainly make that electronic copy a version that would be usable and accessible to the end. And then they could still provide it through a subscription process, there's no reason to give it away if they're not giving it away to other people, but they could still make it available. And I also think something else, which is, as you point out in the book, and the country of the blind, so often, things that are done for us, will help other people as well. So great tape is wonderful. But how is a person with dyslexia going to be able to read it? Yeah, so it isn't just blind people who could benefit from having a more accessible version of it. And probably, it would be worth exploring, even discussing with him about finding places to get funding to help make that happen. But if somebody's got their heart in the right place, then I think by all means, we shouldn't bless them. We should be teachers, and we should help them because they won't know how to do that stuff.   Andrew Leland ** 26:10 Ya know, I love that answer to be a teacher. And I think there was I think there was a teacher Lee vibe in my, in my response to them, you know, like, this is a thing that is actually important and useful. And you ought to really seriously consider doing it. You know, I mean, I think if you think about the how people act in the classroom, you know, it's those kinds of teachers who, you know, who, who correct you, but they correct you in a way that makes you want to follow their correction, instead of just ruining your day and making you feel like you're a terrible person. But it's interesting, because if you, you know, I mean, part of a lot of this is the function of the internet. You know, I see a lot of disabled people out there calling out people for doing things and accessibly. And, you know, I feel I'm really split about this, because I really empathize with the frustration that that one feels like, there's an amazing film called, I didn't see you there by a filmmaker named Reed Davenport, who's a wheelchair user. And the film is really just, like, he kind of he mounts a camera to his wheelchair, and a lot of it is like, he almost like turns his wheelchair into a dolly. And there's these these, like, wonderful, like tracking shots of Oakland, where he lived at the time. And there's this there's this incredible scene where it's really just his daily life, like, you know, and it's very similar to the experience of a blind person, like, he'll just be on a street corner hanging out, you know, in somebody's, like, the light screen, you know, like, what do you what are you trying to do, man, and he's like, I'm just here waiting for my car, my ride, you know, like, leave me alone. You don't need to intervene. But there's this incredible scene where there are some workers in his building are like, in the sort of just sort of unclear like they're working. And there's an extension cord, completely blocking the path, the visible entrance to his apartment, and he can't get into his house. And he's just this, like, the, the depth of his anger is so visceral in that moment. You know, and he yells at them, and they're like, oh, sorry, you know, they kind of don't care, you know, but they like, they're like, just give us a second. And he's like, I don't have a second, like, I need to get into my house. Now. You know, he just has no patience for them. And it's understandable, right? Like, imagine you're trying to get home. And as a matter of course, regularly every week, there's something that's preventing you. And then and then and then you see him when he finally gets back into his apartment. He's just like, screaming and rage. And it's, you know, so that rage I think, is entirely earned. You know, like, I don't I don't think that one one should have to mute one's rage and how and be a kindly teacher in that moment. Right. But, so So yeah, so So I kind of see it both ways. Like, there are moments for the rage. And then I guess there are moments for the mortar teacher like because obviously, like the stakes of me, getting access to good tape magazine are very different than the stakes for read like getting into his apartment. Right?   Michael Hingson ** 28:53 Well, yes and no, it's still access. But the other part about it is the next time, that group of people in whatever they're doing to repair or whatever, if they do the same thing, then they clearly haven't learned. Whereas if they go, Oh, we got to make sure we don't block an entrance. Yeah, then they've learned a lesson and so I can understand the rage. I felt it many times myself, and we all have and, and it's understandable. But ultimately, hopefully, we can come down. And depending on how much time there is to do it, go pick out and say, Look, do you see what the problem is here? Yeah. And please, anytime don't block an entrance or raise it way up or do something because a person in a wheelchair can't get in. And that's a problem. I so my wife always was in a wheelchair, and we were married for two years she passed last November. Just the bye He didn't keep up with the spirit is what I tell people is really true. But I remember we were places like Disneyland. And people would just jump over her foot rests, how rude, you know, and other things like that. But we, we faced a lot of it. And we faced it from the double whammy of one person being in a wheelchair and one person being blind. One day, we went to a restaurant. And we walked in, and we were standing at the counter and the hostess behind the counter was just staring at us. And finally, Karen said to me, well, the hostess is here, I don't think she knows who to talk to, you know, because I'm not making necessarily eye contact, and Karen is down below, in in a wheelchair. And so fine. I said, maybe if she would just ask us if we would like to sit down, it would be okay. And you know, it was friendly, and it broke the ice and then it went, went from there. But unfortunately, we, we, we bring up children and we bring up people not recognizing the whole concept of inclusion. And we we really don't teach people how to have the conversation. And I think that that's the real big issue. We don't get drawn into the conversation, which is why diversity is a problem because it doesn't include disabilities.   Andrew Leland ** 31:16 Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, that seems to be changing. You know, I mean, you have you know, you have a lot more experience in this realm than I do. But But But haven't you felt like a real cultural shift over the last, you know, 2030 years about disability being more front of mind in that conversation?   Michael Hingson ** 31:36 I think it's, it's shifted some. The unemployment rate among employable blind people, though, for example, hasn't changed a lot. A lot of things regarding blindness hasn't really, or haven't really changed a lot. And we still have to fight for things like the National Federation of the Blind finally took the American Bar Association, all the way to the Supreme Court, because they wouldn't allow people to use their technology to take the LSAT. Yeah, lawyers of all people and you know, so things like that. There's, there's so many ways that it continues to happen. And I realized we're a low incidence disability. But still, I think, I think the best way to really equate it. You mentioned in Goldstein in the book, Dan, who I saw, I think, is a great lawyer spoke to the NFB in 2008. And one of the things he talked about was Henry, mayor's book all on fire. And it's about William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist and he was looking for allies. And he heard about these, these two, I think, two ladies, the Grimm case, sisters who were women's suffragettes, and they and he said, Look, we should get them involved. And people said, no, they're dealing with women's things. We're dealing with abolition, it's two different things. And Garrison said, No, it's all the same thing. And we've got to get people to recognize that it really is all the same thing. The you mentioned, well, you mentioned Fred Schroeder and the American Association of Persons with Disabilities at various points in the book. And in 1997. Fred, when he was RSA Commissioner, went to speak to the AAPD talking about the fact that we should be mandating Braille be taught in schools to all blind and low vision kids. And the way he tells me the story, they said, Well, that's a blindness issue. That's not our issue, because most of those people weren't blind. And that's unfortunate, because the reality is, it's all the same thing.   Andrew Leland ** 33:41 Yeah, no, that's something, uh, Dan Goldstein was a really important person for me to meet very early on in the process of writing the book, because I mean, just because he's, he's brilliant. And yeah, such a long history of, of arguing in a very, you know, legalistic, which is to say, very precise, and, you know, method, methodical way. A lot of these questions about what constitutes a reasonable accommodation, you know, as in like, his, his, the lawsuits that he's brought on behalf of the NFB have really broken ground have been incredibly important. So he's, he was a wonderful resource for me. You know, one of the things that he and I talked about, I remember at the beginning, and then, you know, I had lunch with him earlier this week, you know, we still are talking about it. And it's exactly that that question of, you know, the thing that the thing that really dogged me as I pursued, writing this book, and one of the kinds of questions that hung over it was this question of identity. And, you know, like, the sense that like the NFB argues that blindness is not what defines you. And yet, there it is, in their name, the National Federation of the Blind by and like, Where does where does this identity fit? And, you know, and I think that when you talk about other identities like Like the African American civil rights movement, or, you know, you mentioned the suffragette movement, you know, the feminist movement. You know, and it's interesting to compare these other identity based civil rights movements, and the organized by movement and the disability rights movement. And think about the parallels, but then there's also I think, disconnects as well. And so that was one of the things that I was it was really, really challenging for me to, to write about, but I think it's a really important question. And one that's, that's really evolving right now. You know, one of the things that I discovered was that, you know, in addition to the sort of blind or disability rights movement, that's very much modeled on the civil rights model of like, you know, my the first time I went to the NFB convention in 2018, you know, the banquet speech that Mark Riccobono gave was all about the speech of women and the women in the Federation, you know, which, which someone told me afterwards like, this is all new territory for the NFB, like, you know, they don't, there, there hasn't traditionally been this sort of emphasis on, including other identities, you know, and I found that was, I found that interesting, but then also, I was so struck by a line in that speech, where Riccobono said, you know, the fact that they were women is not as important as the fact that they were blind people fighting for, you know, whatever was like the liberation of blindness. And, you know, so it's, there's still always this emphasis on blindness as, like, the most important organizing characteristic of somebody is a part of that movement. And it makes total sense, right, it's the National Federation of the Blind, and they're fighting that 70% unemployment rate. And, you know, I think by their lights, you don't get there by you know, taking your eyes off the prize in some ways. And, and so I was really struck by some of these other groups that I encountered, particularly in 2020, when a lot of the sort of identity right questions came to the fore with the murder of George Floyd, right. You know, and then I was attending, you know, because it was 2020 it was that the convention was online, and I you know, I read it, this is all in the book, I, I went to the LGBT queue meet up, and which, which is also like a shockingly recent development at the NFB, you know, there's this notorious story where President Maher, you know, ostentatiously tears up a card, at a at an NFB convention where there are LGBT. NFB is trying to organize and have an LGBTQ meet up and he sort of ostentatiously tears it up as soon as he reads what's on the card. You know, a lot of still raw pain among NF beers who I talked to about that incident, anyway, like that this this LGBTQ meetup, you know, there's, there's a speaker who's not part of the NFB named justice, shorter, who works in DC, she's, she's blind, you know, and she's part of what is called the, you know, the Disability Justice Movement, which is very much about decentering whiteness, from the disability rights struggle and centering, black, queer, you know, people of color, who are also disabled, and and in some ways, I've found the NFB struggling to, to connect with with that model. You know, I talked to a Neil Lewis, who's the highest ranking black member of the NFV, you know, and he wrote this really fascinating Braille monitor article in the wake of, of George Floyd's death, where he's sort of really explicitly trying to reconcile, like Black Lives Matter movement with live the life you want, you know, with with NFB slogans, and it's, it's a tough thing to do, he has a tough job and trying to do that, because because of the thing, you know, that that I'm saying about Riccobono, right, it's like he is blind is the most important characteristic, or where do these other qualities fit? So it's a very contemporary argument. And it's one that I think the the organized blind movement is still very actively wrestling with.   Michael Hingson ** 39:02 I think it's a real tough thing. I think that blindness shouldn't be what defines me, but it's part of what defines me, and it shouldn't be that way. It is one of the characteristics that I happen to have, which is why I prefer that we start recognizing that disability doesn't mean lack of ability. Disability is a characteristic that manifests itself in different ways to people and in our case, blindness as part of that. For Women. Women is being a woman as part of it for men being a man as part of it for being short or tall, or black or whatever. Those are all part of what defines us. I do think that the National Federation of the Blind was an organization that evolved because, as I said earlier, we're not being included in the conversation and I think that for the Federation and blindness is the most important thing and ought to be the most important thing. And I think that we need to be very careful as an organization about that. Because if we get too bogged down in every other kind of characteristic that defines people, and move away too much from dealing with blindness, we will weaken what the message and the goals of the National Federation of the Blind are. But we do need to recognize that blindness isn't the only game in town, like eyesight isn't the only game in town. But for us, blindness is the main game in town, because it's what we deal with as an organization. Well,   Andrew Leland ** 40:40 how do you reconcile that with the idea that you were talking about before with with, you know, with the argument that like, you know, with the historical example of, you know, it's the same fight the suffragettes and like it because it doesn't that kind of, isn't that kind of contradicting that idea that like, having the intersection of identities, you know, and these movements all being linked by some kind of grand or systemic oppression, you know, so it is it is relevant? Well,   Michael Hingson ** 41:06 it is, yeah, and I'm not saying it any way that it's not relevant. What I am saying, though, is the case of the Grimm case, sisters, he wanted their support and support of other supportive other people, Garrison did in terms of dealing with abolition, which was appropriate, their main focus was women's suffrage, but it doesn't mean that they can't be involved in and recognize that we all are facing discrimination, and that we can start shaping more of our messages to be more inclusive. And that's the thing that that I don't think is happening nearly as much as it ought to. The fact is that, it doesn't mean that blind people shouldn't be concerned about or dealing with LGBTQ or color, or gender or whatever. Yeah. But our main common binding characteristic is that we're all blind men. So for us, as an organization, that should be what we mostly focus on. It also doesn't mean that we shouldn't be aware of and advocate for and fight for other things as well. But as an organization, collectively, the goal really needs to be dealing with blindness, because if you dilute it too much, then you're not dealing with blindness. And the problem with blindness as being a low incidence disability, that's all too easy to make happen. Right?   Andrew Leland ** 42:35 Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, it's interesting, just thinking about that question of dilution versus strengthening, you know, because I think I think if you ask somebody in the Disability Justice Movement, the dilution happens precisely, with an overemphasis on a single disability, right, and then you lose these like broader coalition's that you can build to, you know, I think I think it comes down to maybe like the way that you are our analysts analyzing the structures of oppression, right, like, right, what is it that's creating that 70% unemployment? Is it something specifically about blindness? Or is it like a broader ableist structure that is connected to a broader racist structure? You know, that's connected to a broader misogynist structure? You know, and I think if you start thinking in those structural terms, then like, coalition building makes a lot more sense, because it's like, I mean, you know, I don't know what kind of political affiliation or what but political orientation to take with us, you know, but certainly the Disability Justice Movement is pretty radically to the left, right. And I think traditionally, the NFB, for instance, has had a lot more socially conservative members and leaders. And so it's, you know, that reconciliation feels almost impossibly vast to to think of like an organization like the NFB taking the kind of like, abolitionist stance that a lot of these disability justice groups take to say, like, actually, capitalism is the problem, right. So yeah, so I mean, the thought experiment only goes so far, like, what like a Disability Justice oriented NFP would look like. But you know, that I think there are young members, you know, and I do think it's a generational thing too. Like, I think there are NF beers in their 20s and 30s, who are really wrestling with those questions right now. And I'm really interested to see what they come up with.   