By Roy Mathur, on 2019-04-07, at 23:59:39 to 00:41:39 BST, for Captain Roy's Rocket Radio Show, Listen
With veggie burgers going mainstream (Impossible Burger are being rolled out to Burger King in St. Louis, Missouri, USA), I tried the very expensive Beyond Burger, and it's okay, but really doesn't taste, or smell, any more real or meatier than Linda McCartney’s at about a third of the price.
They do get the grease leaking trick of real meat almost convincing. They've also tried to mimic muscle fibre, but it's a bit too easily frayed and stringy. I think they've also tried to make it smell meaty, but it really doesn't. I know what hunted gamey venison smells and tastes like, and this is not it. That smell is also weird and it's a stench that lingers.
It's expensive and not for me, and I can't see it appealing to vegetarians, vegans, or meat eaters, but I'll still try other makers' versions.
Eventually, someone will get this right, but by then, for ethical vegetarians at least, there'll be vat grown flesh. Mmmm... No. I'm sticking to normal veggie burgers, or whatever they'll be called after the EU renaming thing. Bloody meat lobby.
I swore at the cheese aisle when I picked up a made-in-the-UK brie. Really?! Brie is French, not English.
It reminded me of the possible consequences to the obtainability of cheese post-Brexit and I had a micro rage.
Is male right-side ear hair more prevalent because drivers sit on the right in the UK and get more sun on that side of their face?
I thought of doing a Twitter poll, but no one actually answers mine, so... yeah, boo hoo hoo, and more on that later.
I rewatched Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 in their full director's cut HD glory this week.
While I get that Blade Runner movies are all about slavery and Blade Runners are executioners, I forgot how miserable the films are. In light of that, Roy Batty is not even an anti-hero, but actually the hero the first movie. This is spelled out more literally in the second movie, but it's still depressing.
And what's more depressing is that the film shows humans enslaving other manufactured humans, when today, we don't even have to invent such a fiction because, despite emancipation long ago, some people still illegally enslave their fellow human beings.
I have actually seen seasonal workers treated really badly, and you have to wonder, are they working voluntarily?
Gutenberg has surprising amount of free science fiction book.
For example, I found a source of Philip K. Dick books, but there're a lot more, and not just science fiction, but horror, and other popular genres too.
The EU recently passed Articles 11 and 13. The Guardian says, "Article 11, dubbed a 'link tax', obliges search engines and news aggregate platforms to pay for use of snippets from publishers."
Article 13 making big tech platforms, like Google and YouTube responsible for copyright infringements of committed by their users. CNN Business says "Sites like Google News could also be required to pay publishers for using snippets of their content."
The tech companies oppose this saying that it is hard to do and it will lead to censorship. Others also say that this will affect things like quotes, parody, and memes.
Given, I've used both quotes and links in this article, will this affect me as a podcaster and writer? I don't know. I looked into this and it is complicated. I think it will mean that if something of mine contains a link and an excerpt, then Google or I will have to pay the creator, or, more likely, Google will just filter me out from search results.
See: Wired, ITPRo, CNN, Guardian, Forbes.
I'm up to 10 karma now on Reddit, thanks to people I don't know upvoting me in an Upvoting party.
Reddit's model is broken, Twitter is broken, Facebook is broken. I'm not even sure peer or distributed social networking is a great idea. That will just make the frameworks more robust, but it won't address my central problem--social networking isn't very social.
If we have to do stuff mediated through the internet, let's just make modern distributed versions of IRC, ICQ, and bulletin boards, with blockchain verification.
I use Win 7 64 bit on a Mac Mini 2012, but I can't use the Boot Camp OS selector anymore.
To boot either OS, I have to shut down and start using the Option/Alt key.
I don't know if this is related to a recent Windows or MacOS update, as these seem to be required almost every time I boot into either of these OSs.
I used to be able to play background music over Skype in Skype 7.x and below. I recently upgraded to Skype 8 and I can't anymore. I tried everything, including preventing Windows from taking control of background sounds and reinstalling Boot Camp sound drivers and nothing works.
What else? We now also have end-to-end encryption for voice or text, but not video. Anyone tried this? I only found out about it by Googling. Then I spent ages trying to turn it on, leading to more Googling. I finally got it to work, but then had to explain it to the person I was calling.
How can the UI design team continuously roll out changes that make the interface more difficult to use? More examples? How about hiding your unused, but still available Skype Credit? What is the point?
Or PortesCard, or whatever you call this stupid thing, is yet another idiotic, neo-Victorian attempt by the government to saddle us with their moral hang-ups. Just Google the guy who came up with the Digital Economy Bill, that this nonsense is part of; John Whittingdale. Yeah, that guy caught with his pants down. The print press, online media, and me, irrespective of the political spectrum, have been almost universally scornful of this.
How does this genius idea work? You'll have to either submit your credit card number and who knows how many other details to AgeID run by MindGeek, the rolling-in-it (money, that is) boys behind Pornhub and YouPorn and perhaps, the entire remnants of the pornographic industry they decimated. Seriously, your data in these guy's hands? Or, oh, and this is good, go to the newsagent and buy a pass, with a time limited number that will al1ow you to verify yourself. So the choice is, give up your personal data to a massive corporation, who can track your every predilection, or buy the anonymous porn pass because no one is going to call it the PortesCard. And all that juicy data that MindGeek says it won't use for anything except age verification. Right.
And it's also a great big honeypot for every blackmailing, kompromat seeking spy or criminal in existence. Russia, China, and North Korea are going to be all over this, you can bet your bottom---er---bottom. Even, non-criminal, but simply curious hackers will not be able to resist such a target. It's going to be a disaster.
And here we are again, looking like nitwits. It galls me that the UK is constantly made the laughing stock of the world by our own politicians. Something for the weekend sir?
VPN people of earth! VPN! (And for security, not just for dirty stuff).
There are many recommendations of how to promote a podcast. These are my experiences.
I tried at the beginning, when I still had enthusiasm, using social media to promote my show, but I was beaten down over the years and still have few followers and, more importantly, few listeners.
Guesting on other shows? Only one other podcaster has ever taken me up on this... in 7 years, and even then, only the main host was okay with my presence because I had a few negative remarks from other members of the team.
Commenting? I have managed to get banned by including a link to my blog, website, and podcast on several occasions, though it has worked a couple of times when sending my comments to other podcasts, but not totally without backfiring. A couple of very large media outlets mentioned my podcast, but also in a way that that made me seem a little dumb.
Press packs? I'm open to the idea, but who, exactly, am I supposed to send them to?
Cross promotion? Oh, this is a good one. Only one other podcaster has ever replied to my request for cross promotion and that was grudgingly. The co-host was snarky, which, frankly, I can do without because what I don't need is negative promotion. What I actually need is credibility.
Inviting guests? I've done this, but it can be a pain because of technical problems, scheduling issues, or personality clashes. Even Marc Maron has to deal with the odd berk.
After 7 years, I only average around 1300 downloads a month, so if you are thinking, hey, there are only 660,000 podcasts on iTunes, so there must be room for me; there is, but don't expect many listeners. I'm sorry.
And if I hear some marketing numby say "Call to Action" just one more time...
I haven't given up, but it's hard.
Oh, and late breaking, those 660,000 competing podcasts maybe much higher than the actual figure, due to the number of inactive shows. There's hope yet.
We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix, Snowfall by Joe Harris and Martín Morazzo, Flatlander by Larry Niven, and Bloody Mary by Garth Ennis and Carlos Ezquerra.