I despise instructional video. I told a vendor recently that the fact that the bulk of their technical "documentation" was video meant they needed to come down on their price because I'd have to task someone to write docs.
Also work, but now that we're being absorbed into a HugeCo, I had to watch something like 20 hours of robotic corporate best-practice technical instruction videos, and then take quizzes on it. I was increasingly-seriously considering talking to a headhunter to get me back to a comfortably chaotic startup by about halfway though.
I recently watched a very long video on youtube of a guy resoling (and for that matter relasting and even replacing some of the upper of) a pair of boots at 1.5 speed, but it was in Russian (so I wasn't missing any commentary that I could have understood) and it's pretty easy to follow at that speed anyway.
My job is not at a particularly huge co but it's in a pretty regulated industry so we periodically have to do courses and quizzes on various topics, which one of course tries to speed through (they are helpful and worthwhile, even when they don't directly impinge on my work, but they're also pretty, uh, basic, often, and they're fucking flash half the time).
Anyway remember when ogged said that the one sexual experience he would consider beyond the pale in a potential female partner was her having been simultaneously penetrated by two, I can't remember if they were both supposed to be bio-penises or just two phallus-like objects at the same time? Those were the days.
Um, it's fine that the quoted guy doesn't like podcasts sped up? And it's also fine that others do? This is like the least conflict-conducive difference in taste imaginable, since most podcast-listening is solo.
I listen to audiobooks at 1.1x or 1.2x. It's nice to shave some time off the total runtime, but anything more than that and I have even more trouble than usual comprehending.
I didn't know sighted people did this. But all the (hearing) blind people I know listen to everything at turbo speed.
I definitely watched all my students' ASL videos at minimum 2x, but that basically just got them up to a normal conversational speed.
There is a trend in ASL vlogs to publish at slightly higher speeds (1.5x maybe?) and with pauses edited out, which makes me MUCH more likely to watch a video than if it is at old pokey real life speed.
I'm not the world's most patient person in face-to-face conversations either though. HURRY UP AND MAKE YOUR STUPID POINT I GOT THINGS TO DO
Oh yeah, I listened to most of My Brilliant Friend at 1.2. Usually not podcasts, but I make exceptions when they hem and haw a lot.
I got to tell my kid about this trick so he can watch people playing video games on YouTube twice as fast.
10 My nephew watches those and he doesn't even play most of the video games he watches. I don't understand at all.
My uncle watches movies and he never even does most of the things he watches movies about. I don't understand at all.
Only 10x programmers need apply to work at my new startup, Podcast10x, which is developing a podcast app that's just like every other podcast app except it has a social feature that broadcasts your current listening speed in real time to all of your followers, and also it algorithmically sorts users according to their average listening speeds and then sends people suggestions to join "listening groups" built around various speed levels where autoplay audio sends everyone down paths where what they hear next is a more extreme version of what they just heard and the people who listen at faster speeds turn violent at a faster rate and eventually start attacking the people who listen at slower speeds for being too slow to understand the shadowy figures who really control the country and why they must be stopped at all costs.
There's apparently already a PodcastX so I couldn't use that name.
13 These remind me of "blipverts" from Max Headroom.
10 Is there an Apichatpong Weerasethakul or a Steven Spielberg of video game YouTubers?
I don't even understand your questions. Is there a Li Xiaofeng of movies?
I'm going to listen to all my Chinese instructional podcasts at 2x so I can sound like a goddamn chipmunk.
Also, ¦¦/¦>, is there any more trumpian phrase than "representing our country as a great patriot hostage"? (There is not)
"Hostage paid if mailed within the United States."
Totally agree with random twitter person in the OP. I never listen at faster than 1x, even though I have way more podcasts subscribed than I can possibly listen to. It's not about information delivery, it's about entertainment, maybe also learning something at the same time. Why would I deliberately make my listening experience less enjoyable?
I do it sometimes, depending on the podcast. Also the post title is making me clutch my pearls with distaste.
