News You Can Bruise

It's been seven years since the last episode of the crummy.com podcast, so you might be forgiven for forgetting that it even existed. In fact, forgetting about a podcast is not a sin in any human religious tradition, so no forgiveness necessary. Just enjoy tonight's episode, "Tonight's Episode: An Oral History of Murder".

This is an hour-long conversation between myself and Sumana about Tonight's Episode, a crummy.com feature even older than our ancient podcast, and the first creative collaboration between the two of us. Listen, and explore the origins of Internet comedy so small in bytesize that a joke might be compared to a short sound a bird might make.

A couple things I forgot to mention in the podcast: first, Tales from the Crypt and the Cryptkeeper's stupid puns as a predecessor to Tonight's Episode. Second, Murderous Magnetism, the Jason Robbins magnetic poetry kit for making Tonight's Episodes.

In today's episode, the crummy.com podcasts sell out and play you commercials. Specifically, a Zenith television commercial from 1978, which we found from our buddy bobtwcatlanta. Live the dream! Subscribe to the RSS feed!

This podcast is less than two minutes long, a sorbet after the huge Seder podcast. Don't-miss links: a sequel to the Zenith ad we discuss. PS: I spent a medium-sized amount of time converting and pasting in the original commercial audio rather than giving you the sound of it playing on our TV, so appreciate it, dammit.

OK, time to give you the hard sell: this episode of Sedermasochism is like the first two except there's more singing and everyone's more drunk. It picks up with the after-dinner macaroons and continues until the Seder is over and Sumana convinces me to shut off the voice recorder. 33 minutes. Subscribe to the crummy.com podcast feed, why don't you.

Yes, the multi-part Passover podcast rises again this fine Easter with an episode covering the rest of the pre-meal Seder, taking us from Lucian demanding to be the wicked son (Beth: "Eh, sure.") to Sumana's first taste of gefilte fish. I'm probably going to cut the whole dinner conversation since it's not Passover-specific, and later this week put up a part 3 that covers the last two glasses of wine. As always, you can subscribe to the crummy.com podcast feed. I'm gonna be writing that sentence for the rest of my life!

Beth's Seder was the first one I'd ever attended[0], and it was such an interesting experience I'm editing my recording of the Seder into a series of podcasts. As always, you can download the podcast or subscribe to the crummy.com podcast feed. This episode is rated M for mature, with pervasive suggestive themes, language, and of course alcohol references.

Participating in the Seder were Beth; Lucian; me and Sumana; and three others who wish to be known only by pseudonyms: Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, and Princess Peach. The atmosphere was really fun; I'll try to convey it to non-Jewish Americans in a Beth-approved analogy. (If you're not American or Canadian, the analogy won't work; substitute Guy Fawkes Day or something, I dunno.)

Imagine being a kid at Thanksgiving. Except that Thanksgiving has a set agenda, a specific set of symbolic appetizers before you get to the meal, and a set of rituals and historical recreations (Pilgrims etc.) that give a consistent shape to your Thanksgiving afternoon, year after year. There are many Thanksgiving books giving different scripts for the recreations, and your parents probably have one specific book that they pull out every year.

Also, you and your family are living on a Mars colony, where most people come from countries that don't celebrate Thanksgiving. So, although Thanksgiving is intended to be celebrated with your close relatives, as a kid you often spend the holiday with lots of people whose closest relationship with your family is that they're also Americans. Lots of cranky old folks arguing about the right way to do Thanksgiving (this is an official part of the ceremony; it symbolizes American democracy), you as a child being forced to go on stage and perform ritual Thanksgiving songs. You as a teenager still stuck at the kids' table because there's no room for you at the grown-ups' table.

Then you grow up and leave home. You can do your own Thanksgiving dinner, you can mix and match from the books to get your own take on the meaning of the holiday, and you can invite your peers to the meal. Since the cranky old people are not present, you are free to swear and make dirty jokes and have the arguments you want to have about the right way to do Thanksgiving. And despite the aggravation of the Thanksgivings of your youth, despite the fact that you may no longer even think of yourself as "American" except by birth, you still have this emotional attachment to the old songs and rituals, and you still want to do things correctly.

And that's what Beth's Seder felt like. If you've never been to a Seder before, listen in to learn why there's an orange on the Seder plate (apparently not the real story), hear how Gul Maror reminds us of the bitterness of the Cardassian occupation, and endure the first of two terrible Passover filks.

More Seder podcasts to follow. I'm basically going through the recording, cutting out awkward pauses, and stopping once I've got an hour of footage. I expect it'll probably be 2.5 hours total, since not much happens during the meal.

