hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3921.txt

Episode: 3921
Title: HPR3921: HPR AudioBook Club 23 - John Carter of Mars (Books 1-3)
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3921/hpr3921.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 17:28:50

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,921 from Monday the 14th of August, 2023.
Today's show is entitled Hacker Public Radio Audio Book Club 23, John Carter of Mars
Books 1, 2 and 3.
It is hosted by them, X1-101, Pokey, 5150 and Mark, and is about 109 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, in this episode the Hacker Public Radio Audio Book Club discusses the
first three books of John Carter of Mars.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Hacker Public Radio Audio Book Club.
This week we have a pretty special contributor to the show.
We have the narrator of the book that we were assigned last month.
I'm doing a really poor job of this, this month sorry everybody.
Okay so the audio book club, if you're not familiar with it, we listen to an audio
book over a one month period.
It has to be a book that is freely available so that anyone on the internet can legally
download it and participate in the audio book club if they want to.
That means if you're listening to this you're welcome to join us next time.
We do this over mumble because it is free software, free with a capital F, free as in
freedom and we use all free software to produce the show as well.
We publish on Hacker Public Radio, but if you're listening to this you probably already
know that and I'm getting harassed in our text chat room here.
I am one of the members of the audio book club, I am Poki and with us this week we have
a desk J. Marky, did you want me to use your real name on here?
Well yeah, because you're on the book.
We have Mark Nelson, the narrator of our audio book this week.
Hey Mark.
Konbanwa Minisan.
And we got Taj.
What's good everybody?
Oh hi Okosemasu.
We got 5150 just popped in and say hi before your connection drops again.
Yeah, hey guys, I don't know.
I think, I think what it is, they screwed around on the up point side on the, on the
provide side with my internet connection and I think it's actually been dropping in and
out constantly for the last three weeks, but mumbles are a thing sensitive enough to notice
it.
Yeah, it's super latency sensitive.
And we have X 1101.
Howdy folks.
So also, if you're not familiar with the audio book club, our format is that we will do
a, a three part review.
In the first part, we will review the audio book without any spoilers to our best not
to spoil anything for you.
In case you haven't listened and are still trying to decide if you want to.
In the second part, we will each review a beverage of our choosing, usually a beverage,
sometimes we cheat and do knife sharpeners or motorcycle intercoms or dumb stuff.
And in the third part of the show, we will spoil the heck out of the book.
That's about it.
I miss anything, guys.
You didn't actually tell them what book we're talking about a princess of Mars.
And oh, yeah.
And uh, she was a cause and a prince of Mars.
It was the, uh, princess of Mars, god of Mars, gods of Mars, warlord of Mars.
I remember the last one by Edgar Rice Burrows and red, Mark Nelson.
That would be me.
We kind of usually start there anyway.
So we can start there this week and say you did a wonderful job reading this book.
It was excellent.
Well, thank you.
One of the things we usually hit on is audio glitches, technical stuff like that.
And I don't know that I heard a single double read in the whole thing, which is really rare.
Even for, for most freely available audio books, there's always something.
I don't remember hearing anything.
It was spot on.
Well, thanks.
I do take pride in putting out good product.
And on the side, I am a professional audio book narrator as well.
So I'm used to putting out good product.
Well, then doubly thanks for contributing to the commons.
If it's what you're doing professionally and you're still doing it outside of that for, you know, just for the commons.
Twice, I might add.
Well, I do primarily the free stuff.
I do a few paid jobs a year.
It's not something I count on.
It's not something I make my living on.
And frankly, most of those aren't nearly as fun as doing the free ones.
I get a lot of really awful books to narrate for money.
And thankfully, they are for money.
But when I want to have a good time,
I pick good classic free books.
And I record them for primarily liver box.
I've done a few for patio books.
In fact, I think you did one of mine here.
Yeah, about a year ago, we did down and out in the magic kingdom.
Yes, I read that book and I thought it was wonderful.
And I contacted Corey and asked him if it would be okay for me to do an audio book on a patio books.
And since he's a guy who is really open about copyrights and creative comments and all
that stuff, he said, sure, no problem.
And so I put it up on a patio books and it's actually been very well received.
It was well received by us.
If I remember, it got only thumbs up and we still say bitch and all the time.
Indeed.
Should be a meme.
It is here.
If you can have an audio meme, I think we've done it.
And that brings me to a point I have to make speaking of our audio memes.
These set of books were absolutely non-stop plot bullets.
But the only plot bullet they can use were the plot bullets.
Exactly.
Once again, I will go back to the comment I made when we were talking about it.
I could do social.
We have to take into account that this was during the time where people got paid by the
word for serialized fiction.
It's understandable.
Well, and the other point I want to make, just like when we talked about the Lensman stuff,
it was, you know, it was, in other words, you're escaping me, it was the thing to do before
it was the thing to do.
So, you know, it does, it's not, it's cliche, but it was before it was cliche.
So it's what started the cliches.
So.
Yeah, I get what you're saying.
This is why this became cliche after you did it.
Thank you.
You took what I've rambled through and made it actually clear.
Yeah.
People have to remember, these books were written nearly a hundred years ago when the concept
of going to another planet and other beings and different species were, I mean, it was
all original at that time.
Yeah, and, you know, I was, I'll take this opportunity to make a point that I had planned
on making, you know, ever since I first started listening to this.
I thought it was incredibly, I want to say impressive, I'm impressed with, with boroughs
for calling all of the people in this book Men, even the giant, green, forearmed monsters
with eyes on the side of their head.
He referred to them as men, and I thought that was incredibly open-minded of him.
You just, just to think of people as people, you know, no matter what they looked like.
Maybe that wasn't the point he was trying to make, but I took that away from it, and I
don't think I'm spoiling anything with that.
And see, in the first book, I got almost exactly the opposite, since it's before his ending
up on Mars, I'm going to call it non-spoilers.
He talks about some experiences with Native Americans, and a lot of the language he uses
talking about the green Martians has that same kind of almost inherent racism that you
get from the time period when people talk about Native Americans, and this is definitely
not lovecraftian kind of racism, but it was definitely still there.
I was going to make the exact same point.
I finished the first book, and I thought that I had pinned down, sort of, like, burrows,
kind of philosophy about, you know, different people in different races, whether it was like
overt or subconscious, then I read the second book, and it totally turned everything I thought
on its head, and I was like, well done.
Yeah, and that's why I made it very clear I met in the first book, because the rest
of them don't feel like that.
I didn't mean to say that he was, you know, that he would be admired today as, you
know, a multi-culturalist.
I just meant for his time, I think he was incredibly progressive in that respect.
I think that's true, and if you look at the three books together, you realize that it
is the red race that is the most advanced.
It is the white race that is the most evil, and in the end, the black race is as honorable
as any other.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, he, he, and there was a couple of things in there where he, you know, mentioned,
this might sound funny coming from the Southern channel, and that was the only time that
I had a lapse in that particular respect that I had for burrows.
So I don't know, Mark, how much of our past shows that you've heard, but what we were
talking about there with Plot Bullets is a reference to something we talked about before
where the movie, Dune, the original take on that movie, they used those weirding modules
they called them, and they, you know, had this incredible power over any other armed forces,
and it was basically just to speed up the movie.
So I think it was Taj that coined the phrase Plot Bullets, so that's what we've talked
about there now is just to move the plot along.
See, I remember it being from when we were talking about street candles, and it was E.
Jock's gun that always seemed to have the right bullets for the situation.
Or Cybrosis where they were literal bullets.
Okay, point.
Or in this book where they didn't use the bullets that could shoot, you know, 200 miles
on an average day, but 300 miles if a guy was a good marksman.
And exploded.
I expected them to be used so much more, but they were barely used, and I'm glad they
weren't used, because it just would have put a stop to a lot of things really early on.
Yeah, we're just going to go ahead and retcon that those don't exist.
Um, yeah, about those.
No.
I also thought it was really fun that, you know, anytime he talked about guns, he would
talk about a revolver.
Like here is this super forward thinking guy envisioning this society, but all he can
imagine a handgun as a revolver.
And the 1911 45 automatic had already been invented.
I was just going to go look that up.
So thank you.
My pleasure.
That's a really good point.
I didn't even think of that.
One of the things that struck me is, um, depending on whether you in your head cannon,
there's another one of our audio means, uh, right off bar zoom as actual Mars or, uh,
not.
There are a lot of facts that, I mean, a hundred years ago that they knew about Mars,
which kind of blew my mind.
Like, I, it makes sense.
Technology that they would know something about Mars, but some of the details were like
pretty spot on even about what we know today.
And I found that kind of remarkable.
You talking about like a thin atmosphere.
Yeah, thin atmosphere.
We talked about the length of the days being, you know, uh, pretty similar to what actual
Martian days are.
And there were just a couple of things that I'm reading it when I was listening to it.
And I was just like, Oh, that's actually true.
And it surprised me.
Like I expected more of it to just be made up, but apparently, um, to do a little research,
like there had been a little bit of study of Mars.
And he apparently read some of that and based the book on that.
Well, as, as Sniere always says, trust the math.
That's pretty cool.
You wonder about gravity because that's based on mass and that is roughly, uh, relative
to size isn't, isn't Mars roughly the size of earth?
So isn't didn't you get gravity wrong or no, what's way smaller?
No, it's half the size of earth.
So the gravity is like one third, the gravity of earth.
Oh, all right.
Cool.
Yeah, it's got those giant, giant mountains, right?
That are like 20 times taller than our tallest mountains, isn't that something like that?
It is, but eons ago, there was a lot of volcanic activity on Mars, which died out after the
core cooled.
So there was, there was historically, you know, 100 million, 200 million years ago, the
opportunity to build giant mountains, but then that stopped.
Okay.
I learned that on Discovery Channel.
Thank you very much.
Nice.
I've got to ask you, um, Mark, when you read these audio books, did you read the first
one first and go straight through or did you read them out of order because someone hadn't
done the third one yet and then backfilled?
I did them in order.
The first one was on LibraVox, but it was only a group effort.
There wasn't a single narrator for the entire book, and I felt there should be, it was
a book that deserved to have a title in the catalog with a single narrator.