After much thinking about how to work out a title like "Cram me...times two" echoing "Hold me...lake at Naboo" I decided to just cut to the chase already. So I suppose what I'm really echoing is Trump's senile directness. It's time to make the blog great again! I'll give you pearls to clutch! (Fake ones)
I never listen faster than 1x, but I would quite like Americans to talk at working class Scottish speeds (which are more like 1.5x - 2x anyway). Seriously, you people are slow.*
* possible exceptions for New Yorkers, or people from stereotypically Jewish/Italian/African American fast-talking neighbourhoods.
Basically, speeded up podcasts are the Soylent of audio content.
I'm not sure offered understands how ears work.
People need to learn that 1.5 penetration isn't effective birth control.
7: I spent almost 15 years doing transcription and encouraged myself on the speed piece by reminding myself how fast my blind friends listened to their notes. 2x is almost always too fast to get the computer to keep up with voice recognition as cleanly as I needed it to, but I'd speed up some. And to review a transcript and make changes needed to be at 2x or I would lose my mind from boredom. I could probably stand to listen to podcasts if I doubled the speed. Maybe I'll finally try.
(I do have weird unformed thoughts about whether because I have aphantasia and can't make mental pictures I process words differently. I can read faster than pretty much anyone I know and I think it's not just that I need to get out more because it was obvious among top-level trivia players, and I'm not top-level superhuman by any stretch but I'm at least faster than the people who are. And I could transcribe (so listening to audio, repeating everything I hear with punctuation and formatting macros while listening ahead to keep the simultaneous transcription going) while knitting, which was easy, but after a few years also while reading an unrelated book. I don't have an explanation for how to keep the word streams separate, but it worked. And if that means I'm metaphorically impure by ogged's standards, I'm fine with that.
The one podcast I listen to regularly is 80 minutes a week, and I like to stay up to date, so whenever I'm more than an episode or two behind I switch to 1.5x. It's always weird when I do catch up and drop back down to 1x.
Also because it's impossible for me to pay attention to some feed of information (new podcasts, blogs, Twitter, whatever) and not feel like I'm doing it wrong if I fall behind; if that happens I get anxious and it counteracts any entertainment value I was supposed to be getting.
I'm also reminded of the bizarre one-word-at-a-time reading interfaces that have cropped up over the years. This seems to be a current one, and it's just as alien-feeling as all the others: http://spritzinc.com/
I could probably stand to listen to podcasts if I doubled the speed. Maybe I'll finally try.
I do have weird unformed thoughts about whether because I have aphantasia and can't make mental pictures I process words differently.
Tying these two thoughts together, the most recent episode of Probably Science features a guest with aphantasia (it's also a topic they've covered several times in the past), and touches on exactly this question.
Aphantasia would be a very good name for a dominatrix with a too-literate clientele.
Anyway, I'm very much the opposite. I can't separate streams of thought in my head. I can't even listen to music and think about something deeply.
Date point: I can't rise above mediocre in trivia.
Date point: I can't rise above mediocre in trivia.
I can sometimes, just about, read something untaxing (twitter, say) while listening to a podcast. But generally, two verbal streams completely throw me off, and I can't parse either very well.
On the other hand, I also read really fast. I expect reading really fast is a base level common Unfogged skill. But, as ex humanities academic, I can _write_ prose faster than some of my colleagues can read it, and they are smart people.*
* I've said before, this is the first workplace I've worked in where I not only don't think I'm always the smartest person in the room, it's a place where I know for a fact (absent certain particular domains that are my thing) that I am not.
28 is some terrifying demonic shit.
38 basically is me, minus the smart colleagues.
Same on having a one-track mind. Reading always wins -- if I'm looking at text, I stop being able to follow anything I'm hearing immediately. I used to think of myself as reading fairly quickly, but I think I'm sort of standard for academic types.
Even with words, I use visual imagery. Not like picturing a dog when I see the word "dog", but having a visual image of what the page on which I read the information looked like when I think of that information.
