About

Unabridged Classic Literature in PictureBook form.

  • Great for listening along while working on other things, exercising, etc.
  • 100% ad-free. No distractions.
  • For the full experience, play it on a big screen and put on wireless headphones. I personally listen at 1.25x or 1.5x speed.
  • Happy to consider requests.

How:

  • Images are generated based on the underlying story, while allowing for plenty of randomness and novelty. When curating, I tend to leave in the more odd or striking images, and funny mismatches.

Why:

  • Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to read good literature, but these days I find it hard to sit back and read a book when there is always an immediate and short-term gratification from watching random videos on the internet. This is my attempt to put these classics on a more equal footing with modern content, but without dumbing down, summarizing, or piggybacking on the author’s work by providing ‘interpretation’.
  • I would argue many of these classics are more nuanced and thoughtful than much of the vast sea of modern content.
    • Some of this is due to the fact that classics have withstood the test of time and we see the wheat and not the chaff.
    • There is also the gradual shift to using images to convey stories instead of words, so that outstanding writers are more rare.
    • With corporate consolidation of media in the West, there is more profit potential when firms provide content that appeals to everyone. The recipe for storytelling Pablum has been discovered for all genres.
    • Modern language synthesis like ChatGPT can, like some monstrous mockingbird, generate a lifetime worth of reading material in the blink of an eye, material that will only appear more authentic as the technology improves.

Caveats:

  • These works are in the public domain in Canada but may be under copyright elsewhere. Please follow local rules.
  • This site is primarily English language. While translated versions have been included, these were created using machine translation and quality may vary. While I don’t have the time and computing resources to produce every video in every language, if there is a lot of interest in a particular video or language generally, I’ll try to accommodate.
  • I’ve made this site as simple as possible to try and keep it quick, but am open to ideas and suggestions.

The paid subscription provides access to all videos. Your support is much appreciated is it helps cover hosting, network, and processing costs. If you’d like to instead support this work directly (and thank you!):

Hope you enjoy! J. (ambientinsights@gmail.com)

Music Sources:

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