Comments on: 4: Codex Seraphinianus

4: Codex Seraphinianus

mathowie — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:52:44 -0800

Episode 4 of the MetaFilter Podcast is now up, featuring recaps from me and jessamyn

By: mathowie

mathowie — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:54:07 -0800

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Stuff mentioned in this week's podcast:

Sailor's Psalm by Baby_Balrog

Jack and Jill relationship thread on Ask MeFi.

Help me squish my food on Ask MeFi.

MeFi thread on Elephant Seals featuring this story from Rumple.

Murder etiquette thread on Ask MeFi

BBC Movie Editing documentary on MeFi (and here's the gardening one I mention)

jonmc's blog mentioned on MeFi

Codex Seraphinianus on MeFi

Intelligent podcasts thread on Ask MeFi has tons of good suggested audio shows

Chris Ware/This American Life post on MeFi

Visualization of MeFi users from monju_bosatsu at MetaTalk

MetaTalk post on how it's hard to find archived stuff in Ask MeFi

Shorpy, the 100 year old photo blog on MeFi

By: mathowie

mathowie — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:57:35 -0800

Oh, and this week ran kind of long, so it finished at 30 minutes with the music at the end and the file is about 28Mb.

Next time up I'll get jessamyn to turn down her levels a bit, since she clipped a lot during recording and I couldn't really fix it in GarageBand.

By: cortex

cortex — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:57:36 -0800

Shorpy: the old photo blog so nice we posted it twice.

And jesus, we need a whole Ken Burns' Metafilter episode, buddy.

By: cortex

cortex — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:00:36 -0800

And yes, Jessamyn, you have to come to the meetup.

By: Dizzy

Dizzy — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:18:16 -0800

That was quite lovely. Thanks, M and J!

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:30:54 -0800

My apologies for spacing the names of sleepy pete, Melissa May's partner, and amusebuche, qwip's partner. I remembered everyone's real name, but I'm never sure how "out" people are with their real life vs. MeFi identities and didn't want to inadvertently leak someone's personal info if it was semi-private.

By: ThePinkSuperhero

ThePinkSuperhero — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:32:26 -0800

Very nice.

By: Ethereal Bligh

Ethereal Bligh — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:34:36 -0800

That was very enjoyable. Both mathowie and jessamyn were pleasant to listen to, but I think jessamyn was particularly good this week.

By: deborah

deborah — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:58:23 -0800

Well done again, folks! My mum's visiting and she enjoyed it as well.

By: tristeza

tristeza — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:08:13 -0800

I've never met Jessamyn or heard her talk, but I love that I can detect the teeninest New England via Seattle accent on her. Heh. And Matt sounds 125% like I thought he would.

By: nj_subgenius

nj_subgenius — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:10:42 -0800

good plan mathowie. the levels will work out but yeah, jessamyn's clipping.

By: nj_subgenius

nj_subgenius — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:16:53 -0800

...you need to match her fascinating energy, though...

By: Rhomboid

Rhomboid — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:17:51 -0800

I liked Matt's tidbit about knowing a spammer.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:40:01 -0800

yeah, I didn't get much sleep last night and we recorded early in the morning so I was kind of tired. I actually had to edit out a yawn I busted out near the end.

Thursday afternoon recordings might go better since I'll be higher energy then.

By: dobbs

dobbs — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:32:24 -0800

nice. thanks.

By: mmahaffie

mmahaffie — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:59:32 -0800

Matt sounds remarkably like a guy who works in our Government IT agency. He's freakishly tall, but a nice guy. He's also the guy I have to go to to clear all my crazy-ask gummint website ideas that develop from things I find on MetaFilter. So the irony is now fairly thick.

By: carsonb

carsonb — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:06:59 -0800

You guys are fun to listen to, what with the f-bombs and the OMG!!!s.

By: Rumple

Rumple — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:34:43 -0800

I really like Baby_Balrog's ditty.

By: wendell

wendell — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:11:59 -0800

15 yard penalty for clipping

By: vacapinta

vacapinta — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:31:27 -0800

Wow. This one was smooth and really engaging! And the subject matter was ok - I think its that you two sound much more comfortable in this environment than you did in the previous podcasts.

I do have to admit though that Matt, though smoother, still sounds like a geek with a microphone (no offense, Matt!) whereas Jessamyn has the charm of a full-blown radio personality!

