There are many pleasures to reading that go beyond the words on the page. For me, the words tend to fade away, replaced by the story being told, whether fiction or nonfiction. Audio books add another dimension. A good voice actor can add a dimension to even the best books that doesn’t exist in the…
I am taking the day off from the blog today. We had guests this weekend and it was so much fun to hang out with people again. Now that they have headed home, and things are quiet, I’m just going to sit here, reading my book, and enjoy the afterglow of a really fun weekend.…
For the first time in forever, as Princess Anna might sing, we have weekend guests. My sister and her family have come down for a weekend. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited to have company. After all, it has been forever1 since we last had guests. The guest room was feeling…
We are in peak cicada season here in northern Virginia. Wandering outside, there is a sound in the background that sounds like the distant warbling of a car alarm. It is, in fact, the cicada’s song. I captured a video outside the house this morning where you can hear it behind the sound of the…
A few nights ago, trying to figure out what to read next, I landed on some audio recordings of Harlan Ellison stories. These were all stories I’d read before, but they came with these off-the-cuff (so it seemed) commentaries by Ellison. They were great, and for an hour or so, while I lay in the…
Over the years I have had a harder and harder time watching movies. I finally understand why. Television shows are designed to be broken up into segments. The acts in a typical TV show, whether a sitcom or drama, are neatly separated by commercial breaks. Of course, with streaming services, those commercials are typically absent,…
This morning I finished reading Jason Schreier’s latest book on the video game industry Press Reset. These days, the overall process of video game development is very similar to that of making movies. There are three major phases: pre-production, production, and post-production. Thinking about this, it occurred to me that writing a story or a…
Apple announced recently that Apple Music will now have an option for even higher fidelity music files. This did little to stir my blood. I realized long ago that the limits of my own video and audio perception are much lower than those technology is producing. This makes things like ultra-high definition and “spacial” and…
I tend to think of myself as omnivorous. I’ll eat (or at least try) just about anything. About the only things I won’t deliberately eat are yogurt and cheesecake. I’ve disliked yogurt since I was a young child and tried some plain yogurt. The awful memory of that has stuck with me and is too…
Yesterday was a gorgeous day and I spent a lot of time out on our deck, reading. We have a deck tent for shade (and to keep mosquitoes and other critter out) and I took my book, and a root beer and lay on the couch and read. It is a pleasant place to read,…