Tag: podcasting

My Balticon Drive Playlist

Here without much comment is my Balticon road trip playlist. I”m noting specific shows if I think that episode is notably worth checking out specifically from that series.

Ride up:

Ride Back:

This is far from comprehensive on my podcast subscription list, but it’s a good representation of what a few days of listening might be. Note the mix of big media and small, old and new.

Around the Podosphere 5/26/2010

Here are some podcasts and particular episodes that I’ve particularly liked lately. Torn straight from my playlist!

I’ve been iffy on the Long Now Podcast and on the edge of dropping it. It’s got the same problem I have with TED talks – basically good-willed wealthy technocrats throwing the rabble a bone by letting them experience the sessions. Long Now is the far better of the two, TED always makes me feel like I’m being condescended to. The most recent episode really interested me though. It was Nils Gilman talking about “deviant globalization”, basically pointing out that while all business globalizes the business of criminals does so most of all. The whole thing worth it was for the part where he talked about “moral arbitrage.” I also liked the part when he said that Russian organized crime rose so quickly in the 1990s because only criminals had entrepenurial organizational skills during the Soviet era. Interesting stuff.

I’ve started listening to the Tell Em Steve Dave podcast. This is a Kevin Smith spinoff podcast, as players in the View Askew-niverse are forming some sort of a network of shows. To be honest, I’m not sure that I don’t like this show better than SModcast. I’m not a Smith fundamentalist. I like some of his movies but not all, and sometimes I even skip SModcast episodes. In particular, most of the live show recordings I find completely unlistenable. Playing to the crowd changes the dynamic and I find much to the worse. However, the first episode recorded from their tour I kind of liked.

My friends Michael Butler and Jasper Borgman keep it rolling with Good Clean Fun. I listen to all of them, but like any chemistry driven show some episodes hit better and some hit worse. I’m about 3 weeks behind so I just got to the May 4th show but I thought it was hilarious and I really dug it.

This morning I was listening to Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac (the only thing I bump to the top of my queue so that I hear it when it is timely.) Today’s episode including a birthday shoutout to Caitlin R. Kiernan. This isn’t the very first time I’ve heard someone I know personally on that show but it’s always a nice surprise. Happy birthday, Caitlin!

A few months back I subscribed to Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast. I think there were 30 or so episodes when I subscribed and it took me months to listen through the whole backlog. Now I’m relatively current (as current as anything – 3 weeks behind) and I heard his amazing episode with Robin Williams. I’ll admit that as much as I loved Williams 30 years ago, his relentless shtickifying has burned me out. Nowadays ff I see he’s in a movie I’m otherwise interested in, I rethink that interest. Imagine my surprise at the quality of this conversation between Maron and Williams about comedy, life, fucking up and recovering from it. It’s the kind of episode that by itself validates all the work that goes into the series. I’ve had those, and I think Maron has had multiple ones. Very highly recommended listening.

Nicola Griffith on Starship Sofa

On the newest episode of Starship Sofa, my good friend Nicola Griffith has the featured fiction piece. Her story “It Takes Two” from the anthology Eclipse 3 is the bulk of the episode. This novelette was also selected for The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 4 so it’s not just your ordinary SF story. Check it out!

Podcasts on the Sansa Clip

A few months back my Insignia Sport died and I had to look around for a new low end MP3 player as my podcast device. I settled on the SanDisk Sansa Clip+ 4 GB as the best fit for me. Every time I change players, I end up having to tweak my routine a little in syncing, in how I play them and such.

The Sansa Clip+ was a good news/bad news story for my podcast workflow. The good news is that it has a PODCAST directory built in and files that go in there are treated differently than music files. It maintains your place in the file and you can return to the same spot, even after listening to other files or even leaving podcasts and listening to some music. The bad news is that the directory structure under PODCAST does not honor m3u playlists. That had been my method of listening to shows in the order I wanted to hear them. My syncing script generates a chronological playlist as the last step, but the Sansa Clip+ won’t recognize it. It does recognize the playlist if I put all these files in the MUSIC directory but then it wouldn’t restart and do the other stuff.