37: I was going to say! I thought we were just having dinner.
Ginger Yellow listens to a shitload of podcasts.
I listen to significantly fewer, but I want to listen to all of them, and they're more entertaining if they're slightly faster. As said above, once you're used to 1.5x, normal speech in podcasts sounds slow and slurry. (This does not apply to normal speech in conversation, interestingly. Which is good.) Exceptions are foreign languages, people with accents I have trouble with, and music podcasts (unless I don't care about the genre shifting potential of listening to a song at a higher tempo).
I suppose we could make the argument the other way: if it's just about getting the maximal number of entertainment minutes, why not listen listen at 0.75x, or 0.5x, or slower? But the goal is to maximize net enjoyment/education, which might not correspond to 1x at all times.
28: I definitely can't keep two linguistic streams going at once. It's the strongest restriction on my info processing abilities. That's awesome that you can do that.
Finally, the word "bio-penis" is great.
In my occasional culture wars related browsings on the internet, one thing I've noticed is that the younger conservative set (think gam/er/ga/te and adjacent types) seems to have a huge aversion to text. At least online they seem to communicate with each other exclusively through youtube videos. Not that I was very curious about them anyway, but even if I were, there's no way I would waste hours watching that stuff.
Is it a generational thing or is it more specific to that subculture?
46: As in a webcam video, instead of a blog post?
I think it's generational, but not absolute. E.g. that group spread through text, too--e.g. the Kot/akuInAc/tion subreddit.
47: Right. Some guy sitting in front a a webcam talking.
48 sounds right. My impression of many gaming and fanboy types is that they're barely literate. But then I think that about most people. Also idiocy looks a lot worse written down, cf. Trump transcripts.
Ginger Yellow listens to a shitload of podcasts.
'Tis true. 135 subscribed at the moment, of which I probably actually listen to about 80. Just found out that Julia Davis has a podcast now, so that's yet another one on the pile.
Something's wrong with all you people. The thing I like about Unfogged is that it's mostly text. Even though I spend most of my life in front of a computer, I hate how more and more of the Internet is going to video or audio, and how hard it is to get text or diagrams spelling things out. I want to get media in static visual form when possible. I can view it on my phone with fewer problems, have it open in another window while at work or playing games, and pick it up and put it down for 30 seconds, and 90 percent of people who think they have something interesting to say have no clue how to say it. (That's less of a concern with a podcast with professional production values than with someone trying to make a living streaming a computer game, but the others problems aren't.)
Now going to video isn't enough and people are watching and listening to stuff at double speed? Fuck you all.
but I would quite like Americans to talk at working class Scottish speeds (which are more like 1.5x - 2x anyway). Seriously, you people are slow.*
* possible exceptions for New Yorkers, or people from stereotypically Jewish/Italian/African American fast-talking neighbourhoods.
I'm 100% convinced that older Texans talk very slowly and at length in order to dominate the situation and subtly force you to keep your polite-paused face on for prolonged stretches. Like, you goddamn will show respect to me, sonny.
Anyway, I'm very much the opposite. I can't separate streams of thought in my head. I can't even listen to music and think about something deeply.
Moby is me in this thread.
53.3: I was wondering if that has something to do with preference for youtube over text in subculture I was talking about. You have less control over how and at what pace you take in the information.
But maybe that's over thinking it and Mossy's "barely literate" theory is sufficient.
52: Pretty sure just about everyone here is a fan of text.
OTOH I have become a pretty dedicated podcast listener, but that's replacing listening to music, not reading.
Does anybody else turn off the car radio when they get lost?
Gamer subculture isn't monolithic. There are some really text heavy games. A big JRPG might have multiple hundreds of thousands of words. Visual novels are just text. The text might not be particularly edifying, but it's there.
A twitter mutual from the UK who does a lot of transcription said she prefers to transcribe US Southerners and Australians, since as they talk a lot more slowly you get paid more for your work.
