When ought you first introduce a kid to Dune? And what ought to be the first introduction? I’m thinking the paperbook, just after he or she has read The Hunger Games.
As evidence I submit, this 11 second video – recorded after hearing just the first few lines read aloud.
It delighted me more than any number of cute kitten videos viewed in the same month.
Posted by Jesse Willis
A recent email pointed me towards Project Gutenberg and a public domain novel I’d not previously heard of. After doing a little research I now think it would make a really terrific audiobook!
It’s a standalone SF novel by by Edward Pangborn, it was first published in 1953, and its called West Of The Sun.
Here’s the premise:
On earth it was 2056 A.D. but on the red-green planet it was THE YEAR ONE
There were only six human beings—
DR. CHRISTOPHER WRIGHT, anthropologist— he believed in man’s basic goodness … but could he put his trust in an alien race?
PAUL MASON— he dutifully shared his wife with his best friend.
DOROTHY LEEDS— Paul was her husband, but she knew there were some things more important than love.
SEARS OLIPHANT— the gentle scientist who inspired love in an alien.
ANN BRYAN— the youngest of them all, she had to be taught violence and passion.
EDMUND SPEARMAN— the rebel who had to have his own tribe to rule … even though it meant war with his Earth companions.
Six humans alone against the deadly forces of a strange and distant planet.
Cool sounding right?
I’ve only heard one Pangborn short story, The Good Neighbors, but based on the quality of it, and the reviews I’ve been reading of West Of The Sun (detailed below) I think it’d make a terrific audiobook!
Potential narrators, I suggest you have a look at it HERE.
Posted by Jesse Willis
I’ve never understood the appeal of the art of flower arrangement – flowers are pretty, and I guess they’re full of symbolism – but other than that I don’t really get the appeal.
On the other hand, I find that whenever I visit someone’s home I’m immediately off and looking at their bookshelves. To me that’s where the real art of arrangement happens.
I happened to do a little of that myself today.
It started yesterday – when I spotted this perfectly good bookshelf being given away! FREE!
I snapped it right up, dusted it right off, and found a place for it in my apartment.
Then I policed up various books, and audiobooks, from various other overflowing shelves and arranged them in a handy and functional order.
They’re all basically grouped by author. Some of the books I’ve had for decades, others are quite new.
Here are a few details:
Posted by Jesse Willis
A few months ago I designed and built an iPhone camera mount for making YouTube videos for SFFaudio.
I actually started off wanting a tripod, but I couldn’t find a reasonably priced adaptor for my iPhone. As I tried to find one I realized that a tripod wasn’t exactly the best way to film the objects on my desktop anyway. So I thought about it for a bit, took some measurements, and went down to Rona (a local hardware store) to buy the parts.
Here’s what it looks like:
I really like showing it off!
HERE is the kind of vid I make with it.
To make it cost me just over fifty dollars and the build time was about an hour. Now that I have it I find that the assembly time is less than a minute.
If you have access to tools and a workshop you can make one for yourself for less than I did. I bought too much PVC piping, and I had to invest in a hacksaw. The hacksaw cost about $10. The other tool that I bought was the spring-loaded hand clamp with a range up to two inches – this is essential for making my mount portable and preventing the whole thing from falling over.
A friend* gave me the wooden base.
Here’s how it all fits together. Permanently attached to the wooden base (7 x 10 x 0.75 inches) with four Robertson screws, is an iron floor flange with a 1 inch female pipe receiver with four countersunk screw holes.
This is the only part that I don’t regularly disassemble.
I then screw into the flange a 1 inch diameter pipe measuring 3 inches long (see images below). Atop that fits the rest of the assembly which is all PVC plastic tubing measuring 1.25 inches in diameter. The first PVC piece is the biggest, a straight tube that fits over the 3″ long X 1″ diameter iron pipe. It rises up about 12 inches from the base (though I suggest you add another 7 inches to that if you’re planning to attach it to a table as I have done in the image above). Atop that I fit one of two 90° PVC fittings of the same 1.25 inch diameter. That attaches to another straight pipe of the same diameter running horizontally about 11 inches. I then pop in the other 90° fitting. To which I attach a 4.5 inch long tube running vertically downward. This last pipe has had a notch cut into it approximately three quarters of an inch from the bottom. The notch is about half an inch thick (as that’s how thick my iPhone 3GS is).
I mentioned earlier that you probably want to add about 7 inches to the first vertical tube. This is because when showing objects on my desk I actually have my mount atop the monitor riser, pictured at the back at the back of my desk, and it is 7 inches higher than the desktop itself.
All the pieces are held together by friction which allows me to swap in and out different pieces of differing lengths. It also makes it portable. I took the mount to my classroom and showed it to my students the other day.
Assembly pictures:
[*thanks Andy!]
Posted by Jesse Willis
Back in 2006 Jason Rennie was my podcasting archfoe. He had a podcast called The Sci Phi Show. Back then I used to post about it a lot. It podfaded sometime in 2008.
Jason was a podcaster with whom I had many, many arguments. The problem was I just couldn’t help myself.
Part of it was that he was always talking about topics I loved to think about. And normally that would be cool. But with Jason it always felt more like this…
Now I don’t think Jason was actually out to get me – he lives in Australia so he’d have a long way to swim – it’s more like he was a mirror universe version of myself. I just had to fight him!
And part of it was that he was rather like me – he liked to look for the philosophy in Science Fiction – that’s my thing!
He was doing it wrong.
Jason was a big, big fan of belief.
I too like the idea of certainty (which is a kind of ersatz twin of belief). But having grown fairly comfortable with the fact that certainty is itself a very elusive end to chase I’ve learned not to often persue it.
