549 karma · joined January 6, 2017
The benefit the movies had was just that they were executed very well. As you mention, so much of Rings of Power is just bad execution (or really odd pacing/writing choices).
Assumptions made about what the Elves could have been doing during this time period in Eregion? The author makes them sound absurd and completely outside of what was written. Whatever the Harfoots are doing? That's okay because the author likes their storyline on the show
If you don't like the show that is 100% okay, I think the show is a 7/10 at best and sometimes it dips well below that, but don't hide that distaste behind a call for literary purity.
Has there been an "everybody is listening" style hit since Serial? No. And I strongly disagree that it is even a desirable outcome. It is just something that happens extremely rarely in democratized content where the barrier of entry almost doesn't exist. This creates a landscape where an infinite number of niches can form and provide more content than you could ever listen to. Do you just want to hear discussions about philosophy? video game sub-genres? an author's books? sports team? Fantastic, there is probably hundreds of hours of content for you to listen to (or reject due to quality reasons). This does create an environment where "famous talking heads" can flourish, as mentioned in the article, but as long as the barrier to entry is low and the podcast platforms remain open, it also creates an environment where a terrific variety of content can flourish.
What Serial did was get millions of people to investigate that Podcast app on their phone, but instead of then just bouncing to The Next Great Over-Produced Narrative Podcast they discovered there was a massive, and growing, number of podcasts that spoke directly to them. I've been podcasting since 2014 and the really interesting thing that happened after Serial got big is that I didn't have to describe what a podcast was anymore. That is why Serial was such a big deal to podcasting.
All the Podcast companies trying to replicate the success of Serial are, in my mind, chasing a mirage. You can recreate the quality of the show, but you can't recreate the environment that it was released in, and it was that environment that made Serial a "hit".
The key is in the curation though, it is unlikely that your child will want to sort through thousands of blurry, duplicate, or unrelated photos. 100 really good and special photos/videos are better than a mixed up mass of 5,000.
If you are concerned with passing away before your son is of age, just make sure there are multiple backups, and the sign in information for anything that isn't local is communicated to his guardian.
* Definitely lost a lot of sleep in the early months due simply to how often the baby needed food. This does start to taper off eventually, but whether or not they will sleep through the night is a coin flip for a long time.
* If this is your first, and your partner is in the picture, I actually think that free time can generally still exists. I think I read more books, played more games, and wrote more in Baby 1 Year 1 than I did the year before due to the fact that we were stuck at home a lot more. My advice to try and preserve that time is to establish early a policy of trading off "baby time". In the early months maybe it is sleeping shifts (Person A goes to sleep real early then wakes up at 1AM and is on "duty" while Person B is on "duty" until midnight and gets to sleep in). And then as they start sleeping longer swap off who puts the baby to sleep.
* I have found that the biggest change is in the period after work ends and until they go to sleep. As they get older it just turns into a massive list of "I have to do this" during those hours. Whereas before kids that was a very unstructured time
* For mine the free time crunch was actually the worst in the 2-4 timeframe because they are old enough to be bored, too young to always entertain themselves, and are in constant need of assistance with life things like eating, drinking, being read to, etc.
One of the biggest things that having kids did for me was cause a "hobby triage" where many of the things I was doing had to be re-evaluated to allow for time to do the things that gave me the most joy. I don't binge watch as much TV, watch as many movies, or play a 1/10th of the video games, but I can still focus on the things that bring me the most joy and satisfaction.
The two things that will prevent me from actually using it for my pods are the much discussed VST support and the lack of ability to select a range and mute the selection. The second is actually more important, because it allows for small audio imperfections, like a cough, um, or smack, to be removed from the recording without requiring a split -> truncate workflow that breaks the recording into two pieces, which then have to be moved and repositioned separately.
I have found MD to be the proper mix between formatting and plain text, just enough formatting to enhance readability but not enough to require a mandatory parsing tool. Overall I just consider it essential that at anytime I can take my 4+ years Of daily documents and interact with them in however I want.
In my experience Patreon has been around 11% cut scenario, split very roughly between Payment Fees and Platform fees. But I am on the Founders plan, which is the same 5% platform fees as Patreon Lite, but with the extra features of the 8% Pro plans.
I do think it is probably best for creators to diversify their platforms, but I still think that Patreon is worth it just because of it being a very well known platform outside of just tech circles.
