Thud!

Spent Wednesday polishing scratched CDs and DVDs at the Library. It was somewhat dull, but it is necessary work. You wouldn't believe just how grateful all the lady librarians are NOT to do that themselves. Every one of them said thank you. Its very precise, a craft requiring a lot of attention to detail. And the polishing wheel really does remove the scratches, but then you have to clean off the polishing compound before it hardens into spots on the disc.

At the end of the shift, I borrowed the Discworld novel audiobook "Thud!", one of the ones I hadn't polished. I really should have. When I got it home I found quite a few scratches and spent hours fixing them well enough to record to my hardrive so I can put it onto my MP3 player for my hikes and disc polishing, since listening to audiobooks is the sanest way to pass the time while you deal with the details and steam and removing bits of polishing compound from the CDs. It took me 5 hours to get all 9 discs ripped. I didn't want to miss any chapters. The writing and the voice acting are 5 star.

You know, I really like audio books. My first experience with them was The Hobbit from 1974. Famously good, so famous that most of my generation has heard it, and that's really saying something. My next audiobook was Neuromancer, read by the author William Gibson in full Faulknerian accent, southern drawl enhanced. Fantastic reading. I've got that one of cassette tape, which I liked enough to buy a high end cassette tape player to record it to PC for MP3. Probably not my best plan. But I do have it.

Recently I've been listening to the autobiography of Isabella Bird, which is read by various volunteers and is really quite interesting because they show the America or Japan of 150 years ago, as seen by a person who considered herself educated and modern the same way we consider ourselves educated and modern and the differences between then and now are startling. It is highly convenient to listen to the letters, since that lets you imagine what's described.

A surprising number of actors get work as a voice actor reading novels, and their quality is very high because they can do the voices and record it just so, for a tiny fraction of the cost of film. Audiobooks tend to be expensive, due to low sales, but I think the market for those is growing. The actor who played Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer got a great amount of work doing readings for audiobooks. He's from Chico, which is about 90 miles away, or 60 as a crow flies to the northwest. He's gotten a lot of work and a lot of good reviews for his audio book work. And he doesn't have to bleach his hair anymore. Apparently, he also runs a lot of local plays, assuming that information is correct.

The voice actor for Thud! is Stephen Briggs and his work is excellent. Considering this is unabridged and over 9 hours long, it probably took him a few weeks to record. The list of things he's worked on or voiced on Amazon is quite long. Considering the high quality of his work, I think I'm a fan.

I really hope that more of Discworld gets made into movies and BBC miniseries'. Get the quality to the same level as the Harry Potter series, only the writing is better, the jokes are actually funny like the Hitchikers Guide. It takes some effort to imagine Discworld because Pratchett largely refuses to make maps of it citing: "There is no map for humor".

Of course, there IS a map. There's also video games, cartoons, and I can see the point of a Discworld themed event at the library where I volunteer. We need a stuffed Orangutan to place on top of the shelves, perhaps with a motion sensor activated "Ook." He doesn't like being called a Monkey after all. He's a great ape.

Thud! is an amusing story of a grudge match between Dwarves and Trolls over a battle that neither side is clear on. Allegedly, both sides ambushed each other, and the other side was guilty.