With that simple application, I could regenerate this page whenever I felt like it. So, I wrote a little program in C# that took my Excel spreadsheet (kinda) and generated something similar to the table you see below, beginning with the “Podcasts by Genre.” It counted them for me, arranged all the bold and italic and strike-through and the hovertext. Capisce?” (I don’t know why my inner voice speaks with an Italian mobster dialect, but it does. In a fit of annoyance, I thought, “I wish I had a way to automate the creation of the table!”Īnd that snide, oh-so-annoying voice in my head said, “Dummy. Which meant I never updated it because doing that would take away time I could use writing listening to podcasts. But the list on this site was originally made - painstakingly - by hand. I kept track of them in a huge spreadsheet, which is how I first noticed that I had a lot of ‘True Crime’ podcasts, and that they needed their own subcategory. I have to tell you this last little bit, because it shows how my brain works. Alphabetic, usually, but don’t be surprised if it’s something else.
And within each genre, the sort might change. What follows is my list of podcasts I subscribe to by subject matter (Genre). I listen to so many on so many varied topics that I’ve curated them into smart playlists by podcast, and again by smart playlist for subject matter, and again by smart playlist for length (sometimes I only have 10 minutes, and it’s nice to be able to go to my “< 10 minutes” playlist and go from there). Or they can be just two guys talking into microphones about nothing (picture Seinfeld, only it’s just Jerry and George or Kramer or Elaine sitting in a room talking for a period of time, and you’re watching / listening). They can be strongly about a single topic or generally about whatever pops into the host(s)’s head(s). In case you don’t know, podcasts are like radio shows that are recorded and can then be downloaded onto whatever device you like, and then listened to on your own schedule. If you don’t know what a podcast is, what time frame have you traveled here from, and how did you find my page? I kid, I kid! I know podcasts are not necessarily “mainstream.” These days, when I’m engaged in activities during which writing would be dangerous or at the very least bad for me (driving, showering, working, exercise), I’m usually listening to podcasts.
And not long after that, the obsession - nay, addiction - set in. It was very much not low-quality, nor was it amateurish.Īt the time, I was very much into the Skeptical community, and when I realized there were podcasts related to it, Skepticality wasn’t the only one, it was just the first of many. I searched and found something called Skepticality. I had a vague notion that they were low-quality and amateurish. I had heard of these “pod-casts” (say it like someone tasting the word for the first time ever), but had no idea what they were. So here I was suddenly with an iPod Classic with 320G of storage. I had an iPod but it was a Nano, which only held about 2G of stuff, and what I mostly had on it were audiobooks. At work, I did a thing and it got recognized, and I was nominated for and won a recognition award for my hard work. I first discovered podcasts back in 2006.