Radio Free Burrito: Episode Twenty
wil, · Categories: Books, MusicHoly Crap, it's time for a new episode of Radio Free Burrito!
I must say, I'm pretty proud of my ability to get this one out on time. If I keep this up, I may have to remove the phrase "infrequently updated" from the show's description.
Show Notes:
- The logo was designed by WWdN:iX reader Marc, who asked that I not link to his "in progress" website. Thanks, Marc!
- Radio Free Burrito doesn't work as hard to earn its [EXPLICIT] tag as Memories of the Futurecast does, but it still manages to upset mom and get Twitter breakup messages from sensitive people. You have been warned.
- This week's theme music is Super Bon Bon by the legendary Soul Coughing, fronted by the equally-legendary Mike Doughty.
- On today's show, I read a story from the forthcoming special edition of The Happiest Days of our Lives, called Green Grass and High Tides Forever (and ever and ever and
- If you liked that story, you may want to check out the audio version of The Happiest Days of our Lives.
- Green Grass And High Tides
can be yours for 99 cents at Amazon. That's, like, 10 cents a minute, which would have been a big deal in long distance pricing back when digital watches were a pretty neat idea.
- You know what's cheaper than building a time machine and going back to 1977 to watch Wizards
? Yep. Watching it on DVD right here in the future. - I don't know why Thundarr The Barbarian isn't out in a deluxe Criterion edition, which it obviously deserves. We will just have to console ourselves with the Dungeons & Dragons animated series
.
- The Dark Tower at Boardgame Geek.
- The Dark Tower online.
- The Dark Tower commercial featuring ORSON FUCKING WELLES.
- Flash version of The Dark Tower.
- This link that has nothing at all to do with The Dark Tower.
- This episode is just over 27 minutes long.
- This episode is about 26MB.
- This episode doesn't have artwork embedded, because I still can't figure out how to get it into the goddamn file without exporting as .m4a and converting to .mp3, doubling the filesize in the process. I mean, I could probably figure it out if I spent a lot of time working on it, but that's not nearly as fun as just producing the show.
- This is the end of the notes.
Ready? Then put on your awesome dragon shirt and
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p class=”asset asset-audio at-xid-6a00d8341c59aa53ef0120a7e984b5970b”>Download Radio Free Burrito Episode 20
Something in the air. I was just reminiscing about Dark Tower with my brother. Man, we played that game like there was no tomorrow. Turns out, there was a tomorrow and Dark Tower is now worth $300 on eBay.
Love the podcast Wil, especially because I enjoy your writng a lot. I tried to purchase a copy of Just a Geek, but it’s on backorder.
Anyway, what was the song in the middle of this week’s podcast? It’s really cool.
Love that story about playing Rock Band. Reminds me of playing video games with friends in college- we got so far but at the end of it all it was more about the good times we had than the progress we all strode toward at the time.
Thank you, perfect listening material for work tomorrow.
Aw, my parents never bought me a copy of Dark Tower because they didn’t like/understand this sort of game and I didn’t have enough friends I could invite round for playing it. :/
I dont know the title of that song! It was in a folder marked audio and the track was called track 03. DANG!
RE: Destroying Screener DVDs,
What if you’re a total NERD and want to keep them all as the FRAKKING collectors items that they are!?
That’d be me if I got those.
Thank you Wil, you’ve made my Monday 🙂
Okay, so for the first time I actually had to pause the podcast to explain to my partner the “real” (at least as far as I understand it) reason for the screener DVD license. Yes, as far as your reasons go, the license is effectively unenforceable. That does not make it legally unenforceable, just not worth the time of the studio to track down people who don’t destroy their copies.
The license is really there so that if your personal copy of the DVD becomes a torrent seed or is otherwise commercially distributed, they can go after you for something more than “But…it just isn’t done.” Keeping it longer, destroying it with fire, those are fine. Taking it and “competing” with the industry? That’s a no-go.
My Aunt and Uncle own a video store and they get screeners all the time to determine what they’ll rent and sell in their store. I am able to catch up on any movies I missed whenever I go to visit them. What is annoying about their screeners, is a notice crawling along the bottom of the screen “If you’ve bought or rented this call 1-800-BLAHBLAHBLAH”, and occasionally the footage will go from colour to black and white to colour again.
Call Mrs.Wheaton back, it’s the gentlemanly thing to do:)
I loved your comments on Mr.Tambourine Man at the end, had I been in the studio when that was recorded I would have said “What’s with all the damn noise!”
Lovely Rock Band story. You and your family rock, literally.
That fridge commercial and your comments were awesome, too. 🙂
Thank you for RFB, it’s great.
Great story, Wil! And thanks for the shout out. Loving my Memories mug that I got in the mail yesterday, too!
Re: working out the name of the song, if you have an iPhone you could use the Shazam application and see if it recognises the song.
Thanks for this RFB, Wil, great listening while out on my post-festive fat-burning walk at lunch 🙂
As always, you manage to put across those everyday family events in an engaging and poignant way.
More please!
The Green Grass and High Tide story was one of first that I read as a follower of WWdN:iX. It also coincided with us (my fiance and I) having just recently gotten into the Rock Band and Guitar Hero franchise. It’s easily one of the things that kept me coming back.
Your podcast travels with me on my 20 minute each way commute each day. Every week my library of available material increases 🙂
Dude, I thought I was the only person left on Earth who remembers ONTV! At this point I’m forced to ask if you also played Advanced D&D-Treasure of Tarmin on Intellivision, which is the most awesomest game in the history of the world. Okay, maybe not the MOST awesomest, but definitely the Earth-shatteringly, aliens want to kidnap us kind of awesome.
BTW, thanks for getting Shatner’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” stuck in my head for the rest of the day……..douche.
