Month: January 2009

  • LibriVox

    I have now recorded two stories for Podcastle, one which came out last September and other which hasn’t been published yet. On both occasions, I have been generally satisfied with my reading, but there is/was a lot of room for improvement.

    The only way to get better is to practice! Thusly I have started contributing to the catalog of Public Domain recordings at LibriVox! Their objective is “to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.”

    My first recording for them is The Enchanted Canary1 out of The Red Fairy Book, by Andrew Lang. I think the recording is much better than the last two stories I did, so that makes me happy. The text is available here, from the Gutenberg Project. [3/4/09 edit: Link removed. I’ll post a link to an mp3 upload on my server. Hopefully tonight]
    [3/5/09 edit: go to this posting for the link]


    1: I’m not sure how eternal that link will be. If you get 404, let me know and I’ll fix it.

  • Wrong Oath, Right President?

    Chief Justice John Roberts screwed up the Oath of Office for President Obama and Obama flubbed it in return. He did not state the required “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute…” etc. Instead he said “I Barak Hussein Obama do solemnly swear that I will execute the office… faithfully.”

    Does this mean he’s not president?

    No.

    It’s all about what he signs after the fact, and I bet they got that document correct.

    Still, it doesn’t improve John Roberts’ resumé to have screwed up like that in front of the Whole Damn World, although I will also admit that Obama went along with it. It might have been a prickish move to repeat the oath differently from what the Chief Justice was telling you to.

    Edit: Already 43,000 hits on google for “Obama Screws up Oath”

  • President Obama

    Say it with me: “President Obama”

    Dude, that’s like, totally cool.

    We’re still a racist country, but at least we can say that we’re a bit less racist than we were. And, unfortunately, we can state that we’re one of the least racist countries out there, which isn’t a high bar to clear.

    Jenn and I have two friends up in DC today. You can follow their adventures via twitter at Dfunkmale and Sharonopolis.

  • "In the House of the Seven Librarians"

    I listened to the Podcastle story, In the House of the Seven Librarians today. This is a story about a magical library and its seven librarian attendants who raise a foundling girl.

    About three-quarters of the way through the story, the narrator describes a list of rules that have been scratched down, in various hands, over time. My favorite was:

    “Do not play Nine Hundred eighty-two card pickup with the p to q drawer, or any other.”

    I can just imagine the mess.

  • Superuseless Superpowers

    Currently my most favorite link in the feed reader is:

    Superuseless Superpowers! Check it out.

    And my favorite of the powers?

    99% Opacity.

    There’s a special ability in taking something that is cosmically insane and making it hilariously funny.

  • PETA's "Sea Kittens"

    The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has come up with a new campaign that makes me scratch my head:

    Sea Kittens, not to be confused with War Kittens.

    My opinion of PETA is that they are too much of an over-the-top organization. Their goals are laudable, even if you disagree, but their approach is fundamentally strange. This Sea Kitten campaign illustrates this in blinding highlights. They’ve carried it through, though, in their Fishing Hurts website, but replacing all references to “fish” with Sea Kittens, which just reads weirdly.

    Still, in a bid to bring Poe’s Law back to mainstream awareness, the “stories” section of the sea kittens website leaves me agog. It would be so easy to think that they are making fun of themselves with the stories…but they’re not.

    Wow.

  • Comment Spam (again)

    I’ve been getting a flurry of comment spam again. Amusingly, it is mostly hitting another of my posts that jokes about comment spam.

  • This is Totally Me

    I saw this T-Shirt and started chuckling uncontrollably (if that’s not an oxymoron).

    In honor of the Evil Eyebrow I present a more popular venue for self expression.

  • MacMillan Doesn't Get It

    Peter Hamilton is one of my go-to authors for Space Opera. He writes good stuff, although plenty of people argue that his deux ex machinas get a bit old.

    He’s a brit and his latest book is published by MacMillan in the UK. It isn’t due to be released in the US until March, which I feel is a bit long to wait given that it was published in the UK in October. However, it turns out that MacMillan is also selling an ebook! I’m a big fan of ebooks, as my previous posts about Baen probably tell you.

    I trundle my way over to their website and discover…usury. The price on the hardback is £18.99 and their price for the ebook is £18.58. A grand discount of not-a-whole-lot. What a crock!

    I know there are arguments for not pricing down ebooks because there’s still all of the production that goes into the hardbacks, but I think it’s bullshit. If they’d had priced it a bit more reasonably, I’d probably have purchased the ebook and then bought the hardback, too. Now, they’ve lost a sale, and they won’t even get that money for my book purchase because that’s being handled by Del Rey in the US.

    MacMillan, you lose, but you’ve successfully made me withstand an impulse purchase. Thank you.