TrickJarrett.com

As I went to bed last night TikTok was showing me 90s cartoon intros. And I thought, "Maybe I should start a cartoon rewatch/discussion podcast."

This morning I still think it's a fun idea and my morning brain gave me "Toon in Next Week" as a possible name for it...

Craig Ferguson and Adam Savage shoot the shit

Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart

I listened to most of this interview on the drive into work this morning and quite enjoyed it. One thing that struck me is how Ezra comes into this wanting to discuss the right vs left and Jon multiple times redirects it to be about the capitalism machine and the media businesses which drive the wedge to their benefit.

Podcast Middleman

The NYT are putting their podcasts behind a paywall. You can still get them free for the first few days and then they move behind the paywall. I get it. It's business. But my consumption of podcasts is heavily dependent on the day. And I like being able to go back a little while to recent topics but maybe not immediate.

So I decided to look into using Plex as my podcast server, thinking I could automatically download new podcast files to my server and then listen whenever I wanted. Unfortunately it seems Plex had a podcast function, but it was buggy and they made the call to cut the function rather than integrate it.

Disappointing, but I get it.

Now, I'm going even simpler. A folder on my server, a cron job which fetches and downloads the podcasts daily and keeps them for a month (to avoid devouring server space.) And then I just make my own personal podcast feed for them.

Playing with Notebook LM

So, I have been playing around with Notebook LM (requires Google account) recently. The idea is you can give it a series of files and it can answer questions and do things specific to the input documentation. The real "wow" is that it can generate a conversation "podcast" to let you listen to a simulated conversation about the material. The AI voice gen isn't perfect, but it's lightyears ahead of most text-to-speech, even managing to insert filler "ums" and also adjust the tone of the speakers to a certain degree.

My first exploration with it was to upload some worldbuilding and plot documentation from a fantasy world of mine and see what conversation it generated. It did a summary of the world and some of its key features etc. It lost the plot on the larger storyline I had crafted, but it was entertaining to hear.

This morning I conducted an experiment, the version linked above is the Google version. There is also a non-Google implementation, making use of a Llama driven backend for processing the source file, called Open NotebookLM. For this, I took a PDF of a recent article on GQ about the restoration of the roof of Notre Dame.

First, here is the audio generated by Google's Notebook LM:

Now, here is the output of Open Notebook LM:

Open Notebook's audio is noticeably worse, and the length limitations from the freely available online via huggingface.com, definitely make Google's implementation better. But it's still quite listenable though it feels more like a fluff piece compared to the article, to me. Also, I think it is interesting, Open Notebook pronounces Notre Dame correctly, while Google may as well be talking about the university.

A few years ago I wrote a python tool that pulled my "Watch Later" YouTube playlist and converted them into an audio podcast feed, which was useful for commuting and consuming lecture or podcast style videos from YT. I don't use it anymore since I no longer have the same commute time. But I can imagine a similar tool which pulls unread articles from my to-be-read Wallabag and runs one through Open Notebook LM, then uploads and creates the RSS feed for the generated file.

I don't know how much I'd use it, and I am not yet confident it would be enough content from the source that I would feel I got informed enough. But I can easily believe the quality and depth will be coming in the near future. We'll see.

I was also toying with the idea of generating a personal daily overview/summary and feeding that to the system. Have a sort of personalized morning show that discussed your schedule for the day, headlines, last night's sports scores, upcoming appointments, etc. I might write a concept of what could go into that file and see what Open Notebook spits out, that might make the project more interesting to explore.

Lastly, writing entry forced me to do some Glowbug code changes to allow it to properly handle when I upload audio files to the blog. Up to now it's been strictly for uploading images. While not ideal to have writing stopped for the need of programming, I do appreciate being able to build what I need and have it immediately put to use.

I had a thought as I was going to bed last night, I tweeted it but neglected to post it elsewhere:

Bedtime podcast idea: "Murder, They Wrote" which alternates between discussing episodes of Murder, She Wrote and Castle.

