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Fragrag posted:TAL has put up its live show for sale, for only 5 dollars. Easily worth the money in my opinion. I just bought this, should be perfect for a Friday night watch.
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Nov 17, 2012 04:54
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Zsinjeh posted:Can't be worse than Apples Podcast app for the iPhone, good god is that terrible. It's so bad that I went back to just using my iPod nano for podcasts. How hard is it to just competently play an audio file?
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Dec 13, 2012 19:46
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I think my least favorite are the droll fiction stories about animals doing boring human things and having uninteresting arguments, told in a nasal monotone by the author. David Sedaris and one other dude does them sometimes. I've gotten used to the occasional Sedaris story, but this other guy just should never be on radio.
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Jan 5, 2013 19:53
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I tend to see calamari as questionably-prepared bar food or an unwanted appetizer. Nothing against it, it just shows up on the menu at every TGI Friday-type place that you're forced to meet at when no one can agree where to eat. After reading Jacques Pepin's autobiography, it's hard to be grossed out. The book isn't disgusting or anything, he just likes offal a whole bunch, ate a lot of it as a kid in France, and for a short time, worked in a butcher shop/restaurant in Harlem. It was the only place in America that had a clientele who either had to eat the stuff, or actively sought it out for cultural cuisine. It was a bit humbling to read. Personal anecdote, a friend and I used to eat dried apricots and peaches at work and our code word for them was "hog anus," or "H.A." when in polite company.
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Jan 16, 2013 00:45
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Sometimes you don't get a Simpsons joke until years later. The parent-murderer-adolescent in the last episode had a TV movie made about him with Neil Patrick Harris playing his part. There was something familiar about this. I'm standing there, folding laundry. Why is this so familiar? Early Simpsons episode, when Bart appears to have killed Principal Skinner, there is a TV movie dramatization of the event... with the part of Bart being played by Neil Patrick Harris. Also I usually like historical stuff but the Jackson story bored me to tears. Where the hell was Sarah Vowel?
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Jan 29, 2013 17:47
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CaptainYesterday posted:Single story, two weeks. It's about a high school in Chicago that's had 29 shootings. These guys are seeing a major gap in journalism efforts and are sailing straight through the hole again with some actual news work, aren't they? Good for them. (If I'm not mistaken, this started with their year-long preoccupation with the U.S. economic crisis of 2008.)
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Feb 16, 2013 19:57
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Gio posted:"Another Frightening Show About the Economy" is what got me into TAL. All the episodes involving the economic crisis are incredible. "So... then the bankers basically knew what they were doing, but were separated enough between series of curtains from one another they could pretend to themselves that they didn't?" "... well, yes." "But there's no way anyone ever had to feel really guilty or responsible for it, and there's no way anyone is ever doing 30 seconds of jail time, because of how spread out it was?" "... yes." "And these are almost all the same people who are currently in positions of great power in the U.S. economy? Things have not changed at all?" "Oh, my, yes." TAL was the first that reached my ears to not only come to this conclusion, but also logically follow an actual trail to that conclusion and explain every step of the way. Not that I've distilled a true or accurate understanding of either the crisis or TAL's explanation of it in this post.
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Feb 17, 2013 05:33
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I'll be listening to the latest TAL at work today. This should be interesting. TAL just got done washing their hands from the Fat Turd at Foxconn thing, I imagine Ira Glass and Tori Malatea (sp?) are going to be putting on their curbstomping shoes again.
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Mar 25, 2013 18:00
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I liked it too, but like many an Armisen gag it seemed to go on for far too long.
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Mar 27, 2013 22:12
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C-Euro posted:Am I the only one who thought the ASMR story in this week's episode was completely insane, and borderline unsettling? I listened to it on a good pair of headphones, and I can kind of get what she's experiencing, but hearing whispering of the kind she's hooked on is unsettling. Bob Ross, on the other hand, he's just relaxing. I think I've experienced what she's talking about in a lesser way, when I listen to certain kinds of music, I sometimes have a sensation down the back of my skull. I stumbled on a great video of an Australian group playing Copland last week, and it happened then. But I don't go actively seeking it as a hobby. I mostly found the segment vaguely gross and fetishistic, a notch or two below women smooshing cakes with their bottoms or popping balloons.
