hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1943.txt

Episode: 1943
Title: HPR1943: HPR AudioBook Club 11.5 - Interview with David Collins-Rivera
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1943/hpr1943.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:43:54

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This is HBR episode 1943 entitled HBR AudioBook Club 11.5,
Internew with David Collins Rivera, and is part of the series HBR AudioBook Club.
It is hosted by HBR AudioBook Club, and is about 148 minutes long.
The summary is the HBR AudioBook Club Internews, the author of the latest book we renewed.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honest host.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the author code HBR15.
That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An honest host.com.
Hello and welcome to today's episode of Hacker Public Radio.
Tonight we have for you an audio book club, but this is like a half show.
This is show for us anyway. It's episode 11.5.
We're not reviewing a book tonight. We're interviewing an author, someone who turns out to be one of our favorite authors.
We have with us Mr. David Collins Rivera, known to many in the community as Lost in Bronx. How you doing, Lost in Bronx?
I'm doing really well. Thank you so much for having me here.
Hey, thanks for coming. Thanks for all of the work that you do.
AudioBooks, voice acting, Hacker Public Radio episodes. It's all very entertaining and helps many of us.
Myself included, just get through our work day. Also on the panel tonight we have Touch.
What's up everybody?
We've got Pegwall and X1101. Howdy, folks.
I am just beaming tonight. I am so excited to talk to Lost in Bronx.
I always enjoy talking to Lost in Bronx and I always enjoy his content.
Just right off the bat. Thank you so much for everything that you put out there.
How do you do it, man? How are you so prolific and so consistently good?
Well, I don't feel that prolific, frankly. I always feel like, you know, if I honestly, if I sit one night, like last night, I was going to go...
I'm working on a current episode of Eddie Kay, which I don't know if your listeners would know what that is or if they'd be interested, but it's a sitcom that I do and it's an audio sitcom.
And I was going to go out and record some voices and then instead I sat and watched Stupid Television and then I feel guilty about it for the rest of the night and then all today.
And then I had to go out, you know, run errands and stuff like that and I didn't get out to record and it's like, I didn't do it.
And so no, I don't feel that prolific, frankly.
All right. Can you speak to your consistency? I'm going to call it good. I'm going to say you're good, but I think I can make you at least admit your consistent.
Actually, that's one of my biggest issues. If you listen to street candles, if you listen to just, you know, take a moment and listen to the first chapter, chapter one, and then listen to the last chapter, chapter 40, you'll hear a massive difference in quality.
A huge huge difference in recording quality between those two. And that's because it was an evolutionary process.
Frankly, when I started it, I hate to admit this, but when I started it, I didn't care what it sounded like.
I was like, hey, the audio book is so hard. I don't want to, you know, I got to do this, but I don't really feel like it.
And I was just sort of, eh, however it sounded, it sounded. And somewhere around, I don't know, somewhere in the teens anyway, the chapters, you know, like 13, 14, something like that.
I started taking it more seriously. And I think chapter 40 probably sounds the best. And that's simply because, you know, I tweaked it as I went along bit by bit by bit, you know, my processing, the recording process and all of that.
No, I don't agree that I'm consistent either. I must just have 10 years because I thought all of it sounded good.
Spoken like a true artist. It could also be the, you know, full volume thrash metal all day. That might also have some to do with it.
I'd like to think that I don't have a 10 year. And I thought the quality was good right from the start.
Now I will have to now go back and listen to the last chapter and then back to the first to see if I can notice a difference.
But I thought the quality was was high the whole time, the recording quality as well as the reading and the voice acting.
Well, I'd be actually, I'd be very interested in hearing your opinion about that.
Uh, Poke, because I do highly value your taste in your ear effectively. You know, I mean, other people may not know this, but you and I have worked together before.
And, you know, I've come to greatly respect the work that you do. And of course, I've been listening to you on HPR and other other places for years now. So, you know, I would be very interested in hearing what you think.
And, you know, everybody for that matter. I mean, feel free to drop me a line and just say, you know, I think what we'll do is probably tag it on to the back end of one of our shows.
Uh, maybe in the next one, because the audio book is is a short one. So, maybe we'll do it then and you'll just have to listen.
Hey, listen, Bronx, did we lose you? I didn't know if you meant to cut out so roughly when you just finished there.
Lost in Bronx is lost in mumble.
Yep, I got him.
Oh, I might be too, actually.
I am going to attempt to more frequently push to chuckle since I was chastised last time for not pushing to chuckle.
Can you guys still hear me?
Yeah.
Yep.
Yes, sir.
Okay.
My mumble has become unresponsive.
Uh, I think I'm going to stop the recording and log out and log back in again and then restart the recording.
No, mumble is responding.
I had a window open and split off the screen.
All right.
Got it.
Lost in Bronx.
What's the last thing you remember before you got hit by a train?
I don't know.
I was spouting about something or other.
I have no idea what I was talking about.
What was the question?
I don't think it was about D&D.
Anybody else remember it?
I think it boiled down to, why are you awesome?
Yeah, that's kind of the big question of the night is, I mean, since I've known you, since we met so, so long ago on IRC.
And it was that I'm pretty sure it was even before HPR was revived before Ken Fallon got involved and revived it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think you're right.
I recognized you as a true talent.
Um, and just, and I always enjoy talking to you.
It was always a treat.
I mean, it was always a treat talking to most everybody in, in IRC, which I'll probably be back to more often than I know that I don't know working anymore.
Anyway, it's, it was always a real treat talking.
I knew there was always talent there.
And at one point you had asked me about doing some voice acting for one of the things you wrote, which I thought might have been star drifter.
And I distinctly remember responding to you.
Yes, I will ride your coat tails wherever they go, because I, I just back then recognized the talent.
And I don't know if I have a question, but what do you think of that?
Well, I missed the project we did work on, but neither you nor I had any control over the production end of it.
But you have to admit that, um, that, that particular show was called this thing of ours.
And it was an audio drama about the American mafia set in the 70s in New York City.
And, uh, Poke played the, uh, under boss.
And, uh, he was pretty rotten bastard on that show.
He was a real bad guy.
Yeah, the mic part was written to be really bad.
I recorded it and edited it, and I thought I sounded great.
And then when I was pasted in next to the rest of you, I, I realized just how terrible my microphone and my setup sounds compared to the rest of you guys.
I know a few of those guys are in a professional recording studio, so I get an excuse there.
But even next to you, and I know you just have a home studio as well, you, you sounded terrific.
And I didn't, and X1101, you said you wanted to ask Lost and Bronx something about an upcoming project that you have?
I thought that when we were talking on the, the review episode, someone had mentioned that you lost and Bronx had set up your whole rig to do both, um, the audio recording and also, you know,
uh, online publishing. I just wanted to get some details about that because I've, I'm kind of brewing an idea.
I've been working on it a while, but I want to start, you know, building a technology stack around it to do, um, what I'm calling the open cookbook project.
And so what I want to do is build a stack that will kind of take some kind of input files and then auto publish that into an EPUB.
And I wonder if you had any insight on that.
Well, as a matter of fact, I just uploaded an episode on the EPUB process using free open source software tools.
It hasn't been published yet, but I got it up well today's what to stay probably over the weekend anyway.
So I do have something coming up that you can listen for that covers it probably at least some of what you're looking for, but I can tell you this.
I have not learned how to automate it and I'm not sure it can be well automated unless the, unless the text that's going in is perfect.
And you're formatting, you have all of that set up in advance so that there's never a question about how it's going to be formatted in the final EPUB.
Otherwise, man, it is a lot of hands on. It is a lot of hands on.
Well, automation is kind of part of what I do. So hopefully I can iron that out because I do have a fairly right now.
I have all these recipes I've been collecting probably only a dozen or so actually committed to it in the in the format all in an ever note notebook.
But that's not open and I can't share it very well and I can't collaborate with people.
And so I want to set up kind of a get repository auto building cookbook thing for people to use and share and contribute to.
That would be marvelous. That really would, especially if you were able to use or plug into some current tools that are out there that people are already kind of invested in.
And if you were able to pull that off, man, that would be a boon. That would be really wonderful.
I'm not able to follow the conversation at this point. Maybe you can catch me up to speed here last and Bronx. What what are you?
Well, first like what are you using for text editor and what's your process to turn that into an ebook? And what would you see as the difficulties of automating the process?
I don't know if you really want me to talk about that right now because the the HPR episode that I have coming out soon is going to cover all that information and that's like a half hour long just to cover it in pretty much break next speed.
It is an involved process, but just as a thumbnail, I do everything in nano at the command line. All my basic writing is done there when I'm done, you know, and I do my my
spell checking and all of that stuff there when I get the basically when the work is ready, I then take that and previously I brought it into licks, which is a late tech, it's a gooey program and it's a late tech document processor.
And I primarily use that just to get a clean xhtml file out of the individual individual text files like, you know, from a dot txt to a dot xhtml and that would allow me to bring it then into sigil, which is an open source e pub tool.
And you know, it's a gooey tool that allows you to take HTML or xhtml files or even text if you're it's hard to use it with text, but you can plain text and from there, you can then hammer it out and kind of finish off your your e pub from there and you can create your your you can bring in your covers, you know, any artwork you're doing any any chart, any tables, things like that.
Create a table of contents you can create indexes and bibliographies and so it's it's a pretty powerful tool, but you have to do a lot of processing before you bring it in there, unless you you you do all your all your writing in sigil, which is possible, because it's more or less like a document processor.
Okay, so it's a little more wizzy wiggin doing it in nano.
Oh, absolutely, I mean, you you'd have to write in code, unless well, there are ways to automate it. I mean, there's a tool called txt to HTML, I mentioned that in the hpr episode.
And that's one that I started working with and that can actually take plain text documents and turn them into HTML or xhtml files.
So that's something that past you might want to look at that tool txt to the number two HTML, you might want to look at that in turn for, you know, as part of your your automation chain, because it it works.
I'm still work I'm still experimenting with it, but it does actually work.
That was something that was suggested to me a couple of times when I wanted to start doing HTML show notes for for the book club shows, the audiobook shows.
And I haven't tried it. I was trying to figure out HTML by hand first before I skip past it. I don't know if that's wise or not, but so what does it do?
Does it take? Do you have to like leave a space between the paragraphs and then it puts in the paragraph tags for you and that kind of thing?
Hey, 5150, how are you?
Still not home yet, but I want while I was sitting here in the parking lot, I want to get there and tell you man that this is your best work yet right up with any audiobook that I've had the privilege to read.
Thank you. That's very, very nice. I really appreciate hearing that. I can't tell you how lost and alone you can feel when you're working on one of these things.
Yeah, I can feel I can imagine how long it you must feel lost alone like that, too. It's it's got to be, you know, like a time consuming process before you feel like you're making any headway.
That's the way editing episodes is anyways nearly as I can relate, especially with something as mammoth as street candles was.
I mean, each one of those over they like hour long episodes almost 40 of those almost to take a new ages to do.
And so I can understand feeling like you're not making any progress, but man, it's a fantastic story, fantastically done.
Thanks. Thank you. I really appreciate that the chapter lengths that were all over the map.
There were a couple that were close to an hour. The shortest one I think is chapter five, and that's like between 15 and 20 minutes.
Most of them, especially probably in the 30s, chapter 30 out up, you know, like that, they were they they hovered around 35 minutes each.
All told I added it up and all told it was like 16 hours or so of audio. So that's not too bad.
That's something we need. If anyone listening knows how to do it, we I could really use some software that I can say, hey, look at all of these audio files and tell me what the run time is of all of them put together.
Just so I can just so we can tell people how long our next audio book would be, you know, that's that's something we can really use.
Lost in Bronx, when I hear authors talk about their books, they always mention how many words the book is, how, how, how long that is.
And that seems to mean a lot to authors. It doesn't I'm starting to understand how much it is like 100,000 words is what that's like an average sized book or a big book.
How long was street candles in words if you know that?
Well, actually the average length for a novel depends on the genre, believe it or not.
100,000 words is about average for science fiction, but for things like romance, they're often much less for political thrillers, like, you know, the John Grisham stuff, they can be really long.
You know, so it really does depend, but obviously even within particular genres, they're going to be, you know, quite a bit of variety street candles is over 200,000 words long.
Damn.
Well, with street candles being, you know, so much more novel and less novella than book one.
Lost in Bronx, do you feel like any kind of pressure to go back and revisit the first book and flesh it out to make it longer?
So when, when people come back later and look at, look at it as a series, they're more matched.
You know, I have actually thought of that, but I decided I don't like to revisit my work if I can help it.
You know, I have other projects in mind and you can rework a thing until you're, you're old and gray and never be done with it.
So I decided finally I made the command decision that mother load, which is book one is what it is.
And that's just how it's going to be the next book book three is called risk analysis.
And that's, well, it's not done by any means. I'm about 40,000 words into the first draft.
And that I figure I have a target word count for that up around 100,000 words. So I'm, I'm thinking that there's just, they're just going to be as long as they need to be.
And that's just how it's going to be. You know, I mean, a story can be told many ways, but I just want to tell the story the best way I can for the size that it is.
Mother load, I could flesh it out, but I couldn't really flesh it out without radically changing the plot or adding far more scenes to it.
You know, I thought in terms of well, maybe I could have some action and adventure happening on the planet before he gets the job and then other stuff and then later on.
And I, but I mean, it's, it's all kind of an also ran and I'd rather not, I'd rather not rework it. It is what it is.