I stewed on that for a few days until I realized that the “Play all files” plays them in alphabetical order by filename. I added into my syncing program a little counter that it prepends to the filename and voila! When I play all files in the podcast directory, they play in that order once again. It is a stupidly simple method of achieving that goal but I’m not too proud to take it when it works.

Today is Boom Effect Day

Today is the day for the Boom Effect auction. Earlier this year, my friend Tee Morris lost his wife Natalie suddenly. The Boom Effect is a fundraiser to help with the future of his five year old daughter (known by the internet psuedonym of ‘Sonic Boom’). You can still make an outright donation to the fund via Chipin or you can bid on the various stuff in the auction. There will be a telethon style live telecast to go along with the auction and I’m embedding all this stuff into the post.

Tee has been a great friend to me, to CREATE South, to the podcasting world at large. Please do what you can to help him and his daughter in a very difficult time.

Slusher’s Law of Podcasting Redux

A few years back, I formulated Slusher’s Law of Podcasting, which roughly states that the more people are involved in a podcast, the less I care about it. Here’s someone who feels like I do about some multi-person podcasts:

Bungie. I tried. I really really tried. Your blog is full of interesting information. But for pitys sake, please, can you PLEASE STOP TALKING OVER THE TOP OF EACH OTHER. After 20 mins I just gave up because a) everyone constantly talked over each other (note, a pod cast is NOT a casual conversation, and even if it was, most of what people feel the need to share IMMEDIATELY is just Not That Interesting, certainly not worth destroying someone elses train of thought) and b) no one was ever explained who they are. Who is Joe whatever his name is? What does he do? Why is he being interviewed?

I’m with you, Jake. That’s why I tend to not listen to panel-type podcasts. The worst are the ones where all the people are friends and make nonstop in-jokes. If you are going to do a roundtable show, for god’s sake don’t constantly keep making inane jokes that interrupt the flow.

Around the Podosphere for 2/4/2010

Today was a particularly good day in my podcast queue. Here is the highlights of things I particularly enjoyed:

Within the last month I’ve recently started listening to The Kindle Chronicles podcast. Those podcasters who worry about soundproofing their rooms, try listening to Len Edgerly when his big ass grandfather clock starts chiming midnight. You might not need it as much as you think! Episode #79 featured a particularly good interview with Seth Harwood. I am one of the people who picked up his book A Long Way from Disney last December when he had his post-Xmas special. I liked this interview and think that Seth is a good example of a hybrid new-school/old-school writer. I recommend this series and this episode.

I’ve listened to every episode of the SModcast from the beginning (with the exception of the live show episodes that I had to skip.) My single favorite one ever is episode #103 with his mother Grace, where they get stoned together and tell tales of New Jersey. There’s a point towards the end where Kevin starts cracking his mother up until she gets hysterical. It’s very funny and also kind of sweet. It just made me a little happier to listen to it. Also, I agree with his commentor that says that his mom and Walt Flanagan sound the same. I thought exactly the same thing.

I’ve also listened to every single episode of the Rock and Roll Geek Show. I’m a lifer on that one with my buddy Michael Butler. In episode #387 he has an interview with Tappy Wright, who was the road manager for The Animals, Jimi Hendix and many more that he writes about in Rock Roadie. It’s a fascinating interview and includes Wright’s claim about how Hendrix was murdered. I recommend this for a listen along with every other of the nearly 400 shows.

For five years, I’ve been claiming one of the best upsides of podcasting is the feasibility of doing a show for a niche audience. One example of that in my subscription list is the Flash-back podcast. The episode I listened to today covers Blackest Night: Flash #2. This program covers the various Flash related comic books in excruciating detail. I’m talking panel by panel, friends. Every show is like a master’s thesis in the Flash family. This is not the sort of thing that is for everybody, but for certain obsessed fans of this character (such as myself) it is really and truly awesome.

Memories of the Futurecast

A few weeks ago I surprisingly got caught up on my podcast queue, after two years ranging from one to six weeks behind at all times. I celebrated, of course, by subscribing to more podcasts. First was Tweet Me Harder about which I’ve already talked. Last week I subscribed to Memories of the Futurecast. from Wil Wheaton.