Michael Hingson ** 44:29 I think that the biggest value that the NFB brings overall, and I've actually heard this from some ACB people as well, is that the ENFP has a consistent philosophy about what blindness is and what blindness is. And and that is probably the most important thing that the NFP needs to ensure that it that it doesn't lose. But I think that the whole and the NFP used to be totally As coalition building that goes back to Jernigan and Mauer, although Mauer started to change some of that, and I think it will evolve. But you know, the NFB. And blind people in general have another issue that you sort of brought up in the book, you talk about people who are deaf and hard of hearing, that they form into communities and that they, they have a culture. And we don't see nearly as much of that in the blindness world. And so as a result, we still have blind people or sighted people referring to us and and not ever being called out as blind or visually impaired. But you don't find in the deaf community that people are talking about deaf or hearing impaired, you're liable to be shot. It's deaf or hard of hearing. And yeah, the reality is, it ought to be blind or low vision, because visually impaired is ridiculous on several levels visually, we're not different and impaired. What that's that's a horrible thing to say. But as a as an as a group. I was going to use community, but I but I guess the community isn't, as well formed to deal with it yet. We're not there. And so all too often, we talk about or hear about visually impaired or visual impairment. And that continues to promote the problem that we're trying to eliminate. Mm   Andrew Leland ** 46:22 hmm. Yeah. Yeah, that question of blank community is fascinating. And yeah. And I do think that I mean, you know, from my reading the book, I certainly have found blank community. But, you know, if I really think about it, if I'm really being honest, I think it's more that I've met, it's, you know, my work on the book has given me access to really cool blind people that I have gotten to become friends with, you know, that feels different than, like, welcome to this club, where we meet, you know, on Tuesdays and have our cool like, blind, you know, paragliding meetups, you know, not that not that people aren't doing that, like, then they're a really, you know, I would like to get more if I lived in a more urban center, I'm sure it would be involved in like, you know, the blind running club or whatever, willing to hang out with blind people more regularly, but it doesn't feel like a big community in that way. And it's interesting to think about why. You know, I think one big reason is that it's not, it's not familial, in the same way, you know, Andrew Solomon wrote a really interesting book called far from the tree that gets at this where, you know, like, the when, when, when a child has a different identity than a parent, like, you know, deaf children of hearing adults, you know, there doesn't, there isn't a culture that builds up around that, you know, and it's really like these big deaf families that you have with inherited forms of deafness, or, you know, and then schools for the deaf, that, you know, and with deaf culture in particular, you know, really what we're talking about is language, you know, in sign language, right, creates a whole rich culture around it. Whereas, with hearing blind people, you know, they're more isolated, they're not necessarily automatically you have to, you have to really work to find the other blind people, you know, with, with travel being difficult, it's a lot easier to just like, Get get to the public library to meet up in the first place, and so on. So, yeah, it feels a lot more fractured. And so I think you do see groups more like the NFB or the ACB, who are organizing around political action, rather than, you know, like a culture of folks hanging out going to a movie with open audio description, although, I will say that the weeks that I spent at the Colorado Center for the Blind, you know, which is, you know, you can think of it as like a, you know, it's a training center, but in some ways, it's like an intentional blind community do right where you're like, that's like a blind commune or something. I mean, that is just a beautiful experience, that it's not for everyone in terms of their their training method. But if it is for you, like, wow, like for just such a powerful experience to be in a community, because that is a real community. And it nothing will radically change your sense of what it means to be blind and what it means to be in a black community than then living for a while at a place like that. It was a really transformative experience for me.   Michael Hingson ** 49:11 Do you think that especially as the younger generations are evolving and coming up, that we may see more of a development of a community in the blindness in the blindness world? Or do you think that the other forces are just going to keep that from happening? Well,   Andrew Leland ** 49:30 you know, one of the things that I discovered in writing the book was that, you know, and this is sort of contradicting what I just said, because there there is a blind community. And, you know, I read in the book like, at first I thought that blind techies were another subculture of blindness, like blind birders are blind skateboarders, right. But then the more I looked into it, the more I realized that like being a techie is actually like a kind of a basic feature of being a blind person in the world. You know, and I don't hear if it's 2023 or 1823, you know, because if you think about the problem of blindness, which is access to information, by and large, you know, you basically have to become a self styled information technologist, right? To, to get what you need, whether it's the newspaper, or textbooks or signs, road signs, or whatever else. So. So I do and I do think that like, you know, when my dad was living in the Bay Area in the 90s, you know, when I would go visit him, you know, he was a techie, a sighted techie. And, you know, he would always be part of like, the Berkeley Macintosh user group, just be like, these nerds emailing each other, or, you know, I don't even know if email was around, it was like, late 80s. You know, but people who have like the Mac 512, KS, and they would, they would connect with each other about like, Well, how did you deal with this problem? And like, what kind of serial port blah, blah, blah? And that's a community, right? I mean, those people hang out, they get rise together. And if there's anything like a blind community, it's the blind techie community, you know, and I like to tell the story about Jonathan mosun. I'm sure you've encountered him in your trailer. I know Jonathan. Yeah. You know, so I, when I discovered his podcast, which is now called Living blind, fully blind, fully, yeah. Yeah. I, I was like, oh, okay, here are the conversations I've been looking for, because he will very regularly cover the kind of like social identity questions that I'm interested in, like, you know, is Braille like, is the only way for a blind person to have true literacy through Braille? Or is using a screen reader literacy, you know? Or like, is there such a thing as blind pride? And if so, what is it? I was like? These are the kinds of questions I was asking. And so I was so delighted to find it. But then in order to, in order to get to those conversations, you have to sit through like 20 minutes of like, one password on Windows 11 stopped working when I upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11. And so like, what, you know, if you what Jaws command, can I use in and I was like, why is this? Why is there like 20 minutes of Jaws chat in between these, like, really interesting philosophical conversations. And eventually, I realized, like, oh, because that's like, what this community needs and what it's interested in. And so in some ways, like the real blind community is like the user group, which I think is actually a beautiful thing. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 52:14 Well, it is definitely a part of it. And we do have to be information technologists, in a lot of ways. Have you met? And do you know, Curtis Chang,   Andrew Leland ** 52:23 I've met him very briefly at an NFB convention. So Curtis,   Michael Hingson ** 52:28 and I have known each other Gosh, since the 1970s. And we both are very deeply involved in a lot of things with technology. He worked in various aspects of assistive technology worked at the NFB center for a while and things like that, but he always talks about how blind people and and I've heard this and other presentations around the NFB, where blind people as Curtis would put it, have to muddle through and figure out websites. And, and the fact is, we do it, because there are so many that are inaccessible. I joined accessibe two years ago, two and a half years ago. And there are a lot of people that don't like the artificial, intelligent process that accessibe uses. It works however, and people don't really look far enough that we're not, I think, being as visionary as we ought to be. We're not doing what we did with Ray Kurzweil. And look, when the Kurzweil project started with the NFB Jernigan had to be dragged kicking and screaming into it, but Ray was so emphatic. And Jim Gasol at the Washington office, finally convinced kindred again to let him go see, raised machine, but the rules were that it didn't matter what Ray would put on the machine to read it and had to read what Gasol brought up. Well, he brought it did and the relationship began, and it's been going ever since and, and I worked, running the project and the sense on a day to day basis, I traveled I lived out of hotels and suitcases for 18 months as we put machines all over and then I went to work for Ray. And then I ended up having to go into sales selling not the reading machine, but the data entry machine, but I guess I kept to consistently see the vision that Ray was bringing, and I think he helped drag, in some ways the NFB as an organization, more into technology than it was willing to do before. Interesting.   Andrew Leland ** 54:27 Yeah, I heard a similar comment. The one thing I got wrong in the first edition of the book that I'm correcting for subsequent reprints, but I really bungled the description of the Opticon. And my friend, Robert Engel Britton, who's a linguist at Rice University, who collects opera cones. I think he has got probably like a dozen of them in his house. You know, he helped me you know, because I didn't have a chance to use one. Right he helped me get a better version of it. But he also sent me a quote, I think it was from Jernigan was similar thing where like, I think they were trying to get the public I'm included with, you know, voc rehab, so that that students could not voc rehab or whatever like so that students could get blind students could use them. And it was the same thing of like, you know, this newfangled gizmo is not going to help, you know, Braille is what kids need. So I do that, that's all to say that that makes sense to me that resistance to technology, you know, and it's like, it's a, it's a, it's a sort of conservative stance of like, we understand that what blind people need are is Braille and access to, you know, equal access. And don't don't try to give us any anything else. And you know, and I think, to be fair, like, even though the Opticon sounded like an incredibly useful tool, as is, of course, the Kurzweil Reading Machine and everything that followed from it. There. There is, you know, talking, I talked to Josh Meili, for the book, who's who now works at Amazon, you know, he had this great story about his mentor, Bill, Gary, who, who would, who would basically get a phone call, like once a week from a well, very well meaning like retired sighted engineer, who would say like, oh, you know, what the blind need? It's like the laser cane, right? Or the Yeah, it's like, basically like a sippy cup for blind people like so that they don't spill juice all over themselves. And, you know, and Gary would very patiently be like, Oh, actually, they don't think that that would be helpful to do probably, yeah. Talk to a blind person first, maybe before you spend any more time trying to invent something that blind people don't need. So I think that resistance to like newfangled technology, there's a good reason for it. Well,   Michael Hingson ** 56:26 there is but the willingness to take the Opticon. Look, I think the fastest I ever heard of anybody reading with an optical was like 70 or 80 words a minute, and there are only a few people who did that. Yeah. You know, Candy Lynnville, the daughter of the engineer who invented it, could and Sue Mel Rose, who was someone I knew, was able to and a few people were but what the Opticon did do even if it was slow, yeah, it was it still gave you access to information that you otherwise didn't get access to. And, and I had an optic on for a while. And the point was, you could learn to read and learn printed letters and learn to read them. It wasn't fast. But you could still do it. Yeah. And so it, it did help. But it wasn't going to be the panacea. I think that tele sensory systems wanted it to be you know, and then you talked about Harvey Lauer who also develop and was involved in developing the stereo toner, which was the audience since the audio version of the optic comm where everything was represented audio wise, and, and I spent a lot of time with Harvey Harvey at Heinz a long time ago. But the the fact is, I think the question is valid is listening, and so on literacy is literacy, like Braille. And I think there is a difference there is, are you illiterate, if you can't read Braille, you point out the issues about grammar, the issues about spelling and so on. And I think that there is a valid reason for people learning Braille at the Colorado Center, they would tell you, for senior blind people, you may not learn much Braille, but you can learn enough to be able to take notes and things like that, or, or put labels on your, your soup cans, and so on. So it's again, going to be different for different people. But we are in a society where Braille has been so de emphasized. And that's the fault of the educational system for not urging and insisting that more people be able to use Braille. And that's something that we do have to deal with. So I think there is a literacy problem when people don't learn braille. But I also think that, again, there are a lot of things that Braille would be good for, but using audio makes it go faster. It doesn't mean you shouldn't learn braille, though, right? Yeah,   Andrew Leland ** 58:51 no, it's another I think it's interesting. And it's a related idea, this, this sense that technology, you know, this like, just sort of wave your hands and say the word technology as a sort of panacea, where I think, you know, it's, it's a tragic story where, where people will say, Oh, well, you know, little Johnny has, you know, some vision. So like, he could just use technology, like he doesn't need Braille. And it's fascinating to me, because I never really felt it. And maybe it's because I encountered Braille at a point in my development as a blind person that I really was hungry for it. But, you know, people talk about Braille the way they talked about the white cane, like the white cane, I felt so much shame about using in public, and it's such, it's just so stigmatized, whereas Braille, I just always thought it was kind of cool. But you know, you hear it so much from parents where they it's just like their heartbreak seeing their child reading with their fingers, which is, you know, and so as a result, they're like, why don't I just buy like a gigantic magnifier, that maybe in five years, you're not gonna be able to use anyway, but like, at least you're reading the same type of book that   Michael Hingson ** 59:56 half hour or 45 minutes until you start getting headaches. Exactly. And that, you know, I worked on a proposal once. I was an evaluator for it. We were in a school in Chicago, and one of the teachers talked about Sally who could see and Johnny, who was totally blind, literally, it was Sally and Johnny. And she said, Sally gets to read print, Johnny has to read Braille. Sally couldn't read print very fast. her eyesight wasn't good. Yeah, she got to read print. And Johnny had to read Braille. Yeah, it's the kind of thing that we we see all the time. And it's so unfortunate. So yeah, I, I do understand a lot of the technology resistance. But again, people like Ray helped us vision a little differently. But unfortunately, getting that conversation to other people, outside of the NFB community, like teachers and so on, is so hard because so many people are looking at it from a science point of view and not recognizing it as it should be. The the NFB did a video that did it. Several, they have had a whole series of things regarding Braille. But they interviewed a number of people who had some residual vision, who were never allowed to learn to read Braille. And invariably, these people say how horrible it was that they didn't get to learn to read Braille, they learned it later. And they're, they're reading slower than they really should. But they see the value of it. And it's important that we hopefully work to change some of those conversations. Yeah,   Andrew Leland ** 1:01:33 I mean, it gets back to our earlier in our conversation a