Thank you for not George Lucas in us. Yeah, I was about to say the exact same thing. I know.
I know. I don't want a crappy CGI job of the hut added in the middle of a really already good story that stands very well on its own.
Yeah, I was going to say, oh, sorry, go ahead, Piggle.
I was going to ask, when will the main characters gun be replaced with a walkie talkie?
I was just going to say that I think that mother load is a complete story as it is and I, I don't know, I'm glad to hear you're not going to go back and flesh it out.
Even if you just put like book ended and didn't change what was there at all, I'm glad that you, you know, are just going to keep going forward.
Not to say that a prequel would be offensive or anything like that, but I just mean I think it's complete. I think it's good.
And I think it also, whether it was planned or not, it's kind of a good idea to have a short novella has an introductory to the character into the series of stories.
It's a little more accessible if someone wants to try to get into it.
And don't take away his gun. Space Pokey need to plot plot bullets.
The first book was never going to be a series. It was just a story.
And I just decided at one point that I like this story. I like the character and I like the universe. It's in and I want to do more with it.
Now, I mean, if you want to know what kind of stories I like, just read what I write because I'm writing exactly what I love to read.
Like, you know, I love spaceships. I love ray guns. I love rockets. I love robots. These are the things I love.
And I'm not going to be ashamed of that. It's space opera. You know, it's high adventure.
You know, there's a lot of introspection to it. But I mean, in the end, it's flying around in a spaceship and outer space.
And that's what I love. And I decided that I wanted to more stories and I wanted to play in that universe more.
And that's, you know, I mean, that's the origin of the of the series. But mother load was a standalone originally.
You do, you do really lost in Bronx. I don't you've mentioned the sequel. I'm going to be writing you emails every two weeks. Is it, is it ready yet? Is it ready yet?
Uh, secondly, I love Poké's idea of her prequel. Maybe someday we could learn how he's a gutter.
Actually, it won't be a sequel. I've actually got the series plotted out. Um, that was something I've done. I did a while ago. When I for actually when I started street candles, I did the entire series.
Just to let you know, at least right now, there are seven books. If you count mother load as a novel, there are seven books in this series. However, that being said, I've also working on a bunch of short stories to go along with them working on one right now, actually.
And they might be adventure stories. They might be dramas. They might shine a light on different aspects of the world.
The way I kind of see the short stories is E. Jack will be in them. But he's not the main character in those stories.
And we get to see him through other people's eyes, which I think can be interesting too.
Well, and that'll be a real departure from the other stories because they were so first person, which I very much enjoyed how it was his story from his perspective.
So many stories are told from three, four, five perspectives. And it's nice to have one that is from one perspective the whole way through.
Yeah, I mean, it's easier for me because I wanted to tell a story about a guy who I mean, I want there are some advantages to telling a story from one single perspective.
First off, I can lie to you as a writer. Oh, I was going to ask that next. Yeah, I can lie to you directly because E. Jack only knows what he knows and he only believes what he believes, right?
But that may not none of it might be true. You know, he might be wrong. He might be fooling himself and he might simply not have enough information.
And that allows me to take tons of liberties with the plot and with other characters.
Plot bullets. Yeah, yeah. On the other hand, on the other hand, it also there's a the hard part of that is that you're always in his head.
And if he's not if that's not a pleasant place to be, you know, by page 300, people are going to be damn sick of this book.
Well, I think it also makes this for me at least it makes the stories much more personal because it's E. Jack's story.
It is not a story where E. Jack is a character. It is his story. Yeah, yeah, I think in that sense, it makes it more immediate.
You know, stories that our first person are more immediate, that is to say, you know, if a person is frightened and they're expressing that, you're going to feel that more viscerally than if I'm describing, especially in third person, if I'm describing the fear that someone else is having.
Obviously, it all depends on how it's written, but for these particular stories, this is the direction that I went in and I think it, you know, I'm fairly satisfied with it, you know, with that choice anyway.
Yeah, I would agree because I thinking of like the top scenes from the story that I remember and if it wasn't from that first person point of view, I don't think it would have been as impactful on me.
I'm a little saddened because all of that ruined the most perfect segue that I was ever able to construct in my head.
But on the outside, I'm really happy because you answered the question that we all tried to ask on our previous recording that you weren't even there for and you asked and answered the question that we all wanted to know.
So I feel like we're really smart for coming up with the question in the first place.
You guys are smart. That's why you're geeks.
So the segue was going to go like this.
Lost in Bronx, I have a question for you that might be a bit of a spoiler.
So would you mind if we did our beverage review and then I asked the spoiling question?
How do you want to structure it now?
It's the same way I'm really thirsty.
So what are you reviewing? He wants a drink.
It's a polar lime celtzer.
This is my very favorite flavor of celtzer.
Well, actually my second favorite.
My favorite would be no flavor at all and then a lime squeezed into it.
But this is good stuff. I like celtzer.
I started drinking it years and years ago.
When for a period of time, I felt that I should quit drinking alcohol and I was drinking a lot of beer at the time.
And while celtzer doesn't taste anything like beer, it feels just like beer.
And that helped me get over it so that I didn't have to be craving and missing beer so bad.
I really like celtzer. I really like lime.
It's a reasonable facsimile of a real lime.
Even though a real lime is better, I like to squeeze it in the glass and then like rub it around the rim.
So I get a little taste of lime with every shot.
This is pretty good if you don't have, you know, unflavered celtzer or a fresh lime.
I thought you were going to say that your favorite flavor of celtzer was gin flavored celtzer.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of gin.
It tastes just tastes like a Christmas tree to me.
I've never really been able to drink it.
How about you lost and Bronx, what are you drinking tonight?
Well, keeping with the lime tradition, I am drinking lime.
This is lime Hawaiian punch, but it is the sugar free.
It comes in little powdery packets and I make up a gallon at a time and I put it in an old gallon jug.
And I drink it right out of the jug because I can go through a gallon of, you know, liquid a day easily.
And this is probably the cheapest route I can go with a flavored drink.
So this is what I've settled on.
I used to drink a lot of celtzer.
I did, but it runs in the money after a time and I'm the original cheap Yankee.
So I just can't spend it without cringing.
Yeah, I'm with you. I don't drink celtzer and awful lot.
It is more of a treat and it was kind of the only thing in the fridge tonight when I realized
we'd have to do a beverage review, even though we're not reviewing a book.
Do you want, does it have artificial sweetener in the one that you're drinking or you just drink it completely unsweetened?
No, it's artificial. I mean, it is Hawaiian punch.
So yeah, it's definitely sweet. It's aimed at kids.
And it's an artificial sweetener.
And no, it doesn't taste especially good.
You know, it's fake sugar.
It doesn't taste good.
I drink a lot of diet soda too and they all suck.
So I buy the cheapest crappiest stuff I can get at Walmart, you know, the store brand because they all suck.
So why spend top dollar?
I used to make cool aid and I would do it with three quarters of the sugar that it asked for.
And then I would use twice the water.
So it wound up being, you know, like what, three eighths the sugar, the set math right.
Anyway, but I used to it was almost unsweetened and it was good.
And I could take that with me if I was going for a bicycle ride.
And it was almost like, almost like Gatorade, but without the saltiness in it.
And I used to like that a lot.
But I don't know if you're, I don't like artificial sweetener.
Oh, yeah, they're hateful. I hate it myself.
But I don't like sugary drinks anymore.
I mean, when I was young, a kid I did.
I don't like them now. They, you know, by the end of the day, my teeth are coated and my mouth feels crappy.
And I just, I don't like to drink sugary drinks anymore.
And I drink a lot. I used to drink a lot of coffee and a lot of tea.
I drink them both.
But I've even backed off on those a lot.
I still have my coffee in the morning, but generally that's about it.
So, you know, between this and some some diet sodas every now and then, that's that's about it.
Yeah, I stopped putting sugar in my coffee.
I, I realized that I can drink it with just cream and no sugar.
And it's, it's not quite as, as enjoyable, but it still is enjoyable.
I still like it. So I stopped doing that.
But yeah, Taj, what do you got tonight?
I am rocking a glass of homemade lemonade again.
Always. I mean, that's how I roll.
Had this batch turned out fantastic as always.
I'm glad I had lemons for you this time.
Yeah, I didn't go to the store. There was a sign with no lemons today.
Now, with all the lemonade that you drink, does that mess with your teeth at all?
Do you ever feel like your teeth are being dissolved?
My teeth are terrible anyways.
So I don't know if it's cause or effect.
If I was born that way or if it's from drinking all this stuff.
No, it doesn't necessarily bother me any more than anything else.
At least your answer wasn't what he's.
Well, and it's, it's kind of a seasonal thing.
Like it'll go, it'll go the way of the dodo here coming up now that it's rolling into fall.
And it'll switch over to, uh, to iced tea for a little bit.
And I just go through phases with drinks and just happens to be the last few months.
It's been lemonade kick.
Cool. Pegwall.
What, uh, what do you got tonight?
I have the, uh, the tried and true black coffee.
It's delicious.
And X 1101.
I'm drinking iced tea this evening.
It's, uh, we make a gallon of tea with three bags of green tea and a bag of mint tea.
And it's, it's really nice, mellow, relaxing.
Do you drink that with sugar or a sweetener of some kind?
Nope.
It sounds really nice.
It is, it is.
I grew up, we had, um, mint that grew beside the house.
And so the tea that I grew up with is we would just put regular black tea in and actually fresh mint.
And, you know, that's a real treat whenever I go home.
But this is, you know, green tea and just a mint tea bag.
So it's, it's still pretty good.
How much water are you using, uh, with four tea bags?
Well, I, we microwave like four cups of water and then dilute it up to a gallon.
Okay.
Since really not strong at all.
Mint is wicked easy to grow.
Uh, even up in Maine, it's really easy to grow.
And the, the problem with mint is that it can take over an entire garden.
Uh, and I, I think it can be really invasive.
If you intend to ever grow mint, I'd say put it in a pot or something.
Mint is hard not to grow.
Yeah, I was going to say if, if, uh, I've got your coffee press,
I told you to pick up that, uh, little one cup coffee press.
And when I see it, if you, if you're, if you're coming by the house to pick it up,
then just take a cutting from one of our mint leaves.
You can have whichever one you want.
We got peppermint and spear mint and chocolate mint.
It's, uh, you can have whatever you want.
Well, what else is really hard to keep contained if you put it in the ground
is strawberries.
I got the bright idea a while back to grow my own strawberries.
And they're slowly taking over my entire yard, at least the backyard.
Are they producing strawberries or is it just the plants?
Did the plants are spreading and producing strawberries?
That's awesome.
I'm waiting to hear where there's a problem with this.
The problem is the crazy one who lives next door.
The one who lives next door.
She tries.
Oh, she tries.
Oh, man, I didn't know strawberries would spread right through the yard.
And I know what I'm doing next spring.
Now, I'm assuming that since 5150 year driving,
I'm assuming that we're all T totaling tonight.
Do you want to see each one of us?
Is that call free?
Do you happen to have a beverage with you?
Never.
Well, I have beverages with me.
I'm not drinking them.
I did take the opportunity on the big city to go by a store for greater selection of brews.
So when I was looking in, I got a, I got like a 12 pack of, uh,
a bunch of IPAs.
One should look interesting is he brewed the chosen beer.
That's fantastic.
So you're going to have a box of my hobbies can beat up your hops.
Yeah.
Even my favorite.
I mean, this, this store, I stopped at.
They say, you know, I'm, I'm more of an ale man.
But, well, IPAs are an ale.
But, uh, more of a traditional ale man.
And they, they do see it as,
send, seem to be heavy on the, uh, hoppy side.
And, uh, 50.
I see your, your name in here is still crispy 150.
Are you still burnt or are you all healed up, by the way?
Oh, there.
I mean, uh, I'm healed.
I mean, there's a couple spots there that are still, still healing.
But I, I do not have big open burns down both arms anymore.
And my, you know, my, my face.
I can't tell if there was ever anything there.
I think, I think my left hand in arm.
There's always going to be some slight scars.
But, you know, I got away cheek with that.
Yeah, yeah, thank you.
I did.
And, and how about the house?
Have you guys started rebuilding?
Or do you have any plans for that?
We've got a contractor or mine speed.
He did some, did some rough plans.
I need to call him back and tell him they look okay to us.
But, uh, yeah, we talked about a little one Facebook.
I haven't really done it on, uh, G plus because I want to, uh,
get some video of where we're going to plant, uh,
build a new house.
We're going to.
It's going to be about a mile north of where the old house was.
We were told, you know, you can't really use the same foundation
because of all the chemicals and plastics and stuff.
You'll never, that have seeped into the concrete.
Plus the concrete is probably, you know,
it is no longer as strong as it needs to be.
So the only thing the only way we could build where we were
was to dig the hole.
All the concrete out of the hole and start over again.
And the build near to it, we'd have to take, you know,
we'd have to build those trees.
So dad's always wanted to be, you know,
uh, build into the hill overlooking the lakes.
So that's what we're going to do is, uh,
it is one of those, uh, concrete filled fiberglass brick homes,
build at least partially into the hill.
But in the meantime, I've rented a place in town for the two of us.
Dad was going to get out this week.
That's why I've been making a big push to get everything ready.
I was here in the city getting some, uh, furniture.
What's not, you know, what's not on his medical stuff.
And, uh, well, I was getting ready to get him a lift share.
