jenett | Sixth Salon: Learning stuff

Welcome to our sixth salon discussion thread. Wander in, invite a friend to come along, and chat! (Not sure what's going on? Here, have a brief FAQ.) The first five went wonderfully - you can find them in my salon tag. Please take a quick look at the reminders at the bottom of this post, too.

Topic of the day: Last week, we had some conversation about interesting podcasts, and that (and several other things) got me thinking about how we keep up with the world and learn new things (or share the awesome stuff we find.)

I used to listen to NPR (Morning Edition and All Things Considered) while driving to work: now that I have a much much shorter commute, I don't. (Also, we don't have very good NPR station reception here.) I miss it, but I use a combo of being more deliberate about checking.

I also have a wide range of blogs (now in Feedly, with the demise of Google Reader) on a whole bunch of topics, and I also have the feeds for the main Metafilter and Ask.Metafilter in there, because both give me a really good way of learning about stuff (links, questions, problems people have). I also adore Longform for bringing me interesting long articles on a range of topics.

(Keeping track of the awesome is an entirely other conversation, but that's what the comments are for!)

Foodly thoughts: I'm going grocery shopping after work. Favourite summer (or winter, if you're in the southern hemisphere) food, and why? (If you want a different topic.) Me, I am delighted we are back in tomato season.

Quick reminders
-

jjhunter did a great guide to following conversations here on Dreamwidth. Also a roundup of regular Dreamwidth events.
- If you want to post anonymously, please pick a name (any name you like) that we can call you - it makes it more conversational and helps if we have more than one anon post.
- Base rule remains "Leave the conversation better than you found it, or at least not worse". If you're nervous about that, I'd rather you say something and we maybe sort out confusion later than have you not say something. (I've heard from a few people who worry they're going to say something that's going to be taken weirdly. If it helps, I am usually around and if there's a thing you'd like to get out in the conversation, but you're not sure how, feel free to PM or email or IM me, and I'll nudge the conversation that direction.)
- The FAQ still has useful stuff, and I added some thoughts about getting conversations going this week.
- Comments tend to trickle in over the course of a day or two, with a few nearly a week later: you might enjoy checking back later if you're not tracking the conversation.

Crossposts: http://jenett.livejournal.com/1259632.html

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From:

kakiphony

I listen to NPR, but since my car radio is awful I have given up on it as a delivery mechanism and just stream my local station. (They have an app for my iPhone which I use in the car, and I stream it directly from the web at my desk or at home.) Oddly, some of my favorite shows/commentators are things far outside my usual interest areas. Frank DeFord's sports commentary on Wednesday morning is a can't miss -- and I am NOT a sports enthusiast!

I also read an insane number of blogs (delivered via Old Reader now that Google Reader is dead), and I have a Sunday print subscription to the New York Times which gives me full digital access. Their news coverage is good to average, but I think their food writing and coverage of entertainment mediums is above average to excellent.

I also find that I'm getting more and more of my "what's going on in the world" feed from social media, particularly Facebook. Back in the day, people would post articles to Livejournal, but that seems to have largely stopped. Now, there are links all over my Facebook feed. I tend to see a lot of stories from the Guardian and left-leaning blog cites (HuffPo, Salon, etc).

I do wonder if my worldview is becoming narrower as my news comes more and more from friends and people with similar taste. It's one reason I try to keep up with the Times -- it tends to cover things I don't see anywhere else. (This is especially true of Business news, which I don't think I ever see on social media unless it's articles shouting about big banks.)

Edited Date: 2013-07-10 02:05 pm (UTC)

From:

jenett

I was definitely thinking about the 'people with similar taste' part - that's part of why I skim Metafilter and like Longform, because at least it sometimes gets me out of a rut.

Which is to say, I'm reasonably in sync with the general ethos on Metafilter, but people link to stuff they don't like as well as stuff they do, so it sort of helps? And Longform is great for "I would never have read about this subject at all."

I do listen to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me as a podcast, and This American Life, but I tend to only have them on when I'm housecleaning or doing more than minimal cooking (because I have a hard time listening to stuff with sentences when I'm doing other work that involves sentences, so I don't listen at work/while writing/chatting/reading other stuff online)[1] and I don't generally like spoken word stuff when walking to work because I hate stopping in the middle of a section.

