Web Excursions 2022-09-24
If podcasting is just radio now, whether the System Settings in macOS Ventura is a turn for the worse, and the elusive future of San Francisco’s fog.
Podcasting Is Just Radio Now
It’s been almost eight years since Serial dropped.
An entire industry has roared to life, drawing in Hollywood studios, corporations, celebrities, and billions of dollars.
But the blockbuster podcast — a subgenre or prestige tier essential to the medium’s rise as an artistic force — is in a serious funk.
For some in the business, the medium’s diminishing ability to drive such moments poses an existential problem.
The crowded market has made almost everything in the business more difficult.
Meanwhile, costs are going up for podcast marketing, still a nascent practice,
with some publishers now willing to spend six digits to advertise on other podcasts, social media, websites, and even outdoor billboards.
Some studios now orient their businesses around selling film and TV rights to Hollywood,
but many creators still rely on advertising, an approach that emphasizes pure volume: more seasons, more episodes, more inventory.
Both models are in a losing battle with what are known as “always on” podcasts — the conversation- and interview-based shows that are cheaper to make and become more powerful as the long tail of their back catalogues grows.
I Was Never There notched more than 100,000 downloads in its opening weeks.
But Call Her Daddy reportedly reaches around 3 million listeners, and Joe Rogan once claimed his celebrity-studded show was doing around 190 million monthly downloads.
In other words: a media business that mostly revolves around high-profile talking heads.
Some insiders believe there’s probably never going to be another Serial-esque moment again.
podcasting doesn’t yet have a social infrastructure —
an internally propulsive web of invested audiences, taste-making creators, and press —
that’s able to support that kind of nuanced feedback loop in how we talk about successful audio productions.
not everybody believes virality and blockbuster status are fundamentally important in the first place.
podcast audiences have continued to grow as a whole.
But it’s difficult to cement a medium’s sense of identity, culture, and meaning if hardly anybody is talking about the same thing —
and that may well have material ramifications for the business in the long run.
Some executives argue that podcasting has generated plenty of buzz in recent years;
the energy is just coming from chatcasts.
The surging popularity of SmartLess, the Arnett-Bateman-Hayes klatch, often comes up as an example with its chummy celebrity interviews routinely making headlines in entertainment trade publications.
Some industry insiders cited Jamie Lynn Spears’s recent appearance on Call Her Daddy as a breakout moment for the show;
others noted that The Joe Rogan Experience is a frequent front of the culture wars.
But these examples are rooted in the fungible power of celebrity.
Podcasting itself is incidental to these enterprises;
the hosts could just as easily move their businesses to other media.
What does it mean if the primary reason a podcast gets any attention these days
comes from its ability to drive newsworthy gossip or extend the brand of various A-listers, public personalities, and influencers-in-waiting?
It means that podcasting is or will become indistinguishable from corporate radio.
Which would be a shame,
given that podcasting’s explosive entrance into the mainstream eight years ago was principally defined by the medium’s possibilities as art.
A big part of what makes a medium an art form is the existence of internal trends and movements: Serial’s catalyzing a whole ecosystem of true-crime podcasts, Ira Glass’s inspiring a generation of narrative producers who write and sound a certain way.
And what keeps an art form dynamic is constant organic reinvention —
that is, a medium’s capacity to cultivate, ingest, and be transformed by new ideas that build on and interrogate what’s come before.
Given the industry’s fixation on celebrity casts and habit of outsourcing its true-crime research to Wikipedia,
it’s hard to contend that podcasting has done much reinvention of late.
Podcasting, though, isn’t lacking in worthy talent right now.
Consider The Atlantic’s Floodlines project from 2020, which realized a stunning vision in sound design while relitigating the government’s failures around Hurricane Katrina.
Or the experimental metafiction of Sharon Mashihi’s Appearances.
Or Jamie Loftus, the most exciting independent creator working in the medium today, with her growing oeuvre of punk-rock curiosities.
Talent isn’t the problem. The shifting incentive structure around it is.
Perhaps the days of the blockbuster podcast are gone.
Podcasting wouldn’t be unique in this loss — after all, we do live in a post-monoculture era of too much everything.
Maybe it’s not so bad to settle for art house: a smaller domain within the industry for fresh ideas, new talent, and actual podcasts as podcasts.
There will be plenty to fill your ears.
Just don’t expect to hear it at a listening party.
System Settings in Ventura: A Turn for the Worse?
Stepping back and looking as objectively as we can, System Preferences as they stand in Monterey are the weakest part of the whole interface to macOS.
Even for those of us who spend a lot of time using them, the layout of the System Preferences app is chaotic.
If there is any logic for the order, it has long defied me.
There’s no evidence of design, instead preference settings seem to have been thrown haphazard into panes in the rush to ship new features, then to have been left to grow like weeds.
Even for the experienced user, navigation is difficult, but aids are crude and seldom worth the bother.
Within some of its panes are outstanding examples of human interface design,
such as the video clips in the Trackpad pane,
but they’re exceptional and hampered by that intransigent window size.
The fundamental problems to be solved in any replacement for System Preferences are:
how to make the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individual controls accessible,
the design of individual panes and dialogs within those.
