Editor's Loudspeaker: Welcome to Tales from the Inbox!

2946-06-06 - Editor's Loudspeaker: Welcome to Tales from the Inbox!

Greetings, fellow fans of Cosmic Background, and welcome to Tales from the Inbox! As the team webmaster announced a little while ago, I'll be your host as we explore some of the amazing stories the audience has sent to our studio over the past six years, which never quite managed to find a time slot on the main CB vidcast episodes. 

When Sovanna Rostami, the amazing host of the Feedback Loop episodes which you all know and love, suggested this method of bringing more of the submitted content to light, I'll admit I was, like most of the studio staff, quite skeptical; Cosmic Background is a vidcast service, and I wasn't sure this audience would warm to a text-only supplement to the show, even if this was a way to consume more of our most sought-after content. 

That was a month ago; by now, most of us have come around to seeing things Sovanna's way. I'm excited to be given the chance to bring you this experimental new content – I've already spent the better part of a week digging through our inbox submissions and picking out some of the best items that will translate best to this format. 

Expect the first installment of Tales from the Inbox to be ingested into this feed within a few hours. As Sovanna says at the beginning of each Feedback Loop vidcast, we do not verify the stories we are sent. That means that while I do plan to exclude the ones that are easily disproven, I can offer no guarantee that every submission is completely factual. Thankfully, I know that the Cosmic Background audience knows from long experience with Feedback Loop episodes to make up its own mind about the outlandish stories we are sent. 

That's all I've got to say for now. 

--Duncan Chaudhri

Cosmic Background Junior Producer 
Editor of the "Tales from the Inbox" Text Feed 

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Notice: Changing Behavior of the Cosmic Background Text Feed

2946-06-05 - Notice: Changing Behavior of the Cosmic Background Text Feed 

With as big an audience as the Cosmic Background vidcast series has gathered, we find ourselves with an ever-increasing stock of material submitted by our fans throughout explored space and the frontiers. While we are committed to our twice-monthly Feedback Loop episodes, we find ourselves unable to fit all of the best material we're sent into these episodes. In some months, we are able to fit less than half of the deserving submissions into the available vidcast time, and as a result we've amassed quite a backlog of stories we've been unable to share without cutting into the other content which makes Cosmic Background what it is. 

To address some of our deep backlog of potential Feedback Loop content, this text feed, previously used only to alert our audience of upcoming special events and opportunities to meet the people behind the show, will now also distribute worthy content from our inbox, cleaned up and edited by our assistant producer Duncan Chaudhri. 

This is an experiment for us here at Cosmic Background, so we can't say where we'll take this method of content delivery in the future, but we are very hopeful that our audience, especially those of you out on the Frontiers who lack the hypercomm bandwidth to retrieve the full daily vidcast episodes, will find this to be a valuable addition to Cosmic Background's available content. Duncan, who most of you already know from his appearances on the vidcast episodes during Ashton's extended vacation in December, has been working behind the scenes on the show in a number of ways for almost two years, and we're all excited to see what he does with this new content. 

Any submission, past or present, may be published to this text feed, in any order. If you want to earmark a submission specifically for this feed for any reason, make sure to tag the hypercast bundle with the “textfeed” meta-key. Our system will route these items directly to Duncan’s desk. 

In addition to bundles containing text submissions from our audience inbox, this feed will also now occasionally host messages from some our sponsors. At this time, the only sponsor who has signed on to support this experimental content is Kosseler Shipbuilding, one of our oldest and most highly-regarded sponsors. Kosseler Shipbuilding's relationship with dates back almost to the beginning of the show, and we're very happy to provide the consumers of our new text feed content with promotions and special offers exclusive to our audience. 

Notifications of upcoming events, giveaways, and other show news will continue to appear here; filter your subscription to only process hypercast bundles tagged with “shownews” if you want to see this text feed without the new content. This will filter out both Duncan's stories from the inbox, and any messages from our sponsors. We hope that nobody elects to skip this new content, but the option is there for you if you wish to use it. 

Please address any questions or concerns about this change to the Cosmic Background customer relations inbox. 

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