Need to put a little geek in your sleep? We’ve got just what you need…
Back in 2009, the musician dubbed Cheesy Nirvosa” began experimenting with ambient music, before launching a YouTube channel where he “composes longform space and scifi ambience,” much of it designed to help you relax, or ideally fall asleep. He calls the videos “ambient geek sleep aids.”
You can sample his work with the playlist above. Called “Video Game Relaxation Sounds,” the playlist features “long relaxing soundscapes from video games.” Sci-fi video games, to be precise. The playlist gives you access to 21 soundscapes, running more than 240 hours in total. Lull yourself to sleep, for example, with ambient sounds from the 1997 Blade Runner video game, a “sidequel” to the Ridley Scott film. Or de-stress with this ambient noise produced by the A/SF-01 B‑Wing Starfighter. It’s taken from this 2001 Star Wars game created by LucasArts.
Stream the playlist above. And hope you enjoy dreaming of electric sheep.
The story of malicious space aliens invading Earth has a resonance that knows no national boundaries. In fact, many modern versions make explicit the moral that only fighting off an existential threat from another planet could unify the inherently fractious human species. H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, in many ways the archetypal telling of the space-invaders tale, certainly proved compelling on both sides of the pond: though set in Wells’ homeland of England, it made a lasting impact on American culture when Orson Welles produced a thoroughly localized version for radio, his infamous War of the WorldsHalloween 1938 broadcast. (Listen to it here.)
And so who better to illustrate a mid-2oth-century edition of the novel than Edward Gorey? He was born in and spent nearly all his life in America, but developed an artistic sensibility that struck its many appreciators as uncannily mid-Atlantic. His work continues to draw descriptions like “Victorian” and “gothic,” surely underscored by his association with the British literature-adapting television show Mystery!, for whose title sequences he drew characters and settings, and the young-adult gothic mystery novels of Anglophile author John Bellairs. The Gorey-illustrated War of the Worlds came out in 1960 from Looking Glass Library, featuring his drawings not just at the top of each chapter but on its wraparound cover as well. Though out of print, you can find old copies for sale online.
Gorey had begun his career in the early 1950s at the art department of publisher Doubleday Anchor, creating book covers and occasionally interior illustrations. In addition to Bellairs’ novels, he would also go on to put his artistic stamp on such literary classics as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, bringing to each his signature combination of whimsy and dread in just the right proportions. Given the inherent ominousness and threat of The War of the Worlds, Gorey’s dark side comes to the fore as the story’s long-legged terrors arrive and wreak havoc on Earth, only to fall victim to common disease.
Though conceptually similar to the illustrations in Pearson’s, drawn by an artist (usually of children’s books) named Warwick Goble, they don’t get into quite as much detail — but then, they don’t have to. To evoke a complex mixture of fascinated anticipation and creeping fear, Gorey never needed more than an old house, a huddle of silhouettes, or a pair of eyes glowing in the darkness.
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) has provided us material for many posts over the years (find some favorites below). If his upcoming sequel Blade Runner 2049 yields half as much, we’ll count ourselves lucky.
The official trailer for the new film came out today. Look for the film in theaters on October 6th.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
“Yes, this should provide adequate sustenance for the Doctor Who marathon,” once said The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy while pushing a wheelbarrow full of fast-food tacos down the street. As the embodiment of fandom for all things fantasy and sci-fi, he would certainly know that Doctor Who, no longer an obscure BBC television show but an ever-expanding fictional universe with a global fan base, constitutes the ideal material for binge-watching, which he could now do at his convenience on a service like Britbox. But it isn’t just watching: now, on Spotify (whose free software you can download here if you don’t have it already), you can binge-listen to thirty straight hours of Doctor Who audio dramas as well.
“An icon of modern British culture and the longest-running science-fiction TV show in history, Doctor Who has never been more popular than it is today,” wrote Christopher Bahn in the AV Club’s 2010 primer on the series, which had relaunched five years earlier after initially running from 1963 to 1989. “No matter who’s playing the lead, the basic premise has been essentially the same since the show’s debut: A mysterious, eccentric alien known only as The Doctor (not ‘Doctor Who,’ in spite of the title) travels through time and space having adventures and fighting evil. He’s usually accompanied by one or two humans picked up along the way. They journey with him in a time machine called a TARDIS, which looks like a blue phone booth.”