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Apr 2, 2013 17:14
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C-Euro posted:That's a good message to convey but outside of that, the episode just seemed to me like another "Democrats think like this, Republicans think like this" discussion, which I could get on any news network instead of needing TAL to tell me that. In fact I didn't really think it was a TAL episode at all, it just didn't have the same personal kind of subject or story that's normal for TAL. A valuable episode, but not really a TAL episode. Ever since their very good podcasts describing the 2008 collapse, it seems like they've been trying to do more journalistic stuff. Personally, I approve, especially since last week's episode featured a dumbass story about how the Penguin got jealous of the Batman hitting on Catwoman or something like that. I swear it was done by one of the squirrel fable guys. Second point, it sort of is a "Dems this, Pubs that," except it's going, "Holy crap, idiots actually think like this, corporations are going to do what they are going to do, and there's next to nothing we can do about it except maybe hope that our pot smoking, gay marrying kids can outlive the stupids." doctorfrog fucked around with this message at 09:15 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 09:12
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It's pretty hard to not get heated up when moneymen and lawyers act like they don't know exactly what they're doing. I really wish there was less tolerance for that kind of double talk.
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Jun 7, 2013 21:54
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Hitch posted:Even back then we talked about how patents were a tool that had morphed into something much more perverse than intended -- and that was with medical device patents. Technology patents are typically worse. After all these years I still haven't seen any major movements towards a solution. I honestly don't think you will. I'm obviously just an internet idiot with kneejerk opinions and all that, but from just paying attention to the news for the past ten years, I've learned an axiom: if something makes people with very flexible morals lots of money, despite a net negative effect on society at large, even at the cost of forward movement in technology, peace, and prosperity, it will perfectly resist every kind of reform until it reaches critical mass and crashes down on all our heads. And after that, it will be slightly reformed, but in a very watered down way, so that the people who best weathered the storm can continue making slightly less obscene amounts of money on it.
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Jun 8, 2013 09:01
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Republican Vampire posted:Part of it is that they're basically turned their back on the kind of thing that made them famous. I mean, you still get the occasional fiction segment, but the kind of light, comic, exaggerated thing that David Sedaris, David Rakoff, Sarah Vowell, Starlee Kine, and others used to do wouldn't fly now because it's not "journalism" or clear-cut fiction. I doubt this. They're a show. They'll do what gets them audience share. If the Squirrel Fable and Droll Tidbit demographic is big enough, they'll get back to it. Personally, I think Snap Judgement has been doing a much better job of what TAL used to be the best at, and some of TAL's best work has been in their more serious pieces, but there still seems to be room for the coastal hipster bits that people know and love.
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Jun 26, 2014 20:02
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Had no idea that Philip Glass was related to Ira.
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Jun 26, 2014 21:04
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GrandpaPants posted:Edit: Although I probably have the same response towards David Sedaris as most of you have towards Glynn so it's not completely imcomprehensible. Same boat here. Sedaris's stories are very humorous at times, but his story-reading voice just initiates that reach-for-the-dial impulse. It's just this put-on drone that just doesn't work for me. His normal speaking voice? Completely tolerable. He had a kickass interview with Marc Maron, talking like a normal person, not like he was writing a book for my parents. Glynn Washington's great and he was in a culty Christian thing like I had to grow up in, only his was even crazier. I'm not surprised some people don't like his energy, though, and "slam poetry" is not an inaccurate way to describe it.
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Jul 22, 2014 08:36
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I'm probably not being fair to TAL this week. I heard the word "Birbiglia" and immediately deleted the episode. I just don't feel like hearing a guy trying to talk like a full-grown six year old at any point in the next hour.
