My dad decided he’d like a business after he retired from his career with the municipality. A Facebook page for the business that he wanted for his retirement years was one of the things he asked me to help him with. We had a supporter for quite some time, before she passed, Marilyn.
Marilyn helped me out quite a lot with tips on how to shape the page. In the area of politics, Marilyn’s perspective proved vastly useful. She expressed surprise that I would do something so amateurish as to make a political post on the page, which could cause arguments.
I realized that I should not do anything like tear people down with political rhetoric. I used the impetus to make an opportunity to learn more about politics, which was interesting as there can be a lot to criticize about political figures. In the first place, Marilyn showed me the problem: there was a lot to say about Trump.
It is now time to consider Trudeau’s problematic administration here in Canada. I don’t know yet all what I might do, considering especially that my dad, although he would not like me to publish this, does not support liberal politics. Even my younger brother, although he doesn’t claim to know all that much about the political scene in Canada, does not take a sharp tongue when politics are the subject of conversation.
Playing the role of an educator requires modesty and humility. With a content aggregator website and tried-and-true RSS feeds, I do some research and call myself a writer.
As part of yesterday’s podcast episode, Russell Brand interviewed a guest, BJ Dichter. He observed that if friends do become divided in a political argument, it is imperative they want to but ultimately agree not to let that end the friendship. Viewers were reminded that no matter what our political views are, we need to live in the same world.
BJ Dichter how to unite together against centralised power
Exploring why it is worth watching after all these years, opinions about the movie from different perspectives, and The moment we finally find our hero.
I was a child in 1986, young enough to believe in fantasy. I suspect the 1986 Transformers movie was available in a serial edit for Saturday morning television, as elements of the plot seem familiar to me.
History of Classic Transformers
In 1980, Takara made the “Diaclone” toy line in Japan as a unique sci-fi series of 1:60 scale figures, vehicles, and playsets. Microchange is a subline of Takara’s New Microman line of the mid-’80s, 3.75″ figures that were super-posable and cars and robots for use by them. They introduced robots ready to change into regular vehicles, electronic things, or weapons. Hasbro bought the Micro Change and Diaclone toys and partnered with Takara.
The TakaraTomy company makes toys in Japan. They are the maker of Transformers in Japan and plan a significant part of the design for Transformers toys. It has been a business partnership between Hasbro and Takara ever since.
Who was the very first Transformer? Primus is the divine force of the Transformers, an ancient and ethereal being that dates back to the universe’s beginning, a force for good that exists across multiple realities, and infinite alternate universes. It was Prima who was the first Transformer created by Primus, and he would later lead Thirteen.
The Thirteen were the Cybertronians made by Primus to battle Unicron. They were each given the ranking of Prime. Simon Furman further invented the Transformers’ origin independently.
Quintessons are a race of creatures being driven off by Sentinel Prime. They are the manifestations of Quintus Prime and rule their realm from the planet Quintessa.
Pre-1986
Tragically, the space transport Challenger crumbled 73 seconds after its send-off, killing each and every one of the seven space travelers. It has been suggested that those old enough to remember belong to Generation X (too old to be considered millennials). Would recollecting the 1986 Transformers feature also help confirm that I am part of Generation X?
The animated Transformers feature film was released on the big screen in 1986. It was in North America on August 8. It was co-created by Nelson Shin.
The screenplay was composed by Ron Friedman, who made Bionic Six. 7.2/10 on IMDb, The Transformers: The Movie is a story that heroic Autobots safeguard the world from Decepticons. Anger is raging between both factions, and that hatred has made them blind to a threat.
The Transformers: The Movie is the first Transformers feature, even though the live-action films get all the attention. The movie gained a cult following among genre fans despite being a box-office failure.
Compared with the TV series’ equivalent of 90 minutes, the film’s budget was six times higher at $6 million.
