Mental Notes & Random Musings

Here we are at the post-midlife part of “As Jeremy’s World Turns” the audiobook. Over the last 20 years or so, I have had a steady stream of old classics, new classics, fantasy, science fiction, and history lectures from the great courses. They have all molded my free time in the car, airplane rides, as well as the insanely long amount of time you must hang out in terminals and of course the long walks through town. Music gets stuck in my head, but audiobooks get stuck in my heart. It is impossible to cover everyone I have listened to, but these are the ones I hope nobody misses. Most of them are a hand-arounds at work, as there is a dozen of us who are audio book listeners outside of work, and audiobook discussers at work. I will also talk about the readers of the audiobooks as they really do make the book better, or worse.  Brandon Sanderson: Stormlight Archive – Read by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading  I wouldn’t have known Brandon Sanderson at all had I not decided to star...

As I had rambled on about in Only the Young and Dumb, the books I read as a pre-teen were pre-modern, and the books I listen to now are post mid-life, with a nod to a lot of the in-between. I wanted to take a moment to highlight a lot of these better, and here we are.  Pre-Modern: Anything that I enjoyed that was written before I was old enough to read. This includes the classics like JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Philip K Dick or Isaac Asimov, as well as the ones that were being written around the time I was born like Roger Zelazny.  The Hobbit: All fantasy should start here. Tolkien's linguistic artistry was not confined to English. The fact that he created an entire language out of whole cloth to back up his vision of Middle Earth, was what installed permanence of a mildly veiled epic of Christianity. Many would say it is overtly veiled, but trust me, when you read CS Lewis, you understand how amazingly subtly the Christianity was in this book. It may have gotten more righteous wi...

Amazingly enough I didn’t start watching Will Trent this last season because I was too busy. I had every intention of binge watching the season when everything else went away for the summer, and that just so happened to start yesterday , while I was on the elliptical for an hour. Holy smokes the show somehow got better, and this is despite the full ownership of this IP by Disney now . Yes, I was generally concerned , that a great show that had a lot of WOKE features would have leaned harder into the WOKEness , dump the good story writing, and acting, and become a dumpster fire. This is me, admitting that I was wrong so far. The first episode of season three was a rollercoaster of excellent writing, amazing cast chemistry, and believe it or not even more WOKEness . Again, WOKE stories are trash because they are trash stories. If you write a good story and it happens to be WOKE there is a difference, and this is the proof.   Goodwill goes a long way in a TV series. I say this wi...

My credibility as a Wheel of Time fan should be indisputable as I have read the books many times, and later down the road owned the audiobooks so that I could listen to them several times more. The factory I work in has a couple dozen people that all listen to fantasy and science fiction audiobooks, and we all listen to the same authors and series. We discuss the books like at one time we used to discuss movies, and The Wheel of Time series was what basically started it all with us. We were all superfans of Robert Jordan and then moved onto Brandon Sanderson from there. We all of course looked forward to the Wheel of Time series on Amazon, the minute we found out they had bought the rights to it.  We weren’t unfounded in our thoughts that Amazon may do a good job with the series. This was long before the dumpster fire that was The Rings of Power, and we were all superfans of The Expanse, which I still contend is one of the best streaming series ever created. It was still a long wai...

The good moral work of art should have all the qualities that a good amoral work of art should have, such as formal unity, balance, contrast, and a sensitivity to the material out of which it is made. ~ Norman McLaren

Writer's Note : In my mid thirties I used to just write blogs about everything, with no concern for being moral, or ethical, or even tell a good story. I wrote about all factors of entertainment and politics, usually just explaining how stupid everyone else is and how smart I am. Over time I outgrew it and then in my forties I was writing things with more structure and a lot less bravado. My various web novels came out of this, and I started writing about the things I always wrote about, while editing my novels for reposting here, and potential publication. In the interest of keeping a certain level of structure on my entertainment ramblings I decided that I would just whine about the good old days and compare them to the crap they make now. Well ok, I will try to be a little better than that. If we are all honest about our lives there are regrets, especially as you get closer to the end of it, and further away from the beginning of it. The best among us has far fewer regrets and i...