“Live for nothing. Die for Something”

The comments on the Dunesteef episodes are insightful, well writen and thought provoking. Much more than one expects to fine as a blog comment. My point is, it might be time for the Dunesteef forums.

Some people have indicated that they find them a little distracting, but to me it shows a great deal of love for the production on your part. That said, I do recognise the truth of what someone else pointed out… namely that I can only dimly imagine how much time it takes for you to hunt down all of the relevant sound effects and edit them in.

So just because I and others love them to bits doesn’t mean you should squander an inordinate amount of your own time fetching them for us. I would still enjoy your audio productions if they only had half as many sound effects, and if that gives you the opportunity to have a lot more time free in your life for other things, then it can only be a good thing.

I say this as someone who long had (who am I kidding? still has) a bad habit of being a perfectionist. In both my academic and work careers, I was always the idiot who, having achieved a perfectly good and praiseworthy result in X amount of time would then spend another 2, 3, 4, or 5X ‘tweaking’ it towards some elusive and mythical greatness. So don’t fall into the same trap; the Dunesteef is fantastic, but I can live with it being 95% or 90% (or, frankly, 50%) as great as it is if that tosses a major monkey off your back in the editing room. (Of course, a monkey loose in the editing room doesn’t sound all that copacetic, either…)

Moving on to the story itself, I enjoyed the way it was executed up until just before the end… which flagged up for me a recurring problem which I hadn’t really spotted before then. Namely, there were various points where the believability lapsed. I’m not speaking of the technology here (in fact, I’ve been working for over a year now on a novel where brain/body backups feature rather prominently)… I’m talking about the way the characters behaved.

Setting aside such convenient devices as the protagonist managing to win enough money from playing dice to own a chain of noodle stands within a week of being brought back, we still have really puzzling behaviour from both of the female characters. And my suspension of disbelief really ruptured completely at the very end where Zinni somehow, with no explanation or story groundwork laid to support her ability to do so, manages to arrange things so a city alderman gets completely cleaned out of all of her clout, connexions, wealth, reputation, and so on in one fell swoop and forced to go mop toilets on an interplanetary freighter (or whatever it was). It may read like poetic justice to some, but for me it simply doesn’t track. Powerful people are rarely rendered powerless quite so easily in anything resembling the real world.

Nonetheless, I did enjoy it overall and it was nice to hear you guys doing a major part of the reading.