I seem to have this constitutional inability to resist doing shows. Last Friday was the last episode of season 10, and I announced then that the first episode of season 11, new name and all, would take place on the third Friday of the month.
Nevertheless, I have been doing episodes on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Fridays of each month, and today’s the 2nd Friday. So, a bonus episode, in the interregnum between the old name and the new. What can I say? I’m just an old softie, really.
Btw, the copy of the Ankh-Morpork Archives Vol. 1 is still up for grabs, as I came up with the new show name myself. So, I’m going to give the book to one of the first five people to email me with the subject header, “Blog Reader.” What are you waiting for?
As I continue to think about, plan, and work on season 11 of what will be, in many ways, a new and different podcast, there are days like today, when I feel frustrated. There are a lot of things I want to, or am already trying to do. I want to get my YouTube channel rolling, and I feel like I’ve made only the barest start on that. I want to get the older episodes of the show on the channel, and I want to have a video of the staff at the end of each one. (Fortunately I have plenty to work with there.) But I still need a lot of practice putting those videos together.
Then there’s the question of audio quality on the old episodes, especially the first couple of seasons. I have the capability to clean up the audio and replace the old editions of the show with better ones in terms of sound quality, but that’s a time-consuming process as well.
Then there’s music, and sound effects. I want to get both of those into the show, as well.
I’m not complaining though—just letting off a little steam, I suppose. As the director of the homeless shelter I worked at back in the teens used to say, “How do you eat an elephant?”
So, there are some interesting things happening here at the Medieval Gnome Productions studios, aka my living room, and some interesting things happening outside as well. Let’s stick with the in-the-living-room, or perhaps more accurately in-the-Gnome’s-head things.
As the end of Season Ten, and thus of 100 regular episodes approaches I feel good about where the shows are going. The GEM Show, favored by a select group of about six listeners (really) is about to feature a new book—Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. We just did Doyle’s Lost World, so it seems appropriate. If you’re interested in listening to an audio-book-with-commentary, The GEM Show’s the one for you. (And what’s the deal with all these hyphens today? I guess my PC has a superfluity that needs using up. Dontcha just love the word superfluity?)
It’s the Portal, of course, that brings most of you to this blog. And the Portal is going to be going through some changes, for the better, for Season 11.
First of all is the name change, of course. I’m still looking for ideas for a new name; a new name which may or may not include the word portal. If you have an idea, shoot me an email at the usual place (randy@mindkindle.net) but do it soon if you want to be in the running for a copy of The Ankh-Morpork Archives, a brand-new book that was just published on the 10th.
Btw if any of you are up on copyright law, please shoot me an email. I want to make sure I get it right this time.
I’m also pondering a fairly major format change for the portal along with the name change. In fact, I’ve decided to do it, at least in occasional episodes, but if I go the bundle on it, it would be… well, very different. Stay tuned.
The staff are doing well. They’re having their morning nap at the moment. (Did you know that adult cats sleep up to 20 hours a day?)
Write if you get work—or not. I’d love to hear from you.
We’re talking strictly about the evolution of this site, which was originally called “kindling minds.” That’s still the ultimate purpose.
But the site is morphing into one more exclusively focused on Medieval Gnome Productions: the podcasts we do, our amazing staff, the Discworld, the podcasting experience, podcasting sausages inna bun. All named meat! Get ’em here! Fifty pence, and that’s cutting my own throat.
Throat does indeed sneak through the portal sometimes and raise a little minor havoc. It’s actually quite fun having him around, as long as I know I can send him back soon after he’s come.
Thank goodness. And thanks for visiting. I hope you’ll leave a comment (if you’d like.) Mind how you go.
Some people find a new interest and stick with it. Others discover a new enthusiasm, and then lose interest over time. Or I guess maybe most of us do both, although one tends to predominate. It’s like the differentiations on the Myers-Briggs, et al. “Feelers think, and thinkers feel” was one of the first things we were taught in studying personality type.
My interest in personality type was engendered by my interest in learning styles. I became enthusiastic about that topic in the summer of 1990, and I incorporated it into my teaching thereafter. Not only did I use it to try to understand myself and my students better, but I specifically taught it so that they might get a better understanding of others in their lives, particularly their teachers.
Ideally, teachers should “bridge” the gap between their styles and those of their teachers. In practice that is difficult to do, but it’s well worth the effort to understand, and at least part of the time, teach to those students who are on the other side of the circle from us as teachers.
