Listen NowOur debut appearance at Monsterama! Presenting The Brides of Dracula!
Dragon Con 2017
It’s that time again! Dragon Con – the place where sleep goes to die – and this year we’re bringing you TWO amazing shows and we’re going to tell you about a third one. Plus an important change to our routine! Here’s the schedule as we have it:
Friday night, 7:00pm – A bit of a variety show as we preview the next story we’ll be telling on the Centauri Express Audio Magazine, Nairobi Jack and the Lost Gold of the Atlantimengani, introducing our Dragon Con audience to a new series by Ron N. Butler, The Three Galaxateers, and the triumphant return of Rory Rammer, Space Marshal: The Last Boojum!
Here’s the big change: This show will take place in the Imperial Ballroom at the Marriott, not in our usual location in the Hyatt Regency.
Sunday afternoon, 1:00pm – The Blood Crow Stories will present their first ever LIVE performance. Come see ARTC personnel assist with tech and play some of your favorite TBCS characters!
Sunday evening, 7:00pm – ARTC is proud to present the 20th anniversary performance of Thomas E. Fuller’s The Brides of Dracula. First performed at Dragon Con 1997 and then repeated at Stage Door Players in Dunwoody in 2007 this powerhouse of music, lust, and blood is NOT your parent’s Dracula. Featuring music by Alton Leonard and special guests The Ghosts Project.
Next Live Performance: Monsterama
Thanks, everyone, for a great Dragon Con! We had some amazing shows and made some new friends.
Our next show will be at Monsterama, where we will reprise The Brides of Dracula and may bring some new surprises as well! Stay tuned for more details!
The Blood is the LifeHEAR Now Festival 2017
We just got back from the 2017 edition of the HEAR Now Festival a couple of days ago, but we’re still buzzing from the experience.
The Weapons Shop and Richard Hatch
ARTC was saddened to learn recently of the passing of actor Richard Hatch. Richard performed with us in 2005 at Dragon Con in Brad Linaweaver‘s adaptation of the A. E. van Vogt story “The Weapons Shop” and had agreed to appear in the extended studio version of The Weapon Shops of Isher.
He was best known for his work on Battlestar Galactica (both the original in the late 1970s and the reboot in 2004), but he also appeared in a number of other movies and television shows, including the web series written and produced by Brad Linaweaver, Silicon Assassin.
He will be deeply missed by all at ARTC.
New Studio Projects for 2017
Last month we talked about the upcoming Treasure Island release. We just recorded the credits and all that’s left is one last quality review and this will be ready for your eager ears!
We’re also pleased to let everyone know that our next podcast serial after the conclusion of Dash Cardigan will be Thomas E. Fuller’s Nairobi Jack Rackham and the Lost Gold of the Atlantimengani! These voice tracks are in the can and editing will be starting very soon.
B
ut perhaps most exciting is the next thing we’re in pre-production on – the entire series of Rory Rammer, Space Marshal! That’s right – every episode of this fan-favorite is going into the booth. Rory, Skip, Rex Gorbechev, DARIL T-8, Kryssa Feynman, Professor Irwin Feynman, and a whole gaggle of supporting characters will be taking you from the skies of Earth to the orbit of the moon very soon!
Everyone’s a Member!
Membership Has Its Privileges
Here at ARTC we make joining up and participating as easy as we can! You contact us, we send you directions, you show up…BAM! You’re a participant.
But it’s also possible to be an actual member of ARTC. To do that you have to start out as a participant and then pay some modest dues (that’s not a metaphor, it’s actual cash).
And there are benefits! You have to be a dues-paid member (among other things) to be eligible to be on our Board of Directors. You have to be a dues-paid member to vote in the yearly elections. And if you’re a dues-paid member, you get a discount on ARTC products!
But what if you’re not in the Atlanta area? What if you’re just too busy or too far away to take that first step by being a participant? What if you still want that sweet, sweet discount?
Dragon Con 2016
Then we have good news for you, especially if you’re attending Dragon Con 2016. Because at Dragon Con, if you’re wearing your ARTC colors, then you’re a member!
Here’s the deal: You show up at the ARTC sales table (which has been located in the Hyatt, down by the art show for the last few years and we expect to be there again this year, but it’s Dragon Con, so you never know) wearing any sort of ARTC logowear and BAM! You get that sweet, sweet discount. How much is the discount? Why, that’s 20% off any ARTC-branded items on the table.
Does that include CDs? You bet it does.
How about digital content? Absolutely.
Other merch? Yuuuuuup.
Where Do I Get Logowear?
You can get some of it here, but th
ere’s a much wider selection on our brand new Threadless shop, Woodrow’s Mercantile and embroidered stuff at Queensboro.
We’ve got funny sayings like “If It’s My Job, It Must Be Tedious“. We’ve got a selection of our cover artwork like The Call of C’thulhu and Blues for Johnny Raven. We’ve even got an old favorite, Rory Rammer, Space Marshal! And we’ve got the tried and true ARTC logo in full color!
Threadless has a wide selection of styles available, too. So far we’ve kept it simple, but if you don’t see what you want, drop us a line and let us know! Adding styles is easy, we just didn’t want to have so many that you got a brain cramp!
Over at Queensboro you can get really cool polos, button up shirts, and hats, all with the ARTC logo tastefully embroidered on them!
And don’t forget our other great logowear like lapel pins and iron-on patches!
Promotion limited to ARTC-branded merchandise at the ARTC sales table at Dragon Con 2016. Discount is 20% rounded to the nearest dollar. ARTC logo must be visible on top of whatever else you’re wearing at the time you approach the table to be eligible.
