Jim Aquino

In 2020, under the pen name "J. John Aquino," I self-published my first non-fiction book, If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You: The Movies and TV Shows Some of Us Regretted Not Catching Until Later. My prior writing credits include think pieces for Splitsider and music reviews (mostly of hip-hop albums) and movie reviews for Metroactive.

I've guested on a couple of podcasts to promote If You Haven't Seen It and would like to plug the book a couple more times. But I never found time to do any guest shots in 2022 because I was busy writing my second book, which I'm still working on as of this moment.

Here are examples of topics I could talk at length about as a podcast guest:

- How to fight writer's block.

- Making the jump from long-form blogging to self-publishing physical books because there's zero money in the former and a little bit of money in the latter.

- The book I'm currently working on is about animated Star Trek shows. I wanted to write a book about the Filmation version of Star Trek, Mike McMahan's Lower Decks, and the Hageman brothers' Prodigy in the style of Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files. I don't love every single Trek show, but I love Deep Space Nine and Lower Decks. Because I'm Filipino American, I loved it when Lower Decks confirmed that Rutherford is Filipino.

- The cinema! Heist flicks from the '70s, legendary movie trailer announcers, the Black New Wave, and Asian American cinema are among my favorite film-related topics. I used to run an internet radio station where I played film and TV scores, so I also know a lot about film composers.

- TV! I have an encyclopedic knowledge of certain periods of TV history. You know how baseball nerds like to toss at each other names of old ball players they were fond of? I'm like that when it comes to names of sitcom showrunners. My favorite kind of conversation with another TV nerd would be something like, "Man, Community was wack during that one season when David Guarascio and Moses Port were in charge."

- Pop music, particularly hip-hop from 1991 to 2015.

- Helping my father take care of my disabled mother. I'm currently doing that while writing my second book.

- I'm anti-car dependency. One of my favorite podcasts is The War on Cars.

The two podcasts I guested on in 2021 were different as night and day. One was hosted by a stand-up comic, and the other was hosted by a software engineer who's misophonic, so he interviews other misophonics like me.

Being a guest on both those podcasts made me realize that I can handle both a mostly humorous conversation with a stand-up and a more serious podcast. I've never been a podcaster and don't plan to become one. I prefer being a guest. When I'm a guest, I sometimes think to myself, "Try not to be like Devin Faraci when he co-hosted The Canon or Bill Maher every time he talks to another person. Smug people suck."

If you're hosting a podcast about film or TV, I would be terrific as a guest. Just don't be a podcaster who covers reality TV. I hate reality TV, and David Zaslav can burn in hell. Every time I see his last name, I keep thinking he's Mr. Zsasz from the Batman comics.