99pi Planchette
podcasts
Recode
Great news for Gimlet, especially for my favorite show Reply All. Congrats! Troubling aspect: could this signal the end of open web distribution of podcasts? Moving away from RSS to walled gardens would be a total buzzkill.
Update (2/6): It is so, Audio-First.
Update (2/6): It is so, Audio-First.
Maximum Fun
On this Podcast Saturday I'd like to recommend another pillar of my podcasting pantheon. Minor television personality John Hodgman is in reality a prolific comedian and author. The conceit of his podcast is that he is a judge that settles the kinds of interpersonal disputes we all have with our friends and family. The show is that, but also a frequently touching reminder to be kind and thoughtful with others. It's part of the Maximum Fun network where you'll find many more great podcasts.
99pi.org
Podcast Saturday continues with another one of my desert island picks. 99% Invisible is a design podcast that explores the mostly invisible work of planning and design that goes into all the things around us from cities to buildings to everyday objects. It is the Platonic Form of podcasts. Episodes are typically a tight, highly produced 20 minutes with interviews, locations, and music. It is a masterclass in audio storytelling every time. The show's host Roman Mars also started the podcast collective Radiotopia and if you're new to podcasts you won't go wrong browsing through their offerings.
hotpodnews.comRemember podcasts? They're an industry now where people have careers and businesses grow and thrive. Hot Pod tracks this burgeoning industry so you don't have to. I like to pick up suggestions for podcasts I might be interested in, but hearing how companies are investing (or not) in podcasting is also interesting and I don't see this news covered anywhere else. This Newsletter Wednesday was brought to you by Squares...sorry, can't do it.
Gimlet
This is the 2nd Podcast Saturday and I might as well jump straight to my desert island choices. I have been a fan of PJ and Alex since they were an offshoot of On the Media called TLDR back in the aught-fourteens. They report about Internet culture and it's the one podcast I look forward to the most. If you're reading this you've probably heard Reply All and I'm preaching to the choir. But if not, go ahead and dig into their catalog. I have a few favorites: #109 Is Facebook Spying on You?, #78 Very Quickly to the Drill, #102 Long Distance, #96 The Secret Life of Alex Goldman, and #44 Shine On You Crazy Goldman. And the Best Episode (once you're a hardcore fan): #36 Today's the Day. I still remember when & where I was driving when I heard this episode. Is that weird?
CBC.ca
Welcome to podcast Saturday! (Also a thing.) NXIVM is (was?) a multi-level marketing self-help system (cult?) that recently imploded. Its senior officers are now waiting for their trials. This podcast tells the story of one senior member who left (escaped?) before the end. I hesitate to recommend this podcast because it requires some serious psychic energy to stay involved. There are descriptions of physical and mental abuse and it gets to be too much at times. Plus it's one of those crime podcasts where you're not sure the protagonist is a protagonist. It is seven episodes of a riveting, difficult story.
Various Hyperlinks
Here are a couple summaries of the latest Mueller investigation indictments: @Baratunde reads through and Lawfare summarises.
These new developments make this article seem less like speculation and maybe it's time to speculate about How Life is Going to Change.
PSA: Remember Stylish the browser plugin that you might have installed that lets you change the look and feel of pages you visit? It's bad now. I exported my styles, uninstalled Stylish, and then imported them to Stylus. That should work until Stylus sells out.
No, YOU need this amazing retro keyboard based on a Hermes Rocket typewriter—not me. I don't have a keyboard problem.
I'm late on this one, but if you have any interest at all in Dungeons & Dragons you should hear Dinah explain it to Matt on his podcast Hobby Horse: Dinah Sanders rolls for initiative. She is the best ambassador I've heard yet for tabletop role playing and her joy is infectious. Go listen!
Also thought this was like something out of a D&D plot: How we discovered three poisonous books in our university library.
These new developments make this article seem less like speculation and maybe it's time to speculate about How Life is Going to Change.
PSA: Remember Stylish the browser plugin that you might have installed that lets you change the look and feel of pages you visit? It's bad now. I exported my styles, uninstalled Stylish, and then imported them to Stylus. That should work until Stylus sells out.
No, YOU need this amazing retro keyboard based on a Hermes Rocket typewriter—not me. I don't have a keyboard problem.
I'm late on this one, but if you have any interest at all in Dungeons & Dragons you should hear Dinah explain it to Matt on his podcast Hobby Horse: Dinah Sanders rolls for initiative. She is the best ambassador I've heard yet for tabletop role playing and her joy is infectious. Go listen!