In the studio today is Kendra Farrow, Project Director with the Older Individuals Who Are Blind – Technical Assistance Center at the National Research & Training Center on Blindness & Low Vision Mississippi State University.   Kendra and Carol discuss the question, “Why not ask the Older Individuals who are Blind right up front if they want to work?" Are we missing the boat with these talented individuals who are commonly not given the option for VR services that can benefit them? Whether it's training, job development and placement, or job retention, VR services in conjunction with IL services, can lead to successful employment outcomes for Older Individuals who are Blind and contribute to their sense of purpose and meaning.   Listen Here   Full Transcript:   {Music} Kendra: When somebody who is 55 or older loses vision and they call about services and they say, well, how old are you? And if they're over 55, they're just pushing them into the older individuals who are blind program. They aren't necessarily then offered the services that they could benefit from. We're cutting ourselves short, and it's a very easy closure once the person has regained their confidence with the older blind program and learning some skills, once they start seeing I can do these things, maybe I want to go back to work now that I have some confidence again.   Intro Voice: Manager Minute brought to you by the VRTAC for Quality Management, Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time. Here is your host Carol Pankow.   Carol: Well, welcome to the Manager Minute. Joining me in the studio today is Kendra Farrell, Project Director with the Older Individuals who are Blind. Technical Assistance Center that is housed at the National Research and Training Center on Blindness and Low Vision at Mississippi State University. Holy moly. That's a mouthful. So, Kendra, how are things going in Mississippi?   Kendra: Oh they're good.   Carol: Awesome. Thanks for joining me today. So for our listeners, I want to give a little background. The Technical Assistance Centers that are funded by RSA, we hold a regular TAC collaborative meeting so we can leverage resources and keep each other informed so we can serve all of you better. And in a recent collaborative meeting, I asked the group for any possible ideas where we could collaborate on a podcast. And sure enough, Kendra brought up an interesting conversation that she had with a group of experts that was talking about eligibility for the OIB program, and that led to a deeper discussion about a place where VR might be missing the boat on serving a very important group of people. So, of course, my background as a former director of a blind agency, it really resonated with me, and I wanted to let our listeners in on the conversation. So let's dig in. So, Kendra, can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and how you came to be the director of the OIB TAC?   Kendra: Yeah, I started out my career working in direct services, providing vision rehab therapy services to individuals of all ages at a nonprofit agency. And after doing that for 14 years, I saw a job posting with the National Research and Training Center on Blindness and Low Vision. We call it the NRTC for short, and they gave me a job. I was hired on a research grant related to employment for people who are blind or have low vision. And once we got started with that a little bit, there was the opportunity to apply for the grant to have the Technical Assistance Center for Older Blind services. And my colleague and I said that we kind of felt like maybe we were doing a disservice to the field if we didn't apply because we have a long history at the NRTC of doing like some external program evaluations for older blind programs. I think we had conducted program evaluations for, I think it's over 25 of the states over the years. Since I've been here, we've only worked with maybe 5 or 6, so not as many. But, you know, we have that background and we've had publications and done different things related to the older blind services back when it was a discretionary grant in the 90s. Before it was a formula grant, only a couple of states had it. So we were kind of like the place where the information was stored, like collected. What is currently collected on the annual 7OB report that is provided to RSA by all of the programs we collected that data. I don't know if it went to RSA too, but we collected that data and then published on it to establish the importance of the services that were being provided. So we do have a long history, long before I came here in 2015, when the opportunity to apply to be the Technical Assistance Center, my colleague and I decided that we should try to get the grant. So it's completely changed my job with the NRTC, I was working my colleague was the project director for a number of years until she retired, and then we had some other directors in between. And so, because I have the historical knowledge, and when the most recent director left, I decided that it was time to just step up and direct the project, because it's the hard thing to have a national perspective on the older blind services. It's not something that's easy to find. You know, we tried to post and hire somebody, and there's just not a lot of people that can come and hit the ground running with having that national perspective.   Carol: Yeah, you nailed that for sure, because I know when I was at Minnesota Blind, we always relied on the NRTC and the resources. You guys had such amazing curriculum. We would have staff go through and take your courses. You were the go to people. So you're definitely the right people. And you're right, there isn't a lot of folks that have that nationwide perspective that you all had. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the mission of the OIB TAC? What is your focus?   Kendra: According to RSA and the grant and the cooperative agreement that we work under, we provide technical assistance and training, and we provide that on four different topic areas, which include community outreach, promising practices in service delivery, financial and management practices, and data collection and analysis, including program performance kinds of things.   Carol: I love it because I had the opportunity you brought me in. We were able to collaborate on a state and that was super fun to watch you and your team, and to see how we could do a little collaboration between the and you. And I really appreciated that. I know you also have had some personal experience with VR. Can you tell us a little bit about that?   Kendra: Yeah, I have always been legally blind. I was a high partial when I was young and grew up just doing the best I could with what I had, and had a few services as a child in three school, large print books. You know, I wasn't really considered in my mind to be blind. But then when I got to college, you know, the reading is harder and everything, and I started working with VR. They provided some assistive technology that I needed to be successful in college, and my vision did start to go downhill. And so I needed more services. And I have kind of been in and out just through my various jobs and different challenges with technology through the years, trying to keep myself up to date and able to do the things that I do to be employed.   Carol: Thanks for sharing that, because I think it's always interesting when you come from working in the system, you can see some things maybe differently. You have a different viewpoint about VR and some of the things that what was working and what doesn't work.   Kendra: One of the unique things is that I have received VR services in three different states, and so just the differences between the states is very interesting to observe. And, you know, the separate versus a combined agency, you know, how that feels different and that kind of thing is very interesting to think about.   Carol: That I did not know that about you. So that is very interesting because people always say there are 78 VR programs and there are 78 ways of doing everything.   Kendra: I've only seen three.   Carol: Let's talk about this conversation you had with a group of experts around disabilities that is going to lead to our conversation today. What is the opportunity that VR is missing?   Kendra: Well, individuals who lose vision later in life. Often people think, what would I do in those circumstances? And so we go on some of our preconceived ideas about blindness or vision impairment. That is going to be hard to work. And the truth is that many of those people, when they're in the situation of losing their vision, they're in their 40s, 50s, 60s, a lot of times they are planning to work until they're maybe like 69 or 70, because you get higher rates on your Social Security retirement account, your payments, if you work until you're older and they usually are planning to do that. And so to take an early retirement is putting them in a financial disadvantage that they weren't planning on. And also people want to be busy. They want to contribute. It makes you feel good to work and to contribute. And so when somebody who is 55 or older loses vision and they call about services and they say, well, how old are you? And if they're over 55, they're just pushing them into the older individuals who are blind program, which eligibility begins at age 55. So they aren't necessarily then offered VR services that they could benefit from. And these are people with decades of experience that have job skills. And we have such a need right now for people to fill positions that are open. You know, we've had this mass wave of retirement and we don't want to see more people retire if possible. You know, I think employers really want people to stay in their jobs, especially those that are experienced and have lots to give yet to their fields. And even if they can't stay within the job that they were in, it's not outside the scope of imagination to think that they could still go back to school and learn a different profession and apply some of their job skills in a different field.   Carol: I know you have hit the nail on the head with this. It really made me think back to my time at SSB in Minnesota, because I thought about our folks coming into the older blind program and how we, you know, you just funnel them in. Oh, you're not going to still want to work. And anywhere you go today, you go to the grocery store, any place you are, you're shopping, you're out and about. You see a lot of older individuals that are back at work. People may have retired and they're like, you know, I want to do a little something or they're working still full time because you are right. I just got my Social Security statement the other day, and there is a significant difference between collecting at 62 and collecting at 70, like substantially different. And so you want to prolong that as long as you can. So your end days you aren't just living in complete poverty. I think that is super smart. I know when you and I were chatting about this, we were thinking, some of this comes down to just that. Overall, in our society, some of the ageism, I know I have felt that turning 60 this last year and. People going, oh, you're 60 now. When are you going to retire Retire? Because I retired from the state of Minnesota when I was 57, because I'd started working during high school, and I knew I was going to go into this TA world and was really excited about that. I had never intended on retiring- retiring. I was going into this other work, but now people are like, you turn 60 and it's like, when are you going to retire? And I'm thinking, well, not yet. I don't want to yet. And even going to my doctor's office, I was there to get a shot. And they're like, well, you know, you're of a certain age now. You need the RSV shot, too. And I feel like, wow, stuff has changed. And I know you felt like you've had that. I believe you turned 50 recently.   Kendra: I did, and even before that, like, I don't know, maybe nine months or a year ago, somebody said to me, just out of the blue, when are you going to retire? And I'm like, hello, I'm not even 50 yet. What are you talking about?   Carol: I know it's kind of hilarious. You go, what's up? And why are we putting that, you know, on our customers that are coming in the door because they're 55 years old. It's like all of a sudden you have no value to work.   