Countdown to comedy

Here's a couple more recent entries into the 2000AD forum short story competition. This one was for a television themed contest. I'm not entirely happy with it and it didn't trouble the scorers. I still can't resist the last line reveal of a well known 2000AD character.

Down for the Count

The studio lights glared down on the simple set, four desks, a letter board, and the clock that gave the show its name. The red light lit up on the Tri-D camera as the floor manager silently counted down from five and then pointed at the host.

"Welcome back to the world's longest running quiz show, I'm Nat Bunderson. Just before the break the delightful Delilah had picked nine tricky letters for our contestants, let's see what they made of them. First of all our defending champion, Reg Trunion. How many, Reg?"

"Only five I'm afraid, POLKAS, like the dance."

"Very musical, Reg. And our challenger, Jam Bepy?"

"Nine, APOKALIPS, as in the war."

"That's rather an unusual spelling, we better go over to dictionary corner. What do you make of that, OED-1?

"[Unusual but accepted spelling variant. 20th century usage. Judgement = allowed]"

"Another nine pointer, Jam, continuing the strange spelling from your first round winner of Nekroplis?"

"Just dumb luck, Nat"

"Let's see if that luck lasts. Onto round three and back to our lovely lady of letters. What have you get for our wordsmiths, Delilah."

"Here they come from the random letter generator.

DINOMIGHT

Another strange selection, Nat."

"Strange and almost explosive, Delilah. OK, contestants, your thirty seconds start now!"

The single hand on the clock began to move as the familiar music faded in. Reg Trunion was scribbling furiously but Jam Bepy seemed to be struggling with his pencil. Their deliberations were suddenly interrupted as the floor manager ran on to the set waving her arms and shouting loudly.

"Bomb! There's a bomb in the clock! Clear the set now. Oh Grud, someone stop the countdown!"

The explosion ripped through the studio, destroying the three desks nearest the clock, and the dictionary computer. As the smoke cleared the production crew looked on appalled at the devastation. Both presenters, the floor manager and one of the contestants were dead. Only Bepy had survived, shielded from the blast as he scrambled under the steel desk to retrieve his dropped pencil.

A production assistant with a clipboard and a headset strode through the carnage issuing instructions to summon paramedics and judges. She took the dazed Bepy by his elbow and led him away from the mayhem.

"This way, sir, we'll make you comfy in the green room. I expect the judges will want a statement later, then I'll need you to sign a release form and talk about you coming back for next week's show."

"Next week? I sort of planned on this being a one off performance. Will there be another show?"

"Of course there will. C4 won't want to break the streak. If Chaos day can't stop us then neither will this. The show must go on and you'll be back as defending champion."

"Champion? I do like the sound of that. Can I think about it?"

"Of course. For now I'll just put you down as a definite maybe."

Adventures in podcasting: 3

By this stage I had four episodes recorded and edited. I had turned them into mp3 files using Audacity and used a program called ID3 editor to edit the metadata tags on each episode. Thankfully it was a pretty straight forward job to create individual artwork for each episode and attach that to the mp3s with the editor so that you see something like this when the episode is playing in your mobile podcatcher.

The next job was finding somewhere to host the files online so that iTunes and other podcatchers can find and download them. Fortunately Brian had plenty of spare space and bandwidth on the Dreamhost server he uses for British Invaders so I was able to share this and have my own folders on the server and use a simple program called WinSCP to upload the files just by dragging and dropping.

I originally intended to use this blog to publish the episodes and build the feed from, and in fact the first episode was posted here. However I realised it was so easy to create a blogsite called megacitybookclub.blogspot.co.uk that I might as well give the podcast its own dedicated page. That means I can still post odd rambling stuff here without clogging up the podcast feed, although I will still be posting the episodes here as well.

Reading articles about podcast feeds gave me the general feeling that a lot of this stuff would be easier with a wordpress site instead of blogger but this page pointed me in the right direction. First of all I needed to set the blog to accept enclosure links, this means that blog posts can include mp3 files hidden within them. This is just a case of ticking a box on the settings page as described here, once that was done I created the post for the first episode and added the link to my mp3 file on the Dreamhost server.

I also wanted an audio player in the episode posting and this meant adding another bit of html to the page which I copied from this site here so that a simple player would appear at the bottom of the posts like this.

Then all that was needed was to tag each episode post with the label 'podcast' and I was ready to build the feed which I would submit to iTunes. Using the links from the pages above told me that the blog podcast feed would be:

http://megacitybookclub.blogspot.co.uk/feeds/posts/default/-/podcast

Almost there but there were a few more bits and pieces to add to make it suitable for iTunes. I used google's feed creation service Feedburner to do the final tinkering. I've read various articles suggesting google might scrap feedburner at some point and that I should be using a service called Blubrry, but these warnings mainly come from Blubrry themselves and their service only seems to integrate with wordpress sites at the moment so I have gone with feedburner.

The feedburner control panel let me add a brief description of the podcast and my logo artwork. For iTunes this needs to be a 3000 x 3000 pixel image at 72dpi. More details about iTunes and image files here. Once done this produced the final podcast feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MegaCityBookClub

All that remained was to go to the iTunes connect service and submit this feed. You need an apple ID to sign in with and then they have their podcast review process before it becomes available in the iTunes store. I got an email from apple telling me they were reviewing the podcast and then a few days later I found that it was showing up in iTunes searches and I was able to start publicising the link to the whole world. I still haven't received an email confirming that my podcast was approved but it's out there in the wild now and people can find it with their podcatchers.

