In the final episode of Mission of the Lunar Sparrow, Commander Field is on her way home against her will. Mission Control has taken over the ship.

Listen on FutureX

In Episode 9 of this short-flight audio drama, Mission Control is flying the Lunar Sparrow on autopilot, returning Commander Field to Earth. A mysterious decision has been made, at a high level, to end the mission. Commander Field, as is often the case in situations like this, is the last to know what has happened. But before the fade out, she takes one last act of defiance.

It’s been rare if not impossible, in our complicated times, to see live theater. As a writer, it can be a long walk to come up with an idea, pursue it in notebooks and pixels, commit to a script, hand it off to an actor, and hear it come to life. Audio drama, as a format, allows that creation, and pretty fast, even in our complicated times.

That’s why posting this last episode is bittersweet. The adventure is over.

I am working on a sequel, or followup, I’m not sure what to call it. Mission Control and Commander Field will return to try to resolve the conflicts between them. There will be other characters who get involved with no clue about what role they play in the drama until it is too late for them.

Thank you all for listening and commenting. Your support means a lot to me. This newsletter will go dark for a little while as I spin up the next podcast or consider whether to bring you sections of the novel I’m almost done with and getting ready to let out of the box.

Lee

Find Episode 9 at FutureX, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.

Mission of the Lunar Sparrow was produced for the FutureX network. Production by Red Cup Agency.

The Waveform is a newsletter from Red Cup Agency about the next edge in podcasting. In each issue, I’ll stay on top of things for you. When we launch a new show or post an episode that stands out, I’ll drop that into the newsletter.

I’m Lee Schneider, founder and lead producer at Red Cup Agency. Did someone forward this to you, or are you reading it on the web? You can subscribe for free.

Andia Winslow Wins Voiceover Artist of the Year

Andia Winslow is the star of our audio drama Mission of the Lunar Sparrow. At the OneVoice Awards a few weeks ago, she took home the hardware for Voiceover Artist of the Year 2021 and also Best Performance in the Gaming category. Not only is she the lead voice in Mission of the Lunar Sparrow, but she’s also host of a 10-episode podcast we’re producing for a global consultancy firm. (I signed an NDA on that one, so the name has to stay confidential.) Andia is super-talented. I hope you’ve enjoyed her work in Mission of the Lunar Sparrow.

The Glo Podcast Passes 20 Episodes

We’ve been in production on The Glo Podcast since earlier in the year, and it’s remarkable that we’ve already posted more than 20 episodes. I’m working closely with the (large) Glo team on this podcast. We have another 20 episodes in the pipeline.

Our most recent episode features an interview with Jo Tastula, a mystical thinker, mother, and yoga teacher of the first order. As in every conversation on this podcast, we go deep into life, how people become better humans, and we tell fascinating stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Just last week, we recorded stories about good and bad anxiety, the chatter in your mind, and spirit world experiences. I’ve been the recording engineer on most of the episodes. It’s been illuminating and fun to listen in on the conversations as we record each episode.

Jo Tastula is not only an extraordinary thinker and teacher, she was also a pioneer — one of the first to teach yoga online with Glo. Listen to Jo’s story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

Why Are We Still Podcasting like Radio?

If you look at the list of Top 50 Podcasts for the past year, you see patterns that scream tradition. At the top, we have Joe Rogan, a shock jock in the tradition of Howard Stern. We have daily-deadline-news from The Daily and true crime from Crime Junkie. If you keep going further down the list, you’ll get to the NPR stalwarts This American Life, Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me, and Planet Money. Each one of those shows have their own kind of traditions. A little ways down the list is Stuff You Should Know from iHeartRadio, which also comes out in a television version. It would be right at home on the Discovery Network and reminds me of some of the shows I used to produce for Discovery, History, and A&E.

You have to get out of the top-ten category types to discover shows that are less like radio and define what podcasting is all about. Shows like Code Switch, Reply All, and Everything is Alive bring what’s best about airing diverse views, giving voice to marginalized people, unrolling long-form essays in audio form, and launching experimental audio dramas that render imaginary worlds. Move further down the list and you get to break things. My Favorite Murder is a popular genre-breaking comedy about … murder. It works as a podcast. Good luck pitching that idea to a television network.

Nick Quah has been writing about the podcast industry in a newsletter called Hot Pod since 2014. He can open up this thought better than I can.

