Theory

[Oils]

Lately I've been listening to podcasts while I work on things, but I haven't been successful in locating a goldmine of information. At first, I listened to all the Charles Hartley podcasts at Actionbutton.net - sometimes multiple times, I have to admit - but that didn't last as long as I would have liked. Hopefully, they'll find a new reader soon.

For a while, I listened to Retronauts, run largely by Jeremy Parish over at 1up, and they're pretty good, but I think they tend to lean more on the factual/analytical side than the unrestrained opinionated candor I crave. In one of their worst cases, they spent around 45 minutes (more than half the episode) talking about some pretty trite facts on Indiana Jones. I wish they'd get a little more NGJ-ish.

The best podcast I've ever heard to this day came from Edge Magazine. I think it was before they "turned into" next-gen.biz (I use those words tentatively because I really have no idea what they did). It was that beautiful, infamous interview with the guy who translated the first Metal Gear Solid, which to this day has arguably been the best localization the series has seen. Such candor! I haven't been able to find more Edge podcasts; I look all over next-gen.biz and can't find anything, but I'm not particularly savvy, which is why I'm asking for help. If you listen to podcasts, are there any particular websites where you hear the best?

[Molloy]

When Next-Gen finished the original run of podcasts the people who made it went off and did it independantly. It's called Game Theory. It's not as good as it was as they don't seem to get any interesting guests. Oddly they never seem to be talking about games they're playing. It's always about console sale figures or how the games industry is percieved. Not bad for a while but it begins to get repetitive.

[icycalm]

Podcasts suck!

Next!

[icycalm]

I mean I've never listened to a single one, but if clowns like Jeremy Parish or whatever are on them, about the only way they'd be worth listening to is if they spent the whole time telling penis jokes and making farting sounds.

Srsly. If you need something to listen to while working or whatever, put on some Beethoven. It's better for your brain.

[Molloy]

I listen to alot of music in work but sometimes a little talk is nice for variety. It's hard to find interesting podcasts, but there are tons of good audiobooks.

[Mr.Stevenson]

First off, the term "podcast" is pretty stupid. I'm sure there's a better term that can be used for them; some people have suggested the term "netcast" be used.

I listen to a number of video-game netcasts (Cheap Ass Gamer's netcast, various 1up netcasts, Giantbomb's bombcast), and yeah, they're all extremely medicore at best in terms of saying anything "interesting". But the great thing about netcast (especially, the netcasts I listen to) is you never need to direct your full attention on them, so it's not a complete waste of time when I'm listening to them. I usually turn on a netcast right before I decide to go to bed, and they've rarely ever failed to put me to sleep.

As far as video-game netcasts go, nothing has beaten Action Button Dot Net's netcasts. The thing is, unlike most other video-game netcasts, ADBN's netcasts are merely audio recordings of written articles (fairly decent ones, at that), so it's not surprising as to why they don't suck. Sometimes, Shawn Elliot of 1up, says something interesting on the GFW netcast but it's sandwiched between shit, stupid and funny, yes, but still drivel.

The best netcasts I listen to are: Frank Deford's weekly Sweetness and Light netcast (Like ABDN's netcast, it's just an audio recording of the article's Deford writes) and Bill Moyers Journal, which deals with politics and social issues. TED supposedly has great netcasts but I've only listened to one of them before. None of these happen to be video-game related, I know.

[icycalm]

First off, the term "podcast" is pretty stupid. I'm sure there's a better term that can be used for them; some people have suggested the term "netcast" be used.

How about ipodcast?

I listen to a number of video-game netcasts (Cheap Ass Gamer's netcast, various 1up netcasts, Giantbomb's bombcast), and yeah, they're all extremely medicore at best in terms of saying anything "interesting". But the great thing about netcast (especially, the netcasts I listen to) is you never need to direct your full attention on them, so it's not a complete waste of time when I'm listening to them.

That's a pretty retarded sort of logic, don't you think? Just because you don't have to "direct your full attention to them", how does that make them "not a complete waste of time"? Obviously, the part of your attention which you DO direct to them, however small, is being wasted.