Kendra: Well, let me just say this, that after we had our initial conversation about making this a podcast topic, I said to myself, is there a way I can kind of test this theory about people wanting to work? So we get technical assistance calls, you know, sometimes from consumers. And so I've had three individuals call me since we had that conversation, and I determined that I would not ask them their age, that I would simply ask them as the first question out of my mouth was, would you like to work? And out of all three of those technical assistance calls, all three said yes. And after the conversation, none of them actually told me their age. But one did tell me that he was 70 and another lady, that she was like, well, can I work? I said, sure you can. Do you want to work? She said, yes. I said, okay, here's the number, call them and make sure you tell them when you're asking about services that you want to work. I said, that's the key. You need to tell them that right up front. That's my little story.   Carol: Yeah. You've got your research going. I think that's cool. I think you and I chatted about just those misconceptions, you know, what are some of those misconceptions about blindness being the most difficult disability to get individuals into employment? Because I sure didn't think that coming to SSB, I had worked in some other agencies with different sort of disability groups, and I'm going, gosh, I felt like this group would be like the easiest group to get into employment, but I know people have a lot of misconceptions. What are some of those?   Kendra: Well, they think that there's higher liability to the employer if you're thinking about something more industrial moving around, that there's safety concerns. And I think there's a huge thing about safety concerns that the rest of the team is going to feel like that employee is a burden, like they have to help them, like you're going to have to help the person use their computer or use the photocopier. And yeah, you might have to help with little things, but the Blind employee can totally contribute in just the same way as any other employee, and is going to have strengths and weaknesses like any other employee. You know, not all sighted employees are good with their computer, and co-workers help each other with their computers all the time. Just getting ready to do the podcast. Today, my coworker had to come in here and help me set up the microphone, and that's okay. I mean, that's a normal thing that coworkers do for each other. You know, it's just the way the workplace goes. So it's not that we don't help each other, but everybody helps each other.   Carol: That is such a great way to put it, because I'm thinking this boomer generation, it's hysterical. You know, you're working with some of the younger folks and they're doing cool new things and you're like, oh, how do I do? How do I do that on the on the computer? We do all help each other all the time. But why is it that if a person is blind or visually impaired somehow that that help seems like, oh, like that's extra. You know, it's an extra thing when it isn't if it's anybody else.   Kendra: Right. I don't understand why that is. And maybe they, I don't know, I'm just guessing, but they just think that the productivity might be less too. And it's true that we do things differently. But I can tell you that there are certain things I can do faster than my sighted colleagues because I use keystrokes. And, you know, I could show them how to use the keystrokes to their Windows, keystrokes, anybody can use them. And so a Blind employee can actually be helping their coworkers become more efficient because they do things in a different way. And it also makes the world better because the things that are sometimes inaccessible to me, the sighted employees are telling me, we hate that too. It doesn't work well, and I think if they would update that system, if they would make it so that it would be accessible for me, it would probably be nicer for the sighted employees too. So having those diverse members of an employment team is really good, because what's good for the blind employee, or helps them to be more effective in their role, is going to help the entire team. I was just having a conversation yesterday with a couple of my coworkers. We have some virtual employees and we have in-person employees, and the hybrid team is, you know, we were talking about when we have a meeting that it would be good if we went around and had like a little introduction slash icebreaker, even though we all know each other, but to know who's in the room to make sure how the microphone are picking up somebody's voice, if they're virtual to the meeting, you know, because then they'll know, oh, the person who sounds really far away, that's Jennifer over there in the corner, you know, because she's introduced herself. You heard and she says, oh, yeah, for Thanksgiving, I had my daughter and my husband with me, you know, or whatever, you know, just a little sentence icebreaker conversation to hear the voice and to remind yourself, because we don't meet every week and or even every day. And we have a big team. There's like, I don't know, like 16 of us and some are always virtual and some are here in person and some are on different teams so they don't interact, except that one meeting every month. So anyway. But that would be good for everybody. It's not just, it's not just the blind employees, but it's something that would be really helpful for those of us who depend on listening to identify who people are as they're talking during the meeting.   Carol: That makes perfect sense. I love that you talked about keystrokes. Dave Andrews back at SSB, he was teaching me keystrokes. I still use him today because it's much quicker when I'm doing different things. Yeah, that resonated with me. So what do you think OIB staff should say to those customers periodically?   Kendra:  In the conversation we had with the experts back in the original conversation that got me thinking on this topic altogether, they were suggesting that it should be offered right at the beginning, as we're making somebody eligible to ask them if they're interested in employment and then again later once they start building up their confidence and their skills. Because sometimes when people suddenly or even not so suddenly lose vision, it's a real hit to their confidence level. And they're like, I can't even pick out a pair of pants and a top that match each other. How am I going to go to work? I can't even warm up soup on my stove and not burn myself, or feel like I'm going to make a mess all over the place when I pour it into the bowl. How can I go to work if I can't even do basic things to take care of myself? It's so important that they can build up that confidence first, because it's hard to think I can use a computer if you can't even make yourself a bowl of soup. So doing those independent living goals and being able to build up that confidence once they start seeing I can do these things for myself. I don't have to ask my husband to always come in here and pour the soup into the bowl. I can do that myself. I can pick out my own clothes. I have a labeling system that helps me know that I match, and I can put on my makeup, and I can look appropriate to go out of the house. Okay, I have that confidence. Well, now maybe I want to go back to work now that I have some confidence again.   Carol: That is so true. I saw that over and over, just that building of confidence with the young people that came in that had lost their sight are older individuals who are blind, that had been losing their vision and getting that confidence back. It helped throughout everything in your life, you know, and not feeling like I can only stay in my house. I can't go out and travel. I don't know how to use the bus. I can't get anywhere, I don't have cane skills, or I haven't learned to use a guide dog or whatever it may be, and even how I'm using JAWS or whatever mechanism to read and do all of that. You see, as those skills get built, that you just see the person completely change. Like it was the most incredible thing for me in the agency, to watch folks in their journey and go from where they were to where they wanted to be, and it's pretty cool. I think the other thing that might be missing, you know, people think about even later on in life, so you're 70 and you want to go back to work. Everybody doesn't want to necessarily work full time. Like some of the people I would like to work part time. I want to work 20 hours a week or whatever. I think we always think this is an all or nothing type of thing.   Kendra: Yeah, definitely. I see a lot of people that would like to work a little bit, even if they're not going to work full time. And so that's still a successful  VR closure. Those people can contribute, and the employers do want to fill those positions that are open, even if they have to hire a couple of part time people to fill a full time position that's open, I think they'd be willing to consider it. You know, we're cutting ourselves short, and it's a very easy closure once the person has regained their confidence with the older blind program and learning some skills, or if they come in there and they still are working and don't want to give it up, I mean, that's the thing that always killed me when I was working in Direct Services, people would call me up on the phone and they said, yesterday was my last day of work because I lost my vision, I quit my job, and now I need to know how to become a blind person. You need to help me with that now. And I'm like, why did you quit your job? Why didn't you call me yesterday? I could have helped you keep going with what you were. You know, it's in society's mind that it's hard to work. But before people lose vision and before they're connected and know about services, it's a thought in their head, too. So that's why they get funneled into these programs and why they allow it, because we're just reinforcing those misconceptions about blindness.   Carol: So, Kendra, what suggestions do you have for VR and OIB to help make a dent in this?   Kendra: Well, I think just being aware first that it could be happening and then talking with our teams and really encouraging the staff that are working within the OIB programs to make sure that they're asking, do you want to go to work? And then the counselors need to understand when you get a referral for somebody over 55, don't look at that as a hard person to work with. This should be an easy person to work with, you know, compared to like maybe a transition student, that is. And I'm not implying that they're, you know, some people are really good at working with that population. But just in comparison, like this person comes with the soft skills, they know how to have professional conversations. They've had years of working experience. You don't have to teach them the soft skills. They just need to know, how can I adapt the things that I used to do visually to doing them non visually? That's all they need to know. And then they need that, you know, your assistance to make sure that they have the equipment and the training to use that equipment, and they should be able to be successful in employment. It should not be hard to get a successful closure out of that.   Carol: That is so well said. You know, you look across the country and I've seen what's happened during the pandemic and the kind of the drop in numbers of individuals that are in VR and people going, gosh, we're looking for customers. You know, we're looking for people to come in that want to go to work. And here's a group that's there and we're missing the boat on that. So I think your advice is super well-timed and important. It's a really important message for VR to hear. So I know we'll hear from you in the future, because you have a whole host of ideas for some other future podcasts, and I really look forward to talking to you about those. So thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate it.   Kendra: Sure, thank you for the opportunity.   {Music} Outro Voice: Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time, brought to you by the VR TAC for Quality Management. Catch all of our podcast episodes by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening!

