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Does Tiny Desk have the best sound engineers or what ?

Thank you very much for making me aware of this wonderful artist.

Reminded me of how deadmau5 named his track The Veldt after the homonymous story by Ray Bradbury.

And if your in the mood for a hard rain there is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvZmrygK3F0&t=3790s

Reminds me of when November 2019 came and went (the date that Blade Runner is set in)

I didn't get the link to the current date. But aside from the fact there was no Mars linkage probably my favorite Bradbury short.

> "Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city of Allendale, California." It repeated the date three times for memory's sake. "Today is Mr. Featherstone's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita's marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills."

The future arrived quietly

It is now public domain ?

I relate strongly with The Pedestrian. I love going for long walks at odd hours.

In the United State police's defence once I was walking all by myself at 3 in the morning in Mountain View, peeking and crouching among the bushes for good shots with my camera. A police car approached me. It ended up being a non-threatening conversation. It was early 2002. All in all quite surprising given my brown skin and then long beard.

https://ibb.co/j9XFgjDS

https://ibb.co/Y7VyGb1w

There Will Come the Soft Rains feels like it was written right after a visit to the World's Fair back in the Atomic Era. A critique of the unlimited promises about the future but virtually no thought put towards the possible consequences of said future. It's a very post-war story.

You know what, you're right - The Pedestrian hit me much harder this time around than the first time I read it.

God, I love Bradbury.

I have a friend who often goes for walks at midnight or later, around a rather nice part of town.

He gets the cops called on him regularly. It's insane.

What's the most unsettling to me is that the one thing that makes it less apt to modern life is the implication that at 8 PM, everyone is at home. Nobody still working or commuting.

>he still thought we'd be having linoleum on our floors...

We still do! Idk if that is changing anytime soon in my life at least.

Lots of places still use PVC covering commonly called linoleum. And laminate that I see everywhere is not so technologically remote, with its plastic surface.

I'd hazard changes in taste are more random than technological progress.

The one that stuck out to me was all the automation, full breakfast etc but the house has to remind them to pay the bills.

> But he still thought we'd be having linoleum on our floors...

Yes, but no. He's writing a story about a character (the automated house) that needs lots (relative to the story length) of explaining. "Linoleum" very quickly conveys "kitchen floor", helps anchor the story in details familiar to his readers - and most of those readers would know linoleum is quite flammable, so it also advances the plot.

Futurism is a heavy theme in most SF writing, but you shouldn't let futurism get in the way of good story writing.

Linoleum became the premium option, now named marmoleum.

https://www.forbo.com/flooring/en-us/commercial-products/lin...

If fossil carbon ever becomes (commercially) scarce, vinyl might end up the premium choice.

I predict plank will always suck.

To quote an obscure reference from my country:

Regarding linoleum let's agree to disagree. I for one appreciate it.

It is still present in my region to an extent. This year my relative bought an apartment where the kitchen floor is made from it.

It would be dull to write about all the great new building materials our houses are made and the utter lack of futuristic convenience we actually have.

I mean, LVP is very popular today and is really not much different from Linoleum.

Bradbury was very popular in USSR. His Wikipedia page has an anecdote of a Soviet filmmaker recognizing him in a crowd and surprising the rest of the celebrities around who had no idea who Bradbury was. (Another such author would be Vonnegut.)

There was a Soviet publisher Kniga (Book) that published only books about other books: book art, technology, bibliophile stories and so on. One of their books was a collection of short stories whose main topic was books, reading, writing or similar. One of stories was Bradbury's "Forever and the Earth", translated, of course, but very well. I was a teenager then an I remember being deeply impressed by it. I knew Bradbury, of course, but mostly from sci-fi and he wasn't really a sci-fi author. (One of Soviet sci-fi writers pointed out that Bradbury was pretty much anti-scientific in his stance.) That story made Bradbury stand out for me.

Better quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quyaaszg6jc

> 1987

correction: 1984

The great sleight-of-hand of the 20th century is that it never went away, we all just collectively decided to stop thinking about the fact that at every given moment for the rest of human history we'll never be more than thirty minutes away from total nuclear annihilation.

