Category Archives: Derived works
Wry records The Love That Guides Humanity
Oh hell yes, she did it again: a much better recording of the fourth Secular Sermon!
Besides adding to Downloads, I am changing the Audio links on the front page to her superior recordings, for all Sermons where I have them.
Wry records the first three Sermons
A brilliant British lady named Wry, with the voice of a trained actor and a heart for poetry that Aleister Crowley could only have envied, has thoroughly outclassed my own recordings of the first three Sermons, and magnanimously allowed me to share them with you. Here (and on the Downloads page) they are:
i shall hope she similarly outclasses the recordings for Sermons 4 to 7 as well, but of course it would be improper to ask for more, after such a delicious gift.
What joy, to be of Human Birth a.k.a. Wie schön es ist, ein Mensch zu sein
A song, with the sheet music available in the Downloads section as PDFs, because my dear friend KarlSebaL kindly typed the notes and lyrics into LilyPond and put them on GitHub. It is in both English…
Continue readingDrei Säkulare Segnungen
Five Secular Sermons
A new video, with all five audio recordings and 403 illustrations, mostly by Midjourney. The illustrations were a suggestion by my wonderful sister (who also gave me lots of practical help!) that in retrospect makes perfect sense. Only a minority of people who might be interested will want to close their eyes and “properly” meditate for 80 minutes, so visuals should be available as an option. So now they are.
A YouTube short
I filmed and published a short excerpt from the first Sermon.
The video quality is a lot better than my older videos, and maybe the brevity makes it more approachable?
Princess Twilight Sparkle reads “Adrift in Space and Time”
The formidable speech generation tool 15.ai is finally back online and it lets Twilight Sparkle, the Princess of Friendship (if you don’t know who that is, you need to watch My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic) read “Adrift in Space and Time” in her own inimitable (well, actually, obviously imitable) style. A welcome diversion from my own sedate cadence…
Continue readingKinder dieser Galaxie
The Bayesian Choir is awesome
That song my dad and I wrote? I emailed it to the wonderful Bayesian Choir, a group of excellent people in the Bay Area who have performed beautifully at the Bay Area Secular Solstices and who produced the spectacular HaMephorash (which you need to read Unsong to not be confused by (and I firmly recommend that)).
What utterly amazed me was their response! One of them is James Cook, who is not just a software developer and a composer of music, but actually develops software to help compose music. How cool is that! He took a liking to this little tune and produced a hymn-style arrangement for four voices which… I’m frankly unqualified to judge, but my dad as a classically trained composer assures me it is quite good. Here’s what it looks like: Continue reading
New YouTube video, and audio now available on insighttimer.com
I hope to make the Secular Sermons more available, and that’s not happening on this tiny obscure blog. So there’s now a new YouTube video of the first three Sermons, and I’ve uploaded the audio recordings to the excellent guided meditations site and app insighttimer.com. Here’s the YouTube version:
Children of the Milky Way
The song I previously mentioned is complete. The music was graciously contributed by my dad, who is awesome and composes classical music. “Children of the Milky Way” is now proper sheet music, with a sheet and everything. Check it out:
Audio recordings of the first three Sermons now available
I’m done with the recordings! Hooray! This took way longer than I wanted it to, but that’s the reality of having to scratch together minutes of spare time between the job, the baby and life in general.
Making these recordings was an important step, because like all meditations, the Sermons work when listened to, not when read. Check them out!
A better recording of the first Sermon, and an interview
Great news! My friends Nikki and Julian of The Blog of Baphomet have re-recorded Adrift in Space and Time together and put it on SoundCloud.
New download section added
The new downloads page contains the three Sermons that exist at the moment, for download in different formats.
There are two PDFs, one plain (for cell phones, ebook readers and similar devices) and one illustrated (for printing out).
There is also a bare bones ASCII text file, for convenient remixing.
I’ll add MP3s next.
Videos of the first two sermons
The Games of Entropy is now on Youtube! While at it, I also re-recorded Adrift in Space and Time. I recommend this recording over the former because it has much better quality, with improved sound, bluescreen magic and in HD.
A printable PDF of the first two sermons
I’ve created a PDF of the first two sermons that is easier to print than the raw blog posts are, and prettier. Hope you like it. Having it laid out on physical paper makes the text feel different to me, and the illustrations do improve on the plain text.
Continue reading