Kris Johnson's Blog…sort of.

Decoder Ring Theater

  • 5 O’Clock Shadow – 05 April 2007

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    Kris Johnson

    5 O’Clock Shadow - 05 April 2007
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    Rockbox , the “open source jukebox firmware”, on my iPod. Unfortunately, Rockbox isn’t quite ready for primetime on fourth generation iPods and after two days of frequent lockups I decided to revert back to Apple’s original firmware.

    Thanks to firmware juggling and not quite unrelated iTunes juggling, I kind of lost track of the podcasts I was listening to and stopped downloading new episodes. Thankfully, I had a backlog of about 400 episodes from 40-50 different podcasts on my iPod. This afternoon, I queued up Black Jack Justice, a hard-boiled detective series from Decoder Ring Theater done in the style of old-time radio dramas. It’s good stuff, and Season One is available at Podiobooks.com. Also available at Podiobooks is Season One of The Adventures of the Red Panda, an homage to The Shadow and The Green Hornet.

    Decoder Ring Theater just wrapped up Season Two of Black Jack Justice and has begun a new season of The Adventures of the Red Panda, so I need to get on the stick and start downloading podcasts again soon.

  • Netstuff: Podiobooks article in the New York Times online

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    Kris Johnson

    There is an article in the Books section of the New York Times online today about one of my favorite websites, Podiobooks.com.

    Podiobooks combines the concepts of audiobooks and podcasts to deliver free, full-length novels (fiction and non-fiction) in regular, bite-sized installments to your favorite podcatcher (I use iTunes).

    After signing up for a free account, you can browse the site and subscribe to more than 90 titles. Once you’ve subscribed, chapters from the novel(s) are delivered to your podcatcher on a weekly basis. Feeds are customizable, so if you want to receive chapters more frequently you can tweak the delivery settings to meet your preference.

    With most podcasts, when you subscribe your podcatcher downloads the latest episode; if you go to J.C. Hutchins’ 7th Son website right now and subscribe to his feed, you’ll get the latest episode of the second novel in his trilogy, which is definitely not where you want to begin listening.

    On Podiobooks, when you subscribe to Hutchins’ first novel, 7th Son: Descent, (and you should), you get a custom feed that starts from the beginning of the book and delivers a new chapter on whatever schedule you like. That’s what makes Podiobooks unique.

    Read the article, then go sign up for an account at Podiobooks.com. If you want some recommendations, I can suggest a few titles:

    • Ancestor by Scott Sigler.Am I the only one who finds the idea of Scott Sigler recording in a closet absolutely hilarious? I hope not. I want a poster made of that photo! Don’t know what I’m talking about? Read the New York Times article, dammit! Most of the action Sigler’s second podcast novel takes place on a fictional island in Lake Superior, where scientists are hard at work creating beastly critters that want to eat us all. I enjoyed the hell out of this book, but I have one bone to pick with Mr. Sigler: No self-respecting Yooper would name his dog “Pasty”.
    • 7th Son: Descent by J.C. Hutchins. I’ve talked about this book on KJToo.com and on The Round Table more times than I can count, and with good reason: it rocks. After a four-year-old boy kills the President of the United States, seven men are suddenly ripped away from their ordinary lives to discover that they are all clones of the man responsible assassination, and only by working together can they stop him.
    • The Red Panda Adventures by Decoder Ring Theater. Radio drama in the style of The Shadow and The Green Hornet. The Red Panda and The Flying Squirrel use clever gadgets, hypnosis and fisticuffs to fight crime on the streets of Toronto. By day, the costumed vigilantes are actually one of the city’s wealthiest menUnless I missed something, The Red Panda’s alter ego is never named throughout Season One. I only realized this about halfway into the season, so I’ll admit I wasn’t listening for the name in the first few episodes. Very clever. and his sassy driver, Kit Baxter.
    • Voices: New Media Fiction edited by Mur Lafferty. A collection of previously-podcasted short stories from authors like Cory Doctorow, Tee Morris, James Patrick Kelly and Patrick McLean (whose “Death of a Dishwasher” is one of the collection’s highlights).
    • The Curious Education of Epitome Quirkstandard by A.F. Harrold. How to describe this one? At the risk of insulting the author and the citizens of the United Kingdom, I’ll call it “very British”. Epitome Quirkstandard is an English dandy who — thanks to World War I — finds himself without a cadre of servants waiting on him hand and foot. Simone Crepuscular ran away from home to join the circus and accidentally joined the army, instead. After a long tour in India, Crepuscular leaves the service and travels across Asia and Europe, eventually returning to England where he self-publishes an astonishing number of pamphlets that contain the length and breadth of his considerable knowledge and experience. When the clueless Quirkstandard passes out near Crepuscular’s pamphlet shop, it marks the beginning of his curious eduction.