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Sep 12, 2014 07:49
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wafflesnsegways posted:The biggest difference here is that the group getting squeezed were white. I struggled a bit with this one, but I think you're basically right. This sort of thing--where the fates of people in a school district are controlled by an "other"--has repeatedly happened to economic and racial minorities, to the point where, like you, I really wonder if it's not just the same old story, but with a somewhat different cast of players. However, this article states that the people most affected by this issue at this point are probably minorities: quote:The simple act of arriving in America from a stressed place puts you in a vivid, complicated relationship with privilege. There are the lottery-ticket odds of landing here but also, often, the vivid comedown from elite status in the old country to a fringe position in the new one. This part of Rockland County has been declining for years, and the middle-class community that once inhabited it has been largely replaced by the Orthodox and by immigrants. There are now only a handful of white students in the public schools, and more than half the children there receive reduced-fee lunches. “A lot of them are from immigrant families, and they’re looking for that better life,” says Fields. “And I don’t know if it’s going to happen.” Many of the refugees are lingering on five- and six-year paths to graduation. Which indicates that "white flight" has occurred, at least for the public school system--and for those who can afford to put their kids on another bus, or in a private school.
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Sep 22, 2014 18:50
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Quoting myself here, but having read this article, it does a more thorough job of explaining the Hasidim side of the story, without vindicating them completely. It's a good article and I definitely recommend it.
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Sep 23, 2014 01:07
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I've been listening to Serial and enjoying it, but I sort of gave up following it very closely around episode 2. I figure there will be something at the end that wraps it up, and like the above poster, assume that if I follow every last detail, there will be twists that nullify that work. I'm also pretty sure of two things: 1. It's a bit biased toward Adnan because he seems like such a swell guy. 2. He's the most likely suspect so far and I think he did it. But I'm waiting for that Plot! Twist! One thing this podcast does that I like is exposing some of the procedural workings of the crime detection and court systems, as well as the (necessary?) biases of those involved. For example, it's not really an American murder police's job to be fair, his job is to find the most likely suspect and send that to prosecution. It's prosecution's job to do their best to convict. To that end, you have detectives and lawyers who basically have to hold true to the stories they've come up with to describe the murder, because their job is to speak for the dead, not give the suspects a fair shake. The court/judge/jury system is supposed to ensure the fair shake, and the defense lawyer is supposed to balance out the biased attacks of the prosecution with those of its own. It opens questions about how hosed up that is as a system as well. The horror of being an innocent person caught up in legal fiction in search of a scapegoat is pretty compelling and scary. So yeah, it's not fantastic, and the structure is meandering, but it's good and I'm going to keep listening. e: I don't like how the podcast brushed away Hae's current boyfriend, because they couldn't get him to consent to interview. It seemed like, "We couldn't get airtime with the dude, so let's just mention him in passing." So he's not a suspect, then? Am I missing something? There's this chapter in Dave Simon's Homicide, and it's parroted in the TV show as well, where a homicide detective basically says, "If you're talking to us at all, you're insane. You should get a lawyer." This reinforces it: don't ever, ever talk to the police (or This American Life producers). Clam up, lawyer up. doctorfrog fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Oct 18, 2014 |
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Oct 18, 2014 21:21
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I'm an easy scare, and I used to listen to old old radio shows as a kid. Lights Out Everyone was a favorite of mine. So the Snap Judgment Spooked V episode is just a whole lot of fun. Makes me want to look up Lights Out Everyone or those old radio plays of Poe stories.
