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Green Mill detail

A detail shot of one of Chicago’s iconic venues, the Green Mill in Uptown.

All photos are printed on archival quality photo print paper. Framed photos are enclosed with black real wood frames, protected by shatter-proof, UV coated plexiglass. If you have a size request or other questions, contact me for a special order and a price quote.

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Austin trip post

I’m fortunate enough to be able to travel a couple times a year. On these trips, I find myself wanting to go on some kind of “epic photo walk.” The epitome of those videos I watch on Youtube. Mixed with Daniel Arnold, of course.

The reality is usually a bit less thrilling. More than anything, I found myself simply wandering. There were some amazing restaurants and stores (Waterloo records!) to be sure, but it turns out that downtown on a rainy day is not the most bustling hive of activity.

That being said, enjoy this primarily “un-peopled” view of Austin.

Technical notes:

Color photos shot using a Nikon D3200 and Tamron 17-55 f/2.8

Black and white shot using a Nikon FE2 and Nikkon 28mm or 50mm lenses, Ilford HP5 film.

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CuddleXpo experience

As promised in my last update, here’s a bit of a breakdown of the experience of doing headshots/portraits at a professional conference.

My primary concern leading up to the event was how much interest there actually was in the service I would be offering. On the one hand, I knew that plenty of people in the cuddling world have small businesses and therefore probably needed professional shots to use in their branding and marketing. So having something easy to offer while they were at an event like this, would make them primed to buy.

On the other hand, this kind of quick service might put people off. Maybe they hadn’t really thought too much in advance and they would want photos but didn’t feel camera-ready… As it turned out, when I was barely halfway set up on the first day people were queuing up for the signup sheet. I wound up getting 12 sessions over the course of the 2 days.

Because this is a “business” post I’ll run the numbers. I think photographers - especially those starting out - are way too afraid of showing our work and I don’t want to be another one of “those people.”

Staging:

A two light setup with basic off-white backdrop

Lights were constant (florescent), definitely would love to go with flashes next time around

My Nikon D3200 with 35mm f/1.8 (which is like a 55mm equivalent, so ideal for portraits)

I was situated in the main hall where there were presentations going on all day, right along side vendors selling various products. I believe I was one of the only service-based vendors. I didn’t have any proper signage, the lights and my little “pricing sheet” did the talking.

I planned for about 15 minutes per shoot and the pricing breakdown was as follows:

$15 - 5 RAW photos (1 outfit/look), no edits

$25 - 5 edited photos

$30 - 10 photos, including 2 outfits/looks

$50 - 10 photo edited

In case you can’t tell, those prices are SUPER cheap! And I was told so by my clients that day. I’m sure that it was a good reason I got as many signups as I did, but on the other hand I feel like I could have/should have charged a bit more. It’s so funny how much I’ve found myself falling into the same “traps” (i.e. not valuing my work enough) as I’ve read from other people and I still didn’t learn! So the takeaway here is don’t under-price yourself!

While I probably went too cheap, I believe that I delivered a professional service in a fairly high volume setting. I’ve gotten back good feedback from my clients from that day. But I also know going forward I’m going to do a better job of representing my value on paper.

Learning experiences:

Bring a mirror! Letting someone quickly check themselves was the number one issue that I wound up having to deal with in editing. I could have made my life easier and made my clients feel just that much more comfortable if they had a simple mirror there to do their hair or double check their makeup.

“Measure twice, cut once” - Kind of like with the first point but I realized that most of my sessions were not taking anywhere near 15 minutes. It’s fine to have the energy and get right down to shooting, but that moment to double check things can save you from some dud shots and, again, trying to fix things in post.

Lighting! I’m greatly appreciative of the lighting setup that we had, but I know I can get even better results in the future if I plan that part of it even more. The one thing I will have to seriously consider is the value/capability of constant or strobe setup. I think having a constant lighting setup was less of a distraction. If flashes were going off every few minutes that might be a distraction.

Without further ado, here are some of the shots I was most pleased with:

Things That Worked

Being a calm, welcoming presence. It’s easy to see the list of people and go “okay, I have to get through this, which can really undercut the interaction with the person who is right in front of you. I was able to “turn on the charm” in a natural way, which helps relax others.

Letting them review the photos. Even though this was a fairly quick service, giving the customer a level of control/input that shows them that you know what you’re doing is important. I didn’t have a tether cable so I just poppped the SD card out of the camera and plugged it into my laptop.