This show was an unusual choice for me. It is Wil Wheaton reading excerpts from his book of reactions to re-watching Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first season. I’ll lay it on the line – I’ve got nothing against the cat but I I’m not particularly a Wheaton fan. If we’re both at next year’s Dragon*Con and in the elevator together, I’m not going to squee. I don’t read his blog or particularly follow what he does. I’m worse than disinterested about ST:TNG. I’ve seen half a dozen episodes and hated five of those six. When it was on the air, my friend Mike Fisher kept urging me to watching it and after six months I’d relent and watch one, which would be the most god awful thing I’d ever seen. Six months later I’d do it again, same reaction. So, I have no fondness for ST:TNG . I haven’t seen these episodes Wil makes fun of, other than being predisposed to agree with him when he points out what sucks.

I’m enjoying the show more than seems to make sense on face value, considering my apathy towards the subject matter. I like the show despite the cutesy-ism. Wil’s style seems to have a lot of the hyper-irony that frequently rubs me so wrong with Joss Whedon. You get exactly one play of the “Oh wait, no, it was the opposite” card before I get really tired of that and Wil has done it a few times in four episodes. The playing of a wrong sound effect has also gotten really tired, although the fact that I’m listening to these episodes one a day instead of spaced out a week probably overweights that as a concern.

Episode four also was a prime example of why in my own show I try not to apologize for any time period between shows. He spent a minute or two explaining why the show went up on a Tuesday instead of a Monday. This was September and I’m listening in November. I just don’t care, get to the festivities dude.

All that snark on the table, having said that I’m having a good time listening to these episodes. I do like him taking shots at ST:TNG – although Wil is doing it from love and I’m enjoying it from hate. We meet in the middle. Mostly I like the concept of the show. He has this work he’s doing and he can publish his own book of it, available in paperback or as a PDF (no MOBI for the Kindle?) and also support all that with an audio scaffold. (Shame points to Lulu.com for selling an ebook without any mention of what format it actually is in. I need more details than “Download” people!)

So overall, I’d recommend the show. If you are a fan of Wheaton or of Star Trek, it’s a no brainer. Just go do it. Even if you aren’t, it’s a fun enough listen. Dave says check it out.

Tweet Me Harder

For five years now, I keep looking for new and interesting podcasts that push the form. My biggest distress with the medium has been the way that people generally stick to the safe formats (including, first and foremost, me.) I’ve always thought that podcasters should take advantage of the very low investments required and low repercussions of failure to try crazy things. That led to early experiments like the “Podcat” show that took clips of other podcasters, mixed them together over a techno beat and seperated sections with a crazy cat meowing.

I’ve recently found a show that I think has all the cool format breaking goodness I long for as well as is legitimately funny. That can be rough to come by sometimes. It’s called Tweet Me Harder and is the self-proclaimed “first, best, only and last talkback enabled interactive audio podblast.” It’s done by two webcomics artists, David Malki! and Kris Straub and is everything I would have hoped to have gotten from You Look Nice Today but that I never actually did.

The show seems to have some natural Subgenius elements to it. They talk about whatever random surreal bull-dada occurs to them, which is generally pretty funny. They stream it live and also podcast it, and while they stream it they interact with listeners from their Twitter account. By adding the hashtag with a show number to your tweets, they see it while they are recording and talk about them, which also means you can go back and look at the chatter from previous shows such as the most current one at this writing.

I got a show almost by random, appropriately enough, because I subscribe to other Kris Straub productions and got one episode in one of those feeds. I enjoyed it and have been listening to all the episodes from #1 forward. As much as I enjoy the wacky hijinks of the regular episodes, it’s the weird breaking of the (very loose) format that I enjoy best. First there was a “freestyle” rap battle to solve a dispute. I put quotes around “freestyle” because how freestyle can a prerecorded bit actually be? It got extra brilliant when the contest was judged by Fake Stan Lee, who tried his best to put everything in the context of early 1960’s Marvel characters only to get cut off every time. “That reminds me of when the Mighty Thor met the Incredible Hulk…” “Ok, thanks Fake Stan.”