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Oct 25, 2014 00:40
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MrWilderheap posted:Don (Hae's new boyfriend) was at work and his boss could vouch for him being there during the murder if I'm remembering the episode correctly. I'm willing to let this go because I'm mostly listening for entertainment like most others, but even that's not satisfying in a way. Do we have more details than that? Are there time records verifying it? Do we know of the relationship between Don and his boss? Could someone have "punched in" for him? Maybe the boss owed him a li'l favor or just doesn't care? Maybe they smoked weed by the dumpster and did each other a solid. I could go on, of course. It just rang a few alarm bells for me. They each had a personal relationship with the victim before she died, and we focus on one, and the other one hardly at all. One's in jail and very chatty, the other shuts down and doesn't want to talk. Which one is better for the radio? I don't think there's a conspiracy, and so far, Adnan is still the most likely suspect, just that I'm not 100% satisfied. Most likely it's a dead end not worth looking at. If he's innocent, it's definitely not worth rooting up his life for the sake of the podcast. But there's a slight possibility it's the cops going, "This guy's the one, forget Don." And then the TAL producer going, "There's no Don material here for the podcast, focus on the material stuff." doctorfrog fucked around with this message at 08:05 on Oct 25, 2014 |
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Oct 25, 2014 08:01
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There's no way I'd pay a dime for Serial, they're much better off shilling for Audible or whatever.
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Nov 7, 2014 05:09
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It also sounds needlessly complicated.
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Nov 9, 2014 06:29
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I just dislike ads that use overlapping copy reading. "Over one," "One million," "Dipshit," "Dipshit," "Dipshit," "Dipshit assholes use MailKaimp," "...Mail... Chimp??????," "MailKaimp," "To deliver," "To deliver," "To deliver unwanted spam to millions." "Millions," "Millions," "My... my lawns?" "Millions of email addresses."
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Nov 9, 2014 10:18
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Johnny Longtorso posted:The latest episode was pretty good, except for the last segment. As a rule I skip TAL segments about the producers' family members because they're not nearly as interesting as the producers think they are. (The one exception I can think of is the one where the producer's grandfather was a psychiatrist who helped get homosexuality out of the DSM.) Otherwise, I enjoyed the investigative pieces. If you want some more depressing background on the US Border Patrol's overreach, read Border Patrol Nation by Todd Miller. I was falling to sleep to TAL last night, and even still, was so bored by that last segment I woke up and changed to a different podcast.
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Nov 25, 2014 21:02
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LFO posted:Why didn't the mom take the kids when they first split? Because she was busy drinking and partying? That's pretty sad too and was just glossed over. Depends on how much of a support network she had outside the cult, I'd imagine. I forget how deep in she was (if it was mentioned at all), but it's possible she was (like her ex-husband turned out to be) so overwhelmed with personal survival outside the cult, that fighting for the kids was beyond her ability.
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Dec 11, 2014 06:56
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It was pretty good. The shouting from the rooftops bit made me cringe, though. "Hey, we should really do that, Jad would smile upon us from the heavens for our wacky spontaneity." But hell, I learned some stuff. You know how as a kid you sometimes ask each other, or yourself, "Which sense would you live without?" And it usually comes down to vision or hearing. I knew some deaf folks, and to be honest, I didn't really care much for the bits of the deaf community that I was exposed to, it just kinda rubbed me the wrong way. They seemed very superior and insular, and sort of culturally frustrated (though of course I am an outsider, and they have to deal with as individuals, and as a group, with a society that treats them a certain way. I was a kid). Choosing to be deaf rather than blind was more about which thing you would lose less with. Most of all, I wouldn't want to miss out on music, audio. I listened to a lot of old 40's and 50's radio shows as a kid, and felt like a lot of A/V media can be experienced pretty well, and uniquely, without the V. But being blind seemed like a greater disability. Why? Can't go anywhere. Mobility would have been too much to sacrifice, and would have too dramatically narrowed my range of experience. For the first time, I'm encountering an alternative way of looking at that. That's good radio.