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Presenter Contact Info Email: RMiller@Vispero.com

ESTHER 9:20-22 Thanks to everyone who supports TMBH at patreon.com/thetmbhpodcast You're the reason we can all do this together! Discuss the episode here Opening song, "As the Crow Flies" from the album, "The Clamour and the Crash" by Jeff Foote

On this episode, we continue our director's spotlight on Michael Mann with his 1986 serial-killer-thriller: MANHUNTER.

Laird Hamilton is a legendary American big wave surfer, known for riding some of the most dangerous waves ever to break. Laird is also a fitness icon and creator of Laird Superfood. Part two is the story of Hamilton's incredible surfing career. He recounts his struggle to find his footing among an industry set on sponsors and rules and how he ultimately became a trend setter rather than a follower. Shawn and Laird discuss "bio-hacking" and how Laird Superfood was created. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://drinkhoist.com - USE CODE "SHAWN" https://gcu.edu/military Laird Hamilton Links: Website - https://lairdsuperfood.com Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/F859FC96-07C4-4ED8-952A-9CA41B8B784F Instagram - https://instagram.com/lairdsuperfood?igshid=NGVhN2U2NjQ0Yg%3D%3D&utm_source=qr Tiktok - https://www.tiktok.com/@lairdsuperfood?_t=8hPulnwWiXy&_r=1 Youtube - https://youtube.com/@LairdSuperfood?si=rjEDqFoHVJU01BQH Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/lairdsuperfood Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

X Outline: 2:28 Willy Wonka Recovery Game 3:45 My role list 6:30 Jacques Pepin, chef 7:45 Rob Zombie 11:30 Spy expert: Public, private, & secret lives 16:15 Jaws poster artist 17:47 Challenge: Role models for your roles www.rockstarcreativity.com

Super fun episode today discussing the nearly sold out in one day Lebowski topper from teppinball.com our friends from The Electric Playground. Also some Jaws speculation as it may be coming soon! Ending on an excerpt from an interview I did last night with Bob Rose, filmmaker and all around cool guy behind the Token Taverns documentary now streaming and touring Film Festivals and Pinball Expos. I've seen it and am in awe of what he has created and the special guests! Go check it out! Follow him on facebook at 'Token Taverns' Amazon Prime https://www.primevideo.com/detail/Token-Taverns/0G1BRJGS084SE2Q8KRI8PHCG0J Vimeo https://vimeo.com/ondemand/tokentaverns Tubi https://tubitv.com/movies/100010742/token-taverns Google Play https://play.google.com/store/movies/details?id=n_nhNbbumv4.P&pli=1 Email me at donspinballpodcast@gmail.com patreon.com/donspinballpodcast youtube.com/@donspinballpodcast --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/donspinballpodcast/support

The Morning team asks Ruben Amaro Jr. about Aaron Nola's contract. The team continue talking about the Foirty-Whiners with Ron Jaworski and Joe Conklin' Xmas song "Jalen Hurts Rocks!"

The Morning team and Ron Jaworski discuss the Birds/Niners matchup. They try to answer why the 49ers are favored. Jaws talks Brock Purdy. 

Mastering a new screen reader can be a daunting task: with a plethora of screen readers to choose from, and the learning curve of new commands it's easy to become overwhelmed. Thankfully, there's a new website to help you along your screen-reader journey!   Blind Abilities podcast host Simon Bonenfant joined Assistive Technology Specialists Allison Mello and Max Avendano in the virtual studio to discuss everything you need to know about the new SRT Screen Reader training website.   You can access the site by visiting this link. The site offers full-length tutorials of some of the most popular Screen Readers such as Voiceover, Jaws, Kromevox, and NVDA.   Interested in practicing the information you learned? Take a look at the Game Portal, where you can find fun ways to develop your skills.   In addition to discussing the features of the website, Allison and Max give an overview of their work at the California School for the Blind, and how they used their lived experiences to compile the site. Don't forget to check back often, as they plan to provide updates as new information becomes available.   To contact the California School for the Blind, visit Their Website To contact the SRT development team directly, visit their Contact Page.   Read More

Adam Hart investigates the most famous and feared predator in all the ocean – the great white shark! With rows of large, serrated teeth, it's often thought of as a ferocious man-eater and was the villain of the film Jaws – which frightened a generation of beachgoers. This star of the silver screen may be the subject of fascination and fright for many, but is it really the ultimate predator of the ocean as Hollywood has led us to believe?Adam hears what it's like to see these sharks up-close and in person for the very first time. He learns more about how great whites detect and hunt their prey, as well as the challenges they've been facing due to another ocean predator. Contributors:Dr Alison Towner is a postdoctoral researcher at Rhodes University in South Africa. She has a PhD in white shark ecology and has been studying the displacement of great whites due to orcas (killer whales) in South Africa.Professor Gavin Naylor is Director of the Florida Program for Shark Research. He is a biologist who has specialised in evolutionary and population genetics, focusing on sharks.Presenter: Professor Adam Hart Producer: Jonathan Blackwell Editor: Holly Squire (Photo: Great White Shark, Credit: Todd Winner/Stocktrek Images via Getty Images)

We hope you all got enough to eat this Thanksgiving because this shark certainly did not. Watch out because Jaws is in your face 3-D style! That's right, we watched Jaws 3-D. We are pretty sure most of the actors in this movie were coked-up in 3-D too! Listen to the discussion! www.garbagedaypodcast.com www.patreon.com/garbageday www.garbagedaypodcast.info  

Mark and David Cross (itsMeDavidCross on X) discuss the 1978 creature feature Piranha. Directed by Joe Dante, and starring Bradford Dillman, Heather Menzies, Dick Miller, and a bunch of hungry fish, the Roger Corman produced film is one of the best Jaws knock-offs ever made. In this episode, they also talk about the inspired special effects, Joe Dante's filmography, and where it stands amongst all the other Jaws knock-offs that were made in the 1970s and 1980s. Enjoy!If you enjoy this episode, make sure to listen to our episodes that cover Alligator (1980) and Grizzly (1976)This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/3382899/advertisement

Jake Ricca and Christophe Jean join the show for today's episode. They talk about having a bad time in Texas, OG Mudbone, and the Jaws-themed open mic in Orlando.Thanks to Christophe and Jake for coming back on the show and again to Jake for the studio. Catch both of these guys on previous episodes from both Orlando and NYC, and make sure click their links for more.Christophe is on Instagram @chrisjeanofficial and hosts the Rough Week Show podcast. Jake Ricca is on Instagram @jakericca and has a podcast with fellow Florida comic and former guest, Joe Censabella, called Cup of Jokes. As always, find Michael Good on Instagram @michaelgoodcomedy and on Twitter @agoodmichael. Check out the show on YouTube and follow the official Instagram page @morninggoodpodcast.This podcast was produced by Paxton Fleming, you can find him on Instagram @yaboypax 

A movie review show that asks the question: Is It Jaws?  Or, in simpler terms, is it a classic, is it good, is it just watchable...or is it totally unwatchable?  Host, Paul Spataro, is joined by a variety of cohosts to look at movies from all

Join the Horrorcast gang as we discuss what films we've been watching!! Email us at askthehorrorcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter @thehcast Check out our Site and store at thehorrorcast.net Join the conversation on our Horrorcast Facebook Group horror, movie, film, halloween, scary, spooky, reviews, discussion, critic, news, interviews, trailers, dvd, collectors, slasher, vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts, haunted,supernatural, paranormal, haunted house, cult, John Carpenter, Stephen King, Universal Monsters, It Chapter 1, It Chapter 2, blood, guts, gore, Jason Vorhees, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Pennywise, Child's Play, Chucky, Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf man, Creatures, Monsters, Tobe Hooper, George Romero, Rob Zombie, sid haug, Lucana Coil, Black Christmas, In Fabric, Daniel isn't Real, rabid, Freaks, Night train murders, Dark Light, Slay belles, train to busan, peninsula, doctor sleep, The fanatic, tumbbad, Midnight kiss, depraved, A Christmas Carol, BBC, A mata negra, the black forest, trespassers, midsommar, parasite, south korea, true crime, Top 10, Best of 2019, Year in review, horror movie podcast, shockwaves, fangoria, dread central, modern horrors, serial killers, horrorhound, I see you, antrum, the assent, the sonota, Close calls, Ghost stories, Netflix, Disney plus, apple tv plus, servant, amazon prime, streaming, politics, true crime, Christine, Underwater, Kristen stewart, Snatchers, 12 monkeys, Lovedeathandrobots, 2020 preview, chucky, don mancini, The howling, Jaws, comedy, sports, arts, news society and culture, music, TV & movies, genre, murder, Hammer studios, Hammer horror, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Terance Fisher, true crime, crime junkie, women in horror

Episode 714 :  Alan Scott: Green Lantern, Jay Garrick : The Flash, Wesley Dodds : The Sandman: Sean and Jim go JSA happy and take a look at the first issues featuring Green Lantern, the Flash and the Sandman of the New Golden Age! Ted Sikora (Punchline 1-3) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/herotomorrow/violante/description We are on Threads! https://www.threads.net/@ragingbulletspodcast Speeding Bullets : Next week Sean is a cohost on “Is it Jaws?” Check it out here : https://twotruefreaks.com/podcast/qt-series/is-it-jaws-movie-reviews/ Upcoming: JSA Spinoffs, Outsiders, The Flash, Hawkgirl, Amazon's Attack, Superman, more Dawn of DC coverage. Contact Info (Social Media and Gaming) Updated 9/23: https://ragingbullets.com/about/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/401332833597062/ Show Notes: 0:00 Show opening, http://www.heroinitiative.org, http://cbldf.org/,http://www.DCBService.com, http://www.Instocktrades.com, show voicemail line 1-440-388-4434 or drnorge on Skype, and more.   4:00 Alan Scott 20:05 Jay Garrick 32:50 Wesley Dodds 50:25 Closing We'll be back in a week with more content.  Check our website, Twitter and our Facebook group for regular updates.

This week word came of the sad passing of multi-talented illustrator Roger Kastel, whose painting for the cover of the paperback edition of Peter Benchley's “Jaws” would go on to become the image for the movie poster—one of the most iconic images in film history. This summer WCS Wild Audio had a chance to sit down with Allison Maher Stern, the model for that painting. She discusses the process for developing that famous image, working with Kastel, and her growing involvement in the wildlife conservation field.Reporting: Nat MossGuest: Allison Maher Stern

We'll provide an overview of the software, plus discuss: Face in View: This new feature in JAWS and Fusion helps you focus your camera before participating in a video call. JAWS helps you center your face, look directly at the camera, ensure adequate lighting, and include or exclude people or items from the view. Split Braille: This JAWS feature enables you to view content from two applications or locations by splitting a line of content on your braille display. For example, you could simultaneously view buffered text and annotations. Two vertical lines separate the content. Inverted Mouse Pointer Scheme: This ZoomText and Fusion feature inverts the pointer and background colors, making the pointer easier to locate. When moving the mouse pointer over a black background, for example, the pointer turns white. The contrast helps you locate the pointer while the text remains visible. Single Wedge Cursor Enhancement: This new ZoomText and Fusion feature displays a single triangle below the cursor, making the cursor easier to locate.

