I sympathize with most of what they’re talking about, but I disapprove of their attempt to throw Frank Herbert’s world-building under the bus for Dune Part 1’s dialogue issues. That’s really on the actors. The easiest characters for me to understand in terms of dialogue in that movie were Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac, some stage experience plus prior sci-fi experience plus voice-acting experience) and Chani (Zendaya, singing experience, by extension at least some stage experience, also some sci-fi experience). The hardest to understand were Paul (Timothee Chalamet, practitioner of the Meisner technique, which values improvisation, emotions and “authenticity” above wording), Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson, ESL speaker), and Stilgar (Javier Bardem, ESL speaker).
Category: Weird Science
Weird Wednesday: Why is It Furry?
I generally like Moleskine notebooks. I don’t have any good reason for it. They feel right in the hand (do you know that bit in Princess Bride, the book, about a sword’s balance? Like that). The fancy limited editions make easier for me to keep tabs on where particular ideas might be: alot of the early concept work for Star Master is in the yellowish orange Gundam notebook, my initial reactions to seeing Orgoglio e Preguidizio for the first time are in the green and beige Oz notebook, but also some of them were later transcribed to the blue 007 notebook, which also houses an awful lot of fantasy mystery brainstorming, and so on. I’ve even found a velvet-covered one at a price I could live with. Even so, I find myself asking, why is there a furry moleskine? And why is it sold out?
Weird Wednesday: Zurich Tourism Webcam
Can’t travel right now? How about a real time, rotating panoramic view of Zurich, Switzerland?
Weird Wednesday: Poohs and Prejudice
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.
Jaglion Press 