smartmoney – ykyz: Have your say

CotW XVI
You’ll find all the nominees for this week at https://ykyz.com/c/na?faveOf=cotwxvii

And now I’m handing things over to u/Mattasher for the winners of Cast of the Week XVII:

Shoutouts
Some shoutouts this week to the people who made our week:
Shoutout to If You Were In My Shoes for her willingness to share a well-crafted and poignant personal dilemma, with episode 5. There’s no point anymore.

Shoutout to Joanie for getting a new mic and making a contest out of it. You sound great to us!

Shoutout MondragonMMA and A Brewtiful Mind for each hitting episode 100.

Shoutout to Demi Semi Quaver Note for the awesome recitation of Walt Whitman’s city of orgies, complete with spot-on sound effects. A reminder to please make sure any poetry you post to ykyz is in the public domain, as is the case with Whitman.

Shoutout to Primal Haze for the outstanding first episode, 3 Reasons Why Microcasting Is A Great Idea. We agree with all of them! A reminder, though, to all microcasters: It’s best to fade out your intro music as you begin speaking.

And, last but not least, Shoutout to all of you for continuing to help promote the site. We’re now ranked at about 120k on Alexa, just 20k away from our April goal.

Honorable mentions
217. Sweden food, Swedish meatballs by ThatBeardedSwede
Our favorite Swede shares the history of meatballs and his own family recipe ingredients. IKEA may have spread this tradition around the world, but when it comes to meatballs, IMO there’s nothing better than homemade.

25. Let’s Eat and eat some more by Angelibean
Angelibean shares her newfound quarantine skill, eating all the snacks. She’s definitely not the only one stress eating, though apparently, some ykyz’ers are going in the opposite direction and stress fasting. Who knew that was a thing?

250. Tomatoes Indoors by SmartMoney
Turns out, a lot of us have food on the brain during quarantine. Our final honorable mention goes to Becky of SmartMoney with this perfect explanation of how to grow tomatoes inside.

CotW XVII winners
And now, on to this week’s winners!

Third Prize:
226. Raised And Cake Donuts by SnippetswithSophia
In this mouth-watering episode, Sophia explains the difference between the main types of donuts we consume. Spoiler alert, if it looks like a unicorn or a Pokémon, it’s a cake donut.

Second Prize:
42. “The talk” to save a life. by Doctor Irish
The good doctor gives straightforward advice for dealing with someone who might be suicidal. Never has an episode been so unfortunately timely, as one of the many, many un-considered side effects of extreme “social distancing” has been an all too predictable spike in depression and calls to suicide hotlines.

First Prize:
236. Animal Crossing Filipino textile outfits by fashionmusings
In this episode, Gem explores the intersection of fashion and gaming and describes how the Ayala museum is using in-game outfits to show off traditional Filipino textiles. In times when traveling abroad is virtually impossible, virtual fashion may be the very best thing to go viral right now.

CotW IX
You’ll find all the nominees for this week at https://ykyz.com/c/na?faveOf=cotwx

First, some shoutouts:

Shoutout to Astrocast by Diz for dropping her magic number 100. Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself

Shoutout to Music and Peace for giving ykyz its first serenade (and we’re just going to pretend it was for us). Addie’s episode 197. Take 7 – Original Music, Here’s A Serenade showcases her lovely voice and is a must-listen. Twice.

Careful watchers of CotW will have noticed that while many multi-part episodes have been nominated, none have won a grand or second prize. This isn’t for lack of good episodes that were part of a series, it’s more a reflection of the trickiness of selecting a single episode out of a series, or giving an award to a series that may not be done yet, or whose start or finish date may not coincide with the previous week.

All that said, we want to shoutout several well done multi-part series that are either in progress or done. In particular, we send a Shoutout to Just Thinking Aloud for his episode on End of our Universe pt1 – Heat death, which gives a detailed yet friendly introduction to this fascinating topic, a Shoutout to A Brewtiful Mind for his well-researched series on Monks and Beer, and a giant Shoutout to The Broken Down Starship’s fantastic series on the fake moon landing conspiracy theory. This series by James is a perfect example of using the microcast format to give multiple self-contained snippets that build on each other in service of exploring a single, larger, topic.

And now, on to the winners. But first, some honorable mentions:

78. My Father – A Hero and A Villain by Voluptuous Voyager
This tightly scripted, emotional yet contained, episode by Asi is a lovely gem of personal reflection.

128. Money Vs. Time by SmartMoney
In this smooth and well-paced episode, Becky explores the tradeoffs between working more (or for more) versus having more money by spending less on “all the things”.

103. MSC Cruise ship crashing into the pier by Dancing Bartender
This detail-rich episode gives a (likely) explanation of what happened in a now-infamous video of a cruise ship docking with full force right into a pier, and another ship, in Venice. We recommend watching the video while listening to the episode.

99. ATTENTION – MERCURY IS NOW IN RETROGRADE by Astrocast by Diz
This innovative episode by Diz begins with a bomb siren alert and warns us of the dangers of Mercury’s movement into retrograde. Diz warns us to expect higher levels of ghosting. If only we had a little more context as to why this truly cosmic event means we shouldn’t update iTunes during the retrograde, which IMO has been solid advice for at least the past five years.

120. Manorial Food Rights by SnippetsWithSophia
Sophia delivers yet another fascinating, well-researched microcast episode with this look at “banal” laws, applied to peasants by lords in the middle ages and lingering until the period when heads began to roll, literally.

And now, without further ado, the winners of Cast of the Week X.

Runner up:
38. Stouts and Porters, Are They Different? by A Brewtiful Mind
Micah takes second prize for this insightful episode explaining the history, and difference, between two interrelated types of dark ales. Framed with the perfect short intro and outro music, Micah sticks the landing right at 90 seconds with just the right tidbit of info.

Grand prize:
152. Bloodbread by ThatbeardedSwede
In this episode, ThatbeardedSwede is truly at the top of his game. In just 70 seconds, Fredrik gives us an informative look at bread made with animal blood as the liquid ingredient. Fredrik packs in a detailed description of the bread, its historical context, an insightful quote by the late, great food critic Anthony Bourdain, and a personal reflection on eating it as part of a meal growing up.