Going through my SFF.net and Dueling Modems Newsgroups, I see there are plenty of groups I haven't read since late September. I tried to sort them by priority of what I enjoy and post to, so that when time is short I read those first. I had no idea it had been a month since I'd gotten all the way through, though. I'll have to look up the title, but the most disturbing one yet was an adaptation of a Jack Vance story about colonists on another world and their interactions with the natives. The fact that they were called "gooks" by the humans and spoke with accents that sounds about half Japanese (no pun intendend) and half American Indian lent an even more troubling racial air to the whole story. With the casual suppression of an entire race because they were incovenient to the colonists, the story had a lot of resonance. I don't know if it was deliberate, because it seemed pretty gleeful and unironic.

In my other OTR efforts, I've been working on downloading the entirety of the BBC series Round the Horne. I used to air this on my comedy show on WREK 15 years ago. We had 8 or 10 episodes on vinyl that I would play. When it's done, I'll have the full series including Christmas specials and several documentaries in MP3 format on a single CD. Sweet! I once sent Neil Gaiman (weblog here) cassette dubs of all the episodes we had at the station, and in return he sent me a copy of the script to the "Midsummer Night's Dream" issue of Sandman.

The other OTR thing I'm doing is learning to use Otter, an OTR cataloging program. Supposedly, it will allow you to check your collection for completeness, rename files and do all kinds of other cool stuff. I'm intrigued by the notion. will be interesting to see if it is as useful as it sounds.