Distractions

I spend a lot of time alone in the studio: throwing and trimming pots, making handles, moving ware boards around, loading and unloading kilns. Down at Club Mud, I'm in the back room, glazing and decorating, or weighing out and mixing glaze materials. Most of these activities are not highly dependent on brain activity (with the possible exception of glaze mixing. Mess up the numbers and you've just destroyed six weeks work). If I'm working in the studio with no distractions and no one to talk to, I start thinking. Well, stressing, really. Did I miss this deadline? Will I get that show? Why don't I have the leaves raked yet? It gets to be tiring.

So I need a distraction. Something to keep the brain engaged while the fingers are on automatic.

For years, it was music. I had a folk music radio show on KLCC from 1990 to 2015, called The Saturday Cafe. Because I was an early adopter of the Folk_DJ listserv, posting playlists on the then-newfangled World Wide Web, I started getting a lot of CDs in my mailbox, sometimes as many as a dozen a week. Working in the studio allowed me to preview everything before passing it on to the music director for the station library.

After I retired from radio, the new music supply dried up. A few discs still found their way to my home address, but mostly, I'm reviewing my music collection these days, a handful of CDs at a time, deciding what I really need to keep and what I only had in case I wanted to play it on the air some day. Meanwhile, I needed some other soundtrack.

I have a few friends who listen to audio-books. I've tried it, but it's not for me. Thing is, I read really fast. Like, a novel a day or so. By comparison, audiobooks are just too slow. And NPR has gone off my must-listen list since the presidential election; too many stories just raise my blood pressure.

So I mostly listen to podcasts these days. I started with the no-longer-extant SF Squeecast, followed one of their hosts to another new scifi-related cast. A couple of others I learned of from friends' recommendations. And there's a few that I have no idea how I heard about them, but wait with bated breath every week to see if they've updated yet. Here's my current list of listening:

99% Invisible. A podcast devoted to design in all its variations; I think it started as an architecture 'cast, but now wanders all over the map (including the map. A recent episode discussed Gerrymandering). And there's over 200 archived episodes, so though they're only 20-30 minutes long, I've got a lot of listening in store. Recommended by one of Denise's bookbinding friends.

History of English. What it says on the tin, sort of. It actually starts way back in Proto-Indo-European, wanders through Germanic, with forays into Latin, Greek, Norse, Romance Languages, but all tied in some way to the development of our shared foreign tongue. Episodes run about an hour each; over 100 episodes to date, and he's just gotten to early Middle English. My jeweler friend Terry told me about this one; updates monthly, more or less.

Verity. My second scifi podcast. About the time the Squeecast ("a never-ending panel discussion of vague positivity") ended, one of their members joined a new, all-female Dr. Who-themed podcast named after original show-runner Verity Lambert. Smart, funny, international--one member is from Scotland, two Canada, two U.S. and one Tasmania--they celebrate the contribution of women to the BBC's longest-running scifi series. They also do silly games, review new episodes, and rag gently on each other regularly. Airs weekly, on Wednesdays, and is generally an hour, plus or minus.

Nerdist/ID10T. Chris Hardwick is a stand-up comic, actor, and self-described scifi and pop culture nerd who parlayed a podcast started in his garage into an entertainment empire, with multiple TV shows, web presence, and a more-or-less permanent position as the go-to moderator for LA Comic Con. He recently sold the Nerdist group of web projects and rebranded as ID10T (sysadmin code: the problem with the computer is in the ID10T at the keyboard). There's over 900 episodes between the two, leaning heavily toward fellow comedians early on, actors in science fiction film and TV later on. Sir Patrick Stewart is hilarious, but Sir Paul McCartney was lovely too. 

Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap. This is a way guilty pleasure. Hugo-winning author and cartoonist (and former pottery student) Ursula Vernon and her husband Kevin Sonney eat (and rate) horrible, pre-packaged food, drink questionable alcoholic beverages, occasionally swear a lot. Episodes usually clock in around an hour, but have been know to go as long as three. For years, they'd start with This podcast was recorded in front of a live Kitchen Beagle. Gir has gone on to his reward, but the coon-hounds, cats and occasional wild teenager make an appearance. Over 260 episodes archived; their Patreon supports, among other things, prescription acid reflux medicine. Updates Sundays, unless book tours/conventions prevent.

Productivity Alchemy. Kevin Sonney of KUEC has an organizer/planner addiction that he's parlayed into a new (-ish: 38 episodes so far) podcast. Productivity Alchemy features reviews of different organization systems, a check-in with his Wombat Test Subject, perennially less-than-organized wife Ursula, and regular interviews with subjects from science fiction authors to open-source computer programmers. I have yet to dive into any of the organizational schema they cover in a big way, but I have started to regularize my to-do lists and be a little better about my calendars. About an hour; updates Fridays.

So that's my list of distractions. What do you listen to?