Adventures in podcasting: 2

Way back when I was just filling in as a guest host I was using a gaming headset to record for British Invaders. Once my guest spot became a regular deal I upgraded to a nice Blue Yeti usb microphone which has been OK so far. I use the free software Audacity to record my end of our discussions and then upload a wav file to Brian who stitches the two halves together and does all the editing magic.

It's a pretty good system that has worked well for us so far, but for Mega City Book Club I have a revolving panel of guests to record and obviously I am dependent on whatever kit they have or can lay their hands on. I'm using Call Burner for Skype which records both ends of our conversations as two separate wav files. So far I have carried on using audacity to edit the first four episodes but I am now learning how to use Sound Forge 10 as I strive for a more professional result.

I have also used audacity to turn my edited audio into the final mp3 files. I was advised by a couple of people that iTunes does a better job of this but strangely my results seem to have a lower quality than I wanted so I'm sticking with audacity until I master Sound Forge.

There's nothing like starting a podcast to send you to amazon to upgrade your kit and a recent spending spree has produced a Shure SV100 and a Focusrite Scarlett interface to connect it to my computer. My office is starting to look like a recording studio. I've also bought a Tascam digital recorder to use when I'm out and about. I used it to record episode four with Tony Richards which we did upstairs in a pub in central London.

Although the pub cast may sound a little rough we will see whether my new kit and software helps my future episodes sound more professional.

Adventures in podcasting: 1

It's been an exciting few weeks as I've discovered the basics of publishing my own podcast. I thought I would record some notes here as an aide memoir, and possibly as tips for anyone considering taking the plunge themselves.

First of all I have to acknowledge the help and inspiration of Brian Doob who encouraged and inspired me to start a comics cast. Brian is the driving force behind the British Invaders podcast that we do about British television genre television, he is also an audio expert and guided me through some of the basics of recording and editing, of which more in a later post.

I had been thinking of doing a 2000AD podcast for a while. With the ECBT2000AD cast covering individual progs and megazines I felt that the obvious gap in the market would be to do collected editions, which would allow me to cover stories from the full 39 year history of the comic. In a way it echoes the thematic intent of the volumes currently being published by the Hachette partworks Mega Collection. Brian suggested I could tie this in to my fundraising efforts from getting comics signed at convention and then selling them on eBay for cancer research UK.

My working title for the podcast was Trading Places which sounds daft now and completely non specific. Fortunately I woke up one morning with Mega City Book Club in my head, I liked the way it combined four words all of four letters each, it was catchy and seemed to work nicely. Brian suggested I register it as a domain name. There are several sites offering registration and all sorts of extras as well. I chose Hover and was able to secure www.megacitybookclub.com using a discount coupon code from another podcast I listen to, A Cast of Kings. My domain name forwards to the podcast blog site, and after fiddling around with the settings on Hover I learnt that ticking the stealth redirection box meant that it still shows megacitybookclub.com in the address bar when your browser gets there.

So I had a title and a domain name, the next thing was to open up Photoshop and design a logo. I spent a lot of time working on a design based on the space spinner free gift attached to the very first issue of 2000AD, but it was difficult to get good quality images of the original toy to play with. The resulting logo ended up looking decidedly amateurish.

I didn't like this at all and was considering paying an online design company when a random google search for Judge Dredd's law book brought up this prop from the much maligned Stallone 1995 movie.

As luck would have it the google images were from none other than Judge John Burdis' own Cellar of Dredd blog although sadly the pictures were not quite good enough to work with in photoshop. So a quick visit to eBay and I soon had my own copy of the book on its way from Hong Kong. It's an odd little notebook with mega city one legal codes printed on the bottom of the pages. Even with my own copy getting a decent photo of the front cover with equal lighting on all the shiny gold lettering was tricky but after a lot of fiddly photoshop manipulation I was able to produce the logo you can see at the top of this post and it looks much more professional in iTunes and on my phone podcatcher.

Next up will be some details of recording and editing before I get on to the complications of preparing individual episodes for publication, and the tricky business of getting a feed and submitting it to iTunes.

Mega City Book Club 2: America

I'm joined by the irrepressible Pete Wells from the 2000AD Covers Uncovered blog to discuss one of the definitive Dredd tales: America. We talk about the original story and the two sequels, Fading of the Light and Cadet. Please note there are spoilers for all three chapters and you should really read these great stories before listening.

The Complete America can be purchased from the 2000AD online store.

Please like us on facebook and follow us on twitter or email the show MCBCpodcast@gmail.com

All comments and suggestions gratefully received. Please get in touch if you would like to be a guest on the show.

Download here
Right click and choose save link as to download to your computer.

New podcast page

Excuse me while I tinker behind the scenes. I've given the podcast its own dedicated page at

megacitybookclub.blogspot.co.uk or megacitybookclub.com which redirects there.

Please update your bookmarks.

I've updated the feed so you may find episode one showing up in your podcatcher, apologies for that. Won't happen again.

I'll still be posting the episodes here as well on on the main page but this blog will soon be reverting to its old title and format for random postings from an aging geekster.

Thank you for your attention.

Eamonn

Mega City Book Club 1: Dan Dare volume one

It's the first episode of a new podcast dedicated to all the collected editions from 2000AD and Rebellion publishing. I'm your host Eamonn Clarke and for this first outing I'm joined by Simon Belmont to discuss the lovely hardback that is Dan Dare: The 2000AD years volume one.

You can find the 2000AD Thrill Cast episode where Pat Mills discussed the Dan Dare collection with Michael Molcher here.

Please check out my justgiving site link on the right of this page, and do head to 2000ADonline.com to purchase your copy of Dan Dare or any of their splendid books.

You can like the facebook page and follow Mega City Book Club on Twitter @MCBCpodcast

All comments and suggestions gratefully received. Please get in touch if you would like to be a guest on the show.

Download here