But, uh, so, but, but he fell out of bed this last weekend,
uh, and injured his knee.
So we decided to give him at least another week in recovery,
uh, so where he can stay, see if he can stand better on that leg.
Damn, man, you're just having a rough time with it all together.
The new site, do you still have, um,
line of sight to your wireless ISP,
where that's going to be?
Uh, you're just going to be able to join us and stuff, right?
Yeah, I was afraid I would, but I was driving, you know,
so I drove, drove up the hill.
It won't be exactly where the house is,
but I can put a post in up there and, uh,
bear, I think, well, I'll bury some underground ethernet to where,
but there's, there's one shot through the trees that I could,
I can see where the antennae is without having to climb up high on
something.
So it, that'll, that'll still work for, uh,
for next few months, I'm going to be on Cox table.
But when you're moving the new house, I still should,
I still should be able to use the same provider I have been.
All right, cool.
Cool. Thanks for the update, man.
Um, I'm sorry.
I don't mean to interrupt a 50.
I don't think I've spoken to you since the, since the fire.
And I got to tell you, first off, obviously, you have my sympathies.
I mean, without question, but you have my horror on top of everything else.
Because when I looked at those photos and I read about everything that happened,
it was like, oh my god.
You know, I mean, it was, it was just gutting.
It was astonishing to see.
And I, I just, I don't even know what I'm trying to say,
except that man, oh man, you know, I felt really, really bad.
Really bad.
Really bad.
Well, thanks for that.
I appreciate it.
And everything that everybody's done and the, and the fun,
anything campaign, oh my goodness, I, you know, I just,
it's, it's more that so many people are thinking of me rather,
you know, than the money, you know, and it's,
I don't even know what to say.
You say thank you to those people and you know you have friends.
That's all.
Well, thanks to everybody.
We didn't do a KPO this week, but some, you know,
I'm going to try to do something in recognition, you know,
when we do the next show.
You need to make that HPR logo and letters on your roof
and the new roof and shingles.
Well, we were actually talking about, and the contractor doesn't think
it's, it's practical.
Somebody showed me a picture of a roof where they actually put a couple
inches of soil and planted grass on the top of the roof.
But I guess we can do different color plants.
I guess you could do KPO if you wanted to.
KPO and HPO, you know, or HPR, one in strawberries and one with mint.
I say, you, you just do a big mosaic of my face in the,
like the whole football helmet picture.
That's your roof.
There we go.
The team logo on the helmet should, could be HPR.
Then they'll get sued by pilots who are losing their eyesight.
Well, the, and all the passengers when the plane turned around
and headed back.
Oh, make it fun of my, my eyesight now, too, huh?
Along with my giant head.
Not your eyesight.
There's when they look down at your mug.
Oh, man.
All right.
So the spoiler question lost in Bronx.
That we were all asking towards the end in our spoiler section.
Was he jock lion to us at the end of the book?
Did it all actually happen?
At least as he believed it all happened the way he said it happened?
Or was he lion to us and just painting his own picture to stay out of prison?
Um, it happened the way he said it happened.
I mean, I mean, I'm not saying when he's telling the story from, you know,
he's, you know, is he an old man or whatever?
He is an old man, but he's not old and body.
Remember, this is a time when people can be genetically reconstructed, right?
So we're actually talking about a time period where practical immortality exists.
Not necessarily because you take a magic pill and it keeps you young,
but because periodically you get your entire body reconstructed and you can reset the clock.
Um, so he might be telling this story.
Remember, much of what has happened is now considered classified and he can't talk about it, right?
Yet he's telling you anyway.
So he must be telling you from a time period when it doesn't matter anymore.
So he's telling you the truth about the things that he said.
So he's telling you the truth about the things that he says happened,
but what he thinks happened may not necessarily have actually happened the way he thought.
You know, there are stories going on like in the novel in the EPUB version, if you read that,
I have little bits and pieces between each chapter of, I call them interstitials.
And these are small contextual things that are going on.
Sometimes they're memos from people in the military.
Sometimes they're, you know, there are other things going on.
Well, in the novel, we actually follow a police investigation back on Oasis for some stuff that happened there.
And we actually follow a character who never appears in the main novel,
but who actually continues, more or less continues, part of Ejak's story back on Barlow into a period long after when Ejak has left.
And the events of the story have been finished.
And they're kind of, you know, in and out of time periods, but, you know, in other words,
there's stuff going on outside of Ejak's knowledge and that stuff still matters.
Cool.
And now you, you had a bunch of words, you know, in this universe in the future that were new to me.
And you just reminded me of this when you were talking about, you know, genetics and stuff.
Like, Jean-Engineered, I've never heard another author use that word and put it together like that.
Did you come up with, or no, maybe that wasn't you. Did I just screw that up?
What? Well, Jean-Engineer is not an original word to me. I've heard it before.
You know, it's one of these things that, in fact, I think it was actually positive in popular media back when genetic engineering was just ramping up in the early 80s.
But it was a term that never really caught on because, frankly, it sounds like something that should be in a science fiction novel and not bandied about on the news.
But it's been used before. That's not my word.
Did you invent any words in this book or did you pick them all up along the way?
Well, I invented all the low-speak and say-shon words. Those are all mine.
And, you know, whenever they're speaking in a foreign tongue, that's all mine.
And I actually have rules for low-speak, not for say-shon, but for low-speak.
I actually have some grammatical rules that it came up for and that I tried to use when I was pronouncing particular words.
You know, so those are mine. But, you know, other things just, I don't know. Yeah, there were a ton of original words, but whether they originated in my brain or somebody else's, I don't know.
Any thoughts on publishing those rules, like in a little Amazon book or something, just as a way for people to say thank you with a little bit of cash, maybe?
Well, actually, I haven't done it yet, but if and when I ever get around to doing a dead tree version of street candles, there are going to be a couple of appendices at the end, one of which will be the rules for low-speak, the ones that I've come up with anyway.
And at tiny glossary, obviously, I'm not creating an original, this isn't clinging on. I'm not creating a full language.
You know, they'd be general pronunciation guides. If you see the words written out and then the way I pronounce them, there was actual reasons for the way that they were pronounced.
You know, you hear the most, probably the most low-speak right at the very beginning in chapter one with the poem that appears at the very beginning with the old man reading the poem.
And that probably has very little context in the audiobook, but in the written book, we actually have an interstitial that covers a doctoral thesis about the poet who wrote that poem and what he was trying to do.
And it talks about some of the rules for low-speak right then and there.
So yeah, in the dead tree version, there's going to be an appendix covering low-speak.
Another appendix is going to be a recipe for Bonn, that breakfast that he just has, because that's real. I made that and I tried it out and it works.
So awesome. Guys, I feel like I'm hogging all the questions here, but I got more.
Do you want to ask your questions? I'll wait.
I've got one. So one of the things that I've wondered, as soon as I got to the point where I realized what the title meant, did the scene come first or did the title come first?
The scene came first, but the scene came before the book. That is to say, I had this image in my head and I don't want to spoil that for anybody, but I had that scene in my head before I actually had the rest of the story to support it.
So that actually was created first and then I created a story where it would work.
Well, you're sick.
Well, I actually started out with, I wanted a story where originally, that scene was going to involve industrial strength microwave ovens.
So, you know, you can keep that for what that's worth.
But I decided that that would be unrealistic in the circumstances and it's actually been done and movies and stuff a couple of times since.
So I'm glad I dumped that concept and just want with something more classic.
But I wanted a story that kind of covered, I don't know, it was, I guess this is kind of a riff on the French Revolution and the madness that followed, you know, after the revolution and they, you know, the guillotineings in the street and stuff like that.
And this was kind of a riff on that and kind of, you know, what would a remote world be like if that kind of craziness was occurring.
And, you know, there's some other, you know, made up junk that I threw in there as well.
But I mean, that was kind of, I was trying to explore what that might be like for a foreigner to run through that, you know, that environment and how, how that would make you feel.
And I don't think it would make you feel very good and I tried to express that.
Yeah, I, it was something that we said, you know, during the review of it, but I really appreciated, I don't know if I could quite say enjoyed sort of, but I really appreciated his spiral into basically PTSD at the end of the book.
And I stepped on touch when I went to say that touch. Sorry.
Now, I was going to say, I thought, I think it's really interesting that that you bring up the French Revolution because I kind of got some of that now, granted my wife is a French teacher.
So I'm kind of around that all the time.
But I got a lot of parallels for like what's going on right now, you know, in the last 10, 15 years, I thought a lot of it kind of echoed that.
And one of the things that I said in the review was, you know, I think this has a lot of impact for me right now because it is kind of has this feeling of current events.
But, you know, even if that wears off, would it still be as impactful? And I think you just answered it because it's just kind of like a will it ever stop?
You know, we kind of, the history kind of keeps repeating itself.
Well, I mean, exactly. I mean, I could do a story that's even closely paralleling the French Revolution, and it would seem as topical as ever because unfortunately it's a problem that never goes away.
I mean, the French Revolution is well documented and I'm no expert on it by any means, but I did do some reading up on it to get a sense of what that might have been like, especially the internaceine fighting among the revolutionaries.
As soon as, you know, the, the royalty was overthrown, these guys started tearing into each other like crazy. And I wanted to kind of capture that concept too without getting too complex because obviously there were probably hundreds of different factions at that time.
And I only, you know, I only work with two in this story because I mean, it would just, it would get out of control. But in the, in the interstitials in the ebook, you get to see other factors in bar on Barlow, including a very well established criminal class.
And you get to see what that might be like. And one of the things I did kind of grab from modern times was the concept of superpowers kind of playing out their politics on a very small chest, you know, chest.
And to say playing out from politics, these third world countries and in the case of third world plan. And that also, especially from the block, you know, it kind of covers that.
That sounds like it.
Yep, I can. All right. Sorry. I don't know what just happened there, but since I got the recording order to make sure I got it, but yeah, everybody just started getting real flaky on me. So stopped and restarted. All right. Carry on.
I'm not sure where I was just the concept of proxy wars and superpowers using, you know, the misfortunes of smaller nations to their own benefit.
You know, in street candles, obviously the Alliance or AIN, AIN, the Alliance of Interstellar Nations is kind of a stand in for the United States. And the empire is kind of a kind of a, I don't know, like a Habsburg Empire type.
It's a smaller collection of nation states. And there is an emperor who can be, you know, he can wield power with an iron hand when he wants to, but most of the time he doesn't and that leaves the smaller guys to pursue their own ends.
Most of the time. And I was, you know, wondering how that would be, how, how, you know, what would it be like for, you know, one lone guy in the street to live out an experience where these major, major powers are sort of playing their games.
Yeah, I think it was, I think that part of it was well conveyed. It was, you know, it was horrifying. It was entertaining on the one hand, but on the other hand, it was also, you, you lived through Ejox discomfort. And I just, I thought that was really well done.
Thank you for that. I, I think the word that you used is the one I was shooting for and that was horror, because like to me horror movies with crazy people with sauce and, you know, machetes and stuff, those are scary movies, they're not horror movies.
Those horror movies are movies about the Holocaust, they're, you know, a movie like the killing fields, you know, those are horrifying that this sense of absolute repulsion, you know, goes through you.
And I don't find those pleasant to watch, but they're very important because people live through that sort of thing. And I'm sorry, go ahead.
Today's horror movies are, you know, slasher movies are torture porn. They're not intellectually terrifying in the way that someone like lovecraft or even really Stephen King can be terrifying at a much deeper level, but you have to be able to appreciate them. It's not just crazy man with, you know, hockey mask and chainsaw comes and chops people into bits.
Well, I mean, a jump scare is just that. And you can have a jump scare in any kind of movie. It doesn't have to be a scary movie, you know, or a so called horror movie. And unfortunately, that's become synonymous with horror, but I mean, you can have a jump scare in it in a children's story where it's just, boom, it jumped out at you and it makes you jump, but that's not, you know, that's not horrifying, but I think people enjoy that it's like a, I don't know, it's like a roller coaster ride, maybe, but that's not the story I was telling.
You know, there isn't any one part where you're like, whoa, I didn't, you know, like, oh, that was scary. There's anything like that in street candles. That's, that's not the kind of story I was going for.
I don't know the max shooting at them when they were on the ground was pretty worrisome.
Yeah, that was, um, might have been the tensest moment in the book. If, if you guys don't mind, I'd like to talk about some of loss in Bronx's other works and some of the other stuff.
Would you guys mind if we transition to that and maybe even just briefly?
Let's do it.
So now you've also done like the Eddie Kay series. Now I'd love to hear what's coming next for Eddie Kay, but just in case people aren't familiar with that.
What is that series that you said it's an audio sitcom, but I think that's about as far as we got into it.
Well, first off, it's absolutely not safe for work. Eddie Kay is a sitcom, but I don't bleep out anything and there's a tremendous amount of foul language in it.
So start, you know, right off the bat and I put a warning right at the beginning of the show that it's, you know, not safe for work and it's not family friendly.
You don't want to play it around your kids unless, you know, you had a family like the one I grew up in, then maybe you do.
You know, I mean, I play my Eddie Kay stuff for my son and he listens to it and that's fine because to me.
Well, that's another conversation, but to me, language is just language and you don't have to be afraid of language.
You need to be afraid of ideas and I teach my son that how you express yourself, how you express yourself matters more than the actual words you're using.
But that's a, you know, that's a philosophy thing and we could go on to that another time, but at any rate, Eddie, you know, well, he's actually helped me write that.
