Click here to play this episode. Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.

My co-hosts for this episode are:

Ed Piskor, the cartoonist for Boing Boing’s weekly Brain Rot comic strip. Has illustrated 2 graphic novels with Harvey Pekar (Macedonia, and The Beats). His first solo graphic novel, Wizzywig was released in July.

and

Joshua Glenn, a Boston-based writer, publisher, and semiotician. He is co-author of Significant Objects, published by Fantagraphics this month, and Unbored, the kids’ field guide to serious fun coming from Bloomsbury this fall. He edits the website HiLobrow, which as HiLoBooks is now publishing classics -- by Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others -- from what he calls science fiction’s Radium Age.

In this episode:

Significant Objects. A book that "collects the results of a literary experiment in which a best-selling or popular author wrote a short fictional prose story about an object on eBay, raising its value; the profit from the object’s sale then went to charity."

Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun, a 350-page guide and activity book for kids.

Radium Age Science Fiction Library: pre-Golden Age SF novels from 1904-33.

Joshua Glenn's science fiction picks for kids. "Science fiction frees our imagination from an enchantment, cast upon it by everyday life, which would encourage us to believe that the way things are is natural, permanent, and inevitable. Much of the media to which kids are exposed blunts their critical reasoning skills; but science fiction gives those skills a good workout. Matthew Looney's Invasion of the Earth." Heinlein’s Red Planet (1949), Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams’s Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine (1958), John Christopher’s Tripods Trilogy (1967-68), Jack Kirby’s Kamandi (1972-78), Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), Monica Hughes’ Isis Trilogy (1980-82).

Creepy Presents Richard Corben. "Horror comics visionary and coloring pioneer Richard Corben has been a voice of creativity and change for over four decades. For the first time ever, Corben's legendary Creepy and Eerie short stories and cover illustrations are being collected into one deluxe hardcover."

Dal Tokyo. Gary Panter began imagining Dal Tokyo, a future Mars that is terraformed by Texan and Japanese workers, as far back as 1972.

And much more!

Past episodes: 001, 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026, 027, 028, 029, 030, 031, 032, 033, 034, 035, 036, 037, 038, 039, 040, 041, 042, 043, 044, 045, 046, 047, 048, 049, 050, 051, 052, 053, 054, 055, 056, 057, 058, 059, 060, 061, 062, 063

Click here to play this episode. Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff. My co-hosts for this episode are:

Michael Pusateri -- a lifelong tinkerer and former television tech executive for Disney

and

Ruben Bolling, author of the weekly comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug, which premieres each week on Boing Boing, and pre-premieres for members of his Inner Hive, which you can join by going here.

In this episode:

Adventure Time Comics

Fanboys VS. Zombies

Star Trek "new continuity" comic books

Significant Objects

The Memory Palace podcast

Tribute to Repo Man Soundtrack

Slimvision reading glasses

Kapoosh knife holder

And much more!

Click here to play the podcast. In this episode of the Gweek podcast I interviewed Robb Wolf. He’s a research biochemist, a powerlifting champion, the co-owner of a strength and conditioning gym, and the author of the New York Times best-selling book The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet. He’s also the host of a podcast I enjoy that also called "The Paleo Solution."

Click here to play the podcast. In this episode of the Gweek podcast I interviewed Ryan Holiday. Ryan’s the author of Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. He's a media strategist who started his career as an assistant to Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power and is currently the director of marketing at American Apparel.

Bonus! Here's an excerpt from Trust Me, I'm Lying [UPDATE] Irin Carmon responds on this essay she wrote for Salon, "Did I ruin journalism?".

Irin Carmon, the Daily Show and Me: The Perfect Storm of How Toxic Blogging Can Be, by Ryan Holiday

"Most crucially, that machine, whether it churns through social media or television appearances, doesn’t reward bipartisanship or deal making; it rewards the easily retweetable or sound bite–ready statement, the more outrageous the better."

-- Irin Carmon, Jezebel

In the first half of my book, I give reader the inside on how to manipulate blogs. There are fatal flaws in the blogging medium that create opportunities for influence over the media—and, ultimately, culture itself. And if I were writing this book two or three years ago, it would have ended there.