57.last: The same happened to me. Recently I've started replacing a small portion of the podcasts with audio books, mostly autobiographies as they show up on the Audible Daily Deal pretty often.
Correction: visual novels are just text and boobs.
58: Yes, I think I've done that. Actually if I'm going to a place that I've never been before, I probably won't turn on the radio.
Also, my wife always points out that I don't do very well when I am trying to drive and carry on a conversation at the same time.
There's also IF and games like Hacknet or Digital: A Love Story, where text is the primary medium and interface. Obviously those are pretty niche though.
The worst driving I've done in the past few years was when a passenger prompted me to explain a real analysis proof while on the turnpike. Almost got in an accident and just barely didn't miss the exit. In general, yes, I also try to remove audio distractions when in a tricky driving situation (or trying to think about a hard coding problem).
Re: gaming, I'm sure that's part of it, a lot of the stuff I'm annoyed to find in video format is about World of Warcraft. But Cassandane listens to podcasts now and then, it seems like I've seen people around here talking about them fairly often, and it's impossible to escape videos on Facebook. Part of why I've used it less in recent months, although not the biggest reason.
I mostly listen to podcasts when I'm either too frazzled to read or doing something physical and mindless like washing dishes. I would listen to more if I had to drive.
As an impatient teenager I had a job doing political surveys over the phone. We called all over the US, and whenever we were doing a survey in the South I would feel like I was going to die before they would finish their sentences.
I like them when I drive. I was vaguely thinking about a second language app, but they all seem to require typing, etc things you can't do while driving.
Anyone know of a driving-compatible Learn Spanish kind of thing?
My brother learned Spanish by listening to tapes while driving. I will ask him what kind if you want.
My experience has been that listening to a foreign language at less than 1x speed doesn't help because it makes phoneme differentiation more difficult.
You forget that Heebie is in the South.
re: 68
You could do the Michel Thomas stuff, which some people like. I did a Spanish one before a holiday, when (ironically), I ended up doing most of the Spanish, despite my wife having about a year or more of Spanish study. So it definitely works a bit.
I listen to everything at 1.5x by default, but then I have to remember to turn it back down to 1x for musical guests. I listened to the Fresh Air remembrance of Aretha this morning and Terry Gross sounded high as a kite.
Of course it never occurred to me that it's possible to listen to podcasts at a faster speed. And now that it has, I don't have any idea how it is done. Good thing I have no interest!
I really envy Thorn's multiple streams ability. I've found that I can swap with some success between two or three text things.
I far prefer reading to video and audio; I'm not a fan of everyone deciding that video and video ads are the way to go. I sometimes put on music, but if I have music on then read or do work, I lose all track of it and will not hear anything until I pause or look up again. So when a CD playing in the background, I often hear half of the first song, hear bits and pieces when I pause in the review/study/reading, sometimes catch a piece and restart the song, listen to it with dedication, then lose the music or text again as I begin reading.
I'm a slow talker, and it's not because I'm trying to filibuster. I'm just a slow thinker. Unless you're talking too slow, and I've already figured out what your next two sentences are going to be and I'm either biting my tongue or interrupting. Basically just a bad person all around.
IHMB that Swiss people I have on FB usually write their comments in Swiss rather than in German. I asked my Swiss doctor friend about this when he was visiting last month, and his conclusion was basically that more lesser educated people are writing more text than ever before. And just don't feel the need to go to the effort to try to get the grammar and spelling right, when whoever they are communicating with likes Swiss better anyway. Coming from the 'apfelschuss' region, I can see it. I have no idea if people from Zurich or Basel do social media differently.
L.! Are you coming to karaoke tonight?? LB is out.
I've started listening to the podcast Ginger Yellow recommended and so far all I can say is that alas 1.5x is much easier to listen to than 2x, which approaches weird robot cacophany, and I am still super judgmental of other people's aphantasia stories. How self-absorbed do you have to be to not realize until adulthood that other people aren't just being metaphorical when they talk about visualization? (Though I'm not flawless myself. I confessed it to my therapist as the reason I was hesitant to let him give me relaxation exercises only to hear in response that he's the same way and so it's going to be things like making my arms feel very heavy and imagining my extremities warm, which I can certainly do. Hmph.)
