My day job, while involved, doesn’t eat all my brain power very often. I’m also part pedestrian, so I ride the bus quite a bit. These two facts afford me plenty of opportunity to listen to music and podcasts.
I’m pretty good about splitting my time between both, but if I had to choose one, I’d probably go with podcasts. Now, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE music, but I generally only use it for those times when I have to do a lot of repetitive tasks.
Podcasting, on the other hand, allows me to learn something and/or be entertained. I LOVE learning and you can only learn so much from just listening to music.
I’m an eclectic guy, if you haven’t noticed, no I listen to a variety of things, from techie subjects to weird music-casts, but my favorites are the fiction podcasts.
Now, just like everything else, 90% of podcasts are crap. Thankfully the social power of the internet filters out a lot of the shit and let’s the cream float to the top. (Is it just me or does that last sentence sound really dirty? Maybe I’ve been here in the gutter too long…)
baD kARmA INk is here to help with at shit sifting. To that end, we present a new and hopefully regular series entitled “Podcasts We Like” and we are launching with a doozy of a fiction podcast.
Escape Pod was founded by Steve Eley and debuted in May of 2005. Escape Artists, the parent organization of Escape Pod and it’s sister podcasts Pseudopod and PodCastle is one of the few paying fiction markets on the internet.
Escape Pod herself focuses on science fiction and, let me tell you, they produce some great stuff. The recordings are usually about half an hour and each one ends with some analysis and listener feed back. The stories, well, they are great and varied. From robots to aliens, humor to fear, all with a sense of wonder, every episode is joy to the ears. I think my personal fave is “Edward Bear and the Very Long Walk“, about a robotic children’s toy that bares a resemblance to a certain silly old bear. If, at the end of the story, you aren’t wiping a tear from your eye, you are obviously an emotionless, green-blooded alien.
I’ve been listening for a couple of years now and I cant tell you how thrilled I am every week when I find an episode in my podcatcher. All the episodes are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives, which means I can save my faves and later on subject people to them without fear of legal repercution. Some people call that torture; I call it forcing people to expand their horizons.
Escape Artists makes the money to pay their authors through donations and by selling cd’s of old episodes at PodDisc so if you love Escape Pod as much as I do, please donate or purchase something from them. Escape Pod is a real internet treasure. Do your part folks, spread the word and toss a few bucks their way.
