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Nerdist Writers Panel #1 – A fascinating insight into writing for television

I was listening to TWiT this week, feeling strangely nostalgic while stumbling home, reminiscing on all the hours of laughs and knowledge it has given me, and an introduction to podcasts in general. I’d listened to the LOST podcast religiously for years of course, but TWiT got me listening to so much more, making commutes not a complete waste of time in the process. When I stumbled across the page for this Nerdist podcast via /r/television, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, and had never even visited the site before, but knowing I’d hear Damon Lindelof talking LOST again for at least a small part of proceedings was enough, and 100 minutes later, I feel like writing a pilot!

The Nerdist Writers Panel series is an informal chat moderated by Ben Blacker (co-creator of The Thrilling Adventure Hour, writer on CW’s Supernatural) with professional writers about the process and business of writing. Covering TV, film, comic books, music, novels, and any other kind of writing about which you’d care to hear. Proceeds from the series benefit 826LA, the national non-profit tutoring program. Recorded live at Nerdist Industries at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles. 

Episode one features: Damon Lindelof (Lost); Jane Espenson (Buffy; Battlestar Galactica; Torchwood); Erin Levy (Mad Men); Drew Z. Greenberg (Buffy; Warehouse 13).

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Listen and TWiT

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Listen is a Google Labs experiment and by far my new favourite Android app, and a must for anyone with an Android phone.

Listen is basically a web audio / podcast discovery app that allows you to search, subscribe, download and stream in such a simple way that I found my listen queue filling up pretty quickly. Downloading has been easy & quick enough through 3G; haven’t bothered with WiFi since it downloads speedily and I can actually make a dent into my normally wasted data plan.

You can tell that it’s a Labs experiment though, with a few strange things that stood out initially, but no doubt Google will be all over it soon enough, and I’m eagerly awaiting v1.0.4.

Gripes / Wants:

  • No support to play other audio / other media on your phone – It only played podcasts that are downloaded through Listen, and strangely, it removes the audio extension on anything it downloads, so the file becomes incompatible with other audio apps unless you add in the .mp3 or .m4a extension
  • I thought I’d had an “ah-ha!” moment the other day when I realised I could use the scroll wheel to seek with accuracy, but then found the seek bar to creep back to its original position, with the scroll wheel doing nada
  • Some kind of web / desktop interface tied to your Google account [you need one to use the app anyway] almost seems like a must

Download Listen via the QR code below

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Coincidentally, my love of Listen has a great deal to do with the gloriousness that is TWiT [This Week In Technology]. I humbly apologise to @renny510 and @pkattera for not heeding your advice earlier. I’ll probably have another mini rant about it sometime, but I’m already waiting for the next episode with as much anticipation as I would a JJ Abrams TV show. Luckily there’s a backlog of 200+ episodes that I can fall back on, not to mention the broader TWiT network, with podcasts like TWiG [This Week In Google] and others from Leo and the gang.

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