You know, he helped me write an episode and he helps me pal the lines in regular episodes.
Well, thank you for saying that. I've got a very young child and I firmly believe exactly what you're saying, you know, words are just words.
It's, you know, it's ideas that matter.
But understanding that different people, different cultures, different parts of our country are more offended by language than others.
And I understand that and that's why I put a warning at the very beginning.
No one, you know, there's nothing worse than being, you know, embarrassed by the content that you're listening to in a, you know, in a mixed crowd or something like that.
You know, forewarned is forearmed in the case of Eddie Kay.
The concept of Eddie Kay is that Eddie Kay is a middle aged lounge singer.
He is, you know, he's a second rate lounge singer.
You know, if you look at Tony Bennett as the, you know, the preeminent lounge singer of the world in today, you know, today, you know, or Frank Sinatra back in the old days.
Eddie Kay is way, way, way down there on the, you know, on the packing list.
He's a guy that, you know, he's this guy that you'll see at 11 o'clock in the polka nose, you know, he's this guy that you'll see in a CD bar somewhere just trying to make a living.
And the character is evolved quite a bit.
And the next episode actually, Eddie Kay's seven will cover the beginnings where he's actually going to open a club of his own.
But the, the concept is simply that he's a buffoon, he's a major buffoon.
And he has a best friend who's also his manager agent, named Salvatore and Sal is a bigger buffoon and a, and a kind of a slime ball, kind of a scumbag, con man type guy.
But they're best friends from when there were kids and no matter what, no matter what Sal does to Eddie, no matter how Eddie screams and hollers and he does a lot of it.
They remain best friends. Nothing can really break that apart.
And it's kind of a story about losers trying to get by.
Really, I guess ultimately that's, that's really what it's all about.
But it's, you know, it's all done for laughs and you can't really take any of it that seriously.
So.
Now, Eddie Kay is definitely a sitcom.
It's definitely funny, but most of the humor other than like the overarching plot lines of each one is, is very funny in the situations that get into or very funny, but most of the humor comes from the vulgarity, which is something I don't usually find myself being attracted to usually
something is, is only funny because it's a swear.
I don't usually find that particularly humorous, but I like that there's other humor in there that the things that dichotomy between, you know, Sal being a scumbag and Eddie being pretty much an upright guy and being put in situations that Sal gets into all the time.
I think that particular dichotomy to be, to be the funny part of it for me anyway.
I find, yeah, I mean, obviously there's a lot of foul language and it is sometimes integral to the, to the humor or the jokes being told, but ultimately it's not the foul language.
It's wordplay and, you know, I'll do a lot of, you know, wordplay regarding it.
There's a, there is a lot of wordplay involved. It's just that the wordplay is all foul and another thing.
I don't know if you've picked it up, Pokey, but Eddie and Sal are.
Oh, did I lose everybody or just lost and Bronx.
I'm still here language and again.
Yes, I'm here. Sorry, I hate to interrupt you just went completely dead for a moment.
The, the last thing I heard you say was, I don't know if you picked it up, but, and then I didn't hear anything after that.
Oh, I'm sorry about that. I'm, as you know, I'm having router problems, but let's see, we'll talk while it lasts.
I don't know if you've picked it up, but Eddie and Sal are the only ones that ever tend to swear in Eddie K.
The other characters don't tend to do it.
And that is purposeful to kind of, you know, sort of put them to the side to show them to be the, the buffoons that they really are.
Yes, yes, it does show.
If I, I mean, to give it a sense of what the characters are like, if I could reach through time and space and cast a movie with Eddie K, Jackie Gleason would be Eddie hands down.
And maybe a young Steve Vasemi could be salvatore somebody like that.
I suppose that, you know, there's probably a hundred people I could do it, but I mean, you know, Jackie Gleason would be a perfect Eddie K.
Yeah, I could see that.
And what, what did you say that, or did you say, I think you did the title of the next Eddie K that's coming out?
It's called, it's Eddie K. Seven, it's episode seven and Eddie K. Seven, Eddie's Fixer Rapper.
And it'll cover the club as they, they're just buying the club.
And, you know, there's a lot of renovation that has to be done.
And, you know, they have to find people to pay for it because it's so expensive and that's where Sal comes in.
So you can, I'll let your imagination run with that.
Yeah, I always love the, the bits that you put after the closing news.
I find that that technique very inspirational.
I try to put stuff after the music of my HPR episodes or ones that I edit.
And you're one of my inspirations for that.
Yeah, I call those postgags because they're, you know, although sometimes they go on for quite a bit.
They might be five or six minutes long and some of them, but they're really just one joke is all they really are is just one joke.
So I call them a postgag and this will have one too.
A little bit different than the others because it's part of a running gag.
But it's still, you know, same, same concept.
Yeah, I, I thought they were very, all the ones I've heard, which I might have missed one, I didn't realize they were six already.
I thought that the postgags were very funny because they almost seem like they might not have actually happened in the story.
Like, you know, if, if any K were true story, the postgags almost seem like these might not be true.
But then it's even more fun if you imagine that they are after having that thought, at least for me it was.
Yeah, well, I figured that all of it's true for Eddie K and all the horrible things that he either that you hear happen in the stories or that they talk about because telling stories is a huge part of Eddie K where they talk about the old days or they talk about some old weird person and strange people that they've known.
And that's a major, major part of the of the Eddie K universe.
Simply because it first up, it's a narrative technique because it expands the storyline and makes the world seem much bigger.
Even though nothing is happening, it seems like there's a lot more characters in it and there are.
I mean, if I just, you know, I've been, you know, kicking around the idea of doing a guidebook to Eddie K where you have a list of all the characters and who they are.
I would have to go back and listen to it all myself because I, I mean, there's so many named characters that you never actually meet all these crazy people that they've met in their in the past and that they talk about.
And the postgags specifically, I tried to do a riff on something that happens in the episode and kind of run with that concept.
You know, so in one, he might be, you know, in one, they talk about going to Vegas. So he's in Vegas at the end.
And another, they talk about, you know, Sal talks about a horrible thing that might happen if you trust some sleazy guy in France.
And then in the end, you hear that it happened and that sort of stuff.
So, you know, it's just again, it's just a gag tossed in that I tried to take a bit of attention with it.
But again, in this, in the upcoming episode, it will be more of a running gag concept.
Yeah, I love it. Now, is Eddie K. Is any of that stuff available on Amazon as ebooks or anything or those audio only?
Those are audio only. I don't think Eddie K would translate well to the written word.
You know, I mean, the script, I always have the scripts available, although some of my links are dead on the website right now. I'll have to fix that.
But I always have the scripts available if someone wants to read them, but I don't think Eddie K stories or books would be of much interest.
I don't think I would want to read, you know, pages and pages of follow language because if you don't hear the way Eddie says it, you miss all the comedy, I think.
But I don't know other people have another opinion.
And dead links reminded me, did you, did you get the star drifter RSS feed straight now?
I knew some people were having problems with that. So just in case anybody didn't download street candles because of the RSS is at all straight now.
Can people get that now if they didn't before?
To my knowledge, it's working fine. Other people may may chime in, you know, either now or in the future and let me know if there's a problem.
But as far as I know, it is working fine. I had some great help on that. Some people from the community step forward and really helping out.
Last time I checked, it was functional though. A feature request or recommendation would be to split the two shows.
Currently the only way I could find to get either of the books was to get star drifter. I couldn't get mother load or street candles. It was everything at once.
I have separate feeds for everything. I have one that's called the whole shebang and that's everything I do. That's the one you're talking about.
I also have one that's just star drifter and I have one that's just ADK. So if you go to the site, you can you can check those out and see if those are working. I don't know if they are, you know, I've never had a problem downloading them when I test them.
But other people have had problems with them.
No, no, what I was saying was the star drifter feed is all of star drifter. It's not just mother load or just street candles.
Oh, okay. I'll have to look at that then.
And I'd be happy to help split those out for you if I can send you the XML files at some point.
Yeah, well, it is a star drifter feed and I did want everything in there for a star drifter.
You know, I mean, I guess probably in the future I should break them up. And frankly, I was thinking of dispensing with the RSS now that the series is done and doing a, you know, a dead download where you get everything at once.
Because I can't imagine people are going to want, you know, I'm only going to want, you know, chapters 11 through 17.
You know, odds are they're going to want everything at once to hear.
I mean, when I'm listening to an audiobook, if the thing is done, I probably want it all just to hear if it's any good.
I would, my opinion would be opposite thereof, because I use a pod catcher that's all based on RSS feeds.
And having it all as a feed makes things much easier to listen to with all of my settings and all of my playlists and just as just another podcast.
Yeah, the size of it too has been a little daunting to make it a single download because it's the MP3 file would be over a gig in size.
And that's, that's just a little too big. I don't tend to download things that size, not all at once anyway.
And you, you've had to learn like every, like you taught yourself everything, which is one of the things that I was really impressed with.
I remember when you were starting out saying, okay, here's what I want to do.
And, and start now with, with Class 2's Slackware.
And, I mean, you literally built your operating system from the ground up to, to, to author books and publish them and, and to record them as audio books.
And I just, you know, I've seen you go through every step of the process, being careful to be meticulous and correct the whole time.
And I just, I found that really, really impressive.
I mean, I'm the kind of person that would, would, you know, look at that entire plan and the whole process and go, that's too much work to hell with it and, and might not do it.
I'm just, I'm really impressed that you went all the way through it and, and, and stuck with it and I appreciate that too.
Well, yeah, I guess I did do that. I, I mean, I don't really think about it now, but I guess, I guess I did take it from bare metal and, and build up what I've got.
You know, I'm the classic, I know a little bit about everything and not much of anything type of guy.
I, I'm no expert on any single phase of this process.
You know, the only thing I probably, you know, if I, if I can claim some level of expertise on anything, it would be the acting end of it, the, the audio acting.
And even then, all I ever hear are the mistakes and the problems. So I, I can't even be sure about that. And I wouldn't even, you know, really, I, I wouldn't even go so far as saying anything like that, realistically.
And the rest of it is just, you know, if I need something to do something, I look up how to do it and then snip out the code I need and plop it in and hope it works.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes in the case of the RSS feed, it doesn't. And you just, you know, it's a process. The whole thing is a process.
It's never, you know, it's never a destination. It's always traveling to get where you want to go. You're never, you're never quite there. No matter what, no matter how hard you try.
Well, I'm going to just to play Saragit for Ken Fallon here for him and say, it probably, he would think that the story of how you built your custom authoring operating system would make a great podcast.
Well, that probably is one that Clat 2 should cover more than me because I used for street candles, start to finish soup the nuts from writing it and everything.
Although I use a laptop, a separate laptop that's actually running Bode Linux on it for writing in nano, you know, I mean, nano runs on everything. It doesn't really matter where I did that, that level of work.
But I think Clat 2 probably should be a little less, this is just me calling them out here, but I think he should be a little less humble and probably go in depth about what slacker media is and what it can do.
Currently, what I'm using right now for my multimedia stuff is I'm using the multimedia Ubuntu release and that's simply for a change of pace. I just wanted to see how far that's come along because that was pretty freaking
years ago and I'm just trying it out now to see how it's going. But I suspect I'm going to be back on Slackware, you know, not too long in the future because there are things about this I don't like.
And slacker media was a workhorse. I mean, the thing it had its boy, it had its peculiarities, but it was strong and it was powerful and I really liked that I like to be able to turn it on and what I knew worked was solid rock solid.
And that's Slackware, that's that's Slackware right there.
I as far as the less humble thing, I'd like to say that I think you sell yourself a little short in the expertise department as far as audio books as well because I think you're one of the world's foremost experts on hand coding
books into into ebooks because you did a lot of that very manually, didn't you?
Well, in the HPR episode that that'll be upcoming, you'll hear that I don't think there's any alternative right now.
If you're doing something with any kind of any kind of complexity to the format or the layout of the book of the novel, I should say.
And I'm only talking about novels, I mean, it can, this is a subject, I mean, there are people that this is their profession, this is what they do for living, not writing books, but taking other people's books and turning them into ebooks because it, as I was saying before, it's not a very well automated process right now.
There are some people that just take plain text and they run them through a, an ePub, you know, program of some kind and they, whatever comes out, that's what they publish, you know, there's some people that have two 300 books to their name out there and they didn't write any of that stuff.
They just, you know, found some content that was, you know, either creative commons or in public domain and they're just, you know, puking it out in ePub format and all of that tends to be automated, but I wouldn't call any of that quality right.
I mean, if you, if you have some integrity with your work and even you can argue back and forth whether my stuff is any good and that's fine, that's a valid argument and that's a valid, you know, criticism to say no, it wasn't well done.
And if you can especially point out my mistakes and there are tons of them that's absolutely valid argument, but there are the difference between that argument and saying that someone who's just crapping out an ePub, you know, where it's text in ePub out and they don't really care about the formatting is that I do care, you know, I am trying it may not be great, but I'm trying.
And I think if you are at that level where you're trying it's not a, it's not an automated process. It's a very manual one and if there are ways to automate some of that anyway, boy, I would look at them really closely.
So you brought up creative comments and I want to ask question or two about that. First of all, HPR community, you're probably preaching to the choir by releasing everything creative comments, but I want to thank you for doing that because I think more good things need to be in the comments, but it does open up the can of worms.
I would imagine being kind of a creative type that you would get very emotionally attached to your characters in your universe, but what happens to somebody walks up and says, well, I'm going to create a new star drift or story, whether lost in products likes it or not.
