#loremen

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.

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).