1986 Underdog Autobots
In The Transformers: The Movie, after a Decepticon assault devastates Autobot City, Optimus Prime wins a deadly one-on-one duel with Megatron, but sustains fatal injuries in the encounter. It was Megatron’s correct calculation that the Decepticon crew would not set off the automated defenses of Autobot City.
I’ve thought about how the story for The Transformers: The Movie fits a quest pattern.
Quest “Initiation”–The Decepticons conquer Cybertron, the home planet of the Transformers, in what was 2005. Thundercracker, Skywarp, Shrapnel, Kickback, Bombshell, and Megatron are jettisoned to conserve fuel, by several Decepticons, led by Starscream. The injured Decepticons are found by Unicron, a conscious planet.
In exchange for the destruction of the Matrix–which Megatron knows can destroy him–Unicron offers him a new body. He tells him Ultra Magnus has it.
Quest “Instructions”–On his deathbed, Optimus passes a power.
Quest “Journey”–Retaking the Decepticons, Galvatron drives to search out Ultra Magnus.
Quest “Confrontation”–The Autobots and Junkions head for Cybertron. The Autobots crash through Unicron and become disbanded. Dinobots, Decepticons, and Junkions continue to battle Unicron.
Daniel safeguards his dad Spike from Unicron.
Quest “Conquest”–Understanding this is the Autobot’s breaking point, the work changes Rodimus Prime, the Autobot pioneer. He is now an Autobot champion.
Quest “Return”–Rodimus throws Galvatron into space to obliterate Unicron, then escapes with the other Autobots.
Quest “Transformation”–With the Decepticons in chaos, the Autobots praise the conflict, and the retaking of their home planet, while Unicron’s head circles.
Screenplay Resolution
During the conquest, Galvatron acquires high ground. (Remind you of Ewan McGregor’s dialogue in Revenge of the Sith?)
The Matrix, realizing this is the Autobots’ darkest hour, transforms Hot Rod into Rodimus Prime. According to Hot Rod’s tech specs, he is an Autobot Cavalier, while Rodimus Prime is an Autobot Protector – unlike Optimus Prime, who is an Autobot Commander. While Unicron’s severed head orbits Cybertron, the Autobots celebrate both the war’s end and the retaking of Cybertron from the Decepticons.
As a screenplay, I find the action and story adequate, and I also think the voice acting is notable. It mostly deserves the 7.2 it has on IMDb, although that score is possibly a little generous.
With numbers as over-whelming as scenes, the Transformers surprisingly realistic film was delivered in 2007 and has gotten five blockbuster spin-offs and a prequel. Even those who don’t like the movie suggest the brand benefited from the film overall.
I agree that Michael Bay is a great movie director, whatever criticism is leveled at him, and his first Transformers film shows it. Shia LaBeouf played the leading role in the movie quite admirably as an up-and-comer, and Megan Fox is gorgeous and fun as the film’s leading actress. Bay had a $147 million budget in the US for the movie, and the box office was $4.8 billion.
Sadly, notwithstanding posting Autobot-sized numbers that followed – Fallen ($836M), Moon ($1.12B), Eradication ($1.1B), The Last Knight ($605M) – the films tumbled off a precipice. While he delighted in making them, Bay ought to have tapped out sooner.
Despite many calling the second movie the worst of the franchise, one Reddit user, chris95rx7500, claims it is still his favorite. Furthermore, he remarks, “if you didn’t like the movie, the toy line made up for it.”
Fans of Transformers tend to view the movies as relatively disposable since so many exist to date. The sixth film in the flagship series, and the seventh overall, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, is set for release on June 9, 2023.
Paramount Pictures
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(Transcript of a video interview with Nova Scotia’s famed trailer park resident, Ricky, whose surname is being kept private for reasons of security)
TV Tropes Trailer Park Boys
Interviewer: It’s a pleasure to meet you.
