Steven Masuch is a "character actor of the web," with a variety of projects under his belt and a day job building iOS apps. He hosts the Slam for Hope Pog Tournament each year in Vancouver BC, Canada, with the 5th one coming up (and still accepting players and donations) on November 22nd. We go deep on something I completely missed while growing up (because I was 20 years old already). It's everything there is to know about pogs.
Some pogs:
The Canadian (evil) Justin McElroy:
Last tournament's surprise champion:
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Erin McKean is a lexicographer, writer, speaker, and maker that started Dress A Day about 13 years ago to chronicle her sewing projects. If you've ever seen Erin at a conference, chances are you've seen her in a really cool print fabric dress she made herself. We talk about her career, how she sews her dresses, as well as tips on how anyone can learn to sew their own clothes too.
One of Erin's dresses, complete with bright red piping:
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Dan Benjamin is the creator of the 5by5 podcast network and the podcast hosting service Fireside.fm and he is really into mechanical watches. We talk about his career in podcasting and how he got started, when he fell in love with watches, and how he wears and collects them today.
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Darius Kazemi is a programmer and bot author and all-around internet artist that has a podcast with two fellow cohosts about an anime series they all love. Darius explains how he got into programming, gaming, bot authoring, and the social network mastodon, before we dive into the ins and outs of anime, what kinds of shows he likes and how one would go about getting started.
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☝️Todd's winery
☝️Todd's bike for the Trans Am Race
Todd Hamina has been making wine under different labels for 26 years in the Pacific Northwest, from farming his own grapes to owning his own winery. We chatted a bit about how the wine industry works in Oregon before transitioning to bikes. Todd's been riding his whole life, but in June of 2018 he decided to participate in the Trans America (self-supported) bike race from the coast of Oregon all the way across the US to the Atlantic Ocean in Virgina.
He pulled out of the race in Colorado after nearly 1800 miles over the course of a couple weeks riding over 130 miles per day all on his own. He had to quit due to cramping in his hands and shoulders that took away his ability to use his brakes. We talk about how he trained, what his setup was like, and how he attacked each day of the race.
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☝️Lucy outside of the StreamPDX trailer where we recorded
☝️Lucy's book along with the three beers we sampled during the show
Lucy Burningham is a writer, editorial director at Cozy, and spent a year getting certified to become a master beer taster and wrote a book about it. She brought 3 beers to the Airstream trailer at Stream PDX where we recorded and we were a bit punchy and goofy by the end.
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☝️Tiffani driving a Ferrari California in Dubai
Tiffani Ashley Bell is the founder of The Human Utility, which helps prevent water shut-offs in Detroit and Baltimore, all using a donation platform she's built. It's a fascinating project that was one of the first non-profits to go through Y Combinator.
Tiffani is also into F1 racing and as a car guy myself, I was curious to hear what makes it exciting and how one goes about following all the action.
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☝️Amber apex jumping a turn
Amber Castaldo is a recently retired veteran of roller derby, from one of the top teams in the world, based in Portland, Oregon. We spend much of the time getting into the nitty gritty details of roller derby rules, and talk about how much work it is to stay competitive.
☝️Amber getting a roundhouse kick to the stomach
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Dinah Sanders has been playing D&D for nearly 40 years, and has been a dungeon master going all the way back. Her current weekly game has a handful of players that have continuously played the same campaign for the past few years.
We cover Dinah's early history in blogging, her two books and her plans for a future one as well as diving into all the ins and outs of D&D with me, someone that's never played.
P.S. The week after we recorded this, I did get to join her weekly D&D night to play my first game ever, and it was a blast. The photo above is a shot from that night.
P.P.S. There's a new theme song and I added a bit of story I forgot to cover in the John Roderick episode so stick around to the end to hear it.
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Andy Baio is a veteran of the early web, creator of waxy.org, upcoming.org, and playfic.com. He was the first CTO for Kickstarter and went on to create the XOXO Festival in Portland Oregon.
