I should have mentioned this before, but time’s been sneaking up on me:

I’m going to be a guest at Dragon*Con this weekend in Atlanta, along with Mur, Michael & Evo, Derek, and many other fun folks in the podcasting world.

We’re all going to putting up a panel on podcasting in the Electronic Frontiers track, at the utterly insane time of 11:30 PM Friday. Yeah, I know that’s the time most people are hunting for bodypainted elves on the hotel party floors, but if you’re around we promise our panel will be almost as much fun. I’m also running a panel for the Science track at 10 PM Sunday called “Burn, Hollywood, Burn!” and will be generally flitting around the rest of the time looking to socialize.

One thing I’d like to do is have at least one lunch or bar meet-up with podcast listeners. I don’t have concrete plans yet, unfortunately, since I haven’t scouted out the lay of the land. But if you’re going to be at D*C and you’re so inclined, drop me a line with your contact info (preferably cellphone, and let me know if your phone can do SMS) and I’ll give you mine, and if there’s at least one of you we’ll figure it out. If there are several responses I’ll actually organize a real event and post it here, so keep checking this space if you get a chance.

Thanks very much. Next year we’ll be a lot more organized about con presence: I’m already making plans to hit Worldcon and Dragon*Con in consecutive weeks on both coasts. Meanwhile, I hope I’ll get a chance to see some of you this weekend!

If you live in the New York area, you’ll get not one, but two (count ’em!) chances to hear about Escape Pod on the radio Friday night.

At 11:30 PM, WUSB on Long Island will be airing Destinies: The Voice of Science Fiction. Chris DeFilippis will be featuring us in his “De Flip Side” segment.

Then, at 5 AM on WBAI, Escape Pod narrator Deborah Green will be on Hour of the Wolf with Jim Freund. She’ll be reading from her novel Soulbound, so if you love Deb’s voice this is your chance to hear more of it.

Both radio stations offer streaming from their Web sites (and WBAI has archived streaming of recent shows) so if you’re not in New York you’ll still be able to catch these. Enjoy!

This seems to be the week for annoying problems:

1. One of our listeners has reported to us (thanks, Paul!) that EP013 isn’t showing up in the iTunes podcast directory right now. This baffles me, because it worked when I tested it last week. No idea what the problem is, but I’m trying to kick some things to see what works. In fact this post is one attempt at kicking, to try to refresh the feed. Hopefully this is a brief glitch; please bear with us, and if you see problems like this in the future, please drop us an e-mail and let us know. Thanks.
2. If you’ve tried to visit the TSFPN Forums in the last few days, you’ve probably noticed they’re down. Those guys are apparently having hosting difficulties, and it’s taking them some time to straighten it out. Although we’re not involved in their problems, I’d like to apologize to all Escape Pod listeners who’ve tried to access our forum and couldn’t. If their downtime extends beyond a few days, I’ll set up discussion forums here instead, because people seemed to be Having Fun with them. Thanks for your patience.
3. Oh, and while this isn’t exactly a technical problem, there won’t be any flash this week. My wife’s been ill, and there’s been other stuff going on. We’re still on track for an Escape Pod release on Thursday, which is our primary commitment. It’ll be a fun one!

For all of you who can’t get enough Escape Pod from the Web site and want to talk about it some more, we now have our own dedicated bulletin board through our affiliation with The Sci-Fi Podcast Network. You can reach our forum here:

Escape Pod Forum

We’ve actually had this for a couple of weeks now, but a friendly e-mail reminded me that we hadn’t actually told anyone about it. Oops. We’ve also put this link in the lefthand sidebar of our page for future reference.

First, thanks to all who entered our Serenity preview ticket contest. We generated a lot more interest than correct entries, but that’s all right. It was fun for us, and hopefully fun for those of you who took the time.

The winners of the contest are Eugie and Matt Foster of Alpharetta, Georgia. We’ll be meeting on Thursday for the film. By coincidence, I’ve discovered that Eugie reviews fiction and Matt reviews film, so perhaps with proper hypnotic gestures I’ll be to entice some future material from them for Escape Pod.

Thanks again to everyone. The next time we run one of these contests, we’ll make sure it’s one that everyone in the world can enter, and that no one will be required to type the word “aspic.” Have Fun!

Update: In response to an excellent suggestion in the comments, here are the answers to the trivia questions (the page itself is still up, but will be deleted in a few days):

The other questions were survey-type questions. “Snow Day” was the unanimous favorite story of all who entered. The rest of the comments were varied, but overall people are digging what we’re doing. This makes our editors very happy. Cookies for everyone!

As we just mentioned in this week’s podcast, Escape Pod is launching a new voicemail number for call-in book reviews. If you’d like to be heard on our show, please call:

206-666-EPOD (3763)

and leave a one-minute review of any book. You can rave, you can rant, you can say whatever you want. You don’t have to leave your own name if you don’t want to, but of please do give the title and author of the book.

Each week we’ll pick a review and play it in the closing segment of the Escape Pod podcast. As for the rest… Depending on how many we get, we’ll surely do something with them. We’re eco-friendly here, we try to find a use for everything.

If you’re looking at our [main page](https://escapepod.org) right now, you can see **Escape Pod** has a new logo. If you’re looking at the RSS feed instead, click back over, it’ll be worth the couple seconds.

This terrific rendering is the work of my good friend [Doug Triggs](http://www.douglastriggs.com), geek outdoorsman and 3D artist extraordinaire. Check out his Web site for some other fine work, and help me convince him that he really ought to be selling this stuff.

And if anyone here has a driving need for a promotional image to help spread the word, hey, don’t let me stop you:

Just a clarification, as I realized it wasn’t mentioned anywhere here:

**Escape Pod** is a weekly podcast. New issues will be released here on Thursdays. Exactly *when* on Thursday may be variable, although hopefully it won’t be just before midnight again.

Between Thursday releases we may put up other content on an irregular basis. It could be simple blog posts like this one, with genre news or book reviews or mentions of other interesting sites; or we may podcast short “flash” fiction pieces, or anything else that amuses us.

So it’s worthwhile to check here often. But if you can’t do that, check here late Thursday or early Friday. Even better, point your RSS newsreader or podcatcher at us and let it all happen automagically.

Any questions?