Bill Mills, of REB AudioBooks, sent me a link to an interesting video that he put together. Writes Mills:
I have been involved in helping The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS) bring this worthy new video webcast series to fruition and I had hoped that you might be willing to mention it on the site. Of course, LASFS is a non-profit organization and my efforts, as well as all those connected with the production donated free of charge to the club. We all are essentially engaging in FANAC (Fan Activity), in support of this venerable institution deservedly known as “This World’s Oldest Science Fiction Club”!
The video is basically a short history of the club and a tour their wonderful facilities and offerings. While the video’s volume is okay there is a hideous hiss in the audio, but if you can get past it I think you’ll agree that the completely crazy people at LASFS are utterly awesome. They’ve got a sweet looking library too (though I didn’t see any audiobooks on the shelves). Check it out:
Second Variety And Other Stories
By Philip K. Dick; Read by William Coon
WMA, MP3 or Audible Download – Approx. 6 Hours 20 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Eloquent Voice
Published: April 15, 2011
ISBN: 9780983089834
Available through: OverDrive, NetLibrary, Audible, CD Baby This collection of five stories from early in his career casts a spotlight on Dick’s incredible imagination. In Second Variety robot warriors appear to have given one side the advantage in a devastating war. But a small band of soldiers begins to question just what the robots’ endgame truly is. In Beyond Lies The Wub a member of a spaceship’s crew buys a Wub (‘a huge dirty pig!’) for fifty cents, thinking it might be a good source of meat for the long journey home. Then the Wub speaks. In The Eyes Have It a man’s imagination gets the best of him, as he takes the words in a paperback novel a bit too literally. In Piper In The Woods a doctor attempts to unravel the mystery of why workers on an asteroid base begin to behave as if they have become plants. In The Variable Man giant computers indicate earth will likely win an interstellar war that will free it from the limits imposed by an aging Centauran empire. Plans are disrupted, however, when a man from the past arrives and throws off all calculations.
DVDcommentaries.co.uk is one of those specialized podcasts that I too rarely talk about. It’s a podcast that provides an alternative audio commentary track that you can run while watching a film, or just listen to while you’re on the go. Unlike many of the official DVD commentaries, that are too often about all the technical junk that nobody except aspiring directors could ever care about, fan commentaries can be extremely compelling listening. A great example of that is this one, from Jan 2010: Curits, Dave, Stu and Tom, a knowledgable set of fans who genuinely love movies, priovide the commentary of Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World. It’s well worth listening to if you’re a fan of the film.
The movie is, of course, based on the novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell. Have a listen |MP3|.
Here’s the trailer:
I’ve participated in a similar podcast myself, Hey Want To Watch A Movie?, in which a few folks watch John Carpenter’s The Thing (a remake/re-adaptation of the same story). Check it out HERE.
Nora Young‘s uncut interview with Robert J. Sawyer, recorded for an upcoming episode of CBC Radio One’s Spark podcast, is available for download |MP3|.
Yesterday, Nora interview the award-winning Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer. He’s just published the third installment of his WWW trilogy, called Wonder. It speculates about a possible world in which the web develops consciousness and becomes “Webmind.”
Bonus: A three part video interview with Sawyer in Hungary.
Sawyer talks about: FlashForward, other Sawyer-related TV shows, dinosaurs, awards, his upcoming book (Triggers), memory, research, assassination, ebooks, Japan, piracy, DRM, advice to aspiring writers, teaching writing, the University Of Toronto, travel, translations and RJS book covers from around the world.
According to this Wikileaks document, an embassy cable from the United States embassy in Ottawa to the U.S. government in Washington, the United States was heavily pressuring Canada’s Conservative government ministers to pass their DMCA-style copyright legislation.