This format “allowed the show to literally go anywhere in the universe and sometimes outside it, with virtually limitless storytelling possibilities.” At its best, “Doctor Who relied on solid, imaginative scripts to create smart science-fiction thrillers with a humanistic, anti-authoritarian heart. Consistently popular through the 1960s and 1970s, the show began to falter in the following decade as tight budgets and questionable artistic choices took their toll.” After its cancellation in 1989, Doctor Who “lived on through the ’90s, as science-fiction shows often do, in the wilderness genres of semi-official novels and radio plays.”
The best known of these Doctor Who radio plays, which you can hear on this playlist, come produced by a company called Big Finish. Having acquired a license from the BBC in 1999 (and recently renewed it into 2025), they’ve put out a range of audio dramas, both one-offs and series of various lengths, using not just the characters but many of the actual actors from the television show, including six of those who have taken on the iconic Doctor role onscreen. Owing to the fact that Doctor Who officially has no canon and thus no need for continuity, rigorous or otherwise, they can get even more imaginative than their source material, going so far as to explore counterfactual storylines such as one where the Doctor never leaves his home planet in the first place.
Below you’ll find a complete list, assembled by a fan on Reddit, of the series and episodes of Big Finish’s Doctor Who audio dramas now available on Spotify and are now housed to our collection of Free Audio Books. The material comes to thirty hours in total, but the question of when to listen to it falls second to a more important consideration: what sort of sustenance will best ensure that you can keep up with all of the Doctor’s audio adventures?
In one of the most impassioned and beautifully written defenses of Burkean conservatism I have ever read, the poet Wendell Berry took government projects of both the left and right to task, proclaiming in 1968 that the emergence of a massive bureaucracy was a tragic sign of the “loss of the future.” His argument is similar to one made over twenty years earlier by the Trotskyist-turned-conservative writer James Burnham, whose 1941 book The Managerial Revolution predicted “at each point,” wrote George Orwell in a thorough review, “a continuation of the thing that is happening.” A “managerial” central state, Burnham also argued, inevitably brought about a “loss of the future.”
Neither the contemplative Berry nor the incisive Burnham have been able to account for one historically inescapable fact: the periods in which 20th century societies imagined the future most vividly were those most dominated by bureaucratic, technocratic, centralized political economies. This is true under conservative governments like that of the U.S. under Eisenhower, in which huge infrastructure projects—from the highway system to hydroelectric dams— rearranged the lives of millions.
And it was true under Khrushchev’s Soviet state, whose Virgin Lands campaign did the same. Indeed, mid-century Soviet “expectations were pretty similar to the futuristic predictions of Americans,” writes Matt Novak, “with a touch more Communism, of course.” Unsurprising, perhaps, given that the two nations were locked in competition over the domination of both earth and space.
Novak’s understatement is fully warranted. Although the people in images like those you see here tend to appear in more collective arrangements, their sci-fi surroundings almost mirror those in the images from the U.S. that were parodied by The Jetsons two years after this 1960 collection. These detailed scenarios come from a “retro-futuristic filmstrip, which would have been played through a Diafilm,” a kind of slide projector. It’s a vision, it just so happens, of our time, 2017, but it looks backward to get there, both in its technology and its design. The illustration above, for example, “was almost certainly inspired by the Futurama exhibit from the 1939 New York World’s Fair.” (Itself built, we may note, on the shoulders of Roosevelt’s New Deal.)
You can see many more of these illustrations at Paleofuture, and at the top of the post watch a video version with “jazzy music and star wipes.” You may find these visions quaint, charming in their naiveté and inaccuracy—yet often quaintly prescient as well. Retro-futurism’s appeal to us seems to rest principally in how silly it can seem in hindsight, even when it gets things right. Perhaps it is the case that the most fully-realized, totalizing visions of tomorrow are as far-fetched as the controlling societies that produce them are unsustainable. As Bob Duggan writes at Big Think, for example, we are bound to associate the “undead art movement” of Italian Futurism with the very short-lived regime of Italian Fascism. Maybe the degree to which a government lacks a future is in inverse proportion to the intensity of its retro-futurism.
