Plug for Baen CDROMs, and am I crazy?
Feb. 25th, 2004 03:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterFolks may or may not have been aware of this, but mainly-military-SF/Fantasy publisher Baen Books has been putting out batches of CDROM drives bound into the back of the first editions of certain hardcover books they've been publishing lately. These CDROMs come with blanket permission to copy and share them as long as you're not selling them for money. If you weren't aware of them already, this is a good time to find out...all five of the CDROMs they've produced so far are now available for BitTorrent download. I'm helping to seed a couple of them myself.
And I've gotten in a bit of an argument in the "Publisher's Podium" board on the Baen Bar, the discussion forum that Baen hosts. It's over the audiobook files on the CDROM for There Will Be Dragons (a book title that amuses me every time I think about it, by the way, as it reminds me of that phlegmatic woman asking about "there may be giants" on track 13 of They Might Be Giants's Miscellaneous T album). Those particular files seem, to me, to be very obviously the work of a very high-quality speech synthesizer. I mean, to me it's as plain as the nose on your face that's what they are. The cadences, the inflections, the pronounciations...they're all so obviously artificial to me that its like someone's hitting me in the face with a smelly mackerel. Yet I seem to be the only person on the bar who is able to notice this. To everyone else (who's spoken up so far), it seems like a perfectly normal human reading.
It's starting to make me wonder if I'm crazy, or if everyone else just doesn't hear things in the same way that I do.
And I've gotten in a bit of an argument in the "Publisher's Podium" board on the Baen Bar, the discussion forum that Baen hosts. It's over the audiobook files on the CDROM for There Will Be Dragons (a book title that amuses me every time I think about it, by the way, as it reminds me of that phlegmatic woman asking about "there may be giants" on track 13 of They Might Be Giants's Miscellaneous T album). Those particular files seem, to me, to be very obviously the work of a very high-quality speech synthesizer. I mean, to me it's as plain as the nose on your face that's what they are. The cadences, the inflections, the pronounciations...they're all so obviously artificial to me that its like someone's hitting me in the face with a smelly mackerel. Yet I seem to be the only person on the bar who is able to notice this. To everyone else (who's spoken up so far), it seems like a perfectly normal human reading.
It's starting to make me wonder if I'm crazy, or if everyone else just doesn't hear things in the same way that I do.
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Date: 2004-02-25 07:19 am (UTC)