The Proper Thing to Do
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A few extra notes for this episode. We have big changes in store for this podcast. First, we have increased the sampling rate for this episode and for all future episodes.
When we started this podcast 10 years ago we purposely made the decision to encode each episode a lot lower than we needed to because the ultimate goal was to help people understand what audio drama was. We weren’t exactly the only game in town, but we were one of only a few audio drama companies that we knew about and what we wanted to do was draw attention to the art form and also let people know about our titles for sale. What better way than to have free samples? We also had years of live performances sitting around that didn’t meet our standards for sale, but were still something we were extremely proud of and didn’t want to keep to ourselves.
Today the landscape has changed. There are dozens if not hundreds of audio drama podcasts out there. Anthologies and series, ongoing and one-offs, and at least one notable podcast about how to do audio drama podcasts. After ten years, it’s time for us to get with the times.
So, with all of that said, this episode, number 167 will be the last installment of what we have been so creatively calling “ARTC’s Podcast”. Next month we’re relaunching as the Centauri Express.
What’s going to be different? Lots. For one thing, we’re joining the club and will begin airing studio-produced episodes of some of the various serials we’ve written over the years, starting with our 13-part expanded story of Dash Cardigan. We’re also working on a new show intro and will be including additional segments from time to time that will feature panel discussions, interviews, and really whatever else you’d like to hear, so be sure to let us know at podcast@artc.org. Plus there’s that improved audio quality we were just discussing.
What’s going to be the same? How you get us. We’re sticking with the same publication platform and RSS feed, so you shouldn’t notice much difference except in the format of the content. Also the same, unfortunately, will be the publication schedule. I had hoped to be able to bring this to you every two weeks, but we’re still getting our studio legs under us, as it were. We’ve been performing live for so long that we’ve gotten pretty good at it, if we do say so ourselves, but adding studio work in there to go with those live shows is a bit of a learning curve. Plus, we want to be able to have a consistent schedule without any gaps in publication. We’re still shooting for that every two week mark, but we want to get there in a way that is sustainable.
For those of you who were enjoying the live performances, fear not. We’ll still be bringing those to you by way of Patreon, which you’ve heard me talk about for the last few episodes. All patrons at any level will be able to hear these updates, which will become free bonus content for those folks like Caran, Matthew, Kerry, Christa, John, Donald, Jason, Chelsea, Brad, Sterling, Ben, Richard, Shael, Juliana, and Sketch. The regular episodes of the Centauri Express will continue to be free, but we’d truly appreciate your support.
And the last thing I’d like to ask of you before we get into this month’s episode is for you to let us know what you’ve been doing while listening to ARTC’s Podcast. Do you listen while you drive? Just sit quietly? Catch Pokemon? Do you listen by yourself or make it a group activity? Let us know at podcast@artc.org or head over to the main website at artc.org and use the Speak Pipe to leave us a voicemail that we can feature in later shows.
And now for this month’s episode, which is kind of a transition episode, as this piece was produced here at ARTC Studio and is the first in a new imprint for us. Our other imprints include things like Science Fiction by Gaslight, which features adaptations of classic horror and science fiction, Into the Labyrinth, featuring original dark fantasy, and Adventures in Sound, which features original work that doesn’t really fit into any specific category. And to that lineup we are adding The Sound of Liberty, a collection of classic science fiction adaptations and some original work that highlights the principles in the American Bill of Rights.
The first installment in The Sound of Liberty is this month’s audio drama offering, The Proper Thing to Do by Brad Linaweaver and William Alan Ritch, adapted for audio and directed by William Alan Ritch, produced by David Benedict.
The Game is Afoot: Game the Fourth – The Ultimate Ultimatum
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We love all of our audiences and look forward to entertaining everyone, but some audiences have a special place in our hearts. 221B Con is one of them. Not least because we pack the house when we go there!
It’s such a ton of fun playing to these dedicated Sherlock Holmes fans. An iconic character, portayed by a variety of actors in a variety of ways, but without having to deal with all the time travel and blue police boxes. For this performance, we commissioned new scripts from Sketch MacQuinor. One was Commonplaces, by Naomi Novik (stay tuned to see if we can run that one on the podcast), and the other was The Game is Afoot: Game the Fourth – The Ultimate Ultimatum.
We also had a special guest for the show, David Nellist!
David was such a good sport about this. We only asked him if he’d appear on stage with us a few hours before show time, but he agreed to do it readily. Right up until the show itself, we were figuring out the logistics of when to have him approach the stage, how to introduce him, and going over his role.
And the fans LOVED it! Next year we hope to have him back in a more substantial (and audible) role, but for this year he honored us by appearing on stage, however briefly, and gamely played along with the joke. Thank you, David!
Thank you for listening! If you’re enjoying the podcast, be sure to support us on Patreon! Or just tell your friends about us!
The Rats in the Walls-LIVE part 4 of 4
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We were so looking forward to this being the last episode of the venerable, but generically named, ARTC’s Podcast. But we just can’t. We can’t put forth something that’s less than our best effort. We just can’t do that to our listeners. So we’re pushing back to August. We hope.
So we’ll be carrying on in our usual fashion for just a couple more months. In the meantime, won’t you consider supporting us on Patreon? We just posted a bunch of really cool milestone goals to help you know what your support will mean to us, and we’re working on a short video to show how we’re operating, too. All kinds of good stuff going on, so remember that you can set your own budget and hopefully you can see your way clear to helping us out a bit. We’d really appreciate it!
