Posted by reaperducer 16 hours ago
They've seemed to configure Cloudfront to block access from Singapore.
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.
I find that outdated previews/predictions of events that have already happened is the perfect thing to get me to doze off.
I think the 2 weeks of heavy speculation about where Giannis Antetokounmpo will be traded to has me set for another month.
The problem with that podcast is that most of their selections are genuinely interesting - I even listened to them on long drives (e.g. "Origin of Species"). Even something I thought would boring like or "Farm Engines and how to Run" them turned out to be fascinating.
This one, on the other hand, seems to be genuinely boring. I couldn't get past the intro.
He has a number of tricks he uses from a monoto delivery, to meandering stories where the narrative constantly interrupts itself with. So you can’t really “follow along”.
My favourite episode (The Bear with a Comet on his Belly): https://www.sleepwithmepodcast.com/414/
To anyone who tries it, it's important to know upfront: there's nothing to "get." It's nonsense. It exhausts the brain without being interesting enough to keep it running.
I can't speak for other cheapskates, but I personally think it's more that YouTube is still so utterly inessential that if ads ever start managing to get past my ad blockers, I'll simply not watch.
Or if it is - why e.g. automated voices reading nyt articles are so bad?
The professionals…
On a related note reading HN comments is a prime example of sleepy text. Gets me every time.
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 were for many years my soundtrack to getting to sleep - news, a short programme (on Sunday it's a recording of some church bells from some church somewhere in the UK countryside - it changes each week), followed by the shipping forecast. The service "signs off" with the national anthem before switching over to the BBC World Service at around 1am through until 6am when it switches back to the iconic Today programme.
The shipping forecast though - that's the gold. If you've never listened to it before, try and find a recording. As an island nation with a decimated but still strong fishing trawler fleet, it's framed as essential safety information, but in truth its just an iconic, beautiful, ever-changing structured poem, read on national radio several times a day. It is perfect for helping calm the mind, it's a weighted blanket for the brain.
Somebody, somewhere realised that a continuity announcer slowly rattling through the shipping forecast was so good at putting over-active minds to sleep that they created a podcast - "The Sleeping Forecast" - which is a mix of slow/ambient music with old shipping forecasts read over them. I love it, but my partner finds it "weird" so I can't listen to it without wearing headphones late at night.
This, somehow, then led to the realisation that Radio 3 (the national classical music station in the UK), could provide more of the same. Cue other programs - Sleep Tracks, Night Tracks - where there is a composition of calming, quieting music, mostly rooted in classical tradition but overall just very ambient and calm.
And then the final inevitable chapter: in the world of DAB radio and digital platforms (including the BBC Sounds app that seemed absurd at its inception but now slowly becoming loved), the BBC realised they could cheaply put together a whole new station: BBC Radio 3 Unwind (or "3U" for short).
All of this being the BBC, there are no ads. No pledge drives. 3 Unwind has no news programming. It's my new go to when anxiety hits.
The BBC isn't perfect, the funding model needs to evolve, but while we have this - just in case one day we don't - do try and enjoy this stuff if you can.
Now I got worried, is this actually true, wanted to look it up and now it was hard to fall asleep again. They shouldn't put stuff like that in the podcast supposed to help you sleep
The ambience there fits Marfa perfectly.
However...it's become my "put this on with a 30 minute timer if I'm having trouble falling to sleep" tool. I'd probably have better luck with the physical book. The narrator, John Rowe, does an excellent job, but his voice is so damn _soothing_.