I have zero problem with that. In fact, I would be highly flattered if somebody did that and I would be absolutely delighted if somebody did that and had an international bus seller and became a millionaire and I never saw a dime of it.
And I'll tell you why it's because someone, you know, first off, I would get some reflected glow off of that glory, you know, I mean, just by natural occurrence.
But secondly, it, it means that someone was able to take my work and do something really wonderful with it. And I don't, I wouldn't say that my stuff is necessarily wonderful, but I've taken other people's work.
And I've made stuff with it all of my tools, everything I used from nano all the way up to the EPUB tools that I've used are all open source, they're all free software.
And that was stuff that people gave away. They created it and they put it out there for people like me to use. There's no difference.
There's no difference in that, you know, me using their tools to create my work as there is to someone using my work to create their work.
You know, there's no difference in that. And I would be the biggest hypocrite in the world, you know, to call somebody out and say, hey, hey, you can't use myself. I would be overjoyed overjoyed if somebody took my work and did something with it.
And I would be, I would be in seventh heaven if they made money off of it, whether I ever saw a dime of it or not, because that means it was good. It was good enough.
You know, it was good enough for people to buy. And I would love to see that.
That is a fantastic answer. Yeah, that's really awesome and inspiring.
Well, I mean, what does it get you? What does it get you holding on to your character? I mean, there's this old train of thought that, you know, someone, you know, people doing fan fiction is going to devalue my work some how the hell does it.
I mean, I've done my my art. My art is done. It's going to live forever. You know, so long as there's a computer database out there that's got some moldy old, you know, data in it. My, my work will be around forever. So, you know, what difference does it make?
If someone else can do something fabulous, you know, I would love to see what other people could do. I doubt anyone has an interest, but if they did.
Boy, you have my encouragement. I say it at the end of every chapter of street candles. I encourage you to do something with it to take it and do something to make money off of it, you know, to do something wonderful.
Why not? I mean, you know, if it inspires you, I'm not going to stop you.
Great big piles of cash or the potential thereof. That's what people are afraid of not getting.
I'm terrified of it too. And I'm not getting it either, you know.
All right.
550.
Yeah. Have a good night, 50 and 50.
All right.
We got to talk about blue heaven.
That was another really good one. And this, and while it was sci-fi, this one was more of a,
I don't know, more of a head game, more of a head trip to me anyway. I thought, so what, what, what was behind blue heaven?
I wrote blue heaven when I was 19 years old. I'm 50 now. So that gives you a sense of how long ago I first came up with that concept.
That, that underwent a lot of permutations. I wrote it as a short story first.
And it sat for a while. And then I rewrote it because I wasn't satisfied and that's sat for a while.
And it sat for a long time. And then I got the concept of turning it into a stage play, a one man show.
If you can imagine it, and it would be a bare stage show with scrims that are, that's to say transparent curtains behind that when the light is on them, they look like playing curtains.
But when you turn your light down and turn a light on behind them, they become transparent.
You can see things behind them. And that was going to be a one man show with a lot of those signs that we talk about these, these things called signs in blue heaven, which are pretty much what they sound like their signs, electric light signs.
And they would be all created behind the scrims. And as you talk, as the actor talks about them, they would come up with a lot of sound effects and things like that.
It was ambitious and probably pretentious. And it never got produced, though I had a couple of people read it. And I got some valuable feedback on it.
And then it's that it's that for maybe 20 years or close to it. And I finally started getting into the audio drama thing. And I thought, well, I could probably pull off blue heaven.
I'll just do a rewrite and see if it works. And that was my first audio project. And I listened to it now in cringe because the audio quality is not that great.
But, you know, it is what like, like mother load, it is what it is. And I'm not going to go back and try to fix it. No.
What was the concept behind it or the metaphor that drove it? I think it was a little over my head. I did like it. And I did get that this guy had a goal.
And he wanted his art. And he wanted his art to live forever. But I think that's about as deep as I was able to get down the rabbit hole. And I feel like I missed something.
Well, I'm not sure it says much more than that. I mean, this is a guy who's lost everything or feels like he has lost everything. And the only thing he feels left in his life, his art, his art to create one of these signs.
And his only chance at immortality is through his art. And he feels these in an environment that does not again, it's one of these things where he might be lying or he might be wrong, you know, again, because you're seeing it totally from his point of view.
And in fact, actually had a concept of writing another story that takes place in the same place, the same station called sky high, where you see it from a completely, in fact, it was going to be a romantic comedy set in sky high.
And the characters actually run into the main character in blue heaven. And they see him as a completely different person and they see the world as a completely different world sky high is portrayed as a kind of hell.
And I wanted to kind of get the concept across that heaven and hell are may very well just be points of view, you know, and what one man's heaven is another person's hell.
I mean, you, you know, think about a lot like for me, I'm an introvert and I don't, I don't like going to parties or anything like that. But some people are exactly the opposite. And if in the afterlife, I was in a 24 seven party, that's hell to me.
But I might be dancing right next to somebody for whom it's heaven. And I don't know if that actually came across in blue heaven, but the idea that this man sees himself in hell and his only chance of redemption and really immortality and I guess in a way, his only chance at any kind of happiness is in the successful completion of this piece of art.
No, there isn't any great depth to it that you missed. Okay, then I got it. Wow. You maybe feel smart twice in one night. It's not that deep, dude. My stuff isn't that deep.
So how about some other projects that you're working on that aren't necessarily fiction based or, or, you know, writing based.
I know you've, you've had several other projects going on besides HPR. Do you want to talk about any of those?
Well, I'm on tap to participate in somebody else's audio drama, but I can't really talk about that right now because it's early days and I was asked not to not to bring it up.
But I'm looking forward to that when it gets ramped up because it's something that I'm a huge, huge fan of.
And I'm just really thrilled to be a part of it. So that doesn't answer your question at all. Let's see.
I, well, I have my go for page, you know, my go for site. I don't know if anybody gives a crap about go for anymore, but I still have it and I still update it.
I do regular, fairly regular updates to something I call Ellen B's audio diary, Ellen B for lost and Bronx.
And those are just audio diaries that I, I mean, it's what it sounds like. I do deviate style, man. I clip my sands a clip to my hat.
And I just talk and I talk about the things that I'm doing and the things that are happening to me.
And most of it's rambling and boring, but if you're, if you're looking for some insight on the production end of how, how I've gone about creating some of the stuff that I do, that's probably a good source because I, I do the, you know, the blow by blow there.
It's like, oh, today I was fighting with sigil and it was driving me crazy.
So there's that.
Palaver.
Palaver, I guess, is kind of faded, but it's always in my mind and not to, I don't want to go down this rabbit hole because I, I, I, I really ratted, you know, I really went crazy with this on HPR when I was on there talking about my son is autistic,
Asperger's or whatever, he's on the spectrum.
And my next Palaver episode was going to be about that.
But frankly, I didn't want to talk about it. I actually didn't, it hurt and I didn't want to talk about it.
And since then, Palaver is faded because I kind of got stuck there and I didn't really want to go over it.
Now, I can skip that and go on to something else, but Palaver is just, I guess the name says it. It's just me talking about things that have happened to me or that are happening in my life or that I see happening around me, you know, what it was like to move from New York City to a small town in Arizona.
What it's like to go to Sedona, Arizona for the first time, just strange stuff. And it's probably not going to be of much interest to most people.
But that's what Palavers about. And I do intend to get back to it.
Oh, I disagree. I've still got it in my feet. That's, that's one that I won't take out of there. I find your, I see Palaver.
I thought was different than the, than your audio diaries because it seemed more structured, more thought out. And it seems like you, you, I don't know, more coherence to the thoughts.
And I liked it. I liked it a lot. I thought there were several of them are just brilliant essays, but I really enjoyed that essay style of it.
I mean, I have a structure to it. I, uh, I have one part that's scripted and I have one part that's more off the cuff. And they do usually usually relate to each other in some fashion.
But the scripted part is the part, you know, I do, I put my time in there and I, I prefer to work from a script. I didn't for this upcoming HPR thing. If you're, if you're hoping for great content, I, I hate to disappoint you because that one was rambling.
And I cut as much of it out as I, you know, my arms and ears and, you know, I cut as much of that out as I could, but there's still a lot there.
I don't think well on my feet. I don't, I don't feel like I'm very articulate without a script without writing it down first. So Palaver at least has some of that.
But I wanted to have a little off the cuff just to keep it, you know, a little, I guess a little more organic.
So since we're bringing up pod fading, my one, if I had a get out of pod fade for E card, it would be for information underground sort of the changes of that ever coming back.
We've talked about it. We, we did. In fact, this is probably talking out of, out of turn here. And I probably shouldn't mention it.
But we actually talked about getting back together and releasing it strictly through HPR, as opposed to having our own beat.
And the problem, as always, is trying to get everybody together. And that was, that was, you know, it's, it's hard, especially now.
Claptoos in New Zealand, you know, I have no idea when we could all get on mumble at the same time. It would be really hard.
And deep geek is insanely busy. He's got to be one of the busiest guys I've ever known between his work and all of his projects.
And he takes care of his, his, his, he's got elderly in laws that he's, you know, a regular caregiver for, I mean, it's just the guy's crazy busy.
And here I am. I'm to stay at home dead. And I don't have a lot of time on my hands. So that's always the problem that's always always the problem.
I was somebody wanted to take the concept and run with it. I would, I would give my blessing to that in a heartbeat because I'd love to just hear it, you know, you know, I mean, the concept is good. It's the characters we want.
Well, I don't know about that. I don't know about that. I mean, basically think about it. The concept of information underground was just each week, the host or each episode, the host, the, you know, the primary host changes.
And whoever it is comes up with a concept that they want to talk about just something that they find interesting that they want to talk about.
And the others are expected to have an engaging conversation about that topic, whether it's something they ever heard about or understood or even cared about before or not.
And information underground, my favorite episode was the fringe religions episode. I can't tell you how little interest I have and such a thing normally.
I mean, I'm a hardcore atheist. You know, so if major religions don't interest me, you can imagine what fringe religions, you know, how they make me feel.
And yet I find that I was absolutely riveted by everything deep geek revealed and our conversation. I just found it so interesting because it was something that was not on my radar at all.
It was completely new to me. And we all have interests like that. There's no reason why someone else couldn't take the concept and run with it.
Kind of like the idea of the rotating host. You make me think about the audio book club, which has been off into it.
And just stealing lost and bronx the club to you and deep geek show.
Well, no, it just made me think that as I said before, I feel like I, you know, host every one of these when really I greatly desire for the audio book club to be more of a round table.
Then a host with panelists, but maybe that's a way to get it done would be to say, OK, well, if you suggest the book, then you get to host the next show too.
That's maybe that would be a way to make it more federated more and more around table, I guess. I don't know.
Well, part of the problem too with information underground was that when you were the host, you were also responsible for editing the show and putting it all together.
And, you know, so you're not just, it isn't just, you know, how do I find the time to participate? How do I find the time to cut the show together?
You know, it becomes a problem. It really does. You know, if this isn't your main job in life, it becomes a real, you know, scheduling issue and we decided to hang it up because we just could not get together.
Well, the other thing that you would have there is varying audio outputs. If you have, you know, two, three, four, five different people doing the editing, each one has their own standards, their own style of how and what they cut and leave.
So you really would almost end up with an equally rotating set of audio styles.
That's okay. HPRs get that every day anyway, but I don't really see a difference there or I could just keep editing them. I don't have a problem editing the show as long as nobody else has a problem with me being a little pokey about actually producing them.
Well, I'll tell you what, since you brought it up, I will come out and say this. If someone was seriously interested in doing information underground on HPR specifically through HPR, I would be interested in participating.
So I'm not going to be the driving force. I'm not going to be the pokey of the show, you know, because that's pokey can tell you how much work that is.
But I would be interested in participating in doing, you know, my fair share in that if other people were interested in doing it.
But only if they were serious because, you know, no one needs to get it. I mean, it would be the incredible show that faded twice. I wouldn't want that to happen.
Nobody can be space pokey. That would be a fantastic logo or tagline to revive it the third time.
Oh, the zombie podcast, you just can't kill it.
Okay. Now, lust and bronze. That's twice that I've been called space pokey and I feel it needs some clarification because I don't know if I remembered this correctly or incorrectly.
But did you at one time, I got the impression you asked me to voice act the part of e-jock at the time I didn't know is e-jock. I didn't even.
It was before any of the the star drifters had come up, but you asked me to do some voice acting and later on down the road, I thought it was e-jock.
And you said that I reminded you a lot of him. Is that am I remembering that correctly or am I talking completely out of my ass?
No, now that you mentioned and I had forgotten it too. I'm glad you brought it up, but that is exactly true.
And it was not for street candles. It was for mother load. And yeah, you were going to be e-jock and I was going to cast other actors in the role.
My original concept for mother load is that was going to be an audio drama, not a mother load is technically speaking is what they call a dramatic story, right?
A dramatized story that is to say it is the entire text of the story, but it's done more along the lines of a of an audio drama.
I cut out things like he said, she said, I said that sort of stuff. And otherwise all of the voices of the other characters are done as if they were written, you know, or as if it was written as if it was a script as opposed to a story.
And I was going to cast you as e-jock in that version of mother load. And I'll say this out loud too. If I ever do an audio drama version, you got the role.
Space Poke lives.
