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EP134: Me and My Shadow

Mark — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:12:23 +0000

Without question, Me and My Shadow the best episode of Escape Pod I’ve listened to in quite some time. It’s got just the perfect amount of creepiness to suck me into the story, rather than sending me running for cover. Additionally the level of tech seems entirely believable in that we could theoretically be doing this to criminals in the real world within a generation of now¹. Those two factors are blended together into a tasty treat² by the writing of Mike Resnick and Stephen Eley’s reading of the work.

¹ As rule I prefer my Sci-Fi to be extrapolated from existing science to have believable future tech rather than wildly unlikely technology. Though if something with wildly unlikely tech has an interesting story or characters that can be fun too (e.g. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi).
² I’m glad lunch is coming up soon, I’m starting to get pretty hungery. *smile*

EP134: Me and My Shadow © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Escape Pod, for shame!

Mark — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 18:00:21 +0000

As a general rule, I love Escape Pod. The stories (and readers!) tend to be excellent, however this week must be the exception which proves the rule. Maybe it’s because I never got into the whole MMORPG thing but I found this week’s story to be a bad rewrite/adaption of Groundhog Day. The movie wasn’t all that great and Save Me Plz is even worse. At least in Groundhog Day Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors, had to do all the work himself; in Save Me Plz, Devon forces Meg into doing all the work for him. Even worse she liked the world the way it was!

So I say shame on you Mr. Eley for bringing us this tripe and implore you to look for more stories like:

#005: Snow Day
#007: The Trouble With Death Traps
#013: The Once and Future Dentist
#020: The Burning Bush
#028: Your Corporate Network and the Forces of Darkness
#031: Robots and Falling Hearts
#034: Free Will, Baby
#038: L’Alchimista
#039: My Friend is a Lesbian Zombie
#042: Practical Villainy
#045: Are You Ready For the End of the World?
#047: Poet for Hire
#052: Single White Farmhouse
#054: Tk’tk’tk
#056: The Clockwork Atom Bomb
#061: I Look Forward To Remembering You
#064: Head of State
#070: Squonk the Dragon
#075: Nano Comes to Clifford Falls
#076: The Dinner Game
#078: The Shoulder of Giants
#082: Travels With My Cats
#100: Nightfall
#102: The Angle of My Dreams
#104: Lust for Learning
#110: Frankie the Spook
#123: Niels Bohr and the Sleeping Dane

Notes…

Why no, this post is not a blatant attempt at being named BofW and getting a free book from Escape Pod. What would ever give you that idea. *grin*
Ok, I could be fibbing when I made the above comment.
Alright I was fibbing and it is a blatant attempt at just that.
However I also wrote up this post to draw attention to what I feel are the very, very best of Escape Pod. Any sci-fi and/or fantasy fans not listening to Escape Pod should start and they should definitely start with the stories on this list!

Escape Pod, for shame! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Dang Computers

Mark — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 06:00:38 +0000

I finished my evening in front of ye olde boob tube¹ at 10 and was thinking about heading to bed early. I decided just before doing so I’d go read some email, maybe run CastPodder and grab some stuff to listen to at work. That was nearly two hours ago and I’m still not continuing on my way to bed. *sigh* I really should learn my lesson and stop thinking I can ~~hit up the crack pipe~~ use my computer for a just a few minutes. On the bright side, my last run of APT-GET updated amaroK which fixed an annoying crash I’d been experiencing for the last week or so. Also, I setup amaroK up to use the MySQL backend and it’s massively faster than using SQLite. The only downside is that somewhere along the way of my manual attempts to fix the crash, updating to the latest/greatest and switching the MySQL backend; amaroK “forgot” which songs I’ve already listened to. This brings my playlist of “new” music to just under 3,000 tracks².

¹ T.V. for you little whipper-snappers.
² This playlist excludes podcasts, audiobooks and the like but does include music that is podsafe or ripped from CDs that I own.

Dang Computers © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

amaroK & Magnatune

Mark — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 01:55:41 +0000

As has been noted on this blog multiple times, I use Linux. Specifically, I use SuSE Linux. For my desktop environment, I use KDE. There are several music players available for KDE but the one that is far & away the best is amaroK. It’s got some great organizational tools, a cover manager and can even copy songs to your iPod. It rocks and if you listen to music under Linux; you’re missing out if you’re still using XMMS.

Another thing I like is Magnatune. This is a website that allows you to listen to MP3s of all the albums they offer for sale as CDs, plus they let you podcast with their music without paying for some ridiculous license. They’ve got a wide selection of music (e.g. blues, ambient, rock, medieval, etc…) and when I’m looking for something new to listen to; they’re the first place I go.

In fact tonight, I started poking around their site for some new music when I ran across this post on their founder’s blog:

A few months ago, the developers of amaroK (the amazingly gorgeous music player for Linux and Unix, that really does give iTunes a run for its money) asked me about Magnatune cooperating on their new release of their version 1.3. Their idea was to make a self-booting linux image, that boots into a linux desktop, with amaroK running and some Magnatune music included.

