The one podcast I listen to every week as it comes out is Lateral, a trivia show hosted by Tom Scott with rotating guests.

Other than that, I have a thing for casual and conversational history podcasts, including:

• The Lesser Bonapartes (old but gold, the full backlog’s only available on spotify under the title ‘From the desk of Glen’)
• Dead Ideas
• Some ‘leader ranking’ podcasts with the same formula: Rex Factor (British monarchs), Totalus Rankium (Roman Emperors and then American Presidents) and Pontifacts (Popes)

Make sure to follow it up with Robin Pearson’s History of Byzantium. He’s still centuries away from done, but I like it even better than Mike Duncan’s after it gets going.

You’re welcome!! Hope it serves you and your cousin well :)

Carl Humpfries’s Piano Handbook and Piano Improvisation Handbook are great, and cover enough for even an absolute beginner. I like noodling around with no previous musical knowledge, and they work very well for that. I think both include pretty decent sections on rhythms, and discuss pretty varied styles.

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The Amazon is so close to the Equator that the seasons don’t really affect the temperature that much. The main difference is that southern hemisphere winter is the dry season, hence the drought issues right now.

Not to downplay the role of climate change and deforestation, of course.

Revolution 9, as was often joked about on beatlescirclejerk in the other place.

Some of the inventions that historically took way longer than you’d expect: the shoe, the wheelbarrow, and the stirrup.

Also archival techniques so that history’s not as messy the next time around.

Thank god that’s changing tho. CK3 and (though to a lesser extent) Vicky 3 both have relatively decent tutorials.

Both my recommendations are over now, but I love the niche of conversational history podcasts, or, as someone once put it, people talking about history like other podcasts talk about bad movies:

The Lesser Bonapartes

Dead Ideas

How does Organic Maps compare to OsmAnd?

The culprit went into hiving.

I’m not a huge fan of the graphics in these 2D FF remasters, they feel ‘neither here nor there’ with some elements in pixel art and some not.

Octopath Traveler’s the only game I feel got away with it, probably because the heavy filtering makes it more consistent.

Tom Scott runs a Podcast (and formerly a gameshow) called Lateral, which is basically all lateral thinking puzzles. I highly recommend it.

Just made an account, and was glad to see an option to import from Calibre. My only gripe so far is that it’s pretty bad at recognizing books with no ISBN registered. It seemed to think a ton of my books were Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or The Fellowship of the Ring for some reason (or Marx’s Capital in French).

Some classics I didn’t see here yet:

Pink Floyd - Wish you were here (all the songs from that album, come to think of it, are in the second person and usually pretty specificially talking to Syd Barrett)

Bob Dylan - Like a rolling stone

Now for a completely different take on “feeling like a conversation”, I have an instrumental recommendation: Bernstein and Brubeck - Dialogues for Jazz Combo and Orchestra

Edit: just noticed that a lot of songs by Steely Dan are also in the second person, usually directed and criminal or tragic figures. Kid Charlemagne is my favorite in that format.

I second the recommendation of Go. I’m very much a beginner, but the subtlety and variety of every game kind of ruined chess for me.

Some more recommendations of learning or beginner resources:

Go Magic has a lot of really in depth video and interactive tutorials. There’s a paid plan, but the beginner and early intermediate courses are free and way more thorough than anything else online right now.

The Conquest of Go is a great little game on steam that has its own tutorials and a campaign mode with scaling difficulty. It’s my favorite way to play against bots, but you can also connect your OGS account and play online through there.

For Android users and FOSS enthusiasts, AntennaPod is pretty great.

Paris by Supertramp. The performances, recording quality and song selection are all top notch.

Shout out to Fishery (309 reviews). It’s pretty niche as an aquarium simulator, but very relaxing and well made.

Also, Ozymandias (770 reviews) is a great strategy game that manages to squeeze the feeling of a full game of civilization into less than one hour.

If you’re interested in classic board games, The Conquest of Go (397 reviews) is a great entry point into Go, with nice tutorial features and a campaign mode that scales difficulty as you win games.