I just got to shows #15 and #16, which had a fantastic macguffin. I don’t think I want to say what it is (even though it is pretty easy to tell early on) because the slow reveal is the real fun part. I just like this show. I don’t know how long this can go and I have yet to take part in the interactivity but I enjoy each talkback enabled interactive podblast.

Talk Geek with Cheap Truth

I got an email from the host of the Talk Geek to Me podcast. He’s doing an interesting sub-project on his main show, periodically doing some episodes that are an audiobook style reading of the seminal Bruce “Vincent Omniaveritas” Sterling edited cyberpunk zines Cheap Truth. I downloaded and listened to this episode and really liked it. His plan as I understand it is to record all of these eventually and put them together as an audiobook. I find that a fine goal and will be looking forward to listening to them. It’s fun to listen to these nearly 30 year old missives from Cousin Brucie and hear the snarky commentator that we’ve all gotten to know so well the last few years getting formed.

Around the Podosphere 9/9/09

Here are some podcasts I’ve listened to recently and found interesting. A lot this got listened to either going to or coming from Dragon*Con.

There are a pair of shows done by webcomic artist Scott Kurtz. The first is a format breaking episode of the podcast Webcomics Weekly. Usually it is a round table with the four cartoonists but this one was just a conversation between Scott and Merlin Mann. In general I’ve burned out on Merlin and his shtick but this conversation with a very specific scope was just right. It’s one of the very very rare podcast episodes that I went back and listened to again. It covered creativity, community, the inner critic and the outer critics and a lot of the issues that are specific to those living a creative life. In a later blog post I’ll cover an idea that they gave me from a stray comment about how to handle hateful commentors.

The second Kurtz episode is his kickoff off a new show he’s doing with Brad Guigar called Surviving Creativity. This first episode is a continuation of an argument the two were having at Webcomics.com about whether or not writers block actually exists. I liked this episode very much and am looking forward to more in the series.

Skepticality #109 had a really good interview with Dave Cullen about his book Columbine and how many of the facts that people generally think they know not only aren’t true but were actually reported correctly shortly after the shooting and eventually replaced by received wisdom. I’d like to read the book now.

One of the last shows I listened to as I was pulling into Dragon*Con was this episode of The Treatment with Elivs Mitchell interviewing Bobcat Goldthwait. Bobcat reduced me to hysterics by referring to a Grover muppet lying on the ground “with its legs akimbo – it looked like a Weegee photo.” Funny stuff.

My Dragon*Con Schedule Reminder

I’m reposting my Dragon*Con schedule. I did it a few weeks ago but to keep it current in blog world I’m doing it again. I decided to drive in early Friday morning rather than spend Thursday in ATL. I’d get there too late for anything useful anyway, so I might as well reserve that evening for last minute preparation and to spend it with my wife and dog.

The one thing I continue to need help with is publicizing of the “Podcasting Tips for Working Writers” panel. There is a constituency of writers that will be at Dragon*Con that are exactly the people I’d like to reach and be of service to but I’m not sure of the best way to communicate to them that this panel exists. If you are a writer, have writer friends who are going please spread around the link love and/or invite folks via the Facebook event linked below.

Finally, for my personal friends or any internet friends that want to get together, starting Friday at the butt crack of dawn we enter “crazy chaos zone” and it won’t end until I cross I-285 on my way out of town Monday. I’m up for dinner and/or drinks with anyone that can mutually arrange it. If you’re my friend and don’t have my cell, email me before Friday morning and let’s exchange cell numbers. I will swallow my pride, hold my nose and use my dormant Twitter account for the duration of the con. It sucks but this is really the one good use it has in my life. If you follow that, some basic telemetric coordination can be achieved. I hope to see and hang out with my friends, make new ones like I always do and generally live the good life with the best of Southeastern fandom. I came up through Georgia SF fandom in the 80s so my roots in this shindig are deep. See you there!

Podcasting Track Kick Off!

