News, Reviews, and Commentary on all forms of science fiction, fantasy, and horror audio. Audiobooks, audio drama, podcasts; we discuss all of it here. Mystery, crime, and noir audio are also fair game.
In The Gloaming, an anthology podcast “in the vein of Tales of The Unexpected and Hammer House of Horror” has a very useful post up entitled: How NOT to make an award-winning podcast. Writes Nathaniel Tapley:
There were lots of reasons that we hadn’t been able to do as many episodes as we’d hoped. People’s schedules clashed, they got work or didn’t get work at the wrong times, we weren’t getting as many downloads as we might have hoped (the episodes had been listened to about 6,500 times at that point). However, most of the reasons we weren’t able to churn them out on a monthly basis were self-inflicted, and could have been avoided with a little thought early on in the process.
In the full post Tapley talks about the errors In The Gloaming made with regard to promos (audio trailers), format, monetizing methods, software and scheduling. It reads like the best advice column for would be podcasters ever. It comes from someone who knows exactly what he’s talking about – because he NOW knows exactly what he’d do differently next time. I wish more bloggers and podcasters would write posts like it. Check it out HERE.
As a former junior employee of The Province, Vancouver’s morning daily newspaper, I know how hard working in the news business is. First you have to get up at five o’clock, six days a week. You have to walk the half-kilometer, or so, to where someone from just up the totem pole has dumped the bundles. Next, you have to peel the all the bale bindings, shove their inky contents into your shoulder bags and schlep the damned things from door-to-door, up and down hills, in rain and ice and snow.
When you think about it, it sounds like an ennobling profession!
As a newspaper delivery boy I brought the news, sports and a little entertainment to the citizens and residents all along on my route. At the time I was mostly only interested in The Province for Hägar the Horrible, but I presume the people I was delivering the paper to wanted to learn about all the important goings on in the society all around them.
I’m pretty sure that they don’t hire kids to deliver newspapers anymore.
They ALSO don’t seem to hire much in the way of investigative journalists or journalistic editors either.
For more than a year I’ve been scouring The Province daily. There’s been hardly a mention of the one issue that affects every single British Columbian:
“I can say for myself, in terms of my own personal digital media consumption habit, that I personally choose to buy products that don’t have digital locks.”
Now as unbelievable as that sounds it also contradicts the facts. Moore has been trying his damnedest to keep the digital lock provisions in this bill. And now he’s turned to outright lies! Nobody that I’m aware of has called him on it. I will.
According to this Maclean’s article, Moore owns two X-Box 360s (one in his riding and one in Ottawa) and has multiple copies of his favorite games including Rainbow Six: Vegas 2. That’s DRM folks, those games have TPMs in them – he’s buying media with built in digital locks and he’s having to buy multiple copies of those games precisely because they have digital locks.
I can’t believe a professional editor, working at The Province, and running that story would be unaware of such glaringly obvious bullshit, or that an editor at a professional news-gathering newspaper would run a story that put such unbelievable guff out unchallenged – or at least, followed it up with a Google search and another story. It’s been nearly a month now with no follow up story.
I must therefore conclude that the editors aren’t reading the stories that they are buying, and that The Province is no longer capable of being Vancouver’s newspaper of record.
I would love to tell you that I’m going to give up my subscription to the The Province – but I can’t. It comes free with the purchase of a cup of coffee, and I’m not willing to give up the coffee just yet.
Apparently investigative journalism and editorial comment will be increasingly found on blogs and YouTube. Here’s some:
The first eighteen minutes of this |MP3| file is the only mention, that I know of by a Vancouver based radio program), about copyright reform in 2010. In the podcast CKNW‘s Mike Smyth (he’s also a Province columnist) talks to Mikkel Paulson, the leader of the recently created Pirate Party of Canada, and Carmi Levy, a Toronto Star journalist and blogger, about Canada’s current copyright legislation, Bill C-32, media levies and the ethics of torrents.
Here’s the relevant section from the official description:
“IS THE NEW COPYRIGHT LAW ‘FAIR’?
MIKKEL PAULSON
PARTY LEADER AND DIRECTOR, PIRATE PARTY OF CANADA
CARMI LEVY
TECHNOLOGY JOURNALIST
Re: if you download music, movies or television, listen up. Canada is in the midst of copyright reform, how can you protect the rights of artists, while not handicapping consumers in their use of digital technology?”