I haven’t fully formed this thought yet, so allow me the indulgence of thinking out loud here: It’s been my impression that, based on the events of the last five years, the rise of podcasting didn’t end up necessarily challenging linear radio in any fundamental way but it did unlock greater untapped value by introducing more efficiency to audio consumption and creation. Say what you want about “peak podcasts,” but today, there’s a whole galaxy and generation of shows — from narrative stuff to extremely long chatcasts to shows hosted by people who would otherwise be denied access to airtime by traditional gatekeepers — that simply wasn’t well-served by the technical structure and dominant incentives of traditional radio. And so, instead of directly interrupting linear radio, podcasting ended up creating new markets, businesses, and systems around linear radio, at times funneling value back into it.

– Nick Quah

Nick announced in early September that he’s shutting down Hot Pod. I’ll miss his way of coming to insights in a ruminative way that seems casual, but not really. He’s started up a new newsletter for Vulture called 1.5x Speed, so I’ll be reading him there and hoping it’s as good.

Podcast Subscriptions Will Win Out Over Advertising Revenue

Advertising is another way podcasting currently resembles radio. Hosts pitch whatever they’re paid to pitch. Commercials can interrupt your favorite shows multiple times, messing with your listening experience. This format is great for drive time radio. It’s super for morning shows. It’s not so great for podcasting, especially podcasts that intend to hold your attention. The whole point of a podcast, for me, is that it makes you want to listen all the way through. The best of them draw you in and don’t let you go until the last music fade out.

This is why subscriptions will soon be the dominant way to fund an indie podcast. Most independent producers already work hard to build their audiences and communities. They activate their social media feeds, hawk merch, celebrate art their fans make, appear at events, do Clubhouse, kiss babies (not really), and some have Patreon accounts to support their show.

In a new development, you can offer a subscription to your podcast on Apple, or you can use a service like the aforementioned Patreon or a service like Memberful to build support for your work. In my next post on The Waveform, I’ll write about how podcasts are building audiences and funding themselves through memberships.

Marketing Services at Red Cup

At Red Cup, we’ve been crafting marketing plans for clients for a while, but I haven’t made a big deal about it. It’s just something that I offer when I produce your podcast. That’s changing because more people are coming to me asking for standalone podcast marketing services. For example, this month, we are doing the marketing plan for a new podcast called Defenders of the Earth launched by Global Witness. We’re making audio trailers and promos. More details on an upcoming issue of The Waveform.

Red Cup Agency. Podcast Production and Marketing.

Working with teams large and small, I take podcasts from the glimmer of an idea into production and distribution. We make trailers, ad spots and promos for your podcast, and we find new audiences for you work with cross promotion.

RED CUP SERVICES

Read Freely.

You can read freely at The Waveform. I’m not tracking opens, clicks, or forwards. I’m not analyzing your IP address location. It’s just you and me, writing and reading. This is a small part of the vast Web focused on people and dialog, not marketing data collection.

Black t-shirts are great, but not when you live with a cat.

In Episode 8 of Mission of the Lunar Sparrow, Commander Field speaks from the heart about how the mission has changed her and what she wants to do about it.

Listen on FutureX

In this episode, Commander Field has sent Mission Control off on a computational errand, keeping the machine busy and giving her a chance to record a secret diary entry. She takes the opportunity to speak from her heart about what she has seen on the lunar surface and how it has changed her. There is no other episode like this one. It’s a solo performance from Andia Winslow. The finale episode is next week.

Thank you all for listening and commenting. Your support means a lot to me.

Lee

Find Episode 8 at FutureX, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.

Mission of the Lunar Sparrow was produced for the FutureX network. Production by Red Cup Agency.``

Not Tracking

Here at 500 Words you won’t be tracked. I’m not tracking opens, clicks, or forwards. I’m not analyzing your IP address location. It’s just you and me, reading and writing. I’m trying to create a small part of the Internet that is focused on people and dialog, not marketing data collection.

Visit the design-minimal but information-maximal archive of all 500 Words posts and podcasts.

The Verge reports that Joe Rogan’s exclusivity on Spotify is hurting his influence, and that his social numbers have halved. Ashley Carman reports that searches for Joe Rogan also dropped after moving to Spotify, and YouTube data have also fallen.

Not a fan of shock jocks like Rogan, Howard Stern, or Don Imus, so I am enjoying a little schadenfreude with this announcement.

