Meeting expectations

If my life were a series of Sesame Street episodes, the word of the day would be: Meetings.

Pretty much as soon as I woke up, I joined Mom at a local Starbucks to have breakfast with Tatjana — the wife of Magic Moreno, who I spoke to for Gladeo not long ago.

Worth reading if you haven’t.

Breakfast was a nice, quiet opportunity to relax and sip down a little coffee. Both of which are very important the week before Finals and graduation.

Speaking of relaxing. I mentioned Tarantino movies the other day, but I’ve also been chilling out by watching some speedruns from various Games Done Quick events.

For those of you who don’t know, GDQ is a series of video game marathons where games are played for record times, under conditions ranging from basic 100 percent completion to multi-player races and even bizarre hacks like randomizers.

All to raise money for charity while showing off cool tricks. Definitely worth supporting.

My tastes are currently aligned with Super Metroid, A Link to the Past and Mario Sunshine.

However, I’m watching a neat Super Mario RPG run while writing this post, so that’s worth a shout out.

GDQ aside, after breakfast I made my way to Fullerton for the semester’s last CSUF Society of Professional Journalists meeting.

We ate pizza, discussed what did or did not work about our events and elected part of the board for next year. Most of the current group is graduating, so it’s a big old passing of the torch.

My girl Kristina, who is not graduating, will be taking over as President. And I know she’s going to kill it.

From left to right: Jared Eprem, me, Harrison Faigen, Rick Piñon, Kristina Garcia and faculty advisor Frank Russell. Photo taken by Anita Ally.

Guess I’ll have to update all my social media descriptions pretty soon to reflect all this graduating/moving on from things.

That’s certainly what I started doing last night.

In the meantime, why don’t you go back and read the thing I wrote about my Smash Bros. Cinematic Universe if you haven’t! That was a fun thing to pull together and it could probably use some more hits.https://t.co/F0k6HrkxCe

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) May 8, 2019

Job applications. Gotta love them.

I’ll get back to that eventually. In the meantime, from SPJ I went to my next meeting in the Honors Center to try and complete a few more graduation requirements. Namely getting my Honors Project title page signed off on.

Which I did:

Now all I have to do is compile the stuff I’ve done so I can officially turn the damn thing in and move on.

While in the Center I had a lovely chat with Dr. Simoes as well. We spoke briefly at my presentation, but today he was more than happy to congratulate me for getting the project through this next step.

He even told me he’ll be buying a copy of my book once it’s published — so long as I sign a first edition for him.

It was very sweet.

After all of that I came back to Redondo and set up a meeting with Michelle to give back that lovely computer I’ve been holding onto. Too bad I never got it to full working condition on account of internet issue, but it’ll be much happier with a video editor where it belongs.

Once that was done, I went to probably my most important meeting of the day:

A meeting with the treadmill.

Because with all of this graduation stress on my shoulders it honestly feels great to go burn some calories and let off some steam.

Highly recommended stress relief, folks. Especially if you can watch some dope GDQ runs while you’re running!

You know I’ve got those great set-up/pay-offs.

This Gladeo Spotlight is Magic

Some of you are probably thinking this headline here is just a symptom of me being full of myself.

But it’s not.

It’s actually a sort of pun on the fact that the person I interviewed is named Magic.

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Is it worse to abuse the obvious pun than it is to be full of myself? I suppose that’s the kind of semantic detail you as the audience should decide. I won’t dwell on it too long because I have a point to get to.

That point being my Gladeo piece on audio engineers is live right now! I just found out about it this morning during our bi-weekly meeting and got right on putting this together. As soon as I finished helping paint the girl’s room. But you can just look at yesterday’s post if you want more details on that.

My conversation with Magic was probably one of the coolest interviews I’ve had the opportunity to conduct. He’s a great guy with a storied history and plenty of things to say about finding work you enjoy doing that really spoke to me at a personal level even more than just my professional judgement of what makes good quotes. I spent plenty of time going into that when I first did the interview a few weeks back.