Doing the Math

Afterwards, I did the math on things that I directly spent money or time on to make this happen. I cannot emphasize how low my overhead was on this: I had most of the equipment on hand, and I was able to borrow the lights for the event. The fact that I did not have to pay for my placement at the event also helped.

Figuring in time to edit on the day after (which I believe around 5 hours), I was making a reasonable $25/hour.

By the way, I tracked my time editing using the app Toggl. It made tracking very simple and even the free version was enough to keep clear track of time. If I took a break, it automatically would stop the clock after going idle in case I forgot to manually do it.

$25 is nothing to sneeze at, it felt good to get paid and have a deadline to work with. But there is definitely room to grow. I would like to thank all the wonderful people who hired me to take their pictures, as well as Keeley for putting on the CuddleXpo and inviting me.

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Site Redesign

I’ve had this site for a long time, and over that time it has undergone many redesigns and changes. It’s always been a blog, of sorts, but it’s also been some form of portfolio as well.

I could own this place exclusively and make my own things and share my own thoughts. It’s the one reason I haven’t made the jump to Medium and, despite being fairly active, remain rather suspicious of image hosting sites like Instagram and Flickr (even though I like instagram!)

So here now is the “Wells” (Wells is the template name) design of my personal homepage on the internet. The prior existence was nice but it felt jagged. Too much… i don’t know, flabby. I still love the term zibaldone, and I think it still rings true as part of the aim of this site. I may still put together a newsletter/dispatch style post, but I think those discoveries fly by so quickly that you may as well follow me on twitter for that sort of thing.

As far as something getting close to a professional update, I recently had a grand time taking portrait commissions at the first annual Cuddle Expo. It was a great space full of caring, compassionate folks, and some of them needed updated headshots and that’s where I came in.

I realized something in that moment. I actually liked shooting portraits. I now have an answer for what I take pictures of (at least in part.) And in addition to the ongoing dream of selling prints I am one step closer to an actual business model.

I may post soon about the portrait sessions at a conference, which as far as I know is a fairly uncommon and unique offering… but that will be a dedicated post in the coming weeks.

With that, I am happy to say that I’m enjoying my online presence now more than I have… possibly ever? Is that even possible?

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Polaroid Onestep 2 viewfinder review

When I learned that Polaroid Originals was going to be releasing a slightly updated version of their Onestep 2 camera, I was intrigued enough to take the plunge. 

A few of the pros of buying a new Onestep 2 camera: 

 Reliable. You know it's going to work out of the box, and if not, there is a warranty behind it. 

Slightly cheaper in the long run. The price of 600 film compared to i-type film may be enough to justify purchasing if you buy packs of film frequently. 

Features. This isn't a fully manual Polaroid experience like you'd get with an SX-70 or SLR-680, but it has just about everything else: self-timer, flash disable, multiple exposure*, and exposure compensation switch. 

You can blow people's minds that they "still make Polaroids"

The cons: 

Price. I purchased my JobPro 600 camera on ebay for about $30, it still works really well and has most of the features of the OneStep 2. The only things it can't do are take iType film and it doesn't have a self-timer.

It will take you about 23 packs of i-type film until you start realizing the savings in difference in cost between buying a used Polaroid camera and shooting exclusively 600 film.*

If you're really cost-conscious and like the idea of instant film more "in theory" than in practice, you may be happier with a Fuji Instax mini. You can find them for much less and the film is quite affordable, even if the images are very small.

  When you open the Polaroid OneStep2 box, you are greeted with the front of the camera facing you. Almost like it's going to take your picture right away. I opted for the subdued black model, but the white model clearly wears is vintage inspiration. In black it appears a bit more "business."

It feels solidly built. It's not noticeably heavy, like a lot of cameras. It certainly feels less-dense than a digital camera. Because it doesn't have a flip up flash, the OneStep 2 looks much smaller when it's sitting on a table. The form factor still probably won't save you much room in a bag or case,  as its maximum height, length and width are still very close to the boxier JobPro/Sun600 models in the "closed" position. 

  The film closure on the OneStep 2 feels weaker than the JobPro. That old Polaroid "CLUNKS" shut nicely, you feel like you've loaded your camera for some serious business. Whereas this new one feels a bit more fragile. It's also interesting to note the slight differences between the roller and frog tongue configurations. Whereas the frog tongue is easily removable on the old 600s, the Onestep's design appears to make any kind of repair or replacement more difficult. 

