Gweek 085: Maximum Sugar Rush

(Thanks to SoundCloud for hosting Boing Boing's podcasts!)

Gweek is a podcast where the editors and friends of Boing Boing talk about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, TV shows, music, movies, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.

My guests in this episode:

Peter Bebergal (left), the author of Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood and a writer for various online and print magazines. He blogs at mysterytheater.blogspot.com. Glenn Fleishman (right), executive editor of The Magazine, a periodical for technology-minded readers that isn’t always about technology, the host of the podcast The New Disruptors, and one of the writers of The Economist magazine’s Babbage blog.

Peter talked about the "lack of pop culture for that once powerful consumer: the 10-13 year-old boy." He said, "I spend so much time with my son trying to figure out the appropriateness of media, from TV to movies to video games. There is so little directed to his age (11). everything is either dumbed down or too violent and mature. My son gave me a list of his favorite things this past year." Peter shares his son's list in this episode.

Other things we talked about:

Maximum Ride novels, about mutant kids who have spy-like adventures.

Justified: It's back and continues to be one of the great network shows.

Sony NEX6: The prospect of a compact camera with most of the characteristics of a DSLR, but at a lower cost and in a more compact form factor. The differences between a smartphone and anything but a DSLR are eroding. Cameraphones have nearly caught up to some of the better point-and-shoots. (And some cameras are becoming phones or running Android.)

PrintrBot Jr., a $400 3D printer.

Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples: the weirdest comic you'll ever read right now for a mainstream audience

Strange Aeons magazine

Wreck-It Ralph Soundtrack

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

MORE: Gweek

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

Bradley Horowitz

Delighted to see you trying Google+ Hangouts. Hoped it worked out for you. If not, let me know and we’ll fix it.
http://profiles.google.com/yao.sce Jonathan Yao

Hmm, why is this Gweek being posted 2 months after it was made?
- Mark_Frauenfelder
  
  I have a bunch of episodes recorded and need to catch up. I’m sorry!
  - http://blog.glennf.com/ Glenn Fleishman
    
    I’ve now retired to Malibu, where I hang out with Groucho Marx. It’s a good life.
http://www.peterbagge.com/ Buddy Bradley

Haven’t listened yet, but I sympathize with Peter’s predicament with his son as related above. I was around 11 when I discovered comic books. How did I discover them? Waiting in line at a small-town supermarket on vacation. I saw a rack of them, 60 cents each. “Mom, can I have this?” Thus started one of the great love affairs of my life.

Comics haven’t been in supermarkets in decades, and I think it’s one of the worst things ever that you can only find them in specialized, out of the way stores (though those places are great). Also it’s my suspicion that there aren’t many comics geared toward 11-year-olds either nowadays.

It would be the most amazing thing if comics could be cheap and easily-available again. I want my sons to discover them the same way I discovered them.

EDIT: I was 10 years, 10 months old, which I was able to pinpoint thanks to the site http://www.dcindexes.com/ which Mark recommended last October.