I'm not taking a "stance" I am just surprised. People can enjoy what they like and as long as it isn't hurting anyone (that doesn't want to be hurt), then I do not care. I just didn't expect it from forumites.
I am genuinely surprised that people want this kind of information about Rym and Scott. Why does anyone except themselves and a few personal friends care what their living arrangement and the details of their personal lives? What is this, the gossip-mag portion of the thread?
For me, I think, taking interest in the exploits of two podcast personalities like Rym & Scott is akin to taking interest in television characters. Both of them present entertaining and interesting personalities on the show, and if you listen to the podcast for a long time you start to (subconsciously) build a vague chronology of their lives. My head turns this timeline into a narrative, it is made interesting by their banter and thoughts on the subject, and all together it causes me to anticipate the next event in the narrative of Scrym's Life. It's definitely not to the point where I would pursue more facts about their lives, but as a part of the show I do find it entertaining.
I mentioned splitting up with my girlfriend on my podcast, and since have got quite a few emails with lines like "are you going to talk more about it?" In this case, probably not. However, I understand the listeners' curiosity. I thought my show would be feature 5 to 10 minute episodes, with nothing but quick opinions. But it has grown along with the listenership, and people make strong connections and really care about people who they listen to every week.
I know what they feel like too! I've been listening to to the SGU podcast for over three years now, and in that time one of the hosts died and another got married. Even though i've never met these people, and only exchanged one or two emails, I care about big events in their lives like this as much, if not more so, than similar events in the lives of people I *actually* know.
I'm not taking a "stance" I am just surprised. People can enjoy what they like and as long as it isn't hurting anyone (that doesn't want to be hurt), then I do not care. I just didn't expect it from forumites.
A odd thing occurs with any radio where you talk a lot about yourself and your life (from Howard Stern to Geeknights) People get a window into your personal life. The more people listen and hear about your life the more attached they feel to you even though there is no real connection. As someone who forms connections easily with people, I already feel like I know many podcasters I listen to (and over the years I've actually met quite a few of them) but I always have to remind myself that I do not actually know these people because I end up knowing more about them then I know about some real-life friends I have. What further cements this bond is when you have some feedback or community around the show like a Forum. I know every-time I quit listening to a podcast that I've listened to a long time it's feels almost like losing a friend. But some people are like that...
A odd thing occurs with with any radio where you talk a lot about yourself and your life (from Howard Stern to Geeknights) People get a window into your personal life. The more people listen and hear about your life the more attached they feel to you even though there is no real connection. As someone who forms connections easily with people, I already feel like I know many podcasters I listen to (and over the years I've actually met quite a few of them) but I always have to remind myself that I do not actually know these people because I end up knowing more about them then I know about some real-life friends I have. What further cements this bond is when you have some feedback or community around the show like a Forum. I know every-time I quit listening to a podcast that I've listened to a long time it's feels almost like losing a friend. But some people are like that...
This actually happened to me very slowly and very subtly. When I realized it happened, it creeped me out and I stopped listening to Geeknights. Now I only listen when something piques my interest.
EDIT: Thanks, I knew "peaks" didn't look right, but I couldn't for the life of me remember the correct word.
I am genuinely surprised that people want this kind of information about Rym and Scott
This illustrates a long-term point we've been making, that there is no more privacy in the world, and no point in trying to preserve it. We are leading increasingly public lives, which will only be more public as time advances. To fully engage in the society of the next few decades, privacy will be the price, and the result will be what I like to call "Web 3.0." It's not the "semantic web," but the truly interlinked one envisioned by Tim Berners Lee, where every device is a publisher as much as a consumer, where communities exist not at a web site, but as a web site (or, more properly, as something roughly analogous to a "web site").
It's going to be, in the free places of the world, an open world. We cannot stop it without stopping our own advancement, so all the better to address the concerns full-on and ahead of the wave.
Maybe it'll still be two a week.
The format of the show is not changing.
Aren't a lot of the FRC all over the east coast now?
With a few exceptions, we're almost all in the sphere of New York City right now. We've been consolidating. The core is in New York, with colonies in Philly and Albany. (And one in Texas ^_~) We spread after university, and now we've all come back together into a network of houses and apartments effectively open to all in the crew.
