There’s been some more bumps along the podcast front, but all my feeds are up and running without a serious break in the continuity of my stories.
Here’s the podcast lowdown:
* Decoder Ring Theater is coming out with a new Red Panda episode every month or so, and the Red Panda still rocks.
* The Internet Archive has a huge selection of old timey radio, including sci-fi programs from the golden age. There’s a lot of Ray Bradbury that found its way onto the airwaves apparently.
* Democracy Now (RSS) has a daily podcast feed so you don’t have to search for that weird station transmitting out of someone’s garage to hear Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky talking about how disappointed they are in the radically conservative Obama administration.
* "Making the Cut (RSS)," the Metamor City podcast novel is in its lasts legs. It’s been a little while since I’ve been caught up with "Making the Cut." There’s been some pretty raunchy S&M bits that only seem to happen when the boss walks into the room. The novel is pretty cogently summarized by my co-worker Jeremiah’s comment: "I forgot there were vampires in this."
* Wormwood (RSS) is one of those things that’s too good to share with my co-workers. There’s a balance that has to be reached between podcast content quality that is listenable, but not so awesome that you’re afraid to walk into another part of the bakery because you might miss something. Wormwood bears a close resemblance to Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff’s "Shadow Falls" which in turn bears a close resemblance to "Twin Peaks." In short it’s a fully-dramatized production about a mysterious small town.
I’ve burned my way through all the available podcatching applications, and I’ve turned back to Miro, the open-source internet TV viewer. Miro is still a bloated and buggy beast of a program, but I’ve found out how to get it to download audio podcasts (and incidentally how one could, in theory, use Miro to consume porn, which I only bring up because it’s an essential ability for any new media if it wants to gain a foothold with the public).
Along with the audio I’ve taken to following some of the internet TV feeds (although I spend barely more time watching internet TV than normal TV).
* TED Talks (RSS-HD), in a zillion varieties are cluttering my harddrive. There’s the tech theme (RSS) feed, the tales of invention (RSS) feed, the TED Talks Africa (RSS) feed, etc. etc. The talks range from the mildly awesome to the mildly asinine. I like the way that anyone who demonstrates a new yet intuitive way to interact with a computer system gets a round of applause.
* Public domain movies show up on a number of feeds (RSS). I’ve actually removed these channels because they use bittorrenting that chokes up a whole lot of bandwidth, all to give me the sort of movie that you find in the dollar store DVD bin. I saw a War-Era British comedy by a forgotten seven person comedy team called "The Crazy Gang." The movie was called Gasbags and involved Hitler-related hijinks and a subterranean super-weapon. I also saw Horror Express, a movie that looked exactly like a Hammer film but was apparently a Spanish production. It starred Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as English scientists on the Orient Express while a primitive fossil man sucked the brains of their fellow passengers out of their eyes. Telly Savalas has a bit part as a Cossack.
* The Onion News Network (RSS) is frequently kinda funny. It’s impressive how closely they replicate the look and feel of cable news networks with such a small budget. It’s probably the best criticism of our smarmy, hysterical 24-hr news cycle out there.
* College Humor is funny about one time out of ten. College just isn’t that funny, dudes.
* Science Friday videos (RSS) are a supplement to the weekly radio program. They appear to be edited together by their intern, but it’s still pretty cool.
* Channel Frederator (RSS) has all the short cartoons that I crave. Might be the only funny independent animation outlet out there.
* Make Magazine (RSS) has a vodcast. They actually spent twenty minutes telling me how to put LEDs on my clothes, which is about as much of an unintentional self-parody as you can get.
* Hubblecast (RSS) totally rocks my world. The host is a weird German guy with an Adam’s apple the size of a European football, bu all the programs are about the jaw-dropping discoveries made by Hubble and any other telescope that suits their fancy. It’s like watching the universe itself.
* Nova’s vodcast (RSS) is best when it has Neil deGrasse Tyson as the host. He’s a goony man, and a lot more likeable than that raving jackass Brian Greene who I hope auto-erotic asphyxiates himself with his own string-theory.