Behind the Bastards on Henry Kissinger

I've been listening to Behind the Bastards episodes about Henry Kissinger and it's just insane stuff. So. Damn. Depressing. Which is - as it turns out - the secret to the podcast's allure. It lets you laugh about truly awful people and truly awful actions.

Smartless on Max

Katie and I watched several episodes of Smartless on Max today, both before and after my D&D game. They are video episodes from live shows of the podcast they do with the same name. Starring Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes. Fun stuff.

And it makes me think about getting a podcast app on the Roku so Katie and I can enjoy their other episodes of the podcast together in the evenings.

Freedom House Ambulance Service on 99% Invisible Podcast

Today we think of paramedics as a service which has always existed. But that is far from true. Among the three emergency response groups they are, by far, the youngest. And this episode of the excellent 99% Invisible podcast delves into the history of the first paramedics. Young black men in Pittsburgh who were, up to then, considered unemployable.

Fascinating stuff which should definitely be known by more people.

Jon Stewart talks with the Crooked Media Guys

I've listened to the Crooked Media podcast folks for a while, on and off, right now I mainly just listen to 'Offline' with Jon Favreau. Enjoyed this conversation a lot.

"Monumental Diplomacy" - North Korea's role in world monuments and their ties to Namibia

I have not finished it yet as my commute is blessedly shorter than a single episode of the 99% Invisible, but I am finding this episode to be quite fascinating. I had no idea that North Korea is a major player in the world monument and architecture scene, especially in Africa. And it started before they became the hermetic nation of today (or, at least, in the earliest days of the nation's independence.) Also, the episode has been a good dip into the history of Namibia and how it relates to colonialism and South Africa's apartheid. I had no idea Namibia had once been a German colony in Africa.

Edit: Finished this episode this afternoon and it is excellent. It definitely starts hitting on some of the more interesting and politically angled directions North Korea's design team takes, as well as hammering on the slavish life these workers live while acknowledging the artists who create the monuments etc. are comparatively well taken care of. In addition they don't miss the chance to point out the existence of Mount Rushmore in our own bit of propogandist monuments.

SendToPod.com - Service takes articles and turns them into a podcast for you

Came across it on Reddit. I signed up but haven't tested it yet. Might be an interesting part of the content pipeline from my Wallabag into this service. We will see how it does.

It's in beta right now, so for July there's no limits on usage, but it will be a Freemium service starting in August it seems.

To Build: YT Feed -> Podcast Feed

Edit: The Podsync Github project looks promising, will have to investigate.

Interview with G. Willow Wilson about her soccer fandom, Seattle, comics, publishing and writing as well as other topics

A great interview from my buddy Dave Clark. One thing that surprised me was to learn that Seattle is a UNESCO City of Literature. Not that I'm surprised that in general, just more that I haven't heard this before.

The Daily - Why the Police Took 78 Minutes to Stop the Uvalde Gunman

A good episode that shines a bit more light on what happened in Uvalde. Far from conclusive, and it left me angry and frustrated that this keeps happening.

I have, this week, become interested in exploring the possibilities of podcast transcripts as information inputs. I enjoy podcasts and listen to them regularly, but at the same time, they are a slower medium for delivery of information. I've realized that a lot of the bigger information podcasts, being bigger businesses and given today's technology, provide a transcript of their episodes.

With these transcripts I can more quickly read and consume the information, as well as (if I'm archiving them) search and have as an easily referenceable source of information in the future. The trick, for many of these, is to find the most ideal process for archiving them. So far, my solution is a manual process, that has me checking the various sites for the latest transcript, then utilizing a browser plugin which downloads the page as Markdown formatted text. I'll then add it to a queue for me to read and clean up the markdown (usually this is removing ad insertions, etc.)

I'm still very new to the process, and who knows how long I'll keep up with it, but it is interesting to me.