And so I did that.
And I think after that, I started getting emails, people encouraged me to finish the series.
So I picked up the rest of them from there.
And I think I did, well, no, I did all five that are in the public domain.
Well, I'm glad you did because the way that I wanted, I knew I wanted to do a Princess
of Mars because it was one of those books that I neglected reading and it's a classic.
And I knew I wanted to do that next.
And I literally went through every version, listened to every chapter.
And I picked yours because I was like, this is a voice I'm okay with for at least the
long haul.
And I noticed you had done all five books.
And that was important to me because I was like, I'm going to listen to all of these
books.
Having not even put together that you had done one of the books we've done earlier.
So it was impressive enough for me to just pick it based on your voice alone.
I'm pleased to be okay.
Yeah, I am really, really impressed with myself as I often am that I recognize your voice.
That was really, really happy to recognize it.
And then it didn't take me very long at all to pick out, keep them moving Dan from the
voice.
And that was really fun for me.
Thanks a lot.
So the reason I asked about the order of them is I noticed in the third book, the audio
quality for maybe like the first four chapters or if I wasn't long, it was just a few chapters
I think.
But something happened, something was different in the audio.
Was it, do you remember that?
Well, probably what happened is, so I have an actual recording booth built in my house.
Unfortunately, it's nice, yes, but it is in the garage.
And it is subject to the weather.
And I live in San Jose, so things aren't really radical here, but between November and February,
the overtime temperature is near freezing.
And a few times, actually I was planning on doing this in my booth, but today it's a hundred
degrees.
So out of the garage, the weather becomes a real problem.
So I set up a alternate recording mini booth in my little office room, which frankly isn't
as good.
Well, it's not nearly as good.
It's serviceable, but barely.
So when things are really bad, I can continue to work, accepting the fact that the audio quality
isn't going to be quite as good because the acoustics aren't quite as good.
The mic, which is the one I'm using here right now, isn't quite as good as my professional
recording mic, but at least can continue recording.
We're pretty much all big audio nerds here.
Do you mind if we nerd out a bit and talk about your setups, plural?
Nerd away.
All right.
Cool.
So the first thing I noticed you said you had a better mic out in the garage than you do
in the house.
So I imagine that's probably a big setup, like with phantom power and stuff.
What do you got going on there?
My primary setup is an audio-technica AT4040, which is a condenser, professional-condenser
microphone.
It's patched through an I-track solo interface, and I record directly into my Macbook Pro.
I record in Reaper, which is a software that there are a few that allow you to do this.
I edit as I record.
I don't record through and go back and fix everything.
I fix every mistake as I record.
It's called punch recording.
And when you've been doing this for a long time, it's really much more time-efficient than
having to record for an hour and a half, than have to listen through and edit an hour
and a half to edit that down to an hour to take all the mistakes out.
So that's how I work out there.
My secondary is a, I have a little thing called a porta-booth, which is a little box basically.
It's a Velcro thing that you fold up.
It's about two feet square cube that has acoustic padding inside where you put the microphone,
which in this case, which I'm talking on now, is an Apple G mic, a USB mic.
It's actually a very good one.
So it works pretty well, but it isn't nearly as good, it isn't as good and doesn't sound
as clean as the pro mic in my recording booth.
It sounds really good now.
Right now you sound as good as the recording, you know, the best of the recordings.
But it was almost as if there was maybe a lot of noise cancellation going on or something
that kind of deadened it a little.
No, not at all.
I'm in a really echoey, noisy, lousy room, actually.
I can hear my wife talking on the foam outside, but I'm close to the mic.
And it's got a pretty close pickup pattern, so it doesn't pick up echoes nearly as bad
as many do, which is the biggest problem with acoustics.
When you get echoes, it blurs the sound very badly.
So it becomes very unclear to the listener.
My booth out in the garage, it's about eight feet, well, six feet by eight, eight feet
tall.
All the walls are double, they're double paneled, so there's some sound buff, sound protection.
And they're all covered with RLX foam, so the sound's very dead, so you don't get any
echoes at all.
Nice.
Now, what did it cost you to build a room like that?
It, we combined it with a kitchen remodel, but it actually, what it was originally.
So you told your wife you got the sink for 80 bucks.
Not quite.
I mean, she was on board, but I used to do black and white photography.
So years and years ago, I had a dark room build out there where I did my developing and
printing, and I kind of fell out of it out of it after a number of years.
So it's been sitting there.
We kind of use it as a storeroom.
And I tried recording in my office, but it's, you know, it's, it's, it's noisy.
The house is creaky and makes noise, like your traffic, I can hear the dogs drinking
in other water bowls, every time the phone rings, I got to stop.
And so one day I went out there and went, Hey, it's really quiet in here.
Hmm.
Maybe I need to take the sink out and move out here.
So that's what I did.
So it was a cost of basically refurbishing, refurbishing what was a built in dark room
into a sound booth.
Oh, nice.
So you just, now you must have bought foam for that?
Yeah, I bought the foam, the, the, the walls inside which were sheet rocked were a double
sheet rock with a stuff in between called green goo, which is a stuff they smear on the,
the sheet rock, which is a sound deadener and sound repulsor.
So it's got some, it's got some soundproofing.
And then the inside walls are all covered with RLX sound acoustic foam.
And how long can you sit in that room before it becomes a sauna and you have to get out?
Normally in the mornings when things are comfortable in San Jose, I can be there all morning.
In fact, part of the afternoon because it doesn't get really hot here.
You know, you open the door.
It's big enough that it doesn't get really super stuffy.
So you open the door once in a while, it's fine.
I got to take a break every 30 or 40 minutes anyway.
I mean, you just get tired.
Like now it's about 85 degrees in there.
And if you tried concentrating at 85 degrees, it's really hard.
I had a pro job I did a few years ago that was started in, well, basically right after
Christmas and had to be done in January.
The temperature outside was around 29 degrees.
The temperature in the booth got down to about 41.
And I can't run a space heater in there because of the noise.
And I've tried millions of them.
There are none.
Do not make noise that we picked up by a microphone.
And if you ever tried concentrating on text when it's 50 degrees and you're shaking, you
find out how really difficult that is.
Oh, yeah.
Anything like that would be.
Not even like a radiant one, huh?
I got one of those.
But you know what?
It has a thermostat and it clicks on and off and every time it makes up and every time
it makes a little think the mic picks it up.
Of course.
Of course.
I mean, there's no, there's no perfect space heater I can have on all the time that won't
make noise that will interfere with my recording.
I wonder if you could manually bypass that and click it on and off yourself at spots
that were convenient.
Yeah.
That's a good thought.
It's plugged into a, I could probably do that.
Good suggestion.
Well, now I have to channel Jeser here for a second, tear it apart.
Hi, I don't think so.
So just another question down the rabbit hole.
So how did you get started doing voiceover work?
Because you're obviously doing it as a profession.
So that's interesting.
It's just how did that start?
Well, originally, many, many, many years ago, I got my undergraduate degree.
He's in radio and TV and theater and in those days, unless because there was no internet,
there was no cable TV, I'm going to tell you right now, I'm 61.
So this was way, way back when this is in the 70s.
If you didn't get a job in a local broadcast radio station or TV station, there was practically
no other options to get work in that field.
So after I failed to do that very quickly, I stumbled into the default career for all
people with worthless degrees.
So I joined all the English majors and the art history majors and I went into human resources,
which I did for about 28 years and did very comfortable living at it.
Then right before Christmas, 2005, I was working for a tech company here in Silicon Valley
and we had a meeting, an all-employee meeting in which it was announced that we were being
acquired by a competitor.
The competitor was simply going to shut us down and fire everybody.
They just went to take out one of the other competitors and it was a hardware company,
so it was going to take about a year and a half to shut the company down.
And since I was a HR director, it felt to me to be the person who would manage all the
layoffs out to the very end and I would be the last employee and basically flicked.
Oh, they're going to go to the dogs, they're having fun.
I would turn the lights out as the last employee of MacStore.
Well, I thought, do I want to go out and find another HR job at the age of 54 or do I
want to try doing something else?
And I decided I wanted to do something close to what I had trained for all those many
years ago.
So I started fishing around, I considered different things and looked at options, I thought maybe
training or the CDs or I didn't know.
The layoffs started in May of 2006 and the bulk ended in August of 2006 after which there
would be this long period of a long, long rundown which is a handful of employees left in
the company and I would finally leave in April of 2007.
Well, in August, the dogs, me and the spouse decided to take a long weekend off after all
that work.
If we went to Seattle, oh geez, oh, Dottie, you terrier, we went up to Seattle for a long
weekend and it just so happened that my wife bought a New York Times, you know, we're not
going to buy a local paper when you're out of town, you know, when I hear about the local
city council meetings and whatnot, it just happened to be the New York Times that had a
full page story on LibraVox, which was then only one year old.
And I went, huh, I'm thought about audiobooks.
I mean, when I was in the field, whoops, sorry gang, hit a wrong key.
So when I was in training for it, I mean, audiobooks just wasn't a thing.
I mean, they weren't even cassette tapes when I graduated college, let alone, you know,
MP3 downloads, people bought audiobooks on freaking records.
Anyway, so I thought, oh, audiobooks, I thought of that.
I love books, you know, I read books all the time.
So when we got back home, I checked out LibraVox, listed, listened to some of the samples and
went, hey, they're good.
This isn't some hack outfit.
I mean, they're good at what they do.
I'm going to try doing that.
And when I did, I got completely hooked.
I just, you know, I just felt like this was a thing I was, I would want to do.
I did a couple of small, you know, chapters.
I hadn't done any entire books at this point.
And then there was a thing on their board where my good friend, Jesse Willis, at SF Audio,
podcast posted a contest, which was make an audiobook, win an audiobook.
And he listed some PD texts that if you recorded one and you were the first, you want a prize.
And I went, hey, well, that might be interesting.
Somebody else at LibraVox said, oh, I want to do The Green Odyssey by
Philip Jose Farmer.
It's in the PD.
And then he went, oh, no, I can't.
I'm in England.
He's still copy right here.
Well, somebody else do it.
I said, okay, I'll do it.
And I did.