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Jan 14, 2015 04:50
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I was propositioned (non-sexually) by people in my church and by some random guy in a Carl's Jr. about vague, thrilling business opportunities related to "multi-level marketing" (something about selling future energy shares) and "cellular marketing" (vitamins, it turned out)--the latter of which had a diagram of a pyramid scheme turned on its side and mirrored to differentiate it--and I was really pleased to see the step by step that the TAL producers took with that episode. It's exactly how you investigate a cult (and this is a commercial cult), by being inquisitive and innocent and questioning, questioning, questioning. You don't unravel it by going head on and charging that it's a cult or a pyramid scheme, because part of the programming is to train its neophytes how to resist those definitions. It was a good episode. Also, Kirby vacuum cleaners, had a friend get roped partially into that.
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Jan 15, 2015 08:31
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C-Euro posted:The episode had an interesting point about a secondary benefit to these things though- because the guy they interviewed worked from home on all of this stuff, he was able to better raise his kids. This is looking back through the fog of a faulty memory, but I recall that his wife said that he wasn't making any money with it yet. At best, WakeUpNow was a hobby for this guy. Which ain't bad, but it's no better than anything else that occupies time and makes no money.
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Jan 15, 2015 19:48
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Somewhat related is the woman who got tired of abusive tweets, so she picked one and told his mom.
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Jan 29, 2015 19:28
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Combining the talk on vocal fry and David Sedaris, his nasal, self-amused droll voice is generally something I couldn't stand. Then I heard an interview with him on Maron's WTF podcast, and just to hear the guy talk when he's not performing, I couldn't help but like the guy. So with him at least, it's a put-on for performance. But the general crowd seems to like it. The vocal fry thing seems deliberately cultured, like small batches of artisan yogurt, in NPR studios, but the hate for it, I think TAL nails it on the head: it's a dogwhistle for sexism and maybe some weird form of ageism or hipster dislike. edit: and I was disappointed that Anxiety Box doesn't exist anymore. doctorfrog fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Jan 29, 2015 |
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Jan 29, 2015 20:50
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I liked it, but it didn't make me any more interested in Burroughs or any other personality from the Beat era.
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Feb 10, 2015 06:02
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It's also because your first post was just really stupidly worded, lol if you think it warn't
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Feb 19, 2015 19:09
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Watermelon City posted:All this plus a story from David Sedaris and Mike Birbiglia which drags down the episode.
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Feb 24, 2015 08:22
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I'm not going to analyze her much, but it did take some real effort to get through that segment, which was otherwise interesting (I have a 7 month old girl and I just got through the WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING WRONG SWEET JESUS SLEEP WONT YOU OH GOD I"M A TERRIBLE PERSON portion of her life). I just assume she's a real fan of Maria Bamford.
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Mar 6, 2015 10:12
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I liked it, but agree that it fell short of mind-blowing and incredible. The seething hatred for it is pretty amusing, though.
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Mar 9, 2015 00:25
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Well, they could stick with importing stories from Planet Money, which reassuringly finds economic activity to be universally great!
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Mar 12, 2015 08:43
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Also, you can only produce so many shows a year. I don't keep track of how many reruns there are, but TV shows only make about 12-24 episodes a year. I ain't gonna get too mad if radio shows recycle at or near the same rate, but it'd be even better if they got out of the way and something else were aired. Also, Fresh Air can recycle shows every time a celeb dies, or an author, who was interviewed when their book was hardbound, now has the same book out on paperback. Then David Cooly can overpraise a mediocre TV show, and that's a wrap.
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Apr 9, 2015 17:41
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There are a lot of pretty good or just good/effortful imitations of TAL out there. When the Car Talk guys retired, Glass came on NPR and mentioned how they were doing reruns anyway and how he disagreed with that, that they should use the air for new voices instead. Now TAL is half reruns, a quarter showcase for other podcast material, and a quarter new stuff that is still pretty good usually, but still a bit hounded by recent scandals. It wouldn't surprise me if Glass was looking for a way to retire the show and open the pasture a bit. But if he's also afraid that they'll just rerun old shows, maybe it's turning into the patchwork of nostalgia/bought/original content it's become lately. If so, good enough. Is there a "stories podcasts" thread in here, or is the TAL thread it?
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Jul 14, 2015 20:34
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