Well, you know, I've been in love with your voice forever. And if I could rip your vocal cords out of your throat and put them in mine, I would do it in a heartbeat.
And it's just a little messy. And I'm not sure if you would survive.
It's about to say, damn, that's metal.
Yeah. I mean, his survival is an important in the context of that sentence, right? It's me getting his voice is what's important. I don't know that it works that way.
Yeah, but I don't think you get much argument from these guys either.
They're bastards. They're just bastards.
Frankly, we wouldn't know the difference.
And I can't do his voice, right? I can do voices, but you can't you can't copy that resonance. And I just don't have it. I wish I did boy.
I'm telling you, Poke, if I had your voice, man, I would be working in this field, dude. I would totally be doing it.
Yeah, but it's my only voice. I really can't do other voices. And I told you this before when you told me that you were doing this thing of ours, which is actually the name of the audio drama, this thing of ours.
When you told me you were doing that, I went and listened to it and didn't hear you. I didn't recognize your voice.
And I can't do that. I can't mask my voice so that people don't know what's me. I mean, you know what I mean? I can't change it. So there is a trade off there.
See, no, but you see, you don't, you have to understand the nature of the business, right?
The amount of people that work and say cartoons or animated like films or something like that, they're tiny, tiny, tiny portion.
I mean, like less than 1% of all the voice actors out there. And most of them are people announcing, right?
You know, most of them are people that are, you know, today on ABC, we have a thrilling story about such and such, that sort of stuff. And that's where people, that's bread and butter.
You know, that's money, man. That's people making a living with their voice. You could totally do that. You could totally totally do that.
But...
Hey, put me in touch with somebody, please. I told you I'm out of work, it's weak.
Yeah, if I knew them, I would be doing it myself because while I can't do what you can do, I can do what I can do.
But, you know, I mean, you have a great voice, but a great voice isn't enough as you know. You know, I mean, you have to have the right work ethic.
That's what my wife tells me. Yeah, well, you know, it's true. I mean, I, you know, I can act, but that's not enough.
You know, that's not enough. I have to be, frankly, if I wanted to be gainfully employed in this field, I would have to switch the windows or Mac, right?
Because there are so many things today, so many technologies that they take for granted that you're going to have if you're working from home and working from home is common. Now it's very, very common.
And they take it for granted that you're going to have these programs or these technologies and they're not available on Linux.
You know, not yet, maybe they will be in some of them are, but many of them aren't, you know, pro tools, you know, good luck getting that running in wine.
You know, I mean, it's just, you know, that's how it is.
Actually, if I remember right, pro tools does run on Linux.
Have a version of it for Linux.
I think it's more of an enterprise addition sort of deal.
Yeah, and it might be on specific hardware that is, you know, ultimately, if you strip it all, all the proprietary stuff out, it is a Linux based piece of hardware.
But, you know, whether or not I could get it running on my ancient, so reason box here is, well, I mean, I wouldn't count on it.
And, you know, I mean, there's, there are just a lot of fact.
First of my equipment and my, my recording equipment isn't good enough to do professional work.
Well, very much professional work. And you got to be motivated.
You got to want it badly enough. And, you know, a long time ago, I decided I didn't really want to jump into the meat market of professional acting.
I had that option when I was young, you know, when I was, I was a theater actor, you know, back in my teens and my 20s and even into my early 30s.
And, you know, people asked me why, you know, because I'm from Connecticut originally and they said, why don't you go into the city, why don't you go into New York and trying out.
I mean, you're good.
You know, they were very complimentary many of these people and it's like, well, you know, being good isn't good enough.
I mean, it's the least important part of getting the work, you know, look at all the people that make money acting now.
How many of them are actually good?
It's not exactly exactly that it isn't really about that.
It's about, you know, if it's like theater or film or TV, it's how you look.
First off, right off the bat. It's how you look, you know, whether or not you're good, doesn't matter.
You look, secondly, you know, are you, you know, how's your voice?
How's, you know, who do you know?
What have you done before?
You know, there are so many, you know, factors that don't go into act, you know, that don't have anything to do with the acting as to whether or not you can be an actor.
And I didn't want to pursue that.
So, you know, here I am doing my own thing, hoping someday it'll pay off.
Can do it exactly the way I want to do it.
I don't have to kiss anybody's ass. I don't have to prostitute myself any more than I feel comfortable.
And, you know, that's just how it is.
And I, I'll probably never make a living at it, but I feel better about it.
I feel better about the work I'm doing.
That's awesome.
How many people can say that about their work?
Well, I'm not satisfied with it.
I won't say that I, you know, look back at street candles and say, you know, I, you know, I, you know, I killed it.
I'm not going to say that, but I am going to say that if I, if I had never written street candles, if somebody else had written it and someone else was directing it.
And I was hired to do the audio book.
I can guarantee you I wouldn't have pursued it the way I did and I wouldn't have portrayed it the way I didn't have probably wouldn't have been my best work.
I'll say it since you won't.
You killed it. It's awesome.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
In fact, if we didn't say that right off the bat, you knocked it out of the park.
Now, I don't think, I don't think you've missed the mark yet in anything that, that I've heard you publish an audio form.
I'm sorry, I'm not much of a reader of written words.
I mean, I, I like to, I just don't get a lot of time to, but I do listen a lot of audio and you, you kill it every time.
And this is, you've raised the bar for yourself. I almost feel bad for you.
Well, thank you for that. I think, but the, with regards to audio books and star drifter stuff, the next one's going to be a lot easier because the story is lighter.
It's not light. It's not comedy, but it's lighter.
You've been street candles. Street candles was, you know, it's a very dark story and it's a very, you know, emotionally,
you know, wrenching story for the character.
And the next one isn't anything like that. It's much, each, I'll say this, each one of the books I have planned out is kind of its own little take, my own take on a genre element.
The first one was a straight up space opera, you know, it's ray guns and rockets, right with, you know, phantom ships and pirates and the whole thing.
The second one is my take on sweeping historical drama.
The third one that's coming up risk analysis is kind of my mission impossible story.
You know, I'll tell you this. E. Jack gets hired to be a spy.
And, you know, it's how that works out. And of course it's, you know, I'm going to try to make it not as straightforward as you might imagine.
And, you know, I have others that are going to be historical romances and others that are straight up coming home dramas.
You know, I have one in the, you know, planned where E. Jack goes home and we find out about his backstory and we find out where he came from and why he's become the guy he is, at least initially from, you know, growing up.
And then finally, I'll have my straight up. Well, I don't know if I should tell probably I'll be giving too much away. So I won't say any more than that, but there are different aspects of science fiction that I'm trying to explore in each book.
I'd just like to say that we called it with the spy thing.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's natural, right? I mean, you know, why not? And it'll be, you know, you're certain or high tech thriller thing.
I love Todd just said you made him feel smart and you're like, no, wasn't that good?
That's funny.
Yeah, I like the space battles. It's absolutely my favorite part of both the books. I love when E. Jack is in his own head and thinking out of problem.
I don't know how you do that. And it's, it's mystifying to me. And I just love hearing it.
Yeah, I just make it up. That's all I do.
Yeah, well, you make it up well. It's, uh, I don't know. It's the best part.
Well, I hope so because that's what he does for a living. So if that part didn't work, man.
Yeah, they could be a turd, man. Um, one thing. Well, I'm sorry. Go ahead.
What's this wee stuff, Taj? I called that.
Yeah, but again, it was a really easy one. So it's not much to brag about.
But I mean, if it wasn't going to be the next. I'm sorry.
I got, don't take my glory. I was still right.
No, I wasn't taking it. Lost in Bronx already took it. That's what I was laughing about.
It's not what I picked up on. I thought it was very astute observation as well.
Well, I mean, it's one of those things that if it wasn't going to be the next book, it was certainly going to be one of the books.
Because I mean, it's, you know, the high tech thriller thing. He's in a perfect position to tell a story like that.
You know, I mean, he's the kind of guy that you needed somebody with his particular skill set to do a kind of a quasi legal job.
He'd be the guy to hire. And it's not quasi legal in the story. It's actually spying on another power.
But it's entirely legal for all these really crazy reasons that I'm still working on.
Guy can't wait to hear it, man. Yeah, but I'm already looking forward to it.
Well, it'll be a while. It'll be a while because I, you know, I'm still I've just I decided that, you know, the but end of 2014 is already K.
And then I will start fresh in 2015 on risk analysis. And you know, the very first thing will be to read over what I've already done and then jump right back into it.
But probably we're not going to be looking at an audio book version of it starting until, oh, man, I don't even know maybe the next, you know, the end of next year, beginning of 2016 possibly.
It's going to be a while. It takes a long time.
I'm going to have to try and watch the live reads this time. I am, I am going to regret that for the rest of my life that I missed out on that event.
And I'm definitely going to have to try and see him next time if you do.
No, I know. Honestly, I don't think I'm going to do them again because first off, I didn't have a great turnout.
It was it was Randy knows and dude, brand, who was really, really cool. Those guys were great. But that was about it.
And I know Randy knows he's a great turnout, even if nobody else shows up.
Oh, Randy's awesome. Randy's, well, Randy's fabulous. There's only one Randy. And as I said it before to him, you know, if Randy didn't exist, we'd have to invent him.
So, you know, he's just a, you know, a hell of a guy and they were great. But the experience was hard. It was very, very hard. And it was especially hard because I was writing the book.
Various drafts, understand that you, you know, you have multiple drafts of a thing. You write it once you go and you write it again and again and again.
There were a total of six drafts of street candles. And I was recording the audiobook and I was doing the live readings all of these at the same time.
And it was, it didn't nearly killed me. I will never do that again. So if I ever choose to do any live readings again, it might be excerpts or something. But I doubt I'll ever do a full, you know, a full reading of the whole book live again.
So you were basically in E. Jock's head all the time for this for solidly for, well, it took a solid year of dense work.
Now, I'll take it back two years of dense work on street candles. And I had started it a year before that and was interspersing it with other projects. So it was three years of work. And I was in E. Jock's head entirely for 24 seven for a year.
And he's not a very nice guy. Ultimately, as it turns out, he's not a very happy guy. And it wasn't really a great experience. And I wouldn't want to be that focused on him or the story again.
So maybe he's not that much like Bogey because Bogey is a really nice guy.
Bogey's a wonderful guy, but he's got a great voice. And I would rather have a guy who sounds great than a guy who sounds like me.
Frankly.
I don't have any problem with the way you sound, but see, now I thought E. Jock was a decent guy because no matter what happened in that book, he was true to his word.
He stuck by his crew. And he did what he said he was going to do. And on his own moral compass, that was north. And it never wavered. And I'm pretty sure I said this journal review. And I don't want to cover the whole thing again.
But I don't know. It's weird to find myself disagreeing with the author on a point like that.
But he was also an arrogant self centered in subordinate cocky asshole.
He is.
But no, he's not.
He's the kind of guy you want swinging into your rescue. He is not the kind of guy you want on your own ship.
You would not want to ship out with that guy. You know, he is, he's, he's an asshole. And he is arrogant. And he thinks he, you know, and what's worse is he's as good as he thinks he is.
There's nothing more insufferable than somebody who's like that. And I wouldn't want to ship out with him.
But if I was in trouble, I'd want him and the other ship coming to save me.
So he's like Linus a lot of the time. He's an asshole, but he gets away with it because he could kind of back it up.
I disagree completely, man. I've worked with enough people who are not as good as they think that I would see that as a welcome relief.
Well, the thing is with people who aren't as good as they think you can dismiss a lot of what they say. And they can, you know, grant it if you're working with him.
You've got to hear him out. But you don't have to take them very seriously if you don't, if you don't want to or if the circumstances don't require it.
But when they are as good as they think they are, you have got to take it. You've got to listen to all their smug crap and their pedantic lecturing.
And he does a lot of that. He does a ton of that pedantic shit where he talks down to them.
You know, he doesn't think he is, but if you imagine when he's talking about when he was talking about the gun when he first take shows the rifle and he's explaining it to everybody.
Imagine being in that room. You just want to hit the guy. You don't want to punch him in the face.
See, I think one thing you're discounting here is a position of authority. If you've ever worked with someone who's not as good as they think and they're in a position of authority over you and you can't dismiss what they say.
You absolutely can't. So I still disagree with you.
Well, that's entirely our option. I mean, you can see the guy is admirable. I think he's admirable. I think he's a good man. He's just not a man I would ever want to work with.
See, I think the other thing is we may have a slightly cloud clouded perspective because I'm making sweeping generalizations here, but the, you know, slightly arrogant, but usually good enough to back it up.
Slight problems with authority at cocky and no problem voicing their opinion. Those all sound like fairly common traits. So, you know, it's easier to work with that when that's, you know, everyone that you work with.
You know, it's easier to work with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky
and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky
and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky
and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky
and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and no problem with authority at cocky and newly
No, this is more like trucker sci-fi. He just happens to be the guy who writes shotgun.
Well, it's sci-fi for the HPR audience. That's what it is.
I kind of think of it as documentary sci-fi. I can totally imagine this as like a shaky cam documentary movie.
The Blair Witch Project.
I hate that shaky cam shit, man. I hate that.
Yeah, I'm with you there. Maybe it's more like as I described it as trucker, you know, and he's shotgun.
Maybe it's more like a firefly type of thing. I mean, big fan of that as well.
I had the firefly vibe the entire time, but I'm also I carry a pewter serenity in my pocket every day.
