so i bought this ten dollar MP3/media player off ebay. actually it was ten bucks and another fourteen to get it on a plane going from hong kong to texas, but that’s not the point. the point is that it’s an amazing artifact of this half-assed global manufacturing culture that we live in. the player has about 40 different language options, including czech and togalog, but it doesn’t have a shuffle function.
let me take a moment to list all the things wrong with this player:
-no shuffle (as i mentioned)
-the "minesweeper" game has no button assigned to moving the cursor down
-no hint of a namebrand, a model name or number, or a manufacturer’s name anywhere on the device or in the instructions
-the least intuitive controls imaginable, what the buttons do depends on what "mode" the device is in, then you have to push tiny buttons on the side that are about half the size of my short, stumpy fingers. the big play button on the front does not appear to actually do anything other than make it play.
-the FM receiver is already broken, after about three weeks
-the battery lasts less than two hours
-the USB cord that came with it has already broken
-one of the earbuds on the earphones has already broken
-it came with sample media, an "ebook" and a video, both of which were named "Lord of the Rings II. The two towers." The "ebook" turned out to be a text file, with numerous junk characters, that told the story of a woman with terrifying facial scars. Here’s a sample: "¡¡¡¡As it turned out we went to lunch several times, and she always wore a hat during the meal. I think that treatments of some sort had caused a lot of her hair to fall out." I don’t remember Tolkien writing that, do you? The video "Two Towers" turned out to be a music video of a chick in a bikini. Which come to think of it, isn’t something wrong with this player at all.
-the "ebook" function doesn’t have wordwrap. it just wraps the characters in the middle of the word.
now, let’s talk about everything that’s worked out with the player.
-the voice recording function works astonishingly well
-it has a full two gigs of memory, which two years ago i would have happily paid 25 bucks to have in flash-drive form.
-it does indeed play MP3s
the plan was to get an MP3 player that would form the backdrop of my everyday drudgery. i could listen to podcasts while bicycling to work. then i could listen to podcasts at work. then i could listen to podcasts while lifting weights at the gym. then when i was at home, i could listen to podcasts while washing the dishes or doing tedious projects like soldering LEDs, carving busts of William Shatner, or drawing illustrations for SPACE SQUID and RevSF.
aside from the two-hour battery life, that plan has worked out pretty well, certainly better than my previous attempts to carry around a twenty-buck cassette walkman playing library books-on-tape.
here are some of the podcasts i’m listening to:
the mel and floyd summer replacement show — the GF hates these guys, but my co-workers love them. every week at WORT community radio in madison, wi, these two guys tape an hour of them reading news items, while making wisecracks and giggling. it’s pretty highbrow stuff, one of the few venues where you will hear people make jokes about james buchanan.
this american life — ira glass has a fascinating whiny voice. they post episodes for free on a weekly basis, so as long as i fire up the podcast downloader, i don’t have to pay for the damn things.
pseudopod — a weekly podcast reading of horror-genre short stories that runs the gamut from gore to high-falutin’ dark fantasy. pro-quality writing all around.
metamor city — i’ve only just started this. it’s a series of stories that take place in the fictional "metamor city", which is an extrapolation for a community writing project of a medieval magic-fantasy kingdom. this metamor city has twenty-first century technology on top of a couple magic systems. it also appears to have a lot of crime, and people being threatened in dark alleys. this is mainly readings with partial dramatization.
Drabblecast — a weekly reading of weird flash fiction. just now i was going through the media player’s folder to delete some files and clear up some space, and i could hardly bring myself to delete drabblecasts that i had already listened to. the "black and white animal saga" (parts 1, 2, and 3) is probably the best work of fiction since the Aeneid. my only complaint is that the drabblecast posts in a weird *.m4a format that required me to install a converter that makes my firewall freakout everytime it loads up.
Pinkwater Podcast — Daniel Pinkwater is the font of all wisdom.
Doctor Who Time Tales — these are full dramatizations of original doctor who stories. we can list this under the category of things i can’t play at work without getting laughed at. but it satisfies my doctor who fix, at least until the new season starts up.
Escape Pod — it’s hard to believe that escapepod pays its contributors as much as they say they do, until you listen to them read a couple of stories. this might be the best source for short sci-fi in the whole genre right now.
i have a bunch more on automatic download, but it’s taking a while for me to get through the backlog on these.
gotta go now. i’m off to do some tedious chores while wearing an earbud.