Unsurprisingly, I'm very self-absorbed.
But instead I'm going to intetpret that as me being really good at abstract thinking.
It's also true that I'm crummy and judgmental, so why not both?
It's clear by this stage of history that literally everyone is crummy and judgemental.
It's not just gamers; my impression is that younger software engineers, especially men, are likely to be less literate these days. They don't read for pleasure, or even for work, if they can get away with it.
I'm the opposite of LB; if I'm reading and there is (e.g.) NPR on in the background, the listening overwhelms the reading. True for music, too (not just songs, but orchestral).
I don't think I've ever listened to a podcast or audio book. My wife loves them, though. I read super-fast and even standard broadcast speeds (NPR again) are so slow I can barely stand to listen.
I used to be unbeatable at trivia, but I don't keep up with popular culture outside a few niches, so I'm not nearly as good now. (I never lost the "Genus Edition" aka "all about baby boomers" Trivial Pursuit, but if there is a current culture one: /ouch).
I think Language Log once reported a study that found Americans to in be among the slowest talkers, and (less sure of this) that native English speakers in general are slow talkers, compared to most other languages; French, for example.
Impressionistically, Rocs talk faster than English speakers, but convey less information because everything is repeated many many many times.
Oh yes, and: sometimes people listen to audio and it's not for entertainment at all! I'm now listening to a local blogger's podcast, and he's a pretty tedious man - both curmudgeonly and fond of vicious gossip. But local political news is thin on the ground, so I need to take it in.
I want to listen to more German podcasts for language-learning reasons, but I lack Thorn's insane dual-stream skills, and I find it hard to simply sit and listen to things: I start trying to multitask, and then realize I've totally missed whatever was going on in the podcast.
Listening while biking or on public transit works (mostly - sometimes I realize I just totally missed the last minute or whatever) but I don't actually spend that much time on either.
I tried just listening to learn-Portuguese podcasts as background noise recently, hoping it would get me used to the sound of the language again, but I don't think it actually helped me process it one bit.
I guess my conclusion from all of this is: there's no magic shortcut to mainlining information into your brain, at least until we get Matrix-y interfaces. =(
Turns out, actually, you need focus, commitment, and sheer will.
I've got to try 1.5x. as it stands I can't listen to podcasts except under extraordinary circumstances of them being awesome, because I feel as if I could have read so many things in that time (like a lot of unfoggeteers I am a very fast reader but like many here I can't listen to music with words or the wires cross.) husband x says 1.5 is a no-go for him because all the voices sound weird. I have to confess I will watch videogameplay from time to time, but usually with my kids. I wish pewdiepie would stop being such a nazi; I have been a fan since like 2014. girl y's obsession is listening to podcasts of other people playing d&d, with 40-minute episodes. she downloaded a ton for the 16-hour plane flight. I don't even know about that.
86 and 87 made me wonder: are English speakers slower than French speakers in terms of words per minute, or in terms of information transfer? It might be that French is just wordier.
re: 92
I guess the Language log article is:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22
There are other recent-ish scholarly articles online about it which suggest that the way in which syllables are timed/stressed in Romance languages gives a false impression to English speakers that French or Spanish speakers are talking much faster.
But, there are variances between English dialects, which can be quite large. And I presume the same also holds true for dialects of Spanish, French, etc.
You can't count French and Spanish as the same. The French hardly pronounce any of the letters they use and the Spanish pronounce all of them.
And it was just such glacial pedantry that condemned Spain to stagnation as le gloire de France shone ever brighter.
86: My impression is that science-fiction readers are now majority women, and that this shift showing up in Hugo voting is what drove the whole Puppy backlash.
91: My son watches Minecraft videos. I understand intellectually why he watches the channels he does (they have super-exaggerated reactions to everything), but I have a WTF reaction at all times. Sometimes he tells me the "highlights", and I painfully feign interest.