And I won the contest by one day.
And I've been hooked on basically sci-fi audiobook recording ever since.
Nice.
The commercial books I've done have been kind of across the board.
I've done horror sci-fi.
A number of nonfiction, including one on the origins of the internet, which has been my best seller.
But I still, it's still best to come back to LibraVox and do free stuff.
Because I get to pick the titles and doom, however, I want.
I don't have to answer to an author or a publisher.
And it's just a lot more fun.
It's one of those things where you think, gee, I'm doing this.
This is a volunteer.
Would it be great to be paid?
And when you start to be paid, you go, oh, this is a job.
That makes perfect sense.
So today, I do occasional paid audiobooks.
I think I've done three or four this year.
It's not something I count on for a livelihood.
People that do that work like dogs.
I've known a few.
I've met Scott Brick.
Well, in fact, I know Scott Brick.
I did a couple of workshops with him down in Los Angeles.
I know firsthand just how brutally hard the people work who try to do this
and make their entire living from it.
That's when it goes from being fun to being a chore.
Yeah.
So what drew you to this book?
What made you want to read this, at least the one?
And I know you said it was a deserved a single reader version.
But I mean, what was it about this book that made you think that?
Well, it was primarily that.
And it's a classic book.
I mean, this is one that really deserves that level of attention.
And I know, you know, and not to diss the other readers at Libravox.
I do know that listeners much prefer the single reader.
It does bother them when they get a book where two or three of the chapters are read by somebody
who is either new or has an accent or, you know, they would listen to a male reader for ten
chapters and some of these female.
And it's distracting.
And I can see that for sure.
And, you know, of course, I also say that,
hey, how much did you pay for this book?
You know, I mean, how higher standard for something you got for free?
If you want to pay for the book, you can go to Audible and pay 2295 and get a professional
reading from one reader, but you're getting it for nothing.
So, you know, back off.
But still, I thought it was something that deserved a single reader.
And at the time, I was fishing around for projects because there is a limited amount of
PD sci-fi and it's getting used up pretty quickly because you've got the pre-1923 stuff.
Then you've got the window of the pre, like just before 1968 when the rules change stuff,
that some of it fell into the public domain, including Green Odyssey.
But more and more, they've all been done.
So, it's getting harder and harder to find quality sci-fi and fantasy titles that are available
and that I can do for Libravox.
So, this one just jumped out.
It just needed to be done.
Cool.
Tosh, this is where you say.
That book go.
That book, though.
So, that's how we transition back to talking about the story itself.
And yeah, it was a cool story.
I really got into the second one.
Like, the first two chapters of the second book really hooked to me.
If I'm in, I'm glad.
In retrospect, Tosh made us listen to all three instead of just the first one.
Because I don't know if I would have listened to the second one after the first one,
but I'm glad I stuck it out because they did just get better and better.
The books are really, really creative.
If you step back and look at them, just the whole idea of races born from eggs and mounds,
and the circuit or prison, and they're just an amazing amount of inventiveness that went
into these books.
And the more you go through them, you realize just how creative they were.
Unfortunately, the one thing that gets in the way is Burrow's uses just such archaic flowery
language that some of it is just kind of hard to read.
It was very verbose, and I often had that thought repeatedly that, wow, he's windy here.
He's just going on.
But it made me wonder, was that a pattern of speech that was common at the time,
or only common in writing at the time?
I just don't know.
I don't know if there's a way to even answer it because we only have writing from the time,
but yeah, it was.
Or is it an artifact of paperward writing?
Right.
I think it's probably the latter.
I'm working on a book right now for Libberbox that was written in 1911,
and it really, if you didn't know, you would not know that it was not written just a few years ago.
It lacks a lot of the floored, you know, over-description stuff that Burrow's relied on.
So I think it's part his style.
I think he doesn't overdo it as badly as Lovecraft, which I did some of those as well.
Oh, which ones?
Not for Libberbox.
I did Call of Cthulhu for a professional commercial read, and I remember I had two sentences back-to-back.
Both of them had 90 words each.
It's like, wait, wait, you said sentence, not paragraph there, right?
Sentence before you got to a period.
It's like, seriously, I mean, 90 words twice?
See, I've read Call of Cthulhu at least twice, and I don't notice that when reading it, but wow.
Yeah, but if you tried to read it out loud, you'd get a little lightheaded.
Well, yeah, I mean, yes, I mean, read it out loud with one lung full of air, and you know you're in trouble.
I think you guys hit on a point that this book kept striking the back of my head while I was reading it.
I don't understand how this is in the public domain, and nobody has made anything worthwhile
or significant with it, because we're talking about the time period.
I'm a huge Lensman fan.
Like, I love all the Lensman books.
I wish they would make Lensman movies, even though they wouldn't sell.
But Lensman is really dated, because it's sort of that high technology sci-fi, but the fact that
this is like fantasy slash a little bit steampunky, it's not extremely dated.
It would be very easy to update that to modern times, especially since the character is from the past.
So it makes sense like if the speech is a little different.
But I just can't, I mean, I know Disney tried, and that turned out in a way.
So I just, I don't understand why nobody else has done anything with it.
Oh, you know, I wish you had said that while sort of wish.
No, I'm glad I had my own take on it, but it would be interesting to listen again
with steampunk in mind, because I didn't even give that a thought.
First, I think you got a way to generation.
For many years or so before you try again, remember to last group, all that again.
And I think as far as the Florida language, transfer, who a movie is John Carter's internal monologue,
not how he's actually, you really can't bring that forth.
So what you wind up with, the fun the blanks, is let's normal sci-fi action-need things,
except Michael Bay.
Exactly. That's, I was trying to think of the guy's name as I was saying it.
Exactly. This becomes a Michael Bay movie.
Well, and I mean, we talked about movies, but I'm not even specifically limiting myself to movies.
Like, I'll be honest, I've only listened to the audio books that Mark did.
So that's as far as I've gotten this series, and I know there's more books, but like,
why hasn't somebody written like new books in this world?
Because it seems like that is that is a huge opportunity.
It's just kind of like sitting there on the table.
It's been almost fully explored for one, but it is literally a whole new world.
It is an entire planet. We could not have seen everything there is to see.
The other thing, what I would say, you know, someone going into it saying,
oh, let's pick up where he left off, if you tried to make a new story along this canon
for a modern audience, nobody is going to buy the teleportation back and forth.
That just is not going to fly.
Other than that, you stand a pretty good chance, but you're going to have to change that somehow
into he tripped and fell in a wormhole or there's something because it's just not going to fly.
I don't know.
I don't think it's that big of a leap.
I mean, there's some pretty ridiculous stuff in TV and movies that people are just like,
all right, and just go ahead and imagine this is any more ridiculous.
You're right. It's no worse than when the guy goes.
They never would let him in the justice attribute or jet packet and ray guns,
but something about he could go back and forward went back pretty much that same way to
a came back with.
I would just like to say for the record, take a drink.
Oh, I have been.
Wait, what I missed.
Justice League DC Comics reference.
Okay.
I'm going to take us on a tangent.
So Tyler set a timer for a few minutes before you so you can say that book.
But my buddy just opened a comic shop and I mean, it was great opening Saturday and it was
absolutely awesome.
I went and bought some but the angel comics.
Deb book.
Sorry. Good note myself.
That's fine.
He was less than a minute.
We can indulge him.
Deb book.
I didn't mean to cut you off.
X-1-1-1.
I just it was that he was a bad joke and I can't help myself.
Well, I will be the first to indulge someone in a bad joke.
So I saw one last week that even I thought was too much and I still laughed hysterically.
On the network team's door, there is a little sign that says,
BOD to the bone.
Wow.
I could not approve of that.
It's so bad.
It's good.
But how long has that got to have been hanging there?
Well, I've walked past it for at least two years and
not really caught what it said.
And then I moved my desk closer to there and I'm like,
oh my god, that says BOD to the bone.
That's terrible and wonderful.
Deb book though.
What about it, Taj?
This was your book.
What was it that hooked you in so hard that made you want to bring it onto the show?
Well, I think I've kind of started to mention it.
First of all, I've known for a long time that this is like a classic series.
But I've only recently gotten into like classic sci-fi.
It's been one of those things that I'm like not wasn't into like my whole reading
experiences and adult or even as a kid.
I never got into classic sci-fi.
I was always the modern sci-fi.
But I read all the Lensman books and that kind of got me on this kick and I've just been
kind of devouring classic sci-fi.
I knew I wanted to read this but it literally something as stupid as this is set on Mars.
That's ridiculous because there's nothing on Mars.
It turned me off for this book for years.
Like the dumbest reason to never read these books.
But then I caught part of the Disney movie, the John Carter on TV.
And back in my head, I knew that a lot of people had told me this movie's terrible.
It sucks.
And I knew a bunch of people who liked the books did not like the movie and didn't like the fact
that the movie kind of ruined the chances that any other movie would ever get made.
Can't confirm.
But then I saw like 15 or 20 minutes.
It was just like while we were getting ready to leave and I turned it on.
I didn't even know what it was.
And I just sort of watched and I was like, I would watch this movie.
You know, I had no idea.
And then I looked on the DVR and saw what it was.
And John Carter, I'm like, I have no idea what that means.
Terrible marketing for a movie, by the way.
So then I looked it up and I found out it was this book.
And I was like, all right, I'll give it a shot.
And I'm really glad I did because I really, I am much like Pokey.
The first book is good.
The second book is really good.
The third book is a thing that happened, I guess.
I really wish that I had taken time to watch the movie before I started it
because I bet I would have enjoyed the movie.
Except I tried to do it two days ago and I got about 30 minutes in and just couldn't.
See, I'm, I don't like modern Disney at all anyway.
So I wouldn't bother.
But there were a bunch of times that like my daughter and I would go to the library
to pick out a DVD or something.
And I would see this movie there, like John Carter.
And I'm like, wow, that's interesting if they would just name a movie after a guy's name.
They don't do that very often unless it's someone who's already famous.
And so I had no idea what that was.
And every time I saw it, like I wasn't sure if I had heard,
you know, that name elsewhere.
And if it was a big deal and I just didn't understand it or if it was just that movie.