The guys bring on Jaws to talk about Sirianni and more. 

On this episode, we begin a new Director's Spotlight. Our coverage of Michael Mann starts with THIEF, his 1981 heist-drama starring James Caan. The first in a set of 5 movies in anticipation of FERRARI.

Jeff "JB" Berckes & Lester Wiltfong take a cooled-down look at the Chicago Bears' latest loss to the Detroit Lions with their usual categories of... Trench Tribute Sweet Tweets Caught up in a numbers game The Fields Report The 3 Bears Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

  How do you turn a lifelong passion for music, radio, and video games into a successful career in voice acting? Join me as I chat with Jim Fronk, a seasoned radio veteran who transitioned into voice acting, entertaining people with his dynamic performances and engaging characters.  But that's not all, Jim's talents extend beyond the microphone. He's also a whizz in website development, skills he's utilized to build successful websites for fellow voice actors. He delves deep into the magic of website creation, including the critical elements of a voiceover website and how you can create a one-page website in record time. Get ready to be inspired, entertained, and better yet, educated by Jim's wealth of knowledge and experience in the voice acting industry. Don't miss out! About Jim Jim has always been creative and secretively a tech geek. While working at radio stations, he gravitated towards graphic arts and webmaster duties. Through the years he created websites, not only for some of his ventures but for other radio friends and their DJ/entertainment side hustles. When Jim entered the VO world, he was amazed at how much it cost to have a basic cookie-cutter website built for a voice actor. So Jim created his 3-Hour Learn-By-Doing Website Creation Class. For a fraction of the cost, he teaches you how to create, update, and expand your own VO website as your business expands. Check out www.WebsitesForVO.com for more details. 00:01 - Intro (Other) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss, a V-O boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza.  00:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to the V-O Boss podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I am very excited to be here with a very special guest, our 20-plus year radio vet turned voice actor, Jim Fronk. Oh, thanks for having me. Oh, jim, jim, jim, let me just tell the listeners a little bit about you, oh by all means.  00:40 I'm glad that you were so excited. Thank you for being here, jim. Let me tell our listeners a little bit about you. You've been behind the microphone in your happy place since you were 10, the tender age of 10. And since then, jim has been acting and singing his way into our hearts, doing improv, stand-up comedy, live, announcing, djing on air, and now he's in his very own 5x8 padded closet capturing our hearts. So, jim, thank you, thank you, thank you for being here with us today.  01:10 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Well, thank you, I'm glad that I'm padded, because the funny thing is I got out of radio because it got so impersonal. I started voice tracking and I was on nine different stations, six different states, at the same time, and I was just in a 10x10 room recording and I'm sick of that, so I ended up in a 5x8 room.  01:28 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Now a 5x8. Yeah, somehow that's smaller, so okay, but it's padded, so that's better.  01:33 - Jim Fronk (Guest) And this is my happy place. I love being here, I love playing behind the microphone. So I started at 10 years old singing. My dad always said that I would either be a politician or a radio disc jockey. Because of my gift of gab and the way that I like to spin the truth now and then, what would you sing?  01:50 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That's my question. What genre would you sing? Jazz, you sing in classic rock.  01:54 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Classic rock for the most part.  01:56 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Classic rock yeah.  01:58 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Actually back in 2000,. I was Ed McMahon's nextbigstarcom winner of the rock category. What did you sing? I sang Better Roses by Bon Jovi.  02:07 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh, my God. Of course, at least she sang Bon Jovi. I was just going to say I'm thinking, bob Seeger, I don't know why. I've done some Bob. Yeah, I've done some Bob Seeger, I like the doors, yeah.  02:16 - Jim Fronk (Guest) I like the doors, my go-to when the bands are playing and they're like hey, come on up and sing. My go-to is Roadhouse Blues.  02:22 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh God, if we are lucky bosses, we might get to hear, I don't know, a bar or two.  02:27 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Maybe if you go to Uncle Roy's this year or maybe actually if you went to Uncle. Roy's next year. I'll talk to them.  02:33 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Next year. Oh yeah, hey, I personally have never heard you sing and I would absolutely love to hear you sing.  02:39 - Jim Fronk (Guest) You might be able to YouTube something Just saying there might be some poison out there.  02:44 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Before we talk a little bit more about your journey into voiceover, because you've had such a long history behind the mic, I need to ask you about the 7.36 pounds of shelled blue peanut M&Ms that you requested from me in my little inquiry into hey, you want to be a podcast guest? What do you require? And so you asked me for shelled blue peanut M&Ms, and I could only find the brown ones.  03:08 - Jim Fronk (Guest) And yet they're still not here.  03:10 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Somehow, oh, but they're virtually here.  03:11 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Oh, virtually Okay, great, I don't know. I was just trying to think of something weird to put on there that I need, because I really don't need anything.  03:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I'm actually kind of hungry for some M&Ms. But, Jim, it's already been a wonderful five minutes chatting with you. I can't wait to dive deeper into your journey. So share with our listeners how your journey kind of got to be 20 plus years behind the mic doing radio. How did you get there? As a small child you were singing, right. Were you singing classic rock at the age of 10?  03:43 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Well, I was singing what was considered just normal pop music, I guess, yeah, and then classic rock was just music, but I did that. But when I got into school I really got into mixing things and I was making mixtapes before mixtapes were a thing.  03:59 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I made mixtapes. I remember them.  04:01 - Jim Fronk (Guest) I was scratching records so things would skip at a certain point and you put a quarter on top, make a knot skip. No-transcript, Mr Jaws, Dr Demento.  04:11 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh God, yes, I might be dating myself here, but I listen to Dr Demento every Sunday evening. Love Dr.  04:16 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Demento oh my God my favorite show. But they always had Mr Jaws. It was kind of like Mr Jaws, so why are you here? Right now, and then it'd be a song, so I used to try to do those myself.  04:27 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And Delilah. I listened to Delilah too. Delilah yes, yeah, delilah's on the air forever. But then I got into radio.  04:33 - Jim Fronk (Guest) When I was in high school, I was at a party.  04:35 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Okay.  04:36 - Jim Fronk (Guest) I was a senior, it was a junior's party. He was trying to be class president and I was just there being me. I mean, I am your extrovert, you know I talk to everybody, I say hi to everybody. It gets me in trouble sometimes, but whatever. But I was just being me and this guy walked up and said hey, listen, I'm the lawyer of this small little cable radio station downtown Woburn, which is my hometown. He goes do you want to try out? Okay, so I went home the next day. I got my Peter Brady tape recorder. We have to hold down the record and you know what I'm talking about.  05:04 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I know exactly. I used one of those in college when I was recording textbooks on tape. Oh, there you go. I know the realistic. Or it was a Panasonic, I can't remember.  05:13 - Jim Fronk (Guest) I think it was realistic because I did have a radio shack within walking distance and my transistor was in there. Everybody did.  05:19 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Wait, I'm sorry, but we're just going all over the place. So my brothers are very much into Heath Kits, heath Kits, heath Kits. Yeah, building electronics Like we did that from Radio Show. Oh my God, they would just build their own little like transistor radios and stuff.  05:29 - Jim Fronk (Guest) I never got into that but I mean, as I got into radio I did get my engineering junior engineering badge from the engineering people, but whatever. So I went home the next day I had my Peter Brady tape recorder and I had my Precorp eight track player, my stereo system at home, and yes, I'm name dropping here. With Precorp I put in Led Zeppelin and you know I talked out of a Led Zeppelin song and I had to wait because you couldn't rewind eight tracks so you only had one take. Well, you had to wait for the next song. It took me all afternoon to get like three intros and three outros and I ended up getting the gig, which was kind of cool. They made me change my name. They didn't want anybody to know that a high school kid was working at school, but yet they gave me like one of those shiny, flashy 80s type of radio jackets with my name on it and the call letters and I did J at all the high school functions and things. So everybody knew.  06:21 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Can I ask what name they gave you? I was Jumping.  06:23 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Jim Jacobs.  06:25 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) All right, Jumping Jim. This just came to me. Jumping Jim.  06:27 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Jacobs, 935-3378, wlhg. Wow, larry Habar Enterprises. I love it. Larry lives two towns away from me right now. We had lunch about a month ago. The owner of the station.  06:39 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Now explain to me. So you just were fascinated. Did you listen to the radio all the time? I loved radio. And then you were just mimicking all the DJs because the DJs got all the chicks. Apparently that's what it was back in the 80s anyways.  06:51 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Yeah, have you heard of Dale Dorman? He's a Boston guy from KISS, but Dale Dorman and one other guy I forget his name, but they invented top 40 radio. They were at a bar one night and they watched people put quarters in to hear the same 15, 20 songs all night long Sure.  07:05 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That makes sense, so they made that format.  07:07 - Jim Fronk (Guest) And Dale Dorman was also on the local TV station as hey, kiddies, that after school type of thing, and I just loved the guy and I just wanted to be him, I wanted to do what he did and I just set focus on it and I ended up doing it. I met Dale Dorman. The program director of the small station I worked for was the assistant PD of KISS 108 Boston and that's where Dale Dorman was, and she brought us in for a program meeting and God, my mind was just blown at that point and I said this is what I need to do. Got out of high school, I went to college for it, went to school for it, interned, did many, many years, and it was like here.  07:43 I am learning from these people that I think are phenomenal but, they're teaching because they can't make ends meet. So I got out of radio for about 10 years 15 years, and I did stand up comedy and I always talked about getting on the air again, because if I'm doing morning radio, I can't hear them not laughing when. I tell jokes, I just play a soundtrack. So I turned 35 and I said, you know, what Everybody laughs then yeah, exactly.  08:08 I turned 35 and said I have to do this, so I just put everything else aside and I did it.  08:14 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Now let me ask you, because you said most of the people couldn't afford working in radio, so they were teachers. Is that always been the case in radio? Is it always been? Maybe not the best paying gig, but the people in radio love radio. I mean, it's just.  08:27 - Jim Fronk (Guest) It's like being in an abusive relationship. It really is.  08:31 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It slaps you around and I'll tell you. It's like podcasting I'm gonna say because for me, I'm gonna tell you that podcasting is my radio show. In a way it really is.  08:41 - Jim Fronk (Guest) The only difference is I was waking up at 2.30 quarter of 3 every morning to get my butt whipped every day.  08:46 - Intro (Other) But yeah, it's definitely a passion.  08:48 - Jim Fronk (Guest) You hear that word passion with VO. It's the same thing with radio. It was just something that I needed to do. I needed to have that live interaction and as far as the money goes, it's kind of like VO.  08:58 - Intro (Other) It depends what market that you're being planned in.  09:01 - Jim Fronk (Guest) I was doing mornings in Nashua, new Hampshire, which is about 30 miles away from Boston, as the crow flies, about a 40 minute trip. My salary compared to somebody doing the exact same thing on the exact same type of station, they probably were about five or six times more than I was making Just the average guy. Now if you became a star then you're up in the quarter of a million dollars in Boston market but not in Nashua. But I loved it and you got the perks I mean I'd go to concerts, I'd be backstage, at concerts.  09:30 My favorite thing was going on stage and throwing t-shirts out at people and saying, hey, I'm frog from Frank 106 or from 104.9 the Hawk, and people scream and they know me and I just love that. I really love that.  09:43 Just being a part of the community. I was very fortunate that the morning show I did for 106, 3 Frank FM I was part of the community. I would announce football games. My daughter did cheerleading but I would announce the popcorn of football games and I would go and people would know who I was. But I was very active in the community and I'd love that. I love being known.  10:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) You were like a local celebrity.  10:03 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Yeah, but I was able to take that celebrityism and put it to good work as opposed to evil Like I did back in the 90s. Oh sorry.  10:12 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And that's another podcast.  10:14 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Yeah, I don't think the ever straining owners are up yet for that one, so we really can't talk about it.  10:18 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, now 20 years in radio, 20 years 20 plus, yeah Now did you say you were doing synonyms, that you were doing radio, and then you went into comedy, or how did that work?  10:28 - Jim Fronk (Guest) I was doing comedy. First I was a wedding DJ, function DJ, when karaoke was all the buzz. I got my own karaoke company. I had like 35 shows.  10:38 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Look at you being a boss entrepreneur at a young age. I mean bosses, and why you to listen to this? All of the people that come on the show, I mean they're entrepreneurs in so many ways, and that was so creative. I mean, jim, first of all, just being in high school right, and going after your dreams and having the bravery to go try out for the radio station and get the gig right At such a young age. And then you've got to be brave. Did you stand up comedy? That's for sure.  11:03 - Jim Fronk (Guest) You know stand up comedy. Five minutes can seem like 20 minutes. Yes, 20 minutes can seem like five minutes. It all depends on the energy of the crowd. But I tell you that first time I got up on stage, the very first time I was hosting a pretty big deal. It was at Berkeley, 5,000 seats. I was hosting it Not really hosting telling jokes, just kind of introducing people.  11:24 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) But I had a couple of jokes. I'm seeing kind of, yeah, I had a couple of jokes.  11:26 - Jim Fronk (Guest) That first joke I told, and when they laughed, that wave that hit me, that became my drug.  11:33 - Intro (Other) That became what I craved.  11:35 - Jim Fronk (Guest) That became what I had to accomplish on a Monday night up in Vermont for a slice of pizza, or a Tuesday doing an open mic night at the KFC in Volrica Mass. I mean, it's just, you did what you had to do, but it was again a passion for it.  11:49 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Now okay. So, passion aside, I'm sure there were some jokes that probably didn't make it, and so did you experience like imposter syndrome. I mean I can only imagine Like I think stand up comedy's got to be one of the hardest skills. I mean it's like improv too. I feel like we all need it and it just really builds our character, because there's just so many things we have to be quick on our feet about. I'm sure that all of this is leading up to a really fabulous career in voiceover, because all of those skills have led up to who you are as an actor today.  12:21 - Jim Fronk (Guest) And as far as jokes bombing, I'm looking for a reaction. You can oh or boo or yeah. Hey, I got a reaction, and if something just didn't work, I really didn't care you laughed at it.  12:31 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh well, that didn't work.  12:32 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Pretty much, yeah, I mean sometimes I'd make a joke about it and take a paper out of my pocket and say our fake paper and say okay, scratch that one off the list.  12:40 Yeah, that didn't work, whatever, yeah, okay, that doesn't work in Poughkeepsie, all right, fine. But yes, everything I've done coming up to this has helped me in VO. You know, the radio, yeah, has contributed the live stuff, the comedy, the improv and all that. I got out of radio back in 2018 because it was just impersonal to me. I wasn't doing mornings, I wasn't doing a talk show. I craved that interaction. I didn't like just talking up 15 seconds of a song coming out, absolutely. I mean, I'm great at trivia, music trivia. You know, you give me 10 seconds of any song from 1960 to 1992 and I can probably tell you what it is, but it just wasn't fulfilling. It wasn't satisfying. I did get into flying drones for a bit believe it or not, a friend of mine, that's random, it really is, but it was a passion, I flew a drone.  13:28 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Radio VO drones.  13:29 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Yeah, well, I flew the drones and I loved it. I got a passion for it. I was making some great money doing cell tower inspections and infrared. At one point I had more money invested in drones than I did in Harley-Davidson's.  13:42 Or in your microphone maybe, or in my microphones. I'm even close. I'm completely. You know how many U87s Like. I sold one of my drones in two cameras and I bought my daughter a brand new Jeep. They were up there but it just wasn't what I wanted to do. I wanted to be behind the microphone. Okay, and a buddy of mine, AJ Duquette Actually I think you were on the show, a buddy of mine, aj Duquette, a radio guy. He's doing VO, and he told me about J Michael Collins and I was driving home year ago, april. I was driving home from New York City on Clubhouse and I think you were on it, j Michael, and I want to say Liz Atherton.  14:18 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh, we've done yeah, we've done a bunch of yeah. And I asked the question.  14:21 - Jim Fronk (Guest) I just got my demos back and I was like, well, how do I know if I have a good demo? Yeah, and J Michael we talked afterwards and he went over it and gave me the good, the bad and the ugly and that just got me on the path of okay. So I'm going to talk to these people. I'm not going to be afraid to approach anybody. I'm very approachable and I'm going to approach as many people in this business that are where I want to be and it's been great. And that's my advice to everybody Don't be afraid to approach anybody, because if somebody's not approachable to you or if somebody doesn't want you to approach them, you don't want them in your circle. Why would you want them in your circle? You know, I like going to Dallas and seeing Ann Ganguza from down the hall and going Ann, and she's like jam. I mean, that's what it's all about Making connections, having some fun.  15:09 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It's all about the relationships, really Absolutely about the relationships. So let's kind of continue on with the voice acting. So you got into voice acting around. You're saying around 2018?.  15:21 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Oh, no, no, no, I got into drones in 2018. Oh okay, excuse me, I actually celebrated two years in VO from when I started in September this past September. So it's been about two years, a month or two, but I got into it. I got some training. I did about five or six months with the training with a great coach, tim Powers, you've met.  15:38 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Tim, actually I know Tim absolutely.  15:40 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Tim has become a great mentor and even a better friend. But from there I got my demos and, like I said, how do I know they're good? And I just started doing the marketing thing. I've since redone my demos. I'm a different animal now, different everything. I kind of went feet first and I thank my wife so much for that. We talk about not making money in radio.  16:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) We all know the struggles that actors have, and we are actors Not making money in voiceover.  16:06 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Yeah, I mean just acting alone.  16:08 God bless my wife. She's very successful in the pharmaceutical business. So when the time came, we sat down and talked and she said, when we first met, I was making $5,000 a year less than you and you were in radio. And I'm like I know, but we have flipped the switch. She's gone so far. So she said do what you want to do. Invest what you need to invest. Get the right equipment. You know what you need. You've been in the business. You can build radio stations. Get what you need. So I did. And here I am two years later and I'm getting clients, I'm booking gigs, I'm doing animation, video games, e-learning. It's been great.  16:42 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) What would you say your favorite genre to work in is Because I'm always a big proponent of people bring their experience to behind the mic and I feel like maybe your stand-up comedy, your DJing, your networking I feel like that all works for you in specific genres Well, animation, I love.  17:01 - Jim Fronk (Guest) I love playing in animation. Right now I've got the allergies going on so my voice is kind of right now, but I love being able to just pop into a character and be like my mind is now melted, I'm with 3.0 and I will reveal the world. I mean, just have some fun. Word, of course I will. I am the evil. I am Ludo the evil one. I just love having fun with that. Video games I love the acting.  17:23 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I love the cinematography and the acting.  17:26 - Jim Fronk (Guest) I trained with Dave.  17:27 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Fornoy yes he's amazing.  17:29 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Yes, and once again people say how'd you train with Dave Fornoy? Yeah, I asked, I asked, I went to his website and I booked some sessions. And there we are. Dave's a great friend now, I mean he's become such a great mentor.  17:43 So I love video games. You know what I really love doing and I hate to say it because I have spent, I'm gonna say, $10,000 in training, maybe over the past couple of years, maybe even more. I hate to look at the numbers, but to beat the DJ out of me Every time that I step back into that DJ voice, my coach would say and now up here's the dealbies, just to snap me back. But I love doing tier three automotive.  18:03 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, yeah, tier three, automotive, yeah, and tier of DJ, it's radio DJ delivery.  18:07 - Jim Fronk (Guest) It's what I do in my sleep, so I'm really loving doing that. Absolutely. I've been training with Chris Zellman. He's been great.  18:15 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, tier three, automotive. I do a little bit of that myself, and it's not as easy as we want it to be, because they're really trying to cram a lot of words.  18:22 - Jim Fronk (Guest) But I was also production director of a six station cluster for many years. I was given the commercials away, so you know, so I know, and most of those were that type of delivery, yeah absolutely that sales delivery that hype. You know, no money down and you can. You know it's. Which is so 80s DJ. It's just ingrained in me so I do love that.  18:43 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And so now we all have to be authentic, and maybe not for tier three auto still. However, talk to me about authenticity and how. Maybe your background having a radio show I feel like having a radio show, you know, maybe not by just announcing commercials or announcing what the next song is, but I think if you're doing like talk radio and you're really getting down in personal with your listeners, I feel like that helps you to be authentic and you can kind of call upon that experience to really help you be authentic in your commercial delivery or even narration delivery or e-learning delivery.  19:16 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Before I was doing morning radio it was just that hype. Morning radio was kind of hype but it was a lot more comedy. We did bits. It was always like Frank's place with Jim and so-and-so or you know the Jim and so-and-so morning show. So it was always my animal to drive my vehicle and just to have that interaction was very conversational. And I did talk radio for the last three or four years of my career with radio and that became very conversational. That's just raw me. So when I was able to unlock that again, because we all know talking conversational and just talking like we're talking now is natural.  19:54 You should be able to do that. It's easy. Yeah, it's easy.  19:57 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) But it's not easy when there's a piece of paper.  19:59 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Yeah, when it's a piece of paper in front of you and it's somebody else's words. You have to learn how to do that Absolutely. One of the things that helped and hindered me was my ability for live read. I love being the first guy in workshops. I love reading stuff cold. I can't tell you how many times I'd be on the air and somebody would give me a piece of paper and say, read this.  20:18 And I have the ability to read about five or six seconds ahead of what I'm saying, which was good for that, but I was disconnected from my words. I was on autopilot.  20:28 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Any cold read is you're executing from left to right and you don't know what the story is.  20:33 - Jim Fronk (Guest) But even after I read it once or twice, I would still be reading ahead which hindered me to get that connectivity with the listener, with the client, with the audience. So when I learned to put that behind me and I'm gonna say live in the moment but read in the moment, be in the moment, my conversational game went up considerably and I think that I have a very conversational read when it is asked for that.  20:59 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) No sales, no announcers. That's right, no announcers. And that's getting the DJ and getting the radio beaten out of you.  21:05 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Yeah, but then I get to go back to tier three and have some fun with it. Yeah, and have your fun. Then, exactly, come on down. The price is really.  21:12 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And I have roles in telephony that I can be as. Thank you for calling your call's important to us. I can be that fun, smooth, promo-y sound.  21:22 - Jim Fronk (Guest) That's a lot of fun, sometimes absolutely.  