(With cleaning, I'll just keep going until I hit the end of the segment or a reasonable stopping point.)

[1] Weirdly, I can listen to music and compose/work on music at the same time. This is a talent that completely puzzles people. Of course, it'd help if I were doing more music composition than I've managed any time recently.

From:

batrachian

I have a fairly extensive list of blogs and webcomics that I try to keep up with on a daily-ish basis; sometimes it works, but right now I just came off a long week where I didn't keep up and so catching up is looking more and more daunting as I go. (Most all of them have RSS feeds; it's an interesting question why I haven't rolled them into DW. Something about separation of content and my perceptions of internet structural forms.)

In terms of 'outside news', though...I really don't. The closest I've got is my DW friendspage, which tends much more towards the personal. (Which is how I like it.) I don't really watch TV, either, so usually the first I hear about some 'major news event' is after it's been discussed on DW, or in the #dreamwidth IRC channel.

From:

jenett

The catching up part is why I have the RSS reader: I deliberately don't pull it into Dreamwidth so that I can ignore it for a few days when I need to, and catch up when I do have time, without worrying I'm going to miss something, or whatever.

I tend to want to catch up by category, so f'ex, I hit the library and tech stuff more frequently, and all the Metafilter stuff - which is by far the most numerous - is in its own category so I can mark the whole thing read if I'm not going to catch up.

From:

sanacrow

I don't "listen" for info all that much because of some hearing issues and some auditory processing issues. I've tried various podcasts and radio broadcasts, but it just doesn't work for me. (Although I do get Rachel Maddow's video podcast.)

I do read Shakesville almost every day. That gives me some political commentary, a lot of social justice info, and some just plain fun stuff as well. (Plus there are some awesome folks there who help me be a better womanist and a better person.)

I use the Pulse app on my ipad a lot. I can scan the headlines of several feeds and read as much as I have time/brain for on any particular day. The ones I read most often are The Mary Sue, Alternet, Think Progress, and Rachel Maddow (which is often video rather than text). The ones I scan to keep up with the rest of the universe are the AP Top News feed, Best of Politics, Best of Science, Salon, BoingBoing, and BBC News. I've also got feeds for XKCD, Fail Blog, Cute Overload and Flickr Top Photos, because sometimes news is just too much to deal with.

I also get a lot of info from my FaceBook, and from my Tumbler. (Although my Tumbler is mostly brainless stuff and pretty girl pictures, I do have Seanan McGuire and Gradient Lair on there, plus a couple of other clueful things that I learn from.)

From:

I get a lot of info from my facebook page, too. It is quick and easy for me. I feel like I need to do some time magic because I'm wishing for more of it to stay caught up on offline life along with not missing the things online that make me happy.

From: (Anonymous)

I'm also a Feedly convert for blogs of various types. I like it OK, except that it's geared toward marking unread instead of marking read. That is, I tend to read blogs where the entries are long with lots of pictures and links and it may take me several tries to get all the way done. I want everything to remain unread until I specifically mark it as read, instead of the reverse.

My blogs are categorized as follows:

Arts and Crafts -- knitting, sewing, art
Art and Craft -- magic and Paganism
Predictive -- astrology
Food -- self explanatory

Plus some stray stuff.

For news, I listen to NPR in the car, watch the local news for weather, traffic, other local stuff, and occasionally check news websites (though I try to restrict that last for the sake of my sanity).

Favorite summer food: berries. Growing up in New Mexico, berries were a rare treat, ungrowable, and really expensive. Now I can get tons of varieties (Tarberries, who ever heard of a Tarberry?) at the local market, in my garden, or along any random country lane.

From:

jenett

For the long things I want to keep reading, I drop them into Instapaper, and just pull them up from there.

My categories - I used to have the work-related RSS feeds separate from the non-work ones, but don't want to juggle two Feedly accounts, so... (104 feeds total, though most of them don't update daily.)