If that gives you an estimation of where I am on the scale.
You see firefly and everything then.
That's because it is in everything.
Well, I'm a massive firefly fan. I saw it when it first was aired on TV and I watched, you know, I watched it.
You know, every week, my wife and I, you know, we wouldn't miss it.
And we were absolutely flabbergasted that it didn't get picked up again.
You know, firefly is a wonderful, wonderful series.
And I guess on a level, it's inspirational for star drifter.
But I'm not telling that kind of story.
And I don't have anybody anywhere near as cool as anybody on on serenity.
Oh, that's not true. Been Robinson's just as cool as anybody on serenity.
Yeah, he is cool. He's cool. But he's my stepdad.
My stepdad's been dead for years, but I based him on my stepdad.
And my stepdad was fucking cool.
It was really, really cool.
It was crude and he was childish and he was silly and he was just all heart, all heart.
And I missed him to this day.
But you know, been Robinson, I based on that kind of guy.
He wasn't, my stepdad wasn't foreign.
You know, he didn't speak with this, you know, really bad Eastern European accent.
But he, you know, he was, he was a cool guy.
And he was a trucker. He was a trucker.
And speaking of the universe in general, there was one thing I wanted to mention
because it was different than I'd ever seen.
And I really liked was the way that you handled faster than light travel.
Taking no time objectively, but taking time subjectively.
I don't know that I've seen that anywhere else.
I've actually seen the opposite in a lot of places.
But either way, I really, really liked it.
Yeah, that was awesome.
Well, that's a variation.
I'm, if you're, if you want to talk influences on Star Drifter,
probably the single biggest influence is the role-playing game Traveler.
I played a boatload of Traveler in my day.
And I really, really enjoyed our games with these fabulous campaigns.
And if you play Traveler at all, the way faster than light works and Traveler is you don't have to worry as far as I recall,
you don't have to worry about gravity shadows or anything like that.
You don't have to get to the edge of the star system at all.
But there is a time, it takes like, it takes like two weeks or so or something like that for every seven parsecs or something.
It was really complex and I never quite always understood it.
But there was a time factor involved.
And I thought, what if, you know, this was just a minor tweak on that where it's like,
okay, we still get all the drama and we have plenty of time to, you know,
have all this shipboard drama because basically that's, that's the purpose that it serves.
But with regards to the wider universe, there's no time passing at all.
And that makes faster than light travel.
I don't know, it does more, I guess it just makes things, you know, more instantaneous where, you know,
you can have a war that can flare up instantly because they can get from one place to another really, really fast.
And aside from the also being useful plot-wise, it was just really fascinating.
One of the places I've seen the opposite thereof is in Orson Scott Cards speaker for the Dead series.
It's the Enders game, the rest of the series.
It was, you know, the opposite.
Time travel would be, the time on the ship was less than the time the rest of the universe sped up.
It's like relative relativity and math and science, and I don't know.
But it would, seeing it the other way was, you know, a good plot device.
I liked it.
Yeah, I didn't feel all that constrained by the laws of physics because, you know,
all of these magic faster than light ships are made with that wonderful element hand wavium.
So, you know, it's just like, you know, that's just how it works and, you know, blah blah blah.
And it goes like that.
And my only justification is that they punch a hole into, they create a pocket universe.
So the laws of physics of ours don't apply.
So they can, they can pretty much go as fast as they want, depending on the technology they have.
And obviously, as time goes on, the tech increases.
That's actually a major, you know, the increase in technology or a technological leap of some sort can become a strategic advantage in this universe.
And that's a major element to the next book.
And that hand wavium works a lot better if you just shout science a few times.
And then we got there instantaneously because of science.
I loved how the, like, messenger ships were just blipping back and forth instantaneously and instant magically.
And I just, I pictured that happening and enjoyed it.
I thought that was really cool.
Well, I mean, it's a natural response because if radio waves are still constrained by the speed of light, then the ship becomes your method of communication.
And so you have to have a way of sending messages back and forth and you wouldn't send a battleship to do it.
So you would have a little tiny messenger guys who are their only job is to jump in, get an encrypted message that they themselves don't have access to, you know, they don't have the clearance to listen to.
And then they jump out again and they got two weeks of on their own where they get to, you know, let this thing run automatically.
And they, you know, they just sit around and do nothing, you know, and I would imagine that most of the time that would be automated.
They wouldn't even have a pilot in those things.
Imagine the bandwidth of a Lori full of hard drives.
I figure we're at the point where, you know, there's like quantum computers made with more hand wavium and they can just get tons and tons and tons and tons of data in these things.
And they can squirt it out in these massive like blanketing bandwidth things that apparently don't seem to bother anybody or cause, you know, interference with anything.
You can't look too closely at these things. You start finding holes everywhere.
I thought it was really fun. I thought it was neat. I was looking real close and it just lots of little blinky flashy lights. And I like that kind of thing.
But that's what I love too. You can't have your, you know, you got your ray guns, you got your rockets, got your robots and got your blanky lights. What more do you need?
And see, I feel like you saw all of the places where there could be holes and filled them with good enough explanations so that they weren't gaping holes anymore.
Actually, there was a lot of that. You would be amazed how many times I had to go back and fill in a plot hole or some kind of hole in an explanation.
I did an awful lot of that. It was, this was not a linear process at all.
Was it more lively, wobbly time you want me? It felt like it, buddy. It man, I got to tell you it felt so it got to the point where first off, I didn't know what was in any single chapter.
I had to go in and open up my, my chapters to find out what was happening at that point because I couldn't keep any of it straight after a while.
Some, some scenes started shifting from one chapter to another and there were character elements that I like, oh, I just don't have the time to fix it now.
I'll fix it in the ebook, right? So there are whole sections and character background stuff that's in the ebook that's not in the audio book folks, the broker of the ship.
We find out more about his background in the first chapter of the ebook because I figured there's a thing that happens later in the story that I figured, you know, this kind of comes out of nowhere.
You know, this doesn't make any sense and it's like, well, I never explained who he was and I went back and I fit, you know, filled that in and I, I hope it didn't seem like a patch, but I don't know, you know, readers are going to be the ones to decide that, I guess.
I didn't notice any patches. I thought it was, I mean, if there are patches there, they're seamless, they're iron ones.
I hate to say this because I could do this all night long, but I have to at this point be realistic about editing this episode.
We're going on an hour and 18 minutes after my connection.
The connection dropped and I restarted and God knows what's there before that.
So if you guys don't mind, is there any last things that you wanted to ask Lost and Bronx about to wrap up or Lost and Bronx?
Is there anything that you wanted to talk about or plug that we might have missed?
Well, I don't have anything to plug, but I actually had a question for you guys since you did listen to the story.
And this will help me for future, future stories, actually quite a bit.
Was there anything as you were listening that you wished you heard either more of or didn't hear, you know, that you thought was a waste of time or didn't work or possibly it was, it wasn't, you know, relevant?
Was there any element about that that you really would prefer to have changed, you know, something that you wished there was more of or less of?
Well, the only things I can think of were things I already discussed in a review show, which obviously hasn't aired at this point so you wouldn't have heard it.
But there are also things I believe at least one of them I mentioned to you over email and that was the first time I listened to it.
Every time he assembled and disassembled the panther, it stuck out like a sore thumb in my brain.
It felt like somebody was, you know, just waving a flag in my brain or flash in a light to distract me from the story.
But I listened to it a second time and didn't even notice it so that may not be a valid criticism.
But one thing that I, one of the things that stuck out most as really good writing, when I thought was really good writing, was when you said eachock had gone by someplace and there was some bombs lying there or something.
And he came back later and they were, you know, the same bombs are still lying there or they were identical enough and I just, I don't know what about that grabbed me, but I just thought that was.
It used far less than a thousand words to paint that proverbial thousand word picture and I really liked it and noticed it both times.
I don't know if that helps at all, but that's what I noticed.
Yeah, actually, that essentially you like the detail, but you like it brief and to the point.
And I think that's probably an area I absolutely need to improve on.
That might be it. My imagination muscle is way underpowered like I can't even do a single chin up with it.
When, you know, like Tolkien, for instance, describes scenery, I just gloss over it. I just, I plow through it because if I had to imagine everything that somebody describes to me, I'd never get through it.
I just can't do that and I envy people who can.
But again, maybe that's just me, which may make it less valid. So whatever grain assault.
Well, it's not valid. It's how you feel. It's your opinion. It's as valid as my opinion about the work and I'm the one that made it.
I mean, it's absolutely valid because it's your time and it's, you know, it's your attention that you're paying.
So in point of fact, your opinion is the only one that matters when you're speaking.
At least that's how I think of things.
One of the things that that I just kind of noticed and I don't actually even want you to change it.
It's just one of those things that as a reader, I'm insanely curious about AI and the Empire and like everything about them.
But they've only been like a minor character and I'm assuming as you do more in the universe, they'll get more fleshed out.
But it's one of those things that I'm like, I really want to know more about the layout of this universe and who the big players are other than just cursory glancing over them as we have.
But I'm sure it will come. I don't want to get you into the show don't tell it.
Well, get you into the telling and not showing.
So, but it's just one of those things that that's one of the things I really kind of wanted more on.
Yeah, the AI thing is just to say it briefly, that deserves a story of its own.
Right. I mean, because it's, you know, I mean, obviously it's it's first off, it's a classic science fixer concept.
And secondly, we're closer to a true AI now than of course we ever have been in computing history and 10 years from now will be even closer.
So naturally, that's an area of speculation and it's one frankly, I don't know what direction I want to go in with it.
I don't have none of my the stories that I have plotted out in my head and the storylines associated with them are major AI stories.
And it's simply because quite frankly, I'm a little frightened of it.
I'm a little frightened of it because it's very, very difficult to break new ground there to tell a dramatic story that hasn't already been told.
And I don't really have a good idea about it just yet.
I may very well explore it in the short stories though.
If something come good comes up to me, I'm definitely going to take a crack at it.
It's hard to break new ground with AI when all of Star Trek was just that.
Well, I mean, they're not the only ones. I mean, AI was around before then the concept of, you know, Robby the robot back and forbidden planet.
I mean, it was, it's been around a very, very long time.
And some of the better examples, I mean, Neuromancer is brilliant.
That's a brilliant, brilliant portrayal of what an AI trying to free itself from human fetters might be like.
And, you know, then there's the Colossus, the Forbidden Project and Demon Seed and all these wonderful movies that explored the concept.
And I don't want to rehash that obviously.
And I'm not sure that Ejox life would necessarily cross some kind of tormented A.I.s.
You know, I mean, the, the berserker stories by Fred Saberhagen were all, I mean, brilliant, brilliant concepts of AI.
And I, I don't know that I could add much to that story, you know, to that, that dialogue.
I don't have any ideas. Let's put it that way. I don't have any ideas about that.
Have you ever listened to an audio book called Crescent by Phil Rossi?
No, I've never heard of it.
It's, it's a horror. It's absolutely a horror story in the, the blood and guts sense of it.
And even kind of the ghost story sense of the word, but it's sci-fi as well.
And his ship is an AI and it's one of the coolest A.I.s I've come across in fiction, even though he's barely there.
It's, you know, you barely hear from him once or twice.
And it's kind of neat if you're, if you're, you know, in the mood for some A.I. type inspiration.
I guess my biggest issue with A.I. is that I don't understand in my own head what it would be like.
Because I'm of the opinion that it would be absolutely alien to us, right?
If it was truly intelligent, artificially intelligent, if it was truly intelligent,
not just emulating human morality and all these other programming things,
that if it was absolutely independent and wasn't dependent upon outside programming for its moral compass,
what kind of being would that be? And I have no idea.
So I don't know. I, I, I'll tell you, I am actively thinking about it.
I think about it a lot, but I haven't come up with an idea yet that I like.
Maybe it wouldn't be too different if it had a job to do and was allowed an extent of freedom to be rewarded.
You know, like, like, and choose its own rewards just like us.
I mean, as long as we're not free free, we can't do whatever we want.
Because we'll have a job to do and the rewards that we want don't come for free.
So we've got to go do our job to, to, you know, get the carrot at the end of the stick.
So I don't know, I don't think it'd be too, too much different.
But again, they're so, let me back out.
I mean, neither. And we could talk about this all all night.
But, you know, it does anyone else have any, any comments about what, what you might have thought.
I mean, even anything, even the audio production, any of it.
I mean, I use, let me ask you this. I mean, there's something.
I, this one I was a crapshoot to me, but there are several instances in the audio book where I use sound effects.
And I had no idea if they worked or not or if they were distracting.
I didn't find them distracting or particularly noticeable because I can't think of an instance of when it happens.
So I think it blended in pretty well.
I was thinking the same thing. I think trying to think back to it.
And I don't remember hearing any of them, which means they fit in perfectly and added to the atmosphere without being noticeable.
That's good. That was exactly my goal.
That was exactly that, those were the answers I was praying for. Thank you.
I was going to say the same. I was going to say what sound effects.
There's at least eight or nine, at least eight or nine sound effects that are instilled in there and different points where I just put them in there.
And, you know, audio effects for the robots and things like that.
They're in there. They're in there. If you go back and listen and you'll hear them, but I'm glad they didn't stand out because then I, then I did it wrong.
The only audio differentiation I can think of along those lines were the drones and the guy who was using the voice filter thing.
But those were, you know, very deliberate things you call attention to as far as, you know, sound effects.
They must have been in there perfectly because I don't even recall them.
