As pre-millenials, The Vergecasters are ancient enough to remember when an IM was no more ruthless than a little yellow man that said "ding" a lot through a crusty ol' 2400-baud Sportster. Now, all the IM's come through FiOS and look more like D-grade Bollywood stars...or do they? Hear the complex story of the modern Internet Marketer unfold before your ears here, in this, the Thirtieth Vergecast of the twenty-first century. With special guests Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land and Eric Migicovsky, co-founder of Pebble.
We are officially one week into the season of movie blockbusters. The Dark Knight Rises, Spider-Man, Prometheus, Expendables 2, and Avengers. Did you guys see Avengers? It's filled with action, explosions, Norse gods and quips. But enough about Avengers. You're here for one reason and that reason is the Vergecast.
We are back in our studio at 4:30 EDT and we'll be measuring the Quips Per Minute (QPM) and seeing how Josh, Nilay, and Ross stack up against Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, and Nick Fury.
The chat below is open now, so jump in. If you'd like to play The Vergecast Home Game you can: Verge Bingo.
The Vergecast approaches its thirtieth birthday on a sombre note with a two-hour tribute to MCA, Paul's Twitter feed, the one hundred fiftieth yearlong celebration of the Mexican army's unlikely victory over French forces at the Battle of Puebla, and BlackBerry OS 9.
If you're anything like the Vergecasters, you've had a gaping gavel-sized hole in your heart since the final episode of Law & Order: Orbach Originals was sentenced to death two years ago. And, if you're more than just a little bit like the Vergecasters, you were relying on 2012's Game of Codes: The Goöraculan Chronicles to be engaging enough to cauterize that hole long enough to pen the grisly fan fiction screenplay that would finally fuse the two courtroom dramas in a perpetually dismal yet never dull union in the center of the love triangle of technology, crime, and reality television. If you're a lot like the Vergecasters, the cautery iron was brought within millidegrees of thermal utility by the fiery, populist early testimony of Larry Page only to be plunged into the numbingly dull ice bucket of paperwork / technicality-driven plot twists that would never hack it in prime time.
If you are the Vergecasters, the wound still gapes, you got sick and tired of being sick and tired, and now you're busy enjoying your twenty-eighth gin & tonic on the maiden voyage of the vessel Arkyd and will be Vergecasting from the bottom of a strip mine on Ceres if the Wi-Fi at the Planetary Resources Starbucks can handle it. Smell ya later, earth-wads.
The Vergecasters survive the Vergecast's 27th birthday in style with a two-hour celebration that includes visits from Jim Belushi, the Google Glass Girl, and a newly-discovered adolescent specimen of the quickly-evolving Goöracluan race not-so-subtly disguised as a door-to-door matter generator salesman.
A Friday Vergecast riddled with Instagram fun and ebook price fixing is ready for your listening pleasure. Feel free to listen — and then relisten — to the only bit of audio that allows Josh Topolsky and two flavors of Miller to enter your ear canals, infect your brain, and fill you up with all of the knowledge you need to live a Vergecast lifestyle.
It's Friday. It's the 13th. And you probably thought we forgot about your weekly Vergecast. We would never scare you like that. However, instead of the regularly scheduled Thursday broadcast we are coming to you live from the beautiful day of Friday. Even though we are Vergecasting on this bright new day, we are still bringing you all of the things you love about the Vergecast! Except for Nilay. Nilay won't be here. Sorry. Instead we'll be providing you a healthy dose of Ross!
We will be live from the studio at 1:30PM EST. Join us if you like technology and friendship.
If you'd like to play along at home, there are two amazing fan-made bingo games: Verge Bingo and The Verge Bingo.
Do you know how you can tell this Vergecast is sponsored by The Living Trust of Jerry Garcia and/or Phish and/or Widespread? Because you can click on these links and read the articles at home; sure, and you know what, there's really nothing wrong with that. They're great articles. But there is simply NOTHING that approaches hearing the 2-hour extended hypermix of "Lumia" into "Project Glass" at Vergecast 025 and you know the Vergecasters will never do it quite like that ever again. You really can't even explain it in any sort of content management system that exists today, is how good it is, is all we're saying.