So what exactly is the relationship between state power and utopian futurism? The question invites a dissertation, and surely many have been written, as they have on the symptomology of the techno-dystopian and urban apocalyptic forms of futurism. We might begin by wondering what our actual 2017 will look like 57 years from now. What will people in 2074 make of our endless culture of revivalism, from zombie steampunk to retreads and remakes of everything from Ghost in the Shell, to The Matrix, to Star Wars? Who can say. Perhaps, for whatever sociological reason, we are suffering, as Berry put it, from a loss of the future.
Back in the day, Americans could watch an occasional British TV show on PBS or UHF. A little Benny Hill. Some Upstairs Downstairs, but not a whole lot more.
Those days of scarcity are now long gone. Last month, BBC Worldwide and ITV launched Britbox, a streaming service that features the biggest collection of British TV shows ever. And, according to Nerdist, that collection now includes 550 classic Doctor Who episodes, originally aired between 1963 and 1989. For those not familiar with Doctor Who, Den of Geek has a handy guide that will help you get started.
Britbox currently offers a one-week free trial. Ergo, you can start binge-watching some Doctor Who shows for the next 168 hours. After the free trial, the service costs $6.99 per month, and you can cancel, hassle free, whenever you want.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
As reflexively as we may now describe the 2019 Los Angeles of Blade Runner as “dystopian” — and indeed, as vivid a modern dystopia as cinema has yet produced — who among us wouldn’t want to spend at least a few hours there? Much of the surface appeal is, of course, visual: the rainy neon-lined streets, the industrial fearsomeness, those tower-side video geisha. But no film truly succeeds, at creating a world or anything else, without the right sound. We may not consciously realize it when we watch the movie, no matter how many times we’ve seen it before, but the sonic elements, all carefully crafted, do more than their fair share to make Blade Runner feel like Blade Runner.
And so the best way to put yourself into Blade Runner’s world may be to surround yourself with its sounds, a task made much easier by “ambient geek” Crysknife007, whose Youtube channel offers a playlist of ambient noise from Blade Runner places. These include Deckard’s apartment, the Tyrell Building, the Bradbury Hotel, and others, each of which loops for a continuous twelve hours. (The complete playlist above runs for 72 hours.) Some of the locations even die-hard fans of the movie might not recognize, because they come from another extension of Blade Runner’s reality: the 1997 PC adventure game that has a new cast of characters play out a different story in the proto-cyberpunk urban setting with the same necessity for just the right sound to create just the right atmosphere
Crysknife007, who as an ambient musician goes under the name “Cheesy Nervosa,” seems to have a side line in this sort of thing: last month we featured other sci-fi-inspired selections from the same Youtube channel like the sounds of the ship’s engine from Star Trek: the Next Generation and the TARDIS from Doctor Who. But it’s Blade Runner, as Thom Andersen says in his documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, that “continues to fascinate. Perhaps it expresses a nostalgia for a dystopian vision of the future that has become outdated. This vision offered some consolation because it was at least sublime. Now the future looks brighter, hotter, and blander.” But even as the real 2019 draws near, whatever the future actually ends up looking like, we at least know we can keep it sounding interesting.
For your weekend listening pleasure, we present a 70 minute radio dramatization of The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury’s “timeless fable of doomed Martian colonisation.” Aired by the BBC, this production stars Derek Jacobi and Hayley Atwell. Read this little blurb, which helps set the stage. Then stream the embedded Spotify audio below.
When the first expedition to Mars mysteriously disappears, Earth sends a second to find out what happened. But the real mission is classified. And only Captain Wilder knows the truth. Spender, an anthropologist on Wilder’s crew, attempts to prevent the colonisation that she believes will eradicate the last of an ancient people living on Mars. But to what lengths will she go?
As the honourable but duty-bound Captain Wilder tracks the now rogue Spender into the Martian mountains, the future of this ancient planet is at stake. Meanwhile, Earth itself teeters on the brink of its own global catastrophe as the very survival of humanity hangs in the balance.…
Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