I am a very big fan of everything you guys do.
Awww, shucks. We're a fan of you, too. (Host another FNPL!)
The greatest FNPL we ever did was when the group ganged up on R&S; about how people drift apart and they said the FRC would go on unchanged forever. Yet change happens.
I would still argue that the FRC has done nothing but get closer. Certain people who have recently begun to spend more time with the inner crew, and I'm sure they could speak as to how tight-knit of a family we are. ^_~
As for the forthcoming awesome, it sprung largely out of PAX. To hint at it, I'll simply say that we escalated our live programming after first stepping into the anime circuit. Having maximized that realm (the low-hanging fruit, if you will), we moved on with tentative steps into gaming with our first lecture at PAX 2008. That first step escalated yet again, and upcoming PAXes and other large conventions will see us doing with gaming what we've already done with anime). Gaming was a harder nut to crack, since it has a thriving, professional stateside industry, unlike anime, but we've done very well for ourselves. By next year, we'll be in the same position in gaming that we're currently in with anime. We're now using this as leverage to escalate into the next realm.
Where all of this is leading is difficult to say, but we're growing at a rate that is just barely manageable. We spend most of our time maintaining our new growth, and increasingly we have less and less time to plan for each next stage of growing. (Notice, for example, that we've very suddenly come to be the heads of panels for Connecticon, joined the panels staff for Otakon, committed to a massive amount of programming for the PAXes (and another yet-to-be-announced convention). What I can say, however, is that GeekNights isn't going to disappear, not by any means. It's growing too hot and too fast to drop it. In the next year, we're going to be doing everything we can to fan the flames.
To fully engage in the society of the next few decades...
To fully engage in society? How do you define fully engage? Unless you make yourself a public figure, it is fairly easy to keep a relative amount of privacy and not everyone can, nor wants to, be a public figure. Just because they are not a public figure doesn't mean that they aren't fully engaged with society.
As to the FRC breaking apart, even if we live across the the world, we all still meet up and stay in contact. Really, distance is a minor issue when your friends function as a family.
To fully engage in society? How do you define fully engage? Unless you make yourself a public figure, it is fairly easy to keep a relative amount of privacy and not everyone can, nor wants to, be a public figure. Just because they are not a public figure doesn't mean that they aren't fully engaged with society.
Unless you make yourself a public figure, it is fairly easy to keep a relative amount of privacy and not everyone can, nor wants to, be a public figure.
That's all going to change. You realize, for example, there is technology, which anyone could acquire or make, which could map your movements throughout your own private house, trivially, from the outside? You cell phone can track where you are pretty accurately. Your web browsing habits are not too difficult to dig up if one really desires to see them. Fast forward a decade, and there will be no effective privacy in most realms. Technology reveals information far more rapidly than it can hide it, and it will become increasingly trivial to discover just about any information about a person that you wish. I don't believe there is any way in the world to prevent this.
Just because they are not a public figure doesn't mean that they aren't fully engaged with society.
More and more as time goes on, the only ways to take advantage of advancing social technology will be to trade away privacy for it. When the technorati organize themselves with auto-shared calendars aggregated with auto-shared GPS coordinates, biometrics, public messaging, augmented reality, and the like, they will be moving outside the circles of anyone who does not do the same. Privacy will be tantamount to cutting oneself off, just as not using the Internet currently cuts people off. Being private in the future will be like a business not having a web site today. More and more, things that aren't on the net are ignored entirely by the technological generation.
Look at the Internet. The most engaged people are the ones with public personas. Facebook profiles, Linkedin profiles, blogs, etc... These people all reveal a great deal of public information to others who do so in kind. They move in social circles which would be entirely impossible without this information sharing. The more you share, the more you can engage. People without web sites or social networking profiles are practically invisible on the Internet, and are taking part in only half of what it has to offer. The passive side of the net is the least interesting and least advancing part of it now. The be a part of the next generation, we have to be on the active side, or we'll cease to exist.
