Today's Keyboard Smash

I've been playing catchup a bit with some of the podcasts I listen to. (Partly because iTunes sometimes just...doesn't...feel like pinging the podcasts' servers even though I manually demanded that it refresh the episode listings. Because why not.) And maybe it's silly when it's a podcast about current events, but I don't want to miss them even though it's been a few days and the information may be out of date.

Partly it's because I'm interested in the analysis and commentary more than just the raw facts of an event. The facts of news events are generally pretty contained, however significant they may be. Someone did this. Someone said that. This thing changed. What I look to podcasts---and news channels and websites and, if I'm feeling particular into suffering, Twitter--for is to get a breakdown of that significance. What will this impact? What does this imply? Why should I care? That will generally still be useful even if they're no longer the first source informing me that a thing has happened.

Partly it's because I'm there for the personalities. I want to hang out with these personalities (to use a rather distasteful media term) because I find them funny or comforting or inspiring. They feel like friends, because parasocial relationships are a hell of a drug, and I like to let their voices wash over me when I am otherwise alone and bored.

This can, I'm sure, be the start of a dangerous path. Just because I like them doesn't mean they're correct about an issue. Charisma can cover a multitude of sins, with things like shortsightedness and bias perhaps being the least of them. But damn it, sometimes I want to listen to someone whose name I know make the same inside joke about politics again and do a funny voice to impersonate a public figure. Even if it IS two-day-old news.

It can be weird, though. Particularly right now in the aftermath of an election, being even a few hours behind the times can lead to some strange moments, alarming or amusing by turns. Speculation about states that have now been called can be vaguely ulcer-inducing, like you're stuck in a time loop. Listening to someone speculate about supporter demographics that might explain the choice of, say, a Philadelphia landscaping business as the site for a press conference, on the other hand, becomes a rollicking good time when you have the advantage of later evidence that it was just a massive fuck-up.

What it does not help is my sense of what damn day of the week it is. I've heard hosts announcing it's every possible day of the week within the first four hours of my day. I would say that's enough to throw me off, but I absolutely did not know what day it is even without that help. This continues to be a year that reinforces Douglas Adams's philosophy: time is an illusion--lunchtime election time doubly so.

Lake Lewisia #606

Growing old never struck her as all that bad, when her adventuring days had left her with bad knees and unsteady hands long before age could wreak the same havoc, if it meant quiet nights by the fire with a pair of thick socks to ward off the chill. It wasn't so much that the stories had left an old woman behind, running off with the next strong, young thing that came along swinging a sword and chasing a legend. Now the stories had to come find her, and those young sword-swingers had to plead for her advice, and she got to sit by her fire while they told her of the beginnings and the endings to be found these days.

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LL#606