Incidentally, check out this awesomely funny sentence from the Wikipedia entry on certainty:
![It is widely held that certainty about the real world is a failed historical enterprise (that is, beyond deductive truths, tautology, etc.).[1]](https://www.sffaudio.com/images12/FromTheWikipediaEntryOnCertainty565.jpg "It is widely held that certainty about the real world is a failed historical enterprise (that is, beyond deductive truths, tautology, etc.).[1]")
So like I was saying, Jason Rennie was the antipodean Jesse Willis.
He was a self-confessed Christian, and he metaphorically wore a crucifix round his neck in every single podcast he produced.
This is rather unlike me. As I am a nothing, holding no religious belief and answering the question of my religious convictions much like THIS when asked.
But somehow, listening to Jason’s show, I always found myself drawn in.
I think it was something about the assumptions he made in every podcast. And how they just lay there, unchallenged.
It’s not like I have a very big atheistic axe to grind, not having being raised with any religious belief that I’ve now overcome or dispensed with …. I mean …. how could I have any real axe to grind? I was never even given a metaphorical helve!
Jason used to insist that I had a worldview and that I was just refusing to articulate it. I think he was wrong, and is wrong. But I’ve thought about that a lot since then. The closest I think I come to having a worldview is with a conversation game I like to play.
At a party, or around a dinner table, I like to ask everyone to figure out what a given person’s favourite word (or phrase) is. And then I ask what that word or phrase might mean about him or her.
So for example, at one such party we figured out that my mom’s favourite phrase is “at least” – and we figured that perhaps that meant that she was always looking on the bright side of things.
Fun right?
My favourite word, apparently, is the word “apparently.”
Personally I like to think my extensive use of “apparently” is because I care greatly about precision and that that the word works as a kind of bulwark to my skepticism about my own statements. Apparently others hold other opinions on this matter.
My friend Luke Burrage’s favourite phrase on SFBRP seems to be “it’s a bit strange.”
I think it’s a bit strange that that’s his favourite phrase because I’m not sure what it means.
Now, having listened to Jason’s podcast, I think his favourite phrase was “intellectually lazy.” I don’t know exactly what that means about him either. It’s more of an observation at this point. I’d need to discuss the matter more with people who’ve heard him use it in context. Figure out if it really is a phrase that stands out and if so what meaning it might have.
This all would have been of little interest except, apparently, Jason had recently un-podfaded his podcast!
And it seems he is actually producing two podcasts now!
One is familiar in name and substance. It’s called The Sci Phi Show, a ressurectied version of the old show with new recordings on familiar topics. And the other is wholly new, but similarly themed show called Christian Meets World.
I’ve listened to a few episodes of both.
And, apparently I’m still a sucker for Jason’s magnificently targeted antagonism, all these years later.
I wouldn’t have said anything, but for Twitter.
It’s been a few days now I’ve been unable to get this horrible tweet out of my head:
What can I say to that?
It’s like a tractor beam … must resist … can’t resist!
‘Say nothing’, my friends tell me, ‘it’s just linkbait’ they say.
And I want to listen to them …. but Jason is …. just …. so …. wrong!!!
I think I’m going to quit looking at Twitter.
Posted by Jesse Willis
Also:
Jason can’t have his old archfoe status back, that slot is currently occupied by a fiend of a different ilk.
A terrible menace that apparently doesn’t even know of his own status as such.
I speak of course, of that arch-villain, that Professor Moriarty of podcasting, that obstructionist joker known as Patrick Hester.
I’ve been listening to audiobooks my whole life.
It started as a young boy when adults would read me bedtime stories. Then, as I grew up, I turned to 8-tracks and LP records. Then for a long time in the 1980s and 1990s I was using cassettes almost exclusively.
For personal portability, with cassettes, I used about Sony Walkmans and Sanyo knock-off walkmans. At home I used ghetto blasters and clock radios with cassette players.
Eventually CDs came in, and I used them concurrently with cassettes. They were followed by MP3-CDs. Then I was using iPods (I owned four over the years, three Nanos and a Mini). Every technology that’s has come in has improved the accessibility and portability of audiobooks for me.
Today I pretty much use just one device for all my audiobook and podcast listening. That’s my iPhone 3GS.
I use it so much I had to start worrying about it holding a charge for the whole day.
The current solution I’ve come up with has been very satisfactory. I use three separate charging docking stations at home. All of them are identical, the Sony ICF-CS10iP. I have one at my computer, one in my bedroom, and one in my bathroom.
In fact, I’ve liked it so much I bought a fourth for work and use it in my classroom. I gave one to my niece and one to my sister and my mom bought one for herself and I bought one for a friend too. They come with a little remote control, but I tend to have them near at hand most of the time.
When not at home listening I’ve used light and cheap over the ear earphones for most of my life. But I’ve always disliked the burden of cords. So, for about six months now, I’ve been using a Sony DR-BT160AS headset. I don’t like the fact that it is an in-ear ear-bud model, but the fact that it combines stereo earbuds with a microphone with a behind-the-neck mount and NO CORD at all make them a substantial improvement over every pair of headphones I’ve used before. It is rechargeable (with an internal battery) and sustains a charge for several hours of use. It’s Bluetooth enabled and works incredibly well at a distance of up to ten meters or so. In fact it actually works a little better when at a distance than it does when close up.
Unfortunately, like any pair of earbuds they aren’t truly comfortable, but their compact size, the built in microphone, and the lack of cables makes me very pleased to have a pair. I actually bought a second set shortly after the first so that I’ve got as a backup for when the first dies.
What hardware do you use to listen to audiobooks and podcast?
Posted by Jesse Willis