Look at banking, as an example. Right now, even in the US, there are two completely separate banking "societies." The first, with which we are all engaged, is the normal banking world. We have checking and savings accounts, get mortgages, have ATM cards and debit cards and credit cards. We have direct deposit paychecks available to us. We're part of one realm, one society, of economy. But, there is a separate world, almost entirely cut off from us, of people who don't engage. They have no bank accounts. They cash their paychecks at corner stores. They get loans from payday businesses. They do not have access to ATMs. These people are living in a different economic world. They are invisible to us, in our world.
Society is the same way. The culture and society of the Internet is almost entirely cut off from that of the non-net-enabled people of the world. We engage and communicate in entirely different ways, and have entirely different options available to us. You, using a walled-garden forum like this, are engaging in ways that those left behind never will. We live in a different social world.
Privacy will, in the long run, be just as important of a deciding factor. Even now, the people who publish and are public are diverging from those who primarily consume on the Internet. Bloggers and podcasters and twitterers are slowly breaking away even from their similar Internet brethren. To be private is to fall behind.
To add to what Rym is saying, it will be possible to live privately in the coming world, but doing so will come at great expense. Think of the hicks who live in the woods. I'm talking about the true mountain folk, who stay on a hill and never come down.
In the coming world, you will be able to find out about these people. Sattelite imagery already shows you the location of their homes. Other technologies will make it possible to track their movements. However, they will still live privately because nobody will care. If all your information is on Google, but nobody cares to search for you, you're still effectively private.
The thing is, if you want to engage with society in any meaningful way, you will reveal information about yourself. Want to buy something at a store? Even if you use cash, the cameras in the store will see you. The point of sale system will scan the barcode or RFID. You drove to the store in a car? You have a license plate, and maybe a GPS, and maybe a phone. Now anybody who cares, knows a fuckton of information about you. As that info becomes organized in databases and becomes searchable, you become a public figure. Maybe someone who is a fan of the product you purchased will e-mail you and ask how you like it? Maybe someone who lives nearby and had a bad experience at the store will try to relate to you?
If you try to hide, and be a private person, you'll have a very hard time. Even if you succeed in concealing this information about yourself, you'll become a nobody, like the mountain folk. You'll apply for a job, and there won't be any data available on you. That will be incredibly strange to employers. You'll meet a new friend at a show, and barely any info about you shows up on their screen, it will be very very strange.
I think there are a lot of good things about privacy. I mean, we don't want the Chinese government to know if some Chinese person buys an anti-communist book, right? We don't want employers to be able to see medical records, right? I agree, we want to keep these things private. If I thought it were possible, I would definitely say we should do it. But with all I have seen, technology makes it impossible. The cost of keeping secrets is impossibly large. A lot of people are going to be unhappy, but privacy is impossible to maintain. It will be far more productive for our society to just accept that fact, instead of uselessly fighting against it. Let us come up with strategies to cope in a world where all information is public, rather than continue to fight for what can not be.
Think of the music companies. They have fought for years and years for copyright, and the simple reality of the world is that technology has broken their business model. By clinging to it, they have suffered mightily. If they had accepted reality early on, they could be living it up right now. Their refusal to accept that the world has changed, and that they must adapt to it, cost them a great deal. Our society must not make the same mistake. We must quickly accept the fact that privacy is dead, and move on, lest we suffer a fate far worse than what record companies have faced.
I don't think so at all. The active participants are the ones advancing, and there's going to be another divergence. The original intent of the web was to have every node as a consumer and publisher. We're finally moving back toward that original goal.
Geographically, the core is near Beacon, if you plot it out on a map. But, everything is in the sphere of NYC. We're all in orbit of it's massive gravity of money, jobs, and cool stuff.
I find all this talk very amusing considering 5 days ago you said you couldn't predict what the internet will do in 6 months.
I have no idea specifically what it will do. Society is going to change rapidly. I don't know what exactly the changes will be, but I know that they will be precipitated, at least in their next stage, by information sharing and active engagement by full duplex nodes. Where it will go from there, what the next divergence beyond it will be, or even what the advancing circles will be like, I have no idea.
Of course it's speculation. People are free to disagree, present contrary trends, debate, discuss, whatever. I simply feel, personally, that there is enough evidence to expect this trend going forward, and am thus preparing myself for it as any rational person would.
