/reader

 

I haven’t done a podcast recommendations post since the dark days of 2020. But I thought I’d do a quick one rounding up top 5 podcast series that were new to me this year.

In no particular order:

Sold a Story

Sold a Story is a compelling podcast series about the decades long reading crisis in America’s schools. It deep dives into the systemic issues surrounding reading programs, and the settled science of how children learn to read.

The host has been on this beat for years, but the podcast (and its audience) emerged in the aftermath of the pandemic lockdowns – driven by concerned parents who witnessed the quality of their children’s reading lessons up close for the first time.

This show has a lot in it: A fascinating exploration of learning itself, the science of reading, and the challenges to structural reform due to cult-like creators of reading programs, publishing industry interests, government funding, and teachers’ unions opinion of George Bush Jr. The whole show orbits stories from children themselves.

As the series progresses, the impact of the shows reporting begins to have an impact on school boards around the country. Later episodes thoughtfully examine the reintroduction of phonics into curriculums and how the dogmatic application of ‘Science of reading’ reforms risks undermining the very goal of improving literacy. An easy binge.

The Telepathy Tapes

This is, without a doubt, the single best piece of media I’ve consumed all year.

The Telepathy Tapes explores the telepathic abilities of non-verbal autistic children who have learned to communicate using the pointing method. What begins as a series about unconventional communication methods expands into profound spiritual questions and the existence of astral realms.

I devoured all seven hours of it in just one day last week.

If you’re a staunch materialist, I encourage you to suspend your skepticism and approach this show with an open mind. They are taking donations and raising money to make a documentary series, as the host is a film maker. I’ve donated so should you!

I cannot recommend this podcast enough. It’s been absolutely blowing the people I’ve been sending it to’s minds. It’s blowing loads of peoples minds actually.

There are so many books I want to recommend people who enjoyed this, but Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe by by Dean Radin is a very good follow up

The Department of Midnight

The Department of Midnight is a six-episode audio drama is a collaboration between Warren Ellis and The Bellport Theatre on the Air.

It follows Dr. John Carnack and his role at the Department of Midnight—a clandestine organisation tasked with investigating and policing dark matter experiments.

As the story unfolds, you’re drawn into a richly realised world where dark matter, ghosts, demons, and folklore are all connected.

No spoilers, but the final episode was a great way to end the series. The production quality is also outstanding, right up there with some of the best radio dramas I’ve listened in my life including all the classics from the Golden Age of radio I’ve consumed.

With dashing adventures, daring deeds, and a wonderfully irreverent take on HR departments and bureaucracy, it’s very cool from start to finish. Folks who have read Warren’s Injection series for Image Coics will recognise some thematic echoes. I really hope it gets a second season, and has a pre-roll ad read with 1940s/50’s J-E-L-L-O style production.

Venthuffer

Created by Jmac (aka Halstrick), Venthuffer is a deeply personal journal podcast that reflects on the host’s relationship with the Steam Deck and video games and gaming in general.

Each episode is a wonderfully written vignette, focusing on a particular game, genre, and the host’s connection to the subject.

I love the tone that Jmac strikes towards his subject matter in the show.

The episodes are fantastically produced. It’s not just a podcast about games—it’s a celebration of the medium and its personal impact. I know I only wrote about this show the other week, but I’ve found it utterly charming, and very inspiring.

Side Missions

Side Missions describes itself as “low-key meditations on art, life, and the everyday.”

There’s only one episode so far, but it’s an absolute masterpiece.

Clocking in at 47 minutes, 8-bit, 8 bar, is a deep dive and labour of love audio essay about how vintage video game soundtracks influenced the development of UK grime.

It’s jam-packed with examples, samples, and references, all strung together with engaging narration. The towards the end the episode, it hones in on the creative cross-pollination between UK and Japanese grime scenes, exploring how video games sit at the heart of this international relationship – super fascinating! I can’t wait to see what comes next from this show!

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a weekly podcast 301 seconds in length; written, recorded and edited by @thejaymo

The post Podcast Recommendations (2024) appeared first on thejaymo.

 

Let it snow. 11:48 am. 35° F, December 20, 2024. Stamford, CT. Pictures from this morning’s walk: Time Lapse video & Sunrise photos.

 

Today was a long busy hard day — no time for fresh photos. So you get a photo taken earlier this fall.

This is a green shetland wool shawl collar pullover. It’s from Ralph Lauren’s Rugby line. I can’t remember if I got it on massive “we’re killing this line soon” clearance or second hand. I just know I didn’t get it retail.

This is another very warm one. The shawl collar is massive. It has basketweave leather buttons and leather patches at the elbow. Looks like something one would wear to The Game and then grab some Pepe’s after to celebrate The Bulldog’s victory with your Scroll and Key brethren..

