Daughter of Godcast Season Four, Choice. Episode 121: Dad. Pop. These words for father are also palindromes. Mom too. I am guessing there must be some etymology about the palindromic nature of parental abbreviations. Because that's the beginning of speech? The same consonant at the start and the end of the word with a vowel in the middle; easy to say if you're just starting to articulate.

Our next episode will be coming out right around Christmas, and then New Year's Day. What nice timing, to share the holidays with a couple of podcasts.

Around this time last year, my father went into hospice. He left the planet on New Year's Eve, 2017, right between Seasons One and Two of the Daughter of Godcast. He was alive when I wrote and recorded Episode 70 and dead for Episode 71. Season One was all about the past, and Season Two, the present, asking for feedback with you all. I am not sure I made the connection then, how my dad's death coincided with the end of DOG's history and the beginning of DOG's completion.

What a wonder. What a nifty bit of theater on his part. Nice one, Dad. Let me be clear. I'm fairly certain my dad never heard a single episode of this podcast while he was alive. I'm not sure he even knew what a podcast was. He knew I was doing something and maybe if he hadn't been so messed up from Parkinson's, he might have tried to learn more. Not that I needed or wanted him to. He would have been perplexed, perhaps even offended. Worried, certainly, that I was being so open about my life and feelings. He wasn't great about sharing feelings.

When he was alive, that is. He wasn't good at sharing feelings when he was alive. Now he's great at sharing feelings. I feel that crazy fucker's feelings all the time. He's excited, he's enthusiastic, even. He's super happy.

I tried to be polite when people offered condolences for my loss. I get that they are motivated by generosity, even if they are confused about death — about life, I daresay.

I'm glad my dad's dead! We get along famously now. He's my inside man at the big box store in the sky, scheduling deliveries of all the best outcomes. He's helping me a lot, and not a moment too soon. We've got a movie to finish!

Where are we this week? Significant headway in revamping the dog.movie web presence. I asked my pal Lauren to give some design guidance, and she opined that the front page needed to be bolder. Lose everything except the Wall Street Under Water gif and a find-out-more link, was her idea.

A great plan, but for a few weeks I couldn't decide how to move forward. I had gotten all fired up to redo the site with BeaverBuilder, a page builder plugin for WordPress that I had learned about at WordCamp in Ann Arbor. In the last few months, WordPress has been polishing off their own page builder interface, Gutenberg. Is Gutenberg supposed to make all the plugin page builders obsolete? Which learning curve should I climb?

After diving in and flailing about a bit, I discovered that I'd have to learn CSS if I wanted Gutenberg to meet my needs, so the gentler curve turned out to be BeaverBuilder. I also learned that the concept behind Gutenberg is not only to offer more-intuitive page editing within WordPress, but also to provide a consistent code base for other page builders to hook into, which means there's likely a robust future for BeaverBuilder. Climbing the BeaverBuilder learning curve would likely provide long-term benefit.

That geeky little story was not about revising dog.movie, but deciding how to revise dog.movie. Choosing a tool that would both be easy to learn and stay relevant for the rest of the project. These seemingly simple criteria weren't always obvious to me. In the past I dedicated time and energy to becoming proficient in major software packages that are now defunct. Completing Daughter of God in early 2019 means we've got to be super efficient. Flowing along the path of least resistance.

So in the last few days the web content has been restructured and about 50 percent of the pages have been revised. Another day or two and we can hand the whole kitten caboodle over our crack copy editor, Emily.

In reviewing the FAQ for the project, I came across the list of deliverables that I postulated about a year back: movie spin-offs, multiple trailers, another website for the development archive of the project, a feature documentary about the making of Daughter of God, multiple language overdubs... pretty ambitious stuff! Let's see what's left after pruning next week.

Speaking of deliverables, I whipped up a short list of logistics deliverables before beginning web renovations. We touched on the three remaining phases of financial simplification in Episode 120 and just now discussed revising the dog.movie web presence. Here's a couple more: gathering and verifying all existing media for assembly of the final cut, or should I say cuts plural, because test screening of the entire movie will likely generate several iterations. The other day when loading legacy AE files in AE CC 2018, some movies weren't recognized. Uh oh. I've got media that's over 12 years old. If I want to migrate to the latest version of AE, I've got to sort that out. Even more basic, we need an approximate timing for the movie; I'm still not sure how long it is. There's plenty more, but that gives a taste of what we can expect in future episodes.

As I was telling Greg, our miniatures guy, wrapping logistics means immersion in production. Plenty of dead people are helping to finesse the energetic logistics as we speak, so getting there is inevitable. These podcasts will really shine when there's more to see and hear. I'm excited to be there with you, and I'm so excited to be right here, too.

My dad never heard these podcasts while incarnated on Earth, as far as I know. He's all about them now, crowded around the shortwave with the rest of my deceased relatives and friends, plus laughing Jesus, Hedy Lamarr, Charmian Carr, Kurt Vonnegut and Phil Dick. Besides dead people, who else? Maybe a few transdimensional ETs — that would be supercool. I pretty sure most of my family and many people I hang out with do not, never will. Just a handful of devoted allies, close friends. Meanwhile out there in the wild world, hundreds of people I don't know, have not as yet met are tuning in every week. Anonymous! Brothers and sisters, we are legion.