A podcast where geek-culture meets the real world … from the minds behind Dragon*ConTV. Everything from movies, television, science and news. Sometimes serious, mostly funny, always a little off-center.
Crispy could only stay for part of this podcast, which may be why Stephen felt free to claim that geek culture isn’t really a thing. On the plus side, though, it leads Patrick to recommend the documentary Merchants of Cool, which you can watch online. Thanks, PBS!
Finally, we’re sad to note that Roger Ebert has died, and cancer’s going to kill awesome SF writer Iain M. Banks in a few months. If you’ve not read Banks’s stuff, try Player of Games or Use of Weapons.
In technology we talk about how Patrick thinks he may just want a dumb phone. You’ll definitely think differently about your smart phone if you watch the short film Valibration. Also: BORG RATS. (Spoilers: they are not actually Borg rats.)
We recorded this the day before Sony held its press conference announcing the PS4, so of course we had to make terrible, off-base predictions that would be proven wrong before we posted this episode. Instead of predicting, it’s like we’re postdicting, only badly!
We got ourselves a stunt Patrick! Super-producer Pattycakes from The Sci-Fi Janitors joins us and pretty soon is arguing with our Patrick about whether or not J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek reboot is really a Star Trek movie. You know, like geeks do. The gist of it is that Patrick hates fun.
We spend some time talking about TV. Fringe, which started life as a monster-of-the-week show with no mythology, has ended, and Crispy and Stephen make the case for everyone going back and watching it. (It doesn’t hurt that Jasika Nicole and John Noble from Fringe are attending Dragon*Con.) Community is coming back, and rumor has it that the Doctor Who 50th anniversary episode will have all the doctors in it (sadly, not true, as we found out after we recorded this episode).
Up in the Sombrero Tower you’ll enjoy a fine view of the empty North and South Carolina landscape. It will also give you the opportunity to reflect on other conventions that you may attend once South of the Border Con ends. We hear that our smaller sister convention Dragon*Con has a new website, and that Con co-founder Stephen will be attending Science Online 2013. Crispy, another of our co-founders, will not be attending Chattacon or Con Nooga because he will be too busy recovering from the Reptile Lagoon convention masquerade and snake bites.
If you’re more the introverted type and want to spend some time in your room in the South of the Border Motor Inn, why not relax with some video games? We have all of the latest games, from Borderlands 1 to that Walking Dead series that everyone is excited about. (Sorry, we don’t yet have Steam boxes in all of the guest rooms. We definitely will next year, maybe!) You’ll also find a complimentary copy of The Unincorporated Man in your nightstand along with the standard Gideon Atlas Shrugged.
Science! It’s what’s strange and unintuitive and often mistaken for magic, as we talk about in this episode. It’s why Stephen puts on his lab coat and scientist hat.
But there’s other stuff going on. There’s Neil Patrick Harris’s Puppet Dreams, speculation about The Hobbit, and much discussion of Wreck-It Ralph. There’d be talk about Skyfall but Stephen hasn’t seen it, thus podblocking the discussion.
What else? Oh, right, Patrick’s been reading the Wool Omnibus, we remember Dave Brubeck, Crispy can’t get this out of his head, and Shannon of the Efts writes in, having discovered us through PodCulture. Yay PodCulture!
Patrick’s got a Nexus 7 and he can’t stop talking about it, so of course we can’t stop talking about it either. Patrick’s gone from iOS to Android, and he’s extremely pleased with the experience. Plus it turns out that Patrick’s very happy with a 7″ size — and, really, who wouldn’t be?
While Patrick was fondling his Nexus 7, Stephen and Crispy went to GMX. Brian went to the Ohio Valley Filk Fest, which means he willingly went to Ohio in the fall — and during an election season, no less! Speaking of politics, the gang geeks out over the new era of “big data” in politics, from sophisticated voter tracking methods to the wizardry of Nate Silver. World War Z looks like 2012 only with zombies instead of an exploding Earth, Brian finally saw Looper, and Stephen finally saw Dreddddddd, now with lots of extra “d”s because it’s been slowed down. Patrick loves The Men Who Built America, and so should you.
In non-WhatTheCast news, Stephen’s been seeing other podcasts behind our back! He showed up on Veronica Belmont’s Fact or Fictional talking about the science behind Fringe-like alternate universes and on The Nerdy Show talking about how dark matter can totally explain Ghostbusters.
All this and a bionic hand. What more could you want from an episode?
That’s good, though, since Stephen hasn’t been watching many TV shows lately, and Brian and Patrick weren’t around for this episode. So there’s no one to keep Crispy and Stephen from talking a lot about the videogames they’re enjoying! Stephen is head over heels for Dishonored. Crispy can’t stop playing Borderlands 2: Keep On Borderlanding. We’re still talking nostalgia, mainly because the people behind old-school isometric CRPGs like Planescape: Torment and Baldur’s Gate had a Kickstarter for Project Eternity that raised all the moneys.
Since this was recorded two weeks ago and is only now being posted, we talk about our upcoming attendance at Geek Media Expo Vol 4, which we’ve already been at and was wonderful. We also talk about Baumgartner hurtling his body from near the edge of space all the way to the ground. Since we mention the neat music video of Baumgartner’s jump set to the Boards of Canada song Dayvan Cowboy, here it is!
Our friend Jonathan Strickland from How Stuff Works and the Tech Stuff podcast stops by to talk about his awesome new web series Mildly Exciting Tales of Astonishment. It’s a fun series about superheroes going about their everyday life, doing things like trying to get hired at a daily newspaper or accidentally building their lair under a subway system or interviewing henchman. He’s Kickstarting its production and you can be part of it.
But that’s not all! We also talk about Doctor Who adding Mr. Weasley to the show, Minecraft, Borderlands 2, the Blackwater Kickstarter for a space mining real-time strategy game, and the problem with long-running shows. On October 11 Brian Richardson will be talking about Dragon*ConTV and social media at Digital Atlanta, and in February Jonathan is giving the keynote at the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Conference. Stephen doesn’t get to do any of that, so he went to an anime convention to talk about DCTV and make up an imaginary anime series.
It’s our annual live episode from Dragon*Con, with Stephen, Brian and Crispy! This year was enlivened by our guest, Chris Gore. He’s on G4, he writes and produces movies, and he also runs a podcast where he crashes others’ podcasts. He was on WhatTheCast back in April, and he re-crashes our podcast in person!
This being Dragon*Con, we spend most of our time talking about cosplay. We touch lightly (and with trepidation) on Chris’s barely-there costume he donned for the Parsec Awards. We talk about how Dragon*Con has costumes from almost any fandom from any era, and discuss our favorite costumes of the con. Everyone imitates the Simpson’s Comic Book Guy, which is very impressive considering how rough and scratch our voices are after 72 hours of being at a convention.
Crispy could only stay for part of this podcast, which may be why Stephen felt free to claim that geek culture isn’t really a thing. On the plus side, though, it leads Patrick to recommend the documentary Merchants of Cool, which you can watch online. Thanks, PBS!