Of course it's speculation. People are free to disagree, present contrary trends, debate, discuss, whatever. I simply feel, personally, that there is enough evidence to expect this trend going forward, and am thus preparing myself for it as any rational person would.
Don't you know, your not supposed to disagree with Rym, only Kate is allowed to :-p
Of course it's speculation. People are free to disagree, present contrary trends, debate, discuss, whatever. I simply feel, personally, that there is enough evidence to expect this trend going forward, and am thus preparing myself for it as any rational person would.
Don't you know, your not supposed to disagree with Rym, only Kate is allowed to :-p
I would still argue that the FRC has done nothing but get closer. Certain people who have recently begun to spend more time with the inner crew, and I'm sure they could speak as to how tight-knit of a family we are. ^_~
Definitely. You guys are all great. And thanks for letting me and mine be a part of your crew.
The rest of this conversation sorta got off topic, dinn'it...
Wow, I knew Thead would react like this. OMG RYM AND SCOTT ARE BREAKING UP!! We have not suddenly become suburban soccer moms overnight or anything, Geez Louise. Scott had been making noises about moving into the city before Rym found the house, because of the strain of commuting that we all feel. Basically, as all y'all know, I'm not super compatible with Scott as a roommate, so it was either Scott-Rym permanently in the house forevah and I move back to the city and hang out with Rym on the weekends, or Scott gets an apartment and I pay Rym rent on the house. To be honest, this house business is mostly Rym. I'm happy just about anywhere I am, but it will be nice to eat dinner together without having to bike across town, and watch movies/play games/make out just by going across the hall rather than across Beacon. And plus, why is me living with Rym worse than if Scott does, Thead? I've known him almost as long as Scott has, and we are best pals. Plus, I am a neat and interesting roommate. We also are probably going to crash at Scott's place a lot, and he will probably be up here on the weekends all the time. Geeknights is still going to be recorded mostly in the same room, with the same old cast (and audience - me).
I find all this talk very amusing considering 5 days ago you said you couldn't predict what the internet will do in 6 months.
I have no idea specifically what it will do. Society is going to change rapidly. I don't know what exactly the changes will be, but I know that they will be precipitated, at least in their next stage, by information sharing and active engagement by full duplex nodes. Where it will go from there, what the next divergence beyond it will be, or even what the advancing circles will be like, I have no idea.
Interacting with each other primarily through virtual personas? That's what I see. You can already effectively be someone else on the Internet if you try hard enough; as technology advances, I foresee a more pronounced dual lifestyle.
To put it more succinctly, the world will be (well, actually, already is) a William Gibson novel.
It's funny that so many people think Geek Nights is breaking up because a simple move. It's not like they are going to be across the world from each other. Dave and Joel from Fast Karate are in different states and still do their podcast.
It was inevitable that eventually Scott would probably live on his own and Rym and Emily would probably live together as most couples tend to do. I say good luck to all of them. I lived on my own for over a year in my own tiny apartment after my first real relationship and living with someone for almost 2 years. It was nice knowing I could make it on my own. Coming home to my own apartment, vegging out on my recliner, making my own dinner. It was probably one of the most pivotal years in my life to defines who I am. I think it would be a nice change for Scott to be able to have his own place with all his own things, doing whatever, whenever. Plus walking around the apartment sans clothes is a good perk.
As for Emily and Rym, it's always exciting when you start living with your significant other. I can honestly say you learn more about yourself and your significant other when most if not all inhibitions are revealed. This isn't necessarily always the case, but I think living with your significant other has more positives than commuting to and from their place. I'm happy for both you!
If anything, we'll probably hear of awesome stories of things going on at Rym's Geek Haus.
Interacting with each other primarily through virtual personas? That's what I see. You can already effectively be someone else on the Internet if you try hard enough; as technology advances, I foresee a more pronounced dual lifestyle.
I'm hoping for neural interface jacks to be reality by 2025. Full brain "disk image" creation and loading to a computer by 2050. That would be awesome. Immortality, yay!
Comments
1) Geeknights ongoing?