21:24 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, for the most part, we're all about the authenticity. Speaking of authenticity, from a few of the things that you've already talked about, you were so into drones, you were into, like, video games I get this feeling, and from talking to you previously, that you are kind of a geek. You are a tech geek, and so that kind of leads you into yet another talent of yours, which is websites, and I wanna make sure that we have time to get into websites for voice actors and talk to us a little bit about your expertise number one and what got you into web development first of all. Then let's talk about what's important in a voice actor website.  22:02 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Well, for the most part with the radio stations. You wear many hats and I was brand manager and web guru and graphic artist. I know enough about Photoshop to get you and I in a lot of trouble, but not enough to really make any money at it. As far as-.  22:16 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Except nobody uses Photoshop anymore. It's all Canva, Both yes. But yeah, no, I get it Photoshop was definitely a skill, I mean for sure, and when I was deciding.  22:26 - Jim Fronk (Guest) When I was getting out of the drones, I was actually going back and forth between VO and maybe going to school for graphic arts.  22:33 I really enjoy that. But I was thinking to myself you know, it's a three-year program, $36,000. I'll be 58 when I graduate. Do I really want to enter that type of field where I'm so far behind technology wise than the kids are these days? I said, you know, my happy place is behind the microphone. So that's what I did. Gotcha, every business that I've had, I've designed my own websites. I've used Wix my whole life. So when I say I'm a website builder, I'm a Wix master, is what I go by. There's just so much that's come along with website development. It's actually very user-friendly, but people need to be taught how to use it.  23:10 - Intro (Other) So when you say I'm a website developer.  23:12 - Jim Fronk (Guest) I'm more of a website instructor.  23:15 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) What.  23:15 - Jim Fronk (Guest) I like to do is I have something. It's a three-hour website. Do it yourself, learn by doing creation class, where we'll sit down together, you'll watch me on the screen and you'll mimic what I'm doing. I'll show you where I'm getting things. I'll teach you how to do things. So by the end of the three hours you should have a one-page voiceover specific website ready to go, ready to be hosted, and I'll go in there afterwards, because I'm always like an admin and I'll go in and I'll tighten things up and I'll put a little couple extra spinny effects and different things to make them happy. But I found that so many people didn't have the crucial items for a website, for a VO website and other people are charging 15, 16, $1,700 to build a website.  24:01 We're in a business. We're not making any money, but you have to have your online you know.  24:05 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) so Sure, absolutely, that's who you're marketing to.  24:07 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Exactly so. I try to help people learn how to do that so that they don't come back to me and say, hey, can you upload my new demos? No, they're gonna know how to upload their own demos. If they have a problem, I'm always here. I will build a website for somebody. It's twice the money, and when I'm done, if you need help, there'll be an hourly stipend to be your web guy.  24:30 I'd rather give you something that's cheaper, that takes me more time, but to teach you something. So that's what I'm doing. You can find that at websitesforvocom. It's very easy. I've designed other sites and gotten really deep, like Dave Fanoy, for instance. Dave has become a great friend, but his website was terrible no downloadable demos granted, he's Dave Fanoy, but still links that went to things that were expired event page that the latest event was 2019, it just wasn't conducive for somebody that's in the business. So I kind of owed him a favor. Dave became a really good friend. He helped me out. We started off by coaching. He helped me out directing my demo. He's helped me out with a lot of coaching. That was unexpected. So instead of sending him a bottle, what's a friend of mine said? Just send him a bottle and say thank you. I decided to a deep dive into his website and I completely revamped it. On Wix all of his scheduling You're a Wix person, I am a Wix person.  25:26 - Intro (Other) I've seen your schedule.  25:28 - Jim Fronk (Guest) I see, don't you love how it's all in the back?  25:30 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) door there. I love my Wix website your scheduling your payments, your tickets your events everything.  25:35 - Jim Fronk (Guest) So, Dave being a techie guy, a web guy, when I went to book my first gig with Dave it took me about 20 minutes to figure out and it was like email me.  25:44 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) There are some coaches out there that like well, email me for pricing or email me to get set up, and that to me is like why would you do that?  25:51 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Go to Venmo and do this here, and then I'll send you my Calendly link.  25:54 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, exactly.  25:56 - Jim Fronk (Guest) So I went in, I took care of Dave's and I taught him how to do it. He's now putting on his own events and he's doing all the ticketing and all the ticket sales and all the marketing, all the social marketing, all in the back door of Wix. So I taught him that. I try to teach everybody that, because there are things you need of your website.  26:12 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes, what are those things? Let's talk about those critical things.  26:16 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Number one downloadable demos Above the fold. Everything I'm talking about right now is above the fold. I've talked to a lot of agents, casting directors. They don't want to click, they don't want to scroll.  26:29 They don't want to look so right there, front and center, downloadable demos, ready to go. Your name, obviously, something that shows your personality. It's a logo, a picture, something that shows who you are and if we have some fun with it, have some fun with it. Your contact info should always be in the header so when they scroll, if they scroll, your contact info is always there.  26:52 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It stays there it stays there.  26:54 - Jim Fronk (Guest) One of the main things that a lot of people don't have is a call to action button. Okay, I'm on your website, I'm the customer. Look at your website as a customer. I'm a customer, I found your website. I like your demos. What do I do? Now? There's a button there that says request a free audition. What's that all about? I mean, you and I, we all know auditions are free, of course. Well, all audition. You know we're not paying to audition. We're not getting paid to audition, but they don't know that.  27:21 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, sometimes we do, sometimes we do, but they don't know that.  27:23 - Jim Fronk (Guest) But they're getting a complimentary free audition. Send me a 30-second snippet of your script and I'll send you back an audio sample of what it will sound like, performed by me, and I can't tell you six. I've gotten six jobs off of that, so far.  27:39 Contact me is not a call to action. Maybe you offer some other service. I think it was Mark Scott said something about. These are six ways to book me. You know, give them something, something that has some information, whether it's directly related to booking you or VO related, but have that call to action button. Those are the basic things. Everything else after that is fluff. You go to my website. I probably have 15, 16 pages.  28:05 - Intro (Other) I have some people actually write the SEO for me.  28:07 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It's all fluff. It really is. There's nothing there. Let's talk about SEO.  28:12 - Jim Fronk (Guest) It's for SEO. What about SEO lately?  28:14 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Is SEO worth anything at this point? Still, because of, let's say, generative AI, which is generating content in seconds. Now, all of a sudden, it used to mean something with our websites. Right, that we had identifying words and words that could be found, but I feel like that whole SEO pony might be changing a little bit as things start to evolve.  28:35 - Jim Fronk (Guest) It is changing, it's getting simpler for people.  28:38 - Intro (Other) And with a program like Wix.  28:39 - Jim Fronk (Guest) They actually have an SEO and, by the way, I don't get paid by Wix. I'm not endorsed by Wix, it's just what I know. I've tried Squarespace play buttons, a play button, rewinds, rewind, pictures, picture, but I just didn't like how the whole system worked together. Wix was very user friendly. If you can do Canva, you can create a website.  29:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Canva changed the game.  29:01 - Jim Fronk (Guest) They really did. They made it.  29:03 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Wix is changing the game and some people might say well, what in VO is changing the game? I mean, we could talk about that if we wanted to.  29:11 - Jim Fronk (Guest) How about that? So much in VO has changed the game.  29:13 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Tell me about a VO actor. How can they change the game to make it successfully in voiceover and what can they do to change their game to make it and not be so afraid of all this technology that people are just, oh my God, the robots are gonna take our jobs away. Let's talk about-.  29:30 - Jim Fronk (Guest) No, they're not. The robots can't act, the robots can't change. What can we do there?  29:34 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) you go. We need to act right. They can't improv, they can't crack a good joke. Well, sometimes they crack dad jokes.  29:40 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Yeah, well.  29:41 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) But yeah.  29:43 - Jim Fronk (Guest) All right, so I got a lot of my dad jokes from chat. No, I'm just kidding.  29:46 What you can do is be authentic. Be human, show your range, show your emotion when you show up for a gig. Be the person that they wanna work with. Don't be the person that they're waiting on. Be fun, be happy. Don't be a nuisance to anybody that is hiring you or that you're working with, because you never know who's going to say, hey, Jim was here two months ago, He'd be great for this spot. You know, it could be the engineer you never know.  30:11 You have to have your online inline, which I try to help people do, because your website may not generate any business for you right off the bat, but you have to have that presence.  30:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes, you absolutely have. It has to be something that's not wixitecom.  30:24 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Backslash, jimfrong55, it has to be Jimfrongcom. Jimfrongvocom, your name vocom. Sure and keep it simple. Keep those domain names simple so you're easily found Exactly.  30:36 I was gonna be Frank the voice. I had all these domain names that I was going to do. Jimfrong was available for the first time in a long time, cause I looked for it back when I was doing standup comedy. Jimfrong was available and I said you know what that's it? That's it. So I'm Jim and Jimfrong, so it's so easy to remember. You're double branding your name Absolutely. And as far as changing the game, talk to people, make friends, go to conferences. A lot of people in this business are introverts, but a lot are extroverts. You know, you get your naked gents, your Anganguza's, you get your Jim Fronks. We're out there saying hi to people. You know, kissing babies, shaking hands, whatever the case is. Get out there and say hi to people and if you're not that type of person, find someone that is, find me, make friends with me. I'm very approachable. You hate me or love me, but hopefully you love me and I'll introduce you to people, I don't care.  31:27 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) There you go, it's absolutely fun. Words of wisdom. Jim, Thank you for that. And actually, Jim, you have offered the bosses a little deal for your website creation class that you have.  31:40 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Oh, I have.  31:40 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes, you have. Remember you wrote it down.  31:43 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Well, I was kind of upset about the PNNM's not being made.  31:46 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) But you're going to give our bosses 10% off the website creation class.  31:50 - Jim Fronk (Guest) I am absolutely without a doubt. What kind of coupon do you want to get?  31:53 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) We've got that promo called, called VEOBOSS10 at Chicago VEOBOSS10,. Okay, and we'll be putting that on our show notes pages, guys, so when you look up this episode, we will have that code available. Jim, thank you so much. It's been so exciting talking to you. I mean, you have such an amazing history. Yeah, I mean we're actually kind of 10 minutes over. See how time flies when you just have so much fun.  32:15 - Intro (Other) We're going to have to have you come back.  32:17 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) We're going to have to have you come back, jim. It's really been amazing and thank you for sharing your wisdom, your wonderful personality, your fun, amazing, just the fun. Amazing who you are.  32:28 - Intro (Other) Jim Fong with us.  32:30 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes bosses, I want you to take a moment and imagine a world full of passionate, empowered, diverse individuals that are giving collectively and intentionally to create the world that they want to see. You can make a difference. Visit 100voiceswhocareorg to learn more. And a big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. You too can network and connect like bosses like Jim and myself, just like Jim has been talking about all episode. Find out more at IPDTLcom. Jim, thanks again. You've been amazing Bosses, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week.  33:05 - Jim Fronk (Guest) Bye, guys, bye, thanks Ann.  33:07 - Intro (Other) Thank you so much Thank you Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, Ann Gangusa, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast to Coast connectivity via IPDTL.   

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