The Arcane Athenæum

The four people who read this blog may have noticed something interesting; the title and url have changed.  This might not come as a surprise to most people; Critical Shit, while a unique name that has some history with my friend group, is perhaps not the best title for a website to be throwing around.  Unfortunately, a year ago when I first created this blog I wasn’t worried about the inappropriate title.  My audience, I told myself, would all be in the upper teens or older anyway.  I wasn’t trying to appeal to children or families.  And with the Internet being what it is, and my belief that one should not be forced to censor oneself on the World Wide Web, I felt the name wouldn’t be unacceptable.

There was more to it than that, of course.  As I said, Critical Shit was a rather unique name.  My blog, and associated posts, were always at the top of the list on Google when searching for the term, and one friend pointed out that this would help with brand identity and allow me to stick out from the crowd.  While this may be true, I didn’t consider why that might be such a unique name, or whether my “sticking out from the crowd,” in this instance, would be a good thing.

Things came to a head when I submitted the podcast for Legends from Aeramis: The Nacre Amulet.  iTunes, curiously, accepted the podcast without any issue (even though I had dared to list the copyright as belonging to Critical Shit).  This pleased me; I could keep my existing name and still have the podcast on iTunes, which expressively forbids obscene language anywhere except within the podcast itself.  I created a new censored logo for iTunes (and future use) and thought everything would be fine.

Unfortunately, about a week and a half after being accepted I received an email from Apple informing me that my podcast had been removed from the store.  I think, at least I hope, that someone had glossed over the initial submission and it wasn’t until later that anyone actually looked at the podcast and found that 1) the copyright contained the word shit and 2) the RSS feed url contained the word shit.

So with this heavy dose of reality I was forced to accept that my carefully chosen name wasn’t acceptable after all.

As such, Critical Shit has been renamed Geeks New England.  criticalshit.org will automatically redirect to the new geeksnewengland.org, as I will retain custody of the domain.  The podcast will continue as normal and, for now, iTunes has re-accepted my RSS feed and Legends from Aeramis can once again be found in the iTunes store.  Hopefully that will remain true this time.  Episode 02, by the way, will be out this weekend.