Gonna take a Sentimental Journey

Well, okay. It's not my sentimental journey, but more Fr Roderick Vonhögen's. Those of you who have heard of him know that he is a priest from Amersfoort in the Netherlands. He is also quite involved with Catholic New Media, being the founder of the SQPN family of Catholic podcasts and videocasts, etc.

He had also been quite involved with the Star Wars fandom as well. Nine years ago, he had a hand in developing a website he called Rebel Friends. He intended for this to be a site for kids. You can tell he was into the old text adventure games as I can see a lot of that influence in this work. (Okay, those of you who grew up in the 1980s: admit that you were into such text adventure games as Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. I still have mine, complete with map. What a wonderful blast to the past! :) )

Last Saturday, Fr Roderick intended to record episodes of his popular podcast, Daily Breakfast. He generally records his podcasts on uStream, and lets us know when he'll be recording so we can flock to the chatroom. That's part of the fun - interacting with Fr Roderick and other regulars to the SQPN chatroom as he does his show preps and eventually his recordings.

His energy levels were rather low so he decided it would be a good day to hang out with the chatroom regulars. I can't remember what gave him the idea to revisit Rebel Friends, but he decided to give a virtual tour of this work, and it was a lot of fun to watch him click through the screens, as well as to display his work to all in the chatroom.

Unfortunately, he's been having some technical difficulties of late, and was disappointed that the recording of this charming virtual tour was apparently lost. In actuality, it wasn't lost - it's in amongst the SQPN video clips - if you look at Untitled Video SQPN 3, you will see it - approximately 51 minutes worth of video, including the tour, music he played whilst he dashed off to the supermarket shortly before its closing, and of all things, a discussion about soda and other soft drinks. Unfortunately, after a certain point, the video and the audio did not synchronise, with the video lagging behind the audio by approximately 4 minutes.

Despite that, it is still fun to watch, at least the bit where he's giving the virtual tour of his website. Just thought I'd blog on this just in case any one else is interested to take this sentimental journey with Fr Roderick.