Friday, September 4 at 1 PM, Hilton 204

Panelists: Dave Slusher, Scott Sigler, Len Peralta, Veronica Belmont, George Hrab and moderated by Swoopy

Join some of your favorite podcasters as we take the temperature of the Podcasting world, and talk about some of our best moments of the past year.

Facebook Event for this panel


Podcasting Tips for Working Writers

Saturday, September 5 at 2:30 PM, Hilton 204

Panelists: Mur Lafferty, Dave Slusher, Michael Stackpole, Scott Sigler, Christiana Ellis, P.G. Holyfield

A discussion with authors and podcasters who have turned the art of the podcast novel into a formula for publishing success.   

Facebook Event for this panel


Reality Break – LIVE!

Sunday, September 6 at 10 PM, Hilton 204

Panelists: Dave Slusher, Keith R. A DeCandido

Come be in the audience for a live taping of the Reality Break podcast with author Keith R. A. DeCandido. He is currently the author of the Farscape comic books from Boom Studios. Keith has a bibliography longer than a yeti’s arm and there is a good chance than everyone at Dragon*Con has read something he has written.

Facebook Event for this panel   


Social Media Overload

Monday, September 7 at 1 PM, Hilton 204

Panelists: Dave Slusher (What? I’ll have to dragoon people to joine me if there are no others.)

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr – Are we still creating content or just floating along on the stream? Discuss the pros and cons of social networking as it pertains to podcasting.

Facebook Event for this panel

All in all, that’s a highly reasonable schedule. I’ve certainly done many more panels in a single convention. The biggest bummer about the way Dragon*Con is organized now is that there seems to be little or no overlap between programming tracks. I attended Dragon*Con as a science fiction guest every year from 1993 to 2000 and would love to be back on some of the SF panels again, but once I got slotted in as a Podcaster track guest that seemed to be it. I’m not a big enough fish to catch anyone’s attention across tracks, I guess. I’m just happy to be going and doing this one more time.

Five Year Podiversary

Tomorrow is the actual day of my five year anniversary as a podcaster. My plan is to sit down tonight and record the episode. It will effectively be published tomorrow because the absolute earliest I could get it online would be very late tonight.

I’ve been having a deep rejection of nostalgia lately and in keeping with that, there will be little to no glory days reminiscing in this episode. Instead I will focus on where things are at, where they are going and where I want them to go. I feel about this anniversary a lot like I feel about my birthdays. Ostensibly a cause for celebration, they serve to me as convenient annual markers of how fall I am falling short of my goals. It’s not party time to me, but occasions to hunker down, redouble and retreble efforts to move forward.

I may or may not ustream tonight while I record. If I do, I’ll post it here and also to my Friend Feed account. Thanks to everyone who has stuck it out this far, those people who started at the beginning and are still here, the recent converts and even those who started out and flaked away. We all have our own reasons and own paths, so do what you need to do.

And now, the party’s over because there is work to do.

Up to Speed with Bashpodder

I’ve now been using bashpodder long enough that I’ve completed my transition from Juice. The worst part of moving from one podcatcher to another is that you lose your history, and there is always some duplication and hassle at the cutover. I’m now about a week past that point of dealing with that issue and now I’m into baseline business as usual.

I’ll have to say that I am truly digging bashpodder. Linc Fessenden wanted to make sure the world knew I had made this switch, and I’m doing what I can to publicize that fact. I posted to Linc’s forum about the changes I have made. One I made over the weekend allows for the same script to handle either RSS or Atom podcast feeds. The irony is that for bashpodder it was a couple of lines of XSL code but I’ve never built support for Atom feeds into Amigofish. Maybe one day and maybe if more than a few dozen people start using them.

All in all, I really wish I had moved to bashpodder years ago. If you are an OS X or Linux user it is a no brainer and if you are Windows user it is a barely brainer.

Sad Confession: I Don’t Really Watch the Videos

The previous post about switching podcatchers and my podcast consumption workflow also involves me confronting a sad fact. I subscribed to multiple video feeds. I always have the best intentions with these things, but I don’t actually watch them. The only one I’m anywhere current on is TIki Bar TV and that’s about 6 months behind. I have over 100 episodes of Meet the Gimp to watch. Like, every one of them past the first episode. I have downloaded every episode, I just don’t watch them.

