I don’t know if listening to podcasts is your thing, but it sure is mine. I listen to approximately forty-one podcast spread out across iTunes, Audible, and Stitcher. Some are three to five minutes and come out several times a day. Others are 20 minutes and publish four to five times a week. Others run an hour-long come out once a week. My favorites can run two to three hours long and stream straight into my earholes once a month, sometimes less seldom. I started listening to a handful of these audio shows in 2005. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Surely, everyone with ears will be all over this or so I thought! I could not convince anyone around me to listen to them. I am sure there is some algorithm explaining where the threshold is for something to take off like a rocket. It probably goes something like X(Cool Kid X 1000)X10 + Y(Loner Nerdy Kid X 1)=10,001 (Stupid Success).
I’ve been a big fan of radio narratives like The Shadow from the time I was a kid. During lunchtime, I would listen to recordings of the 1930s radio show, in one of my classes while doodling in my sketchbook. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”, in a sinister scratchy voice the speaker cried out on the vinyl records. I remember loving that shit better than anything on TV. Later as a teenager, I listened to the Dr. Demento Show on KMET, it was there where I was introduced to the parodies of “Weird Al” Yankovic. This was thoroughly entertaining and again could not convince those around me to give it a shot. It is not that nobody was listening. On the contrary, they had listening fans spread out all over the world. The operative word here is “spread out”. Before the web, you would be hard-pressed to find your tribe. Now, if wanted to find fans of S-Town from This American Life fame, it is a Google search away. Or if you are looking for a less popular podcast but rabid fan base, Welcome to Nightvale is your stop. Welcome to Nightvale reminds me of Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM radio show in its absurdity meets H.P. Lovecraft’s world of weirdness, but it is scripted like an old radio shows. Hands down it is one of my all-time favorite podcasts.
“With its uncanny blend of the macabre and the mundane, the news out of Night Vale sounds like what might occur if Stephen King or David Lynch was a guest producer at your local public radio station.” – NY Times
Not that I need to shed any more light on my very mild OCD behavior, but I will keep lists of the old podcast shows no longer publishing as well as the actual episodes on an external drive for posterity. On that note, I will conclude this post with a list of some awesome podcasts!
Here are some of my other favorite podcasts: Code Switch, Design Matters, Monocle On Design, Hardcore History, History on Fire, Revisionist History, Open Source, Radiolab, The Ezra Klein Show, Larry Wilmore Black on the Air, On the Media, The Gist, Darknet Diaries