By: Ethereal Bligh

Ethereal Bligh — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:34:14 -0800

Yeah, I didn't want to insult Matt while praising Jessamyn, but I agree. I kept thinking that jessamyn could work a morning show. And I used to be (long, long ago) in commercial radio.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:43:56 -0800

Yeah, jessamyn is really sharp on them. I think she did college radio, but she reminds me of the DJs I've interacted with when doing radio interviews. I'll try to up my game over time so it's not so lopsided.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:45:22 -0800

Oh also, I think this one worked because I truly hadn't seen any of the threads she liked and she hadn't seen the ones I mentioned, so we each got to play the part of the audience that didn't read absolutely everything on the site.

We'll need to try and do that in the future, I think it helped immensely.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:53:53 -0800

Aw thanks. I used to have a radio show in high school. Being a librarian means you pretty much have to be able to talk to anyone about anything. I had literally woken up 40 minutes before we spoke and was just getting the jolt from my first cup of coffee. I'm also always worried about coming across like an unprepared spazz and so I read up on stuff beforehand. But really, with material like all of AskMe, it's pretty easy to have fun stuff to talk about.

By: Ethereal Bligh

Ethereal Bligh — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:05:37 -0800

There's a real skill associated with two or more people being on mikes at the same time. I never acquired that skill because I was rarely in a position to need it. Of course, there are other venues than radio where you do such things, other kinds of performances.

One of the counterintuitive things about radio announcing is that to sound natural and casual you have to not talk the way you normally talk. Not just in eliminating the usual sorts of stutters and whatnot, but also in cadence and changing intonation. The trick is to hit the sweet spot where you're doing the right things to make it more comfortable for a listener to listen yet keeping that below the threshold where they will be consciously aware of it. To the degree the listener is aware of it, it sounds phony. Just my two cents.

As far as interaction goes—and, again, I can't claim much of that skill myself—my sense of why jessamyn sounded good in this podcast was because she seemed to have a good sense of working with your conversational timing, adding short interjections without talking over you. Some of this is very like so-called "active listening". It works (when it's not too heavy handed) in performance situations because the person at any given time who's the active listener is effectively standing in for the audience. The active listener's participation helps draw the audience into the conversation. Maybe. I'm just thinking out loud.

jessamyn, you also have a pretty good radio voice. The timbre of your voice is pleasant.

By: hindmost

hindmost — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:56:29 -0800

You failed to link to the Codex Seraphinianus thread, which I only grouse about because it sounded interesting enough for me to track down (and I couldn't tell what Jessamyn had said exactly, just codex something...) and now I'm completely bowled over.

By: trip and a half

trip and a half — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 03:20:08 -0800

At first glance, I thought the post said "featuring recipes from me and jessamyn", and I thought the podcast was going all Martha Stewart. Imagine my combined disappointment and relief.

Thanks matt and jessamyn! Always a pleasure to hear from you guys.

By: mmahaffie

mmahaffie — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 06:50:44 -0800

EB, that's a very nice summation of how to do talk radio well. There are a few local AM/FM yakkers I may have to send that to! National ones as well.

By: Miko

Miko — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 08:46:46 -0800

I really like the way these podcasts add dimension to the idea of MetaFilter as a community. It's just wonderful. Thanks for doing this. Of course, I'm a radio geek and can never get enough voice transmission and ambient sound, but to have it be about MetaFilter? Fantastic. Thanks you guys!

By: juv3nal

juv3nal — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 19:41:02 -0800

These are always appreciated. Good Stuff.

By: dg

dg — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 15:44:07 -0800

I love the podcasts - they allow me to connect with MeFi in an entirely new way. One tiny thing that does annoy me, though - mathowie, you need to stay the same distance from the microphone or something, because you seem to fade in and out, which makes it hard to concentrate on what you are saying. The two of you work well together, though and there seems to be a natural affinity in timing terms, as Ethereal Bligh noted. Good stuff.

By: web-goddess

web-goddess — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 02:55:53 -0800

I just finally listened to this, and, jeez, mathowie's rapturous ode to my performance in the first MetaFilter Runs challenge is making me feel really guilty about SUCKING THE BIG ONE in the second. :(

By: drezdn

drezdn — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 12:49:13 -0800

Keep up the good work on the podcasts, I read mefi religiously five days a week, and I'm always shocked by the cool things I've missed.

By: catburger

catburger — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 23:08:37 -0800

I somehow missed the "Help me squish my food" thread, so it cracked me up to hear jessamyn talk about it in the podcast! Thank you guys.