And I had no idea.
And when when Todd should pick the book and said, okay, we're doing Princess of Mars.
Okay, I never made the connection.
I had no idea that, you know, the lead character was named John Carter or anything like that.
I didn't look into it at all until 50 emailed me and said, oh, it's, I saw the movie.
So I should be okay.
Now I knew he was joking, but still I had no idea what he was talking about.
But then in the first chapter or so,
where the guy, the original narrator who is the nephew of John Carter mentions Uncle Jack,
and then says Carter, I was like, oh, now I get it.
This is that thing.
So this really is something somewhere somehow.
And now I get it.
It's pretty cool.
Once again, terrible marketing.
But I get it because it's probably, they didn't want to market it.
First of all, it's John Carter of Mars because that's a different book.
They probably didn't want to call it a Princess of Mars because people would watch it
and have the same knee jerk reaction I had as a dumb kid.
Oh, this is set on Mars.
That's stupid.
But there had to be a better solution than what they went with.
Yes, don't make the movie, especially not if you're Disney.
Fair point.
Well, I had a similar reaction years ago.
I think I've mentioned I read that when I was in college.
Man, this is one of the best books I've ever read.
This has got to be a movie.
Years later, Kevin Costner came around and wrote.
Be careful what you wish for.
I missed what you said, which movie was that?
The Postman.
That is a really good good story, though.
The Postman's really awesome.
I hope you mean.
Yes, no, the movie was terrible.
But I mean, when I say I'd like to see like Linsman,
like I love the Linsman books, I would love for there to be Linsman movies.
Not even so much that I want to see a movie.
It's that I want more people to experience it and know about it.
Like I feel like there's this like in club of people who know about Linsman and
have read it and stuff and it would be nice if more people were there.
I know full well if they ever made a movie out of it, it would be terrible.
Just because that's the way it would be.
But it's still one of those things that I don't even think it's the movie that I want.
It's just the more popular knowledge of it, just to share it with people would be cool.
See, most likely you'd say you want a movie, but what you'd get is like a J.J. Abrams and Michael
Bay movie. You shall not speak the J.J. name.
See, I feel the exact same way, I feel the exact same way, touch about Mark Twain.
I wish more people understood what a good writer and what a hilariously funny guy he was.
Instead, they make you read.
Yeah, but the, you know, all the movies that I've seen, the books, they don't seem that far off,
though. I don't, maybe I'm missing the full law of the humor that was in the, again,
in the internal monologue rather than the good word.
Well, there is a bit of that, but what I was about to say was that, you know, instead of like
really good Mark Twain writing, they make you read Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, which, you know,
while we're important books are not his humorous writing and that's not the funny stuff.
And being a teacher.
I agree that probably the only humorous one out of a record you're thinking of is the jumping
frog of Calvary's County. And I probably, but you're that and that's hilarious.
Now, I was going to say being a teacher, I can fully confirm that like, we're not allowed to
teach Mark Twain a lot because people are scared that we might have to have a conversation about
Rachel racial slurs and books, which is ridiculous.
Yeah, there is that word. You can't even talk about how, okay, here is this time when
people even think about saying it and how bad that was. Oh, we're just going to plaster.
See, I think a lot of people miss the point there too in saying that that's just the way it was.
And that's it. I don't think that's it at all. When I read his books, you notice that it starts out
that way, but gradually Huck's mind changes. And, you know, so should the mind of the reader.
It's a gradual thing that Twain walks you through. It's not, I don't think it's a specific
timepiece that he intentionally did. I think he, I think he, you know, was trying to accomplish
something with that, but that's not this book. You almost needed honours class to do something
like that. Yeah, for sure, but, but that book though. Are we about prespoilered out?
I think so. Yeah, I think I am. I will take a moment to acquire my average.
Yeah, I got to run and get mine too. I'm sorry. I didn't open it ahead of time. So I will take a
brief pause as well. I snuck out and got mine. And I just want to mention that I just finished
first Lensman for Librevox just a couple of months ago. So it's out there for free.
You know, I noticed that that popped up and I didn't even look at who narrated it. I actually
downloaded it. It says it popped up. So I've already got that. I haven't listened to it yet.
Is that right after the one that we listened to already, Tush? Yes.
Might I say bitch and bitch and indeed 5,000 Wolfie in the times as they are.
Seeing how you jump to shark, now you're in a different book. A really good book, but a different book.
Okay, I'm back too. I don't know if anybody else. I don't know if anybody else just said they were back,
but I thought it was a good guess. You win your first. So now you're coming. Sounds ridiculous.
Minus 5,000 Wolfie. See, that's the way you do it. You put in the chats. Nobody knows. And I
don't have to edit anything out later. Oh, you don't have to edit it back. That can sound silly.
I don't mind. Mark, you back as well, or did you not leave? I'm still here.
Awesome. I heard 50 sort of. I saw him light up anyway. I think I talked over to 50.
That's okay. I talk over everybody else. Well, you want to lead us off then and review a beverage?
I'll be glad to. This is for most people. It's going to be very bovar beer company, which I had
these it up in Missouri last spring. I had a alumni event. And then I didn't drive home that
evening. So I had a hotel room arranged for it. And then I came back the next morning to take the
plant tour. And I've talked about. Oh, Mark would know, but I have a series on hacker, public
radio on 50 shades of where I review some some times and stuff like that. So this is first
establishment. I've actually been sort of larger in a brew pub. Well, they pride themselves on
being the second biggest brewery in Missouri, the other one, which they refer to as that damned
horse farm. But I asked one was there. I said, I know we tasted well, they have what they call
the tasting room, which is wind up the end of your tour. And during the tour, they give you a
couple bottle cap playing a fallout that you bring the bottle caps back. And they give you about
a shot and a half of a couple selections that they have there. So, you know, they know they're
always going to leave in a state where they shouldn't be. And I'd already tasted a few
there's a cruise the night before. So I've gotten through and but I asked them at the time. Have
you guys ever considered doing a sour? Because the thing is there's a lot of companies that
put out a sour, but what they tend to do, they tend to put it out in a four pack at the six pack
or above price. So in other words, you're paying ten bucks for get the sour. I guess maybe they
are more. I don't know. What if you've listened to listeners on 51 50 shades of beer, you've heard
me mention a say song, which is a little bit a sour is way tart. So if you try it, if you've gone
out and you've looked for a say song, you like that, then you'd probably might you might want to
try a sour, but if you tried to say song and you said, man, I just don't not like this, you're
certainly not going to like a sour. This is Boulevard's funky pumpkin spour, sour, I'm sorry,
sliced sour ale. This is a very strange mashup for a pumpkin spiced ale. I can't think of anything
as far away from a sour and they've put the, you know, I would have thought they would have started
out with just a straight sour, but they've mashed these up and it's I guess not bad, but I think
I'd like to see if just a sour separately. But the nice thing about this, it comes in a six pack
and that the normal six pack price you'd expect, you know, it's your show. So been listening to me
talk about sours on the podcast and you want to see if that's something you might like to try.
This is this will give you at least an impression of it. Like I said, you can probably tell,
you can probably taste the sour and taste the pumpkin separately. I'd like a good pump ale,
but I'm not sure I'd like the combination. It does sound odd, but you know, it sounds a little
complex, I like complex beers. When you mentioned sazon, I've I've had I think two sazon's and
I like them both. Well, I like you try this. I mean, at least this for listeners, listeners
will give you an impression on whether a sour is too sour. Poke, have you had the one from Ali
Gashet? The sazon, I don't think so. My wife really, really digs it. So I mean, if you're into
that style of beer, I check it out. I like how complex it is. Of course, the unique thing about a
sour is most of the time you're brewing. You do it in a sealed container because you don't want
to do so any wild bacteria is going to throw the flavors off. And this is how they get the flavor
for a sour. They do it. It's fermented and open. Where they're actually inviting wild bacteria
out of the air in. Of course, it's probably done in somewhat a controlled environment because it
sort of know what they're going to get. That's the other major distinction between a sour. Is it
bacteria actually or is it yeast? What are we talking about here? Well, you wouldn't have yeast
floating around in the hoki. No, it's back there. Sure you do. You have yeast floating around in the
air. Most of the one I won't say most, but many of the trappist beers use wild yeast. Okay, well,
I was sticking with Tracy Holtz explaining that it was back here. Here's a ghost and that shows
Oh, and I don't want to put them on the spot, but I have invited Tracy a few shows on when he's
got in time. Yeah, that'd be good. So what have you got for us, hoki? Oh, all right. I'll go next.
Um, I have yellowtail shardonnay. And um, it's kind of odd. I've never tried this one before
because I do drink yellowtail and off a lot. And if I drink white wine, it's usually a shardonnay,
but I don't think I ever try to yellowtail shardonnay. So that's what I'm trying. It's very, very yellow
in color. It's, it's almost off-putting how yellow this is. It's definitely shardonnay though.
Nothing wrong with that. It's a little sweet up front, a little dry on the back end. And
I think eventually it balances out the aftertaste is kind of nice. And um,
next smells kind of hoki standard shardonnay. Uh, not bad. I don't know how much I paid for it,
but probably decent for the money because the usual yellowtail isn't that expensive. So, uh,
yeah, kind of like it. I'm not much of a whiner viewer. I like wine. I just don't know how to
describe it very well. It's all I can do. How about Taj? You always excite us and
intrigues with your selections of tap water. So yeah, I'm going a little crazy and I have
a big old talk glass of dehydrogen monoxide as always. Crazy. Um, but, and I've also posted in
the show notes, uh, a website that will tell you all the facts about the dangers of dehydrogen
monoxide. You should check that out and send it to everybody, you know, because it's hilarious.
That is, that is one of my favorite and oldest favorite websites at the same time.
So I'm going to be totally, uh, me and be a rebel and do something besides a drink. Um,
I'm going to do another app pick for Android, although it's, it's just sort of a pick for
something in general. Uh, my daughter has discovered texting. And I'm terrified of that. So,
and she's, she's very young. She has her own tablet, but she has no internet or she has no like
cell phone access. So she wanted a way to talk between her and her mother and her grandparents.