Ricky: Well, Mr. Smartypants, I’m mostly here because the judge said that if I set a positive example, it would look much better on me than going straight to what I do best, which is to grow dope and then to sell it. That’s how I make my living, that’s how I feed family, and who has a right to tell me otherwise?
Interviewer: I only said hi. Is there something you could say to introduce yourself?
Ricky: To the people watching?
Interviewer: I don’t really have a lot of viewers.
Ricky: Then why interfluke me in the first place? Why is it I’m helping you do that when I’m supposedly to be setting a good example?
Interview: What was the reason for your summons?
Ricky: You don’t listen too good, do you? Selling dope.
Interview: I think sales of that nature have to be regulated.
Ricky: Is that right, Mr. I told you so? I spend plenty of time in nature. Where do you think I calibrate myself?
Interview: Excuse me?
Ricky: Oh, so that’s your true colours. I turn the tables on you and you start playing dumb. Calibrate myself in nature, you asked me why I don’t do that.
Interviewer: I meant drug sales have to be regulated.
Ricky: Don’t tell me you’re a cop! I knew this was a bad idea. I must be out of my mind giving an interview to make the judge happy.
Interviewer: No, no, I’m not from the police, I just wanted an interview that I could put on social media. You’re known for making a documentary about trailer park life.
Ricky: I am, ain’t I? Look, sorry about your little news report thing here that you got me here for, but I just remembered. I don’t need to do this! I got my own documentary movie-making people.
Interviewer: I just thought on top of that.
Ricky: Nah, this is over. I got people waiting. You hear that? Real-life people that don’t want their lives put in some Internet book. I’m getting out of here. Find somebody else to intervain.
This episode is frightening, unnerving even. It’s one of the worst aviation disasters in history, above Lake Michigan, in a lightning storm in the skies when a jetliner entered the fray, and minutes later, abruptly disappeared from radar. The radio contact just ended. Naturally, there was a significant alarm, and, everywhere the jet might have flown off course, lost in the storm, airline personnel searched for radio contact. Nobody knows what happened. It was just gone.
Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 2501 was a propliner operating a daily transcontinental service between New York, and Seattle, when it disappeared from radar on the night of June 23, 1950.
Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 2501
There was a virtual quest for the missing airplane, at first apparently down in the tempest over Lake Michigan. What was weird was that the debris proved just absent. It just wasn’t in the lake. The things that turned up were frightful – odd pieces of the airplane, and peculiar clothing and things, logical from the missing plane. What’s super mysterious is that there just was no significant wreckage, just the rain of horrible debris from the aircraft. The plane completely vanished. I would think, if lightning struck the plane, the whole thing would have gone down, and people searched and searched for it. If it somehow detonated in flight, why would little bits of the plane and its passengers have landed? If the plane somehow got vaporized, everything should have been destroyed. It is a terrible secret, and for a long time, trackers have looked and looked for more proof of what occurred and never tracked down it. There is not a really obvious reason.
A rock marker, given by Filbrandt Family Funeral Home, was set in Riverview Cemetery with 58 names of flight 2501 survivors and the expression “Gone yet Never Forgotten” in 2008.
Discovery Channel’sExpedition Unknown (season 8, episode 2) featured the crash, which aired on February 12, 2020.
What’s extravagant is an incredible night’s rest, perhaps nine hours to re-energize.
Morning coffee is excellent, typically several cups. Taking a look at my YouTube menu in the morning helps shape my inner world. Watching videos, whether for entertainment, information, music, or an intersection of all these stops (!), is a great way to handle the early hours of the day.
I wouldn’t be satisfied without making time for TV entertainment. I enjoy single episodes like people would watch in the golden age of TV, before home videos and streaming video took over. I like, for example, an episode of Riverdale on the Netflix service, or another series that happens to have my fancy. While I don’t live on Netflix, I often make Netflix a go-to for streaming entertainment.