Basically, if you keep listening to them it means you enjoy them, so there's no need to make excuses for that. One day, when your taste has been refined, and you no longer draw any amusement from garbage like that, and when you have found more interesting and enjoyable uses for your time, you'll simply stop listening to them.

[Mr.Stevenson]

When you said "draw any amusement from garbage like that", I started wondering about various other forms of media beyond just netcasts, for example: books, television, cinema, and so on. I don't think it is a stretch to say the vast majority of media is filled with things sitting right on top of garbage, if its not garbage already.

And that's causing a bit of a problem for me. How should one deal with things that are mostly garbage but still have some worth, no matter how minute that worth is? Is it just a risk-reward situation, in which it's up to the individual to correctly be prejudice against whatever "near-garbage" media they come in contact with?

[icycalm]

The world of human beings, my friend, is a labyrinth. When you start out you know fuck-all, and therefore telling trash apart from art is practically impossible. That's why you have to taste a lot of trash in order to be able to recognize art when you see it. -- The greatest connoisseurs of art are also the greaters connoisseurs of trash.

Now I have no idea at what point in the labyrinth you are. In fact no one does, not even you. It's up to you to educate yourself and try and make some progress. Choosing to read this website, for example, is a move in this direction as far as games are concerned, though of course how much you take away from it is up to you.

All I can tell you, in regards to this thread, is that the content of radio shows in any way, shape or form is bound to be inferior by definition (none of the greatest thinkers ever bothered with the radio, or with any kind of oratory). Deriving amusement from a radio show is a sure sign that someone is in the early stages of intellectual development (same goes with TV, by the way, but for other, much more complicated reasons).

In conclusion, here's the last part of Pauline Kael's essay, "Trash, art, and the movies":



When you’re young the odds are very good that you’ll find something to enjoy in almost any movie. But as you grow more experienced, the odds change. I saw a picture a few years ago that was the sixth version of material that wasn’t much to start with. Unless you’re feebleminded, the odds get worse and worse. We don’t go on reading the same kind of manufactured novels—pulp Westerns or detective thrillers, say—all of our lives, and we don’t want to go on and on looking at movies about cute heists by comically assorted gangs. The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again. Probably a large part of the older audience gives up movies for this reason—simply that they’ve seen it before. And probably this is why so many of the best movie critics quit. They’re wrong when they blame it on the movies going bad; it’s the odds becoming so bad, and they can no longer bear the many tedious movies for the few good moments and the tiny shocks of recognition. Some become too tired, too frozen in fatigue, to respond to what is new. Others who do stay awake may become too demanding for the young who are seeing it all for the first hundred times. The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new. And despite all the chatter about the media and how smart the young are, they’re incredibly naïve about mass culture—perhaps more naïve than earlier generations (though I don’t know why). Maybe watching all that television hasn’t done so much for them as they seem to think; and when I read a young intellectual’s appreciation of “Rachel, Rachel” and come to “the mother’s passion for chocolate bars is a superb symbol for the second coming of childhood,” I know the writer is still in his first childhood, and I wonder if he’s going to come out of it.

One’s moviegoing tastes and habits change—I still like in movies what I always liked but now, for example, I really want documentaries. After all the years of stale stupid acted-out stories, with less and less for me in them, I am desperate to know something, desperate for facts, for information, for faces of non-actors and for knowledge of how people live—for revelations, not for the little bits of show-business detail worked up for us by show-business minds who got them from the same movies we’re tired of.

But the big change is in our habits. If we make any kind of decent, useful life for ourselves we have less need to run from it to those diminishing pleasures of the movies. When we go to the movies we want something good, something sustained, we don’t want to settle for just a bit of something, because we have other things to do. If life at home is more interesting, why go to the movies? And the theatres frequented by true moviegoers—those perennial displaced persons in each city, the loners and the losers—depress us. Listening to them—and they are often more audible than the sound track—as they cheer the cons and jeer the cops, we may still share their disaffection, but it’s not enough to keep us interested in cops and robbers. A little nose-thumbing isn’t enough. If we’ve grown up at the movies we know that good work is continuous not with the academic, respectable tradition but with the glimpses of something good in trash, but we want the subversive gesture carried to the domain of discovery. Trash has given us an appetite for art.