When I start pairing albums to fragrances, you'll know I've gone too deep
Themed playlist szn is upon us
Honestly, I don’t have any really good stories or anecdotes. There was a Thursday episode of this here newsletter that I opted not to blast to people’s inboxes, because I still feel weird about writing too much. But I made some more playlists and wanted to keep the Sunday habit going (even if I wrote this before you’ll receive it)
The death of Twitter, Part 10494
For the uninitiated, there has been some uh, drama in the Twitterverse. I’d mostly stopped posting for months anyway, the engagement has been trash ever since he took over, and it’s just been a lot of figuring out what people are where. We’ve been here before, but not quite like this. The ways that massive platforms have sucked up all of the oxygen out of the Web 2.0 era can’t be overstated. We went from a fairly diverse world of internet weirdness to essentially relying on Twitter as critical infrastructure and while everyone doesn’t use it (my mom isn’t getting critical updates on it) there were still lots of public agencies that abdicate their responsibility for disseminating information to the public, by simply thinking posting it on Twitter was informing people.
The absence of Twitter as a reliable form of communication will force communities to find other ways to reach folks rapidly, which isn’t bad. But it remains to be seen how we’ll deal with it, many will fail.
You can find me on a bevy of other networks, I have them all linked at find.ronbronson.com
Themed playlist Szn
I was at a coffee shop and they were playing successive soul tracks and I don’t really make soul playlists like that. But the vibe was working for me, so I decided to take the seedling they planted and made my own playlist. I don’t usually say it out loud, but I like sometimes imagining what it’d be like to colorblind cast old movies like Back to the Future. In this particular instance, I just assumed that Doc Brown would’ve been more hip than we gave him credit for and had some rad songs he brought with him to the future, because let’s be real, that dude was constantly taking trips when no one was watching, right?
I started on this whole “themed playlists” thing because I did them for years, but eventually, I found I wasn’t listening to them all that much. The omnibus playlists I make are great for driving, because I can put them on shuffle and it’s like listening to my own personally curated radio. But if you find yourself listening to a lot of newer music all at once — as I have lately — it’s hard to keep track of those new tracks and they buried on a playlist with 100s of songs, so I started segmenting out again.
That’s what this playlist is about, below. It’s your usual RonBronson-core, solid background noise and not a whole lot of abrasiveness that I can recall. Very listenable.
Back on my live radio thing, I’ll be live on air for KBOO-FM on July 4th from 3pm until 11pm at the Portland Waterfront Blues Festival. You can stream it live.
How I got into community radio
I just sort of assumed that people who’d been around while were aware of my random radio hijinks. The short version is when I was attending the University of Wyoming in 2005, there was still no student radio station. It’d been converted to a NPR station decades earlier. For whatever reason, my friends thought I could solve this with an internet radio station, still kind of a weird thing at the time.
I did some research and it turned out, there was some software I could buy to setup a small station and you could stream for periods of time or 24/7 if you had a good enough internet connection. Thankfully for me, university apartments had broadband and I could connect a desktop I owned (and stopped using) to a wall and it became the radio station.
We advertised and people submitted their own content, but a few shows were done live from my kitchen apartment where the desktop lived. It worked well, it was a lot of fun and we did it for close to two years (intermittently) before I stopped since I was paying for the whole thing myself.
Years later, living in Bloomington, Indiana I discovered WFHB-FM which has been around for 50 years. It was started by some locals who wanted to broadcast news and music focused on the South Central Indiana area and over time, they got a signal and grew it out. The studio is inside an old firehouse downtown Bloomington. I don’t know what I expected when I first volunteered, but I got into news mostly because I didn’t really want to host a music show (weirdly, I know) and because after a bit of shadowing and training, I got to go on the air as a sub news anchor.
After a few months, I took over a weekly news anchor slot which was fun. I did this for two years and only stopped when I moved to Portland. Since I’ve been in town, I’ve always meant to do more radio but COVID slowed things down considerably. It’s only been in the past year, that I’ve finally gotten back to the anchor seat.
While I do podcasts and speak a bunch, there’s nothing quite as fun for me as getting to do live radio, especially focusing on the nitty-gritty community-focused stuff you do in community radio. Interviewing local businesses, amplifying local events and sharing news is so vital. I grew up reporting sports scores to the local newspapers in New Jersey and would get PAID every spring by both. It was a sweet little gig, but they also would cover our events and talk about local high school sports.
These days? That simply doesn’t happen except for large events and even then, the coverage is scant if it’s not football or basketball. It’s really disappointing that we’ve got access to share information rapidly and instead of telling hyperlocal stories, and connecting to each other, we exist in a consolidated environment where nobody local owns the papers, radio stations or much of anything else and it shows in how we communicate with each other about happenings in communities.
Not to be all wistful about the days of yore — I’m not — but we’ve lost something and the folks lamenting what we’ve lost are hardly interested in fixing it, they’d rather accelerate the chaos.
And that’s why I listen to doomgaze.