În dimineața zilei de 2 februarie am coborât din tren in gara Sirkeci din Istanbul, având ca punct terminus al călătoriei orașul Kastamonu din partea de nord a Turciei. Așa a început o odisee de 10 zile pe tărâmul semilunei, marcată de multiple descoperiri pe care vi le voi prezenta în continuare.
Impresia generală era că urmează să mergem în mijlocul nicăieriului, la bordul unui autocar ce urma să parcurgă cei peste 500Km ai călătoriei în aproximativ 8 ore. Doar că autocarul turcesc este mai ceva decât avionul european: 2 „însoțitori de bord”, snack-uri, apă, suc sau cafea, tv on demand în tetiere, baie la bord și loc berechet să-ți întinzi picioarele. În bucata de țară peste care am putut arunca un ochi pasager am văzut că se lucrează din greu la infrastructură, că blocuri noi, uniform stilizate, răsar peste tot și că transportul pe șosele are sens pentru o țară atât de mare.
Yesterday LO 192 was released and in it Dan & Fab pimped a recently released audiobook, "Blue Heaven", written and read by lostnbronx. Since I'm a sucker for audiobooks I grabbed it right away, and since I found it most excellent I thought I'd blabber a bit about it right here.
From a dramatic point of view, it really is, well, dramatic. I'll try to keep this spoiler-free, so I'm just going to say that the psychology of the (main?!) character is deeply connected to the action, and the two swap in and out of focus, in a very neatly orchestrated manner. Since I mentioned the action, it takes place in Skyhigh, a space colony/space station city inhabited by Earth's outcasts. Although this place does share a few characteristics with the typical sci-fi counterpart, the resemblance stops there.
I won't go into detail about the action because I want you to discover it yourselves, so I'm gonna cheat and skip to the end. While I anticipated the finale, the action that leads to it surpassed any of my expectations. It suffices to say that there is a climax there, and it will surprise you.
On the technical side, somewhere in the ogg file's tags it says: "[...] these four pieces, rather ineptly cut together by lostnbronx [...]." It's anything but ineptly, lostnbronx did an amazing job with the audio backgrounds, and it's obvious all-around that this was a work of passion. There is a bit of unevenness in the audio levels or tonality near the beginning, maybe a switch of recording equipment, but other than that I think that overall the recording easily rivals Audible productions.
The reading/acting is very well carried out, and IMHO lostnbronx has a really cool voice.
That's about it, head on over to lostnbronx's webpage for Blue Heaven at http://www.info-underground.net:70/lostnbronx/fiction/blue-heaven for audio downloads or the text version (Note: the website errors out in Opera, but it works great in Firefox). Extra geek brownie points of you do it via Gopher: link. If you're a lazyass with HTML5 powers, just admit that _there is no thought, only action_, then click the play button below.
