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Implausipod
Art, Technology, Gaming, and PopCulture
Implausipod
Grats 2024
Twice is enough for it to be a tradition, right? Yeah, I think we'll go with that. Welcome to our second annual end-of-year holiday thank you episode, something to offset the Festivus celebrations you may be having on this day before the day before Christmas. Thanks for stopping by whenever you do. :)
The Newsletter and the archives are here: https://implausi.blog/newsletter/
Dr Implausible can be reached at drimplausible at implausipod dot com
Welcome to a quick holiday episode of the Implausipod. As we close out 2024, I thought it'd be worth it to do a quick wrapped style summary of the past year, dish out some thanks, and chart the course for the year ahead in 2025. And even though this falls on Festivus, this isn't quite a Festivus episode.
We're not going to air any of our grievances. We'll just talk That takes courage and true strength, so let's see what 2024 looked like in this episode of the Implausipod.
And to start with, why don't we crunch the numbers and give you some stats. Over the course of the year we had 48 blog posts, 8 newsletter issues, One book chapter, 15 plus podcast episodes, over 170 plus pages of text, and some 90, 000 plus words. I wasn't doing any counting while going through the course of the year.
I'm not really focused on the numbers, but looking back, I'm really pleased to see what we were able to accomplish here. It's fantastic for showing what we're doing here, and what we're going to 2025. And, during the course of putting up those numbers, there was a few major events that happened along the way.
The most major of those was probably the shift to YouTube. This happened back in May or June, and was predicated by Google shutting down their Google Podcasts service and rolling everything into the YouTube platform. Porting a couple of the episodes to YouTube has been something I tried previously in 2023, but that's a different set of skills, and one that I'm still learning.
And it's one I'd like to continue doing more of, but for now, we'll continue with the auto generated ones from the RSS feed, along with the subtitles, and we'll develop them further as time goes on. Along with the addition of YouTube, we also made some changes over on the blog, including the start of the newsletter issues.
We published those monthly, starting back in March, and even though we had a couple dual monthly ones here in the fall, mostly due to a number of external events going on, we're happy to continue pushing those out into the new year as well. Thank you. It was a really good way to get into the habit of writing and publishing more consistently, to show off some photography or other things we were working on, as well as it was the kind of testing ground for some stuff that eventually became episodes or new ideas, and we're going to keep that going too.
I'll put a quick link to the signup in the show notes on this episode. And speaking of the blog, we had originally created it using WordPress as a platform, and there had been some drama with the WordPress stuff. ecosystem throughout the later half of 2024, which caused us to start moving some of the content to a more indie version or light version of the blog, was just some raw HTML and CSS.
And honestly, that's been a lot of fun, even though it isn't completely integrated into anything we might call a workflow yet. We're going to continue working on it. And hopefully that'll be the online home for all of our media going forward. The last thing we started doing with respect to the podcast is publishing more icebreakers, just short, five minute, punchy, topical episodes related to current events, media, what have you, and we're publishing those as bonus episodes, much like this one, and we'd like to continue doing that going forward into 2025.
The next thing I'd like to do is just to maybe reflect back on some of the major Themes and topics that we talked about throughout 2024. The main one I think was AI. That was kind of a constant throughout the year. We talked about it in a number of episodes and there's also a big takeaway from that. We study it as art now, but in 20 years, I'm arguing, I think it'll be normalized and we really have an opportunity to view it at the beginning of the medium.
And we're kind of throwing a little bit of that away. We looked at it in the terms of Soylent culture as how processes and remixes culture that currently exists. We talked about it in terms of Eshanjay, that gentrification and replacement that goes on. And we also looked at it in terms of like robotics and a few other views of it through science fiction.
I don't know how much AI coverage we'll be doing in 2025, but suffice to say, I think it's part of the current tech and cultural landscape and we'll still be touching on it from time to time. Another one of the big takeaways was social media and we did a couple of episodes that were specifically related to that, whether it was ongoing trials and tribulations of TikTok or Twitter slash X, and seeing some of the ways we either interact with or integrate social media into our lives and how it also has a role in influencing the larger culture.
I think. That'll still continue as a point of analysis for us in 2025 as well. We also came up with a few new things, like the work we did on the nostalgia curve, and some of the looks at science fiction in particular. And lastly, we integrated some elements of theory, whether it's innovation theory, communications theory, media theory, and we're starting to bring that forward.
view to some of what we're doing here. And I'm really happy that we're able to include that as an educational component to the content that we're creating, but it wasn't all sunshine and roses. There was a few challenges that we faced over the course of the year. Stuff that you as a listener would be unlikely to be aware of.
One of the things I really struggled with was putting out the material consistently. There was a couple of pauses that we had during the course of the year. There's some external reasons for that, but it is a challenge that I want to acknowledge. There's also a couple episodes that we had recorded, but the audio was troubled or very poor.
So I wasn't able to actually use that for episodes. And that kind of threw the schedule off a little bit. Lastly is the Appendix W, which I tried to move off into its own podcast, but I think I'm going to roll back into this one here. I want it to be its own thing, but I think doing multiple podcasts is also a challenge at this point in time.
So I'm going to figure out the best way to balance that going forward into 2025. But before we get to looking at what we're going to do in 2025, I'd like to issue some thank yous, much like we did last year with our Grats 2023 episode. Since we posted that episode, we've grown a little bit, and I'd just like to offer a quick shoutout to anybody anywhere around the world who's been tuning in and listening to us.
Whether you've been following us for a long time or just watching us. Recently joined, I want to say thank you. The breadth of the reach here is really quite stunning. Whether you're in Orlando, Florida or Portland, Oregon, thank you. Whether you're in Winnipeg, Manitoba or Dublin, Ireland, I appreciate you.
Whether you're in Leeds in the UK or Mexico City, Mexico, Illinois or Oklahoma, Kansas or California, I appreciate you tuning in and checking us out. Whether you're in Rio, Brazil, or Sydney, Australia, Vienna, France, or Leeds in the UK, I thank you for tuning in. There's so many listeners from around the world.
It's really humbling that I look at the list of locations, but to all the listeners in Canada, my home country, from coast to coast, again, thank you once again for listening. I hope there was some good for you in 2024 and we can find some good in 2025 as well. It might not be easy, but we'll work at it and do our best.
And so what we have for 2025 here on the ImplausiPod is a few things I'm really excited about. When I started the podcast, I kind of sat down and made a list of all the topics and ideas that I had for different episodes. And that was about 100 or 120 lines. And since then, we've only added to it. I'm going to go back to a few of those ideas and In the first quarter of 2025, I know we have at least one interview and possibly a few guest appearances.
We're going to return to Appendix W and do a bit of a speed run there. And we're going to look at the Star Wars Andor series, a season one recap and a preview for season two before that happens. We're also gonna return to some implausibilities, some new and emerging technologies that we're gonna be looking at deeply, and we will be coming to, I think, impact our lives in 2025 and beyond.
So stay tuned for all that and more, and whatever current events come up and whatever changes we need to look at. Thank you once again. Take care and have fun.