In The Realm Of The Free

Where is my tour guide?

I had previously mentioned that there were 6 GB of free music from the South by Southwest available as bit torrents.

That's around 60 hours of free music! Well over 1000 songs, one song per artist.

How do you even know what to listen to in that mass of musical notes?

You need a tour guide.

How do you find the tour guide?

NPR's Sound Opinions has some of that covered in this podcast.

But really, in the morass of free everything, when the lowest common denominator is free, then all normal distribution channels, which in some part are conveyors of worth, the music worth listening to, the movies worth watching, the books worth reading, are completely destroyed.

What then to rely upon? the internet? blog posts, podcasts, forums, tweets?

A community of people who may or may not have worthwhile opinions.

Are we back to the village square, carved out of the digital milieu?

So much noise for so little signal.

Whither the kingmaker?

Subliminal

Extruding America - a podcast I picked up from the Podcast Awards is just very, very strange.

"Searching for the heart of a nation in the throat of it's people."

Subliminal. Tragedy or comedy?

Sci-Fi Podcasts - Cinema/Film

Out riding my bike and listening to podcasts, I managed to listen to two in a row that were both interesting and relevant to film and cinema, both found on Escape Pod:

Episode 105: Impossible Dreams (Tim Pratt) - is about film and cinema, but not the film and cinema that you know about.
Episode 107: Eight Little Stories (Robert Reed) - a dull sci-fi series broadcast on TV is cancelled, but is that all there is to the story?

If you know cinema, the first one has some fairly hilarious moments. The second is not as funny or quirky but there is a definite relevance to the present mediascape.

Both are available at Asimov's (Impossible Dreams, Eight Little Stories) and both are Hugo Nominees.

Marino Interviewed

At the Aussie Machinima Festival, Paul Marino was interviewed by a guy who has a video podcast (filmed by Thomas Reynolds - podcast by Cameron Reilly - GDay World). It covers quite a few of the topics that were already mentioned/discussed/thrown about at the NY festival, but it's a nice introduction to machinima and there are a few new gems of wisdom/information.