Despite the pressure, which included placing Canada on a “Priority Watch List”, the Conservatives weren’t able to please their U.S. advisors by delivering a DMCA-style copyright law. This failure is attributable to the Conservative’s minority government status and a growing opposition (public awareness). According to the cable neither attempt, Bill C-32 nor Bill C-61, was brought to a vote because the Conservatives knew it might cost them the 2008 election or the next (Monday’s). One of the more interesting lines, in the fascinating document, is this one:
On February 25, however, Industry Minister Prentice (please protect) admitted to the Ambassador that some Cabinet members and Conservative Members of Parliament – including MPs who won their ridings by slim margins – opposed tabling the copyright bill now because it might be used against them in the next federal election.
Despite Industry Minister Jim Prentice’s protected status he will not be running for re-election.
It may have been in a bid to curry such protection “an [unnamed] influential Liberal MP on intellectual property issues” told the U.S. embassy that “the copyright bill would receive widespread support from the Conservative, Liberal, and Bloc Quebecois parties if and when the GOC [Government Of Canada] sends it to Parliament.”
WOW! The Liberals and the Bloc would have supported Bills C-61 and C-32. Nice to know.
Perhaps this is due to the “inherent inferiority complex of Canadians” toward the U.S.? That’s detailed in this cable about how the U.S. needed to stay out of Canada’s last federal election. Will the trend be overturned on Monday? Maybe the “orange wave” can prevent whatever successor copyright legislation that comes after the election from being written wholly with U.S. interests in the foreground.
In the U.S. blue stands for the Democrat and red stands for the Republican. In Canada red stands for Liberal and blue stands for Conservative. No matter which side of the border, though, both red and blue are the parties of big business.
Individual people, small business owners and the self employed are not served by voting red or blue. The funding for all four red and blue parties comes from big business, they are honourable and so they do what they are paid to do – serve big business. But unlike our American cousins we have a second option in Canada. We have a choice of either blue/red or orange. Sure, maybe having green would be a good idea one day too – but right now we really only have a choice of either red/blue (big business) or orange (people). Please be a person on Monday and vote-in an orange government.
Gregg Taylor, the creator and writer of Decoder Ring Theatre, is a creative genius, the quality and scope for which we have seen very few before. He is writer of genuine superbness, on the level of J. Michael Straczynski and Rod Serling. But unlike Straczynski, who wrote 92 of the 110 episodes of Babylon 5, and unlike Serling, who wrote 92 of 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone, Taylor has written 42 out of 42 episodes of Black Jack Justice and 70 out of 70 episodes of Red Panda Adventures. I don’t think there is any kind of precedent for this in the history of scripted drama, not on work of this quality or superfluity.
Battlestar Galactica, the recent TV series, ran 73 episodes. Writing credits for that show go to more that a dozen different writers. People think that Joss Whedon wrote Firefly. He did, but he didn’t do it alone. He wrote or co-wrote maybe only half the episodes of that short series. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Nobody is doing anything like what Gregg Taylor is doing with scripted series, and I’m not sure anybody ever has, not on radio or TV. Taylor has, unbelievably, released a full cast production episode of both of his full cast series every two weeks, fall through to the spring, every year since 2005. That’s a stunning, stunning achievement.
I could go on and on and on. But if you just go and listen to the shows yourself I’m sure you’ll get as caught-up in them as so many fans of these independently produced shows have. Maybe start with the fairly standalone-ish episode #70 of the Red Panda Adventures |MP3|. Here’s the episode description:
There are some situations that you just can’t prepare for. You can be the cleverest mystery man on the block, there will still be days that you just never saw coming. Those are the moments that cry out for a fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty… well, you know…
The talented Thomas Perkins, who does the covers for the Red Panda novels*, created this awesome “lobby card” art for the episode:
*Yes, Gregg Taylor is writing novels set in the Red Panda world too. And no, they are not mere reworkings of the scripts – theses are true canon series novels that fit into the chronology like so many Star Trek novels written for hire never did, and like the Babylon 5 novels claimed they would.
According to this 