 The viewfinder 

One of the biggest complaints about the original OneStep 2 (the OneStep 2.0, if you will) was the viewfinder. It was simply a window between the front and back of the camera. It was very easy for users to place their eye in such a way as to exacerbate the parallax view and miss-frame their shots. This model resolves this issue  with a  proper viewfinder. It makes the OneStep 2 even more like the original Polaroid cameras. Now there is no question as to how to look through the viewfinder, and while it cannot resolve the inherent parallax issue of having a separate viewing lens from the taking lens, it at least reduces the instances of user error. 

  After you've gone through a few packs and start to understand the ticks of the thing, the general functionality seems to be about the same between the JobPro and the Onestep 2. The camera meters for the whole image. It doesn't do any fancy "matrix metering" or anything like that, it just a reading from the entire frame and exposes for whatever the middle of that is. If you're in weird lighting, you'll have to think about how you want to compensate. 

In bright light, while it still recommends the flash you probably don't need the flash. It does  a nice job of filling against harsh shadows at midday at a reasonable distance, but otherwise it's not going to make or break things. 

 Indoors, you will probably want to use the flash. The camera has a fixed aperture that is fairly small. While Polaroid doesn't say on their site, the consensus seems to be that it's about f/11. If you disable the flash, you can hear the shutter click slightly slower, so it's probably compensating for the light difference with this. This is part of why camera shake can be a serious issue when shooting indoors.

If you know what you're doing (i.e. can read light and have a tripod or other steady surface) you will get excellent pictures in natural light under many conditions.

The only issue with the flash is its placement on the camera. It is almost in line, horizontally with the lens. I believe this leads to all kinds of flash "blooming" and what almost appears as blur. A good example of this can be seen between the two photos below(Left, without flash. Right, with flash):

Power is closely related to the flash. In one of the biggest departures from the legacy of Polaroid cameras and film, the OneStep2 has a built-in rechargable battery. It is powered through USB, so it can draw power from a USB outlet adapter or charge from a laptop or battery pack. The battery will get you through about 18 packs of film before it dies... which is like ~$270 in film** before a recharge.

One quirk of the new power supply is that the camera can take a few seconds to fully charge up and be ready to shoot. I started shooting with the idea that I could flick the switch to "on" and just shoot, but you have to let the camera charge up the flash before it'll take a picture. If it has been off for a while, this can lead to a noticeable "pause" of about 5 or 6 seconds which I found to be slightly awkward when you hit the shutter button and nothing happens.

I did accidentally leave the camera on for a full weekend and it was dead when I checked it before a shoot (had plenty of time to charge it, though), so while there is very little power draw it does not have any other kind of "sleep" feature. Charging from completely flat using a wall charger takes under two hours.

Unlike on older Polaroid cameras, the film only ejects from the camera after the shutter is released which means that there is a slightly longer delay from when the camera takes the picture. It does slightly interrupt the classic Polaroid sound of the camera in operation, but it is overall an improvement as you can keep the button held and move the camera into a shade or shadow to eject the film if you're particularly cautious. You can also turn the camera off with the shutter pressed, then release the button while the camera is off and create a multiple exposure. This can work with the flash off or on.

It took me about halfway through my first pack on the Onestep 2 to be converted. I really liked my JobPro. I also liked my Impulse AF... each of these cameras had features that the other ones didn't. In the Impulse AF, there was real autofocus- which allowed for neat shots with shallower depth of field- and it could focus fairly close. But you can't disable the flash. The JobPro can disable the flash, but you can't do multiple exposures, and it has a fixed-focus lens.

The Onestep 2 can do most of the things of both older cameras, but it does not autofocus. I'm willing to accept the quirk of fixed focus if it means I have everything else available to me. Overall I'm very happy with the OneStep 2. I think Polaroid Originals did a great job with the design of the product, and I think that for real photo nuts the Polaroid format has some real benefits over the Fuji line. Primarily in the ability to get more creative with them after they come out of the camera, as well as their size and color rendition.

This review took a good amount of time and film. If this helped you make a buying decision or otherwise taught you something about the new generation of Polaroid cameras, you can thank me in a couple different ways.

