I made a rather vague announcement a while back about an updated edition of my reasonably popular Doctor Who guidebook, VWORP!1, a few weeks ago. I thought I’d let you know what that entails – and how you can help! … Read more
Some time back, I wrote and recorded and only partially edited a longer intro for the daily Escape Pod podcast that gave a better explanation as to what the heck the thing is about; my thinking when I wrote it was that, what with the usual progression from space missions and science milestones to celebrity birthdays and obits with a geeky bias to moments in TV, movie and video game history… it might seem unfocused to somebody. (It doesn’t seem that way to me, but I still have to pitch it to an audience that isn’t me. Damned inconvenient sometimes.)
I had the crazy, sleep-deprived thought recently that maybe I should finish that out. I started from scratch on the sound effects mix, and came up with nearly 40 seconds of mechanical futuristic beauty, only to realize why I’d given up on it the first time:
But just for giggles, I’ve posted the intro on its own – if nothing else, it’s on the RSS feed if anyone needs an “explainer” of what the Escape Pod covers and why it’s there. You can hear it here:
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/podcast/escape/pod/escapepod0000.mp3]
The background sound mix is a multitrack monster 22 tracks deep, with about eight of those tracks being layers of the ascending power-up/engine-start sound, which I thought should be deep and whooshy if you’re hearing them from inside the pod. There’s a lot going on here, including lots of little audio Easter eggs as homages to some old favorites. See if you can spot them all in the complete Escape Pod intro sound mix:
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/podcast/escape/pod/escapepod-fx.mp3]
The mental picture I had during all of this is that you’d want a real escape pod on a real spaceship to have the cold-start-to-ready-to-go time of a horny dog. Therefore, you go from opening the hatch to hitting space in under a minute.
The Pod is still looking for a sponsor or two to justify the not-inconsiderable time that I sink into it every month, if anyone’s interested. … Read more
Just in time for the release of Star Trek: Into Darkness, I thought it’d be fun to reach into an alternate universe and whip out a soundtrack from that mirror universe’s vastly superior library of Star Trek video games. (I make little secret of my opinion that a lot of licensed Trek games are big piles of steaming salt monster excrement.) In this other universe, virtually every movie and series has had a knockout video game based on it, with outstanding music from some of the big screen’s finest composers. Here, then, is an entire full-album-length chiptune tribute to the Star Trek universe from Kasatochi, free for download. … Read more
…and both are named Voyager. Inspired by the recent announcement that Voyager 1 is rapidly approaching starship status. (Click for larger versions that you can slather all over your desktop.)
After I did that one, I thought I’d have a bit of a giggle with it. … Read more
A friend’s mention of the HD restoration of Bambi Meets Godzilla triggered a distant memory of something on TV that was actually – so help me – fun and exciting and mind-expanding. At the dawn of the 1980s, USA Network’s overnight weekends were filled not with informercials, but with the marvel of free-association video that was Night Flight. … Read more
By the Prophets, has it really been 20 years? I remember it like it was yesterday – a contact of mine at a local TV station bringing me a fresh-off-the-satellite raw feed of the pilot episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine… just before New Year’s Eve, 1992. (Strange as it may sound, the episodes fed well in advance of the usually-over-the-weekend broadcast dates, to the tune of “at least a week”, so yes, I got to see the first episode of DS9 before 1993.) It was an awesome sight to behold. It was an intensely moving story, especially since I was 20 at the time and could relate to the sense of not-having-moved-on-from-something-really-bad-happening. It was a story that I needed to see; I suspect it was a story a lot of people needed to see. I was working in radio at the time (but was a few months away from transitioning to TV), so I was still a viewer (with inside info), although one of my last radio tasks was to interview Dennis McCarthy about the remixed version of the show’s theme. Deep Space Nine wasn’t my job yet.
… Read moreWarning: if you’re not up for reading a lot of stuff about Star Trek, the local end of broadcasting syndicated shows, and inter-office warfare, you probably don’t want to go past the jump.
Warning: packaging is narn-recyclable… Read more
So, funny story related to today’s episode of Doctor Who. It really won’t make any sense unless you’ve seen it already, but it’s absolutely true, it was absolutely unexpected, and it’s right up there with the “draw hash marks on your friends’ arms while they sleep” gag. … 
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