So it has been a while since the last Spam Spam Spam Humbug episode, and I apologize for the delay (hopefully some of you are still listening to the ‘cast and will thus hear this apology!). All of us who contribute to the podcast wound up having an extraordinarily busy May, and our repeated attempts to record episodes always seemed to fall through for one reason or another.

To get us back into things, we’ve put together a special — and, frankly, awesome — episode. Major props to Linguistic Dragon and Boolean Dragon for putting together the main body of this episode, which is a dramatic reading of a short story penned by Linguistic. Entitled The Fall of Astaroth, it depicts — as one might expect — the defeat of the Shadowlord of Hatred by the Avatar. Linguistic also did the reading, and Boolean Dragon handled the audio editing and sound effects. It’s a great piece, and well worth the listen.

As always: if you’d like to recommend anyone for a shout-out, send us an email…which you can also do to suggest podcast topics, offer commentary or criticism about podcast episodes, and/or to volunteer your time as either an occasional or regular contributor to podcast sessions.

As well, if you haven’t already, you should totally sign on with the Ultima Dragons group on Facebook, or with the Ultima Dragons community on Google+. The Facebook group is easily the larger and more lively, but that just means that the Google+ one needs a few more members posting content there on a more regular basis. And if you’re on Twitter, don’t forget to contribute to the #udic hashtag.

Finally, there’s the Ultima Codex Patreon. A $5 pledge that will get you access to Spam Spam Spam Humbug episodes the day before they go live here on the site. And if you contribute, you’ll be helping me both maintain and — with sufficient funding — expand the server infrastructure of the Codex to better deliver all the things you come looking for thereat.