Talked about on today’s show: SciPodBooks.com (Mark Douglas Nelson’s audiobooks), Mark’s double understanding of Hyperion, “make it internally consistent”, Jurassic Park, living in forward and backward time, “The Scholar’s Tale”, setting reality aside, “why can’t stories be written in less than 600 (or 1100) pages”, “the nomenclature was great”, Hyperion made Gregg sad (it reminded him of Walmart), The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, was Hyperion a near miss?, “The Priest’s Tale”, Robert Sheckley, if they were self contained stories would it have worked better?, The Fall Of Hyperion, comparing the Hyperion Cantos to Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series, “The Diplomat’s Tale”, the stories get worse as you go along, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughterhouse Five |READ OUR REVIEW|, “The Soldier’s Tale”, making a link between sex and violence, Starship Troopers, Colonel Fedmahn Kassad is a good character, “The Poet’s Tale”, Martin Silenus (the Satyr) and Sad King Billy (William XXIII of the Kingdom of Windsor-in-Exile), “The Detective’s Tale” (the long goodbye), cybrids are very cool, John Keats, Ezra Pound, combining a hardboiled/noir detective story with William Gibson’s Neuromancer, talking to dolphins, narrator duties, you don’t fall in love with the client!, “when a detective‘s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it”. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, “The Scholar’s Tale”, Sol Weintraub, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, Merlin sickness (Merlin’s disease), David Hume‘s explanation of miracles: a miracle would be “a transgression of a law of nature”, if speculative fiction exists this is what they were talking about, time debt, if anything can happen then I don’t care what happens, the story of Abraham and Isaac (the binding of Isaac), is Hyperion a religious book?, Abraham’s ethics were childish compared to Sol, The river Lethe (was one of the rivers in Hades – it was river of unmindfulness, The Green Odyssey |READ OUR REVIEW|, why was the windwagon late?, Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express and Ten Little Indians, what happened to the Templar?, We’re Off To See The Wizard, The Wizard Of Oz, the confrontation with the Shrike, it’s a grab bag of everything, Simmons must have been inspired by all sorts of sources, the half-hour blender metaphor, Gregg is upset we all came to the same (and correct) conclusion, Simmons set himself a Titanic task with Hyperion, where was the editor?, listening to a multi-voiced audiobook, Full Cast Audio, Hyperion‘s narrators (Marc Vietor, Allyson Johnson, Kevin Pariseau, Jay Snyder, Victor Bevine), having to fend off the legions of audiobook groupies, Gregg gets emails about the pronunciation of “prestidigitation”, the generic American sitcom accent, Norse mythology, Yggdrasil (the world tree), Stephen King’s the Dark Tower series and Kevin J. Anderson’s Saga of Seven Suns series, Kevin J. Anderson‘s writing secret (he goes hiking with a voice recorder), Frank Herbert’s Dune, David Lynch’s Dune, Dune Messiah is a let-down but it has the Golah!, Gregg wants a copy of The Orange-Catholic Bible, “would you be a Bene Gesserit or a Mentat?”, Gregg would be a Morlock, look elsewhere for a cannibal podcast, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle‘s Oath Of Fealty, Jonathan Swift‘s Gulliver’s Travels, Julie Davis of Forgotten Classics, Gregg says Julie is really a horse!
Uvula Audio‘s James Campanella, of Uvula Audio, has just completed an unabridged reading of the 1947 adventure/mystery/science novel The Rocket’s Shadow by John Blaine. The Rocket’s Shadow was the first in a 24 book series which used “realistic science” and, according to the Wikipedia entry, the publishers were averse to “any suggestion of the supernatural in the series.” Sez James:
“The Rocket’s Shadow follows the adventures of Rick Brant and is the first in a long juvenile pulp series that was published from the late 1940’s until the late 1980’s . Rick is young (~19 since he just finished high school in the first book), but not a kid. This first exciting book in the series introduces readers to Rick , the son of a famous scientist, Hartson Brant. As with all the Brant series, quite a bit of actual down to earth science was the basis of the books– unlike Tom Swift, for example. Hartson brant is trying to win the $2 million Stoneridge Prize for the greatest scientific accomplishment of the year. The group of scientists headed by Rick Brant’s father works desperately to complete their moon rocket experiment before the deadline of year is up. But, someone in that closely knit group is a traitor – unknown and unscrupulous – who menaces the success of the experiment at every turn.”
Sounds fun hey?
The Rocket’s Shadow
By John Blaine; Read by J.J. Campanella
7 MP3 Files – Approx. [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Uvula Audio
Podcast: December 2010 Rick Brant is the son of scientist/inventor Hartson Brant and they live on an island called Spindrift. The island houses a research facility and several scientists also live there. Some of those scientists are descriptively similar to members of Doc Savage’s group. Rick has as his sidekick Scott, an ex-marine, capable of physically defending himself when necessary. This story, the first in the Rick Brant series has Rick’s father trying to build a rocket to hit the moon. A large monetary prize has been offered for the first group able to do so and the Brant group is the leading contender. However, there are other groups in the chase and one of them is a criminal group that does everything it can to sabotage the Brant effort.
Part 1 |MP3| Part 2 | MP3| Part 3 |MP3| Part 4 |MP3| Part 5 |MP3| Part 6 |MP3| Part 7 |MP3|
And, for those looking for something a bit more xmasy, look out for more files in the feed. Uvula will be presenting a Christmas special “covering L. Frank Baum’s Life”, the Adventures Of Santa Claus and Kidnapped Santa Claus!
The Skylark Of Space
By E.E. Smith; Read by Richard Kilmer 19 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 9 Hours 22 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: December 16, 2010 The novel begins with the accidental discovery, in a Government laboratory in Washington D. C., of a form of clean nuclear power. Our hero, Dr. Richard Seaton, uses this power to build first a flying belt and then an interstellar spaceship. He later discovers that the process operates by generation and manipulation of gravity fields. When his government coworkers do not believe him, Seaton acquires rights to his discovery from the government and commercializes it with the aid of his friend, millionaire inventor Martin Crane. A former colleague, Dr. Marc DuQuesne, joins with the unscrupulous World Steel Corporation to try to steal Seaton’s invention. The resulting conflict escalates, as Seaton and Duquesne develop greater and greater technical capabilities and enlist more and more powerful alien races as allies.
In The Gloaming, an anthology podcast “in the vein of Tales of The Unexpected and Hammer House of Horror” has a very useful post up entitled: How NOT to make an award-winning podcast. Writes Nathaniel Tapley:
