Terror Mountain Comics podcast: Recent Episodes
Keith Foster
Terror Mountain Comics is the home of Kodoja and Three Protectors, and the podcast is the home of Audio dramas, interviews and Nerdometrics. Nerdometrics is our attempt to use statistics and measurements as they apply to our favorite nerdy things: music, science fiction, comic books and everything else.
Death tends to mean a whole lot in real life, but in comics? In a lot of cases it's just the end of Act I of a multiple-act play. This episode is a full-on 'Nerdometrics' style episode that analyzes death in comics (and how comics end death), bringing in Andy Campbell to discuss the data and what it found.
If you want to see the data Andy and I discuss head over to www.kodoja.com for the post on this episode.
In this episode, Keith talks about a subject he really wanted to write about that held his interest for a long period of time, only for the research to turn up nothing more really needed telling. Three slightly separate things are the focus of the episode: (1) The excellent Graphic Novel "Torso" by Brian Michael Bendis, (2) The writing process (at least a little bit) and (3) the infamous serial killer known as The Butcher of Kingsbury Run.
Here's the link to the excellent article in Cleveland Magazine mentioned in the podcast: http://www.clevelandmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=E73ABD6180B44874871A91F6BA5C249C&nm=&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A3AArticle∣=1578600D80804596A222593669321019&tier=4&id=787EFD80E2954205AAD059BA6724F957
Here's a link to the book 'Popular Crime' by Bill James, also mentioned: https://www.amazon.com/Popular-Crime-Reflections-Celebration-Violence/dp/141655274X
How close are we to controlling large pieces of machinery with our brains and bodies? Is the neuroscience in Pacific Rim far-fetched, or within the realm of plausibility? What's being controlled this way, and who's doing it?
More importantly, how close are we to me getting in a Jaeger and beating the living crap out of some Kaiju that just came out of the breach?
For this podcast (and the answers, more or less, to these questions) we reached out to our friends at Carry the One Radio - mainly the show's Founder and lead interviewer Sama Ahmed - to talk about the Neuroscience Behind Pacific Rim.
We discussed Man/Machine Interfaces, how they relate to Pacific Rim, and where were are today with this technology. Sama - himself a very knowledgeable person on the subject - brought in a Subject Matter Expert (Joey) to talk things out.
This episode is a co-podcast with Carry the one, hope you enjoy it!
You can find more out about Carry the one here:
http://www.carrytheoneradio.com/about
Art Credit: Rory Smith (http://www.recsfx.blogspot.com/)
Originally at the end of Nerdometrics Episode 2 I wanted to share a few thoughts with Kyle Yount (Kaijucast) on Pacific Rim. Partly due to schedule and partly due to the subject we decided we needed a separate discussion, AND we needed someone else to join the discussion and got just that! I had two main thoughts I wanted to crunch some numbers on and not only spoke to Kyle, but Andy Camble of Kaiju 101 joined in on the conversation!
SPOILER ALERTS GALORE. If you haven't seen the movie yet you should! So go do it now!
The first thought was on the frequency of Kaiju attacks in Pacific Rim continuity: in both the movie and the (movie) novelization, one of the scientists discusses the frequency of Kaiju attacks and uses this data to predict (a) that the frequency doubles over time (that is, each successive attack is assumed to happen in half the time it took between the previous attacks) and (b) that there will be a 'double event' where two Kaiju come through the breach, then three, and so on. Then I looked up the actual data from Pacific Rim continuity... it didn't exactly match up.
The second thought was around the Anti-Kaiju Wall. In the movie, the governments of the world decide at a certain point to pull funding from the Jaeger project so they can focus their monies and efforts on building an 'Anti-Kaiju Wall', a huge structure presumably 30 stories high, with all kinds of reinforcements, that builds a perimeter around the entire Pacific Ring of Fire itself. When I first heard that my first thought was: why? At the point this decision got made, yes the PPDC had lost plenty of Jaegers but (1) you would have to think they had taken out more Kaiju than the numbers of jaegers they had (proven true by the book) and (2) since there weren't any Kaiju stomping around the globe at the time it's safe to say the Jaegers were 100% effective in their goal. So why build a wall then? And why divert funds from one thing to another? Could we just do them both? I projected out world GDP and defense spending to see.
Check the episode out and see what I found! If you want to see cool charts and stuff then head over to www.nerdometrics.wordpress.com.