This Vergecast addresses the defining question of our era: whose cuisine will reign supreme? Will BlackBerry, the besmirched Team Jacob / Lil Kim / Team Gale of the blogosphere, rise up against shining favorite Apple, the Team Peeta / Nicki Minaj / Team Edward of the entire universe? Or will both contenders be felled by Google, the arena's Volturi / Universal Music Group / Capitol? SPOILER ALERT: Joanna Stern smokes them all with a company-issued Lumia 9000, and it's a Vergecast.
Two score and fifteen years ago, long before they were Vergecasters, the Vergecasters were taking a lunch meeting during nursery school in the coolest, most blinged-out crib in the whole nursery school. In between bouts of teething on his My First Sony, Paul struck up a conversation about how much he had enjoyed that Sunday's edition of Car Talk. "I just learned so much from Click And Clack, the Tappet Brothers, about why my Cozy Coupe II gives me trouble when I'm trying to engage the parking break on an incline. And the callers! Such a diverse, spirited crowd — brought together by their love of the road!" "Hear hear," cooed Lil' Nilay, "it would be so sick if one day us three best baby friends had a television or other sort of broadcast platform from which we could discuss our favorite topics with a dignified and knowledgeable audience." Josh took a moment to drop his sippy cup full of Diet Coke and give the other two an omniscient high-five: it's the Vergecast.
Dusty and darkened by his 1,700-mile journey on horseback from the heart of Texas, Gonzo Journalist 3.0 Nilay Patel rolls his Retina Crystal Ball from its repurposed velveteen Crown Royal satchel onto the Vergecast studio conference coffee table. His abilities enhanced by a half a vodka-soda, Media Theoritician Joshua Topolsky gazes deep into its almost-too-real surface, failing to notice it's sticky with day-old margarita juice and unsavory bits of dried salsa. As he swipes, pinches, and zooms nimbly in the airspace around the orb, JT communicates a fantastical vision of the present from deep within the darkest corner of its fourth core: an era free of the feudal shackles of FM frequencies, the print edition of the New York Post, and the cantankerous media tastemakers and oligarchs who once held so much influence over the populous. Peering up above his reading glasses from the Ba-Bl section of his recently-hyperinflated Encyclopedia Britannica, Dubious Sage Paul Miller wonders what can possibly come next. Not so shockingly, it's the future: one where all citizens exist in a fat green cloud, joyfully passing bits, bytes, kilobytes, and pagesix.com links directly to their Fave Five Friends upon tiny Napster- and KaZaA-branded puffs of cumulonimbus. Jarringly, the sphere momentarily flashes in a spinning beach ball animation, then goes dark. And Nilay seems to have left his charging cradle down south. You could cut the air with a RAZR: it's the Vergecast.
Do we look 21? We certainly feel 21, or at least Big Bossman Josh does, after the night he had last night. In HD. We can buy you beer if you give us a few bucks is all we're saying.
Vergecast XX is the "November Rain" of Vergecasts. We see you, fanboy, and NO, we don't see Josh naked and shivering in the fetal position at the end (that's for Vergecast XXX), but we do get to think it's over about 3,000 times before it actually is, so if you're into that thing, you're into this.
The Vergecast: using the freshest, hottest tech to reach out and touch a topless, peanut-butter-covered Chris Ziegler and his Playbook since 2012.
Siri, what if The Vergecasters spent an entire Vergecast talking about TurboGrafx 16, rave fliers, notifications in OS X, and how to pronounce Paul's name?
Frankly, I've wondered that myself. I don't know. I would ask that you address your spiritual questions to someone more qualified to comment.
This edition of the Vergecast was written in longhand in a spiral-bound notebook, mimeograph'd into our thermostat (with the help of a very expensive proprietary mimeograph -> Nest conversion cable we've developed at PARC in conjunction with Honeywell) and can be yours at the low, low bandwidth of eighty kilobits per second. You're welcome!
We promise to let you listen to this Vergecast if you promise to not tell anyone about the Social Media Devolution we're storyboarding in conjunction with DARPA, Richard Branson, and the foreign guy who makes the sandwiches taste good at the God Bless Deli right by Josh's house. Our Pinky Swear script is still in beta though so just know that we (i.e. all above mentioned parties and their corresponding security forces) are watching you (when we're not watching VH1 Soul [so we're actually never watching you]).