Hahvahd’s team may fight to the end
But YALE! WILL! WIN!

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hey, I'm Zinzy! In early August, Manuel invited me to be a guest in his wonderful People & Blogs series. I'm writing this and it's late October now; here I am.

In many ways, I'm a very Dutch person: I like cheese, flowers, milk, and not standing out. I am also Afropean, gay, non-binary, and neurodivergent, which means there's always something about me that stands out. This is why I'm blessed to call Amsterdam home, where everybody is a little different all the time.

I love puzzles, I live with unrelenting curiosity, and I like helping people find what they need. I suppose this is why, despite academic adventures in linguistics and theology, I eventually became a designer by day, and a community builder by chance. One of my favorite projects right now is All Saints Amsterdam, a radically inclusive and very young Episcopal church.

First and foremost, though, somewhere, I'm still the kid who taught herself to build websites at age 11. I am an advocate for an Internet that is open, independent, transparent, cozy, and small.

What's the story behind your blog?

I like to think of the personal website as one of the corner stones of the Internet. I treat them as rooms, as homes that I get to enter, motherfucking websites that can hopefully stand the test of time, unlike so much of what we see on the Internet today. In many shapes and forms, my personal website has always attempted to fulfill these roles.

Zinzy.website is an all-in-one place, your one-stop shop for learning about me on the Internet. I've tried, in the past, to maintain a personal website and a professional one, but I've always experienced this setup as disingenuous. (This is not to say that you, reader, are disingenuous for having different websites for different parts of your life.) I suppose it stems from my continued nostalgia for a time on the Internet when the personal was professional, and the professional personal.

I taught myself to build websites in the mid 90s. Seeing things appear on a screen felt like looking through a mirror at my hand drawing an object. I could not have been more fascinated. Soon, it became a way to experiment with the art of self-publication. It helped me explore the Internet, interact with others, and look far and wide beyond my little bedroom at home.

As a teenager, I made the first of what I'd consider to be a blog: a collection of dated posts the visualization of which required no manual alteration to be refreshed beyond publishing a post. My blog has known many names in the past, most of which I've forgotten. The parts of it I do remember are archived on zinzy.website/museum, my favorite still being DoYouLikeMyTightSweater.com.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Simone Silvestroni in his own People & Blogs interview summed up quite nicely what happens on my website: "She alters the look, changes typography, structure, navigation so often that following through RSS isn't enough. When I see a new post, I go check the website."

My website is at the mercy of constant pruning, reshaping, reimagining. On our own websites, we have full control over what our words look like; form and content are in perpetual interplay. On zinzy.website, I tell stories with words as much as I do without them. I've tried maintaining a changelog of what I modify on the website, but it was a ridiculous effort. Whenever I feel the itch, I'll get started on a redesign that's usually finished within an hour or two.

I collect fleeting thoughts and oneliners with whatever's ubiquitous, on a sheet of toilet paper if I must. When I feel the itch to turn it into something, I sit down to hover around a first paragraph for a while until I find myself asking: "what am I trying to say here?" Some of the long-form content that I write brushes up against the lyrical essay, so tone and cadence are what I initially focus on. My writing starts because I think something sounds good, and then I spend the rest of the process trying to figure out why.

The majority of my writing sits in the category slices of life: an ode to the mundane ongoingness of my time in the world. It may be an experience I had, something I didn't understand, something that irked me, media I consumed, something I value, an idea I have, what I'm up to now. It's what I like to see on personal sites, and it's my rejection of the design industry's unwritten rule that every designer should try to be a thought leader. I'm not just a designer, and my website reflects that.

One of the reasons it took me three months (sorry Manuel!) to answer a simple set of questions is that I returned from a transformative trip and found myself rethinking what I was actually doing with my life, which is to say what I was doing with my website. Lately, I've been struggling even more with performativity and self-presentational techniques common amongst IT professionals. Turning my front page into a photo blog has helped me return to the small and simple.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I web master best in public togetherness that honors how hell is other people. I love a good coffee place: me, a screen, and people around me who leave me alone. Noise-cancelling headphones with an endless Spotify loop of those ridiculous lo-fi instrumental beats that underscore the Plan with Me garbage I watch on YouTube. Website tinkering usually happens on Saturday morning at our local Coffee Company.

My writing environment depends on the content I'm writing. Since it usually accompanies a certain level of unrest, I do it wherever I find myself: at work during my lunch break, at home in the kitchen, on the tram. Early-stage writing happens anywhere, editing always happens in the same place.

