In honor of the 5oth anniversary, the folks at Future Publishing are hosting a competition for AudioGO, formerly BBC Audiobooks, and they are giving away 50 Doctor Who audio presentations, 25 CDs and 25 digital downloads. These are actually Audiobooks, with a single person reading a novelization, Radio Plays, with a full cast, sound effects, interlude music, and the whole nine yards, Soundtracks from the original TV series with narration to fill in the missing visuals, and several other formats. Some of the soundtracks are from episodes that have only survived in audio form, with the full original cast. They have literally hundreds of them, they have been doing Doctor Who audio stories from the beginning and are still cranking them out. To get and idea what kind of things they involve, you can download the free sampler and listen to 45 minutes worth of excerpts from all the different kinds of programs they produce. The only bad news for this contest is it is only open to residents of the UK (if I was reading the rules correctly), but even if you don’t live there you should grab the free sampler and check out some of the amazing stories you can collect.
The next film of the franchise, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, doesn’t come out until November, but the trailer indicates it may be just as good as the first one. Suzanne Collins has done a superb job with these books, hopefully the film studio will continue at the quality level they brought to the first movie adaption.
In honor of the Apple iStore’s 5th anniversary, a bunch of games and apps have become free for a limited amount of time. They haven’t made it official and posted them anywhere, but Kotaku figured it out, and Techtola has collected up the ones they could find and listed them on that page. There are a few real goodies newly made free, and as usual some turkeys thrown out in the hopes some folks will mistake quantity for quality. App Snatcher lists some of them as well, but seems to be running a bit slow (probably because of all the folks hitting the site), and includes a few the other sites have missed.
Japanese commercials look strange to western eyes mostly because we do not have the cultural context to appreciate them. While some of these look very like what you might find on TV over here, some are just bizarre looking. Enjoy.
I am more than ready for Pacific Rim to hit the theaters! Finally the US gets its own Giant Mecha vs. Monsters kind of movie!
It has been quite the expedition this week, with all kinds of amazing and exciting events, but it has also been exhausting, and at this point even The Luggage is ready to go home and take a break. We will all be resting up and thinking about everything we want to make sure we can attend next year, but for now a gaping Luggage yawn followed by the fluffy sound of impacting face first into the pillows is the best thing for us. See you all again soon!