It’s like Reese’s Peanut Butter cups, they’re getting peanut butter (Magnatunes) mixed in with my chocolate (amaroK)! Nice move people! :D

amaroK & Magnatune © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Quick Update

Mark — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 15:27:27 +0000

Apologies to all my faithful readers, I’ve been busy working on some new features for the ICON 30 website (with some massive help from Aizuchi. For extra pain, we’re into our next beta cycle at work; so I’m considerably busier there. And if that wasn’t enough, I’ve had a bit of a cold that just isn’t going away. Ye olde Advil Cold & Sinus beats it down for a while, but it seems to keep coming back. If it doesn’t go away by this time next week, I’ll probably be making an appointment with the doctor to get checked out. *sigh*

I did get one break since my last real post and that was last weekend’s AnimeIowa. I was rather disappointed with this year’s con. The programming track was only sparsely filled and I didn’t see anything in it that interested me¹. So I mostly hung out with people I knew at the con and tried to help out the con photographer². Mostly, I just helped tear-down/setup his gear in different rooms. *shrug* It was no big deal and I got to see pretty much all of the costumes. As usual, some were fabulous and some were.… not. Of course some of the best were in the Masquerade, and the Masquerade was the main reason we went this year. A friend of ours was in charge of it and overall it appeared to go fairly well. However there were a few problems; most of which I did not hear about until after the con was over. The main thing that I noticed was the costumers wouldn’t shut up. It may seem a bit harsh, but they all know they’re supposed to keep quiet while in the green room and we had to constantly go around asking them to be quiet throughout the whole Masquerade. *sigh* If you know the rules in advance, have them re-explained to you when you show up shortly before the Masquerade then why do you have to continually break them? *grrr*

As for the rest of the con, the dealer’s room was smaller this year and unless you wanted Naruto or Full Metal Alchemist merchandise; you were pretty much out of luck. Since they didn’t have as many dealers; the con-com put the Artists’ Alley inside the dealer’s room. This was a bright idea and I ended up buying some magnets from the guy who does the FAUB webcomic. I was not familiar with the webcomic prior to this year’s AnimeIowa but I really liked the artwork in the magnets and have since read through their entire archive of webcomics and added it to my Portal page.

I didn’t have much desire to go into any of the video rooms, but I did find one playing Bubblegum Crisis which was kind of nice. Though I didn’t get to stay around long as that was just before I had to help Wookie move his gear from the hall cosplay judging room to the green room for the Masquerade.

All in all, it was a disappointing weekend. *shrug* Oh well, can’t win ‘em all.

In more current news, I’ve finally gotten caught up in listing to all the podcasts I’ve downloaded. It’s nice to listen to them and actually hear other people’s thoughts on current events while the events are still current. Along those lines, the jazz mashup from the episode# 240 of the Daily Source Code was extremely cool. Anyway, that’s all I’ve got time to write for now.

¹ I should say nothing on Saturday or Sunday as I wasn’t there Friday.
² Wookie comes to the con and takes pictures of all the Hall Cosplay entries & after the con puts them on a site where people can order prints if they want them. Also, Wookie’s a fun guy to hang around the con with.

Pukka’s Links of the Week

Mark — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 22:26:04 +0000

From Pukka:

Things Hagrid the Half-Giant Would Say If He Served Jesus Instead of Harry Potter.
Con as in Convention!
Ding!
Regarding New Orleans
Badger Badger Badger
Coffee So Strong.….…. [Editor] I don’t know seems like it’s kind of weak coffee to me if you actually have to drink it to wake up from the Matrix. With truly coffee, smelling the aroma of it should be enough to do that.
Exploring Communities, Questions and Concerns of Lesbian Video Gamers

Not from Pukka

Scone recipe: how to make/bake/cook fruit scones
President Bush: Sell the Ranch
ReaderÂ² [Editor] It’s kind of like del.ico.us or Flickr but for books.
iTunes Tip: The “Perfect” equalizer setting [Editor] On the off chance that this blog is your sole source of news; Apple released a new version of iTunes this week. Along with the first iTunes enabled cellphone from Cingular/Motorola and more importantly, the iPod Mini replacement.… the iPod nano. Yum!
Escape Key
The Signal [Editor] This is a podcast by fans of the cult favorite TV show, Firefly. Firefly came out back in 2002, quickly gained a devote following but the dorks in charge of FOX killed it after showing only 11 of the 14 produced episodes had been made. The Singal’s goal is to pump up support for the movie follow-up to the tv show, Serenity. I just started listening to it this week and have nearly caught up to the current shows. Probably my favorite one so far is the one where they interview Gina Torres. Although the interviews are cool my favorite segements are the “learning chinese” bits; they lend a whole new insight into various scenes in the series. All the more I have to say about that is æ˜“çˆ†çš„å¤§è±¡è…¹æ³» ¹.

Oh and in case you’re wondering about almost total lack of posts this week… We’re going into our next beta at work (much extra crudola to deal with). Additionally, I’ve been trying (and pretty much failing) to write an online, registration form for a local sci-fi con² that captures the data we need and accepts payments via PayPal. *sigh*

¹ Explosive elephant diarrhea (chinese translation obtained via Babelfish).
² ICON 30

Pukka’s Links of the Week

Mark — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 15:05:14 +0000

It was a slow week for links from Pukka…

Not from Pukka, but worth noting: