Q: What’s up with your iTunes feed? A: We started off with a janky heroku site, because Jim was in love with ruby on rails development, and, well, things got complicated. We somehow stranded our iTunes feed on that old site, and Apple won’t let you shut down/update a feed that it can’t access. We’ve tried working it out with Apple, but shockingly they don’t care about the plight of a few podcasters all that much. So now we have 3 feeds, only 1 that is active. If you want the right one, click here. We’d love your review!
Q: What license is Blue Yonder released under? A: All Blue Yonder episodes featuring ONLY the hosts Jim Jones and A.Ron Hubbard are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. This license does not cover any episode featuring other hosts or interview subjects.
Blue Yonder Lore…
A.Ron’s Grudge Matches: A.Ron can be… a bit much sometimes. So far, he’s challenged, on air, Uwe Boll, Steven Segal and Steven Hawking to a street fight. Anytime, any place. Hawking, you ask? Hey, he’s a bit of a dick.
Badasses: We have a deep, abiding love, which some might call an unhealthy fixation, for 80’s action movies. Sue us. We long for the days when Arnold, Sly, and Bruce reigned supreme at the box office, kicking ass and dispensing extra-legal justice. And we’re always keen to debate the relative merits of badassery old and new. To this end, we devised the definitive rating system for badasses, the patent-pending Three C System. A successful badass must be a physical Champion, play numerous badass Characters, and ooze with badass Charisma. Check out Badasses! – Ep 5 and Badasses Part Deux – Ep 25 for everything you need to know.
Corn: This is an in-joke going back to our Zombie Draft episode. Basically, Batman fails at agriculture. Jim declared this by fiat, since in his mind the key to surviving a zombie apocolypse is having farmers. Don’t ask me, the man is clinically insane. When A.Ron pointed out the fact that Batman, Ironman, and Robert Neville, all brilliant scientists in their own right, could damn well grow corn, Jim said “Batman can absolutely not grow corn.” After a bitter fight and wiki vandalism ensued, a meme was born.
Curse: The boys have a bad track record in making predictions. It’s so bad, that we feel like if we take a stand on anything, the opposite is bound to happen. Probably the same day the cast we made the prediction gets released. See Cursed – Ep. 58 for more details.
Draft casts: The most fun Magic: The Gathering format is booster pack drafts. The best part of any fantasy football season is the draft. So it would follow that the best kind of podcast would be a draft format. And wouldn’t you know it, some of our best, most fun casts are draft format. The guys pick a theme, (like form a team to survive the Zombie apocolypse) then take turns selecting characters that fit the theme. Once a character is taken, they are “off the board” and cannot be selected by anyone else. Then the guys argue and fight over who “won”. A good time is had by all. Examples: Zombie, Geek Babes.
Draft Rules: As discussed above, a draft cast is where the participants select a scenario, then begin selecting a “team” to achieve success in that scenario. If real life individuals are involved, they may only be selected by one person, and then are “off the board” and cannot be selected by anyone else. However, in drafts dealing with fictional characters, it gets slightly more complicated. You can draft a character only once, and you usually specify which version of the character you select. For example, you could select “Batman”, and further specify the “Adam West” version of this character. Or, you could select the “comic book version”. Whichever you specify, all remaining versions of Batman are then “off the board”. Conversely, if I select Dutch, the Arnold Schwarzenegger character from Predator, someone else can still draft John Matrix from the movie Commando, because they are drafting the different characters Arnold has portrayed, and not the actor himself. In fact, you could still draft Arnold the real life actor, if you wished. There are usually other rules that aim to level the playing field involving Blue Yonder drafts, (“no super beings, no robots, no super naturals” being a popular one) but those tend to differ from draft to draft.
Gemini: A.Ron likes to speak proper. None of this “me and Jim” bullshit. Oh no, when he refers to his co-host and himself as a unit, it’s invariably as “Jim and I”. And then Jim… well… you get the picture. This happens about once an episode.
Mel Gibson: The ultimate Gentile. His antipathy to all things Kosher is so strong, he eats nothing but unbled pork meat, has surgically enhanced his foreskin in lieu of circumcision, works twice as hard on the Sabbath, etc. See Mel Gibson and the Magic Marker Kilt – Ep 61 for more details.
NARPs/NIRLs: These were attributes the guys came up with to judge the merits of geek women during one of their “draft” shows. NARP stands for Nerd Action Role Play, which is of course a take on LARP, and is a measure of how many geeky roles a woman has played in pop culture. NIRL, pronounced like “girl”, is a measure of how nerdy they are “in real life”. Both scales went to 7, of course. See Geek Babes Draft – Ep 17
Personal Arrogants: At one time, the Bald Move Empire waged a bitter and cruel war against these misguided Seattlites, but circa PAX-East 2011, the war has cooled down to a semi-friendly rivalry. They lord over us the fact that they have more followers, facebook fans, traffic, the alleged sucktitude of the Midwest in comparison to the West Coast (again, they’re from fucking SEATTLE), while we rest secure in the fact that our show is, you know, actually good. See Winter Formal, Ep 41 to see how it all began.
Square Down: We don’t do round ups. We’re not qualified, topical, or informed enough to authoritatively round up anything. We do the opposite. We square shit down. First appearence, Video Game Square Down, Ep 40.
Top 7: You’d have to ask Peter and Stafa over at Powerplay for a fuller explanation, but most of their lists or rankings top out at seven. As a result, Blue Yonder frequently follows this tradition.
Wheelbarrow: A term A.Ron coined to refer to the penchant fantasy authors have for giving their characters and the world they live in utterly alien names. Fer’ridal. Bznooth. Chi’li’a-al the IV. That kind of bullshit. When he sees this sort of unpronounceable crap, he mentally substitutes the phrase “wheelbarrow” so in order not to bog down in the diacritic marks and nonstop consonants and keep going. The Greater Wheelbarrow Theory states that if you get to 3-4 wheelbarrows in one stretch of plot, you’re in trouble of losing your audience. One of our favorite episodes.