Radio Active #14: Podcast Updates, Saturn Reviewed

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Radio Active PodcastUpdates on Radio Active, including why #14 was delayed and how much bandwidth the podcast is consuming, and news about a new RPG podcast called Dice Go Bonk.

There’s also a review of Ben Bova’s hard science fiction novel Saturn.

Getting the Podcast

Show Notes

  • Neo Matrix Quote
  • Transitions
    • On Delays
      • Sorry for the delay in getting out Radio Active #14 — since the last podcast I’ve left my old job, gone on vacation and started my new, much, much closer job, all of which didn’t leave much time for anything Nuketown related.
      • Things should start returning to something resembling normal this week … once we figure out what normal is.
    • On Podcasts & Warcraft
      • Figured out how to fill part of the podcast time shortfall left by the death of my 2-hour commute: listening during World of Warcraft. Just cue ’em up in iTunes and I’m off.
    • On Bandwidth
      • And finally … moving to Nuketown’s new server has allowed me to start to get a handle on how much traffic Radio Active is generating. I decided to move Radio Active #13 over from .mac to nuketown.com, and whoa …
      • Halfway through the month, Nuketown has uses 13.9 gb of traffic.
      • Show file generated 3018 hits (though I’m sure that’s not the same as the number of people who actually downloaded the shows as those numbers are usually hyper inflated
      • Interestingly saw initial surge of traffic after show went live around Aug 12/13, and then a HUGE surge on Aug 19/20.
      • I think I may go back to .Mac for the recent shows, and put the older shows on the main server, and see how that does.
  • Science Fiction Podcast Network Promo
  • Podcasts of Note
    • Revised Podcast Directory
    • Dice Make Bonk
      • http://www.noirchickenstudios.com/Dice_Make_Bonk/ [Web Archive]
      • From the site: “Two guys pontificate, wrangle and generally shoot the breeze about tabletop roleplaying”
  • Geek Fu Action Grip Promo
  • Mur Lafertty’s “I Should Be Writing
  • Book Review: Saturn
    • by Ben Bova
    • 480 pages
    • Tor Books
    • Buy it from Amazon
    • An uneven book about 10,000 scientists, free thinkers and other malcontents exiled to Saturn by the religious fundamentalist government of Earth.
    • They travel there on a gigantic, cylindrical space habitat called Goddard.
    • The set-up is grand and the space habitat is an intoxicating idea … if one that’s poorly executed. The habitat is home to 10,000 people, but strangely only has two restaurants (one things that Bova has never actually been to a town with 10,000 people — I did, and Lock Haven PA, while a small college town, did have more than two restaurants…
    • The science is fun — particularly the details of how Goddard operates and the intricacies of the Saturn system.
    • But where it all falls apart is the politics. Goddard is home to a bunch of freethinkers, but the fundementalists aren’t about to allow this little ideological hodgepodge to go ungoverned. They seed the exiles’ population with loyalists intent on establishing a fundamentalist government on the station.
    • Utterly ruthless (and horribly stereotyped) these individuals rally around a man named Avery, who orchestrates a conspiracy to win public approval for a very democratic, very individualist constitution … but with a clause that will allow him to declare martial law and establish a Soviet-cum-Jerry Falwell theocracy.
    • Opposing him and his cadre are … no one. Despite allegeldy being a bunch of freethinking individualists, the population of the habitat are portrayed as either being unthinking followers who latch on to Avery’s message, or passive drones too caught up in their own lives to pay attention to the manuevers toward dictatorship.
    • The only one who has a clue what’s going on — the station administrator — refuses to act because it would interfere with the great “social experiment” that is Goddard.
    • The lack of any meaningful opposition to Avery and his lackies is frustrating and unrealistic — I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be at least a handful of individuals among the 10,000 on the station that might not be suspicious of Avery’s rhetoric (anyone who so loudly and frequently wraps himself in words like “liberty” and “freedom” inevitably ends up being a tyrant)
  • Contacting Radio Active

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