Tag: george rr martin

Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for September 5 2015 – The Cost of Dignity

In this episode, I play a song from Sligo Rags; I tell a story about Cajuns and Irish Music; I wrap up the Dog Days of Podcasting; I tell a story of an altercation and my loss of dignity; I discuss a Kristine Kathryn Rusch article about the crappy parts of the writer job; I talk about Song of Ice and Fire vs. the Jack Daniels mystery series vs. Murder at Avedon Hill.

Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, September 5 2015

Links mentioned in this episode:

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

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Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for April 2 2015 – Beyond the Wall Podcast

In this episode, I have a long and delightful conversation with my friends from the Beyond the Wall podcast. We discuss their show, the Game of Thrones TV show, the Song of Ice and Fire novels and all things GRRM, along with a few digressions. This discussion is LOUSY WITH SPOILERS, up through the first four seasons of the television show and approximately the first four novels (I got waved off of a topic on the border because of spoilers.) Be warned if you are not current on the TV show there are many spoilers about who lives and dies, and large plot points.

Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, April 2 2015.

Links mentioned in this episode:

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Soaking in Game of Thrones

I’ve spent since Thanksgiving reading A Song of Ice and Fire. I finished Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows and now I’m a third of the way through A Dance with Dragons. Three books in 4 or 5 months is pretty good for me in recent years. However when you consider this is 3,000 pages which is 6-10 of the kind of books I normally read, it’s phenomenal.

I’ve now also seen S1E1 of the TV show. I bought the first two seasons on DVD/BluRay during a Gold Box special recently. Having immersed myself in this world in multiple media, I thought it would be a great time to start listening to the Beyond the Wall podcast as I watch the episodes. Basically, I get to relive 2011 with everyone else. When I went to try it, the first few episodes are no longer there on the site. The posts exists but the media files give a 404 error. Do they exist somewhere that I can get them? These are the dangers of living your media life half a decade off of everyone else.

Ebook Errors?

People who know about the inside working of big publishing, I need your help.

I have been hearing people talk about ebook editions that appear to have OCR type errors in them. This sounded suspicious to me, in that “publishing can’t possibly be doing what I think they are doing” type way. I have now some examples in captivity. I own all of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books in hardcover but I am reading them on my Kindle. Who wants a 10 pound book smashing their face at bedtime? I noticed these errors in the passages of the kingsmoot, where Balon Greyjoy is referred to many times. There is a stretch of two paragraphs with half of them “Balon” and the other half “Baton.” If the image is too small to read, follow to the blog post and click it and you’ll see a pretty large version of it. I highlighted the passage on the Kindle just to make it extra obvious.

The question is this: do the big publishers prepare their texts for commercial ebooks by scanning and OCRing typeset versions of the text? In other words, is there no way for them to capture the final edited version in a soft copy that could then end up in the ebook version? I’m withholding judgement until I understand this better but it seems remarkably backwards to me. If the electronic copy can introduce additional errors from the paper versions, something in the workflow seems amiss to me.

Storm of Swords and Beyond

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I finished reading A Storm of Swords last night. I was a little surprised that I read this nearly 1200 page book in six weeks (the long holiday break helped a lot.) It took me longer than that to read Tasteful Nudes, which was a fraction of the length. It went to the top of my pile mainly to mitigate spoilers from the TV show that are seeping into ubiquity in pop culture. The fact that I was surprised at major plot twists is evidence of success in that plan.

My original plan was to read something a little lighter (and shorter) before getting to A Feast For Crows. However, fumbling with my Kindle I accidentally ordered it 20 seconds after finishing A Storm of Swords and the momentum of the last few chapters has me dying to find out what happens next. So I think I’ll jump back into another few months with George R.R. Martin.

Storm of … Oh My

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I just got to the 60% point in Storm of Swords. Oh. Oh. Yes, I see what the Game of Thrones TV show watchers were on about. I think I have officially outrun the spoilers now on this 15 year old novel. I can read a little easier now.

But seriously, I am glad I made it this far knowing as little as I did. It was impossible to avoid mentions of The Red Wedding in pop culture but I did not see it coming as it did, even as I was getting upon it and completely primed for it. Well done, George R. R. Martin!