Listening to audiobooks. Or not.

I read a lot. I also listen to audiobooks. I get ’em from the public library, for the most part. I listen to them on my iPod or pocket computer. Now, since the library’s collection comes almost entirely on compact disc (they do still have cassette tapes, believe it or not) this means I obviously have to rip the CDs—convert ’em to MP3—before I listen to them. ’Cause I’m not lugging around a portable CD player and a case of discs.

I’m not sure how the library feels about this; I never bothered to ask. But my usual modus operandi is to go to the library, pull the audiobook CDs off the stacks, sit down with my laptop, and rip it right there. Then I put the CDs back. I don’t even bother to check them out. I used to, but that was silly: I’d just go home, rip the CDs, then return them the next time I went to the library. Meanwhile the discs just sat there at home, and any poor schlub who wanted to listen to that book had to wait for me to return it. Seems a waste. Now, no waste.

I figure it’d be piracy if I kept the MP3s, but I don’t. I delete them after I listen to them. Or once I’ve given up on the book.

𝘈𝘵𝘭𝘢𝘴 𝘚𝘩𝘳𝘶𝘨𝘨𝘦𝘥, the libertarian bible.

I was asked to repost my old rant about Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which I originally posted 28 December 2009. Um… okay. But I reserve the right to update those old essays a bit, and I did so here.

I didn’t actually read Rand’s capitalist version of Lord of the Rings till ’09, when I posted the piece. I’d always been encouraged to. People said it changed their lives. But these were the same sort of people who said Dave Ramsey changed their lives, or Bill Gothard changed their lives, or Francis Schaeffer changed their lives. Naught for three.

So I approached Atlas with the same sort of hesitation I had for the first 12 Left Behind novels: Didn’t really wanna read ’em, but my friends were reading ’em, quoting ’em, and letting their fearful Essene/Manichee scenarios leak into their theology and draw ’em further away from the Light. Same with Atlas; I’d spent years wondering why all the so-called “Christian” conservatives I knew were so heavily infused with social Darwinism, despite Jesus’s compassion for the poor and needy. Time to muddy myself with the source material.