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Dispatch Ajax! Podcast
A Geek Culture Podcast - Two life-long Nerds explain, critique and poke fun at the major pillars of Geek Culture for your listening pleasure.
Episodes
186 episodes
Classic: Artificial Intelligence Part 1
While we're deal with some crazy life stuff we thought we'd revisit a rapidly changing topic in Artificial Intelligence. We walk through the foundations that make AI feel inevitable: formal reasoning, the Church Turing thesis, early neural netw...
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Pets and Companions
Why do pets and animal companions in fiction feel so immediate, so universally legible, and so devastating when a story takes them away?We pull threads from everywhere, comic book pets like Krypto, the daemon companions of His Dark Mate...
The BC Fourteen Cinematic Universe
Bigfoot in space, Krampus as a demonic Christmas weapon, a clone of Alistair Crowley, reptilian Stalin, Satan pulling strings, and a title card that promises a fight that may never happen. That’s not a mad lib we wrote, it’s the kind of chaos y...
Sci-Why? F.U.! - Garth Marenghi's Darkplace
* Redownload if necessary*Greetings, fellow traveller. For our Sci-Fi Channel series finale we bring you Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, a short-lived but brilliant British parody show that never really got its due. (Sorry we wer...
Sci-Why? FU! - Max Headroom
Max Headroom - a glitchy cyberpunk face that seemed like a novelty in the 1980s - somehow became a pop culture anchor through commercials, parodies, and wall-to-wall brand exposure. If you mostly remember New Coke or a weird talking head you sa...
Slash Fiction
We step away from our sci-fi channel mini-series for Pride Month to give slash fiction the spotlight it deserves, because it is not just “spicy fanfic.” It is a long-running tradition of readers and viewers naming queer subtext, building commun...
Disclosure
In a break from our mini-series we’re taking a hard look at why UFO disclosure and UAP transparency keep feeling “right around the corner” while delivering almost nothing on which people can agree. Along the way we touch the viral political cha...
Sci-Why? F.U! - The Tragic Tale of Voyagers!
In one of the last episodes of the series we take a hard look at Voyagers!, the 1982 time travel series that barrels from setup to action in seconds. If you’ve ever loved Quantum Leap, Doctor Who, Back to the Future style causality, or TVA styl...
SciWhy? F.U! - LEXX
We’re continuing our Sci-Fi Channel origin series by digging into LEXX: a cult space opera about a cowardly non-hero, an undead assassin, a love-obsessed robot head, and a former love slave flying a living ship built to destroy planets. It’s si...
Sci-Why? F.U!: The Universe of Gerry Anderson
In our ongoing series we’re tracing Jerry Anderson’s strange, essential legacy and why early Sci Fi Channel programming kept looping Supercar, Stingray, and Space: 1999 into the brains of American kids who had no idea what they were watch...
Preview: Gerry Anderson (sorta)
This is a preview of our ongoing series on the origins and programming of the Sci-Fi Channel. I promise we do actually talk about Gerry Anderson in this one.
SciWhy? F.U!: William Shatner's TekWar
William Shatner's TekWar is a so-so cyberpunk cop story that somehow grew into novels, comics, trading cards, syndicated TV movies, a USA Network and Sci Fi Channel series, and a PC video game that many people still call one of the worst ever m...
Sci-Why? F.U.: Misfits of Science (Re-Download, if Possible)
A superhero team that rides in an ice cream truck? Courtney Cox?? The Predator??? sounds like a joke until you actually watch it. We go deep on Misfits of Science, the short-lived 1985 NBC sci-fi superhero series that later found a second...
Memmory Gamma: Gul Dukat
Gul Dukat ruled Terok Nor with an iron fist, measuring Bajorans like inventory even as the occupation began to crack under resistance and political pressure. We unpack how fear of assassination, obsession with control, and a need to be admired ...
The Sci-Fi Channel Part 2
We start with the big thesis: the Sci-Fi Channel is an early masterclass in niche marketing, built on the belief that sci-fi fans are loyal and underserved. From there we dig into the credibility play of bringing in Gene Roddenberry and Isaac A...
Classic: Highlander Part 3 - Gabbin' Macleod
In our classic third installment of the Highlander franchise (because of the reported first footage of the remake premiering) we really have a blast talking about all the other fun stuff we'd been waiting to cover. Believe it or not...
Classic: Highlander Part 2: The Sickening
This is part 2 of our revisitation of the Highlander franchise - since the official footage of the Highlander reboot recently debuted at CinemaCon.
Classic: Highlander - Immortal Crime Unit
The Highlander remake is officially moving from rumor to reality, which means it’s time to revisit the series on one of our earliest explainers. We go deep on the franchise’s core mythology of immortals who can’t die unless they’re beheaded, wh...
The Sci-Fi Channel: A Primer
We're Back! And with that we start a new mini series about The Sci-Fi Channel (SyFy, if ya nasty) and its wild diaspora. Something strange happened on old-school satellite TV: a channel appeared out of nowhere, looping wormholes and...
Important Update!
Rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated! We're still going, just having some hiccups, kinda like the rest of the world.
Nerd Culture, No Gatekeeping: A Little About Us
We open the door to the underexplained corners of Nerd and Geek culture—where a driveway TARDIS keeps you warm at the bus stop, Flash Gordon becomes a friendship hinge, and debates about whether Star Wars is science fiction or fantasy spark bet...
159th Episode Spectacular!
We celebrate our 159th with - among many Geeky things - a fast, funny tour of Star Trek’s dangling threads, from Tasha Yar’s exit to the lost “Conspiracy” arc, plus DS9’s long-game brilliance and Voyager’s resets. We field listener questions on...
We're Not Saying It's Erich Von Däniken, But...
...It's Erich Von Däniken. In the 1960's a Swiss hotelier wrote a book that changed how millions see the past—and how pop culture tells stories about it. We revisit the wild trajectory of Chariots of the Gods, the “ancient aliens” hypo...
Gil Gerard: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
RIP Gil Gerard. A New York cab, a day job in drama class, and a shot at the 25th century: that’s the unlikely runway that launched Gil Gerard into Buck Rogers, and it still glows with neon charm. We open the vault on Gerard’s early grind throug...
536: The Worst Year Ever
536 CE: What happens when the sun dims for eighteen months and summer never really arrives? The volcanic winter that blanketed much of the world in a cold, bluish haze, and the chain reaction it set off—failed harvests, famine, migrations, plag...