Adventures in Podcasting

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about the Stars End Podcast here. There is a couple of reasons for that. The first is that it’s a bit of a pain in the neck to copy a post from one WordPress site to another; that’s one of the few things I really don’t like about WordPress. The second is that, as the academic year progressed, I became worried about this site turning into “All Asimov all the time.” That’s better than what did happen though which was months with very little content here. If 2022-2023 turns out anything like 2021-2022 that could happen again. Long story short, I’m reversing that policy. If you want to follow the Stars End Podcast you’ll be able to do that here apart from some occasional exclusives.

So, let’s get caught up.

Last December as we were wrapping up our discussions of the Apple TV+ series we made our first collective guest appearance on another podcast, The Starbase 66 podcast from the Infinite Potato Alliance.

This was especially nice for me as the host, Rick is one of my oldest friends. He also guested on Stars End last month.

Also, you might notice that we have a spiffy new logo. The spirals were created using four logistic functions plotted on the polar coordinate system using Maple, a professional-grade mathematics program. That gives us a stylized representation of the Milky Way Galaxy. The starburst was taken from one of the early images published from the James Webb Space Telescope. It represents the location of Trantor, the capital of Asimov’s Galactic Empire. It’s as close to the black hole at the center of the galaxy as a star can be which is why Trantor is known as “where the stars end.” The background, fleshing out our stylized galaxy is a public domain image of the Horsehead Nebula.

How about all of our episodes? We’ll jump back to the beginning of the podcast in case there are some new listeners here. If you want to get caught up or get started, you can use these links.

• In season one, Dan <@MrEarlG> and Jon <@jblumenfeld100> and I read through and discussed Asimov’s original Foundation Trilogy in anticipation of Apple TV+’s Foundation series. We also tracked show news when we could find it and had a fun segment called Asimov Trivia.
• Our season two coincided with season one of Foundation. There’s a prelude, a discussion on each episode, a season overview, and our first-ever Hari Awards!
• We’re in the middle of season three right now and it will continue until Apple TV+ decides to grace us with more new episodes. We’ve gone back to reading Asimov’s work; so far this season we’ve worked our way through the prequels, Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation. We’ve just started reading and discussing the robot novels beginning with The Caves of Steel.

Finally, here are our latest two posts on StarsEndPodcast.WordPress.com, the start of our Caves of Steel stuff.

Next Time on Stars End

Stars End S3E14

You can look for these here going forward.

Image Credits:

The featured image and the Stars End logo © The Stars End Podcast, 2021