*calculations based on standard retail prices of i-Type and 600 Polaroid Originals film.

**18 packs at $16 (baseline i-Type price) per pack.

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"I don't know what this is about"

On June 30th went to the "Keep families together" rally at Daley Plaza in downtown Chicago. While I was waiting on the train, I overheard two young women next to me who were clearly on their way to the protest as well. I knew they were on the way because they were talking about the protest, but they were talking about it as though they were going a school assembly.

"So like, what does keep families together mean? Like it sounds nice, but I don't get what is supposed to happen."

And then, "... I wonder what actually happens after these things. Like just because you protested doesn't mean anything is going to change."

I can't recall everything they said, exactly, but I remember the feeling behind the words: apathy. And specifically I recall them recoiling from "politics"… while they were on their way to walk in a protest march. They really didn't want it to get "political."

When something gets political, that usually means it makes someone uncomfortable, and that usually happens to someone with privilege. They're having a nice time and they don't want someone else to ruin it with their feelings to the contrary.

I was troubled by this thought. That politics is something one does only if one must. Like changing your own oil… The direct participation and analysis of the choices your elected representatives make was foreign to them. And I admit that I fall far short of the mark for direct engagement with my political process but I have at least thought about my place in it.

I could understand why they were asking these questions. A protest is a galvanizing experience (or it should be) and unfortunately, a lot of folks go to a protest the same way they go to a concert: they go there to be entertained. On a very basic level they may feel politically engaged, but ultimately they are there for spectacle. To have gone to a protest. This is a big reason why I find most "funny" protest signs incredibly dull.

At the end of the march, when many people had gone home, I watched as a black woman was trying to cross the street near the plaza and the police were blocking her way. She was not in the mood to endure the police telling her where she was going to go. It wound up getting fairly intense.

A white woman started recording/streaming the interaction… and narrating to her cloud-based audience "this is not what we came here for"- she was upset that someone was yelling at the police. I remembered having those kinds of thoughts. The idea that yelling at police who were "just doing their job" and "trying to keep us safe" was rude. The reality was I knew that the police could revoke your rights on the spot, at will, and I dared not consider the painful repercussions that power has had on thousands of people.

At protests, I don't feel all that interested in engaging with people. They're (hopefully) so amped up that a meaningful dialogue isn't going to happen there. That's fine. It's about emotion, will, and expression.

In that moment of tension between the police, the woman and the watcher, I realized there were at least 3 events happening simultaneously.

There was a protest of the moment, the one pressing issue that sparked this event: illegal separation and detention of migrant families.

There was the ongoing monopoly of state violence that manifests itself in so many injustices: most commonly against those that do not fit into an established white normality.

And there was the spectacle. The funny posters, the sale of merchandise, the performative "good guy cops" shaking hands with protesters.

I believe that the three need to exist together, otherwise you do not have a coherent response to the "what is this about" question asked by the newcomer. It is hard, almost impossible, to put into words. They have to be shown, and they have to see the three sides of the protest. It may not come into relief at first, usually the spectacle wins out as it asks the most of our senses and the least of our hearts.

When the protest ends, hopefully something has changed or shifted in you as a witness and participant. And then you move forward with greater knowledge and an increased will to see something made better.

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It’s fascinating that we already have these deep dives going on whenever there is an accident involving a “self-driving car.”

It also reminds me of the Philosophy Tube video regarding autonomous vehicles and the “trolley problem.”

One of the big take aways was that when it comes to programming and designing how these things behave, we are much more critical of the slightest lapse in apparent judgment or “accident.” We are far less tolerant of machines making mistakes, even if their “failure rate” (the rate at which they would make a mistake) is much lower than a human’s.

That’s why it is not good enough that cars perform better than an average driver. They have to be, in a sense, perfect.

There is a  whole scale of vehicle autonomy (perhaps better understood as “level of human operator interaction”.) Where a car rating zero doesn’t even have cruise control and a car at the top of the scale can drive and park itself. Almost any of the intermittent levels, in which a human has to pay some level of attention to the cars operation are far less appealing to drivers. That’s why Tesla advertises “autopilot” even though you have to technically be touching the steering wheel at all times. It’s not actually that impressive of a feature. But it sounds like a great idea in practice- to be able to read a book while your robotic valet gets you from place to place.