Shock jocks give themselves permission to say what they want by claiming to “say what is on everyone’s mind.” This is somehow seen as liberating, or even worse for the rest of us, a right.

After dinner tonight, my nine-year-old son was complaining that he had a lot of throughs in his mind that he wanted to say but we, his parents, didn’t want him to say them. He made the point that if he said whatever was in his mind, he would get in trouble. This wasn’t fair.

I said, Just because you have something in your mind, doesn’t mean that you have to say it out loud. People could get hurt. You might not mean what’s in your head. It might be rude. He considered this and clearly thought it to be advice of dubious value.

I considered bringing up Freud, the ego, id, and superego, and all the rest of the moral ball of spaghetti. Yet it didn’t seem necessary. It’s enough to consider that speaking whatever comes to mind will hurt people, and, as a person over the age of five, you have a responsibility to other people about that.

Bodhi at 9.

Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work,” Kierkegaard admonished in 1843

I'm going to turn the universe off and then back on again and see if that works.

— God (@TheTweetOfGod) August 27, 2021

Episode 6 of Mission of the Lunar Sparrow is ready for your listening pleasure. After this, there are just three more episodes.

In this episode …

 Commander Field returns to the Lunar Sparrow after a mysterious excursion. 

Click to listen on Apple Podcasts

Here’s the synopsis: Mission Control saves Commander Field’s life after she blacks out on the lunar surface. When Commander Field insists that she has felt and experienced signs of life on the Moon, Mission Control believes that she is losing her mind. The mission hangs in jeopardy as Commander Field goes public with the evidence she has gathered.

Find Episode 6 at FutureX, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.

Mission of the Lunar Sparrow was produced for the FutureX network. Production by Red Cup Agency.

Not Tracking

Here at 500 Words you won’t be tracked. I’m not tracking opens, clicks, or forwards. I’m not analyzing your IP address location. It’s just you and me, reading and writing. I’m trying to create a small part of the Internet that is focused on people and dialog, not marketing data collection.

Visit the design-minimal but information-maximal archive of all 500 Words posts and podcasts.

The Waveform is a newsletter from Red Cup Agency about the next edge in podcasting. In each issue, I’ll stay on top of things for you. When we launch a new show or post an episode that stands out, I’ll drop that into the newsletter.

I’m Lee Schneider, founder and lead producer at Red Cup Agency. Did someone forward this email to you? You can subscribe.

What We’ve Learned After a Year and a Half of Recording Remotely (and in Closets)

You may be considering being a guest on a podcast or doing a podcast for yourself or your company. Maybe you’re worried that you have the right recording facilities. Hey, you can stop worrying. While waiting for recording studios to get back into full swing, we’re recorded more than a few tracks with the voiceover talent speaking from a closet. We’ve used plenty of spare rooms, offices, basements, and downstairs dens. Not only that, but we’ve used every kind of weird sound dampener you can imagine, including one called a Kaotica Eyeball. (It wins the award for best name)

If you’re thinking about recording a podcast, as a guest or as a host, let’s start with a couple of tech tips:

• a good mic doesn’t have to be expensive, so get one
• the room you pick to record in matters as much as the mic
• life is easier if you have a strong internet signal

Once you have a lock on those three things, everything else falls into place like magic. We send guests and hosts microphones, and we coach them through recordings. We’ve worked hard at Red Cup to perfect a system to remove the distracting sounds of the room and make recordings made in different places sound like they happened in the same place.

The Glo Podcast, Same Same but Tech, and How the River Flows are examples of podcasts we recorded remotely over the past few months.

Mission of the Lunar Sparrow

There are two actors in Mission of the Lunar Sparrow and only one of them is human. This audio drama is a proof of concept to show how to make a podcast that falls between a radio play and an audiobook. Andia Winslow plays the lead and does a wonderful job.

The show is getting write-ups and climbing in the Apple rankings for science fiction podcasts. Have a listen to the first six episodes. There will be three more for a total of nine.

Web Clips

Last week, NPR launched a subscription service. It allows listeners to opt out of ads for NPR podcasts. The price of the “sponsor-free feed” matches Spotify’s $2.99 per month subscription and offers ad-free versions of its shows. Look for a shakeout of subscription services vs. “free” distribution of podcasts via RSS. Soon, producers will have to take sides, deciding whether to be free or offer subscriptions.