2) Forthcoming awesomeness?
I know what they feel like too! I've been listening to to the SGU podcast for over three years now, and in that time one of the hosts died and another got married. Even though i've never met these people, and only exchanged one or two emails, I care about big events in their lives like this as much, if not more so, than similar events in the lives of people I *actually* know.
EDIT: Thanks, I knew "peaks" didn't look right, but I couldn't for the life of me remember the correct word.
It's going to be, in the free places of the world, an open world. We cannot stop it without stopping our own advancement, so all the better to address the concerns full-on and ahead of the wave. The format of the show is not changing. With a few exceptions, we're almost all in the sphere of New York City right now. We've been consolidating. The core is in New York, with colonies in Philly and Albany. (And one in Texas ^_~) We spread after university, and now we've all come back together into a network of houses and apartments effectively open to all in the crew. Awww, shucks. We're a fan of you, too. (Host another FNPL!) I would still argue that the FRC has done nothing but get closer. Certain people who have recently begun to spend more time with the inner crew, and I'm sure they could speak as to how tight-knit of a family we are. ^_~
As for the forthcoming awesome, it sprung largely out of PAX. To hint at it, I'll simply say that we escalated our live programming after first stepping into the anime circuit. Having maximized that realm (the low-hanging fruit, if you will), we moved on with tentative steps into gaming with our first lecture at PAX 2008. That first step escalated yet again, and upcoming PAXes and other large conventions will see us doing with gaming what we've already done with anime). Gaming was a harder nut to crack, since it has a thriving, professional stateside industry, unlike anime, but we've done very well for ourselves. By next year, we'll be in the same position in gaming that we're currently in with anime. We're now using this as leverage to escalate into the next realm.
Where all of this is leading is difficult to say, but we're growing at a rate that is just barely manageable. We spend most of our time maintaining our new growth, and increasingly we have less and less time to plan for each next stage of growing. (Notice, for example, that we've very suddenly come to be the heads of panels for Connecticon, joined the panels staff for Otakon, committed to a massive amount of programming for the PAXes (and another yet-to-be-announced convention). What I can say, however, is that GeekNights isn't going to disappear, not by any means. It's growing too hot and too fast to drop it. In the next year, we're going to be doing everything we can to fan the flames.
As to the FRC breaking apart, even if we live across the the world, we all still meet up and stay in contact. Really, distance is a minor issue when your friends function as a family.
Look at the Internet. The most engaged people are the ones with public personas. Facebook profiles, Linkedin profiles, blogs, etc... These people all reveal a great deal of public information to others who do so in kind. They move in social circles which would be entirely impossible without this information sharing. The more you share, the more you can engage. People without web sites or social networking profiles are practically invisible on the Internet, and are taking part in only half of what it has to offer. The passive side of the net is the least interesting and least advancing part of it now. The be a part of the next generation, we have to be on the active side, or we'll cease to exist.
Look at banking, as an example. Right now, even in the US, there are two completely separate banking "societies." The first, with which we are all engaged, is the normal banking world. We have checking and savings accounts, get mortgages, have ATM cards and debit cards and credit cards. We have direct deposit paychecks available to us. We're part of one realm, one society, of economy. But, there is a separate world, almost entirely cut off from us, of people who don't engage. They have no bank accounts. They cash their paychecks at corner stores. They get loans from payday businesses. They do not have access to ATMs. These people are living in a different economic world. They are invisible to us, in our world.
Society is the same way. The culture and society of the Internet is almost entirely cut off from that of the non-net-enabled people of the world. We engage and communicate in entirely different ways, and have entirely different options available to us. You, using a walled-garden forum like this, are engaging in ways that those left behind never will. We live in a different social world.
Privacy will, in the long run, be just as important of a deciding factor. Even now, the people who publish and are public are diverging from those who primarily consume on the Internet. Bloggers and podcasters and twitterers are slowly breaking away even from their similar Internet brethren. To be private is to fall behind.
Well that's wasn't going over the top a bit Rym :-p Otherwise I do agree.
In the coming world, you will be able to find out about these people. Sattelite imagery already shows you the location of their homes. Other technologies will make it possible to track their movements. However, they will still live privately because nobody will care. If all your information is on Google, but nobody cares to search for you, you're still effectively private.
