Tag: podcasts

30 Days of the Thrilling Adventure Hour, Days Fifteen & Thirty

Day Fifteen – Recommendations
Oooh! First recommendation is The Hidden Almanac by Ursula Vernon (ursulav). She took inspiration after hearing so many people describe Welcome to Night Vale as “Lovecraft meets A Prairie Home Companion“, giving it a listen, and feeling that the Prairie Home Companion comparison wasn’t quite right. She then thought about what would happen if Lovecraft met Garrison Keillor’s other show, The Writer’s Almanac, and thus The Hidden Almanac was born. The show broadcasts three times a week, but with each episode only lasting three or so minutes you can catch up with the entire run (it started last September) in about eight hours of listening.
Next recommendation is Ursula’s other podcast, Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap, which she hosts with her husband Kevin. On it they get drunk and review pre-packaged foods of varying qualities. Remember, They Eat It So You Don’t Have To!
Leverage – The best con/heist show of the past decade. Great characters, smart writing, and a lot of fun.
And lastly, Black Books. A British sitcom from the early 2000’s it’s incredibly funny and features the habitually drunk/hungover/irritable Bernard Black, a misanthropic bookshop owner. The comedy never quite goes black, but I’d call it very dark grey so watch yourself.

Day Thirty – Favorite Fan Moments
There’s so many things to talk about, but my absolute favorite moment will always be getting to see Karen Gillan and Dave Foley in Sparks Nevada at the live show. The crowd was excited during the theme song, got louder when Mark and Marc entered the stage, went nuts when Dave Foley came out, and absolutely went wild when Karen Gillan came up on stage. It was exhilarating to be part of that audience.

BayCon

I spent all day Friday at BayCon, the Bay Area’s largest sci-fi & fantasy convention. It’s been about fifteen years since my last con (and the last one was a small college-sized affair) so this was all pretty new to me. I mostly went so that I could meet the artist Guest of Honor Ursula Vernon and her husband Kevin Sonney ( & respectively). Kevin & Ursula are the pair behind the excellent podcasts Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap and The Hidden Almanac. Ursula is also the artist/author of the Hugo award-winning comic Digger, a fantastic artist, and extremely funny to boot.

It was a lot of fun. I drove, parked, wandered the wrong way around the parking structure/hotel/convention center, registered, and ended up in the throngs of people. I checked out the dealer’s room (where I picked up an anthology of sci-fi mysteries (a hard genre to pull off), and a couple of mid-sixties Peanuts and Charles Addams collections) and the art show (excellent leather masks by this one lady whose card I lost and some impressive work from the Bay Area Lego Club.) I attended a few panels throughout the day (one on costuming, one on how Doctor Who has endured all these years, and one about clockpunk, steampunk, & cyberpunk. I also poked my head around the entire con to see what else was going on. I found a nice Indian place a couple blocks away from the hotel for dinner and I got back in time to watch the presentation of the Guests of Honor. The author GOH, David Weber, is a great storyteller. After that I stuck around for charaoke (charity karaoke), but I was feeling some heartburn from the biryani for dinner so I never did turn in my slip to perform “Mahna Mahna.”

The big highlight of the day was meeting Kevin & Ursula at their table in the dealer’s room. As their unofficial segueographer I felt it my duty to bring them a nice snack so I brought some honey sticks from Buzzbee’s Honey, and I apologized for the box of food that I sent a couple months back. I browsed through Ursula’s selection of prints and chatted with her and Kevin while I picked out a few.

And the best part? I got a wombat sketch in my new notebook!

Other memorable moments:
* David Weber’s amalgamation of the worst con he’d ever been to – no schedule, no con staff, had to pay own expenses, con committee ended up in jail on fraud charges.
* “Sherp is a verb, isn’t it? It should be.”
* “Lots of planets have a Vancouver.”
* “Located next to the memorial Gorn.”

I spent most of yesterday napping off an on. I’m kind of glad I went on Friday when it was a little more sedate.

Current Mood: 🙂happy

Night Vale

After seeing all the hype I downloaded the first five episodes to see what was going on. I’m going to guess someone here is listening, so I’ve got a question: When does it get good? How many episodes do I need to give it? What I’ve heard so far just reminds me of peyote-influenced X-Files fanfiction, so I assume it doesn’t hit its stride until later in the series.

Do you know what won’t cause spontaneous human combustion?

For the past month or so, I’ve been enjoying “Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap“, a podcast by ursulav and alchemist. Each week they review a variety of pre-packaged foods; some cheap, others too pricey for their quality. And each week, “[They] eat it, so [we] don’t have to.”

And I’ve been having a wonderful time. It’s great listening for my bike rides or when I’m doing the dishes, and of course, because of a quirk of timing I now associate podcasts with California, so it’s nice to listen to something that’s based back East. I really enjoy listening to them, and I love trying to figure out how the various food products will get rated at the end. Some of my favorite through-lines include “Is this made of food?” and “Oh god, why do we do this to ourselves?”

But the best has to be the odd questions and ramblings that lead into the sponsor’s spots each week. Over the years they’ve had three and a bit sponsors, and are currently sponsored by Dash Systems and SofaWolf Press.

While I’ve been listening, I’ve been noting down the lead-ins they use before the sponsor spots. And I collected them all into a single spreadsheet. While they’re all great, I’ve listed a few of my favorites below. See if you can guess which lead-in went with which sponsor, without looking at the whole spreadsheet.

* Do you know what has a really good crust and a really good assembly?
* You know what won’t make you violently ill, feverish, and full of chills?
* You know what won’t attack you and eat your head?
* You know what won’t give you botulism?
* You know what will provide you an orgasm per meal?
* You know who does pay us to mention the brand name every time?
* You know what won’t raise your bad cholesterol?
* Do you know what you will not block out of your memory?
* Do you know what texture is not distressing?