I remember the velvet, slick with age, and the ashtrays at the end of the arms on the creaky seats in an also run theater in the barrio Chino of Barcelona. I remember being high as hell on a new batch of hashish from the kid brother of a friend. I remember being both scared and fascinated at the same time. We decided not to stick around for the second feature, we wanted to go out to a bar to talk about Eraserhead. That was my introduction to David Lynch.
This TTS (Text to Speech) tool from Kokoro (early development) is an early look at what I will probably use to create short listening passages from content my students create, or that I create. It works really fast (60x live speed, this clip took less than 5 seconds).
Here is the Text:
It was late autumn in Cedarville, the kind of day where the air smelled like wood smoke and the leaves were all shades of orange and gold. I had just run into Nakayama at the old diner by the train tracks—the one we used to hang out at after football games in high school. Nakayama was still the same as ever, wearing that beat-up denim jacket and grinning like life was one big inside joke.
“Didn’t expect to see you here,” I said, sliding into the booth across from him. He had a cup of coffee in front of him and one of those little plates with a half-eaten slice of pie.
“Yeah, well, life’s funny like that,” Nakayama said. “I was just passing through, thought I’d stop in for old times’ sake. You still living here?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Figured someone should stick around and keep an eye on the place. How about you? Still playing music?”
Nakayama shrugged, looking out the window at the empty street. “Not really. You know how it goes. Things don’t always pan out the way you think.”
And here is the Speech:
After 20 years with Webhostinghub, who have overall done very well, I am moving to a more bare-bones (cheaper) option at hostinger.com (referral 20%off/$4/month). This reflects less of a need to put stuff out there as I move away from producing stuff in English and toward integrating into the culture here in Japan, which is requiring a lot of time for language learning.
I feel good about this change. But it means my personal email address at ryan@kevinryan.com no longer works. It was flooded with too many ads and I had moved most of my important account maintenance to another address.
Kevinryan.com will continue here, with my personal thoughts and ideas. I’ve decided to follow Cory Doctorow’s idea of posting in one place and then sending out links on social media to that one place. WordPress makes that easy, except for Facebook, where it only posts to my page, and not my timeline. That may change as Zuck keeps loosening restrictions and allowing more “free speech” on the site, but I am less and less engaged there.
I’ll post once a week in Facebook to point to my blog. Hope to see you sometimes. Comments available but I have to approve your first one. Going old school. You can email me at my gmail address too.
NYTimes (gift article) checks your knowledge of current words that are popular. A good example of a quiz working as a learning tool. I got 6 out of 10, which I consider pretty good. I especially liked the new meanings of “preppy” and “Ohio”.
Nowhere better can you find the nuances of culture than in the words that are used. Nancy Friedman tracks those at Fritinancy. This year we get a bonus, wordS, not just word.
My favorite: The Fall of the Broman Empire, on the X-odus of people from Musk’s vanity website. Others include 4B (from Korea), Debank, social tonic (laced with THC), Pretendians. I have a couple of young HENRYs in my family tree. And there is the Hawk Tuah girl.
I can tell Nancy has been around a while at this game because she is writing on TypePad, a platform that had its heyday many years ago.