When I feel a piece is almost there, I move to Visual Studio Code and fire up my localhost, so that I can see what it looks like in the browser. I often run my localhost over my IP address so that I can see it on my smartphone as well. To iron out any typos or mistakes, I listen to a blog post with Speechify (referral link), my text-to-speech software of choice. I think the most profound part of my writing happens when I look at it in the browser.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I build my website with Hugo, it lives in Github, and is served through Netlify. My domains have been with bHosted, a tiny Dutch company, since the early 2000s.

On touch devices, I like Working Copy, and on my machines I use Visual Studio Code. It's important to me that what I put on the Internet begins on my website, and because the Micropub standard and I aren't the best of friends, I do enjoy the iOS shortcuts that let me post notes and photos to my website in just a few seconds.

I use CSS framework Tailwind for styling purposes; not because my website needs it, but because it helps me collaborate with engineers on my team. I can't believe we ever wrote vanilla CSS.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I'll answer this by telling you about my most important Internet-related values and how I acquired them.

• Tools do not matter: still disgruntled over all the writing I lost before I began properly backing things up in 2005, I believe strongly in the value of a simple computer folder with a set of text files. If I were to start today, I'd move heaven and earth to maintain that folder as my single source of truth.
• Own your data: aside from the data we owned but lost, there's the data we never really owned to begin with. The easier it is to transport data from one portal to the other, the more relevant the archive we build over time. If I were to start today, I'd do my best to publish things on my website, and (manually) syndicate to Hyves, MySpace, Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, TikTok, or whatever platform was there to make us feel suboptimal about our choices.
• To be yourself is all that you can do: I can't verbalize the cringe I feel at all the pretentious paths down which I walked in my time on the Internet. That time I called myself a "digital story architect" is but an example. If I were to start today, I'd attempt to hold myself to a much more authentic standard.
• No numbers: At work, I'm the founder of the Data Ninjas, a club promoting data-driven product development. On my website, I reject metrics as much as possible. I don't employ cookies, display likes, or engagement metrics of any nature. I don't know you've been on my website unless you tell me.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I had to look up the one expense my website requires: a domain at 40 euros per year. I don't monetize my website, even though there's a "buy me coffee" link hidden on some page somewhere. The websites I most like to visit are personal websites created for the sheer gratification of having brought something personal to the Internet. The moment a personal website turns into a fulltime job, I've found I tend to lose the reason for coming there. I don't spend money on anybody else's blog, but I've subscribed to a handful of Patreon tiers of people who are, for example, independent researchers who happen to also have a website. Andy Matuschak is a good example of this.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I'm a visual thinker (my partner calls me a super recognizer), and websites are best in their natural state where I can see them for what they are. I can't even find enjoyment in using an RSS reader, so I just have a long list of websites I like on my Bookmarks page. I don't really care if you published a new post. Sometimes I just want to be around you for a bit. Top of my head, three of my favorites include eatock.com, matthewsmith.website, and patrickrhone.net for the way they tell me about their makers, and the surprises I encounter there.

One thing that makes me not like other girls is that I have a bad day if the Wayback Machine is down. Sure, it's awesome that Kottke is still around making "fine hypertext products since 1998", but remember those blue lines from 2013?! And remember that very naughty 1095-day photo project that Naughty James completed in 2006? Whatever happened to that guy?! And what about Heather Champ's blog, with those Polaroids that were the last known to man at the time? When I think of it, the fact that some genius thought to archive the internet as early as he did, I'm overcome with gratitude and humility.

Okay, so the previous paragraph made me so nostalgic that "who do you think I should be interviewing next" only elicits a disappointing response. I miss Aaron Swarts. I want to know what he'd think about the Internet today, what he'd be writing about, what his website would look like. (Isn't is sad that the link under his name doesn't even have https yet? Where does time go?) I miss Dooce and the candor, wit, and vulnerability with which she welcomed the Internet. I struggle with how I learned so much about her, and how I'll still never know what she was thinking and feeling in her last moments in the world.

On a happier note, I want to hear from Patrick Rhone, Derek Powazek, from Maggie Mason. The bloggers from before responsiveness. People who were publishing slices of their lives so that we can publish slices of our lives. What's it like to still have a personal website today? Do you miss the good old days? How has your website changed over time? How has the Internet changed for you?

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

To everyone taking it upon themselves to find ways, continuously, to share parts of who they actually are on the Internet for everyone to see, unfiltered: thank you. Keep doing what you're doing. I feel this thing of ours is a rare dialect at risk of extinction.

To everyone not reading this because they're on some street corner balancing their phone on a bench so they can record a poorly performed dance for TikTok: no.

This was the 69th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Zinzy. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.

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