Previously, on AMOV, I talked a little about dramatic podcasts.

Well, this past weekend, I drove up to see my beloved. This is why my not-really-random-ten and my silly picture of the week haven't been posted this week (And they're not gonna be. It's not really easy to come up with a funny picture every week without spending way more time on it than I can really afford, so I'm just going to add last week's to the queue and develop myself a little stockpile).

But the reason I tell this story is that it's a very long drive up to see my sweetheart. Now, I always used to enjoy long drives, and when my girlfriend is at the other end, they're even better. I fill those long hours on the road with the help of my tiny little Rio Cali MP3 player (The Rio Cali is a cheapish solid-state MP3 player which I endorse half-heartedly. Of the cheap MP3 players I have used, it is the friendliest to use, gets great battery life (It ran for the whole eight or so hours of the round trip on a single triple-A battery that was only half-charged when I left), has a good screen and backlight, is expandable via SD card, and supports playlists. On the other hand, it's not MSC compatable, can only be loaded with music via its proprietary software, and, absent a playlist, it adds files to its default playlist in a first-fit order (The technical term for the order you end up with is "no meaningful order", but that's not really descriptive of what you end up with. If you add five files, then delete the second one, the next file you add will be the second one in the resulting playlist. For the sake of convenience and on the advice of John Cater, I will from now on describe this order as "tharglian"). So it's a mixed bag.).

So I packed it full of dramatic podcasts and listened to...

• Desolate Metropolis: I'm not sure what to make of this. It's a very modern-art-y sort of play -- and you can tell it was written as a stageplay and not for audio. It might well be very good but I'm too gauche to appreciate it. On the other hand, it might, and this seems rather more likely, be utter tripe designed by someone who's trying to sound artsy. But I have a hard time telling with modern art.
• Blood (episodes 1-3): This is a professional production, with all the goodness that implies. It's pretty well put together, but it's not easy to follow. But it's not easy to follow in a kind of lovecraftian-this-is-meant-to-be-beyond-mortal-comprehension way. So it's successful, but is this really a good thing to be successful at? But it's good enough that I actually tried to understand, rather than just giving up.
• The City Burns At Night: Lightning Bug Films, which is apparantly some kind of proper production house, churned out this noir-style production. It's not bad, and they've really captured the classic-age radio feel. On the other hand, the production is a little rough. The laugh track, though allegedly a "live studio audience" sounds artificial, and the recording quality leaves something to be desired. The story isn't great, but it's no worse than radio drama of the period they're imitating.
• Forever Fifteen: I only listened to the first chapter of this. The production is pretty good. It's a slightly amateurish Anne Rice-style vampire novel. Personally, I think this school of Harlequin Vampire Story is almost as tired, cliche, and generally unimaginative as the faux-Tolkein that makes up most of modern fantasy or the faux-Gibson that makes up most of cyberpunk, but folks who like that sort of thing are liable to like this.
• Other World News:Something in the vein of The Twilight Zone meets The Name of the Game, supernatural stories pursued by tabloid journalists. It's not bad, though at times, the actors seem to be showing off; a lot of the characters are affecting voices that don't really seem right for the characters.
• This One Time: A now-defunct radio show out of Bard College. Production is very good, and it kinda reminds me of some of NPR's offerings. The scope of the show varies wildly. To give you an idea, the third episode is college students telling their vacation horror stories. The second episode is a physics professor discussing the practicalities of doing theorhetical physics (It seems his PhD thesis relied on work done by a computer program which, years later, turned out to have a critical bug that invalidated all his findings). The first episode is people telling the stories of how they lost their virginity.

So that's the current roundup. I just found a short series of Doctor Who dramas which I'll comment on once I've listened to them. As always, suggestions for new stuff is welcomed.

Till next time...