- Academia (non-library education/higher ed blogs)
- Authors (self-explanatory)
- Astronomy
- Comics
- Legal issues (copyright, Popehat, related things.)
- Food (mostly recipe blogs)
- Knitting
- Libraries
- Pagan
- Practicalities (organisation blogs, Askamanager, stuff about doing things)
- Technology (like it says on the tin)
- People (My boss's blog.
- Thinky (stuff that I know is going to take me more time to process - Longform lives here. Powered by Osteons.)
- Voluminous Reading (Metafilter)

Re: From Venecia

From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2013-07-11 03:13 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

untonuggan

I have to ask - what is a Tarberry?

Re: From Venecia

From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2013-07-10 08:00 pm (UTC) - Expand

Re: From Venecia

From:

untonuggan - Date: 2013-07-12 04:24 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

untonuggan

I try to keepup with blogs and things, but I have found that right now (and often, really) I do not have Cope for News. I just...don't. So I absorb the Most Important Bits from those in my immediate household, and just...let go of having to know everything at all times. Not that knowing things is bad, it's just knowing stressful things (which is what News News usually is) is bad for my brain and mental health. Sometimes I forget and go into Righteously Angry Rants and Letter Writing Campaigns. These may be good for posterity, but are often followed by...hospitalizations. So, yes. Top of list of cope: Do not read the newspaper even if it's on the dining room table.

From:

jjhunter

Quick comment now, more later: I get a lot of my news and food for thought via the podcasts I subscribe to.

Of the following list, I've added a '^' to the podcasts I recommend with passionate enthusiasm, and a 'v' before those I recommend with reservation. (The rest need no modifier - they're simply excellent.) If you listen to any of these yourself, by the way, feel free to jump in with a reply about what you get out of it and why other people should listen too. Likewise, if there are any that are entirely new to you & you'd like to know more about, tell me which: I'll respond with a haiku-worth of blurb per.

From:

oyceter

Oooo, adding Backstory to my podcast subscriptions, thanks!

Re: ask me podcasts

From:

jjhunter - Date: 2013-07-10 11:37 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

finch

I watch the local news at least once or twice a week while getting dressed for work - and the local fox affiliate is the only one showing news that late. And twice a week in the gym I situate myself on the bike between the TV station showing Rachel Maddow and the one showing Hannity. I leave my music on but I end up reading the CCs on both (compulsive reader when there are words in front of me) and I figure that balances out all the commie liberals I read online.

I used to get my fair-and-balanced from cousins on Facebook but I think I had them all during the last election. I do read HuffPo, because life is too short to make myself want to stab conservatives all the time, and I read local papers like the Oregonian online.

I read a couple dozen blogs via NewsBlur, including some SJ ones and some legal ones like SCOTUSblog and Popehat, as well as writing, craft, and spiritual blogs, and a curated selection of Mormon Mommy Blogs and cutesy home decor blogs to make sure I feel inadequate without custom labels on matching jars in my pantry, and a couple of extremist prepper blogs to keep me paranoid. My favorite is when the mommy blogs and the prepper blogs intersect.

I figure that I'm doing a reasonable spread from anarchic liberalism though mainstream and out to conspiracy theories, which are overwhelmingly conservative, so I get a good mix.

I don't do NPR or a lot of podcasts mainly because I have audio processing difficulties and so I don't actually get everything unless I'm focusing on them. I do occasionally find myself listening to Stuff You Should Know and Stuff You Missed In History Class on longer car rides, though.

From:

kakiphony

I am a huge fan of seasonal foods, although my seasons run a little later than most of the country because I live on the 45th parallel.

Spring: Asparagus (I would eat it every day) and rhubarb -- and I'm JUST out of spring season here!
Summer: Tomatoes, peaches and sweet corn. I especially love cherry tomatoes -- I throw them in a cast iron skillet on the grill with a little olive oil, salt and pepper and they are divine.

I also love my herbs in the summer. I've been eating basil almost every day for the past month and just can't get enough of it.

From:

From:

kakiphony - Date: 2013-07-11 01:13 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

magenta

My favorite summer foods are tomatoes and cucumbers. Which is why we had gazpacho for dinner last night.

Later, pesto will move into the top spot, but my basil is still at the 4 leaf stage, and only one of those. I will probably have to swap, or, *gasp*, buy basil this year.