This from The Daily Beast: MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow “is seriously considering leaving the network when her contract ends early next year.” Media wags say she is considering opportunities in streaming and podcasting, a nod to how powerful the podcast medium has become.

This quote from Katherine Wilkerson made me think somebody should make a podcast about it:

“The climate crisis is not gender-equal or gender-neutral,” said Wilkerson, author of All We Can Save and The Drawdown Review.

Men have a larger carbon footprint than women, by 16 percent, according to one study. And the top 1 percent of income earners globally, who are overwhelmingly male, are responsible for more carbon emissions than the bottom 50 percent of earners. According to the U.N., that’s roughly 70 million at the top, compared with 3.5 billion at the bottom. Yet it is women and girls who bear the burdens in the wake of more frequent climate disasters. Those burdens include displacement — 80 percent of people displaced by climate change are women — as well as increased homelessness, poverty, sexual violence and disease.

One Last Thing

A podcast I produce, The Glo Podcast, is a series of conversations about yoga and life. Its vibe is sincere, biographical, and rooted in discussing how we might become better humans. In complete contrast, there’s the podcast we just wrapped on after two seasons, Same Same but Tech. It’s a clever jokester of a show, and between the laughs it went deep on how tech transforms culture.

They are dramatically different podcasts. It follows that the audio trailers we made for them were also dramatically different. For The Glo Podcast trailer, we needed the music to wrap around itself and tell its story in a spiral, much like the way the podcast tells its story. The trailer for Same Same but Tech is straight like an arrow with its snappy lines and oddball sound effects, just like the show.

Working with the creative teams for both groups, I wrote both trailers in the same week, switching back and forth from one to the other in the same hour. You’d think I’d get myself terribly confused during this process, but there was something that made it simple. The host of each of those podcasts has a strong identity. 

You may have heard people say, “podcasting is all about the host.” This is true. The hosts of the best podcasts record their shows as though the two of you are the only people in the room. This is sometimes called podcasting’s intimacy. You can’t dial it down to just one word. That would be misleading. Success no doubt starts with the distinctive voice of the host. They are usually born with it, though it can be coached and made stronger. But week to week, episode by episode, the host depends on a supporting cast of writers, editors, mixers, and composers. We producers build a house for the host to inhabit. It’s a house made of audio design.

Here is the Same Same but Tech Season Two trailer and the trailer for The Glo Podcast.

Red Cup Agency. Podcast Production and Marketing.

Working with teams large and small, I take podcasts from the glimmer of an idea into production and distribution. We make trailers, ad spots and promos for your podcast, and we find new audiences for you work with cross promotion.

RED CUP SERVICES

Read Freely.

You can read freely at The Waveform. I’m not tracking opens, clicks, or forwards. I’m not analyzing your IP address location. It’s just you and me, writing and reading. This is a small part of the vast Web focused on people and dialog, not marketing data collection.

lithub.com

A close reading of the new name for the Pfizer vaccine.

docuguy I’ve been reading the lively debate here about Ulysses and Scrivener (and other writing apps). It convinced me to try Ulysses again after leaving in a huff a few years ago, when they went to the subscription model. Here are the results

📚 ✍️

I was a Ulysses user for a couple of years, until they went to a subscription plan, and that pissed me off, so I left for Scrivener. After reading some posts here on micro.blog about the superiority of Ulysses, I decided to give it a try again. (Perhaps because of the influence of @jack, I am becoming a software and platform tester?) I’m not ready to leave Scrivener, but I am going to use Ulysses for much of my everyday writing tasks and stop using IA Writer.

This post might not help you decide which of these two platforms is best for your work. Both are designed by people who clearly care about writing and who have given the writing process much thought. For long form, they both do something marvelous: You can write in small pieces and glue those pieces together. You can also write in large rivers and split up the river into tributaries. Your research lives in the same digital space and is searchable. And you can reorder scenes and chapters easily. If you ever wrote scenes on index cards and tacked them up to the wall, then moved them around until your story came together, you’ll be right at home with Scrivener or Ulysses.

I’ll try to give you a working perspective of each.

The Big Picture

Since I am a visual thinker when I write, Scrivener has an edge for me there. I like displaying my outlines as virtual index cards, as Scrivener can do. I like color coding characters and stages of drafts. With Scrivener, you can write in colors for specific revisions. In long-form work like novels, you can trace story and characters by color coding them.

