#loremen

[haveyoulistenedtothispodcast]

Have you listened to Loremen (2017-)?

Yes

Partially

No

Never heard of it

Voting ended onMar 19

Summary:

Alasdair Beckett-King and James Shakeshaft share stories of folklore and legends from around the UK (and occasionally further afield) then score each other's stories using an entirely arbitrary scoring system.

[brimstone-cowboy]

Average English Xfile

[hildyj]

Podcast Recs: Comedy

So I know that there's nothing more subjective than comedy, but I feel I have to toot the horn for these two podcasts, even though they can both be placed in the same surprisingly narrow category of "British men in their 30s and 40s talking about subjects in a humourous manner".

Loremen deals with local legends, ghost stories and other historical curiosities of mostly Britain (though they will go to other parts of the world if they have a guest host). The two hosts take turns going over the story of the week and at the end the other will grade the story-telling using various whimsical categories. It's not hugely inventive but it's alway good fun and the two hosts match each other well when improvising comedy.

I have never laughed harder at any podcast than when I listen to Three Bean Salad. Three comedy writers/performers pick a random subject from suggestions sent in by the listeners (everything from Bags to France) and use that as a jumping off point for their conversation. A few times they will actually deal with the subject at hand for the entire episode, but mostly they veer wildly away from it immediately. Their comedy style tends towards the delightfully absurd, and the three men are each so particularly weird in a very normal way that I just don't tire of hearing them talking about their adventures trying to find a birthday card, their lovely family made up of hired actors, or what they would do if they came home after Christmas to find a cut of beef in their fridge close to its sell-by-date. The subject in the title may be Dentists, but you just never know what sort of hilarious nonsense you're actually going to be listening to over the next hour. Oh, and make sure to start from the first episode, if only to see the slow building of their comic universe of references upon references and ever-evolving jingles.

[procedural-generation]

Loremen Simulator

Something that I’ve written about (together with Max Kreminski) is the idea of a generativist reading of a text: reading something with the end of creating a generative model of it. That is, we closely examine the symbols and meaning of something and try to build a machine that can create similar symbols (with hopefully similar meaning). A ‘text’ in this sense is the view from literary theory: in essence, a ‘text’ is anything that can be read - that is, it has symbols that can be interpreted. By considering a text through the lens of a generativist reading, we can relate the  symbols of the visible artifact (the description of folklore, in this case) with the text we’re examining (a podcast) and our model that emulates the processes of that text (Michael Reeve’s pandemic project generator that invents new folklore).

https://myk.ninja/loremen

[brimstone-cowboy]

Fairy physics

[brimstone-cowboy]

Putting my first piece of red string on my Supernatural Brit podcast cork board under “Blobby protocol”

[brimstone-cowboy]

25% of my podcasts was just Loremen.

[fredbydawn2-thefredening]

For this April Fools Day, consider listening to this episode of the Loremen podcast (where two comedians discuss folklore of the British Isles and beyond) on the topic of the Scottish tradition of pranking and a hoax at Loch Ness