This edition of the Vergecast is coming at you straight from Margaritaville Shenzen, where the sun is always setting, the tequila flows like labor, and the State of the Union is always required to be full of perfect surf reports. You can follow Margaritaville Shenzen on Twitter and visit us inside Secondlife -- check in on SecondFoursquare to get your free-range Parrothead-edition Tamagotchi app to your ePhone for free!
As an unwashed horde of jarring, neon-shattered Las Vegan vignettes wanes from the tides of our memories, life at the intersection of technology and culture slams us with another dissertation-inducing week of progress, sparring, and confusion. All we can do is sit here and Vergecast about it.
Boom. We are out of here, but not before we deliver one last hard-hitting Las Vegas-style Vergecast. We hope you enjoyed our Vergecasts this week because we really enjoyed doing them even though we could barely even focus on the cameras in front of our faces for lack of sleep, vitamin D, and food that didn't come out of a can or a cup. See you next week! Boom.
As Consumer Electronics Show exhibitors begin ripping all the TVs off the walls, un-docking all the iPods from their cradles, and having their robot butlers fold their screen-wiping cloths, let's take a few hours to go over every single staff member's best and worst of the show, in Vergecast form. It's a love it or leave it kind of show.
P.S. Paul would like to apologize about hurtful things he said to Raymond about a certain pastime and Raymond's relative skillset at that pastime. "Raymond is the best, I suck," is how he put it.
LIVE from New Vegas, it's the first-ever PICKLERCAST! With your hosts, The Unimpressed Josh Meme, and Joanna Stern's baby, a Macbook Air, in a robotic stroller, with musical guests Justin Bieber and Kelly Pickler.
The tenth-ever Vergecast (and the second-ever CES 2012 Vergecast) was recorded in a post-post-modern Sony-branded production turret amidst a small army of zambonis, pregnant women, and Verge editors. That's pretty much all we can do for you, so we hope you like it.
Yes yes, y'all. It's time.
Did you miss us? Probably not. But if you did, don't worry: our holiday absence will be so enormously offset by our omnipresence in your media consumption patterns during CES next week that you will never want to see / hear from us ever again - we guarantee it. Happy new year!
Song: Standby Ghost - Can U Dance
We might be On The Verge of having a conniption fit from the excitement of pondering how many items from the 27-page wishlist PDF we submitted will slip through the recently-swept Vox Media chimney. We might be only halfway through designing calls from Santa for all five people on our contacts list. We might be busy pasteurizing the neighborhood cow's last TGIF bucket of milk and borrowing just one last cup of sugar from the neighbor to create the warmest, most well-rounded cookie plate this side of the North Pole. But that doesn't mean we don't have time to Vergecast.
P.S. But we were too busy to do video.
Song: Standby Ghost - Ground Force
It is Friday. You have had a week. One of those of weeks that hits you between the eyes like a bad Ash Wednesday joke, drives an 18-wheeler through your carpal tunnels into the next dimension, finds you left out of the silliest "women drivers" image-enhanced forward everyone else in the cube farm and your extended family has received, you found out how many calories are in french fries, and the FedEx guy left your triple-180gm virgin vinyl edition of J. Bieber's "Under the Mistletoe" on your front porch in the freezing rain. What do you do? RELAX... with the Vergecast. Strap on a cold one and leave the italics to the dudes who are both on the verge and behind the microphones at the same time.
Song: Standby Ghost - Fall Into the Light
We did this podcast in Paintbrush.
Song: Solvent - Product of the Process (Ghostly International)
The Vergecasters are a lot like that commercial: sometimes they feel like a nut, sometimes they don't. This Vergecast is all Almond Joy: 4000 calories, 0% recommended daily value of Paul Miller, 100% RDV / Stern, and a bagful of Yellow 5. Just throw it in the bag.
Song: Ben Benjamin - Oblivious Athlete (Ghostly International)
You know what they say about third times, and this edition of the Vergecast is certainly no exception: it's a reeeeeeeal charmer, with conversation topics veering so wildly from the links listed below that you might think you're listening to Car Talk for a good portion of the show. There's also a pretty cool American Idol section easter egg in here somewhere. Tune in and let your freak flag fly.
Note: If you've previously subscribed to the This Is My Next Podcast feed, you should be all set!
Song: Mux Mool - Jen and Soda (Ghostly International)
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