Organization

Aside from the visual advantages mentioned above, both platforms help you organize long form material. It’s just a matter of taste and preference. Ulysses has introduced something they call a Material Sheet for background, character studies, and notes. That was new to me and useful. Scrivener has a sidebar you can open up for any document, passage, or chapter to put in notes. I use it every day and it works equally well on the Mac as on the iPad. Global search (and replace) is powerful on both Ulysses and Scrivener, so when you decide to change a character name from Kate to Kat, it’s no problem. Reordering scenes and chapters in an outline form is the secret weapon for any long form writer. Both Scrivener and Ulysses do it well.

I use Scrivener’s inline comments and footnotes often to remind myself something about a scene or to make notes that should make it into the next chapter. Ulysses’ inline comments are easy to use, but I find the footnotes less so.

Fake Markdown

With Scrivener, you have to write in good ol’ formatted text. I prefer Markdown, and Ulysses allows it, but their version of it, which is a kind of fake Markdown or Markdown Lite. I’ve had to learn new commands and workarounds. Real Markdown works everywhere, including in iA Writer, Bear, and other writing software. A few folks here on micro.blog have mounted impassioned screeds against Ulysses’ version of Markdown — and communicated their disaffection to the folks at Ulysses. The ire is well-deserved. Markdown is one of the few things in life that cannot be improved upon. Ulysses’ fake Markdown is maddening.

Elegance

Ulysses is the more beautiful software. It is easier on the eye. The themes are better. In Ulysses, the sync between devices is flawless. I’ve never lost anything in Scrivener, but I have worried about it. Scrivener requires Dropbox to sync, and it feels a little kluge-y. I’ve had “conflicted files” more than once when popping back and forth between the iPad and my MacBook Pro. With Scrivener, I have to remember to close and backup my work on one device before opening it on another. That’s never necessary in Ulysses.

Ulysses has vastly improved its style/grammar checker. There’s no need to export a document into another else. (I’ve used it for this doc, so let me know if I missed anything!)

With Scrivener, I use ProWriter Aid, a terrific software and platform that sucks in Scrivener-formatted documents, Word docs, and Google Docs, and makes short work of corrections and mistakes. It’s an ad-on, though, and makes for another step. Scrivener does have a final-read writer’s helper that removes extra spaces between words and sentences. It also has a name generator for characters. I’ve used the name generator a few times, but I always use the routine that removes extra spaces after sentences. My hands still have typewriter habits. This is written in Ulysses, so if you see some extra spaces after a period or two, you’ll know why.

Outputs

Eventually, you have to get the work out of the magic box. Ulysses (and IA Writer for that matter) have seamless publishing to Ghost, micro.blog, Medium and WordPress. Scrivener requires some wrangling. I’ve written three long-form book projects in Scrivener and have never quite mastered the output process (called Compile in Scrivener). As part of my editing process, I create PDF page proofs to mark up in iPad/Pencil apps like Goodnotes and Nebo. It took me weeks to get an output from Scrivener that I liked. Using Scrivener to create a Word doc to send to Kindle, Lulu, or Blurb — is, to quote Snoopy, blech. I’ve never gotten it right the first time and had to burn hours of my life in Word, my least favorite program of all time, to tweak it.

With Ulysses, you can export your work into DOCX and continue formatting in Word, but if you want to save time, Ulysses offers some slick templates that may serve your needs. Scrivener also has templates, but I find them overly complicated and, as I wrote above, hard to get right.

The Wrap Up

As you’ve probably guessed, I can’t decide for you between Scrivener and Ulysses because I can’t decide myself. I’m drawn to Ulysses’ elegant ease of use, but I need Scrivener’s down-in-the-dirt granularity and control. Ulysses has pretty templates, but I can view my work in fresh ways in Scrivener. I’m going to finish the novel I’m writing now in Scrivener, and then we’ll see what happens when I export it for printing (probably to Lulu, but I have used Blurb, Smashwords, and Kindle as well). Vellum has been my go-to for formatting. But if Ulysses can deliver a print-ready DOCX or PDF, I might try it.

A taste for lab-grown meat: In an online poll, 19 percent of American adults responded “Yes, I am eager to try” cell-cultured meat when it becomes available, while 78 percent of meat eaters said they would prefer “real meat” in the long run. (Piplsay)

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1967) Source

We’ve heard the unfortunate term “digital sharecroppers,” which refers to everyone who is posting their life story on a platform that they do not control. We’ve known for a while that in the hands of Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and LinkedIn the intimate details of our lives are mere marketing data. These platforms don’t call themselves publishers, although they should. They pretend they are only in business to help us communicate with each other.

