It's the end of the calendar year so I'm upping my recurring donations to charities and artists. And suddenly... my hard drive is full? This seems ridiculous because I haven't done anything data-intensive in months.
A short investigation later...
A truly incredible 119G of memory stores unlistened-to podcasts. In a year of actively subscribing and donating to things, this 2020 garbage fire of using my attention and privilege to do better, it is time to unsubscribe from some stuff.
Podcasts from which I'm unsubscribing, sometimes hundreds of episodes behind:
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...
David Tennant interviews various guests and makes them say like two sentences and an anecdote for every separate fact he extracted from a whirlwind tour of their Wikipedia/IMDB page. This just never held my attention enough for me to listen to the episodes. - Dissect
This is a really fantastic music analysis podcast but it requires a lot of attention and the host's voice and production values just didn't ever push it to the top of my queue, so it has languished for several years. Alas, pruned! I'm still subscribed to three other music analysis podcasts so if some truly incredible song comes along I will hear about it, even in my digital monkish seclusion. - Jordan, Jesse, GO!
The original podcast. An extremely good way to feel not-lonely and not-isolated when in grad school abroad, but in the years since it has not held my attention. At one point the hosts themselves called out that they are a stereotype of "two white guys discussing their childhood video games with no particular agenda" and over time I've developed more varied and diverse podcast interests. (Sometimes their guests promoted the guests' podcasts, which I subscribed to and found more interesting.) And I guess I no longer feel America-sick, since I live back here now. - Social Distance
The pandemical podcast from The Atlantic. In March was comforting to have a daily podcast of people also worrying and sharing information, then they exhausted the low-hanging fruit of topics and became less interesting and less relevant, then I had enough mental space to do my own research and reading and I haven't listened in several months. (I still read some related columns but they are much faster to get through than the podcast.) - This American Life
I found other things more interesting and haven't listened --- there are more than 8G of these episodes alone. I have since heard some spot-on parodies of the tone and style that were so perfect that subsequent listening to the actual show is dimmed in comparison.
Several others are on my watchlist --- doing inventory reminded me of my interest in the podcasts, but I hadn't listened in a long time. If I don't listen to them by the end of December, I'm also going to unsubscribe and delete all those files.
This is what happens when I've already KonMari-ed my excess clothes, books, furniture, childhood memorabilia, shoes, electronics and cables, and piles of miscellaneous cruft. My documents are in organized folders, my photos are sorted, my finances are in order. If I were any more responsible it would ooze out my pores and be even more repellent than my already-achieved levels of disgusting competence. \end{humblebrag}
This post's theme word is autotelic (adj), "having purpose, motivation, or meaning of itself; not driven by external factors." Autotelic cleaning and organizing gets its own chapter in my autobiography, but blogging just gets an incomplete sentence fragment footnote... if I get around to it.
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