You take your wins when you can

[melannen]

I have put a lot of time into this project lately and I am very proud of it:


(Yes, that is all my currently-in-progress podcasts in a neat sequence of 1-15 episodes left.)

(The next few dozen are a bit messier. And then there's the ones I completely gave up on keeping up with but still haven't unsubscribed to that linger at the end.) (The list of ones ones I am caught up with is mostly just embarrassingly short in comparison...)

Anyway if you are interested in My Thoughts on any of those podcasts, just ask! Maybe someday I will rate & review like they keep telling me to.

***

Also I cleaned out my handbag today. Usually it doesn't get too bad because I always clean it out before travelling, but, uh, I guess it's been awhile since I travelled, huh. Here is what was in it:


*Surprise very old, very pulverized eggshell in the outer pocket
*a small notebook, mostly full of small notes
*5 pencils
*5 markers
*14 pens
*a handkerchief
*a pair of fingerless gloves/wristwarmers
*a scarf
*a phone charger & cord
*another bag
*some post-it flags
*a tube of lotion
*my wallet (yay)
*a broken necklace shaped like an owl
*2 small pocketknives and a mini leatherman
*set of nail clippers
*tape measure
*2 2021 pocket calendar/dayplanners (blank)
*out-0f-date closing checklist for work
*scrap of paper with notes on house floorplan
*6 hair elastics
*3 forks
*a rubber stamp of a smiley face
*a keychain ring
*28 cents
*a spout off a tupperware jug
*4 receipts
*1 origami crane
*the instruction booklet for a car-to-usb charger
*a cloth facemask
*24 bize-sized chocolates
*4 gobstoppers
*a comb
*a pair of earbuds

Comments

[kalloway]

Not too different than what's in mine, actually. I just did a clean out and mostly found money that I didn't know was there. Nothing else terribly exciting.

[melannen]

The eggshell was kinda exciting, in that I didn't realize it was in there until I had dumped it all over the floor! And I thought I was going through chocolates awfully fast.

[kalloway]

I usually tend to have small amounts of electrical gribblies or small washers fall out whenever I dump a bag. Work hazard. I should inventory the metal pencil-case I carry, which is sticky notes, binder clips, a tire gauge, d20 in case of important decisions, pens, business cards for all circumstances...

I am admittedly slightly jealous about the chocolates.

[melannen]

I had a bunch of small gribbles appear on my bathroom sink recently and I don't know where from! That kind of stuff for me usually ends up in pockets and the on the shelf by the washer, though.

You should! Bag inventories are fun!

[rachelmanija]

Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men, please!

[melannen]

This is a podcast in which Jay and Miles X-plain the X-men! They go through the comics in order, and also other continuities in special episodes.

This was recommended to me a few years back when I wanted to know x-men canon better. I'd heard of it before but I'd been avoiding podcasts that were about other fictional media for some reason, so it took me a bit to try.

But it's in the format I like best (two good friends chatting on-topic) and it also neatly gets around my problem with x-men canon, which is that I can't read most of the comics from their most important eras. Starting late 70s to early 90s there's about 15 years of superhero comics I just can't handle the art. Generally bad art and ridiculously exaggerates people aside, even the stuff that isn't objectively bad there's something about the way line, color, value, and composition were done at the time that my brain does not enjoy processing? Also I can't with the bad phonetic accents. So the podcast is a great workaround, I get information on the canon + context vicariously through two people who do really enjoy them, and I can ignore the visual companions (you kinda have to, they don't work well on mobile) and when they talk about how good the art is I can visualize an ideal of good art in my head and pretend the real thing wouldn't look like a technicolor yawn to me.

They're also, to me at least, quite good at acknowledging the problematic stuff - sometimes extensively - without making you feel like a horrible person if you enjoy it less critically.

Jay is also really into Mark Trail so there's that.

That said I have not, you know, read the comics, so idk how well it reads if so.

I've been reading some of the IDW transformers comics lately (which weirdly I *can* parse despite most of the panels just being collections of abstract rectangles) and if I catch up on jay and miles (and the Thor one, which is the same format and also Miles) I'm considering starting the similar podcast about the G1 cartoon, since I also can't deal with most 80s roy cartoons and podcasts seem to be a workaround that works for me.

[grammarwoman]

Starting late 70s to early 90s there's about 15 years of superhero comics I just can't handle the art.

Weirdly enough, that's the era that was my main focus! But UGH, Liefeld and company - do you even know what a human looks like?

