5 posts tagged “podcast”

I'm not a 'fan' of too many online personalities yet, but I'm close to it with Patrick Norton. His old IPTV show, DL.TV has lost a lot of its charm since he left. This man is the Henry Rollins of tech. He has a new show on the Revision 3 network (home of Diggnation), Tekzilla. His co-host is the smoky Jessica Corbin and as a tech podcast sits nicely in the middle between geeky and gadgeteer. No RSS feeds that I can find yet but here's the first episode or check it out in HD.

The Episode for Week 77 of EscapePod, A Single Shadow is remarkable for two reasons. Its writen by an Australian author and is spoken by an Australian reader. What is not unusual is the quality of the story.

From here.

EP077: A Single Shadow

Published by SFEley on 26 Oct 2006 at 4:38 am. 21 Comments.
Filed under Podcasts, Rated R.

By Stephen Dedman.
Read by Benjamin Grundy (of Mysterious Universe).

“I suppose you think we turn into cats and foxes when your back is turned?”

I smiled. “Only some of you - you, for example. You’re much too beautiful to be human, but you could be a cat, a flower, a tree - no, scratch that one, you’re too short.” I glanced at Hiroshi. “Maybe Shimako’s the tree-spirit,” I said, softly. Hiroshi ignored me, but Miyume covered her mouth and laughed.

“I assure you, I’m quite human,” she said. “I don’t doubt that Shimako is, too. And how many girls have you used that line on, before?”

Rated R. Contains explicit sexual content. And ghosts. Explicit sexual ghosts, really.

Now I'm always one for bandwagon jumping and smallbutwirey and Morabbin's recent posts about their favourite podcasts got me thinking about my own. These are the ones I listen too if not immediately, then within a week of release.

Geekson - smallbutwirey put me onto this, and like him I love it. These guys are funny, interesting and opinionated on topics geeky every week (mostly) and is always worth a listen. Their forum is a pretty nice place as well.

TWiT (or This Week in Tech) - Leo Laporte heads a weekly roundup and discussion of the tech news and views with a distinguished panel of IT's best and most interesting journalists, entrepreneurs and minds. They have a number of excellent casts on the network including Inside the Net with Amber MacCarthy which I listen to most of the time (and where I found out about Vox!)

Escape Pod - I don't keep up to date with this nearly as much as I should (I'm usually about two to three weeks behind) but I listen to every episode. Escape Pod is a sicence fiction short story podcast that anyone with a love of Sci-Fi should listen to. I haven't heard a bad story yet. A couple of ordinary ones, but generally the quality is high, the readings excellent and like good sci-fi it always gets you thinking.

12 Byzantine Rulers - I blogged this one just the other day and I recommend it for anyone with an interest in European and Near East history to listen to it. Comes about monthly and is easily my most anticipated podcast of them all at the moment.

There are others, but I tend to be selective about what I listen to and watch. If anyone can recommend any other good historical podcasts I'd love to hear about it.

A Place So Foreign and Eight More

Cory Doctorow

I've been enjoying a lot of short science fiction lately. Having two small children, a job that demands quite a bit of attention and a desire for a social life (including an on line blog habit) does not make for a lot of spare mental capacity for big, big books. I was getting tired of giant sci-fi and fantasy multi-volume door stoppers and thanks to the Escape Pod podcast I've been listening to a lot of very good Sci-fi short stories.

Anyone who has around the web enough knows who Cory Doctorow is. Blogger on Boing Boing, author of science fiction and Internet freedom raconteur I was introduced to his work when I heard about a young science fiction author conducting an experiment in giving away short fiction (the excellent novella Eastern Standard Tribe) in a multitude of formats just to see what would happen. I downloaded the book and read it on my PDA and thoroughly enjoyed it.

A little later (probably months) I was haunting one of my favourite Brisneyland bookshops, Folio Books, when I spotted A Place So Foreign and Eight More a collection of Doctorow's short stories. I bought it in a little frenzy of book buying, put it on the shelf and promptly forgot about it until the recent feeling of being over the aforementioned giant books.

This is a great collection of stories seen through the pop culture filter you see in the posts on Boing Boing. I was engaged and charmed by most of them and Doctorow displays a real feel for that human element I hold as the most important part of science fiction. His stories are about real people in situations that are beyond our current realm of possibility but within sight to visionaries who show us a way forward.

The standout stories for me were probably To Market, To Market: The Rebranding of Billy Bailey about a future where every kid has his or her own brand and marketing deal; The Superman and the Bugout - what if Superman had have been raised by Jewish parents in Toronto rather than Methodists in Kansas and 0wnz0red, probably my favourite story, about a government program to hack the human body.

I emailed Cory and gushed at him about the collection (the first and only time I've ever been so fannish) and he told me he has a new collection of short stories published by Avalon called Overclocked: Stories of the future present coming out soon. Great news for short science fiction lovers!