I'm also experimenting with a split-podcast listening process. I have one app (Pocketcasts) which is my primary, it has the majority of the podcasts I listen to. And then I am testing Snipd, which is a podcast player that has build in transcription and is designed for you to share parts of your favorite podcasts. We'll see.

One of my projects today was downloading the entirety of Tim Ferriss's podcast transcripts for my own reading and reference. Interestingly I didn't go for his show's entire archive. Of his nearly 600 episodes, my archive ended up at around 335. This is because I was only really interested in the episodes where he interviews someone else and so I left the other variety of episodes and didn't download the transcript.

I did this thanks to Tim having posted the transcripts on his blog. So I was able to make use of a Firefox plugin which downloads the page as a Markdown text file. Next will come a long process of reviewing the transcripts, making notes, tagging and flagging things, etc.

Embracing the content queue

I consume a lot of content. Articles, tweets, videos, podcasts, books, etc. As you might have noticed, I have recently dove back into queuing of content, that is utilizing systems designed to allow me to capture interested content for consumption at a later point. Specifically, this is in regards to podcasts, articles and YouTube. The value here is to be better able to capture interesting content as they come across my feed, but also that it improves the quality of what I consume by basically giving me a two pass approach at filtering the content.

The first filter is a measure of immediacy and my mental prioritization of the content. If I don't consume some content immediately upon seeing it, then that says the content failed it's initial test. This content is either not interesting enough for me to prioritize it over whatever I'm doing, or it might be that the content's specifications (length, medium, etc.) are not convenient.

The second test is, if I am not going to consume this content now, am I going to consume it later? And if I think the answer is yes then it gets added to my queues. For articles, that's my Wallabag. For YouTube, that's my "Watch Later." For podcasts, that's my, well, queue.

The third test is if, when I see the content later in my queue, does it get consumed? In many cases, the answer is no. In some cases this is simply due to the interest in that topic being gone. Or perhaps I've already learned about the topic of the content through other means. Or it might be that the immediacy of that content has passed.

Sometimes I'll leave things in my queues for weeks. But I have found that in general, if an item languishes in my queue for three weeks, the odds are very high that that item isn't going to get consumed.

Thinking about November for this year. Last year I wrote a (bad) novel. I have another idea for a novel that I might tackle this year. However I'm also toying with the idea of, rather than writing a book, binge-ing and writing an app for the phone. A month-long "hackathon" sort of thing.

The thing I'm considering is a podcast app. I have one "killer feature" for it, which is the ability to group/tag podcasts and then select playlists based on the group or tag. Want to listen to the news on your morning commute? Here's today's news podcasts from NPR, the New York Times, etc. Want something to laugh at while you work, hit your comedy group. Etc.

We'll see. I'm toying with the idea. I haven't written an Android app in years. Maybe I'll dive into it again for NaAppHackMo - National App Hackathon Month

Naval Rakivant interviews Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum

I listen to the Tim podcast far less frequently than I used to, but I did turn on this episode as I was curious to hear Vitalik and learn more about Ethereum.

Welcome to my World, Episode 1 - Ilsanya

[{audio}]myworld1-ilsanya.mp3[{/audio}]

I originally wrote this in the middle of 2020, I recorded and shared it with just a few people and didn't really pick it up to share wider. I'm sharing it here for posterity. I might do more with it. I call it a podcast in the recording but I don't currently support it as a true podcast anywhere.

Script:

Welcome to my world.

I'm Trick Jarrett and this is a... podcast? Yeah, I'll call it a podcast. It's a simple thing, I'm going to tell you about my fantasy world, Ilsanya. Can you read about it? No. I'm not publishing anything, this is the world I've made for my home D&D game. And since I am mentioning D&D, now is a good time for me to make you aware that I work for Wizard of the Coast, the company which makes Dungeons & Dragons. I'm not selling you anything, this world is 100% homebrew and not coming to any D&D product in the future.

Now, with my disclosure out of the way...

World building has been a longtime hobby of mine. I think of it like model building, sitting down and just doing world building is relaxing to me. Now, I don't do it non-stop, I have plenty of other equally nerdy hobbies which distract me, but world building is one I come back to over and over.

So, let's talk about Ilsanya. Ilsanya is a high fantasy world. I'm really proud of it and I expect to keep building and defining this world for years to come. It's got a lot of unique features that I really enjoy. Of these, the most identifiable and possibly unique thing about my world is the "Infinite Court" - think of it as the afterlife for most souls.

To explain the Infinite Court I actually want to tell you what inspired this entire world. It was inspired by an episode of Broken Mirror, the one titled San Junipero. It's from the third season and it actually won a number of awards. The premise is that there is a digital afterlife, you get uploaded into this cloud computer and live out your afterlife in San Junipero. More recently, the Amazon show Upload touches on some of these ideas.

I looked at this concept and asked myself, what would San Junipero be in a D&D world? I loved this concept from the episode and wanted to explore it. As I thought about it, there were a number of interesting ideas and byproducts of this idea.

Well the afterlife in D&D is a very flimsy construction, with enough gold and a high enough cleric almost anyone can be brought back from the dead. So Ilsanya needed a bit more strict of a structure.

So the initial structure was simple, "When you die, your soul arrives in the Infinite Court." And when I initially imagined it, it was much closer to a Fey court idea. I was imagining the gods of the world offloading the boring and annoying parts of running a world and letting the dead souls oversee these functions. As I built out the concept, this idea fell apart and evolved.

As I explored the idea I realized the metaphysics and the rules that defined the Infinite Court were paramount to figure out and codify.

These are the rules I have settled on:

First, Ilsanya and the Infinite Court are locked off from the multiverse, there is no travel off the planes except as defined in the rules.

Second, time between Ilsanya and the Infinite Court is concurrent.

Third, not every soul from Ilsanya makes it to the Infinite Court. I figure I'll go over ancestries and races in Ilsanya in another episode (if there are more) but the shorthand is, beastfolk (such as dragonborn, tortles, tabaxi, etc.), genasi, faeries, and classic D&D "monsters" when they die their souls don't arrive in the Infinite Court. The whys will be explained in the ancestry / race episode.

Fourth, traveling between Ilsanya and the Infinite Court, operates under the following rules:

1. Dying humanoids, after 6.17 days, the soul departs the body and travels to the infinite court
2. Offerings made by the living are transported to the Infinite Court via the Vast Collective (Vast Collective is the name for the living organization counterpart to Ilsanya)
3. There is a single physical link between the two worlds, hidden deep and away from the daily life
4. Gods are able to traverse freely to and from the court, though they rarely do. Ruh and Wakolt are able to bring living beings with them.
5. The souls of the dead cannot leave the Infinite Court except through a single exception: The god Ruh can restore a soul to life after they expired. Ruh is able to create a body for the soul if needed.

Now, there is also communication between Ilsanya and the Infinite Court. So the living are able to speak with their ancestors, and this has a large impact on the knowledge of the world. Imagine a world where the greatest minds of history remain accessible, and depending on their work, they remain hard at work even in death.

This communication though also follows a set of rules.

First, they can only contact someone they know, or have a deep knowledge of. It isn't enough to think, "I want to talk to John Smith" - The Infinite Court has 120,000 John Smiths. But if someone can say, "I want to talk to John Smith, my father." The blood bond provides a very clear contact. Blood bond isn't necessary, but it is the easiest route to find your contact.

This connection is facilitated by magic. There's no fantasy switchboard of operators connecting these calls. And so, like any automated system, it either works great for you or is infuriating to navigate. Herein lies the importance of the Vast Collective, something I touched on briefly before.

The Vast Collective is the finger quotes "church" for the Infinite Court. I will go deep into it in another episode, but you should think of the Vast Collective as the Catholic Church crossed with Ma Bell at the height of its monopoly days. There is no alternative, and there never will be. If you want to contact your dead relatives, either you develop the magic needed to do so, or you make use of the Vast Collective's services to facilitate it.

I know I went off on a deep dive tangent, but we're talking about the rules that govern communication between Ilsanya and the Infinite Court.

Second, the connection is inherently magical. Items, magic, or events which interfere with magic disrupt this connection.

Third, neither the living nor the dead must "accept the call" - they have the mental option to refuse calls.

Fourth, these calls are mental, there is no talking out loud. And it only transmits as words. Think of it as speech to text in your mind. Nuances and emotion are not transmitted.

Aside from the things mentioned before, such as travel from Ilsanya to the Infinite Court, or the communication between them, is the only magic between the planes. No other magic exists or transmits between the planes.

Okay, I went way deep on the Infinite Court. But as you can see, it's a very important feature of my world.

The next feature of my world I want to highlight is what I refer to as the three realms of Ilsanya. In this case it refers to Septun, Ulrada, and Gralit.

Septun refers to the realm of the floating islands. And, I know, floating islands are cliche. In Ilsanya though, they aren't just small floating islands, in fact there are three massive islands the size of countries or continents in the sky. They fly over the world, casting dark shadow underneath them.

When they are overhead, the light is usually just dim dusk-like and not completely dark due to the unique positioning of the two suns in the sky. Zara is the larger of the two suns, and the one predominantly affected by the presence of the floating islands. Obor is the smaller of the two suns, and it tends to hang low to the horizon at the far north, thus much of its light can still reach the land when a floating island is overhead.

Along with these three major floating islands, there are a number of smaller islands, from a few hundred feet up to several miles in size. These islands all move and float and travel around Ilsanya's sky.

Ulrada is the term for the "main world" - it has a number of continents spread across the globe. There is not much to say about this one, without diving into the politics and stuff.

Gralit is most comparable to the Forgotten Realms' Underdark. It is a realm of subterranean caves. Unlike the Underdark, it cannot be mapped. Gralit is constantly moving, massive caves and cave networks shifting and moving on tectonic-esque plates, moving on a permafrost layer and constantly changing.

It is a hugely deadly and dangerous realm, with few people making their home there, and leaving it largely to the unknown monsters. It holds secrets forgotten with time, lost and never to be seen again.

Imagine traveling into Gralit, determined to search for great treasure. But not having any way of knowing how you'll get back out as the realm continues to move and shift. The ultimate adventure, if you succeed you'll be one of the greatest explorers in the history of Ilsanya.

The third of the major things for me to discuss are the repercussions of the first two items. Access to most of the history of the world changes things. You're no longer solely relying on written historical documents, you can contact the soul in the Infinite Court and ask them what they saw, or meant in their writings.

Additionally I see this living history as means for moving past some of the heavier tropes in fantasy around racism and nationalism. Yes, nations or kingdoms still exist, but their role in the world is stepped back. Also, for D&D, I think it provides a good solid basis for why the "Common' language exists.

Next is the need for supplies for the Infinite Court, the Vast Collective is also responsible for providing supplies to the Court. Sending writing supplies and other magical supplies, etc. They don't need food or drink, but without the supplies from Ilsanya to the IC, the realm is a vast empty wasteland.

Or the floating islands and the need for airships or other means of travel to facilitate travel in the world. I mean, who doesn't love flying airships?

I think that's a good place to stop with the introduction to Ilsanya, hopefully you enjoyed this look into my world, Ilsanya. Next time, I'll be discussing the gods of Ilsanya, what they represent, and the creation story of the world.

Under the Influence podcast

A friend turned me onto this CBC produced podcast. I've only hit some of my friend's episodes, but I plan to listen to more of the show as I find the 'infotainment' from the show to be good.

The business of being a Youtuber with MKBHD

The Verge interviews YouTuber Marques Brownlee, you can choose to listen or read the transcript. While there is no juicy revelation, it's a good overview of his team and how the channel works, as well as some hints of things in the works.