Also thought this was like something out of a D&D plot: How we discovered three poisonous books in our university library.
Link Defragmentation
I save links in Safari's Reading List on my iPhone so I can reference them later. Sharing them here on my blog is their final resting place. Once posted here, I remove the links from my reading list and the cycle of cruft can begin again. It's a similar process to—and as exciting as—defragmenting your hard drive. How many hours did I spend watching the defrag visualization colors rearrange themselves in Windows Disk Defragmenter? That's rhetorical, but many. Many hours. Of watching. Now you too can watch the metaphorical defrag colors along with me:
First, go listen to the latest episode of Matt Haughey's podcast Hobby Horse where he interviews people about their side projects. In Episode 4 he talks with Erica Baker about ancestry and geneology and it absolutely changed the way I look at family trees. We’re all connected in ways I hadn’t thought about before. So great—go listen!
While I'm talking podcasts, Gimlet has a new one out called The Habitat that I'm hooked on after one episode. It's about a NASA study to determine how six humans live together for a year in a confined space. They're trying to simulate the conditions that people would live in on a mission to Mars. You can binge the whole thing.
Last week I posted about the SmugMug/Flickr exchange and I've been enjoying the takes: Tom Coates, Ben Cerveny, Jim Ray, and for context this 2012 article (cold take?) by Mat Honan: How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet.
Did you know you can look up at least some of the interests Twitter has assigned to you for personalized advertising? I was surprised at how accurate some of the more obscure interests were but I shouldn't be. We need more privacy and dumber phones.
Google set up a new way to query information in books called Talk to Books. As an introvert I feel like Google really gets me with this project, you know? I'll just be over here talking to books.
@lhl found a tumblr dedicated to gathering depictions of floppy disks in anime. It's even better than it sounds.
ok, off to delete my reading list. Defrag complete!
First, go listen to the latest episode of Matt Haughey's podcast Hobby Horse where he interviews people about their side projects. In Episode 4 he talks with Erica Baker about ancestry and geneology and it absolutely changed the way I look at family trees. We’re all connected in ways I hadn’t thought about before. So great—go listen!
While I'm talking podcasts, Gimlet has a new one out called The Habitat that I'm hooked on after one episode. It's about a NASA study to determine how six humans live together for a year in a confined space. They're trying to simulate the conditions that people would live in on a mission to Mars. You can binge the whole thing.
Last week I posted about the SmugMug/Flickr exchange and I've been enjoying the takes: Tom Coates, Ben Cerveny, Jim Ray, and for context this 2012 article (cold take?) by Mat Honan: How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet.
Did you know you can look up at least some of the interests Twitter has assigned to you for personalized advertising? I was surprised at how accurate some of the more obscure interests were but I shouldn't be. We need more privacy and dumber phones.
Google set up a new way to query information in books called Talk to Books. As an introvert I feel like Google really gets me with this project, you know? I'll just be over here talking to books.
@lhl found a tumblr dedicated to gathering depictions of floppy disks in anime. It's even better than it sounds.
ok, off to delete my reading list. Defrag complete!
Philosophize This
I stumbled on this great podcast about philosophy that you should check out if you also like things such as philosophy and podcasts. (I didn't so much stumble on it as Spotify's recommendation algorithm put it in my path and then I stumbled on it.)
Each episode is about 20 minutes of host Stephen West walking us through some problems that philosophers have tackled through years. For example, are we condemned to be free as Sartre thought or are we limited by the structure of our cultural mythologies as Barthes thought? If you need a place to start, you can't go wrong with his look at Simone De Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity. West has a real knack for making dense, often technical philosophical ideas accessible.
When the prescription for fixing our dystopian techno-hellscape is often adding more humanity, I think it's worthwhile to take some time to think about what it means to be human. Philosophize This is an entertaining way to see how that question has been answered in many radically different ways.
Each episode is about 20 minutes of host Stephen West walking us through some problems that philosophers have tackled through years. For example, are we condemned to be free as Sartre thought or are we limited by the structure of our cultural mythologies as Barthes thought? If you need a place to start, you can't go wrong with his look at Simone De Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity. West has a real knack for making dense, often technical philosophical ideas accessible.
When the prescription for fixing our dystopian techno-hellscape is often adding more humanity, I think it's worthwhile to take some time to think about what it means to be human. Philosophize This is an entertaining way to see how that question has been answered in many radically different ways.
I'm a fan of Douglas Rushkoff and Team Human, but this episode makes me angry. And I can't completely reject it.
Really nice to see PRX's RadioPublic using RSS and open standards to extend podcasting rather than working to lock people into a particular client.