Being A Dink

You can be a dink or not be a dink. It is up to you.

I committed over a decade of my life to Red Man Laughing, my former podcast series. I started the show as a vehicle for me to be funny, write comedy, create characters, and sharpen my comedy tools while I was a stay-at-home dad to my two daughters.

I started Red Man Laughing when I had no audience, no gear, and no website. Hell, back then Apple barely had a podcast directory. It was the early days of podcasting and I had a blast creating the format for the show, it was integral in my comedy development and voice.

After the first few seasons, the show evolved and became a platform for me to host interviews and panels on the rapidly changing public and private discourse happening in Indian Country as a result of the Idle No More movement.

The conversation central to the discourse Red Man Laughing wrestled with was - who are we, how’d we get here, and how the fuck do we get out of this mess?

All future seasons of RML dealt with these questions and explored them from historical and contemporary lenses. I used the show as a way to share music, art, and literature. We recorded live in communities and festivals. I toured Red Man Laughing across Canada twice. The show was adapted into a national comedy special for CBC Radio One in 2014.

In 2016, season 5 of the podcast series (24 episodes in all) was dedicated to audio essays, interviews, and various investigations into what were the early days of “reconciliation” and what it meant for this idea to show up on the door of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike. Season 5 of the podcast is the most pride I’ve felt making a podcast.

It was personal.

It was devastating and hopeful at the same time.

It was groundbreaking.

Then it ended.

Then It Was Gone

The show always had a good audience. Even when I struggled to publish, people came back time and time again when I could make a go of publishing and writing and researching for the show. Podcast production is tedious and doing it well demands that you put in the time to do it right. Finding the time between 2017-2020 was getting harder and harder as I struggled to build my companies while freelancing and working gig and contract work.

The show slowed down during the pandemic in 2020 and I stopped publishing the series. I was struggling to make money and feed my kids during the pandemic and I lost all will to be creative and fun and curious. It was at this time that my domain, Red Man Laughing, expired with my domain host and because I slept on re-upping the registration fees to keep the domain (I know, I know, rookie fucking move), the domain got scooped. It was my fault.

When I committed to starting this Substack my original plan was to dust off the Red Man Laughing RSS feed and bring the series back with no audio imaging, a new format, and a new life. That’s when I discovered what had happened to the domain.

On the internet when you snooze, you lose. I not only lost the domain, but I also lost the RSS feed associated with the domain as it was linked to the domain and its email client. Red Man Laughing was dead dead.

I had very little recourse other than to pay the ransom to the company that scooped the domain and put it up for sale. I considered doing this back in early 2021 but didn’t have the $450 the company wanted for the domain. The domain then got sold to a different group of internet dinks and the price for the domain went up by 5X and currently sits somewhere around $2000 for me to get it back.

These fucking dinks are squatting on the domain and the RSS feed and have no intention on doing anything with it. They’ve even told me so.

My January 2023 correspondence with the dinks that are squatting on my domain. This dink and his team of dinks are the dinks that inspired this post about being a dink.

I, of course, don’t have the kind of money lying around to spend on domain pirates but that’s not really why I’m telling you this story.

I’m telling you this story because I was recently got thinking about how valuable the transcripts for Season 5 of Red Man Laughing would be to me for the writing I’m doing and for the writing I’m doing this year.

I’m telling you this story to say I firmly believe dinks get what they have coming to them in this world. I think the universe is mostly good and that those who are bad ended up attracting bad shit to them.

I’m also telling you this story to tell you that if you’re compelled to be a dink, to not be a dink.

In the end, I hope these dinks are bought up by Amazon or Google and immediately shuttered for being dinks.

Don’t be a dink.

That’s all.