If you know two things about the Dungeon Crawler Carl book series, one is that it has impressive audiobook adaptations. Listeners are frequently surprised to learn that one man, Jeff Hays, is responsible for all the voices (aside from a couple guest spots.) The eighth book in the series, A Parade of Horribles, is due in a couple weeks, but you can get a peek behind the curtain and watch Hays record the first few chapters of the audiobook (spoilers, obv.)

• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Part 8

While the audiobooks proper are under a ten year exclusive contract with Audible, Hays' production company, Soundbooth Theater, has been recording an audio drama version—dubbed an "Audio Immersion Tunnel"—that they distribute themselves. These are slightly re-worked versions with author Matt Dinniman's input and/or approval, added sound effects, music, and an expanded cast (Hays still voices the main characters.) You can watch him recording Season One, Episode One (Part 2, Part 3.) The finished episode is free on Soundbooth's app.

Indigenous solar projects to tackle diesel shortage concerns and halve power bills. Two remote Indigenous communities have attracted a combined $11 million [US $7.9 million] in funding for solutions to tackle their fuel security and cost-of-living crises.

AP report King Charles III addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress today, only the second British monarch to do so after Queen Elizabeth II in 1991. Speaking during the 250th year of American independence, he invoked Magna Carta, Oscar Wilde's line about being "divided by a common language," and framed the relationship as "A Tale of Two Georges" — Washington and George III. An interesting blend of speechwriting, symbolism, diplomacy, and royal theatre. Curious what others made of the speech.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: For its famous intractability, the Bloomberg Terminal has long inspired devotion, bordering on obsession. Among traders, the ability to chart a path through the software's dizzying scrolls of numbers and text to isolate far-flung information is the mark of a seasoned professional. But as a greater mass of data is fed into the Terminal -- not only earnings and asset prices, but weather forecasts, shipping logs, factory locations, consumer spending patterns, private loans, and so on -- valuable information is being lost. "It has become more and more untenable," says Shawn Edwards, chief technology officer at Bloomberg. "You miss things, or it takes too long."

To try to remedy the problem, Bloomberg is testing a chatbot-style interface for the Terminal, ASKB (pronounced ask-bee), built atop a basket of different language models. The broad idea is to help finance professionals to condense labor-intensive tasks, and make it possible to test abstract investment theses against the data through natural language prompts. As of publication, the ASKB beta is open to roughly a third of the software's 375,000 users; Bloomberg has not specified a date for a full release. Wired spoke with Edwards at Bloomberg's palatial London headquarters in early April, where he shared several examples of what ASKB can do. "With ASKB, I can create workflow templates. I can write a long query, and say, 'Hey, here's all the data I'm going to need. Give me a synopsis of the bull and bear cases, what the Street is saying, what the guidance is.' Now, I want to schedule [the workflows] or trigger them when I see this or that condition in the world."

As for what separates mediocre traders from the best, assuming both have access to the same data, Edwards said: "These tools are not magical. They don't make an average [employee] all of a sudden great. The difference will be your ideas. In the hands of experts, it allows them to do better analysis, deeper research -- to sift through 10 great ideas when they might have only had time for one. If you're a mediocre analyst, they'll be 10 mediocre ideas."

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Inside the cavernous former train station that now houses Hamburger Bahnhof, 400,000 wooden cubes stack and topple into piles. Conceived by Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelytė and commissioned by Chanel, “We Make Years Out of Hours” is a large-scale installation that invites the public to remake structures from these 10-centimeter blocks made of pine and spruce.

Lapelytė often combines sound and performance and collaborates with both professionals and novices. This participatory work continues the artist’s interest in collective making and caretaking, particularly as it relates to shared authorship and how we might amend and reshape what currently exists.

A trio of weekly performances on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays will feature a libretto with the words of 15 writers, including Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong, Lebanese-American painter Etel Adnan, Iranian filmmaker
Forugh Farrokhzad, and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Centered around community, love, and loss, these songs create another dimension in the space to consider agency and hope.

“We Make Years Out of Hours” opens on May 1 and is on view through January 10, 2027, in Berlin. Explore more of Lapelytė’s multi-disciplinary works on her website and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Lina Lapelytė Fills Hamburger Bahnhof with 400,000 Wood Blocks for Communal Building appeared first on Colossal.