Questions you want answered.

It's interesting to think that I remember watching that on daytime TV as a kid. The 90's were a hell of a time to grow up.

Brit here. Maybe it's a UK/US difference but in my neck of the woods noone rases an eyebrow or calls foul if someone asks for a packet of fags. Everyone knows they mean cigarettes.

garion333 wrote:

The British cigarette word is something Americans coopted and has turned into a derogatory term.

Not at all.

"Fag" as a British slang term for a cigarette (late 1800s) is of unclear etymology but is most likely related to the verb "to fag" which meant to droop and shares some relationship with the verb "to flag".

"Fag" as an American derogatory term for a homosexual man (early 1900s) is a shortening of the word "faggot" in its older sense (1500s) of a derogatory term for women, especially older women or unpleasant women. The word itself means a bundle of sticks, as I'm sure every middle schooler can tell you, and was used as an insult toward women who were a burden (c.f. ball and chain, baggage, etc.)

That cross-over of terms insulting to women being used to insult gay men isn't uncommon. Consider also "pussy", a word derived from a word for cat and used to describe women, later specifically women's genitalia, that's also used to insult men for being too feminine or not masculine enough. (The assertion that it's derived from the Latin "pusillis", meaning weak, doesn't hold up etymologically.)

Today's lesson is that "fag" in that sense has always been derogatory (just misogynistic instead of homophobic), and British cigarettes have nothing to do with it.

I’m American. If you tell someone that you’re pissed and you’re looking for some fags, they will NOT assume that you’re drunk and craving nicotine.

strangederby wrote:

Brit here. Maybe it's a UK/US difference but in my neck of the woods noone rases an eyebrow or calls foul if someone asks for a packet of fags. Everyone knows they mean cigarettes.

It is very much a UK/US difference. No one in the US calls cigarettes "fags".

Just like in the US, if you say you spilled something on your pants, everyone knows you spilled it on your trousers.

See also that going on a bender has a huge difference in meaning in Tallahassee than it does in Glasgow.

Why is our world such a sad place exist in, yet also be filled with wonderful people, beautiful nature, and inspiring art?

There is no light without dark.

RawkGWJ wrote:

Why is our world such a sad place exist in, yet also be filled with wonderful people, beautiful nature, and inspiring art?

There is no why. However, depth, color, and character all result from such contrasts on this dust speck in the universe we're lucky enough to call "ours" for the brief time us bits of the universe are able to experience it.

maverickz wrote:

There is no light without dark.

Always two, there are.

I think because we are in a transition from hunter-gatherers to whatever lies on the other side of technological advances and the social advances they make possible.

I feel like we've been led to believe that we exist in the 'prime time' of history. Like previous generations were there just to make our lives possible, and anything that seems established to us is the baseline.

When you reflect on how old civilization is--not to even mention pre-history--we're a blip on the timeline, including things we think of as 'old' or 'traditional'.

The older I get, the more I try and deal with the sadness surrounding the beauty by thinking that I'm an immigrant like my ancestors. Instead of a geographical immigrant though, we're immigrants of time. We're building something for a future where the beauty outweighs the sadness to a critical degree.

It's just that we are especially sensitive to how far we have to go in changing the mix because of how much faster our world changes than it did for the people who came before us.

How then am I so different
From the first men through this way?
Like them, I left a settled life
I threw it all away
To seek a Northwest Passage
At the call of many men
To find there but the road back home again

--Stan Rogers, Northwest Passage

Cross posting here in hopes of a bit more notice.

I know it’s been discussed before and probably regularly, but I’m hoping for an update. What’s everyone’s podcast app?

I’m on iOS but have android devices too.

I’ve been using Castro for a few years but a glaring flaw has gotten in my way too many times. I can’t find a way to play a podcast oldest to newest by default. I just added a language learning podcast with 1500 episodes and I’m sick of scrolling to get to the next in-order. I’m also not a fan of their move to a subscription model.

So I’m in the market for a new podcast player. I’m happy to pay for one (once, preferably if such a thing still exists), but a try-before-buy is ideal.

I’ve dipped briefly into a few various podcast apps, but I’ve yet to find anything that I like more than the Apple Podcasts app for iOS. There’s nothing special about it, but it works as expected, and for me that’s good enough.

Doggcatcher had been great for me, for years now.

Antichulius wrote:

Cross posting here in hopes of a bit more notice.

I know it’s been discussed before and probably regularly, but I’m hoping for an update. What’s everyone’s podcast app?

I’m on iOS but have android devices too.

I’ve been using Castro for a few years but a glaring flaw has gotten in my way too many times. I can’t find a way to play a podcast oldest to newest by default. I just added a language learning podcast with 1500 episodes and I’m sick of scrolling to get to the next in-order. I’m also not a fan of their move to a subscription model.

So I’m in the market for a new podcast player. I’m happy to pay for one (once, preferably if such a thing still exists), but a try-before-buy is ideal.

I’m still on PocketCasts. They made some recent updates which have soured me a bit, but after some searching it seems to still be the best out there. Two strengths are that it has a web app and an Amazon Echo skill.

For the basics, the Apple Podcast app also works just fine and they recently launched web streaming as well. I don’t know how robust the streaming is or if it syncs with the app though.

I have been using Overcast for a while.

LeapingGnome wrote:

I have been using Overcast for a while.

Me too. I switched from Downcast to Overcast when DC got a little flaky and unresponsive and developed the bad habit of dying whenever the phone was locked even if I did nothing else with the phone in the meantime.

