Through the magic of Poladroid you can fill any picture with fake nostalgia! I've always felt about 42 years old, and so when I look back on memories it feels only proper that they should be discolored and scratched rather than full of jpeg-artifacts. Of course, you could do this with photoshop but, well, this is just more fun.

Go to the website and install the (small) program, and start transforming your pictures. The interface is ridiculously simple, making pictures takes time, and you can only process a limited amount of pictures at once. At first I found this annoying, but then I started thinking about why I like polaroids (and game boy camera pictures). It has something to do with the limitations set by the form of production, which force you to think a certain economic way when taking pictures. To get real old pictures would be enormously hard work, and so it seems only fair that a small degree of those limitations stay with me when I'm taking this shortcut.

Here are some pictures that I've transformed, and if mine aren't enough for you then there are about THIRTY FIVE THOUSAND MORE on flickr. If you make any, why not show off here at Awesomepedia? Dump a link in the comments, and let us know what you think of this tool!

Ok. Let’s start with the name.
The totally awesome name.

Escape Pod is a podcast, so the name is good right off the bat. But it’s also good because Escape Pod is a Science Fiction podcast (and an escape pod is something you're more likely to find on a spaceship than on an Austin 7). But there’s also another scrumptious level of meaning, because Escape Pod is bite-sized SciFi audio fiction, and as such it provides an escape from the real world.

Escape Pod releases an mp3-file with a new short story every week. They actually pay their authors, which ensures a level of quality above what you'll usually find in the valleys of Internettia. The really great thing about Escape Pod is the quantity of it. Don't get me wrong - it has quality too - stacks of it - but the bliss of finding hundreds of well-written and well-narrated 40ish minute stories after having wallowed in a Terry Prattchet Discography for months and months is undescribable.

I would be ENTIRELY convinced that Escape Pod was the best name for a podcast ever if it wasn't for its sister podcast, which follows the same model except with fantasy stories instead of SciFi. The name of that podcast is Podcastle. Yeah. Anyway. The lovely cavalcade of oral distractions that is Escape Pod is brought to us by Stephen Eley, who reads intros and outros for every episode, as well as often narrating the story itself. And let me tell you. After listening to Steve Eley every other voice in podcasting will seem contrived.

Right now there are 188 episodes of Escape Pod, 41 of PodCastle and 133 of Pseudopod (You know how I said PodCastle is the sister podcast of Escape Pod? Yeah, well, Pseudopod is the evil-twin-podcast. Or the scary old-friend-of-the-family Podcast who likes to tell the children disturbing stories and then give them candy. And not the good kind of candy.) Here is a link to episode 100, which is as good a place as any to start, or perhaps better than some, considering how it's Isaac Asimov's Nightfall.

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