131–140 of 140 posts
What I do is to put a podcast in a language I'm learning, radio France is very good for this. I have a good level of French but my listening still needs work, at the beginning I can understand what they're saying but around the 20minutes or 30 mark my brain becomes too tired, I stop understanding and then I fall to sleep.
Not sure how accessible all this is outside of the UK (you'd need to check the BBC Sounds website & app), but the BBC has perfected a couple of great "gets you to sleep" radio outlets. The oldest is Radio 4, the BBC's national spoken word radio station (there's also Radio 5 which focuses on sport and news, Radio 4 is more a mixture of comedy, arts, culture and news). Late at night (UK time), there are programmes that…
What do you mean in the last paragraph? I don't know much about the BBC, but I cherish our local equivalents.
There's more info on how the license fee works here: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...
As a result, and given that most political parties sense bias in the BBC (it's telling for me that the right-wing think it's too left-wing, and the left-wing think it's too right-wing, meaning it's probably just quite balanced and open and apolitical), the funding model is a hot political potato.
Recent announcements have suggested that the license fee should apply to anyone with a car radio (radio licenses were phased out years ago), and/or using streaming services regardless of whether they consume BBC content at all. This has not gone down well.
For me, I think regular consumption of at least some part of the BBC's very wide and diverse output is the only monocultural thing in the UK that helps people feel a common sense of belonging - we're a very multicultural society (and have been at least since WW2, and arguably since the Romans). People who hate the BBC are, in my experience, more likely to voice racist, homophobic, Islamophobic or Covid-hoax views.
So, in short, making almost every household in the country fork out £180/year to fund it is not something that goes without political consequence or debate, and it's likely that rolling it back in some form is on the cards in the next 10 years.
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A similar one I recently discovered is https://www.youtube.com/@SleepOnPhysics . I think it was meant to put you to sleep with the detailed narrative, but I found it to be very interesting and captivating, especially for long drives. The content quality is pretty good, I am almost certain the audio is AI generated, but wonder how the content itself was authored.
I don't believe it to be ai generated voice. It's too good. Or if it is - why e.g. automated voices reading nyt articles are so bad?
Older (and cheaper, possibly self-hosted) text-to-speech software.
I love visiting Marfa. If you haven't been, I recommend it (you should read up on it first, it's not really for everyone, it's a pretty weird little dessert town).
I love visiting Marfa. If you haven't been, I recommend it (you should read up on it first, it's not really for everyone, it's a pretty weird little dessert town).
It's also a pretty weird little desert town.
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Amazes me how people in a tech industry paying six figures refuse to pay a tiny percentage of their income to get rid of adverts on something that consumes so much time.
Paying for YouTube does not get rid of ads. Only using sponsor block does.
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Paying for YouTube does not get rid of ads. Only using sponsor block does.
The whole point of YouTube Premium is that there aren’t any ads.
Northwoods Baseball Radio Network is my favorite. It’s a fictional baseball league based primarily in Wisconsin. Games are called by a droning announcer. Even the fake commercials between innings are monotonous. I listen to it during the day too. I’m very tempted to score some of the games, but I’m a little worried I’d find holes like only 2 outs in an inning or missing innings in a game. https://www.sleepbaseball.co…
I've determined it must be fictional (maybe wrong?) given the just-entertaining-enough player names, which set me up into a smile during the lineup introduction.