[0] We only knew one Jewish family when I was growing up, and my Mormon parents wouldn't have been comfortable at a ceremony centered around getting smashed on wine.

Hey, it's part 2 of my conversation with Lucian. This time, we talk about boys' and girls' fashions from the late 80s and early 90s, the styles that caused a nationwide push for school uniforms. Lucian then explains the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to me (apparently Raphael is cool but rude), and explores his lifelong obsession with being a cool dude.

I was going through a box of old stuff from my childhood and I have this thing I wrote then I was six, a list of things I like. And it's like "cats", blah blah blah, "COOL DOODS!"

Here's the direct download; here, the RSS feed.

On Sunday, Lucian Kahn and I had a long conversation about our respective childhoods, growing up in southern California in the 1980s and 90s. I've cut the conversation into two parts and part 1 is now available.

In this 41-minute episode, Lucian and I discuss our early encounters with the mysterious personal computer. Most retrocomputing podcasts focus on video games, but we talk about everything: school computer labs, operating systems, paint programs and creativity suites, online services, weird DOS front-ends, wooden mice, and the "turbo" button. All with no nearby Internet access, so we can spout off half-baked theories informed only by the vague ideas we had as children.

In next week's episode, Lucian will explain things I never understood when I was a kid, like fashion and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Bonus: I have bowed to popular demand and created an RSS feed for the podcast. Let me know if it doesn't work. You can also see a HTML page with the same information as the RSS feed.

The end-of-year bonuses don't stop just because the year is over. Here's the seventh crummy.com non-podcast podcast, "Snuggles the pillow". In this episode the eponymous pillow visits our household, with wacky/disturbing results.

Way back in January, our friend Martin pointed out that the UN had designated 2009 as the International Year of Natural Fibres. Sumana and I immediately spent an hour or so coming up with an anthem for the International Year of Natural Fibres. Which we never recorded.

Of course, what with projects like Keep the Fleece (creators of the world's longest scarf), the International Year of Natural Fibres didn't need any help from us. But we thought it would be a shame to let the International Year of Natural Fibres totally pass us by, so before natural fibres are crushed by the International Year of Biodiversity, enjoy the sixth crummy.com non-podcast podcast: Sumana and I giving our rendition of the INYoNF anthem.

Before posting The Trouble With Scribbles I cut out a couple minutes due to the then-active embargo on public discussion of IF Competition entries. Now that the competition is over and Adam's "Earl Grey" has taken 5th place, you can legitimately hear me and Adam compare "Scribblenauts" and "Earl Grey".

On Monday, Adam Parrish came over and we recorded a conversation about Scribblenauts, the video game that's sweeping the nation with a large cartoon broom. (For the uninitiated, this Penny Arcade should do the trick.) We focused on 1) topics in game design, 2) silliness. I cut the long, long conversation down to 45 minutes and the result is "The Trouble With Scribbles", the latest in the irregular series of crummy.com non-podcasts. Thrill! As we:

• Pit Scribblenauts's object interactions against Nethack's.
• Investigate how well Scribblenauts implements kashrut.
• Improve Scribblenauts's design, controls, and marketability with bold spinoffs like the Scribblenauts text adventure, Star Trek: Scribblenauts, and the sinister Scribblenauts-Prime.
• Propose Georges Perec-style speedruns and Scribblenauts-enabled animal sacrifices.

Plus: complaining, and pterodactyls with ropes attached to them. Includes spoilers for Scribblenauts and Nethack.

We also talked a little about Adam's entry in the IF competition, but I cut it out because competitors are still embargoed from talking about their games. I'll post it separately later.

Errata: 1. In vanilla Nethack you can't sharpen a weapon on a flint stone. There are also no creatures who can eat rock, so the code I mentioned never gets executed. 2. In Scribblenauts, you can get a generic fish-as-food by typing "fish"--but no human will eat it. 3. "Machinima" is pronounced with a soft "ch" and a long "e". 4. Nobelium's half-life depends on the isotope, but they're all pretty short. 5. There's a Scribblenauts level where the Penny Arcade trick is a winning strategy.

In the unlikely event you were wondering how "Scientist and Penguin" goes, Sumana and I re-recorded the very end of a previously improvised episode (0:44) as one of our trademark non-podcast podcasts. The backstory is that the scientist took the penguin on a boat to an island to see if there were any other talking penguins on that island. There was one, owner of a bar, but he was really cranky and he was out of coconut cream. Then in a medieval bestiary twist it turned out the island was actually a giant coffinfish, so we fled.

Also somehow the name of the show changed to "Penguin and Scientist". That nutty penguin stole the top billing! He's a penguin!