[melannen]

I'm not surprised! That's when a lot of people in our generation got into it, especially for the X-Men in particular, and so many of the classic stories and characters and artists are from then.

But it's not even just the Liefeld badness (And the Miller/Lee-esqe stylization that Liefeld was the worst expy of, that became a huge trend starting in the late 80s) it's just something about how pages were put together? I actually first noticed it was something beyond that when a friend loaned me a bunch of the classic Wolfman & Perez New Teen Titans; I don't think anyone uses that as an example of bad art, but my brain just couldn't parse it at all.

I think it's partly that I need pages, idk, to have a sort of solid sense of form and line and negative/positive space? And that period was when things were shifting from the all-manual four-color printing to more modern technologies and methods, which offered a whole much of new possibilities, but a lot of the possibilities they tried first involved going for color! and dynamism! instead of shape and line and depth, and it makes my eyes just sort of skitter everywhere.

I was the right age at that period, and I wanted to be a comics fan, but I was reading Elfquest and shonen and newspaper comic compilations and Archies and wormeaten silver age stuff from my grandparents' basement because the mainline superheroes of the time made my brain hurt.

(I have a related problem, I think, with original-sailor-moon era classic shoujo manga. It's all froth and gradients and my eyes can't figure out what to look at.)

[jesse_the_k]

That's a very impressive purse inventory!

Peeking at the finished podcast list, I'm curious about the mysterious bowl-of-noodles icon.

[melannen]

That's Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap, in which Ursula Vernon (of SF fandom/Digger fame) and Kevin Sonney eat bad prepackaged mass market food items and review them on air, while getting progressively more intoxicated, dyspeptic and off-topic. It was one of my favorite podcasts, because it basically recreated the experience of sitting at a table in a con hotel listening to people more interesting than you talk for hours at a stretch. It was like a guaranteed cure for loneliness, if only temporary.

Unfortunately, it hasn't updated since last May. They were already talking about switching formats/topics (they were getting too old to handle the weekly stomach upset and hangovers), and had been updating less regularly, so it wasn't entirely a surprise, but they haven't officially ended the podcast as far as I can tell - they just stopped updating - and I've had other ones come back after a longer hiatus (poly weekly has twice) so it stays in the "caught up on, waiting for next episode" pile instead of the "ended" pile, at least until they do a "this is officially done" update to the feed. There are a huge amount of back episodes still up though!

[jesse_the_k]

Oh! Overhearing smarter people at the con bar is something I’ve been cruelly missing — thanks for the rec.

[melannen]

Then I definitely suggest trying it! I would probably start in the 150s -early 200s (which is about as far back as my feed goes anyway) - the early episodes are a little less rambly, the most recent ones are a bit off-model as they wound down, and just post-2016 it gets kind of depressing for awhile (as you do). Or skip up to 250 or so, and then go back pre-2016 if you decide you like it.

[jesse_the_k]

Ahhhhhh.

I'm listening to Ursula being not!hangry and very cranky about box wine and this is so soothing in a strange way. It's like cognitive ASMR.

[melannen]

Isn't it though?

Honesty, "A few interesting people who like each other very much chat in an unstructured and largely unedited way about a very niche topic in which they are experts" is my favorite podcast format, but KUEC is like the platonic ideal of it - I started looking for things like that after spending just enough time at large SCA encampments to stop being frustrated by people chatting geekily all night right outside my tent and start being soothed by it instead. :D

They do very occasionally have sudden noises due to sound issues and/or animals, and they do their best to be considerate of people who can't with startling noises, but given how the podcast works their best is sometimes drunkenly saying "OH no, we said we would try not to do that anymore, I'm so sorry, *listener who wrote it*, but we are too drunk to fix it". So there is that.

[j00j]

I'm going to try some of these! What's #6 since I can't see a title?

[melannen]

That is the K6RAU Morse Code course out of Merced! When I realized I could type in Morse on my phone, I decided to see if I could find a podcast to learn from, and found that. It's surprisingly hard to find any info about it online, but I guess it was originally broadcast over amateur radio in the 60s or 70s, aimed mostly at Boy Scouts, and recordings of it have been bouncing around the internet for years.

I can't speak to how good it is, comparatively, at teaching Morse, but it really creates the feeling of being next to a radio in the basement in the 70s. I put it on when I have the kind of insomnia where just listening to something isn't enough distraction, it works pretty well! Sometimes I go back and do old ones at higher speed too.