Soon the world will be too hot for any more moss to grow.
96. That certainly seems possible if you look at the Tor website. Most of the new books mentioned are by women, though Tor certainly publishes books by men!
My guess is that some other publishers would have mostly books by men, but some by women: Baen comes to mind here.
The Puppies seem to have a particular hate for Tor.
That rising pinnacle of windswept rock, thrusting triumphantly on the spine of every volume...the incel puppies could never do anything but whimper in furious envy.
96.1: I agree with this. Generally, most readers are women. SFF has a higher portion of men than most*, but it's been trending more towards women. This is easier to show with authors--for this year's Best Novel Hugo Award, it's half and half men and women**. But for Best Novella, every nominee is female. Ditto Best Short Story; Best Novelette is 4/6 female and 0/6 cis male.
101: On the one hand, this is probably why the puppies happened, and also why they got smacked down. On the other, there have always been prominent women in SFF--Bujold has been writing and winning awards the top-of-the-class Miles Vorkosigan series for decades. And it's not like explosions-in-space military sci fi is going away--it turns out women like to write and read that, too, if in slightly smaller quantities and with different emphases then men would have. Works for me.
The puppies probably hate Tor because the Nielsen Haydens are vocal, smart, put their money where their mouths are, and are extremely successful (see the occasional freaking out over John Scalzi's contract with them).
* Though the manliest of all subgenres is probably military history. No, wait: alternate military history.
103: ISTR that, anecdotally, the authors of SF manuscripts submitted to Tor are pretty evenly split male/female. That's probably a better measure than the Hugo nominations because that's a small sample.
The readers, who knows. It's very difficult to define even what that would mean.
What percentage of copies of SF novels are bought by women? But that doesn't mean that more women read SF, just that women read more SF. (Or, rather, buy more SF. It could just mean that teenage boys get SF books for their birthday from their mothers.)
Share of women who have ever read an SF novel?
Who read at least one SF novel a year?
We can use multiple measures simultaneously, but I'd be partial to using sales (including fanzines, etc.) as it better measures engagement.
The thing about the puppies group is that at least some of those authors seem to sell extremely well, which makes their whining about not getting awards especially pathetic.
Jerry Pournelle was a conservative writer of mostly military SF who sold huge numbers of books (apparently he was one of the first SF authors to break onto the "real" bestseller lists) and never won a Hugo, but never complained about it. When asked about it in an interview he pointed to his sales and the sizes of the advances he was getting and noted that money will get you through the times with no Hugos a lot more comfortably than Hugos will get you through times with no money.
It seems like a healthier attitude than the puppies'.
Sure, because he was a professional, while the puppies are right-wingers who want their cultural proclivities to be respected. Different goals.
106, 107: Yes, but it's not exactly unusual for bestselling authors to be sad and/or angry because they don't get critical respect or awards.
"I'd be partial to using sales (including fanzines, etc.) as it better measures engagement."
So, 10 women buy 10 SF novels each. 50 men buy 1 SF novel each. This proves that most SF readers are women.
106. From the other side, there's an anecdote about Terry Pratchett saying something similar to J.K. Rowling. "You and I, Jo, can afford to be magnanimous about these things", or words to that effect.
109: As I said in the first half of that comment, I'm absolutely fine with simultaneously considering different measures.
And honestly, yes, if we're going to give precedence to any particular measure I think that's a better way to go about it. It isn't a proof of membership in a class but rather acknowledgment that participation is skewed. We don't say most people are readers because they read their favoritest book ever, The Great Gatsby, under duress decades ago.
More succinctly: a man who buys one SF novel a year is a fake gamer boy.
You're the professional here, but if I were trying to sell something I wouldn't advertise it as being a piece of shit.
Boy, that sure looks like an example of programming expertise.
That was a lot of comments. And now I see there are even more.
Unfogged, where even the spam bots accidentally double post (and then some)