In its current state, System Settings
solves the first far better than System Preferences, but
the second remains mediocre at best,
and in some respects is significantly worse than what we’ve got in Monterey.
System Preferences seems to have been designed for users to learn the contents of each pane,
and with that knowledge navigate through to the section required.
In the early days, it just about worked,
but since then the number of settings has outgrown our capacity to memorise,
to the point where you can waste many minutes
looking through the contents of the Privacy tab
and still not find what you need.
Its View menu doesn’t reproduce the list of panes, but gives the middle ranks in alphabetical order.
Time Machine is a good example,
as it’s no longer a pane in its own right, but part of the General pane,
where it merits a direct link from the View menu.
If you know the name of the subsystem, this is now a good place to come.
Search has been greatly improved too.
Each of the hits shown gives the context, and selecting any of those hits at the left takes you to the setting, jumping through deep hierarchies to the dialog you need.
Perhaps most revolutionary of all, the System Settings window can be changed in size, albeit in only one axis.
The Elusive Future of San Francisco’s Fog
While coastal fog isn’t unique to the California coast,
few places in the world are so deeply associated with the ethereal movements and cooling spritz of fog’s peek-a-boo routine.
Fog pours through the Golden Gate and crawls up and down the wrinkled hills of the city and the nearby coast.
It cloaks and chills.
Millions are affected by it, if only by the invisible cool breezes that presage the fog’s arrival.
Summer fog is why the mighty coastal redwoods grow where they do,
surviving California’s dry season thanks to refreshing gulps of cold, wet air.
It is why, until recently, few people worried about wildfires along the coast.
In June, July and August, as most of the Northern Hemisphere, and most of California, feels the full force of summer heat,
the average daily high in San Francisco is below 70 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 21 Celsius,
coolest of any major city in the continental United States.
The general consensus among the small cadre of scientists who study coastal fog is that
it is decreasing, not just in California, but around the world.
However, the reasons aren’t clear.
Fog may be the most difficult meteorological phenomenon to capture, calculate and predict.
Unlike temperature, precipitation, humidity or wind, there is no reliable gauge for it.
There is not even a practical definition of it.
Most will say that fog is a cloud that touches the ground, which sounds simple enough.
But fog is movement in three dimensions, dipping and rising, forming and disappearing.
The question in a changing climate is whether fog water is a viable resource, if not a solution, for populated places expecting a drier future.
Dr. Dawson studied redwoods and concluded that 30 to 40 percent of their annual moisture arrives in the form of fog.
The high canopies of redwoods are giant filters for drifting fog.
The trees get drenched and nourished;
water drips to the forest floor.
There it sustains other plants and helps keep stream beds from drying,
aiding species from lichens to ferns, newts to salmon.
the frequency of fog, measured by fog hours per day, had dropped 33 percent since the middle of the 20th century.
Fog is a niche of science, and the field of study is not a crowded one.
One reason is the elusive nature of fog itself.
Another is that it affects relatively few geographic areas, each differently.
But the biggest might be that it crosses so many disciplines, from sea to land to air —
oceanography, meteorology, geography, biology and chemistry among them.
Research is fractured.
Above the Pacific, high-pressure winds spin clockwise, pulling ocean currents westward, away from the California coast.
This churns up deep, cold coastal seawater, which creates fog when it meets the moist air.
But all this fog has few places to go: Mountains line the coast, keeping it mostly offshore.
An exception is the Golden Gate, a gap in the hills.
As warm air rises over inland California, the cold fog is sucked through the gap and into the city.
This delicate balance of forces creates a daily summertime ebb and flow.
Late in the day, cool fog pulses inland.
In the morning, it dissipates.
Then the cycle repeats.
In Southern California, during the periods colloquially called “May Gray” and “June Gloom,”
research shows an increase in cloud-base height — low clouds persist, but are now less likely to be in the form of ground-touching fog — because of the urban heat-island effect.
Some experts surmise something similar is happening in San Francisco, too.
But in some places, the fog puts on a show.
It clings close to the ground, like a stalking cat.
Sometimes it pauses, sometimes it pounces.
It slips through topographic gaps.
It peeks over the top of hillsides and slinks into valleys.
Sometimes it comes in wisps. Sometimes in waves.
Some locals love the fog. Some hate it. All deal with it.
Fog is such a part of the landscape that it even has a name: Karl, personified through a wry, anonymous Twitter account.
“This is my town,” it responded to a follower recently. “You’re just living in it.”
The area is littered with shipwrecks and sea tales, not all deep in the past.
In 1971, in the middle of a foggy night, a pair of oil tankers, each owned by Standard Oil, collided under the bridge.
Caen considered foghorns the music of the gods.
Far below the bridge’s deck, on a perch accessible by a tiny elevator, operating engineer Randy Rosenkild examined one of the five foghorns.
They are shaped like trumpets.
Two larger ones, 48 inches long, face in opposite directions near the base of the south tower.
Three slightly smaller ones are tucked below the roadway near midspan.
The larger ones have a specific signal: two seconds on, 18 seconds off, over and over.
The others burp something quite different: one second on, two seconds off, one second on, 36 seconds off, repeat.
The idea is that mariners blinded by fog can guide themselves between the distinct sounds.