The thing is, if you want to engage with society in any meaningful way, you will reveal information about yourself. Want to buy something at a store? Even if you use cash, the cameras in the store will see you. The point of sale system will scan the barcode or RFID. You drove to the store in a car? You have a license plate, and maybe a GPS, and maybe a phone. Now anybody who cares, knows a fuckton of information about you. As that info becomes organized in databases and becomes searchable, you become a public figure. Maybe someone who is a fan of the product you purchased will e-mail you and ask how you like it? Maybe someone who lives nearby and had a bad experience at the store will try to relate to you?
If you try to hide, and be a private person, you'll have a very hard time. Even if you succeed in concealing this information about yourself, you'll become a nobody, like the mountain folk. You'll apply for a job, and there won't be any data available on you. That will be incredibly strange to employers. You'll meet a new friend at a show, and barely any info about you shows up on their screen, it will be very very strange.
I think there are a lot of good things about privacy. I mean, we don't want the Chinese government to know if some Chinese person buys an anti-communist book, right? We don't want employers to be able to see medical records, right? I agree, we want to keep these things private. If I thought it were possible, I would definitely say we should do it. But with all I have seen, technology makes it impossible. The cost of keeping secrets is impossibly large. A lot of people are going to be unhappy, but privacy is impossible to maintain. It will be far more productive for our society to just accept that fact, instead of uselessly fighting against it. Let us come up with strategies to cope in a world where all information is public, rather than continue to fight for what can not be.
Think of the music companies. They have fought for years and years for copyright, and the simple reality of the world is that technology has broken their business model. By clinging to it, they have suffered mightily. If they had accepted reality early on, they could be living it up right now. Their refusal to accept that the world has changed, and that they must adapt to it, cost them a great deal. Our society must not make the same mistake. We must quickly accept the fact that privacy is dead, and move on, lest we suffer a fate far worse than what record companies have faced.
Geographically, the core is near Beacon, if you plot it out on a map. But, everything is in the sphere of NYC. We're all in orbit of it's massive gravity of money, jobs, and cool stuff.
The rest of this conversation sorta got off topic, dinn'it...
Scott had been making noises about moving into the city before Rym found the house, because of the strain of commuting that we all feel. Basically, as all y'all know, I'm not super compatible with Scott as a roommate, so it was either Scott-Rym permanently in the house forevah and I move back to the city and hang out with Rym on the weekends, or Scott gets an apartment and I pay Rym rent on the house. To be honest, this house business is mostly Rym. I'm happy just about anywhere I am, but it will be nice to eat dinner together without having to bike across town, and watch movies/play games/make out just by going across the hall rather than across Beacon. And plus, why is me living with Rym worse than if Scott does, Thead? I've known him almost as long as Scott has, and we are best pals. Plus, I am a neat and interesting roommate. We also are probably going to crash at Scott's place a lot, and he will probably be up here on the weekends all the time. Geeknights is still going to be recorded mostly in the same room, with the same old cast (and audience - me).
Geeknights forever, man.
To put it more succinctly, the world will be (well, actually, already is) a William Gibson novel.
It was inevitable that eventually Scott would probably live on his own and Rym and Emily would probably live together as most couples tend to do. I say good luck to all of them. I lived on my own for over a year in my own tiny apartment after my first real relationship and living with someone for almost 2 years. It was nice knowing I could make it on my own. Coming home to my own apartment, vegging out on my recliner, making my own dinner. It was probably one of the most pivotal years in my life to defines who I am. I think it would be a nice change for Scott to be able to have his own place with all his own things, doing whatever, whenever. Plus walking around the apartment sans clothes is a good perk.
Also Scott, you should get this guy to do a wall art for you.
As for Emily and Rym, it's always exciting when you start living with your significant other. I can honestly say you learn more about yourself and your significant other when most if not all inhibitions are revealed. This isn't necessarily always the case, but I think living with your significant other has more positives than commuting to and from their place. I'm happy for both you!
If anything, we'll probably hear of awesome stories of things going on at Rym's Geek Haus.