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No ads

Farhad Manjoo over at The New York Times, of all places, actually got something extremely right. Advertising is killing the web. Under the weight of online advertising, sites are polluted not only with ugly design, but bad information. There is a lot to not like about the web, and advertising itself is the cause. It's such a core feature of the web that I think we've forgotten how fast and elegant sites can be when they aren't trying to load a dumpster's-worth of advertising code in the background.

Even well-designed sites are bad. Look at the Outline. Every article has a weird animated slideshow thing in the middle of it. And that's on a site that is pretty restrained. Don't even bother with regional news websites.

I think one of the more baffling instances of advertising making things worse online are twitter promoted tweets. Not only is this a tweet (99% it's an ad) that is forced into the users' timelines, but if the tweet has an attached video, the video will have a pre-roll ad for it. What winds up happening when you're scrolling through your feed is you'll see a split-second image of something and then it jumps to the same annoying pre-roll ad you're always used to seeing. It's a little silly and frustrating. I can't understand why anyone pays to promote tweets...

Which is why I'll also take this moment to reaffirm my interest in a truly open web where people can just post what they want to have their own spaces, apart from overt corporate control, to communicate with the world. I know almost no one reads this. I don't care. I'm still going to keep doing this.

Anyway, give the piece a read.

There's "retro gaming" and then there's "historical gaming"

It's kind of a clunky term, but I think that "historical gaming" is a more accurate way to describe high end enthusiast vintage gaming. The kind of people that insist on using CRTs and original hardware whenever possible.

Over at the Verge there's a piece about the Analogue Super NT. In the ephemeral world of retro gaming, emulation is widespread. Many emulators recreate the hardware architecture of the game system in software. The Super NT, however, uses hardware to recreate hardware and because of this, it is able to create a more faithful emulation of the Super Nintendo as it was in the early 1990s. In fact, it probably runs games slightly better than the Super Nintendo.

The article refers to the creators of the project as having an almost hi-fi like obsession with accuracy in the design and performance of the hardware, and I can certainly respect that. It's also apparent that this may be part of the key to archiving and keeping the past alive. If there weren't companies out there making analog hardware like tape decks and turntables, we would have lost even more analog music than we've already lost through the digital migration.

This also made me wonder, at what point does "retro gaming" turn into some new form of historical reenactment?

How valuable do you feel?

The Atlantic has an article on the company WeWork. In it, the company is revealed to be less valuable than its venture capital goals, but at the same time, the basic logic of the piece is that WeWork (and other startups in this bizarre world) are really only as valuable as investors "feel."

In the show Silicon Valley, one of the lines that stuck out to me in the first season was when one character was lamenting the lack of revenue. Another character said that this was a good thing, since when you don't have income, your estimated value can't really be determined. You could be worth billions. And now we're to the point that even with income, if a company is clever enough and slick enough, we can pretend like that doesn't matter and that they'll soon be worth billions.

This reminds me of a point that John Oliver (and a few other nightly joke shows) brought up: That Donald Trump's wealth fluctuates with how he feels. While that notion was derided at the time (rightly) that's exactly how startup investing works on a certain level. There are plenty of people at VC firms to crunch numbers but at the end of the day "how it feels" is really what moves the needle.

Physical Goods

I moved in the past month, and now that i have an even more stable living arrangment, I've found myself being less afraid of owning physical goods. I don't think I'll ever go back to the cluttered life I lived when I had many hundreds of DVDs on my shelves, but I bought a CD for the first time in probably a decade. That CD was Thundercat's 2017 album "Drunk."

It's an amazing album and benefits from the higher fidelity of CD, plus I wanted to be able to listen to this CD when the internet goes down or in some dark time when all of the music streaming services go offline. Ownership, at some point, does have its advantages.

By the way, a remix album of "Drunk" is coming out this year. "Drank" is a wild re-envisioning of Drunk slowed down and chopped. It's extremely disoriented in the best way possible.

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Dispatch into chaos

In the ever-evolving processes of life, this page is undergoing shakeups.

It feels like a lot of work to decide what is worthy of the "Black Rectangle brand" which is something I can't believe I just typed. It's barely a brand, and now that Black Mirror kind of ran away with the whole "what if phones but too much" thing, it feels less and less interesting to me to try and run with that.