From:

silveradept

Most of my gathering for the human information aggregation that I do as most of my postings comes from my circles on DW, my friend list on LiveJournal, and a couple of extra sources, such as the Maddow Show podcast and associated blog, and some blogs that are very invested in feminism and women's issues. The thing I'm missing, really, is an excellent conservative news aggregator / source to take the place of what Quick News did on LJ.

When I was just a student, I could go through lots of things daily. Now that there's work and other things, I'm lucky to have a post every two weeks. I still learn lots, just based on my profession and habits, but now I have to get very efficient about it.

From:

jenett

I like your roundups! (And part of why I thought about this topic for the day is that I was sorting through links and realising how long it'd been since I did one on the professional blog.)

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silveradept - Date: 2013-07-10 07:53 pm (UTC) - Expand

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From:

jenett - Date: 2013-07-10 10:48 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

stormyhearted

I haven't had the spoons to keep up with much in the way of serious news for quite a while, but I do use my RSS reader on a daily basis- with the demise of Google Reader, I switched to The Old Reader, but I'm not loving it. Anyone find a new reader they love? (Or at least like a lot?)

From:

jenett

I'm using Feedly, which occasionally does things that make me blink (and the iPad app is cranky and won't let me log in properly), but which has a pleasant sorting mechanism, an easy way to mark stuff read, and so on.

(And multiple different formats for reading: I do the 'small picture + 4-5 lines of text version)

Re: RSS reader recommendations?

From:

finch - Date: 2013-07-10 07:17 pm (UTC) - Expand

Re: RSS reader recommendations?

From:

sanacrow - Date: 2013-07-10 10:55 pm (UTC) - Expand

Re: RSS reader recommendations?

From:

jenett - Date: 2013-07-10 10:58 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

leanne

Mmm. Summer food. Sushi and summer rolls top my list. Tomatoes and tomato-avocado salad, too.

From:

jenett

Do you have a good recipe for summer rolls? Or a place to point me at ways to think about making them?

(no subject)

From:

leanne - Date: 2013-07-10 11:33 pm (UTC) - Expand

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From:

st_aurafina - Date: 2013-07-11 06:57 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

kyrielle

I am very much a language learning - not audio, not visual, *words* in either format. (Diagrams, I can use; they do not, however, work for me as words do. Spoken or written words, both effective, though I prefer to be able to refer back to it.)

I am therefore mining the comments here for blogs and podcasts and so on!

Alas, two children under five and a full time job means VERY little reading time. However, I have an annoyingly long commute (average 1.5-2 hours per day, round trip) which I have partly managed to leverage. I listen to lectures from online university courses (mostly Coursera) as I drive.

As someone I know said when I mentioned using the audio format, they read faster than people speak. So do I, but I can't do in a moving car, and I keep the radio tuned strictly to the couple stations whose traffic reports actually encompass most of my route rather than only this or that bit of it. As a result, online courses or podcasts are my friend.

(Audio books *aren't*. Things written to be read and not to be heard *sound* wrong when read aloud, and it jars me. There are exceptions, but the tedium and expense or time limitations of trawling through audio books is just *not* worth it to me.)

Of course, if I didn't have the commute of doom, I could read more stuff...sigh.

From:

kyrielle

What's not to love about the bounty of summer foods? Watermelon, tomatoes, zucchini (within reason...), LEMON CUCUMBERS (seriously, those things are excellent), raspberries, strawberries, peaches....

Okay, now I'm hungry. And I ate well for lunch. Heh.

From:

aamcnamara

I stopped by the farmers' market today and found local raspberries. Reader, I bought them...

(I am used to food co-ops like there are everywhere in Minneapolis, that try to get local everything; out here in Boston I am struggling to find local produce that isn't the weekly farmers' market. Starting to suspect I was just spoiled in MN.)

Re: Food.

sanacrow

Tomatoes. Watermelon and cantaloupe. Peaches and summer plums. Fresh baby salads. Summer chili. Potato salad. Coney dogs (no tears, please) with limeade and lots of silliness with friends. Sushi. (But then, I almost always want sushi.) Shaved ice. Orange and yoghurt freezer pops. Frozen grapes. Banana custard. Homemade Key lime pie (mine is tart enough to bite back).

