Occupy Eugene: Bridging Occupy and the Tea Party, with Dan Carlin

SFFaudio Online Audio

Getch of Occupy Eugene talks to Dan Carlin (of the Common Sense and Hardcore History podcasts).

Also available in a handy |MP3| version!

Podcast feed: http://occupymedia.libsyn.com/

Posted by Jesse Willis

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History: #42 Logical Insanity

SFFaudio Online Audio

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcastPowerful podcasting, that’s what Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History was. Carlin used to put out the most powerful podcasts I’d ever heard. With episodes like Punic Nightmares, Ghosts Of The Ostfront, and Steppe Stories (now available as audiobook downloads). Half-way through them I’d be calling up friends and telling them “Hey, new Dan Carlin is out!” and then start telling them how awesome the show was.

And over the years I can’t say the show ever went bad – because it really never did – it just didn’t consistently hit the incredibly high highs that it had earlier. That is until just before this point this morning…

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History - #42 Logical Insanity

…where I realized that there was a new classic Dan Carlin out.

Carlin’s connective thread in this episode – that the insane choices of 20th century history are in fact a kind of horrific logic – delivered with fascinating historical evidence and illustrated with his incredible storytelling skill, shows the inevitable, frightening, awful logic of bombing cities full of people – even with nuclear weapons.

Carlin poses questions like. ‘In war, how many enemy civilians are you willing to kill in order to save one of your own people’s lives?’

And of course if that number is not equal to zero you’re down the path towards logical insanity.

Here’s the episode |MP3|

Podcast feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/dancarlin/history?format=xml

Posted by Jesse Willis

Dan Carlin’s Common Sense #217 – The Big Ketchup Show

SFFaudio Online Audio

Common Sense with Dan CarlinThe latest Dan Carlin’s Common Sense episode, #217 – The Big Ketchup Show, has Carlin asking tough questions and proffering incredibly reasonable answers. |MP3|

Podcast feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/dancarlin/commonsense?format=xml

Carlin’s take on SOPA is both surprising and insightful. He also talks about the latest U.S. presidential jockeying and a number of other recent items in the news. But the most enduring takeaway, at least for me, was his argument with regard to the “mistreatment of enemy dead by U.S. soldiers” – As Carlin points out the reasons for the controversy and compares it to the Collateral Murder video promulgated by Wikileaks and then wonders if:

‘First person shooters offered the chance to piss on a virtual enemy’s corpse?’

Now I love a good FPS myself. I’ve played quite a few of them. Many deliberately offer controversial sequences. Modern Warfare 2, for instance, has one sequence in which you can act as a terrorist, shooting innocents in a Russian airport. And while the body count is incredibly high in these games, I’ve virtually killed more than 51,000 times in Battlefield 2 alone, most game companies actively discourage swearing, racism, and such from their servers. I haven’t yet seen one yet that officially offered desecrating an enemy corpse as an option.

But where there is humanity there something just as human, and similarly disrespectful: I refer of course to the rampant teabagging of enemy corpses!

The Wikipedia entry on the subject describes the virtual act as “done to humorously imply domination or humiliation.” And The Giant Bomb website has this to say:

“Tea-bagging is primarily used to make one’s death a more humiliating experience and provoking the other player. This action is most commonly performed in video games found within the first-person shooter genre; however, every game that has a crouch button and dead bodies is susceptible to this phenomenon.”

The difference is, the worst of human behavior in computer games is all virtual, and generally not mean-spirited. Going to war should be a big fucking deal. And to make that clear we’d do better to show the reality of it, and to do it in high definition.

Posted by Jesse Willis

SFSignal Podcast (Episode 070): Panel Discussion of Favorite Podcasts

SFFaudio Online Audio

SFSignal PodcastSFSignal Podcast #70 features me and six other folks very quickly discussing Science Fiction (and other) podcasts. Unfortunately I think a lot of the best stuff came after the actual podcast ended. At least that’s the part of the discussion I enjoyed most. As a part of that I also invited Matthew Sanborn Smith to participate in an upcoming new releases and recent arrivals podcast.

In episode 70 of the SF Signal Podcast, Patrick Hester asks our irregulars: Do you listen to podcasts? Which ones, and do you listen to fiction podcasts?

Have a listen |MP3| or subscribe: http://www.sfsignal.com/podcast.xml

I took notes and think I got most of the podcasts that were mentioned:

Me:
The Cthulhu podcast
Lightspeed magazine podcast
Forgotten Classics
The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast
Gweek
HuffDuffer.com

Fred Kiesche (of the Lensmen’s Children blog):
Escape Pod
Beware Of The Hairy Mango
The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast
The History Of Rome
Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History
The Incomparable! podcast
Geek Life
Writing Excuses
Adventures In SciFi Publishing
The Tolkien Professor
The D6 Generation
The Nerdist
The Command Line
Living Proof Brewcast
365 Days Of Astronomy
Spark
Quirks And quarks
The Naked Scientist

Jeff Patterson (of the Gravity Lens blog):
The Nerdist
-The Doctor Who Cast
RiffTracks
Changesurfer Radio