Part of what is leading to this reconsideration is that my goals have shifted I'm less worried about coming up with some kind of grand unifying "awesome idea" and instead putting more effort into different areas. Photography and writing will still be here, but just... different. No more "black rectangle" anything that isn't me, Ben.

Sidenote: for a while I had though to have different names here that I would write under to suggest that there was some kind of structure to this site. Suffice to say that was too much work for me. I'm glad that I didn't pursue that too far.

Like a lot of people, I have a LinkedIn page. I hate it. I hate LinkedIn. I still can't bring myself to delete it just because I keep thinking someone is going to try and reach out to me there. I honestly don't think I've ever gotten anything out of LinkedIn besides just wasting my time trying to polish up my page and enduring the "hustle zombies post about how much they respect Mark Zuckerberg.

Suffice to say that i think having a personal website is more important to me now than it has been in a long time. Despite the fact that i pay someone to host it, there's no other real advertising happening here. It's not even really ad-friendly and I think in 2018 and going forward I am proud of the fact that no one really reads this unless I direct them to it.

It's not a thing. No one cares until they're interested in who I am. That's fine.

"Nobody reads your blog."

In the past couple of months I came up with a photography pseudonym/handle: "30ghosts"

It's derived from something I think I read from Warren Ellis. He wrote that there are something like 23 dead people for every living person on the Earth. I rounded that up since "30ghosts" kinds of rolls of the tongue better and it's probably just as true in the sense that we all are part of a legacy of humanity. Yes, that's pretty high concept. I guess that's part of my deal.

If you type the URL "30ghosts.rip" into your browser, that will take you to my public facing Instagram. As the weather gets better, it will be populated with more new stuff.

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geometric CGI evolution

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In the future

In the future, we'll wear headsets that track our verbal output during the day.

And like bitcoin miners, we'll be rewarded with currency when we have a verified original thought after it's checked against the blockchain of recorded human ideas.

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Episode 35: Open Waters

Adrift in November's cold seas, Ben and Jim must take stock of dwindling creative provisions.

We find the monomyth in a cartoon, guidance

Links

War of Art

Nanogenmo on Twitter

Photo Credit: Eli Duke (Flickr creative commons license)

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Episode 33: Even Hemingway Hates Hangovers

Ben is feeling pretty good about things, and in this episode we talk a good amount about how to keep feeling good when writing for Nanowrimo.

Ben and Jim also tackle the old stereotype about booze and writing and why it may not be all its cracked up to be. Of course, if you disagree, let us know! Cheers!

Links:

Are Hangovers Good for Writing?

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Unfit-Bits: Free your fitness data from yourself.

Many insurance companies are now offering discounts to customers who agree to wear a fitness tracking device and whose data shows an active lifestyle.

Does your lifestyle prevent you from qualifying for insurance discounts? Do you lack sufficient time for exercise or have limited access to sports facilities? Maybe you just want to keep your personal data private without having to pay higher insurance premiums for the privilege?

Unfit Bits provides solutions. At Unfit Bits, we are investigating DIY fitness spoofing techniques to allow you to create walking datasets without actually having to share your personal data. These techniques help produce personal data to qualify you for insurance rewards even if you can’t afford a high exercise lifestyle.

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Howl.FM Review

Like a lot of podcast and comedy fans, I was surprised to hear the recent news that Earwolf had released a new app. Podcast apps are nothing new and are key to podcast listening and discovery. The hosting service Libsyn bundles an a prebuilt app with certain tiers of it's service. In fact, this was a way that some podcasts had been monetizing their shows for years.

But Howl and the website, Howl.fm are something else. Not only are they a means to access podcasts, but they are in a sense a single service that hosts (predominantly) humorous audio.

Let's break down the key ingredients of Howl. For the sake of this review, Howl and Howl.fm are essentially the same thing. "Howl" is the name of the app and underlying service and "Howl.fm" is the URL and browser version of that service.

Howl is an app for iPhone. A version of the app for Android is also on the horizon but does not have a release date. A person can download the app and start using it right away without needing to sign up for anything or paying any money. You can create a free account and then you get some added features like being able to use Howl.fm to listen and subscribe to the same podcasts you listen to through the app without any additional hoops. This is similar to Stitcher and PocketCast in a way.

