rebel yell
Oh my gosh, I thought I a was a total nerd for actually always recognizing this scream in movies (I always call it “the Star Wars” scream, although not really out loud, since none of my friends are Star Wars nerds like me) but I never realized it was an actual *thing* with a *name*. Thanks, MetaFilter!
nerd alert!
I’ve been on a sort of New Yearsy, self-improvement, mind expansion sort of kick lately, and thought I would share a few of my geeky discoveries:
DailyLit
This site has a bunch of free books that you can have sent to you via email in little snippets that you can read each day. Right now I’m having The Sorrows of Young Werther sent to me in 48 daily chunks. Mainly because I don’t see myself curling up on the couch with Goethe, but if I read a bit each day in my inbox, it makes me feel smarter while not intruding on my life. I’m also contemplating having pages from the Bible sent to me daily, because it’s probably something that I should read, but the thought of sitting down with it is a bit overwhelming. It’s sort of like being spoon fed healthy food. DailyLit seems like the literary equivalent of, “Here comes the airplane….it’s coming in for a landing, open the hanger….”
LibriVox
LibriVox is a site that offers free audio files of books in the public domain, meaning books whose copyright has expired, so it’s mainly just classics. Of course, I do love the classics, so it’s fine by me, although I don’t foresee Greg using the site anytime soon, since he has an aversion to any book written before 1940 or movie made before 1978. But I digress. Anyway, the only weird thing about this is that the books are read in chapters by different volunteer reader. Which means firstly it can be a bit distracting to have to get used to different readers with each chapter, but also that some of the readers are just plain terrible and I don’t know why they would go out of their way to volunteer for something like this. Some of them are very good, but I swear some of them read like they’re standing up in front of their tenth grade English class. Still, it’s free, so the price is right.
iTunes U
Although the iTunes store is a pain in the ass to navigate through, I’ve found some interesting college courses on iTunes U. I listened to one course from Berkeley about The Brothers Karamazov and I’m listening to one now about social psychology. They have courses from all sorts of big name schools. Plus it’s free, as opposed to $45,000 a semester. Take THAT, Yale!
RadioLab
This is one Greg got me into. Pretty interesting, although the editing style can be a little strange (e.g. weird music, overlapping voices, etc). It’s sort of like a more sciency version of This American Life.
Stuff You Should Know
A very entertaining and short podcast about completely random topics. I’ve decided to start listening to this in the car on the way to and from work, rather than just spending the time dreading work and hating mainstream radio.
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