While around the time of the 2010 NHB telethon may have been one of the lowest points of the show, by telethon of 2011 things were quite up.  Quite a lot happened over that year, that perhaps will be featured on a future podcast.  But Niio reminded me of this epic telethon show in a recent tweet.  

This telethon show was the first under the name of Suburban Homeboys.  This show was also the last time I ever took a shot of buttershots - drinking a whole bottle of that really put me off of that.  The thought never occurred to me to buy another bottle - but enough time has passed now maybe it's time to pick one up.  This was also the first Bob Ross painting show I did.  

Unfortunately, true to the name "Amateur Hour" (despite this being under a different name), this was a show that was plagued with technical problems.  My setup had a nasty hum at the time, and was something I had fixed with the use of a ground loop isolater.  Why the damn thing picked right before a telethon show to stop working, I'll never know, but it did, which caused the show to start late, and resulted in my having to bypass it on the right side, which is quite noticeable throughout the show.  

This is also the show that Niio did one of the sickest telethon stunts ever done in NHB history, if not the sickest.  

It's too bad the stickam video stream wasn't captured - but all the audio is here, beginning to end.  Enjoy

 August of 2010 is a dark chapter in the history of The Amateur Hour.  The show had been simulcasting on NHB Radio and WildBunch Radio on Saturday nights.  The shows had a revolving cast of regulars that would come and go, and would often go late into the night, some shows going up to 6 hours.  At this point in time, I had been a member of Rico's NHB Management team.  Much has been said and repeated many times about my time in this management team.  It's a story I've told many times, including in much of the audio that exists from this time period.  It boils down to me being very frustrated by being a member of the NHB Management team but having no means or access to actually do anything as a member of that team to make positive changes to the station or deal with many of the shortcomings that existed, and also by Damon showing up and bitching about how much things sucks and threatening to shut down the station, but not even taking my calls when I wanted to get serious about discussing these matters with him to try and get things moving in the right direction.  This built to an angry rage quit, to which Rico responded by firing me, and to which Damon refused to intervene in.  

What followed that was a WildBunch only show the Saturday evening of August 21st, 2010, which went on for 6 hours, started with a rather restrained rambly rant of the situtaion that led to me only streaming on WildBunch that evening, and eventually built to an angry drunken rant when Pedge showed up and helped rile things up.  Upon reviewing the audio, it's not something that's really worthy of a reposting in it's entirety, and I find little of it that's entertaining.  The Shocker guys did call in at one point in the show, but Pedge also tells a rather shocking story that I'm not sure is exactly PC these days.  That show will remain in the vault for now.

In response to the show, and some facebook posts that I had also made, the next evening of August 22, 2010, Damon and most of the staff of NHB got on the streams and proceeded to spend an hour airing their greivences of the whole thing.  That broadcast went on to spend further time discussing the upcoming telethon, and ended in an epic event that we'll get back to shortly.  In response to their airing of greivences, I took to the WildBunch streams and offered my own rebuttal to the things they said.  Upon my recent relistening to these 2 bitchfests, I found nothing of entertainment value contained within.  I was able to edit them into a bit of a back and forth to enbed my rebuttal responses into their original show....but it's pretty much just rehashing of more of the same, and was really just a waste of my time to edit.  

Only one good thing came out of all of this mess and drama.  And that is the last half hour of the NHB staff broadcast.  This audio isn't exactly rare or unheard, I think it might still play in NHB Automation, if anyone still listens to that.  To have something fun to include in the evening's broadcast, questions for another match game were prepared.  Of course, I was sitting at home, listening to the stream, as I was taking notes to prepare my rebuttal.  Normally getting 2 listeners to call in to be contestants on a match game was no struggle.  But somehow this evening, they only managed to get 1 caller in.  The thought occured to me - wouldn't it be funny for me, the guy they fired and just spent an hour ranting about, who now meets the requirement of not being staff - to call in and be the 2nd contestant?  When a good joke pops into my head, I just can't hold it back.  And so I called in.  I expected to be hung up on, but to my surprise, they rolled with it.

And I think to me, that's a big part of what NHB is all about.  NHB is steeped in a history of drama, disagreements, emotions running high, and anger.  But at the end of the day, we were all friends who cared much for each other, and all loved a good joke.  And when we got into a big group chat with each other, usually very little got done, because we were always cracking jokes back and forth at each other.  For that one hour we accomplished what I had been trying to spend the previous 48 hours trying to accomplish - peace among us.  It may be too bad that we could only accomplish it for that hour at that point, but that is still something.  After that match game, I did my rebuttal stream, and in the middle of it all I reached a note I took of Damon's comment that "this was necessary".  And at that moment it hit me.  No, it wasn't.  And I proceded to throw down my cards, and wrap up the stream, and wish everyone a good night.  For the next few months, The Amateur Hour continued on as a WildBunch only show, but by December cooler heads prevailed, and The Amateur Hour made a return to the network.

I present here a replay of the one good thing that came out of all this drama, the epic match game of that evening.  I don't know if all the drama that led to this epic moment was worth it, but it is what happened.  Enjoy.

 This past week, I did a little investigating into airfare

 This past week, I officially retire my 2nd computer build, which has me going through the archives to put together the story of how this machine came to be, because much of it is lost to time.

Records show I bought the parts from newegg in March of 2007, so I've turned to those shows to review for the story.  Which has led me to this episode, a memorable one.

Due to a series of hardware failures, I ended up turning to my AMD K6-2 computer I had recently re-acquired, and happened to be able to get it to work well enough to broadcast in a pinch.  I go more into that in the show.

I reference looking to put in an RMA for the mobo - I do remember having to RMA that board a lot, so that may be what resolved it, as I did continue to use that mobo and processor for at least another year past this episode.  But, with the amount of RMA's, I guess I decided it was time to shop for new parts.  Which - I do reference noticing that 2 PCI slots was the norm at this point, which was disappointing.

Damon calls in, and we talk old computers.

Vamp calls in - somehow we end up talking about weird porns, and contemplate Gothard's question about what the opposite of a rather unusual circumstance would be.

Good group call with Vamp, Dune, and Damon on the line.