Here’s the strange thing: We know this, but we continue to publish on these big platforms because, well, they’re big. Their audiences are big. There is always the promise that someone outside our small circle of friends and colleagues will discover us on a global platform. It’s an illusion, of course. The platforms are metering our posts, presenting them to only a few in our feed (unless we promote them with an ad). Still, we play on because it seems worth it. There is always the hope that someone else will discover us, or even that a post will somehow go viral. More friends, more business, more fame — whatever we are seeking will be ours.

If we get off that treadmill for a moment and look around, we will see that the topography has changed. We are on to another level of all this, signaled this week when Facebook announced its virtual office product called Horizon Workrooms. Facebook wants to capture more territory, and the landscape they crave, the geography they are planting their flag in is not physical, but inside us. They want to claim just a little more of our consciousness. It’s information imperialism in action. We’ve long known that the real estate inside our brain is valuable to marketers. Let’s remember, though, that Google and Facebook are full-on AI companies now. They need data to train their AIs. We’ve known for a while that Facebook, Google, Amazon, even Apple, want to collect enough information about us so they can anticipate where we will click before we click. Of course, as companies building more advanced machine learning models — secret models — they will be taking this adventure in data capture beyond mere marketing. But where are they really going with it? That’s the question.

I don’t have the answer now. But I am certain that, like imperialists of the past, our friendly AI-building publishers are rolling open their maps and sectioning off territory that they plan to control. This time they are not opening maps of mountains, rivers, and farmland. This time, they are building a map of the inside of everyone’s mind.

Tomorrow is the day for a new episode of Mission of the Lunar Sparrow. I’ve been having fun editing the trailers in Descript. You audio and podcast folks may have heard of that platform. It’s a visual way of editing audio. Catch up on the Lunar Sparrow’s mission here. futurex.network/mission-o…

Episode 4 is out and I’m already getting started on the mix for episode 5. futurex.network/mission-o…

Greetings!

Episode 4 of Mission of the Lunar Sparrow drops today.

Commander Field touches down on the lunar surface to find herself smack in the middle of a crisis with a damaged spacecraft and a limited power supply.

Here’s what happens: Commander Field’s perfect lunar landing becomes less than perfect when she discovers a problem with her spacecraft. Her chance to inspect the mining equipment drop point may fade away, placing her mission in jeopardy. She makes the call to go outside on the surface and attempt to make repairs.

Something Amazing

Last week we got close to breaking through the Top 100 Science Fiction podcasts on Apple.

For a teeny-tiny podcast like Mission of the Lunar Sparrow this is nothing less than … [ahem] a moonshot. If you like what you’re hearing and want to help this moonshot, please recommend the podcast to friends. You can forward them this email or send them a few links. Getting us more visible in the Apple universe will help more people discover the show.

Thanks for listening,

Lee

Episode 4 at FutureX, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.

Mission of the Lunar Sparrow was produced for the FutureX network. Production by Red Cup Agency.

Not Tracking

Here at 500 Words you won't be tracked. I’m not tracking opens, clicks, or forwards. I’m not analyzing your IP address location. It’s just you and me, reading and writing. I’m trying to create a small part of the Internet that is focused on people and dialog, not marketing data collection.

Visit the design-minimal but information-maximal archive of all 500 Words posts and podcasts.

Currently reading: The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking by Roman Krznaric 📚

Started out strong with good ideas. Hit a slump in the middle, recycling said ideas. Now in the last quarter and going strong again with research new to me and unusual thinking.

Must read (again) Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Announcing …. creative working groups for writers, podcasters, and actors working in a futurist mode. If you’re thinking about getting a fiction project to take flight … or have one in progress that needs a community … futurex.studio is for you. futurex.network/studio

Meander, Spiral, Explode

“If narrative naturally wants to flow toward its end but doesn’t want to get there yet the pleasure’s in the journey- it might hold back by strewing conflicts, boulders, along the way, as an adventure story might. But it might be bored by classic conflict, so instead lingers by flowing along an extravagant arabesque of detours: this is what meandering narratives do. A meander begins at one point and moves toward a final one, but with digressive loops. Italo Calvino says that digression is a strategy for putting off the ending. “ ― Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode, p. 70

Still life with water bottle.

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