Okay. Now I need to go find something to eat. I'm hungry.

From:

killing_rose

I am still getting used to my new state's produce and seasonal foods.

I bitterly miss salmon and salmonberries and watermelonberries; I like the various fruits and vegetables we're getting in our CSA (chard, carrots, carrot greens, and so on), but... Lords and ladies, the salmon are running, and it annoys me that I'm several thousand miles away.

Sockeye is 12 dollars at my local grocery store, and the last time I paid more than 5 dollars for salmon, it was because I bought several pounds 10 minutes after they came in from the docks.

Salmon. I wants it.

From:

jenett

Oh, yes, regional foods.

I'm still going "Oh, wait, I could, y'know, buy lobster and cook it" (though I need a thing to cook it *in* and something to help me go at the claws.) But I'm back in the land where lobster is cheap food, and cheaper than steak, and sometimes cheaper than happily raised chicken.

(This is the difference between soft-shell lobster and hard shell. See, after lobsters molt their shells, the new shell stays soft for a bit, which means they get caught, but they don't hold up well to transit. And people also think the soft-shell meat is more tender and has more flavour, though there's usually proportionately less of it.)

So they're really really common in Maine, and they're particularly good for lobster rolls, and the hard shell get shipped elsewhere. (You can also basically tear them apart by hand when they're cooked, and they're fun like that.)

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killing_rose - Date: 2013-07-10 11:57 pm (UTC) - Expand

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From:

jenett - Date: 2013-07-11 12:08 am (UTC) - Expand

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From:

elisem - Date: 2013-07-11 12:31 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

jjhunter

Now that we're into summer, it's time to revisit one of my all-time favorite recipe sets: Recipes for 101 Simple Salads for the Season [NYTimes Magazine]

This list has been my inspiration for such delights as quick & easy watermelon mint feta salad: watermelon cubed small, feta crumbled, and a moderate drizzle of mint sauce make for a colorful & delicious side dish. If you've got fresh mint on hand, mince a few leaves and add them to the mix for bonus elegance + minty deliciousness.

n.b. that this is best the day-of; any leftovers the next day will still be good, but they wouldn't be quite as amazingly great as the fresh version.

-

Do you have any favorite salad recipes that go far afield from the stereotypical 'caesar salad' version of salad?

From:

jenett

Oooh. Good topic.

My aforementioned tomato, mozarella, basil, pinch of salt, drizzle of olive oil, drizzle of basalmic vinegar.

Cucumbers and dill and some diced onion and garlic and yogurt. (Tzatiki, basically, but if you have more cucumbers than other stuff, it's more or less a salad.)

I do one that is basically
- a can of black beans, drained,
- a can of corn, drained,
- a can of black olives, drained
- as many tomatoes as I feel like dicing up (usually 2-3 sizeable ones) ,
- an avocado or maybe two
- lime juice
- cilantro (it's better with, if you don't think cilantro tastes like soap, but you can make it without if your tastebuds do not like it.)
- a pinch of salt

Mix, let sit, it's better if it marinates for a day in the fridge. Eat by itself, or with tortilla chips.

Also, because I cannot believe I started a food conversation and have not yet mentioned it: I generally go wandering to the Smitten Kitchen when I want inspiration (link is to the recipe index). Everything I've made from her recipes has come out well (and some of it has turned out *astonishingly* awesome) and I just plain like her posts.

Re: Foodly thoughts: unusual salads

From:

theora - Date: 2013-07-11 02:31 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

aamcnamara

I realized the other day after buying some sweet corn, boiling it, and biting in...that it wasn't really truly summer until that moment. Fresh sweet corn is one of those tastes that will always be associated with summer for me, and vice versa.

From:

firecat

I get most of my news from my FB feed, which is definitely too rarified. So I recently also started reading the weekly news roundups at The Economist because it has world news as well as US news. The Economist is certainly pro-capitalism and has a reputation for being ragingly conservative but I don't find it so, at least not as measured by US standards.

I also love linkspams for learning about things.

andrewducker does a good one.

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Sixth Salon: Learning stuff

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