Category: Announcements

I will be participating in a panel at FTBCon on Sunday. FTBCon (Free Thought Blogs) is an all-online convention, a chance for a lot of people to get together and hangout while listening to people talk about atheist and skeptic issues. I proposed a panel on whether human immortality is a good thing or a bad idea  in principle when Myers first asked for submissions, and a few hours later I had managed to fall into this. :) I’ll be speaking withDavid Brin, PZ Myers, and Eliezer Yudkowsky, which is amazing as they’re all on a level significantly above mine. I guess there’s some advantages to moving quickly and organizing things. Anyone who’s seen any of these people speak before knows that this is going to be extremely cool, and very thought-provoking.

The panel will taking place over Google+ on Sunday, July 21st, at 12:00noon Pacific Time (GMT -7). To watch, go to PZ’s page here, it’ll start streaming at the appointed time. You can chat with other people (and submit questions to the moderators) right here. Afterwards the recording will be put on YouTube, I’ll post a link when it becomes available.

The full schedule of all FTBCon sessions is here. Wouldn’t ya know it, I’m on at the same time as the Atheists in Pop Culture panel, with Rebecca Watson. Curse the timing!

This is just a reminder that the podcast now comes out every other week. The next episode – 87b – will be available 5/29/13.

OK, I know this isn’t dignified, but I’m just barely suppressing a complete fan-boy moment right now. Zoe friggin Chace of NPR’s Planet Money agreed to do Penelope Clearwater for the podcast! And then recorded the lines and sent them to me!

If you don’t know Planet Money, they’re an economics show on NPR with a twice-weekly podcast. Zoe Chace is a regular and she has the most amazing voice (I once geeked out and made a sample clip for people who haven’t heard her yet). The inflection and accent just pull me in, it’s a joy to listen to.

As Penelope only has a few lines I managed to drop them in over the weekend. You can hear them here:

Chapters 1-6, and 9, have now been re-recorded and replaced. This was done in preparation for WorldCon 2012, both to bring the quality of the old episodes up to current standards, and to capture Eliezer’s recent re-writes. The break-neck pace of the past will not continue (2 episodes a week on top of a full time job is unsustainable), but I will continue to replace older episodes with new recordings over the next few months. The old files are still available in the Table of Contents, for the morbidly curious.

The iTunes feed has been updated, if anyone who was subscribed through iTunes isn’t getting new episodes, please let me know.

I had to get rid of the drop caps because they weren’t showing up in iTunes, resulting in the first letter of every description being dropped. That makes me sad, as I thought they were pretty, but c’est la vie.

LibSyn doesn’t support 301 redirects, so anyone who was using a non-iTunes feedreader will need to manually subscribe to the new feed. All the links are at the top of the sidebar (or near the bottom of the page if you’re viewing this on a mobile device).

Thanks for your support!

This podcast has been selected as a Finalist for the 2012 Parsec Awards (for Best New Speculative Fiction Podcaster/Team)! Thank you to whoever nominated me, it is an honor!