He's also into collecting original 1980s Infocom games and still plays them today despite owning modern computers and video cards that can do so much more.
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Marcin Wichary (MAR-cheen ve-HAR-ay) is a brilliant writer, coder, and speaker famous for going deep on everything he does. We discuss his entire history from college through joining Google, to creating the famous playable Pac-Mac google doodle, to joining Medium, and ultimately becoming so obsessed with typewriters and keyboards he took a sabbatical from work to begin writing a book, then he never looked back. The first draft of his book is done and now he's in the editing and publishing phase, hoping to release it next year.
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Alex Cox is an Apple aficionado, technologist, and staff member of the Cards Against Humanity empire. She's currently working on four different podcasts that cover a wide range of topics but we figured out her recent obsession with smoking/eating weed is something she hadn't talked about before and would make a good subject to chat about for an hour.
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John Roderick is the creator of the band The Long Winters and a prolific podcast host and guest. He grew up in Alaska and sits down to explain every aspect of the state. He is not a man of few words. In our nearly 90 minutes of talking, we cover when to visit, what to do, and where to go, what the culture is like and why it's worth trekking to the most remote places. Don't miss John's tips on how to select and broker a deal with a bush pilot. Also we talk about bears.
Most of the links in this episode are to Google Maps and because Alaska is such a huge, varied place, it makes a lot of sense to click and open them up to know what parts of the region we're talking about at each moment.
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Erika Hall, the author of the new book Conversational Design, sits down to talk about how she got into doing triathlons and all the work it took to get there.
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Jessie and friends bounding as Mouseketeers from The Mickey Mouse Club
Jessie Char is co-founder of the Layers Conference, taking place in San Jose on June 4-6th next month, which brings a bunch of design leaders talking about iOS design during the week of WWDC. Previous she worked on Pacific Helm, an iOS design studio.
Jessie's also way into Disney Parks and is an annual pass holder even though she lives in the Bay Area. She still makes it out to the parks a couple days each month, thanks to short cheap flights and having a cofounder in Long Beach.
During this talk we cover how she fell in love with Disney Parks growing up, how she rediscovered them as an adult, and what she likes to do there on a typical day. We go over our favorite places to eat and share strategies to have a fun time at Disneyland and California Adventure.
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The four shapes of yo-yos:
A wall rack showing off some of Jeff's 200-300 yo-yos he currently owns:
Jeff Atwood is the co-founder of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites and in 2012 started his company Discourse to build software and services around better forums.
In September of 2017, his son got a yo-yo and Jeff was instantly hooked, playing with yo-yos for the first time since he was a kid in the 1980s, and it quickly became an obsession and a collection with hundreds of yo-yos. Recently he's been sending out gift packs to everyone he knows online and we talk about how he came to yo-yos, what's great about them, and why he's spreading the gospel of yo-yos to anyone who wants to listen and try.
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Erica Baker is a Senior Engineering Manager at Patreon and has spent the last ten plus years tracking down her family tree from every source imaginable, including family, online databases, microfiche, and documents sitting in libraries. Some may look at ancestry and genealogy as a silly hobby, but for Erica, it's about filling out the story not just for her own family but hopefully someday for every other African American family as well.
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Cal Henderson is really into shoes, currently owning about 100 different pairs. His criteria is whatever looks cool to him, and he makes a point of wearing all his shoes instead of merely collecting them.
Cal's favorite shoes, special edition of Nike Air Max 97s
Cal's storage solution where he's currently got about 100 pairs of shoes (every cubby is now filled)
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It was fun to catch up with Jessamyn as we chat about non-librarian or online community things. We went deep into Learned League, the shadowy internet nerd trivia league with what I consider impenetrable rules and traditions.
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I play Alto's Odyssey and love it, but Jason Kottke really loves the game, so much so he's got one of the highest scores in the world. We go deep on the game for 45 minutes, talking about he got into it, what sets his playing apart, and what role games play in our lives.
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