And so I wanted, I was like, well, let's set you up with an XMPP, you know, jabber, uh,
login. And then we can do texting. But then I thought about my school and I thought about all
the kids again, trouble when other people get a hold of what they said. And I don't want my
daughter to be, um, I don't want anything she's doing at this age to be remembered at all.
So, uh, chat secure, which is a, uh, cool Android client that's made by the Guardian project,
which makes all kinds of cool open source like privacy apps. So if you don't know who they are,
go check them out. Uh, it does off the record encryption. So basically I've set up my daughter's
tablet to where she, if she has internet, she can text her mother, she can text me, she can text
her grandparents and it's all encrypted on both ends and it's brilliant. So she gets the experience
of trying this out in a safe place and it's never recorded. So she can send poop emoji all day long
and nobody will ever know. That's pretty good thinking, helping your kid to be anonymous. I,
I wish I knew that sooner or, or, or new what was going on a little sooner than I did.
Yeah, I don't think she's gonna live in my house and not know about internet and an entity
just because of who I am. So there you go. Uh, think of the children. Do what's right? Wait,
wait, did you just use think of the children, put it in a non-harmful way? I did. Isn't that crazy?
I took it back. It's arising in. I took it back. And I know it kind of makes me distrust you now.
I got to do it with the voice. I'd be like, think of the children. Think of the children.
Want someone to always think of the children. Mark, have you got a, uh, a beer or a wine or what
were you drinking tonight? I forgot what you said. Um, well, I started the night off on Merlot,
but right now I'm drinking a Lagonitas IPA India Pale Ale. Oh, I don't know if this is
common to you folks or not. It is brewed in Petaluma, California, which is I'm in San Jose.
So this is a little north of me. And, uh, in fact, my wife just told me today that
Heineken has bought half of Lagonitas. So that will probably increase their distribution throughout
the world. And it's a very good beer. It's an IPA. It has the, the traditional hoppy IPA taste,
but it's not obnoxious about it. There's something about hoppy beers, at least out here in
California, where they, they've gone like completely batshit. You know, they have things like
hop stupid and triple hop and hop you in the head and, you know, hop you till you die. And it's like,
we have, we have that here to X 1101 has, uh, has a word for that. No, no, it's poke. It's 5150s.
That was 5150s. Oh yeah. Nice one. Yeah. My term is my hops can beat up your hops.
Yeah. And, you know, there's, I think there's a limit to how much hops you can stick in one bottle.
This one has the hoppy taste, but it's not obnoxious. Um, so it's, it's, it's balance. So you can
like right now I can just sip it. Uh, you could also drink it with food because it just won't
overpower everything you're eating. Um, also want to mention that it, it's 6.2% alcohol,
which is, it's got a punch to it. I'm, I'm sure my addiction isn't as good now as it was an
hour ago. Uh, at the same time, it's not over the top. Um, a while back at the local grocery store,
I was home alone for dinner. So I picked up a takeout and I grabbed a, uh, 22 ounce bottle
just to have because I had nothing else at home to drink and I picked a double buck which sounded
interesting and, uh, ate my dinner and I had my two glasses of beer and I noticed that the room
was spinning rather severely. I go look at the bottle. It's 9.5%, which I just, you know, I did,
you do the math. That's like drinking five bud lights in a half hour, which I think is a little
bit much. So it's not, it's, it's got a kick to it, but it's not overly obnoxious. And, uh,
if you don't see it where you live, now that Heineken is going to distribute it, you may see some
more of it. It's a very, very nice beer. It's right up there with my, one of my other favorites,
which is, um, anchor steam, but made right here in San Francisco. Yeah. I've had lagoon,
something, something ale. Why is happy? I see lagoon. It is all the time. I'm in New Hampshire and
there's there in every grocery store here. Also in Indiana confirmed. And main. That's one of my
frequent gripes on the show here is that the selection of beers in the grocery stores has turned into
IPAs and very little of anything else. And I don't know if you've found that to be the,
the same over on the West Coast, but, uh, the allegonies is almost always in that lineup of,
of IPAs. Yeah, the IPAs, I mean, they're good, but come on. I mean, I like other stuff too.
Yeah, like a black IPA. They can't sell, yeah, probably if they could, the price would,
the definition of microbo, you'd have far less selection. Yeah, the grocery stores here still
think of Sam Adams as a microbrew. Shock top. Yeah, it's just, yeah, yeah, it's
shocked up exactly. Look, we have variety. We have a hard, Chuck's, hard citer, what Chuck's
whatever the hell it is. And what Chuck's not bad, but I want a couple other kinds of citer too,
thank you. Yeah, if you're, if you're indecider, for sure. So X-1-1-1, last but not least,
you've always got something super impressive. You got the good beer store near you. We have lots of
good beer stores near us. My wife brought home something for me. She said, what do you want? I said,
an IPA that I haven't had before, which at this point is getting to be a challenge.
But she brought home a shipyard, which is a local brewery around here. It's out of Portland,
Maine. Oh, yeah. It is called Shipyard Little Horror of Hops. And it's got the plant from
little shop of horrors on the bottle. And that's about the extent of it. It says, like, don't fear the
hop. My hops eight year hops. They heard you 50. It's a nice, like, amberish color. It's a darker
for a pale ale. X-11-1, I am most impressed. Your wife knows as you have it, have not had.
But she's had most of them too. For an IPA, it's actually not, not super bitter. There's not a lot
of the nice, piney floral notes you get with a lot of the better IPAs. It's more of a, it's almost
tastes like some kind of an amber ale with some extra hops in it, which is still nice.
Oh, I might like that then, because I don't like that piney taste that a lot of the hopped up beers
have, like, especially red hook. It breaks my heart that red hook tastes like that, because they're
they're building the brewery, they're restaurant. It's also nice, and it's right next door,
and I just I can't drink many other beers. Oh, and I love red hooks long hammer. That could,
I could drink that starting first thing in the morning all through the end of the day.
Have you had their porter? It's too hot for a porter, man. It's like 110 degrees or something here.
I'm dying. I didn't mean this afternoon. I mean, ever. When it gets cold, I'll find one maybe.
They're decent. It still has that that signature red hook hops. It's also a porter. It was
actually pretty good. Being a hop lover, I do have to say I really like the tendency to have
so many IPAs, because it does give me the option to say, I want an IPA, but I want something different,
but it would be nice to see something else too. I think stones all day IPA, or maybe they're
go to IPA. One of those has a lot more of the citrus notes to it that I really like.
Have any of you guys had any of the clown shoe beers? I have actually never even heard of that.
I might even be getting the name wrong. No, it's not. Clown shoe is one of their brews. I think
it's happy feet as the brewery. Hoppy feet. No, I think clown shoe is the brewer. And hoppy feet is
one of the... Anyway, I had one of theirs. It was a Mexican style milkstout, I think. I did not
like it. It was not for me. And I'm a stout guy. So that's... I don't know. There was something just
wrong with it. Let's go and say, I can't... I can imagine, usually, think of that as logger
and milkstout in the same sentence. Yeah, it was weird. They tried to do too much with it,
and it wound up tasting cheap. They don't make it often. It's a seasonal beer, but once in a while,
Anker puts out a porter, which is really, really, really good. Ah, to look off. I always love a
really, really, really good porter. Anker has another stout. Oh, one of my favorites cannot think.
They should make a Martian cactus milkstout. Is that your attempt to get us back on track?
No one else was going to do it. That book, though. Nice segue.
Well, I guess that's it. We are beer club. It was... I don't know. I have to get to bed at some
point tonight. I'm on my 11th day of 12-hour work days, and I need to sleep. Oh, you poor man.
That's awful. It was voluntary. I signed up for it. One of the overtime, and I sure got it.
But tomorrow's day 12 of 12, and then I get four days off, and I'm going to think spend the whole
first day sleeping, and the second, too, maybe just motorcycling. One thing I'd like to talk about
start with. Oh, the steampunk technology. There's some stuff very reminiscent of Joel's fern.
Everybody thinks the Nautilus keep her submarine. Joel's fern had this idea. Their
selectromagnetic fee harvest. All his stuff had elected the same way, seems like even though
contemporary, what they have discovered, perhaps that's a development, but they have these
knowledgeable rays of the sun can be separated out. Number nine can run the giant generator
on oxygen to the atmosphere. And ray number eight, they essentially are flying craft. Number nine,
which can lift great weights of battleships in the air. If you're going to build a battleship
into the side, so that's kind of a problem. Yeah, especially if it gives them 11 for writing
in the time that he did, sort of had pre-condition of fighters, fighter tactics. Well,
when he's gotten in the book as a great altitude, he did predict fighters. You're right, 100%
50 about, you know, why didn't he armor them, especially when they have enough levitation
power to send the thing accidentally into orbit the first time they did it. Well, I mean,
they've said that the greats, the great airship, about great huge guns. Why not armor it,
sit behind your guns, just absolutely look for the enemy from 300 miles where your auto aiming
cannons work from. It seems like, and maybe I just didn't catch everything. It seems like a lot
of the technologies left over like it's from a time before they don't really understand it a lot
of the time. They're just like, Hey, this is here. We'll use it. So I mean, I could see where they
might not be the most like engineering forward society ever. Maybe the other races besides,
especially in the first book, besides the red and the green Martians, maybe them, but those two,
it seems like they're probably not into, you know, being very smart with the engineering stuff.
Yeah, but it doesn't seem like, oh, well, the whole flip shot down the reds main red city and
all is lost because we don't have the technology to rebuild it. You would think that would be
mentioned. Right. And he did mention a couple times that, you know, there were certain machines
of Martian manufacturer. So they definitely have manufacturing going on. I think he just kind
of, there were some things he just glossed over because they weren't integral to the plot of
the story. And, you know, talking about these things now and looking back at some of the earliest
stuff in the early book like the super long range guns and all that kind of stuff, it makes me think
that he, it probably sounds stupid to say this, but it makes me, it makes me think he made it up
as he wrote it. You know what I mean? As opposed to a lot of writers will outline a story and have
some idea where the plot's going to go if not the entire story. But it, it, it does make me think
like, okay, he made some of this stuff up and then when it wasn't useful, he's kind of abandoned it.
