Reminds me of a story I love telling. My very first real job - a summer gig between my junior and senior years of high school - I was working in the records department of a pharmaceutical company (shout out to Burroughs-Wellcome, long since absorbed by some other corporate behemoth).
My job was to sit in a dark room methodically microfilming documents. I'd empty a box of records, and go through it page by page, putting each one under a camera, pressing a button to photograph it, move it to the "done" stack and moving on to the next one. All day long, ten hours a day, all summer long. After about the third day of this, I swiped my sister's transistor radio so that I'd have something to listen to while I tried to avoid dying of boredom.
The only radio station I could get was the local Top-40 station, and they constantly advertised that they'd play "ten hits every hour!" After a couple of days I realized what they really meant was the *same* ten hits every hour. It was the summer that the Dirty Dancing soundtrack was all the rage, and to this day I can sing the songs that made the radio by heart, some 30+ years later.
The question, of course, is whether you can find anything for which you *are* the audience. I find it frustrating that in many cases, either what I want doesn't exist, or it's incredibly hard to find. (Cue rant about news sites and searches that think everyone cares primarily about whatever is "trending".)
Oddly enough, I can do a bit better with the punditsphere than I can with more mundane things. Someone on substack probably produces something more suitable to me (or you?) than the NYT does. But no one wants to sell me appliances that don't have "soft" controls, and far too often at least the potential for software "upgrades" not under my control, potentially changing their user interface.
“...the low entropy of Top 40 radio playlists”. I love this juxtaposition. And you’re right, the 11-year old expressed that skillfully, if not in specialist terminology.
Reminds me of a story I love telling. My very first real job - a summer gig between my junior and senior years of high school - I was working in the records department of a pharmaceutical company (shout out to Burroughs-Wellcome, long since absorbed by some other corporate behemoth).
My job was to sit in a dark room methodically microfilming documents. I'd empty a box of records, and go through it page by page, putting each one under a camera, pressing a button to photograph it, move it to the "done" stack and moving on to the next one. All day long, ten hours a day, all summer long. After about the third day of this, I swiped my sister's transistor radio so that I'd have something to listen to while I tried to avoid dying of boredom.
The only radio station I could get was the local Top-40 station, and they constantly advertised that they'd play "ten hits every hour!" After a couple of days I realized what they really meant was the *same* ten hits every hour. It was the summer that the Dirty Dancing soundtrack was all the rage, and to this day I can sing the songs that made the radio by heart, some 30+ years later.
The question, of course, is whether you can find anything for which you *are* the audience. I find it frustrating that in many cases, either what I want doesn't exist, or it's incredibly hard to find. (Cue rant about news sites and searches that think everyone cares primarily about whatever is "trending".)
Oddly enough, I can do a bit better with the punditsphere than I can with more mundane things. Someone on substack probably produces something more suitable to me (or you?) than the NYT does. But no one wants to sell me appliances that don't have "soft" controls, and far too often at least the potential for software "upgrades" not under my control, potentially changing their user interface.
“...the low entropy of Top 40 radio playlists”. I love this juxtaposition. And you’re right, the 11-year old expressed that skillfully, if not in specialist terminology.
So I have a theory about who killed Asmodean...