Unlike a daily news cycle, these kinds of longer-form database profiles and such don’t have a super quick turnaround, so I’ve been waiting to see everything get through the editing process for a while. In the meantime I’ve been working on some other pieces, but this is the one I’ve been really excited about.

I updated my Gladeo work listing in that tab over on the right, but if you want you can jump through this link here to check out the overall profile on being an Audio Engineer I put together. Through there is another point of access to the Spotlight I wrote about Magic specifically.

When I first started to work on this piece I mentioned an interest in posting the full interview transcript. After all, he said so much wonderful stuff that it was difficult to have o distill it down for proper publication. So I figured hey, I’ve got a personal blog. Why not put the full text here?

If you’re interested in reading the full (somewhat) unabridged hour-long talk I had with Magic, go ahead and click the read more button / scroll down. But if you’re not, I’d still appreciate it if you could check out the published piece over on the Gladeo website.

Thanks a billion everyone, looking forward to getting more out there soon!

The Magic of Storytelling

The longer I spend time doing work for Gladeo, the more I find myself loving the idea of writing features as much as hard news.

Mostly that comes out of a deep interest in the people and telling their stories, something that comes inherent to all aspects of news writing but takes an especially poignant angle for profiles. After all, a profile is taking the opportunity to tell someone’s story with the sole focus of telling it.

For some reason I always figured I was never very good at features writing just because I’ve always written hard news. But once I got it in my head that it’s all about telling someone’s story, I’ve found myself getting more confident in the idea of writing them.

As I said, Gladeo has helped. Even if it takes more of a Q&A approach to the idea, everything still ties back to finding interesting people and learning the interesting things they have to say.

Tonight, that hunt for interesting people brought me to Magic Moreno. His full pedigree is far too lengthy for me to possibly ever be able to grasp in just a few fleeting words, so I’ll let his website do most of the talking there, but in essence he was a child star musician at six years old and eventually became a music producer/performer with multiple gold and platinum records under his belt and a rolodex featuring such names as Aretha Franklin and Freddie Mercury.

Needless to say, a fascinating guy to get an hour-and-a-half with.

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Editor’s Note:

Quick shout out to Aly for making friends with Magic’s son through band at RUHS. I knew you’d come in handy one of these days!

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What wound up being even more fascinating about Magic than his accolades (though those alone are a great chat) was his spirituality, his philosophical outlook on the world and how both of those tie in so deeply with his career and how he looks at giving back through other branches of his work like teaching.

I’m only about an hour or so out from actually talking with Magic as of writing this post, So I’ll need a little more time to debrief, and transcribe out what I got to truly have any insights that stood out as especially bright gems.

If anything, I’m considering publishing the entire transcript here once it’s all out together and my Gladeo piece is out there. Because his words deserve an uncut treatment.

Seriously, this interview wasn’t only cool because I got a brief glimpse into a star-studded life, or even just because of the 10 minutes or so we spent listening to a song he just finished producing.

Though that was amazing in itself, seeing him able to distill out one of the 100+ audio tracks comprising the song just to explain how it was an exotic instrument out of Uganda and showcase the way it seamlessly blended into this copacetic composition up until you specifically know to listen for it.

Particularly interesting for me having dabbled slightly into similar audio mixing for broadcast classes, but there’s a vast difference between the three audio tracks there versus the 100+ for a song.

But overall, the stuff that stood out most to me were his philosophical approaches to the ideas of why we do the things we love, the drive we have for that.

I actually felt a pretty deep connection with what he was saying while thinking about the work that I’ve done in the past. After a week that felt like a spiritual lull for me, it was honestly a wonderful thing.

Like I said, it’ll probably be a while before I get to throw everything out into the world, but look forward to it.

I’m certainly looking forward to adding his name onto the list of people I’ve had the pleasure of telling their stories.