Tag: song of ice and fire

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.

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Editing Fun

I am working on the podcast with my friends from Beyond the Wall. It is a big scale, long duration job editing a 150 minute conversation with five people. Additionally, at patron request I am for the first time adding in chapter marks for the conversation. That’s another big job as well as completely new functionality to me. It’s a job on its own separately from trying to cull all links for the show notes and fixing any sound glitches.

Despite all that, just listening back to this is making me about as happy as I was recording it in the first place. I will really be interested in listener feedback on this one. I can’t tell if this is objectively good or if it is just a memento of getting to spend an evening discussing a subject I enjoy with people I enjoy. We shall see. For those that like it, you will get a lot of it to like. Lengthwise this episode is to my typical episodes as Song of Ice and Fire is to ordinary fantasy series.

The one thing I am pleased with is how well the conversation went with such a large panel. By being explicit traffic cop and directing the question to specific people as it went, there is way less talking over each other than you’d expect in this situation. I expected I would have to fix some crosstalk as best I could, but there has been practically none. Color me pleasantly surprised.

Evil Genius Chronicles Bonus Podcast for March 17 2014 – Discussing Game of Thrones

In this BONUS episode, I mostly discuss my experiences with the Song of Ice and Fire novel series and my recent viewings of the beginnings of the Game of Thrones television series. In there is a little discussion of my new lavalier microphone, comic book retailing and other good bits.

Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, March 17, 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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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.