From: https://maraoz.com/the-secret-of-psalm-46-transcript/
First presented on 23 March 2002 at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California. It was accompanied by a digital video of a total solar eclipse, synchronized to a harpsichord recording of J.S. Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge (The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080, 1751).
A slightly revised version was presented at Worcester Polytech on 18 January 2007.
On 23 May 2011, the Drama Society at the University of York (UK) presented Hamish Todd’s The Name of the Power That Moves You, a play based on this lecture.
Galician artist Iván Sende adapted the lecture into a Spanish graphic novel, published November 2016 by Diábolo Ediciones.
Below is a February 2010 studio recording of the lecture, produced for inclusion in Jonathan Blow’s game The Witness (2016).
The voiceover was engineered by Bruce Mattson using a Røde NTK tube condenser microphone captured at 24-bit 48 kHz. The music is realized with an excellent modeled piano by Modartt instead of a harpsichord.
How many of you here have personally witnessed a total eclipse of the sun?
To stand one day in the shadow of the moon is one of my humble goals in life.
The closest I ever came was over thirty years ago. On February 26, 1979, a solar eclipse passed directly over the city of Portland.
I bought my bus tickets and found a place to stay. But in the end, I couldn’t get the time off work.
Well, anyone who lives in Portland can tell you that the chances of catching the sun in February are pretty slim.
And sure enough, the skies over the city that day were completely overcast. I wouldn’t have seen a thing.
That work I couldn’t get out of was my first job out of college: A sales clerk at an old Radio Shack store in beautiful downtown Worcester, Massachusetts.
On my very first day behind the counter, a delivery truck pulled up to the front of the store.
They carried in a big carton, upon which was printed the legend TRS-80. It was our floor sample of the world’s first mass-market microcomputer.
The TRS-80 Model I had a Z80 processor clocked at 1.7 megahertz, 4,096 bytes of memory, and a 64-character black-and-white text display. The only storage was a cassette recorder. All this could be yours for the low, low price of $599.
This store I was working in had seen better days.
At one time, it had been near the center of a thriving commercial district.
But like so many other New England cities, the advent of shopping malls had, by the early ‘70s, turned it into a ghost town.
Worcester’s solution to this problem was decisive, to say the least.
The city’s elders apparently decided that if they couldn’t beat them, they would join them.
The city’s elders apparently decided that if they couldn’t beat them, they would join them.
In their place was erected a vast three-level shopping complex, with cinemas and a food court.