what i've been listening to
Posted 11/11/2024
i've seen people do link roundups a lot and here's one from me, but just comprised of stuff i've been listening to lately.
The Prisoner's Dilemma Podcast
a real reason to look forward to every other sunday. i've never seen this show, but ever episode does inspire me to want to watch it further and i will probably watch it before this podcast concludes.
Brendan McLeod and Matthew Guzdial talk through all episodes of The Prisoner, a 1960s tv show created by and starring Patrick McGoohan. every episode has a recent spy only referred to as "Number Six" residing in a place called "The Village" and his efforts to escape this apparent captivity. the Village is a strange place, occupied by other people only referred to with numbered codenames and the antics Number Six gets into every week revolves around whatever plan Number Two has to extract Six's reasons for suddenly resigning from the British secret service.
i think that Brendan and Matthew give really good overviews of every episode and contextualize them both in how they operated at their time of release and give fresh takes about how to interpret things through the lense of a modern audience. i highly recommend this podcast and at time of writing there are 4 high quality episodes that you can listen to on anywhere you get podcasts, or going to their website directly here!
final V3 Podcast
Noodle and Sam are people that make things for the internet and this is a podcast where they talk about them and the environment of game development and creating web content at large.
i randomly got recommended a youtube video of one of the episodes of the podcast and i have no fucking clue why, it didn't look like anything i'd watch or listen to.
and then i got recommended the video again and so i watched (technically listened) to it and i really liked it. i've never technically directly (knowingly) interacted with either Noodle or Sam's work before, though i have watched a video or two of Noodle's since getting into the podcast.
as a person that technically operates in the game development sphere in both an indie and commercial sense its interesting to see their perspective on game development in a relatively parallel capacity. in one of the episodes Sam talks about how the "Devlog" and how its place in the game development ecosystem functions that i found really poignant, i forget the specifics at the moment but i think his argument can be boiled down to how the devlog has often become something other than just documentation, but the actual content itself, rather than the game being developed as the content.
these people are barely my peers in any kind of creative sense, but it is nice to hear people just talk about things that they are passionate about in their work and honestly how they have to navigate being a part of the larger machine we call the games and media industry. they are crude but insightful.
you can check them out on youtube, spotify, or apple podcasts.
Abyssal Arcana by Draven
i sometimes wonder what music does it look like i that i like to listen to? i don't outright say i hate any particular genre, but i also have a really specific music taste that i don't share with anyone else i've ever met in my life lol. (the bottom line is that i highly prefer songs WITHOUT lyrics unless its radiohead, and i love electronic stuff)
anyway, i've been trying to find more dark synthwave artists/albums to listen to and came across Draven. his albums seem to all have plotlines that connect them but i haven't read up on what some of the other ones are since i'm still working my way through his discography.
Abyssal Arcana is apparently about a city being besiged by vampires, where an undead(?) being named Deamien Raven is thought to be the key to salvation by an order of priest, but his salvation is just razing humanity to the ground.
the album is really good. i like it a lot. you can go listen to it or purchase it on bandcamp here.
Confider by Miles Morkri
Miles is a really good friend of mine and they released a new album at the end of september. Miles' composition abilities are really unparalleled and i love their jazz fusion stuff.
Confider is probably one of my fav things i've heard from them so far. its really hard for me to "feel" music, probably attributed to the autism, but Miles' original songs really invoke something in me every time. i don't know what to call it, i'm hardly a music reviewer and don't have the expertise in language around music (nor emotions for that matter lmao) to describe it. but there's something here.
i really recommend you give this album a listen, or buy it on bandcamp.