I generally dislike serial TV. Breaking Bad and Sports Night are the only series I ever watched end-to-end. And I watched a ton of X-Files back when I had an antenna on the TV. Lost, Six Feet Under, Better Call Saul - all lost me by the end of the 2nd season. I don't like investing in these things just to have the storytelling fall flat. I hate walking away in the middle of a story, but I'm not going to sit through 60 hours of filler just to find out what happens. TV serials - at some point - always fall into the trap of filling a season instead telling a story. The Walking Dead did the same thing to me. They got so high on their own importance that it seemed they thought all they had to do was tease a death at the end/beginning of the season and I'd come back for another 12 hours to find out who. Nope. I'm out. So anyway, usually no TV for me, unless it's old Twilight Zones or Outer Limits. Anyone remember Eerie Indiana?
I'll cop to enjoying The OA and Stranger Things, but they're still in the single season probationary period.
I often wonder what I'm doing here because I don't read blogs - or other screen-bound materials because I prefer not to read off of screens. I've tried ebooks on my phone and tablet with minimal success. It's just not the same as an actual book. Clearcut the forests for my entertainment.
I prefer nice, heavy hardcovers. Paperbacks are good, but too floppy. Too many ads in magazines. And with a new baby in the house, what little time I had to chill with some reading material has gotten even smaller.
I don't pay for cable. I have some very fine friends who allow me to piggyback their Netflix and Hulu logins. Every so often I get a coupon for Redox and spend 25 cents on a rental. But that's it. Kids, mortgage, groceries. I don't even compulsively buy used books at Barnes & Noble anymore.
If it ain't free, I ain't gettin' it.
Which is why I love some of the podcasts I've found recently. Fiction podcasts are the absolute funky shit. I have a lot of long days of simple, monotonous work and on those days I just plug in and listen.
This is where it started for me:
OpenCulture: Just an endless list of free stories. All public domain. Mostly semi-pro reads done thru Librivox If you're a HorrorHead like me, this is a great way to experience HP Lovecraft. But that's just a few of the roughly 900 free stories. Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and more.
That led me to what is one of my favorite corners of the internet: The New Yorker Fiction Podcast. The New Yorker is famed for its fiction and with good reason. What I really dig about this program is that it features an author who has been published in The New Yorker reading a story from the New Yorker that they love. That's already a nice little bit of geek fun, but it gets better because, after the reading, they do a little dissection/discussion about it with Deborah Treisman, the New Yorker's fiction editor. The discussions feel very informal and friendly. I almost always feel invited to interject on some point. Sort of the literary equivalent of a good commentary track on a DVD.
The NewYorker also has The Writer's Voice. Simple. no-frills. Just a recently published story read by the author.
As a horror/fantasy/sci-fi type guy, the New Yorker products keep me from staying insulated in my little genre bubble.
As for the Genre Bubble, I like The Nightmare Magazine Stories Podcast. Horror at a literary level, I suppose. Here, you'll find horror from all corners of the globe read by a few excellent readers. One of the shortcomings of a lot of podcasts and the like is that many people just aren't up to the task of reading aloud and simply butcher everything they read. Nightmare does not disappoint.
Next is Clarkesworld. Clarkesworld is a wide variety of sic-fi. Not my area of expertise, but it seems to be some of the best in the game represented here. All stories are read by Kate Baker. To her credit, she never gets old or falls flat.
I just added Pseudopod and Escape Pod to my podcasts and am quite happy with these as well. Both are audio only platforms for horror and sci-fi, respectively.
Those are the way I get my reading fix in a life that's often just too busy to keep my nose in a book for more than 30 seconds at a time.
And if another person says to me that I should be watching Game of Thrones, I might strangle them. "yeah, but it's got nudity and violence" is not sufficient to get me to commit to staring at a TV for 80 hours - and it makes me question a person's genetic diversity when that's their evidence for it being a good show.
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