Here is a neat impressionist drawing that Rachel did of me at another friend’s birthday party. It looks like charcoal, but it was all done on an iPad in the span of an hour or so…pretty impressive! The cat was a nice touch :)
[Posted with the permission of Rachel Walters]
Over the last few months, I have acquired yet another hobby. Those who know me may appropriately groan at this point.
There is a wonderful little website called LibriVox.org. They specialize in converting public domain works from text into spoken word. This has a number of useful side effects: Continue reading
Almost a week ago, I posted about my intention to compare the “Barsoom” series of Edgar Rice Burroughs with its recent film adaption, John Carter. The other night I watched the movie with a friend of mine. Here are some of my thoughts.
I want to address this film first from the perspective of a person who has read the books, because that perspective is the most striking. Whoever was responsible for the writing/directing/producing of this film is clearly a fan of the books. Many book-to-movie projects have a lot of their original flavor, world-building, and novelty wrung out of them as they are stretched across the big screen. Not so here!
Similarities:
The high-jumping John Carter, for the most part, performs his function as an indominable male protagonist, swinging his greatsword as a mighty Thark might swing one of his own four arms! Continue reading
Before this month, I had never heard of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It seems he was a pulpy writer from the Golden Age of SF. He also invented that jungle vine-swinging hero, Tarzan.
Why do I bring him up? Well it seems Disney has taken it upon themselves to make the first ever movie adaptation of A Princess of Mars, an epic fantasy novel set on a 1910’s to 1930’s era conception of Mars. Despite credit as an inspiration for many alien monster-containing movies and TV shows, nobody has before taken the initiative to turn this adventure story into a big-screen feature. The film is called, John Carter, named after the protagonist of the story.
Now as a newly initiated volunteer for LibriVox, the group dedicated to transliterating public domain works into audio format, it occured to me that this 1911 classic (likely in the public domain by now) had probably been recorded previously. I looked around and found that it had! In fact, it was done as a collaboration first, then handled by a solo reader after that (the link above is to the latter recordign). I’ll be talking about LibriVox a little more in a future post.
Today I’m kicking off the first episode of Synthetic Voices! I’m really looking forward to the challenge of recording a podcast every month and hopefully a couple people will enjoy listening to it!
Take a listen to the episode here:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Continue reading