If you’re not familiar with the concept, personality type can be identified through a set of four oppositional pairs: thinking/feeling; sensing/intuition; introvert/extrovert; judging/perceiving. These four pairs can then be combined into sixteen distinct personality types. For example, I am an INFP. I am an Introvert; I rely on my iNtuition more than sensory input; I tend to rely on my Feelings more than my Thoughts; and I view Perception of the world more important than making Judgements about it. The chart below summarizes all this.
There is of course a lot more to it. Some people dismiss it as a load of hooey. Interestingly enough, they tend to be clustered around the S and J identifiers; thus ISTJ, ESTJ, INSJ, and ENSJ in particular. The opposite is true for those who identify and N (iNtuition; since I is already in use for Introverstion) and P. That’s me, as and INFP.
You can conclude a lot about a person’s learning style, based on their personality type. If you google “learning styles debunked” you’ll find a lot of scholarly articles doing just that. My guess would be that none of these “scholars” have ever tried to apply learning styles in their own teaching; to a large degree because they don’t do any actual teaching. They have graduate students for that. If they do “teach,” it’s by the lecture method, and students who struggle in their classes just aren’t studying enough/applying themselves/making the effort. It’s a nice tautology.
I used learning styles, as I said, in my own teaching. And I had concrete experiential proof that they worked. Of course, that’s anecdotal, and thus unacceptable in academe.
The strongest proof I got was from kids whose grades improved in other teachers’ classes, because they, as students, were able to better understand why their teachers taught as they did, and were better able to adjust themselves to a teacher’s style. N.b. This was without the teacher in question making any adjustment, or, in most cases, being ignorant of learning styles.
Ir’s been two decades since I was in a classroom, and my interest in learning styles has naturally wanted. Nevertheless I remember them fondly as a powerful tool in my “teacher’s toolkit.” Of course, I was a maverick. As far as most of my colleagues were concerned, I was a maverick who went completely off the deep end the last year I taught high school. But that’s another story.
October 1st, 2020.My older brother, who died at 27, would’ve been 73 today. He contracted Hodgkin’s lymphoma in the spring of 1973, and died the day before Thanksgiving.
I use the word “contracted” deliberately. He was an aspiring physician, and before he started his residency he spent a semester working in a medical laboratory in New England somewhere. I remember him being exposed to some nasty chemicals there. It’s been 46 years, and I don’t remember if I heard that from his lips, or from some family member. I’ve always thought the two things were connected, though.
Right now I see a connection between Covid-19 and the brazenly public presence of the militant far right. There were people with pistols on their hips at an anti-mask protest here in my small (20,000 pop) town. The really disturbing part is that they held their protest in front of the police department. A little intimidation factor there, maybe?
Then we have a ninety minute temper tantrum by a three-year-old masquerading as the President of the United States during a presidential debate. Does anyone find this surrealistic, and pathetic? How can anyone say that’s “just” politics?
Once again we are experiencing racial upheaval. The massive moral debt owed people of color in the US, unpaid for almost 400 years, has accumulated insupportable interest. When we have to be reminded that Black lives do matter, we have to stare in the face the fact that we have let a disgraceful reality fester, and that in doing so we have created and sustained an “underlying condition” that may allow the acute infections to kill us.
And hovering not only the U.S. but the entire globe is the shadow of real catastrophe. Not a pandemic which kills a few million, but a slow-moving natural disaster of Biblical proportions which kills a few billion. How are we possibly going to effectively mitigate the effects of that natural disaster when a sizeable proportion of people, including that aforementioned three-year-old, deny that it’s happening? Deny that it’s real?
What happened? In September 1939 Auden told us, “We must love one another or die.” And Yeats. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Yeats called it over a century ago.
What now? Those who consider themselves good among us must speak and act with conviction. And with love.We are aflame. We cannot stop the fire with more gasoline.
I haven’t been able to do any writing for weeks. Not even a journal entry. I am managing to keep producing the Portal, but that’s been about it. No walking. Indeed, I spent pretty much all of June in bed.
I am now boycotting the news. I just can’t stand to read about any more stupidity. And I am going to move heaven and earth to stay out of bed when I’m not sleeping, as much as humanly possible, and to start getting my walks in again.
Illegitimi non carborundum— mock Latin; genuine sentiment.
kindling minds 