Well, let's face it, it shouldn't take down the boring battleships with rifle in the beginning
and then they're there. Right. And if your, your range weapon technology was so effective,
a guy that can jump pretty high is, is pretty impotent against such things.
Well, they didn't say they could shoot through, it was to fill in the blanks. I would say maybe
that had part telepathically, or perhaps you focus it all pathically. No, I thought he said they had
an auto aiming device, like a, some kind of scope or something, it almost sounded like he was
describing, but it sounded like an aiming device. But you're right, it's a little bit of a
thing as someone we should talk about. See, I thought it was just, they were badass. Well, Brad, I don't
know, Brad, perhaps thinning linux, they've been hacked. Not this all glad of yearning rifles and
linux, but the company took down all of the safer security out of linux. You know, anybody can get
a Wi-Fi connection? Yeah, I heard some stories about that. And it was kind of sad.
Mark, he looked at you about to say something. No, I just hit a wrong key again.
So the telepathy that 50 mentioned, I thought was was kind of interesting and it was kind of a
neat plot device, you know, to where he could not projective his thoughts, no matter how hard he
tried, but he almost couldn't help but listen in. And that was, again, useful for a while.
And then abandoned kind of a short time later. In certain places, it was sort of Dayasek
mock getting out of the huge plant that provides oxygen, the entire planet. And you could tell
in the administrator's mind that, oh, maybe I should have thought too much that the special
mental code, nine-motion character, who's afraid that it heard it. Well, the best witness
sleeps. You know, first he thought, maybe I didn't hear it well enough to get out. And then he
thanks these things. Um, the Dayasek mock and a thing is also interesting. You bring that up.
I don't mean to transition away from the telepathy so quickly, but since you brought it up,
this whole book to me, all three of the books seem like nothing but Dayasek's mock and a,
the, it was almost like a pendulum that swung the entire time going, oh, this was incredibly
fortunate. And this was incredibly unfortunate. And then this was incredibly fortunate. There was
no middle of the road and slam for the story. Did you guys notice that at all? This bad thing happened
and then the most lucky thing in the world could happen. Yeah, every time, every, every movement
was like that. That's what I meant by the plot, but bullets earlier. Yeah, that's true. And it goes
through all of Burrow's books. And it's important you don't think about those too much because
the coincidences are just too good. I mean, this is a whole planet, right? And in the third book,
he gets thrown into a jail cell with his estranged son. Hey, how lucky. I also did the
polluced our books. And there's one where these two guys burrow down into the inner core of the
world. I forget the name of the, the second guy. And one comes back to the surface. He's on the
surface for like 12 years. And he finally goes back down again. He burrows through and he meets his
friend right at the second. He's about to be attacked at that second, at that spot in the entire
world where he didn't even know where he was. And so you're gonna have to kind of let that stuff
slide because the coincidences are just sometimes pretty extreme. Yeah, absolutely. And I thought
the exact same thing while listening as well is that you just had to let it go. And I think maybe
for that reason that the reason of the incredible luck and the incredible pendulum swings between
bad luck and good luck, I think that might be why the first book was good. And the second book
was really great. And the third book was not quite as good as the first one was all about world
building. And he did build a really cool world there. And then the second book was basically a
chase scene or our exploration, excuse me, where he's exploring this other world again. And the
third one was the chase scene where it was all about the luck on and on. And it seemed like the
only break that you got from luck was when he rested up. And it was like, oh, I just I slept for
a couple days because you know, that's kind of what I had to do to catch up to them. So you know,
it wasn't as consistent with the adventure I think of the first two. I might have rambled that
out too much. But but but Hitchhiker was a spoof. So he I'm sure Douglas Adams was making fun
of the outrageous coincidences where in the entire galaxy, two spaceships or a spaceship finds two
guys floating in space who had just been kicked out of their other spaceship just seconds before
and caught him just before they died. It was kind of part of the in joke.
I was going to say there was nothing in that series that was done on accident. No, not at all.
I agree with you. It was definitely all of it floated there right in front of your eyes,
just like bricks don't. Exactly. It was comedy. I mean, it's it's the same thing as, you know,
telling the joke of the the three guys, you know, trapped on a desert island who who find the
genie in the magic lamp. I mean, it's it's comedy. You can any setup is fine. Close enough.
I'm going to channel at y'all here and say that's how a southerner might say it. Yes, I know.
I was channeling. Um, yeah. So, uh, I don't know who I feel like I've done most of the talking
who haven't we heard from? Well, I was going to talk about kind of what I mentioned before about
how like my whole viewpoint changed about burrows and his his beliefs because at the beginning of
a princess of Mars, like there was the kind of unfortunate uh, Native American part. And then when
he gets to Barsoum, it's like, Oh, here comes the white savior here to save all the all the people
who have colored it's again, you know, warrior culture. And I was like, Oh, this is kind of
unfortunate, you know, but it's still a good story. And you know, and at least it showed some,
um, some respect for that culture despite the fact, um, that there seemed to be a difference.
But then we get to gods of Mars. And it's basically like, Oh, those white gods that came to save you,
yeah, they're a total sham, uh, basically everything you believe about religion is wrong. And the
religion that they believe is wrong. And it's just like this continuous like lines of bullshit
that he just kind of cuts through in this entire culture, like it's this hierarchical uh,
stack of just wrong thinking. And this one dude just comes through and just cuts it all down. And I,
I think that's why I like the second one the best is because it's just that's all that book is,
and it's it's amazing. It's one pissed off southerner ripping apart a global size Ponzi scheme.
It is excellent. Now do you think the likes of Tars Tarkas?
The fleet, the lack of a man, the lead act that lack of evolution.
I, I don't see how it could have been anything other than deliberate because just the language
he uses to talk about the Native Americans on earth. And the language he uses to talk about the
green Martians are so similar that if he wasn't deliberately drawing a conclusion, then I,
I really don't know what was going on. Well, let's face it by Paris and the red Martians are not
in this whole lot more. They're more like you, they don't seem to have love.
No, the red Martians are warriors. They're revered for their battle skills. They're not
particularly advanced beyond the other races. So, so no, they're really not special. They're,
they're still barbarians. Point is made earlier, they have such limited life,
has to be, was any race traits were, well, I think when he, when he presents the green Martians,
they have to be alien because if not, it's going to be too close to just basically Native Americans
in space. So I think any of those things that are negative are like turned up to 11 just to make
sure that we know this is an alien place. These, these beings are not like human beings.
Despite the fact that, you know, we find some that kind of are just having that, I think,
differentiates. And as we get closer and closer to, you know, the original creatures of the ones
who think they're the original creatures, they progressively get more and more human like,
not to say that that means that they're good by any stretch of the imagination, but they do,
they do tend to take on a more complex state of being almost, to where the,
oh, I forget the name, the original ones or the old ones or whatever, the first ones,
whatever they're called, the first born, the first born, that's what it is. They're, they're very
complex. Way more than I think the other races are. And so I think that that's sort of,
that that complexity, just going further and further and further, and it helps that they're
the ones that have the most resources. So maybe they have the luxury of being able to develop
more fully like that. It's everybody you're ready to take a drink. It's almost like in Star Trek,
how all of the non human races kind of represent an aspect of humanity versus the whole.
This compared to like, Hoth, an indoor and this planet with this trait all across it. Yeah,
that too. Wow, double. Well done, guys. Man, somewhere in there, 50 said something I wanted
a comment on, but I lost it. Yeah, I had something. Yeah, it'll obliterate you. And I did think
a little again, John Carter, John Carter is suddenly exposed to that. That also happens in
Heinland's stranger in a strange land, where a completely human individual is dropped on Mars
and then develops Martian like abilities. Though I did implicitly have been that all of them,
they all have topic links, the language and a couple of different subjects. Well, you got to
thank you talking how much of that opathic one go say and then she thought was, oh except for that
chick at the end who gave the suicide speech. She said this, this and that and this.
I didn't use GMT. I used Gmail. It's set to my local time. It translates through GMT. So
that would be a setting on your end, I think. In any case, I thought it says Wednesday. Yeah,
I'm looking at it here on my calendar. It's eight o'clock today. It's on there correctly.
I think you got your Google calendar setting. It didn't show up on my calendar today either. I was
looking at it earlier today and it just wasn't on my calendar and neither were like the past couple
of months, but it's there now. So I think that's a Gmail glitch going on there. But if it was telling
you it was tomorrow, I honestly, I think that's a local setting. Yeah. Well, like I said,
when I connected to the reason I'm not dropping now, I'm on the phone. Yeah, we're turning the phone
on. Yeah, you. I remember now it was the Deus Ex Mach and a thing that you were talking about.
I thought through several points of this story that he almost ruined the story,
except that it was consistent. So I guess I could live with it for that. But he almost ruined the
story a couple of times with his Deus Ex Mach and the the one biggest example that sticks out
in my mind was this this year long tower of torture that that oh, I can't think of her name now.
The wife, the princess was Deja Thoris. Deja Thoris, thank you. That she was trapped in.
And I thought that was actually really clever. I thought that was kind of an ingenious thing
that there's this tower that you're in for a year and it was a pretty clever punishment. But
then Deus Ex Mach and oh, there's like a hole in the middle where you can just go in anytime.
But only for extra torture. Yeah, like something like that. I mean, I didn't like that.
