Consumed Podcast #14 is Live: Locke Lamora, Jo Walton, Battlestar Galactica, more

For the second episode in a row we managed to get all three hosts together: Nathanael Sylva, Max Cantor, and myself. This time we had an insane jumble of topics, two thirds of which we cut right before air. Still, we managed to cover a lot of distance, including the most book talk the podcast has ever seen, covering Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora, Jo Walton's Among Others, and Shirley Jackson's classic The Haunting of Hill House.

Eventually we shift to the television shows Max and Nat have been binging on, particularly Battlestar Galactica and Justice League Unlimited. Surprisingly, it's the superhero cartoon that gets more praise for its depth, while Max struggles to balance the narrative achievements in Battlestar against its racial and plotting issues.

We saved the weirdest part for last, discussing Frog Fractions, a free videogame that starts out parodying educational games and becomes a genre-bending work of art that I could only compare to Tristram Shandy. I'm not even sure how much Max left in of this conversation, because it goes to a lot of paces, including self-publishing, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, how pigeonholded Romance is, whether editors help or hinder creativity, and... well, you should really just hear it.

You can download the episode for free right here.

Consumed Podcast #13: Wreck It Ralph and Games Bonanza

It's been a long time since all three of us were in studio together, but that's our Thanksgiving gift to you! Nat, Max and I gathered to discuss a great range of topics. What stories exactly won't mainstream fiction tell? Is there a market for live-action short film? What drives an artist to compare his working conditions to the Holocaust?

And somehow this all revolved around videogames. We started with Wreck-It Ralph, which is adorable and quite appealing for audiences with any level of familiarity to old games. From there, we stretched into a documentary on videogames development and how nuts it drives programmers, then sampled the fruits of their labors with some of the incredibly unusual approaches to games available on Steam and XBLA. Nat winds up calling one of them "Portal as written by Douglas Adams." Which was it? Click through this link to find out!