They were subtle. They were subtle wind effects and things like that. They were subtle.
And I'm not talking about the very beginning, but they appear later on as well.
Well, well, that's good to know.
How about you, Peg? Well, it was something that you wanted to hear more of and something that you wanted to hear less of.
Oh, he stepped away. Damn it, because that joke would still be funny.
Still funny.
Actually, I did want to bring up something else about the audio.
I particularly liked the song that you picked for the theme for street candles.
Yeah.
And I was really disappointed when I went and downloaded the whole song.
I don't like the whole song nearly as much as I like the parts you cut out and put around the actual story.
So I think you're, and I'm a music guy.
So I mean that that's saying something.
I think you're judicious.
Anything of the song actually improves a little bit.
Same with the photos on the cover.
I looked at the original art that you referenced.
And I thought they were bullshit.
I don't know how you pulled out the good stuff from the art and the music.
It's, that was awesome.
Once again, illustrating the power of the creative commons.
Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
And you would have, I mean, I spent, I'm not lying.
I spent months and months listening to creative commons music to try to find a piece that worked.
I even listened, I even listened to, I spent a lot of time listening to royalty free music
that I was willing to pay for.
And I didn't find anything I liked, anything that would work.
And I finally found this piece.
And the key to it was something that had different moods in the story that would capture the moods of the story.
So that, you know, I would have a, you know, a mournful part of it.
And I would have an upbeat hat, you know, not necessarily happy, happy, but energetic part of it.
And it had to have all of that in there and still be the same music.
And that, that was a real channel.
That was a mighty challenge.
Finding the right music is so hard for something like this.
You know, I don't have anything picked out for the next book yet.
So it's, it's going to be hard.
Is somebody who writes music is specifically, I've done score music and, and stuff like that.
It's, it's really hard.
I don't, I don't understand how you can do it with something that's already written.
When I've done something and I've worked for somebody, they, they come to me with those notes.
And they're like, I want something like this for this part.
That's just, it blew my mind.
How well it worked.
I just, it took a long time.
It took a long time.
I honestly, I listened to hundreds of songs, hundreds.
And, you know, and, and this wasn't my original music.
This wasn't going to be the original music that I wanted.
There, there's a, um, an Icelandic rock band called Mammoth.
And they're, uh, they're amazing, absolutely fantastic, young group.
And, um, they're just an amazing group.
And they have one, one song called Salt.
And it's all sung in Icelandic.
But that's the song I wanted for street candles, but they're a professional rock band.
And I wrote them a letter and asked them for permission.
But maybe they, I don't know, maybe they really don't understand English, but they never got back to me.
And I figured no answer is an answer.
So that was that.
I'm glad you didn't use the, uh, H.P.R. mailing list version of the answer.
Silence can, can, can send.
Yeah.
But, uh, I don't know that the music is really hard when you're coming for something like this.
And it helps to find something you really like early on.
Just, I find it inspirational sometimes to listen to the music as I'm going along in the dark parts when I feel like I can't go on with it.
Just to hear it and, and imagine it overlaid into the rest of the story.
Cool, cool.
Well, on music, I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt your poking and I'll let you, I'll let you end this in a moment.
But I, I have an open invitation.
I'm putting it out here to anybody that if you are a musician and if you are interested in working on something like this on an audio project like this.
You know, I am so willing to work with original, you know, artists who want to release in the creative comments that obviously that's, that's fundamental.
That's an interest that people have.
I am very interested in working with people and what they can do because, I mean, it's, it's so hard.
I spent so much time looking for a good piece.
Close up.
I did want to say one thing because I realized you haven't heard the actual review yet from a couple of weeks ago.
It's kind of a running thing that I listen to everything at three times speed just because I don't know my brain works that way.
Last chapter of street candles, I listened to it in real time because I didn't want it to end.
I was so disappointed that I was on the last chapter that I listened to it in real time and I can think of no higher praise for four book than that.
From a geek, that is the highest praise I could ever hope for and I thank you for that.
I was going to say it, it must seem to the listener that we invited you on to kiss your ass because we're buddies and we've known each other a long time.
When in reality, we really did invite you on because we've been such big fans of your work and as far as knowing you ahead of time,
I consider that a tremendous stroke of luck and fortune on my part that I've been able to know you.
In so far as you can know someone who's two and a half thousand miles away through IRC and on the internet and collaborations like HPR,
I just feel very, very fortunate to have known you through all of this and I'm certain I would be as big a fan had I not known you already and I'm certain I would have appreciated and enjoyed your work as much as I have had I not known you.
I'm this big a fan of several people who I don't know I just I find myself very, very fortunate to know you and I consider your friend and I just I just hope the listener understands that I don't want the listener to think that the only reason you're I mean knowing you has has nothing to do with with why you're here.
I'm almost felt guilty reviewing audio books of people who we know but you know what I mean so I just I want to say that to you and to the listener.
Just thank you for for you know being my friend as well as being such a terrific author and voice actor.
I really appreciate that and I don't I don't doubt that that's how you feel but it's exactly because you're my friend that I have to discount all the nice things you say it's like your mom saying your handsome.
Yeah whatever you got to say that so you know it's it's it's it's very nice to hear but it's one of the perfect stranger you know says something to you that it seems less you know less some subjective I don't know if that makes any sense.
Of course it does well then take take some of those compliments from me then because I mean we've run in the same circles but I don't know that I've met you prior to the night and I absolutely love the work.
Well thank you that does mean more than anything Pokey might have to say.
And and you know for people listening please you know leave some feedback on this episode for lost in Bronx or get in touch with them on his email especially now you've heard it especially if you're a perfect stranger let him know what you thought of this book.
You know go to our bad which you know I suspect is good but he's invited the bad as well so let him hear it please.
Yeah and you'll find I'm I'm happy to hear the bad because I want to hear how I can improve you know I know the ebook has got tons of typos no matter the fact that I spent months and months and months going over.
You know all trying to find every type of graphical error but there's still a bunch in there and it's simply because I can't afford a spell you know a a proofreader and that's a practical problem that could change in the future and I just reissue another addition of it with all that crap fix.
It's not the end of the world to tell me you found a problem that something you don't like I'm pretty flinty and I would like to hear that.
I'd also I'm sorry I'd also like to help anybody who's starting down this path I mean I'm no expert but I've learned a few things and I'd be very happy to share that information with anybody who's like got an idea they want to do an audio book or they want to write a book and publish it you know as an e pub or something like that and whatever information I have I'm very very happy to spread around.
It gets a lot easier to do this if more people know how.
Oh yeah that's definitely true it's I have that thought very often with podcasting and you listen to podcasters who like on the commercial side really only talk about themselves and I just want to like why the hell are we not cross pollinating here why aren't you guys doing it's the only way to grow.
The industry and the podcasting season of decline you know the more commercial it gets it's um yeah I'm with you on that one with with all that said.
I think we we do have to wrap up but this has been a tremendous amount of fun lost in Bronx thank you so much for coming on here with us thanks to everybody for joining us on such short notice I drop the ball and sending out the email in a timely fashion.
This is characteristic of me and thank you everybody for listening please leave feedback on the episode please if you are interested in participating in the audio book club don't hesitate join the HPR mailing list and and find out the details there please because that's a lot quicker than waiting for the shows to publish very often they're published long long after the next one is recorded so unfortunately if you're you're listening to hear the next.
Book that that will be too late to participate if you want to participate please join the HPR mailing list and I think that's about it did I forget anything guys.
I didn't forget anything I just wanted to add I'm going to start working on posting the schedules as as we agree on them to the existing Facebook group as well so if anyone is on Facebook there is a part in HPR group or page or whatever the hell they call it.
That I've been posting the audio book club information to a couple days before the show just to try and include anyone else who hasn't seen it.
And I want to thank you guys so much for asking me to come on that this has been a real privilege just being well first off here's my show for the year right but secondly it's actually it's it's really been a privilege to talk to you guys and and to just frankly just to hang out.
Talk to people who are 12 years old so that's that's really been a real real privilege and you know I'm very happy and thankful to you guys.
Yeah man absolutely thanks all around and thanks for listening I already have a good night night all.
Good night.
I've said this to poke in an email but I want to say it to you guys too I just want to thank you guys for doing the audio book clubs I mean there's such a beautiful change of pace for HPR I mean it's just you know HPR can be really really geek heavy and it's nice to have something that I think is still geeky and yet you know it's it's entertainment and it's about entertainment.
But it's also criticism and you know discussion and everything it's it's really it's nice and I really you guys do a good job.
I think thanks for providing the awesome stuff for us to actually get to get out of here.
Yeah and I try to say it as often as I can and off as often as I think to say it but it's these guys who do it I mean I was really I was struggling to get the show done and everything and these guys show up and make an awesome show
and it helps me to get motivated to do the editing and to record another one it's it's you know and I think we try lost in Bronx to make the show is accessible as we can to everybody and that might be the word that you know you were hunting there for for a minute is it it's accessible and that's really what I've tried to strive for and these guys pull off I don't even know if I've ever even said it to them but they do it anyway.
No it's it definitely shows an accessible is definitely the right word and I would probably add broadly accessible that is to say you don't have to be a hacker public radio you know subscriber to enjoy it you know what I'm saying like say you get into a car someone's a you know you never heard a hacker hacker public radio but your body is a big listener and he's got this thing playing and you can enjoy it you don't have to know a thing.
A thing about hacker subjects to enjoy it and yet there's a strong techie here I should say geeky sort of of angle to it it's it's it's it was a good idea and it's very well executed.
Well it's got a key tilt to it because well we're geeky people and so we're going to relate everything to geeky topics because well we do.
Yeah and thank you for saying that it's well executed I don't think it to be completely honest none of us even myself included myself included can't take credit for the idea it was actually integrals idea he wanted to review he just wanted to get together and talk about one particular book which I'm hunting for the name of now.
Oh yeah shadow magic he just wanted to get together talk about shadow magic wait really I just listen to that recently I listen to the first two the third one wasn't available listen to so I went to Amazon and bought it because I had to know how the story ended.
Yeah yeah I don't think the third one's ever going to be available as an audio book I don't know if he's just lost interest in it or what but I did the same we weren't we bought it on Amazon and my daughter read it and then I read it and yeah it was fantastic.
Well it's funny I was thinking about suggesting that but if it's already been done that would kind of be in bad taste.
Yeah we haven't done any sequels yet and it pegwell how's how do you sound?
I don't know you sound excellent.
Taj was it you who said you were a big D&D or back in the day?
Back in the day you mean Saturday night.
I like that answer even better.
You should check out a website called roll D20.net I think it is or see a better roll 20.net one of those.
You can use their little tool thing and roll dice and play D&D via Google Hangout.
Yeah there's this thing that I want to do and since Pokey's here this is probably a good time to bring it up.
I'm going to do a hacker public radio on open source role playing games because there are a couple one of which is a D&D clone and there's an open source thing like roll 20 that she could use and I was thinking about doing a multi part hacker public radio.
I am totally down for that.
I am too but I haven't played D&D and forever or like made a character or anything I don't remember how.
It's all my experiences with a fourth edition and pathfinder but we can make it up as we go.
A fourth edition.
Yeah I have an idea for that.
Hey Losson Bronx you're back.
Yeah I'm back I'm sorry my router is not good today it started acting up before I forget touch my thought on an HPR D&D campaign would be a similar format to the audio book club where you break it into two pieces and whatever you put in the middle.
You know whether it's a you know something like the beverage review you know whatever I don't have an idea for that unless you want to just copy the beverage review whatever but the first part could be the technical this is how you.
Set up and use this particular software that we're using this is how you choose a character and their stats or this is how you do this part of it et cetera and then you have your part that breaks it up and then the second part would be the role play because I can imagine lots of people may be interested in the technical part but really.
Not want to hear someone else's game role played out I've never been a role player I don't know much about it but I've heard that the last anybody wants to do is hear about your character so but I don't know if that's true or not but if it is it might be a way to work around that.
No gaming stories yeah that's it's like a tried and true thing yeah I like that idea it's one of those things i'm talking around with I'd like to get it done.
And see just to get it out there like Losson Bronx was and just something different equally nerdy but not on the same topic is normal.
Man I'd love to play I got rid of all my gaming stuff a long time ago though.
Well definitely count me and I've got a big ol bag of dice and a perfect tabletop here to throw them on.
Ooh I got a glass table I could throw my dice all over it I'm in.
I'll do super geeky die rolling because there's a dice application in the game section of rock box that I have installed on my Santa clip and I can roll my dice that way.
No joke I literally used that the other day when I didn't have any dice.
I have a record in my phone to do it.
For the record every time I've ever used digital dice you get really really shitty randomness.
Every time I throw dice I get shitty randomness it's just I'm a terrible terrible dice.
A terrible oh cursed hands cursed hands.
The best dice application I've ever seen and I miss it so bad was on MAMO was on my 810.
And you could tell it how many dice you wanted to roll how many sides each die would have and you could label the sides which was what really made it unique it didn't have to just be numbers.
So we made one that had two four sided dice and one die was four colors and the other was left hand right hand left foot right foot and twister actually was a decent game for once ever.
I'm not too proud to admit this I literally we played like a little game a D&D in my math class to teach like basic math facts and my administrator walked in and he's like what are you guys doing I'm like just teacher math isn't a big.
You are the math teacher that I wish I had a bunch of kids in the school stay that but then when they actually have me they're like your hard what happened usually cool.