As part of dealing with my computer issues I needed a little more free space and the very first thing I dumped overboard was a directory with 12 GB of TED Talks in it. I tried to watch a few, hated the “Look you chumps at the wonderful bones we insightful rich are willing to throw you!” vibe of the ones I did watch. When space got tight, out they went into the bit bucket before anything else.

I care about the videos, at least I think I do. However I don’t watch them when I drive or walk the dog or as I type code at my dayjob, which is basically where all my audio podcast consumption occurs. I feel like I care but I don’t actually watch them. Sorry, video folks. I still want to learn how to use GIMP so I guess I have 100 X 10 minutes to spend with them.

I Move to Bashpodder for my Podcast Pleasure

My recent computer woes led to some corruption that makes python no longer run on my MacBook. This means that I can’t use Juice as my podcatcher anymore. To be honest, I’ve been using Juice for years without ever liking it but without much of an alternative since I refuse to use iTunes as my podcatcher. In a way, losing python was a positive because it forced me off the fence and into looking for a better alternative.

Luckily, I found it first try. I decided to try out Linc Fessenden’s bashpodder. It’s a 50 line bash script that takes a simple text file of feed URLs and fetches them. No muss, no fuss, no BS. RSS feeds in, podcasts out. I like that. There are now many variations as hackers have fiddled with the functionality, but I’m running the core vanilla mainline version. This one collects together shows into a date based directory. Because of the way it is using wget to fetch the actual files, in most cases it preserves the timestamp of the server version of the file. This actually helps me out a lot in my attempts to listen to shows in chronological order. I did make my own little hack to it, changing where it does the logging of a show URL to the history. The original script does it unconditionally, I have it check the exit code of wget and only put it in the history if that was successful. This way, a failed download will retry later.

Switching from one podcatcher to another is always a bit dicey at first. Since some of these feeds do the insane thing of keeping hundreds of episodes in them, if you aren’t careful bashpodder will fetch every one of those and fill up your hard drive. Here’s how I handled the transition. It was a bit labor intensive and required me watching it, but after the first run everything was perfect. The thing to be aware of is that there are two files – podcast.log and temp.log. The first is the permanent list of fetched files, the second is a working copy and at the end of the run the two are combined, duplicates filtered and the whole thing resaved to podcast.log. As files are fetched, it checks to see if an URL is in podcast.log and if it is, bashpodder skips it.

I ran the script from my MacBook in a terminal window. I ran it via:

sh -x bashpodder.shell

so that it was outputting all of its variables as it worked. When it would get to a new feed, it would splat out the list of file URLs that were parsed out of the RSS feed. I’d copy the files from the list I didn’t want downloaded and just put them directly into podcast.log via a file editor. You can be somewhat sloppy with this. When in doubt I let it fetch the file and I’d delete it later. If the URL goes into podcast.log more than once, no problem. It will get taken care of later. This required me riding the script for 45 minutes or so, but I mostly got the old shows into podcast.log manually. After the first run succeeded, I ran the script one more time. It fetched a few at the edges that I missed but then was completely caught up. I deleted files that I knew I had already listened to and away I went.

Now when I run it, I get only the new files. They go into that day’s directory, they sort themselves out somewhat by timestamp. I set up a cronjob to run this at 5 AM and now I’m in business. All the scripts that I use to put the files on my Insignia MP3 player work fine with the new directory structure and I’m back in business. Thanks Linc. This workflow is better than what I had, I no longer have Juice bogging down my machine and eating a lot of memory to do this simple task, and the whole thing runs in a simple bash process that I’m comfortable modifying if I want to. Right on.

Lloyd Kaufman on the Treatment

Lloyd Kaufman's Autograph

The other day I listened to the podcast version of Elvis Mitchell’s show The Treatment . It featured a great interview with a guy I met last year, Lloyd Kaufman. During this interview I thought he made an enormous amount of sense about the movie business and how it works and should work. At last year’s Dragon*Con he ad libbed a great ID for Good Clean Fun, and signed my copy of his DVD set on filmmaking Make Your Own Damn Movie. He was a lot of fun to be around and just in the few minutes I spent in his presence I enjoyed the hell out of it.