You're not kidding. I read this in the late 70s, and it's a bit of a gut punch to revisit it now, on the very day of the story, in a world where smart homes are somewhat there and nuclear saber-rattling is once again the theme of the day.

Of course, writing about the future means you won't get everything right - especially once specific dates or years enter the picture and technologies are in use that haven't been invented (or invented and discarded) yet. Nobody predicted that World War III would last as long as it has, or be so full of utter stupidity. On the technological front, film projectors are relics in this era, and film-based storage never really caught on. On the other hand, videotape wasn't around in 1950, and even audio tape was a fairly new technology.

Oh, this just popped into my head. If you want an early piece about global warming, I submit Metropolitan Nightmare:

https://poets.org/poem/metropolitan-nightmare

Earth overcoming the sickness that is homo sapiens is a long-standing meme. The ideas that species can become extinct (Cuvier) and that humans are hurting the planet (Humboldt) have existed since around 1800.

"shake us off" sounds more like George Carlin:

> We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.

But it recognizes the dog. Priorities.

> Bradbury describes the fully automated smart home, but its technology does obviously not extend into the garden exterior.

In the 7th to last paragraph, second sentence, he lists the automated processes still going, including "cutting the lawn by remote-control mower".

People still cook in houses with microwaves and wash dishes despite owning dishwashers

Well I enjoy mowing my lawn (with a mechanic mower of course). Anything but the office chair and monitor.

Boy, I hope somebody got fired for that blunder!

Yeah. All they needed back then was a healthy dose of some of those new chemical fertilizer/herbicides to broadcast onto their monoculture non-native grass lawns. They could look forward to the smell of fresh-cut grass while they enjoyed snorting the exhaust from their leaded gasoline lawnmowers and edgers. They could have the nicest, greenest lawn on the block and be the envy of all their neighbors.

Later on, like their neighbors, they can stumble thru the last years of their lives with Parkinsons or other chemically-induced afflictions or just slowly waste away with internal cancers while their lead-addled offspring elect criminal pedophiles and imbeciles to lead the whole country - backwards.

Man, I need to go to sleep. I do agree with your analysis though.

Bradbury wrote rockets the way other writers wrote sunsets

This is such a surprising comment! Bradbury's style is very sparse and plain, and much closer to Hemingway's end of the spectrum than to the other. Where would you put, say, Nabokov, Melville, or Lovecraft?

To each his own, I suppose.

I particularly like Bradbury's style. It reads very prose poetic. One of my favourite is Dandelion Wine, which you will probably hate.

As "Forever and the Earth" shows it wasn't just stylistic, but essential.

Interestingly, I had the exact opposite reaction - I enjoyed the writing itself, but didn't find the premise all that interesting.

OT: Selected Shorts is wonderful.

My one complaint: it's rarely revealed when a story was published, and it took me far, far, far too long to realise that many of my favourites were many decades old.

That said, hearing a story read and acted by a skilled player is its own joy. I'm a good reader, but I'm not that level of good, and a few decades of listening to Shorts has improved my own inner-reading voice.

Available as a podcast, though the back-catalogue is parlous brief, largely due to copyright, I suspect. Still worth following.

Thanks for sharing this gem.

Zarelli - Falling Light ft. Leonard Nimoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_ekjpJWSvY

It was published 5 years after World War II was ended via the first ever nuclear warfare. The silhouettes on the house wall are a clear allusion to the shadows of people left on buildings in Hiroshima. The bleakness was a warning and reminder of what was at stake at the time.

if you find this to be bleak, don't read his "The Small Assassin", or much of anything in The October Country.

It's nothing particularly special in that regard, there's plenty of apocalyptic fiction that came out of the nuclear arms race. What's really bleak is that the story's depiction has been a real possibility for longer than most of us have been alive, and pretty much nobody cares to do anything about it. It's to the point where people talk about the threat of sudden nuclear annihilation as something relegated to the past, when it never went away.

A speedy thermonuclear demise would have been better than this mess. Emphasis on speedy.

Yes, I set a calendar notification then.

Don't mind the dup, though.