Agent Palmer

A while ago I asked a Twitter Poll question “Your favorite indie #podcast can either remain indie and more or less remain as it is or go mainstream and potentially be vastly different… You want it to Remain indie or Go mainstream?”

That the results were so close, with 51% saying they would want their favorite podcast to “Go mainstream” is extremely surprising… Or is it?

There are two reasons I picked up Confessions of a Baseball Purist by Jon Miller with Mark Hyman. One, Jon Miller was the voice of the Baltimore Orioles during my formative years listening to games on the radio and two, he really knows his stuff.

The book originally released in 1998 and the updated edition from 2000 may appear dated, but it is not antiquated at all. In fact, more of his observations are proven out than those that aren’t in the 18 years since this text has last been touched.

I always take notes when I read a book. Part of it comes from wanting the ability to add quotes to the reviews I write, but the bigger picture reason is because sometimes I like to go back to those notes and see them at a later date. By actually being able to read through a small document with all the quotes I pulled, I’ll find the one I remember, and it’s easier than paging through and rereading a whole page.

I bring this up because the notes I collected from reading The Innovators by Walter Isaacson are more than a lot of the other books I have recently read, even some on the same subject.

Empire of Imagination by Michael Witwer is a grand retelling of the life and times of Ernest Gary Gygax, from his childhood and earliest inspirations, playfulness, and adventurousness ness to his early wargaming and the creation of the game which is synonymous with his name Dungeons & Dragons, to the exile from the company he founded in TSR and his resurgence as a celebrity. It’s all in the pages of this books.

The author of this book takes a novel approach to the telling of Gygax’s life story by making a narrative out of it.

“From the emergence of the first browser through the boom of social media, this fascinating history reveals how the internet changed everything we thought we knew about technologies–and ourselves.”

That first sentence from the inside cover flap explains in broad strokes what How The Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone is. But it is more than that.