Okay, that might have been a overly click-baity way of talking about the fact that A. A. Milne (author of Winnie-the-Pooh), once adapted Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the stage. The BBC broadcast a radio version in 1967, with Derek Jacobi voicing Darcy. Surviving copies of the play in book-form will set you back a few hundred dollars, but you can listen to the radio adaptation for free.
Weird Wednesday: Physicists Chasing Unicorn Particles For the Grant Money
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/26/physics-particles-physicists
“Epicycles ‘R’ Us” is the expression that comes to mind.
Weird Wednesday: I Don’t Know, Elon, I Always Thought Optimus Would Be Taller…
…And squarer, and have a red-white-blue color scheme and talk like Peter Cullen.
Weird Science Wednesday: Benedictine Sisters Demonstrate Hydroelectric Power in the Congolese City of Miti
If you have the water and the technology, it’s hard to beat hydroelectricity as a source of power. African-born Sister Alphonsine Ciza, who had studied mechanical engineering, teamed up with the rest of her convent, the Benedictine Sisters of Agnes, and built a small hydroelectric dam to power their facility in Miti. The Democratic Republic of Congo suffers from rolling blackouts, and relying on hydroelectricity allows the sisters to teach computing programming on actual screens instead of just showing their students the underlying principles in a textbook.
I don’t have a lot of use for the National Catholic Register in general, but I liked this article, which links back to the original Reuters account, complete with pictures of Sister Alphonsine, and also to information a similar hydroelectric plant built about thirty years prior by Benedictine monks in Tanzania.
Weird Wednesday: Audiobooks!
Thanks to the auto-narrator function at Google Play, I now have audio book versions of four of my novels available:
Shadow Captain
Marrying a Monster
Waking the Dreamlost
Loving a Deathseer
Right now I am working on polishing Shadow Captain’s sequel. I hope to have it published by late December of this year, at which point it will spend 90 days in Kindle Unlimited so that the KU readers of the first book can enjoy it. The audiobook for the sequel will be made available around the time it comes to Google Play, sometime in 2023. Once I have Shadow Captain’s sequel completed, the focus will be on re-editing the Ancestors of Jaiya novels in preparation for their audiobook release, and on a new project to be announced later.
Happy Listening!
Bit of Dragon-Slaying (Well, Croc-Slaying) in China, 1000-1400 BC
Weird Wednesday: Super-Deep Geothermal Drilling
Normally, geothermal power is only used for generating electricity in places that have “hot spots” relatively close to the surface, like this location in Italy. Meet Quaise Energy who believe that you can generate electricity with geothermal heat anywhere in the world, if you just drill deep enough.
Here’s hoping they end up emulating this Peter Cushing character, not this one. Good luck, guys.
Crossdomain “Transmedium” Threats
The Pentagon would have you believe that the truth is out there, although I am not entirely clear on when we started taking the Pentagon’s word for this stuff. I don’t know whether the truth is out there or not, but some days I suspect Robur the Conqueror is.
(Please Note: the film version of Master of the World features Robur’s much more generic airship from the prequel, Clipper of the Clouds. If you watch the film, you will get to see both Vincent Price and Charles Bronson doing their thing, but you won’t get to see any Steampunk Triple Changer that can function as an aircraft, automobile, and submarine.)
Thoughts for Weird Wednesday: The Measure of a Muse
There are writers who, when they speak of their Muse, are basically personifying their subconscious mind. (e.g. “My Muse won’t give me the rest of the story, it just gives me the opening of a different story. Argh!”) If it works for them, great, and if it doesn’t work for them, it’s not my job to tell them what to do instead. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time myself. I do know that my subconscious is me, and that I’ve not derived any particular benefit from trying to personify it as an Other.
Continue reading “Thoughts for Weird Wednesday: The Measure of a Muse”Weird Wednesday: We Can Imagine It For You Wholesale
Still trying out wacky prompts in Midjourney, and developing a fresh, if wary, respect for AI-based images. I have actually pretty good versions of my heroines from the Ancestors of Jaiya series, and some more space art for Star Master. I will probably share those at some point, after some more clean-up.
In the meantime, here’s some completely random Midjourney fan art: the main characters from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly as pirates. General note: for more old-school actors with conventionally handsome features, Midjourney sometimes struggles to create a likeness humans can recognize (see the Clint Eastwood image below), whereas celebrities with quirkier, more distinctive features fare a bit better (see the Van Cleef and Wallach images below).
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: We Can Imagine It For You Wholesale”
Jaglion Press 