BlogOfTheMoon

Wednesday, 24 March 2021

Podcast Recommendations: Honorary Mentions

In the final part of this series, I’m going to talk about podcasts that don’t make the cut. For the most part, ones that I used to listen to but for whatever reason, fell off. Maybe not for me, but others might still enjoy these.


StarShipSofa

StarShipSofa is another really early podcast for me. It started off being hosted by two Geordie lads talking in-depth about a specific SF author each episode. Authors covered included Alfred Bester, Michael Moorcock, Henry Cuttner and Charlie Stross. I enjoyed that format and it both taught me new stuff about authors I was already familiar with and introduced me to new writers. At some point, one of the duo left the podcast, and the remaining host transitioned it into more of an audio fiction magazine. I didn’t really have time for these longer episodes any more, so I dropped it. It’s still running though and if you’re looking for SF short stories, you could do much worse.

Drabblecast

I think I started listening to the Drabblecast after the host, Norm Sherman (another chap with a great radio voice) guest-hosted Escape Pod a few times. Its tagline is “strange stories, by strange authors, for strange listeners”, and it ran “weird”, often pulp-like, fiction, that was usually, but not always, SF. A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words, and each episode would have one of those, followed by a longer story. I used to enjoy this, but it went on extended hiatus, and I eventually dropped it. I understand that it’s back now, but I seem to be spending a lot more time listening to non-fiction, preferring my fiction in written format. If you want weird, often humorous, tales, give this a spin.

The History of India Podcast

I know embarrassingly little about my ancestral homeland, so when an acquaintance recommended the History of India Podcast, I jumped at it. Since the history of India is a huge subject, the host, Kit Patrick, chose to focus on the story of one city – Pataliputra and how its story weaves into the wider story of India over the millennia. Since sometimes stuff happens that inconsiderately isn’t around Pataliputra, there are also special episodes that tackle culture, art and more that’s unrelated to the focus city.

The tone of the podcast is very different to others I listen to. It often feels more like a set of lectures (without slides) than anything else, with very little in the way of razzmatazz. There’s a huge amount of information in there, but as time went on, I found I wasn’t really absorbing the material, and I never really looked forward to the next episode. So after about three series, I decided to bow out. But it’s a good solid, detailed introduction to a dauntingly wide subject.

Monster Man

Somewhat differently to the others, Monster Man is a podcast that I’m still, for the moment, listening to. It’s a podcast where the host, James Holloway, is reading through every entry in the 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, talking about each one in turn, including its real world history, culture, inspiration and suggestions for how to use it in games. This, I suspect, is a podcast that’s perhaps more of interest to a GM than a player of D&D, but the episodes are short (usually about ten minutes) and I’m half way through the Monster Manual by now, so I figure I’ll keep going until the end of that book. There’s a lot more after that, but unless something really catches my attention, I probably won’t continue beyond that.

There’s actually a spin-off podcast called Patron Deities in which the host gives the Deities and Demigods book the same treatment, except in more detail. Unfortunately, although the first episode was in the main feed, the rest is a subscription-only thing, available if you subscribe to the host’s Patreon. I actually really enjoyed that taster, particularly how it tied the deity back to its origin in the real world and the wider culture that it tied in to.

50 Things That Made the Modern Economy

This is only in the honourable mentions because it seems to be over. There have been two seasons, each encompassing 50 items or ideas that helped create the modern economy (plus a handful of extras). It’s another podcast from the indomitable Tim Harford with short episodes in mini-essay format.


And that’s your lot. That’s a whole bunch of podcasts, I hope you’ve found something in this series you like. Feel free to tell me why I’m wrong or what I should be listening to instead/as well. The other parts in the series are listed below.

Thursday, 18 March 2021

A year of living in a Covid world

I last wrote about the Covid-19 pandemic a couple of months into it. It’s now been exactly a year since I last worked a full day in my office, so it seems like a good time to revisit the topic and reflect on the last year.

March 2020 was a strange time. I’d been on strike on and off for several weeks beforehand, and hadn’t been in the office much anyway. There was some low-level worry about this new disease, but it didn’t really seem like much until the very last day of the strike, when the picket was called off, and it suddenly started to feel very real. I came back to work after the strike ended, to find the office already half empty. I didn’t really like the idea of working from home full time, and had intended to try to go into work a few times a week, but just a handful of days later, the full lockdown started. I never expected at that point to a) still be working from home a year later and b) how much I’d come to enjoy it! Although I don’t have to commute any more (which is just so freeing), I still get up at the same time as before but instead use the commute time to go for a walk and listen to podcasts before starting the working day, which I enjoy quite a lot (especially when the weather’s nice). I also go for a long walk after work – my pedometer tells me I’ve been getting ten thousand steps more consistently this last year than ever before – and almost never work after hours any more. Unlike many, I think my work/life balance has been improved since working from home!

I do, of course, realise that I’m very lucky. I live alone and have no dependants, so don’t have to worry about home-schooling or getting under someone else’s feet when trying to work. I’ve got a decent space for working and I’m both well-paid and my job was easy to move to remote working, so I’m still working, much I was before. None of these things are universally true, and I’m very grateful for the advantages I’ve had.

I’ve mostly coped okay with not seeing people in person over the last year. During the period when things opened up in the summer (too much, as we discovered afterwards) I took advantage of it to meet a handful of people, over lunch or in the garden. There are short periods when I miss people intensely, but the drip feed of personal contact, combined with online socialising keeps me sane. While we’ve been back in a full lockdown since January, the online socialising has been fine, although I am looking forward to arranging some outdoor visiting as soon as the weather is clement enough to do so.