I did not fully understand the dangers of that world. The costs of the cheap power I had as a media manipulator were hidden, but once revealed, I could not shake them. I had used my tactics to sell T-shirts and books, but others, I found, used them more expertly and to more ominous ends. They sold everything from presidential candidates to distractions they hoped would placate the public—and made (or destroyed) millions in the process.

Realizing all this changed me. It made it impossible for me to continue down the path that I was on. The second half of this book explains why. It is an investigation not in how the dark arts of media manipulation work but of their consequences.

HOW BLOGS CREATE THEIR OWN NARRATIVES FOR FUN AND PROFIT

In 2010, I oversaw the launch of a new line of a Made in USA, environmentally friendly nail polish for American Apparel. Although American Apparel typically manufactures all of its products at its vertically integrated factory in L.A., for this product we’d collaborated with an old-fashioned family-owned factory in Long Island, where even their ninety-year-old grandmother still worked on the factory floor. Shortly after shipping the polish to rave reviews, we noticed that several bottles had cracked or burst underneath the bright halogen lights in our stores.

It didn’t pose a risk to our customers, but to be safe rather than sorry, we informed the factory that we’d be pulling the polish from store shelves and expected immediate replacements. We’d discussed the plan in-depth on a weekly conference call with our relevant employees. A confidential e-mail was sent to store managers informing them of the changes and asking them to place the bottles in a cool, dry place in the store until instructions for proper disposal were given. The last thing we wanted, even with environmentally friendly nail polish, was to throw fifty thousand bottles of it in trashcans in twenty countries.

A Jezebel blogger named Irin Carmon somehow received this innocent internal communication and e-mailed me at 6:25 a.m. West Coast time (Gawker is in Manhattan) to ask about it. Well, she pretended to ask me about it, since she signed her e-mail with the following:

Our post with the initial information is going up shortly, but I would be more than happy to update or post a follow-up. Thanks so much. Irin

By the time I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, the post was already live. When I saw it, all I could feel was a pit in my stomach—and, frankly, that surprised me. I knew how blogs worked, was plenty cynical, but even then I sensed that this would be awful.

Click here to play this episode. Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff. My co-hosts for this episode are:

Michael Pusateri -- a lifelong tinkerer and former television tech executive for Disney

and

Seth Godin -- author, entrepreneur, and human wunderkammer.

In this episode:

Real money trading in virtual worlds - Diablo 3 gold now selling $2.50 per million. And Valve's resident economist blog.

True Believers by Kurt Andersen. "Both a thriller of what life what like in 1962 and know," says Seth.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. "The key message of the book is that being a spectator is no fun," says Seth.

The pathos of the Golden Silver Age comics of the Justice League of America.

Seth's riff on the worldviews of Superman vs. Batman.

Follow up on The Breach, recommended by Ernest Cline

Michael: The perils of re-reading books from your youth (Heinlein's The Number of the Beast)

Mark: The joy of re-reading books from your youth (Philip Jose Farmer's Dark is the Sun)

The Philosophy Book

Nest thermostat

And much more!

Click here to play this episode. Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff. My co-hosts for this episode are:

Kevin Kelly, senior maverick at Wired, editor of Cool Tools, co-founder of Quantified Self, co-creator of The Silver Cord, and author of books.

and

Rob Reid, entrepreneur and author of the new science fiction novel Year Zero.

In this episode:

Rob Reid's $8 Billion iPod talk at TED2012

Year Zero, by Rob Reid. Giveaway! If you subscribe to the Gweek podcast and email me to let me know that you did, you'll be entered into a drawing for a free copy of Year Zero (sorry, but the publisher will mail the copies to the US and Canada only.) (Giveaway closed!)

John Hodgman reads Year Zero

The Cyberiad, by Stanislav Lem

The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul, by Douglas R. Hoftstadter and Daniel C/ Dennett

Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia

The Graphic Canon, Vol. 1: From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Dangerous Liaisons, edited by Russ Kick

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4

Lightroom 4, by Scott Kelby

Born Standing Up, by Steve Martin

3 Idiots, the highest grossing Bollywood movie ever

And more!