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Episode 42: A Faith Demand Moment

June 7th, 2013 | Robin

First up, Ken and Robin enter the Gaming Hut to transcend their origins and discuss transhuman RPGs. How do we create inhuman characters human players can still portray?

In the Tradecraft Hut, we discuss the implications of the Obama administration’s war on leakers, and how to bring press revelations into your espionage gaming.

Robin then bows to popular demand with a Politics Hut Rob Ford update, this one covering the first thirteen days of the Toronto mayor’s crack video problems. (Warning: contents of scandal may have shifted our recording date.)

Finally Ken’s Time Machine revs up, with an account of how Ken altered our timeline to keep the 1928 Baltimore space program an amusing footnote, and not a historical catastrophe.

19 Responses to “Episode 42: A Faith Demand Moment”

  1. GB Steve says:

    That sounds amazing. I’d never heard of the Baltimore Space Program. I found this clipping from 1969 which mentions it.

  2. Ian says:

    Ken, can we use the time machine to end the war with the Krell? Its getting pretty rough out here.

  3. Chris Tavares says:

    Hey guys, just wanted to mention there appears to be an error in your RSS feed, and I’m unable to download the latest episode. Any chance you could check it? Thanks!

    • Robin says:

      Another user reported a temporary problem that was resolved by unsubbing and resubscribing. Not sure what the issue is.

      • Scott says:

        Unsubscribing and resubscribing did not help me. Still says there is an error. When I load the feed page in a browser, it also lists an error. I can’t fix it on my end, so I’m hoping you all can fix it on your end. Thanks so much for any help!

        • RogerBW says:

          It’s an invalid character in the entry for the latest episode, brought on by the use of smart quotes rather than normal ASCII combined with a character handling bug in the site engine. The W3 feed validator goes into more detail; it’s specifically in the itunes:subtitle section, just before the square brackets at the end. Line 78 in the validator.

          The site engine has chopped off the text of the subtitle entry at a specific number of bytes, but that number of bytes leaves the multi-byte UTF-8-encoded character that’s the apostrophe fragmented and invalid.

          • Scott says:

            Is there anything that an end user like me can do to get the feed going again on my end?

          • RogerBW says:

            No. It’s invalid. If it works for anybody that’s a bug, and potentially a bad one, in their client software.

            What you can do is simply download the MP3 file and play it.

          • Robin says:

            I’ve edited the curly apostrophe into a straight apostrophe in the post. Does that get anyone anywhere?

            If not I’ll bug our webmeister about it tomorrow.

          • Seems to be working now. Am listening via my Squeezebox now. Thanks!

          • Scott says:

            Thanks so much, Robin! That did it, and now it’s on my mp3 player. ::thumbsup:: Woohoo, a new episode of the best podcast!

          • Robin says:

            The client I compose posts in routinely uses smart quotes, so I’m surprised that this didn’t crop up before now. Will keep an eye out for them in future.

          • RogerBW says:

            It’ll only happen if a multibyte character happens to hit the byte length cutoff for the itunes:subtitle – they’re fine earlier or later in the description.

      • Can confirm this is still an issue, regardless of subscription.

  4. Judd M. Goswick says:

    I think you might have oversold how alien the mindset is in trans-human fiction. I think you were thinking of post-humans, which are mostly a scary background concept in H+ fiction. Post-humans are humans that have been caught up in a singularity (which is a developmental one, not a quantum one, because that would be bad).

    That being said, the advice was very good. Most trans-humans in the genre are just people with understandable agendas and motives who have access to integrated technology to the point of being superpowers and such. So your advice was spot on in that regard.

    The Baltimore Space Program was a neat chapter in history I was unaware of. Very fun idea to tinker with.

  5. Charles says:

    At one time there was a romantic notion that Heisenberg’s calculation errors were deliberate. I’m not sure if anyone still holds to that theory, but there was always a feel-good aspect to that story that’s endearing.

    • Tom says:

      I once saw a rather good play on that subject: “Copenhagen” by Michael Frayn.
      As you would expect, since we know where the play takes place, the outcome of the Bohr/Heisenberg conversation that night remains uncertain by the end of it.

  6. Mark says:

    Not a single drop of the term Rob Fnord! Shame you missed-out on such PUNditry.

  7. Jeromy French says:

    Bibliography

    Books:

    Peter F Hamilton – Though no titles were mentioned, The Night’s Dawn Trilogy touches upon Transhumanity.

    Charles Stross – Though no titles were mentioned, main series are The Laundry Files and the Merchant Princes.

    Cyrus Reed Teed – We Live Inside. Though I can’t actually find a bibliography of Teed’s work (I’m typing this as my eyes lids are drooping and Google is failing me), what I did read makes me really, really want Ken to do a Consulting Occultist on this guy. Bat shit crazy, but oh, so fascinating.

    Movies:

    Three Days of the Condor by Sydney Pollack (feat. Robert Redford).

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