John DeNardo (of SFSignal.com):
Functional Nerds
Beware Of The Hairy Mango
Notes From Coode Street
StarShip Sofa
The Skiffy And Fanty Show

Paul Weimer (of Blog, Jvstin Style):
Russian Rulers Podcast
Ancient Rome Refocused
Heatflash
the Speculate! Podcast
Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me
Three Moves Ahead

Matthew Sanborn Smith (of Beware Of The Hairy Mango podcast):
StarShip Sofa
The Tobolowsky Files
Tank Riot
Around Comics
RadioLab
Lightspeed
The New Yorker Fiction Podcast
Luke’s Creative Podcast
Dunesteef
Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas
I Should Be Writing

Patrick Hester (of SFSignal.com):
Seattle Geekly
Dragon Page
Adam Carolla
Slice Of SciFi
The Babylon Podcast
The Geekdad
Mac Tech Break
Podiobooks.com

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #115

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #115 – Scott and Jesse talk to Anne Frid de Vries of the Anne Is A Man blog for a talk about podcasts and podcasting.

Talked about on today’s show:
Anne rhymes with manna, SFFaudio Podcast #053, finding time to review podcasts, listening ideas, recruiting blog readers to be blog contributors, working with WordPress, this Anne needs 3G, university courses, iTunes U, Yale, Joanne B. Freeman, subscribe to iTunes U programmes as podcast, University of California, Berkeley, Anne does the detective work for his readers, BBC World Service: Witness, Fermat’s Last Theorem, Luke Burrage, The Tobolowsky Files, Groundhog Day, HuffDuffer, use your DropBox public folder to HuffDuff your audio files, this doesn’t fit the Wikipedia definition of podcast, podcasts are not radio, retweeting and re-retweeting, using Google Reader as a podcatcher, Dutch Treat (a podcast about the audiobooks of Elmore Leonard), sooo nichey, radio is about scarcity, paper publishing and ebooks, there’s a need for a new podcasting snipper software, drag and drop and trim and label and tag online, we need an audio search engine, speech to text, YouTube’s transcribe beta feature, MIT, speech recognition, podscope.com, trend in podcasting (blogs adding podcasts), iO9.com, Rivets And Trees, are podcasts just portable blogs?, podcasts about podcasts are the best podcasts, what makes a podcast good?, BBC Radio 4, In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg, On Being (aka Speaking Of Faith), CBC Radio One, Spark, Spark Plus, Eric S. Rabkin, Robert J. Sawyer, using podcast medium to enhance radio shows, Rachel Remen, prep and post production, live podcasts vs. scripted podcasts, “Interesting Stuff About History” pisses Anne off, Europe From Its Origins, A Good Story Is Hard To Find, Julie Davis’ Forgotten Classics, Genesis, what do you do with footnotes?, CBC Ideas, 104 Pall Mall (the Reform Club), Phileas Fogg, Around The World In Eighty Days, Ideas is too pretentious, Entitled Opinions, a very insightful slice into English history, putting in a bad episode in a podcast feed can hurt your podcast (or ours), LibriVox, Mystery at Geneva: An Improbable Tale Of Singular Happenings by Dame Rose Macaulay, The League Of Nations, The United Nations, iTunes is not where you find podcasts anymore?, HBO’s Realtime with Bill Maher podcast, CBS’ 60 Minutes podcast, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, can podcasting do for TV what it did for radio?, NBC’s Meet the Press, MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, The Ricky Gervais Show, how do you listen to podcasts? TWiT, how many podcasts exist?, can you hurt students by recording their classes? – consensus no, smartpens (like the Livescribe) should be hacked to podcast, podcast editing app, people get really hung up on video, Fr. Roderick‘s Catholic Insider podcast, the intimacy of audio podcasts, sound seeing tours, ABC Radio National’s The Philosopher’s Zone, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Brief History Of Mathematics, CBC Radio One’s Tapestry, thank you to all the Australian taxpayers, why is philosophy so prevalent in podcasting, A Partially Examined Life, Philosophy Bites, The History Of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, CJSW’s Today In Canadian History, Bob Packett’s History According To Bob‘s endless Civil War series, Viking armor, The Conquest Of Mexico, Matt’s Today In History, The Tunguska Event, Medieval Commune, Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, Death Throes Of The Republic VI, The Ghosts Of The Ostfront, Dan Carlin has perfected the art of the monologue, Common Sense with Dan Carlin, Hardcore History, blitz shows, James Burke, Gwynne Dyer, New Books In History podcast, the New Books Network, New Books In Public Policy, iTunes fail, I like podcasts about books, Marshall Poe interview with Christopher Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania From The Roman Empire To The Third Reich, The Origins Of Political Order, BIG HISTORY, Anne needs funding, The Do It Yourself Scholar, podcast directories are dead (Podcast Pickle), The Podcast Place, soccer, Tour de France, big media is dropping podcasts in favour of iPod and Android apps, Lance Armstrong, Queen Elizabeth II, “there’s something to be said for a constitutional monarchy in which the monarchy doesn’t live in the country.”

Posted by Jesse Willis