I know, I know… I was horribly late with the editing on this one, but I swear that two weeks ago we recorded a new BF on the first day of the new decade! This one was a pretty straightforward retrospective, but the first time we actually had an episode one year ago that we could pull our predictions from. That’s right folks! BF’s run now straddles two new years! The venerable Kevin Saunders joined me, alongside Matt Legler, fulfilling his BF-imposed new years’ resolution… one year later. There was reflection, prediction, and a solid dose of classic BF. Have a listen! And have a most excellent decade, everybody.
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This Week’s Post-Show Song Pimpage: “Days Aren’t Long Enough” by Steve Earle
15/01/2010 at 5:00 am Permalink
Yeah, I’m one of those people who came from the ASL videos page and started listening and realized that the whole Bad Philosophy thing isn’t half bad, lol.
Though, I have to say, I’m a visual person and it’s hard for something to keep my attention when there’s nothing to look at. I start listening to one of these episodes and the next thing I know I’m flipping through websites and puttering around the apartment and such, and not really fully paying attention to what you guys are saying. However, the ones that have the video option, even though it’s just video of you guys talking, completely hold my interest. Is it possible to upload videos more often?
And, hell, I might as well mention that my Twitter account is @ChaosPlatypus. If only because I just recently started using it again, after the obligatory “I used it for a week, got bored, and ignored it for the next 10 months,” and since none of my friends really use it, I only have 4 followers. It’s a lot easier to get in the habit of writing 140 character updates about life if it seems that someone is listening.
16/01/2010 at 5:36 pm Permalink
Ditto in regards to enjoying your ASL videos prior to listening to your podcasts. The advertising is obviously working to some degree. With that being said, I have to be honest and try some constructive criticism. This episode was lacking majorly in content. I realize it was the first of the year, the are unrehearsed and unscripted, but most people won’t listen to a couple guys talking for an hour without obtaining new knowledge, insights, intriguing opinions, etc..
Some of the predictions were slightly amusing (remove your underwear without removing your pants? I predict we will have light sabers before that happens,lol) but I still found myself distracted despite downloading the episode I usually do so I can clean house while listening to them on my PSP.
May I be so bold to suggest a partial script? Not a full rehearsal mind you, I am in college too and the coursework can be quite demanding (Ethics,Geography,Art history,Economics,Biology, oh my) but something like writing questions and topics down before starting and trying your best to cover them before starting. And if possible, providing links that pertain to the discussion, like tech articles about Apple’s projects, or a research blog when talking about the mind and/or body.
That’s just my silly opinion, I’ll still have the RSS feed bookmarked-the least I can do for taking your time to entertain us on youtube. ( The kids I watch at the after school program like your performance of ‘Fireflies” better than the girls that have done it.)
20/01/2010 at 9:10 pm Permalink
cyberdraco,
I won’t speak for the other folks who do the show, but some of the things you criticize are what I think makes Bad Philosophy what it is. The show really is us talking off the top of our head, which I feel gives us more of a conversational tone. We’re all relatively intelligent folks and letting our minds and thus discussion go where it will gives us new opportunities for discovery that may not occur if we stuck to a more strict outline style. Keep in mind the show is called Bad Philosophy, and we never really try to hide that. We intentionally go down those rabbit trails and where they end up we can never predict.
Some of our episodes are better than others, I won’t deny it, so you may want to try and sample a few before you make a final decision. I strongly suspect that this particular episode would be more enjoyed by our long term listeners as it had a lot of in jokes and references to last year’s new year’s show. Off the top of my head you could try Reading Rainbow (ep 51), Bach in Business (ep 45), Eight Buffaloes in a Row (ep 36) Or you could go way back in the archives and check out The Jolly Llama (ep 14 and one of our best early episodes) and if you wan to know how bad BF used to be, check out MyJority Rules (ep 0, recorded almost accidentally.)
All that being said, BF ain’t for everybody so it’s no skin off my nose if it don’t scratch your back the way it scratches mine.
And your best bet to find info on the stuff we talk about on the show: Google.
30/01/2010 at 2:37 pm Permalink
Uh, I’m a new listener/viewer here and I like the off-the-cuff style. This style has been used by normal and abnormal philosophy buffs for years and, well, it is the way that I find interesting thoughts from people other than myself. My living memory doesn’t go earlier than beatniks, but I’ve had discussions with older folks who’d said there were coffee houses even before there were beatniks and, well, if you read any Plato you’ll see that conversations have been going off on a tangent without a script for a long long LONG time. Not that I liked Plato, and I know my paper that I turned in on him absolutely horrified my instructor at the time, but he has a famous name and he went off on tangents and I guess that makes it a conventional method for philosophical use. Or was it Aristotle and dialectic? Oh, well, they did speak to each other.