I thought he devised this nearly perfect machine, this nearly perfect device that was
themed correctly for the setting and the story and all that stuff and then just
drill the hole through with a plot drill. Well, he was lighter on Mars. So I mean, I guess that's
appropriate that he should be able to do that, you know. Well, you're right. The green guys who
would never have been. Yeah, that was another thing that kept. I thought was a little inconsistent
that, you know, maybe Barrows didn't think of was that if he was so strong that he could jump
forever, you know, like with 30 feet in the air, I think, or 35 was one of his first jumps,
and a hundred foot long, like all your muscles in your body are that strong. So he ought to be able
to just do like hand springs and stuff all over the place. These other guys can't do that. So they're
like incredibly weak in comparison is what that amounts to. So they shouldn't be able to hold
the candle to him in a sword fight. He should be able to just knock their swords out of their
hands, but he, you know, really didn't even address that. Well, in several cases, he killed people
with a single punch because he was so much stronger than them. But I think what was actually missing
was so years and years and years go by and he still has this exceptional strength because he
grew up in earth gravity. At some point, that's going to wear off. Yeah. And as far as killing
people with a single punch, yes, exactly. So you're making the point that I was trying to make when
you say that. No, actually, I think he's actually making a bigger point. The original
like power set of Superman pretty closely matches John Carter before his power has got like
ridiculous. Well, yeah, but he came from a heavier gravity. Red sun is yellow. It's kind of
funny that you guys mentioned Superman because I was almost earlier going to make a Superman joke
when, you know, when we're talking about how he became more Martian
throughout the years or that they should be more more human in strength. And I was just going to
say, no, no, it's just because they have a red sun. You came from a yellow one. Again,
D.O.S. X. Bach and until he needed them. After that, he long after that super cold breath and all
that stuff. Don't forget bowling ball sneezing. And again, like John Carter, I think at the
beginning, he fly over in space. He was jumping a little. Yeah, lethal buildings in a single
bound, which was the original Superman. He could jump over buildings, but he couldn't actually fly
that came later. Yeah, it's a good point. So John Carter was or Superman was John Carter,
rather. So first set. Because he's a shape, Jeffrey, he can just make his structures because he
wants it to be. Because the sun always looks red to him. And when he gets here, it's yellow.
You damn right, you will. So another thing that I thought about, and I always looking for like
interesting political angle in any book that I read. And I thought the interesting political
angle in this book is the one that Burrows never even noticed is the, there should have been
a power struggle for energy. There should have been some sort of
struggle over their energy source or sources. And so far as the, oh, what did he call the power
source of the guns and the and the ships and everything or the motors, at least on the ships.
As opposed to the, the rays of light, he, he had some
iridium. Yeah, thank you.
Radium. Where, where did the radium come from?
Right. And why weren't they fighting over it? Because if you could control the radium,
well, you could just wipe out all these other tribes or colors of men. So like he, he completely
missed that. Maybe he, maybe he didn't want to address it or maybe he didn't envision it. I
don't know. Well, had it been, or he wouldn't have known of radium. So they do there. It was a
power. Well, it, at least knew it was something mysterious, but he used it as a power source in
this book. Yes. And it's not like there were no struggles for energy at the time. I mean,
you know, Moby Dick described the, the quest for whale oil, you know, when that was the best
you could get, except they didn't because it was what their bullets were made of.
Yeah. And in, in 1911, basically, you were talking about coal. So at least in this country,
there really wasn't like a giant energy competition because it was just cold in 1911.
Yeah, maybe. So maybe the ushering in of this almost universal energy source kind of
eliminated the struggle for it. Maybe. And that kind of makes sense because if you think about when
like energy crisis started to be like a thing that was in consciousness, like you get books like
Dune, where that's like a major subplot of that book is that, you know, the scarcity of energy
resources. It was probably not known in the early 1900s, just how relatively rare those
elements really are. I mean, we know that now because we've been using them for things like
energy and medicine and stuff. But back then, I mean, it was discovered, but there was no reason
to not to think that they were ubiquitous in everywhere. And you just dug up a couple of piles and
you got some more uranium and radium. Better do it. Not as a days prices. Not unless there was
someone living there we could blow up. You guys are bringing me down with the real talk. We need
to go back to that book though. I wanted to say another thing. This is, I think this is the
the thing that 50 was saying. Or it made me think of this. The names in this book were really good.
A lot of times you hear like a fantasy book and, you know, all the names are made up, the names
of things and places and all that. And they're made up. And they're just the cumbersome and
awkward to say. But these were fairly consistent in like the way they felt, the way they
must feel on the lips and certainly the way they feel in your ears. And I thought they were
pretty good and pretty creative. I mean, even Barsoom is just a cool, like powerful name for
this planet that these people revere, you know. Don't know, it's bitching. Sorry, bitching.
So now I'm totally going to have to edit this and cut those two sound clips out.
I've marked saying excellent bitching and make those like notification tones on my phone.
Yeah, that was a pretty good excellent actually. Probably shouldn't have been corrected.
Does anybody else feel that way about names in this book or names and fantasy books?
Am I alone in that one? No, I agree with the tasks and things. Clifftouts.
That's it. I need to click note. Yeah, if I've done a bunch of HB and Piper books and all the names
were Verkenvall, Huckandoo, Zimmingsall, Shubidoo. And it's like in one chapter, you can't keep
them straight. But in these books, at least, they were clearly foreign, but they were distinctive,
and they were also, I thought, pretty consistent as to like tribal name consistencies.
Yeah. So it was actually much easier to keep the fantasy name straight in these books,
and I've had in some much later books where it just, I mean, even as a reader, I get confused
as to who I was talking about. And they were cool names too. Like, I got to believe that everyone
who's ever written a fantasy book and has used made up names does it because they either think
they sound cool or because they want them to sound cool, but these did sound cool. Like Taras
Tarkas, that's a bitch in name if you're a warrior. I mean, the jet-ac of jet-axe, come on.
If you're at the jet-ac, you know who's in charge. All the races had jet-ac.
Well, yeah, because all their words were the same, they all spoke the same language,
so that made sense as well. And yeah, that must be a bad day if you're the jet-ac of
some race or tribe that thinks you're the hottest shit on Barsoom, and John Carter shows up,
that's got to be a bad day for you.
And actually, Jiz, that came later.
He was pretty much the boss too, except for Granny.
Well, I mean, that Granny had some balls, but at the end of the day, you never pulled
you would like to learn.
How about his kid, Carthoris? How about him? He should have only been a 10-year-old, right?
Freed me out for a minute.
Yeah, but when you grow up on Mars, 10 years is a hard 10 years, you know what I'm saying?
He was the jet-throw of the jet-axe.
Oh, that makes sense. He was a big boy. Got you.
Well, you remember the eggs? That's another thing. How do you have an egg?
Yeah, I was going to say that.
But I thought only the green Martians had eggs. Have I forgotten already?
Yes, sir. Yeah, I was at the end of the first book where they were, what, five or ten?
That was five Martians that stood guard around the high tower with the one small egg in it,
and that was Carthoris.
Oh, jeez. I guess I read these too long ago to remember.
Which means he should have only been five years old, but I do think I remember them standing
hatched like right away after John Carter disappeared back to Earth.
Well, remember, again, get ready to drink. Next generation, you know,
Klingon's grown to adulthood in about 10 years.
You know, Warf meets his son, and he's like an eight-year-old human.
And let's don't forget Morgan Mindy's kid hatched as a full grown old man.
These are hardly presidents for burrows.
Nobody take a drink for the Morgan Mindy joke. That was not drinkable.
I'm going to take a drink to try and forget that joke.
If I could have remembered his name, would you have laughed?
Possibly.
You know, you have the strange case of what's his and so popular ago.
That was from Merlin Benjamin Button.
Yeah, so everybody go get hammered.
I think we're a little past that point today, 50.
I know I am.
Oh, speaking of getting hammered, Mark, when you had a beer that was worth five
bloodlights and a half an hour, do you get hung over like that?
Because I get the worst hangovers if I even have just a little too much.
Well, fortunately, it was really, really early in the evening.
So I didn't suffer the next day.
But boy, I got the spins worse than I have in a long time, even intentionally.
Oh, I'm glad you didn't suffer the consequences of that.
So what's next?
That's all I can think of.
You wanted a suggestion for a next book.
Yes, good timing.
So since this falls to me as to be as Captain Newby, I focused on three.
I'm not sure about your rule.
So I'm going to give you a general description of each of these.
And maybe you can decide from there where you want to go.
So I've got a book, a sci-fi.
I heard on patio books some years ago.
I really liked option A, option B, a book that I have not heard.
But I know that narrator and the author and I think it would be very good.
And has been very well received.
And it's on LibraVox and patio books.
And third, I have a mystery novel on patio books that happens to be one of my recordings.
So what do you think?
Oh man, all three of them are fair game.
Jeez, I don't know.
I abstain from the vote.
I would suggest the mystery one just because it's different
enough from what we usually do that it will be a nice change of pace.
Anybody else have thoughts there?
Well, I hope whichever way we go, we talk about all three.
They all sound like interesting books I'd like to read.
Yeah, I was going to suggest that we, like very often, we have a section in our show notes
where we say if you liked this book or if you liked what we talked about tonight,
you should check out these other things.
So whatever book it is you do recommend, we still want the other two.
Especially for me, especially when you said you really liked.
Other than that, I don't have an opinion.
I have no idea.
It's I can't choose.
Don't make me choose.
Okay, so like I said, like I said, but never said it was sci-fi, but
trappings of sci-fi.
Okay.
Oh, did you literally mean that the genre is mystery?
Not that it was mysterious in nature.
No, the genre is mystery.
Oh, I see, and that's why I thought it was a good idea,
because we do tend to stick to sci-fi and fantasy stuff so much here.
No, the last one was the fantasy mystery.
It was a fantasy book that also was a mystery,
but it fell solidly in the sci-fi and fantasy realm.
So your pleasure is what?
Let's check it out.
Let's do the mystery.
I always like a mystery.
All right.
The book is See You At The Morgue by Robert Blockman.
It's on potty books.
It's Creative Commons.
The text was made available by Wonder Audio Books.
By my good friend, Rick Jackson in Michigan.
So that would be number one.
The other two, I had in mind,
there's Crescent by Phil Rossi, which is on potty books.
And the other is Badge of Infamy,
a classic sci-fi by Lester Del Rey,
read by the excellent Steve Wilson.
That's both on potty books and Libbervox.
I am both glad and heartbroken
that we didn't pick Badge of Infamy,
because that was the first book we ever did on an audio book club.
So I bailed you out, I guess.
Yeah, though Crescent was good too.
I liked Crescent.
And Phil Rossi has one of the bitchenest voices in all of voice acting.
It was very, very well read.
I was very impressed.
I enjoyed that a whole lot.
Badge of Infamy was very good.
So both sci-fi were good to listen to that.
And actually now that you mentioned it of the three,
see you at the morgue is the only one I haven't heard.