Take care!!
Wil,
Loved the Rock Band story. In listening to this and other stories you’ve shared, it seems like you have an unusually close relationship with your sons. I mean you guys seem to really enjoy spending time doing stuff together and sharing your interests, even during those awkward teen years. I could never get my dad to play video games with me and eventually learned not to even bother asking. In fact, outside of an interest in cars, we really had very little in common.
My parents were 35 when I was born, so we were on two totally different planets from the time I was about 12, on through my 20’s. Do you attribute your closeness with your sons to the smaller age difference, or something else? As I sit here at 31 with no “prospects” on the horizon, I wonder when/if I ever have kids, am I going to be the one that seems to be on another planet? Will I be as far removed from them as I was from my parents? Am I going to hear the “you just don’t understand” phrase as many times as I fed it to my parents?
If it’s not too personal, would you be able to comment more sometime about parenting and your family dynamics? It just seems like you have a good thing going that a lot of people (like me) could maybe benefit from.
Intellivision D&D – I loved that! Wow, blast me back.
Another entertaining RFB. You’ve made Monday’s a much better day of the week, Mr. Wheaton.
Tee,
Glad I’m not the only one who loved that game. I still have every single piece of all my Intellivision sets, if you can believe that….including D&D!
Your nerd-rants are my nerd-rants; your wife’s eye-rolls are my wife’s eye-rolls.
Keep these going. To paraphrase an astronomy term, they are good-hearing.
Oh, and up-strum bass FTW. It’s the only way to rock.
JT,
Wish I did. Long gone, here. Lucky you!
Radio Free Burrito is one of the very few podcasts that I listen to at normal speed – I get through most using the 2x feature on my ipod. And it isn’t because of the intermittent music, I really enjoy your pacing and stories!
The Amazon MP3 Store owes you a referral bonus. Ever since hearing RFB #20 this morning, I couldn’t get that damn Outlaws song out of my head. Since the last copy I had of this song was on 8-track (crap, I’m old), I had no choice but to buy it.
I *so* love the Green Grass and High Tides Forever (and ever and ever and) story, yet another one of my favorites. I love how you completely lose it and use every single curse word that you know for two minutes just to have Ryan tell you to chill out. That’s a good kid you and Anne raised there, Wil, you have every right to be proud of that.
Another reason why I love that story so much is because years before Rock Band was ever conceived, we’re going back at least 25 years or so, my next-door-neighbor decided to try to learn to play that song on guitar and not only failed miserably, he tortured me and my sister all fucking summer failing miserably! I remember thinking at one point “If this kid can’t even master the solo from “Free Bird”, what the hell makes him think that he’s going to learn how to play THIS song?” It got to the point to where we decided to start torturing him back. We would call up the local rock station and request the song and dedicate it to him. He never improved and eventually stopped trying to. Looking back on it, I guess you can say it was kind of mean of us to that, but after a couple of months of having to hear that song being massacred on the other side of your wall (his bedroom was next to ours and the firewalls are paper thin on this block), it just gets to a point to where you just reach your breaking point. To this day every time I hear that song part of me groans and the other part of me laughs about how my sister and me got revenge on that kid.
Wil, your podcast is Amazing! I really enjoy listening to you read your stories. I look forward to mondays now for my burrito fix. By far one of my favorite podcasts. Oh yeah and…Wizards rules! Ralph Bakshi is fantastic. Keep up the great work.
You use a Mac atm right?
The free Embed Artwork (http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=embedart) AppleScript from Doug Adams forces iTunes to embed artwork in the audio file itself rather than storing it in a separate file. This works whether you add the album art manually, use iTune’s built-in Get Album Artwork feature or run another fantastic piece of software called GimmieSomeTune.
The very special Al Yankovic also commented on Screeners yesterday:
http://twitpic.com/yp5ca – …then on the 24th, please throw a brick through your TV and set your house on fire.
(http://twitter.com/alyankovic/status/7918269494)
Thank you Mr W for another excellent Burrito.
Oh thanks! Ill check this out.
Hey Wil, well TODAY is my B-Day, Woo Hoo!! (I made it!) I just wanted to tell you I enjoyed this show just as much as the rest, geeze mate, I think you found a new calling! Today I get to sit and go through all the old ‘casts at my leasure! We ARE out here listening, reading, it’s strange when you “Release” the words out to the ether and people respond, we are here Wil. Ok Mate, Birthday Tweets are coming in from Twitter, gosh those make a LONG work day better, say HI if you have time and keep writing, reading and ‘casting. -Ethan Tudor W.
Regarding destroying the screener DVD, have you seen/heard of self-destructing DVD’s? My sister got one as a gift a couple years ago. Full-length, legit movie that costs $6-$7, but, once the shrink-wrap is opened, something on the DVD starts to break down & it will no longer play after 48 hours. Isn’t that crazy?!
BTW, “the same 12 notes played over & over again in different patterns” describes ALL music. 🙂
Love your podcasts, Wil!
I very much enjoy the podcast, and was wondering if I could obtain permission to replay archives as a part of the content we use to fill in between live shows on our geek-centric SHOUTcast server. I’d love to share your stuff with our listeners…
As long as you follow the BY-NC-SA license, I would *love* for you to replay my shows. Thanks for asking!
Beauty. Thanks! Have you ever considered recording the show live? We find live (IRC chat-based) audience interaction to be a blast.
A friend brought over his screener DVD of “Up in the Air” a couple of weeks ago. When I saw ‘scissors’ in the legalese, I turned to him and asked, ‘What, are you supposed to kill me at the end of this, since I’m not a member of the Academy?’
‘What else do you think the scissors are for?’ he replied.
Very tasty burrito this week.. I cracked up listening to the Mr Tambourine Man piece at the end..