Yesterday, I really enjoyed listening to the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Umberto Eco's The Name Of The Rose (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkpLbVtTAuk).

And today I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations for similar audio-books which have multiple voice actors.

All genre is okay but preferably singular works that focus on story over recurring characters (anthology series are okay). Preferably works that are available on YouTube, or otherwise freely downloadable--but this is not a strict requirement.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

BBC has just put out a 4 part "factual drama" based on Jimmy Savile. It is available here. Steve Coogan plays Savile. Here is the IMDB page for it.

For those who don't know, Jimmy Savile was a live dj, a radio dj, and a tv presenter. He played local dance halls, and then moved to Radio Caroline in 1958 when he was 32, and he moved to BBC TV in 1964 when he was 38. There were allegations made against him right from the start of his dj career, and as time went on these became more and more known among the public, but organisations failed to deal with them and failed to hold him to account. When he died hundreds of people came forward. After extensive police investigations police concluded he was a prolific sex offender, and probably the UK's most prolific sex offender. Wikipedia article about savile, and wikipedia article about the abuse scandal.

Coogan is a great, he's clearly a talented actor and he does pretty well here. The show heavily features a dramatic representation of Savile's biographer, Dan Davies.

The show covers Savile's entire career. It shows changing public perceptions of him, it shows him testing boundaries and getting away with minor rule breaking, it shows the manipulations of power he used to get access to girls.

But there are problems here. There are many complicated reasons why people don't report sexual abuse, and this show fails to do anything but pay minor lip service to those. Biggest for me is the focus entirely on Savile, and not the systems that enabled his abuse. Clearly he is the only person responsible for the abuse, but how did he get away with it so long, why didn't anyone stop him, why did organisations let him continue? There's a mealy-mouthed attempt to explain this, but that's a few lines of dialogue at most. This is important! The question of "How do we stop abusers?" needs a robust, evidence based, approach that doesn't stop at a shrug of the shoulders and "we dunno, he was a master manipulator". He absolutely wasn't, he was just brutally uncaring and wealthy. You come away from this show thinking that organisations were well meaning but a bit clueless, but that wasn't the case. Society just did not care about abuse enough to prevent it from happening, and we need to examine why we allowed it to happen.

Each episode starts by interview survivors, and it's good that their voice is prominent.

The TV drama Three Girls about the Rochdale Grooming scandal is better - it focuses on victims and how they were let down by the system. Or you could watch The Red Riding Trilogy one, two, and three - this is fiction, but features investigations into the Yorkshire Ripper case.

This is Album of the Week #5 ~ This week's album is Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP

Year of Release: 2000
Genre(s): Hip Hop
Country: United States
Length: 72 minutes
Album.Link

Excerpt from Pitchfork:

But the anger and trauma he conjured from his childhood of abuse and bullying felt uncomfortably real in all his performances. On The Marshall Mathers LP, he suits the action to the word and the word to the action. He picks the right tone for the right mood, the horrorcore of “Remember Me?,” the beleaguered artist on “The Way I Am,” the impish malevolence of “Criminal,” or the tortured, regretful, loving, deranged, murderous everything-all-at-once feeling of “Kim.” We don’t really believe it, but we believe Eminem really believes it.

Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?

--

Album of the week is currently chosen randomly (via random.org) from the top 5000 albums from a custom all-time RYM chart, with a 4/5 popularity weighting. The chart is recalculated weekly.

Missed last week? It can be found here.

Any feedback on the format is welcome ~~

I've been writing and rewriting this to make it more formal, but I've decided to screw it because the original was raw and can probably describe my needs better than my rewrites could ever. So apologies if it doesn't fit the tone of Tildes

As of right now, I am currently not seeing anyone for my mental health. However, I'm in the process of getting help. I already have a consultation form for one and all I have to is figure out if I'm saying too much because one part ended up being like 16 paragraphs long and I don't think mental health professionals like that...

Anyways, I've been having trouble getting myself to clean. There's a gap between my bed and the wall that I put in case I ever got bedbugs (never got bedbugs in my life) and what ended up happening is various items of clothing would fall into that gap without me knowing. Which led to a whole bunch of carpet beetles suddenly flying in my room a month and a half ago.

Here's my concern: I did have a period where I found fleas in my room, and after seeing them a few times I went on a cleaning spree. Eventually my dad had to stop me because I was deep cleaning the house every single day, and when I wasn't doing that I was researching about pest control. When I wasn't able to clean I ended up researching too deeply on pest control, which led me to find out about scabies. Which led me to a delusion that I had scabies, then went straight back to my cleaning frenzy again, this time with this newfound fear that I'm infesting my family with scabies if I don't babywipe or vacuum everything.

Then one day, I started getting psychosomatic hallucinations that matched the symptoms of scabies. At night, I wouldn't be able to sleep because I would feel hundreds of bugs crawling inside my skin every time it got dark, forcing me to sleep with 3 lamps around me to mitigate the sensation. Every time I got out of a hot shower I could feel it too, but not as strongly as at night. And then when I sought out a dermatologist, because there was no way I didn't have scabies if I was going through all these symptoms, it just suddenly... stopped? Which was my biggest indicator that it wasn't scabies, because it would have never stopped if it was scabies.

It was a... bizarre experience for sure, but an impactful one. Especially now that it's been about a year since it all went down, and I've been having trouble sleeping because my room gets so stuffy. I keep my window open at all times, even when I'm too cold to sleep, just because the air is so musky and makes me feel like I'm on the edge of throwing up. I don't feel hunger in my room, and all I can think of is how there's carpet beetles in those gaps and how I will have to clean them when I get better. Because I don't want to repeat what happened last year. I don't want to clean and have these stupid carpet beetles or whatever else I find in that gap briefly take over my life like those fleas and imaginary scabies did. For the past few years I've been swinging between moments of depressive symptoms, grandiosity, and paranoia one after another and a few months ago is the first time in five years since I stopped having these back-to-back moments and I just... can't have another one again. Not until I get help.

But it has come to my attention that help might take a long time. If I need therapy, that might take months, if not years, and there's a good chance if I need medication I won't find the perfect one right away. So either I have to wait until months or years of my room rotting more and more or I clean it now. To clean knowing full well that I might relapse into another stupid paranoid episode because it was a trigger before and can be a trigger now.

I don't know. I don't know what to do. I want to clean but I don't want to trigger what I went through in the past again. I don't want to trigger anything. Any causes to my episodes I keep it in my head and make it a rule to avoid at all cost, but how do I avoid cleaning when it's impacting my physical health not to clean? I know I should get help, get treatment, but I shouldn't do anything funny while I wait for the perfect solution right? When I have the right treatment and coping mechanisms I can tackle my triggers, so best not to clean? If that's a trigger? I hate this. I just want guidance

Let me start by saying I really enjoyed playing the Mass Effect games. They are awesome.

I found the plot, though, incoherent. Especially in ME3. I don't mind small conveniences like "good thing this random teleporter beam designed to suck up corpses has easy entrée to the reaper's command center," because it's a game.

But how on earth did Cerberus amass seemingly billions of elite special operations forces with nobody noticing? What do you mean the secret weapon against the reapers has been improved each cycle by people who didn't know what it was supposed to do? How could that possibly result in a functional device?

It's clear, I think, that this wasn't necessarily the direction the first game was going. Cerberus was the subject of a side quest, but nothing more. The authors of the lore seemed to be taking great pains to ensure everything was logical, based on the in-universe rules they had established.

...and then ME2 kicks off and the series is almost as much about Cerberus, from this point on, as it is about the reapers.

What did you think about how the plot unrolled?

(You may also wish to read this series of essays. It's about 18 billion words long, though - fair warning. https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792)

Always a fan of Sloan here, but I was recently reminded of Pure and have been grooving to “Spiritual Pollution” and “Anna”. So make me a virtual mix tape: What were your fav Canadian bands, albums, or songs of the ‘90s?

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

It is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the game/games are worthwhile.

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Platform: Android

What is your calorie counting/meal planning application of choice? Looking for something simple and hyper-focused on calorie counting, and I'm ok with a bit of macro tracking, however that's all I want it to do - no feature creep into other wellness/fitness goals and coaching, etc.

I'm fine with paying (as long as it's reasonable) for a simple application without a ton of ads that does this one thing really well.

Suggestions?

Spotify recently increased their price, making it the same price as Apple's service. I've had Spotify since 2016 (started with the free version), and got premium in 2018 when they had the college student deal where you would get that and Hulu for only five bucks a month. I've been an off and on Premium subscriber since 2019. Only re-subscribing to it when Spotify would send me offers to sign up for three months for the price of one. This is actually the first year that I've consistently had Spotify all year since I was in college.

But now that they're the same price I was wondering if I should switch over. I don't want to get into the whole quality thing and lossless (I don't even know what that is) but I haven't been happy with Spotify's algorithm for a while. Streaming services have always been how I discovered new music, going back to me using Pandora while I was in high school. But now Spotify keeps suggesting the same songs whenever it's on smart shuffle. For example, if I play a song from the late 60s or early 70s, I know the next song Spotify plays is going to be Ain't No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Whenever I play an indie pop song, like a Lana Del Rey song or something, I know that the next song is going to be Borderline by Tame Impala.

I'm kind of sick of it at this point, and I feel like it's limiting the scope of what I'm listening to. I'm not sure what Apple Music's algorithm is like, I've heard mixed things with some saying it's better than Spotify and others saying it's worse.

I'm also happy taking recommendations on other things to do or try with Spotify to correct this.

Any advice should be suitable for a non tech person who knows how to google and follow instructions but not code in any way.

Can anyone suggest which firewall and or antivirus might be best? All suggestions for making life easier while dealing with a new machine are welcome.