After months and months of planning, my boyfriend Jay and his dad Jack of “The Lost Podcast with Jay and Jack” had their 25-hour-marathon live podcast. It started yesterday (Saturday March 15) at 3:30pm & was scheduled to end today (Sunday March 16) at 4:30pm. They were raising money for the charity Autism Speaks. I followed along the donations that were made to PayPal and all in all, they raised $2,625 (and counting!). I was there for the entire time, minus an hour and a half it took me to drive home to my parents house. I’ve been awake since 8:30am yesterday morning. It is now 10:36pm.

The show started off with the Married Man Podcast, a podcast about relationships, etc. that Jack does with his friend Dale. It’s hilarious. After MMP, Lost star Jorge Garcia (Hurley) stopped by for a good 3 or 4 hours. However, the company that was hosting the live podcast, Talkshoe, had issues (as usual it seems) & poor Jorge was left waiting for almost an hour til we could get it started again. Jorge ROCKS though & after the guys were done deciding who the Top 10 Coolest, Toughest Guys in Movie History are (I think Han Solo won in the end), he spent a while answering questions from fans. Talkshoe allows people to participate in big group calls or podcasts. You have one administrator (in this case Jay) who can mute or unmute anyone who is there in the chatroom with a microphone. I asked a question; Jorge, Jack & I made fun of Jay. It was grreeaaattt.

The rest of the 25 hours was filled with other awesome guests, such as Ryan & Jen Ozawa from The Transmission podcast, Jimmy Aquino from Comic News Insider podcast (he’s the guy responsible for Jay & I meeting Michael Emerson), Ralph from the Dharmalars/’Lars & Cue the Music podcast (for a good 5 hours, including while I was driving, so I didn’t even miss much of it lol), and a whole lot of other Lost podcasters such as Kurt from Black Rock, Josh from Josh Meister, and a lot of others whose names I feel genuinely terrible about not remembering at this 40-straight-hour of consciousness. Our good friend Clif was on. John Norton & I were set up to at the end, from 3-4pm. Lost actor Daniel Dae Kim (Jin) was going to go after us from 4-4:40pm. I know, right? FUCKING AWESOME! Jay and I were looking forward to a MetroBuzz meets Jay and Jack verses segment (we were all going to take one of the Indiana Jones movies and debate which was best, then leave voting open to the public). Seriously, we were so excited for it, especially since we both had been up and involved for the entire show. The only thing more perfect for us than such a FUN way to end such a tedious event was for Daniel Dae Kim to show up and talk. Oh yeah, wow, cool. Look at that. DDK was going to. He had only from 4-4:30pm to talk because he has such a busy schedule filming Lost now to make up for the time lost during the WGA strike. But awesome of awesome, he was still willing to do it. HOLLER.

Guess what? At 3pm, JUST as John & I were about to call in and record, Talkshoe, which had been running adequately since the Jorge Garcia event 18 hours before, decided to COMPLETELY CRAP OUT. Not just a “malfunction” but a total crash that they called an “error in their coding” that would be fixed within 30-60 minutes.

It was not fixed within 30-60 minutes. Everyone in the chat room waiting for us to start was so patient and wonderful. It was stressful to not know what was going on, to have no control over the situation, to know what was at stake. Daniel Dae Kim (and I call him that bc I have never spoken with him; I call Jorge by his first name because I have now officially spoken with him one time lol) was so gracious to continue trying to access the chat room until his free time was up. We waited from 3pm until 5pm to no avail. Talkshoe never went back up and Norton & I never got our chance to play with Jay and Jack. Jay & I were so disappointed that we never got to do that section together after using that as the way to get through the rough 25 hours to stay awake & sane. I was really excited to do the live show and interact with everyone. I hope that Daniel Dae Kim doesn’t think badly of them because the issue was TALKSHOE’S FAULT, NOT THEIRS.

That’s the thing. Talkshoe sucks. They’re a company that, according to their website, “a new way to create live group calls, conversations, discussions and interactive podcasts.” Basically, Talkshoe markets themselves as a company that specifically caters to large groups. Jay & Jack’s Autism Speaks podcasting marathon was a big deal. It was “official.” The charity knew that it was happening and expected donations as a result. Talkshoe let us all down with its numerous service errors. As a result of these errors, Autism Speaks suffered. The errors resulted in a loss of donations from potential listeners who were turned off by the lack of the interactive podcast that is the main aspect of Talkshoe’s service.

Here’s what I propose to all those who participated in Jay and Jack’s live marathon podcast and to anyone who is a supporter of Autism Speaks. Let’s start a campaign to get Talkshoe to rectifiy their mistakes by donating money to Autism Speaks. This will make up for the loss of time and donations that the charity suffered as a result of THEIR continually technical issues.

Make blog posts, comments on a website, or email a complaint to Talkshoe at support@talkshoe.com. This may not seem like it, but to anyone who was involved in this event, it really was a big deal to us & Talkshoe has let us down completely. Urge them to make a donation to make up for the donations that were lost because of them.

If you’d like to make a donation to Autism Speaks, you can do it through PayPal, by sending it to LPDonate@gmail.com OR you can send checks made out to Autism Speaks to the following address:

P.O. Box 40716
Raleigh NC. 27629

Thanks. Hopefully we can do something. The theme of this weekend seems to be making a difference in lots of different ways. And thank you to everyone who came by during the 25-hours and helped Jay & Jack raise $2,625 electronically. Can’t wait to see the total number after the checks come in