I do think that many posts in this thread are overestimating how hard it can be to get guests on podcasts. Some connections may have helped during his early episodes, but many of the guests on his shows (just scrolling through the episode list) were probably quite easy to book given the audience that they would be speaking to. I see a lot of people who would be actively trying to talk about their subject. Groups like academics and tech researchers are heavily represented in early episodes. Then later you start getting people who might be a "challenge" to book, but only after there are years of a backlog of interviews.
He then also has several interviews with people with their own large podcast/youtube followings which are always a large boost. Just scrolling through his video history I see people like Joe Rogan, Dan Carlin, and Jocko Willink as an example.
His interviews also hit many different interests, not too narrow of a focus, which makes it easy to build an audience based on somebody looking for any number of topics for a podcast/youtube video. That certainly helps build listener numbers over the 4 years that the podcast has been ongoing.
There is this Pew study with come information about generations and religious practices: https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/generatio...
Another thing that have been replaced by podcasts, at least for me are specialty news sites. No need to go read about last nights Red Wings game or the latest blockbuster when a podcast can give me that information, and when I am on a walk or driving to work.
Suggested readings: (this is a mix of books and articles)
* The Infantry Cannot Do with a Gun Less: The Place of the Artillery in the BEF, 1914-1918 by William Sanders Marble
* The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During the First World War by Timothy T. Lupfer
* The Marne and After: A Reappraisal of French Strategy in the First World War by Douglas Porch
* The Evolution of British Strategy and Tactics on the Western Front in 1918: GHQ, Manpower, and Technology by Tim Travers
* Operational Art and the German Command System in World War I by Bradley John Meyer
* Not Glamorous, But Effective: The Canadian Corps and the Set-Piece Attack, 1917-1918 by Ian M. Brown
"So rapidly the power of your initial attack runs out. And then the counter-attacks, as inevitable as the rising sun, start. Your opponents can shell you from nice, prepared positions, while your artillery now has to move forward to support you. Their troops can ride railways to staging posts close to the front lines, advance through well-maintained communications trenches directly to you, while your troops have to advance over open group, under artillery fire, in order to support you."
The cause of the WW1 stalemates was not artillery, but asymmetrical mobility capabilities on the attacking and defending sides of any offensive. During the war the various armies, as stated in the article, got really good at the first phase of an attack: breaching the enemies front line. They were not always good at this (see Somme, 1916) but they got there through refining their use of primarily artillery. However, what they could never solve during the war years was the problem of what to do to push an attack forward, and this was caused by mobility problems. The attackers had very limited options when it came to the attack, and it was almost entirely men walking forward. This limited both speed and endurance. No many how many men you had if they all start walking from the same place they can all only walk so far before they need to sit down for a bit of a break. There was no way to expedite this process because the technologies that would allow it either did not yet exist (reliable and powerful ICE) or could not be pushed forward fast enough (railways). The limitations of a person moving forward on foot meant that at some point the initial impetus of the attack was going to end while reinforcements caught up, and that is where the problem was.
While the attackers were struggling forward on foot the defenders could use a fantastic technology: railways. Reinforcements could be rushed in from almost anywhere to counter the attack that was developing. Then when they arrived at the railheads they could move to the front line and begin launching counter attacks near their own sources of supply and against an enemy that had just walked themselves into exhaustion. This advantage was most strongly felt in the very well developed and confined areas of Western Europe where both sides (Germany 15, 16, 17, Entente 18) would be able to move around troops very quickly. On the Eastern Front this advantage was less apparent because of the less developed transportation systems which put the two sides of an attack on more equal footing.
Artillery was really good at solving the first problem (tactical breakthrough) but really bad at solving the real problem, how to continue an attack. This problem was just made worse by the long artillery preparations of 1915-1917, because the various armies were broadcasting to everyone where precisely they were going to attack, giving them a very long time to prepare. These preparations could not prevent an attack from occurring, or it being initially successful, but it could always prevent an attack from transitioning from battle of attrition to battle of movement.
This turned into a bit longer of a post than intended, and I do want to reiterate that I do like this article and I think its only flaw is that it does not follow its own logic one more step.
In many cases what is already digitized, much like what is shown at museums, is just the tip of the iceberg of information kept in non-digital forms.