So yeah, excellent.
So the little backstory on that is the first sci-fi book I ever recorded
was The Green Odyssey by Philip Jose Farmer.
It was a result of a contest put up by SFF Audio,
by Jesse Willis, recorded an audio book,
Winner Audio Book.
And that one by one day over Badge of Infamy.
Oh, what could cool.
And bitchen, even.
It was quite bitchen.
And in fact, that's where I got see you at the morgue.
It was like from his recorded audio book,
Winner Audio Book, contest number four.
So that's how I got a hold of that text and why I ended up making it.
How can this not be a good book with the first sentences?
When a jiggle-o is shot to dead.
It's a death in the bedroom of a beautiful girl.
That's an awesome beginning to a book.
Sold.
Yeah, so that's excellent.
All right, so that is our next book.
See you at the morgue.
Lawrence G. Blachman,
narrated by a Mark Douglas Nelson.
The guy's pretty cool, I've heard available on podiobooks.com.
And we will be recording that.
Let me check my calendar real quick.
Wow, I can believe it would be October already.
October 8th, 8 p.m. Eastern time on our regular mumble server.
If you want to join in and haven't been able to and don't know where to find us,
all of our information is available on hackerpublicradio.org.
You can subscribe to the hacker public radio mailing list
and or email us at hpr at hackerpublicradio.org.
And we'll get you on the list and get to the info to get here.
Before we go, I'm looking at, I'm looking at, I believe,
the channel I've been following on Facebook is Tales of the Solar Clipper.
Nathan Lowe, and he is at the beta point of the first trilogy,
starring our old friend,
Ishmael Horatio Wang,
he's three new Ishmael Wang books in the series.
He's released the first one for people to give comment.
Unfortunately, I wasn't getting in on the ground.
Probably they will hit them sort of a tronic book before there's an audio,
but eventually the plan is for to hit podio.
There is not enough bitching to describe that news.
Or Nathan Lowe, in general, true story.
Let me scroll down see if I can't fuzz.
There's always stuff in there.
Let me see if I can't.
I'm willing to bet that I already have
see you at the more downloaded,
because it's such a cool name.
I'm sure I've downloaded this book before
and just haven't gotten around to it.
Now that we've gotten Nathan Lowe writing again,
we've got to get lost in Bronx back on Star Drifter.
He's doing all this other stuff.
He needs to drop it and just get back on Star Drifter.
Oh yeah, right.
Oh, wow, there's a neat tie in there
because I meant to ask Mark about it.
The, you mentioned the other sci-fi writer
who had ridiculous names and all of his stuff.
What was that name again?
H.B.M. Piper.
H.B.M. Piper, that's right.
That was the other book that Nathan Lowe read.
The one that wasn't his was H.B.M. Piper's book, Time Crime.
That was a fantastic story too,
if no one's ever heard that.
Yeah, I've cut that one up on Lipper Box as well.
Oh, that's cool.
I'd like to compare him.
The group is golden to the floor clipper.
All right, I need to wrap this up too.
I'm spent for the day.
Yeah, me too.
All right, anybody else get any closing thoughts
besides being spent?
I want to thank Mark for coming on.
It was nice to have you here and just kind of geek out about this stuff.
It was, you were a great contributor to the Pike Essence Unit.
Thank you very much.
Good call, Todd.
I'd go further and invite him on to
our group in the future if he has time and the interest.
Well, of course, that's a good point though for both of you
because that shouldn't go unspoken, either the thanks
or the come back any time.
Surely, not sure how you guys ended up inviting me,
but it was a surprise when I got it,
and I'm thoroughly enjoyed it.
Well, a lot of times we'll invite the author,
but Edgar Rice Burrows is dead.
And I'm not quite there.
Or he's just on Barsoom.
So thank you all for listening to this show.
This episode of Hacker Public Radio.
It's thanks to Hacker Public Radio for hosting us.
It's a fantastic public service,
truly a service to the public.
Anybody can participate in Hacker Public Radio
or our HPR Audio Book Club.
And in fact, not only are you invited to do so,
but it's actually required if you listen.
You're required to produce a show
because we need the content.
We need the help and we need the participation
from the community.
And that's you.
Thanks everyone for listening.
Thanks to everyone who came on the show.
Thanks for having me along too.
And continuing to allow me to be part of the community.
And thanks everyone there and here and everyone involved.
Bye-bye.
Good night, everyone.
Peace.
Before we get started, I have to say I tried to watch the movie.
John Carter.
I made it 30 minutes before I just got so mad I had to turn it off.
You can only go so long before you're like wrong,
wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, before it's just like,
no, okay, I just can't do this anymore.
Why is this before we start?
This is so legitimate and valid to the review.
Oh, I'll say it again.
Here's the funny thing about how messed up that movie was.
There's a whole book about how Disney botched that movie.
No, that's a different movie, right?
Oh, no, that's right.
The John Carter one was the Disney movie and the Princess of Mars was
another one that got even worse ratings.
Got terrible ratings.
As I said, I watched 30 minutes of it,
but I'm not sure how it can get worse than that movie.
I ducked out for a glass of Merlot.
So I missed the lead up to that.
Um, I did not watch John Carter after I saw the commercial
and they did the oldest, oldest, oldest sci-fi.
My name is Virginia, so and so for Virginia.
Oh, Virginia, I went, oh my God,
this movie is going to be horrible.
I was saying that I borrowed it from a friend last weekend.
Oh, goodness.
To not poke you had it on the schedule for Wednesdays week.
Well, he was wrong.
Okay, I take it back.
Poke is a bad person.
No, I looked, I couldn't find it on my calendar at all 50.
I think there's something going on.
There's something, there's something erred out there.
To 50, he left.
What happened?
At least it got his old internet connection back up.
I've been on two podcast with him this week and it was basically the,
let's just count how long it takes for 50 to drop off game.
I made it about 30 minutes into the movie before all of the glaring wrongness just made it so I couldn't,
I couldn't deal.
Can I just add that I actually kind of liked it in like a terrible totally guilty way?
I didn't think it was that bad.
No, I expected to feel that way, but I didn't.
Anywho.
See, that's how I feel watching Starship Troopers after having read the book.
Yeah, but they're totally different and totally awesome in their own respective ways.
My friend pointed out something that if you watch the movie thinking about this,
it makes it a lot better, is that they made Starship Troopers as a parody of the book.
Pretty much every time they're hoven direct something, it's a parody of the original.
So that's probably kind of the point.
But if you watch the movie thinking that it's a parody, it gets a lot better.
Along those same lines, the movie Iraqophobia was originally supposed to be a comedy.
I thought it was like spoiler still is.
Parts of it are now.
I thought it was funny.
I remember watching that movie as a kid.
I was terrified.
That was what last week?
Week before?
Wow, is he just going to keep dropping like that?
I was just trying to figure out how old x1101 was when that movie came out.
Well, rather than having you take off your socks and shoes and counting on your toes,
when did it come out and I'll tell you.
I think that movie was pre-x1101.
I don't know.
I don't even know what it came out.
Let me look it up.
I'm going to guess that it was 87 or 88.
Close, 1990.
Oh, come on.
I'm not that young.
I was born in 86.
I also can't accept close, even though it was, you know, two years.
It's a decade.
You're rounding his bed and you should feel bad.
Again, bad person.
Taj, was it you I was talking about Borderlands 2 last time?
Yes.
So as part of the in the second one, it's part of the downloadable content that you play after beating the game.
One of the one of the little side things is quite literally a D&D campaign run by a psychotic 12-year-old.
What?
Give me just a second.
I will pull up a link, but it's ridiculous and wonderful.
Sorry, Mark.
Go ahead.
I didn't mean to push the button over yet.
I'm not hearing anything from you, Mark.
Oh, I wasn't saying anything.
Oh, okay.
Sorry.
I thought the lips lit up.
I thought you were trying to talk.
Where are my lips?
Okay.
So before we start the show proper, because I don't want to promote something non-free on the show.
Has anybody read the Martian yet?
I listen to the audiobook and it is wonderful.
JC Bray is brilliant.
Get the audiobook, not the book.
Yeah, I'm about three quarters of the way through the audiobook.
I'm glad you mentioned that and it is so good.
I cannot wait for this movie.
It's going to be great.
There were several laugh out loud sections in that book.
I'd be listening to my headphones in the house and suddenly go fall.
And my wife would look at me and what?
I love the headphone laugh, especially it worked.
And people have to like prairie dog over the cubicles to see what you're laughing at.
I won't spoil the jokes, though.
My wife wanted to synopsis, because she's interested in seeing
the movie, but she's a pretty avid reader.
So she's like, should I read the book?
And I was like, well, imagine like a really smart me got stranded on Mars.
And she was like, no, thank you.
I love that life.
Well, I haven't read the book.
And of course, I haven't seen the movie yet, which I may or may not.
But of the two books that I think I would say get the audiobook over anything else.
Number one, I legend to the Martian.
I heard Harry Potter, if you're going to do that, is also better as an audiobook.
But I'm not going to do that.
I don't want you guys to think that about me too late.
Harry Potter, I think I read that already.
All right.
I feel really guilty starting before 50 gets his internet connection worked out.
But I am, I am really eager to start this first.
I'm really eager to start for a couple of reasons.
Mostly they're selfish as opposed to any other time.
Oh, no, I'm usually pretty selfless.
I think I try to be.
I'm just giving you a hard time, Bogey.
Oh, okay.
It may be a bad person, but not because I'm selfish.
Stupid question.
Who's actually in charge here?
You are.
You were the one going to assign our next audiobook.
No, I meant of the discussion.
It's a round table.
We like to think of it as controlled chaos.
Emphasis only chaos, not the control.
Okay, then.
It I've been around the longest and a founding member of the audiobook club,
but I really, really do my best to emphasize that it is not mine.
It is a community thing.
Insert, Pokey is old joke.
Let me go pull those off the stone table.
I have the written on.
All right.
So would you guys mind if we get started?
No, let's go.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio
at HackerPublicRadio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast,
you click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by
an onsthost.com, the internet archive, and our sings.net.
On this otherwise status, today's show is released on our Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License.