At some point during a weekend of beer and roleplaying a good friend of mine, “Big Dave”, very conspiratorially lent down to my height and gave me a slip of paper containing the web addresses of a series of RSS podcast feeds, along with a recommendation to give them a try. Now I get through podcasts at a fairly rapid rate of knots given that I use them to pass the time on my daily commute to and from London, so I’m always willing to listen to something new. The three that Dave recommended are truly excellent and warrant a mention here at miskatonic.co.uk
Pseudopod (http://www.pseudopod.org) is a Horror Fiction podcast magazine; a very professional and slick audio magazine, online and free to listen. If you enjoy the content, then Psuedopod and its sister sites ask you to make a donation (“feed the pod”) this has become a popular way to help fund many fan based sites these days, (including miskatonic.co.uk – feel free to donate a beer by clicking the link at the end of this article).
Like a traditional magazine new stories are released every week, in this case as an mp3 file. They can be downloaded directly from the website, or better still if you use a pod-catcher program, (like iTunes, Media Centre or gPodder), then you can download the files automatically as they become available each week via the sites RSS feed (http://pseudopod.org/rss2).
In the few that I have listened to so far the audio quality has always been good, certainly good radio quality and I have had no problems with download speeds or navigating the sites. Most of the stories are around half an hour or slightly longer, which for me makes them ideal commuter listening material! They are all clearly and well read and significantly the audio content available through Pseudopod is provided under a “Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial –No Derivatives license” – which basically means you can download it for free, give it to anybody you want, burn it to CD and so on, providing that you attribute the work to the author and that you do not change the original files, or seek to make money from them.
Pseudopod began in August 2006 and presents a mix of both new and established authors. I would stress that unlike it sister sites Escape Pod (http://www.escapepod.org) and Pod Castle,(http://www.podcastle.org), Sci Fi and Fantasy respectively, Pseudopod does not contain stories suitable for children. Or certainly not any that I would recommend as such. Similarly, if you are a easily disturbed or offended, or of a sensitive disposition then I would suggest that it won’t be for you. If you like horror though, it is a great magazine.
I’ve mentioned the three magazines; Escape Pod was the original of the three, launching in May 2005. Like Pseudopod it features a mix of new and established authors, including some instantly recognisable names like Mike Resnick, David Brin, and Elizabeth Bear. Pod Castle is the newest magazine of the three, and it caters for the fantasy market, I’ve yet to listen to anything from these two, so can’t really offer much more insight – however if they are as high quality as Pseudopod then I know I will enjoy them.