The app itself

From the moment the app is launched it is clear that care went into building it. It looks good, it's fast and you can be listening to the shows you like with little effort. The sidebar of the app indicates the four primary sections of the Howl app: Earwolf podcasts (comedy), Wolfpop (pop culture with a humorous slant), WTF with Marc Maron, and Howl Premium. The only "setting" to be adjusted at the moment is whether or not to allow the app to use cellular data to download episodes.

The one overarching negative is that this is not for podcast power users and niche cases. The "skip" buttons only allow moving in 30 second increments (which i find too short when jumping forward and too long when I want to skip back to that thing I didn't quite hear). You can control playback speed (three setttings: half speed, regular (1x) and 1.5x). You can't set a start point (handy for lengthy preroll ads and repetitive intros) and there is no "sleep" function (for those folks who like to listen as they get ready for bed.) If you want those features, you'll need to stick to "real" podcast apps like Pocket Cast.

If you are already devoted to listening to Earwolf podcasts and WTF, that is enough to recommend the app. Someone relatively new to podcasts but knows they like Comedy Bang Bang or WTF can download the app and start listening. This app is already at least somewhat better than Apple's own podcast app.

 HOWL PREMIUM

Howl also offers a premium service for $5 a month. Users easily sign up through the app on the phone and use Apple Pay- the process of signing up was almost seamless. They will not start billing you until 7 days later as a promotion to let you try it out before you actually get charged.

Howl premium grants you access to the entirety of not only Earwolf's archives of podcast episodes but also allows you access to Marc Maron's WTF episode archive. So if you want to go back and listen to the "greatest podcast episode ever" (according to Slate) between Marc and Louis CK, you can easily find it there.

While there are some real gems buried in Earwolf’s archives (including many appearances by James Adomian, Jason Mantzoukas and Harris Wittels), podcast episodes in general aren't particularly "evergreen." The thing that intrigued me most about Howl premium was the new collections of mini-series and specials.

This is where Howl seems to flex its muscle but will most likely appeal to a fairly small audience. I don't know how many people are dying to hear a one-hour audio documentary about the Gathering of the Juggalos, but wrestler Colt Cabana has just that in the premium section. There are also collected performances by Spalding Gray. I had no idea who Spalding was until I stumbled upon them. There is only a brief introduction to each performance by Nate Cordry but it's clear that, had Spalding lived to see podcasting, he would have been towering over all the folks at RISK! and the hordes of other storytelling podcasts. I think smart curation like this of things that are not necessarily directly in a podcast listener’s field of vision makes this a rather interesting service.

Earwolf has just enough of a catalog at the moment to be big without being incomprehensible. When one looks into the abyss of content that a company like Netflix or Spotify has, there is simply no way to know or trust who is running the show. Users must feel around blindly or ask their friends. But in the rather idiosyncratic world of podcasts (and in particular, comedy podcasts) discovery of the new and relevant is still incredibly difficult. In Howl there is a nice middle way. It is accessible to an average user but also quickly points you past the first run blockbusters and goes "oh, hey you know if you dig that check out Andy Daly's Nine Sweaters". It is enabling.

What is the value?

For fans of Earwolf podcasts, there is a lot to like. The episode archive is deep and varied. And specials add a level of exclusivity that I did not expect in an app that was geared towards podcasting, which generally tends towards being freely available. If Earwolf continues to play up its growing role as the premiere venue for "alternative comedy" audio, then this would be a service that is well worth $5. If you don't care about that niche then there is little to recommend here. It's pretty slick and it's a decent one-stop shop for a lot of podcasts but living solely in Earwolf-land can be rather bare if you really wanted to listen to something a little bit meatier like Hardcore History or This American Life.

My final suggestion is to give the premium version a whirl for the trial period and see what lies behind the velvet rope of Howl Premium. Canceling payment is quite easy so you can "buy" and cancel right away before you realize 7 days later that you forgot. You'll still get the full time of the trial period.

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From Joan to Siri

Since I, like many people have Labor Day off I think it's a fine time to reflect on the nature and history of work. My ever-reliable Twitter feed surfaced* this intriguing talk by Helen Hester called "Technically Female: Women, Machines, and Hyperemployment."

Hester looks at the history of "women's work" as office assistants and how the nature of that interaction has not been undermined, but merely shifted, to our personal electronic devices. There is a lot to dig through in the presentation, so perhaps viewing/listening at 1.5x speed will give you the most bang for your minutes.

*Thanks to Kurt Newman (@sadbillionaire)