DC has some nice features OC doesn't, like per-podcast starting/ending positions to skip long intros/outros. But OC has better audio features like silence removal and boosting voices.

OC is free with subscription to remove ads, but the ads are unobtrusive (and they're all for more podcasts so I kinda like them.)

Google play which may be going to due soon. Or stitcher.

PocketCasts for me.

It’s a one time purchase for single device use. I think you might have to pay once more for the web/desktop clients? I can’t quite recall, but whatever it was is totally worth it for powerful and convenient syncing between devices.

I’m also a big fan of the approach they take to defining dynamic playlists (or filters, as they call them) — it just works well with the way I like to think and organize things. The only weak point is that the Windows client doesn’t support custom filters yet, but I just add things to my up next queue from filters on other devices when needed.

That said, both Overcast and Downcast handle filters/playlists in ways that might work better for you, so it’s probably worth trying all three to see what feels best.

Thanks all, I’ll be looking around at those.

On android, google's podcast app is a very useable baseline app. Nothing hugely fancy, but it has jump back/forward buttons, a playback speed dial, a feature to skip silence, etc.

Player FM is my go-to podcast app.

LeapingGnome wrote:

I have been using Overcast for a while.

Second vote for overcast, I've been using it for 3 or so years now. I find the tools to create curated and automatically sorted playlists to be fantastic.

I love PodcastAddict. It has all the things I need, none of what I don't, and it has an easy backup/restore feature for when I change phones.

Oh, one other thought about PocketCasts that occurred to me from a conversation in the Giant Bomb thread:

Among of the many features I like about PocketCasts is that I can configure speed settings on a per podcast basis when I want them to deviate from my default. Music podcasts play at normal speed, and my favorite comedic or dramatic podcasts get a lower increase in speed than others.

ThatGuy42 wrote:

I love PodcastAddict. It has all the things I need, none of what I don't, and it has an easy backup/restore feature for when I change phones.

Seconding Podcast Addict!

I have a question. What type of features do you guys like in these other apps over the default apple ipod app? I've never thought about changing the app or thinking of what else it could do. So wondering what I might be missing out there.

I like that the app designers seem to give a sh*t about real world usability and accommodating user specific use preferences, rather than trying to cram everyone into a very specific and very limited usage pattern centered around interacting with Apple's podcast directory.

I actually stuck with the Apple app far longer than I would have because I was very attached to having my phone connected to and synchronized with the sizable archives of podcast content I had been collecting in iTunes. But, every single update made the app less usable, dropping features I actually used in favor of promoting Apple's new approach to discovery and catalog navigation. Simple one click tasks became two clicks, organizational tools were removed, and general quality of look and feel and usability diminished across the board. So finally I snapped, and decided that I no longer cared enough about maintaining that archive anymore -- if a friend was interested in listening to something I enjoyed years ago, they were just going to have to be subject to the whims of whether the creators kept it publicly available or not.

In exchange for giving that up, by switching to PocketCasts I gained:

- The ability to filter and organize podcasts into groupings and playlists in a way that was genuinely flexible and that made sense with the way I like to think about organizing things.
- The ability to conveniently and efficiently manage my now playing/up next queues.
- The ability to have my podcasts cleanly synchronized across all devices, whether they were made by Apple or not.
- A great number of more refined, clean, and usable features and design elements that get better with each update rather than worse.

Worth noting, most of the alternatives also offer some mixture of the above, but as I mentioned in my earlier post PocketCast's approach just clicked best for me at the time I was evaluating things. If I recall correctly, Overcast was a close second at the time. Things might have changed since then, of course, but I've remained quite happy with my choice and thus had no inspiration to reevaluate. Hell, Apple may have even stopped making their app sh*ttier and sh*ttier with each release, but that ship has 100% sailed if for no other reason than that I value the cross platform synchronization too much these days.

escher77 wrote:

I have a question. What type of features do you guys like in these other apps over the default apple ipod app? I've never thought about changing the app or thinking of what else it could do. So wondering what I might be missing out there.

I switched to Downcast years ago after having to repeatedly remove and re-add podcasts to the Apple app just to get it to download the new episodes. So I guess the feature I liked was that it worked

I’m a UPS driver. I use to be a package car driver. 10 months ago I promoted to feeder driver. Feeder is what UPS calls their short haul tractor/trailer operations.

Since I’m at the bottom of the seniority list in Feeder, Haha. I just realized that I’m a bottom feeder, I have to go back to package car for a couple of weeks. Package car is generally a hostile work environment. Supervisors regularly use intimidation and coercion when interacting with the drivers. I’ve already had my center manager speaking to me in an intimidating manner.

I’m 48 yo. I’m a polite and professional person at work. And I won’t tolerate these “soft harassment” tactics. I am going to have to work with this manager for two weeks starting Monday. I’ve arranged a meeting with him early in the day today to address what has already happened and how I expect him and the rest of the management to behave for the two weeks that I will be working with them.

My question is:
Should I wear a suit to the meeting or just dress business casual?

My shift in feeder today starts several hours after this meeting so I won’t be wearing my uniform. I should also explain that my wearing a suit to the meeting would be a dramatic statement. I have never worn a suit at work. Always my uniform or street clothes. There is also a cultural divide between the management and hourly workers. People in management are called “suits” because they are the only folks who wear suits at UPS.

My reason for wearing a suit to the meeting would be to let this d-bag know that I’m completely serious when I call for respect from my superiors. I just worry that it will be an over statement and possibly be a jarring distraction from the purpose of the meeting. But I am also completely aware of how a person wearing a suit gets treated with more respect than a person in a Dilbert shirt.