The Great Geek Manual

Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Listen to “Blood Willows” by Caroline M. Yoachim at PodCastle.
• Listen to “First Flight” by Andrew Bale at Beam Me Up.
• Listen to “Ignoring The Overlay” by J. M. Perkins at StarShipSofa.
• Listen to “In Spite of Himself” by Nathaniel Lee at Journey Into…
• Listen to “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath The Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky at StarShipSofa.
• Listen to “The Line” by Grady J. Gratt at Pseudopod.
• Listen to “Moon Drops” by Florence Ann Marlowe at Wily Writers.
• Listen to “Must Have Own Weapons” by Edward McKeown at Dunesteef.
• Listen to “Mr One and a Million Monkeys” by JRD Skinner at FlashPulp.
• Listen to “Poe-etic Justice” by Julie Hoverson, adapted from Edgar Allen Poe.
• Listen to “Portage” by An Owomoyela at PodCastle.
• Listen to a serialized version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth at Drama Pod. Parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17…

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Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Listen to “The Black Stone” by Robert Howard (Part 2) at the Cthulhu Podcast.
• Listen to “Gag: a Collective Detective Chronicle” by JRD Skinner at FlashPulp.
• Listen to “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath The Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky at StarShipSofa.
• Listen to “The Shadows of Calcutta” by Phil Rossi at Peculiar Occurrences.
• Listen to “Stereogram of the Gray Fort” by Paul M. Berger at PodCastle.
• Listen to “Stone Wall Truth” by Caroline Yoachim at Escape Pod.
• Listen to “Sweet Sixteen” by Kat Howard at LightSpeed Magazine.
• Listen to “The Talisman” by Heather McDougal at Pseudopod.
• Listen to “Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin” by Adam Callaway at Ceaseless Skies.
• Listen to “The Wolves of Brooklyn” by Catherynne M. Valente at Fantasy Magazine.

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Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Listen to “Five Rules for Commuting to the Underworld” by Merrie Haskell.
• Listen to “Greeters” by Zachery Cole at Beam Me Up.
• Listen to “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath The Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky at StarShipSofa.
• Listen to “Lights” by Jack Westlake at Pseudopod.
• Listen to “The Machine” by M. Rickert at Fantasy Magazine.
• Listen to “The Old Equations” by Tom Godwin at LightSpeed Magazine.
• Listen to “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu at PodCastle.
• Listen to “We Go Back” by Tim Pratt at Escape Pod.

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Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Listen to “Babyhead” by Aliya Whiteley at Drabblecast.
• Listen to “Crucible” by Dan Rabarts at Wily Writers Podcast.
• Listen to “Emmett, Joey & The Beelz” by Ralph Sevush at Dunesteef.
• Listen to “The Landholders No Longer Carry Swords” by Patricia Russo.
• Listen to “Luna Voices on the Solar Wind” (Part 2) by Nick Wood at Beam Me Up.
• Listen to “Night’s Plutonian Shore” by Jack Mangan at Peculiar Occurences.
• Listen to “Peacemaker, Little Bo Peep” by Jason Sanford at LightningBolt Theater.
• Listen to “The Things” by Peter Watts at Escape Pod.
• Listen to “The Trouble in Leafy Green Street” by Lord Dunsany at PodCastle.
• Listen to “Upon a Star” by Debbie Cowens at Wily Writers Podcast.
• Listen to “You Have Been Turned into a Zombie by a Friend” by Jeremiah Tolbert.

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Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Listen to “41 Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by Edward Morris.
• Listen to “Big Inches” by Ralph Robert Moore Cast Macabre.
• Listen to “Dearest Daughter” by Kate Marshall at Pseudopod.
• Listen to “Frankenstein, Frankenstein” by Will McIntosh at StarShipSofa.
• Listen to “Frozen Voice” by An Owomoyela at Clarkesworld.
• Listen to “Greeters” by Zachery Cole at Beam Me Up.
• Listen to “A Hunter’s Ode to His Bait” by Carrie Vaughn at PodCastle.
• Listen to “Manifest Error” by Gary Cuba at Beam Me Up.
• Listen to “P is for Parade, F is for Forever, C is for Crate” by Tim Pratt, Heather Shaw, Greg van Eekout and Jen Reese at Drabblecast.
• Listen to “Peacemaker, Peacemaker, Little Bo Peep” by Jason Sanford.
• Listen to “Plus or Minus” by James Patrick Kelly at Escape Pod.
• Listen to “Trois morceaux en forme de mechanika” by Gord Sellar at Clarkesworld.
• Listen to “Union Falls” by J. S. Breukelaar at Fantasy Magazine.
• Listen to “We Go Back” by Tim Pratt at Escape Pod.

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1790
The very first United States patent is granted to Samuel Hopkins of Vermont for a process for making potash and pearl ashes for use in in soap and fertilizer. (US No. 1) The patent is granted for a term of fourteen years and signed by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and President George Washington, who authorized the passage of the first U.S. patent statute on April 10, 1790.

1930
The radio program The Shadow airs for the first time on the Mutual Broadcasting System. Listen to original episodes of The Shadow at the Internet Archive.

1964
The American space probe Ranger 7 transmits the first photo moon’s surface ever taken by a U.S. spacecraft, mapping the surface for a future lunar landing. Ranger 7 carries six slow-scan vidicon TV cameras capable of transmitting high-resolution television pictures of the lunar surface. A total of 4,308 photographs before Ranger 7 crashed in Mare Cognitum (Sea of Clouds).
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Beauty is a particularly potent and intense form of curiosity. It’s a learning signal urging us to keep on paying attention, an emotional reminder that there’s something here worth figuring out […].

According to Loewenstein, curiosity is rather simple: It comes when we feel a gap “between what we know and what we want to know”. This gap has emotional consequences: it feels like a mental itch. We seek out new knowledge because we that’s how we scratch the itch.

I see beauty as a form of curiosity that exists in response to sensation, and not just information. It’s what happens when we see something and, even though we can’t explain why, want to see more. But here’s the interesting bit: the hook of beauty, like the hook of curiosity, is a response to an incompleteness. It’s what happens when we sense something missing, when there’s a unresolved gap, when a pattern is almost there, but not quite. I’m thinking here of that wise Leonard Cohen line: “There’s a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.” Well, a beautiful thing has been cracked in just the right way.

Like curiosity, beauty is a motivational force, an emotional reaction not to the perfect or the complete, but to the imperfect and incomplete. We know just enough to know that we want to know more; there is something here, we just don’t what. That’s why we call it beautiful.

- “Why Does Beauty Exist?” by Jonah Lehrer, July 18, 2011.

1898
Scientific American runs the first magazine advertisement for an automobile, placed by the world’s largest automobile factor The Winton Motor Car Company of Cleveland, Ohio. The ad invites readers to “dispense with a horse.”

1928
George Eastman shows the first color motion pictures in the U.S.

1930
Radio Corporation of America (RCA) installs a large-screen television system at an RKO cinema in Schenectady, NY. The screen is five feet high.
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