This morning I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Decoder Ring. The most recent episode had a very interesting title: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie…Will he want a Welfare check? I don’t remember this book from my childhood, but I do remember reading this one (and others in the series) to my kids. The podcast explores the fact that, starting around 2015, this book started to become known by conservatives as an allegory against the welfare state. While this podcast episode eventually interviews the author and confirms this was not her intention, I can certainly understand how the book could be read that way. It’s a great example of how art (literature, movies, images, music) becomes “property” of the culture once the creator releases it into the world. In many ways it doesn’t matter what the creator wanted (although I always find that fascinating), but what the culture does with it.

I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.

Politics

5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.

First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation in the world. AI in general has long been a topic for science fiction, but this short story tackles the current LLM version of AIs. I found it to be a very fun episode that is a master class in providing a huge amount of backstory without an exposition dump. I don’t want to spoil anything about this story, but they naturally drop all these background details about the world that make me want more stories in this universe. It also has a fun, light tone to it. I highly recommend you either listen or read (the full text is available at the episode link above)

In short succession 2 podcasts I listen to covered the movie adaptation of The Pelican Brief. If you watched it back in the 1990s you probably didn’t realize how bananas the plot of this movie was. It sounds OK in short summary - some evil corporations kill 2 US Supreme Court judges to prevent a certain ruling. But once the podcasts go into the details of the movie - it makes next to 0 sense.

Ever since a class during my undergrad which mentioned technology that can help make sure the real world is accessible to all folks no matter what their physical limits may be, I’ve been very interested in the topic. It’s led to my interest on web accessibility (although I’m not always perfect when it comes to this blog) as well as in other realms. One of my favorite series from the Game Maker’s Toolkit Youtube channel is his yearly wrap-up on how accessible games were that year. Here is his 2020 video:

It took me a while to get the hang of the many, many options within Podcast Republic so that I could get it to work the way I wanted - automatically downloading episodes on WiFi. Unlike Doggcatcher, but more like other modern pod catchers, you can stream a podcast instead of always having to download it. The option is nice, but it does introduce complexity. As usual, it was annoying at first to have the pod catcher think it needed to download every single episode from the podcasts you subscribed to.

I’ve been using Doggcatcher for YEARS - ever since I first got a smartphone something like 8 or so years ago. I started using Doggcatcher on Dan’s recommendation. One of the best features it’s had is the ability to speed up podcasts without chipmunking the voice. (I think that came a year or so after I started using it). Recently I’ve been a bit annoyed at Doggcatcher, particularly with podcasts from the EarWolf network (although there may be other networks with the same behavior). Every time Doggcatcher checks for updates, all the episodes from EarWolf will disappear and redownload. Until it is done, I can’t listen to the episode.
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s podcast is also annoying in that if a new episode comes out before I’ve finished the previous one, it’ll overwrite it so that I now have two copies of the same file. This makes it more stressful than it needs to be when I’m trying to choose the next podcast to listen to. So I started asking folks for recommendations. Dan recommended Podcast Republic to me. I don’t know if it’ll fix things for me because Dan was using it because Doggcatcher wasn’t working well for him for authenticated feeds, but I’m hopeful.

I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.

Public Radio

Radiolab – Heard about them because sometimes their stories are used on This American Life. Radiolab is a lot like TAL except with a much bigger focus on sound effects. It is, in a way, the descendant of the old radio shows of the 30s and 40s. (Approx 30-45 min)

I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Ever since I started using Doggcatcher on my cellphone I’ve been able to listen to more podcasts because, even without the pitch distortion my sandisk had, it plays the content a lot faster. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.

Video Games

Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games.  I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents about what energy drinks they have, what they ate, what they did between video gaming, and other topics.  However, they always get back to video games and provide a really fun podcast.  Segments include What You’ve Been Playing, News of the World, and EMAILS!  My favorite parts are “What You’ve Been Playing” and “Emails”.  It can be a bit geeky in the same way that some of the tech podcasts I listen to are geeky. First Ryan passed away and then Vinnie went to New York. With the podcast being so personality driven, the changes almost drove me away, but I’ve stayed and the new talent is pretty good. (Approx 2.5 hours long)

I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Ever since I started using Doggcatcher on my cellphone I’ve been able to listen to more podcasts because, even without the pitch distortion my sandisk had, it plays the content a lot faster. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.

Video Games

Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games.  I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents about what energy drinks they have, what they ate, what they did between video gaming, and other topics.  However, they always get back to video games and provide a really fun podcast.  Segments include What You’ve Been Playing, News of the World, and EMAILS!  My favorite parts are “What You’ve Been Playing” and “Emails”.  It can be a bit geeky in the same way that some of the tech podcasts I listen to are geeky. I miss Ryan since his untimely death last year - the guys do well enough without him, but he brought something very special to the podcast that isn’t there anymore. I felt like I actually knew him after about 200 weekly episodes where I spent almost 3 hours with him each time. (Approx 2.5 hours long)