What brought the pandemic properly home was when my friend Olaf died of Covid-related causes. I hadn’t seen much of him for a while before that, and I regret that now. But there was always supposed to be time ahead of us. He was just my age. Later in 2020 my great uncle also contracted Covid-19 and died of it – although I didn’t really know him. I wonder just how many families have been touched by this – whether it’s someone who died of or became seriously ill with Covid this past year, or know someone who has.

During the summer, I thought we had the thing licked, with case numbers in Scotland down to almost zero. Obviously we know how that ended up. But with the authorities, in the UK and Scotland, insisting that a Christmas loosening of the rules was going to happen, I made arrangements to go back to NI and see my parents, for the first time in a year, only for the last-minute panic and stay-at-home order. At least I’m luckier than many, since my sister and her family live nearby, so I was able to set up an extended household with them and have both Diwali and Christmas with them. But they’re not exactly within walking distance, and although they’ve been kind enough to chauffeur me to and from theirs when we’ve met up (to avoid me having to brave public transport, even when that was allowed), it means that it’s not exactly something I can do on a whim.

Over the course of the year, we can see just how badly the UK fared in terms of cases and deaths compared to comparable countries. We didn’t lock down quickly enough and then we opened too quickly and too hard. We maybe did a bit better in Scotland, but I think we followed England too closely. Our peak of cases and deaths was well below that of England (per million), but still much higher in the first wave than, say, Germany (although their second wave seems to track ours more closely). this is a consequence of far too many politicians baying for the end of restrictions as soon as the graph starts to dip, and a compliant media who amplify those voices at the expense of reason. By the way, there’s great data visualisation on lots of data related to Covid-19 developed by Travelling Tabby, which is a great way to view what can be some quite complex data (although why it takes a student-run travel blog to do this, rather than official sources, I’m not entirely sure).

There’s been worry in the UK that some people have ignored requests to self-isolate if they’ve been in contact with someone who might have the virus. And although it’s not something I can condone, I can understand it. The UK has an insanely low level of statutory sickness benefit (this report shows the UK had the 2nd lowest level of sickness benefit in the EU in 2016), and because of that, there are many people who just can’t afford to not work. This would have been the perfect time to do a large-scale pilot of a universal basic income, or even to raise sickness benefit to a sensible level, but, well, that’s expecting the Tory government to see beyond their own nose.

The most exciting development of the Covid year was probably the speed at which multiple vaccines were developed for it, some using an exciting new technology (mRNA). I’m so excited both by the development and prospect of getting my own jag (although I fully expect that to be some months away yet). That very speed has caused some consternation amongst people worried about just how fast these vaccines were developed (although I think of it the other way around – why are most vaccines so slow to develop?). But everything I’ve read suggests that safety hasn’t been stinted upon, just the long gaps between stages while the developers desperately try to scrounge up some more funding to continue development. If nothing else, lack of money hasn’t been a factor in the development of these vaccines.

The rollout of the vaccine(s) in the UK has been a surprising (to me) success, although I’m not the first to point out that this was the bit they left to the NHS, without outsourcing it to private consultants and/or mates of the governing party. I’ve been watching the number of vaccines given on the Travelling Tabby page and it’s so good to see that number going up and and up. My parents and most of my extended elder family have already had their first dose and I can’t wait to level up my immune system.

After a year of being at home I’m almost dreading returning to the office, and not just because we’re going to be kicked out of our small offices in the beautiful Gilbert Scott Building to open plan working in the awful Tay House. The idea of sitting in an airless meeting room with too many people makes my skin crawl, and much as I’m looking forward to going back to the theatre, I don’t know how well I’ll cope in such a crowd. I already look at films and TV shows from the Before Time and shout at the telly that everyone’s standing too close together and not wearing masks. I imagine we’ll adapt fairly quickly, but the transition will be weird.

So, it’s been a hell of a year. I might have been mostly fine, but an awful lot of people haven’t. Whether it’s through being afraid to leave your home for fear of the disease, losing your job, being furloughed, being a key worker and having to be out in public, having to home-school children, or any combination of those and more, this past year has been difficult. I hope that this shared experience will make us kinder and more compassionate towards each other. I can’t wait to get out and hug my friends and family again, when it’s safe.

Monday, 1 March 2021

Podcast recommendations: Science

In what should be the penultimate post in this series, I talk about podcasts about science. Sorry, I mean about Science!


How to Vaccinate the World

Tim Harford, of More or Less fame, started How to Vaccinate the World on BBC Radio 4 in the middle of November 2020 to talk about the then-exciting new possibility of vaccination for Covid-19, and how to get it into as many people across the world as possible. This is a very fast-moving subject and it’s gone from theoretical to actually happening very quickly. That has brought a number of controversies with it, from vaccine nationalism to the gap between doses to how to transport and deliver it. Like More of Less, it’s calm and collected and gets to the nub of whatever matter they’re discussing. There isn’t always a clear answer, the real world is messy like that, but it’s great for breaking through the hysteria that the 24 hour news cycle generates. Episodes are half an hour long.

The infinite Monkey Cage (science)

Combining science and comedy, The Infinite Monkey Cage from the BBC brings together presenters Robin Ince and Professor Brian Cox with world-leading scientists and comedians to discuss subjects ranging from space archaeology to the science of cooking to whether or not time actually exists to that ultimate question: are strawberries alive? The tone is usually light, but there’s real science, coming from experts in the field, with Ince ready to jump in with a quip if things get too heavy. The podcast episodes tend to be longer than the broadcast ones, running up to about 45 minutes.


And that’s it for podcasts that I listen to regularly. Next up, I’m going to talk about podcasts I used to listen to but don’t any more and why you might want to listen anyway. You can find the other posts in this series below.

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