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This episode's guest:
Peter Bebergal, the author of Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood and writes frequently on the speculative and slightly fringe. He is currently writing Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock & Roll to be published by Tarcher/Penguin. He blogs at mysterytheater.blogspot.com.
Koichi is the editor of the Japanese language and culture blog Tofugu and the author of Japanese language resources, WaniKani and TextFugu.
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Koichi:
TextExpander for Mac. Old news, but I discovered it recently and I’ve never felt so emotionally attached to an app. I’m textexpanding everything I can. Answers to dumb / repeating questions, kaomoji, html/code, etc. According to it I’ve saved ~8 hours of time just by using it, which doesn’t seem like a lot… actually it seems like a lot.
Project Phoenix. The big JRPG on Kickstarter.
I’ve been playing a lot of Faster Than Light recently, but I know that’s an old game, so everyone probably knows about it already, yeah? I’m also terrible at it and feel bad that I keep naming my crew after my friends and colleagues only to watch them get burned up by spaceship fires. FTL soundtrack is also the best music since Mozart… ish.
Peter:
Archive.org. I been spending an inordinate amount of time digging through the texts and have uncovered a treasure trove of amazing things, including old Heavy Metal, punk zines, comics, pulp science fiction etc.
Julian by Gore Vidal. Somehow I had missed this all these years. A remarkable historical novel about the last pagan emperor of Rome and one of the most damning accounts of the Holy Roman Empire I have read. It’s also a great piece of speculative fiction.
Moon with Sam Rockwell
Mark:
Ulmon City Maps for iOS. These free iOS maps of major cities work without an Internet connection and use GPS to show where you are. They have metro information and Wikipedia articles included. They were a lifesaver on my recent vacation.
This month, IDW released Feldstein: The Mad Life and Fantastic Art of Al Feldstein!, a 320-page biography written by Grant Geissman . Al Feldstein began working at EC comics, publishers of Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear in 1948. Soon he became editor of most of EC's titles. He typically wrote and illustrated a story in each title and drew many of the covers, a mind-bogglingly prolific output. Eventually he stopped doing the art for stories and stuck with editing, writing, and cover illustrations. According to Wikipedia, from "late 1950 through 1953, he edited and wrote stories for seven EC titles." After MAD creator Harvey Kurtzman got in a fight with publisher William Gaines over ownership of the comic and left EC in 1956, Gaines put Feldstein in charge of the humor magazine, where he remained as editor until 1985.
