Anthropocene Reviewed Megathread

I seem to recall there being a number of Anthropocene Reviewed listeners on the swamp so I thought I'd make a megathread.

It's so interesting listening to this podcast and then seeing an advertisement for a movie made after one of John Green's books. Truth be told I haven't read any of his books, but the content of the podcast seems very different from the content of his books. I've been really enjoying the episodes since @MisterPookie recommended it, and the monthly release is a good cadence for me since I have such a long podcast lineup lol.

In the most recent episode, "John Green Gets Existential", he talks about wonder and sunsets. I'm amazed by how much history, trivia, and citations he's able to pull together in a discussion about the two.

He said that the content for the most recent episode came from a Vlog Brothers episode he did or something, so you may have already interacted with the message haha

Ha! I had no idea. @sWaMPqUeeN had to read a few of his books for a reading/writing class in college, I don't remember them being that bad, but definitely adolescent.

In any case, it sounds like John Green grew up a bit too.

He even talked about his balls, wow, full circle.

This episode is at the bottom of my playlist right now so I'll come back in a month to post once I've listened to it.

Of course I forgot to post about this after I finally got to it in my queue.

This episode was really fascinating. I don't frequently take notes or write down my thoughts, but for the last 560+ days I have been using the daily.io app to keep track of each day. I feel like it would be equally interesting to go back to random days and see what made them good or bad.

As for the sports rivalries, can't relate. Would get my sperm tubes snipped by any doctor, ball preferences notwithstanding.

I'm reminded to post about the last episode I listened to on Auld Lang Syne by this tweet and the fact that a new episode came out. I was listening to that episode about a week ago, a bit after I had come out to my parents. They hadn't spoken to me through anything beyond email for the entire week prior, when on a whim my mother called me just to say hello. I was totally taken aback as I was expecting the silence between us to go on for some time. We chatted and it was partly normal, some emotional, but mostly just nice to hear her.

Green simply does an amazing job of narratively bringing the macroscopic and the incredibly personal together when discussing a single topic. He's able to use this several hundred year old song, Auld Lang Syne, to discuss both a close personal death and what existence means to us as humans. I mean, that's part of the undercurrent of the entire series: how do each of these things reflect on us as a sentient, metacognitive species (and how good are they on a 5 star scale).

And so in light of the fact that I was listening to it hours after my mom had called me, when I the part of the show where he encourages everyone to sing his dearly departed friend's rendition of the song, I found myself sobbing and singing "I'm here because I'm here because I'm here because I'm here". I didn't expect to be so moved.

I rate this episode 5 stars.

I rate this POST 5 stars.

Also, I'm one episode behind, but the circle art mentioned by Hiroyuki Doi is haunting and weirdly beautiful. Like, it feels like it should be natural, but you can tell it isn't, almost like you're seeing something intangibly organic- like thoughts, or specifically, thriving compulsions. It's not specifically monstrous, but it gives off enough of an unsettling vibe that I could almost say it is.

Non-denial denial: I was a little surprised that a cousin of this phrase, the Glomar response was not brought up. "I can neither confirm nor deny..."
This lawyer speak is great when someone asks if you have information; whether you will or won't divulge it, by claiming that you even do or don't have it reveals something about the nature of the information itself. It protects a sort of quantum nature of info, from a legal standpoint.

Here is a great Radiolab episode about it.

I appreciate that this last episode was a "low star only" one, I think it's the first of its kind (at least since I've been listening).

staph underrated tbh

Human's capacity to whatever is overrated, temporal something something, very melodramatic episode.

Damn, blow him out of the water fam. I wasn't crazy about this ep either, even if it did have some connection to the events at hand