A few months ago on Good Clean Fun they showed Tromeo and Juliet. It was ridiculous and so bad it was enjoyable. The thing I truly admired about it was the sense of fun. Even when the effects were cheezy and the story insane, I got the feeling of everyone having fun. I find that inspirational. I have the DVD set I bought from his stand at Dragon*Con last year and I also bought the book All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger. I might also get the book of Make Your Own Damn Movie!: Secrets of a Renegade Director and possibly also Direct Your Own Damn Movie! as a companion piece. For only ever seeing one of his films and that fairly, recentlyll Lloyd Kaufman may end up with a fair bit of my money, none of it for his narrative fiction films. He’s an inspiriation to me for film-making and I’m trying to channel some of his spirit to get off my ass and get to work on my side project. I’m burning summer here! Lloyd says to you me and everyone, get to work!

A Heroes Con Publicity Offer to All

I’m going to attend Heroes Con in Charlotte in 2 weeks. I’m willing to make this offer to any podcaster or anyone with stuff to promote. Send me your flyers, stickers, postcards or whatever promotional material you have. I’ll take it to the convention and put it on the freebies table there. If there are any left over, I’ll take them to Dragon*Con in September and again, if there are leftovers I’ll take them to XCon Myrtle Beach in October. This offer will remain open until I get too much stuff to carry, if that ever happens.

If you are interested in having your stuff toted around, drop me an email to dslusher at gmail.com and I’ll hook you up with shipping information. The only thing I ask of people who want to take me up on this deal is to get going on it sooner than later. The two days before the con I’ll have plenty of my own details to deal with. I need to get everything I’m going to take with me in hand by Wednesday June 17th.

This whole deal is in honor of Kreg Steppe of Technorama, who last year was good enough to go to a Kinkos near the convention center, pick up my Reality Break flyers and then distribute them around. Thanks, Kreg. I’m just trying to spread that kind of love around.

New Reality Break Episode is Live

After a long drought, a new episode of Reality Break Podcast has been posted, this one with science fiction author and memoirist William Shunn. He was game enough to do this interview long before the series was going again and this conversation has sat in the can for a very long time. As he returns to podcasting his memoir The Accidental Terrorist, this interview gets a new shot at relevance.

I’ve been a fan of William Shunn’s writing for approaching two decades now, and really enjoyed the original podcast version of his memoir. Check out the interview and let me know what you think.

Around the Podosphere – 5/28/09

Here are a few things I’ve listened to that jumped out at me as being interesting. All are comic book related, just the way it fell.

  • Here is exactly the kind of show I always say that podcast exists for. I don’t know exactly how wide the audience is for a 75 minute show entirely about the first issue of Flash: Rebirth #1 but I am in that group. I liked this show a lot. I’m a reader of this miniseries. The Flash is one of my favorite superheroes and I used to collect this preferentially over most when I was a small boy. I’ve been in and out of comic collecting for the last 20 years and really appreciated these guys catching me up to speed on the last decade of the character. This is in excruciating detail, but by gum I am in the market for that on this subject matter.
  • I listened to this episode of Inkstuds which was an interview with Chris Brandt. The interview was all about the documentary he directed, Independents: A Guide for the Creative Spirit. The movie looks pretty good. They offer a quantity retailer discount of 50% if you buy 3 or more copies of the DVD. I’ve already got a person to go in with me on one of those deals, so at this point it’s gravy. Leave a comment if you are interested in getting this documentary at 50% + shipping.
  • Also on Inkstuds was this interview with Craig Yoe. There was a moment of hilarity when Yoe was talking about Joe Shuster’s work on “Nights of Horror.” Because of his Ohio accent, both Robin the host and myself listening in my car could not distinguish whether he was saying “horror” or “whore”. In the context of the conversation of the book Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-creator Joe Shuster, either word was plausible. For a little bit, it was a real Abbot and Costello routine there. This was a very good interview. In fact these two Inkstuds shows were back to back in my queue and the two I liked best in the last 6 months.