The BBC soap Eastenders has had a long, rich history going back to 1985, so I like to watch it if I want traditional television. My eighth birthday was that year, a time in life when family and friends are especially important. Since I’m now an adult and more prepared (than an eight-year-old), I appreciate following the stories in Eastenders. My rule of thumb, though, is only one episode per day.
Many days I like to put an hour into Twitter to get a fun peek at people’s hot takes and trending news. I even automate tweets, when topics I am interested in exploring come to light in the hands of capable writers. I occasionally edit the Facebook page for my dad’s cemetery business, which we run together. Sometimes I am specifically required.
I check a few TikToks, likely of the more original variety, often at least twenty of them. They are usually only a few seconds long.
Perhaps best of all, I chill with my girl. Having that bond is important, I think. Even if I devote a lot of time to technical pursuits, a human element can be supremely important.
As Reader’s Digest has been known to recount, laughter can be the best medicine. Laughter is a ready stress-buster. In fact, without a few laughs, the atmosphere feels oppressive and distressing.
Melodrama. Ivan Reitman comedies. Trailer Park Boys. Inappropriately inane emotional notes. Noisy songs that ignore rules of composition. Underwhelmed artists. Films with blissful dialogue.
Ridiculous Internet trends (the hive mind). Obscure Twitter highlights. The excesses of the most fortunate, who have strayed into bad taste. Beautiful, happy cats.
Stephen Malkmus. The Netflix original Flaked.
YouTube humour. The notes of sarcasm that Mutahar of someordinarygamers hits. Riverdale plot threads. Alex Meyers’ critiques of Riverdale. (Almost anything for young adults Alex Meyers likes to despise).
Unnecessary reboots. Well-highlighted irony in cinema. My best friend’s best moments. Being confronted by my own origins. “Postmodernist” or “meta” formula-breaking.
Jerry Seinfeld. Charlie Sheen. My brother sometimes gives me a laugh. His children have been known to give me a chuckle. My sister’s toddler is dear.
Bending reality to the will of the masses. TikTok comedians. What mainstream news opts to single out when the subject matter isn’t too grim nor necessary to be reported. Certain books on the market, whether inordinately silly accounts of common obstacles or cheerfully oblivious celebrity opuses. Faking spectacle to hold on to celebrity status.
Social turbulence. Sometimes optimism in the face of distressing evidence requires a sense of humour in the wake of steep inclines. The last laugh.
Steadfast resolve to succeed. Motivation messages for Generation Z champs. Productivity cult nonsense. Promises of the four-day workweek.
Tim Ferriss. Mark Manson. Bad decisions by Mark Zuckerberg. Really cool, grim scenarios. Characterizations in videogame cut scenes.
Hayden Christensen’s shift to the Dark Side of the Force. Lucasfilm decision-making. The decision to make superhero films unnecessarily dark. What passes for fantasy in the realm of three-act cinema.
My intuition tells me my favourite toy, as a child, was a plush Ernie toy, Ernie, the resident of Sesame Street who graces the TV sets of viewers.
Sesame Street-and I suspect it continues to run–is the public television series with both people and puppets as residents and visitors, on an unusual street, where it is normal to teach life skills like counting and spelling. I am not sure I gleaned a lot of learning from watching, but, when I was small, it could be I did. We had a set of Bert and Ernie dolls in our house.
Bert and Ernie usually disagreed on how they should be living. I am not sure there is a pattern that emerges from accepting that these two blokes live together in a weird, weird world, but perhaps one does. Anyway, I don’t think I am as small and round as Ernie, nor do I lend myself as much to being as silly. I suppose I’m silly much of the time, anyway, but I don’t think Ernie was a role model for me, just a toy that resembled a person.
I had a fair bit of intelligence, as a child, and I’m not sure I played with the Ernie doll as much as it kept me company, when I was entertaining my lonesome, in my childhood bedroom. It is, like I said, only my intuition that informs me of this. I am trying to be honest in the face of a somewhat challenging question about a childhood toy.
I don’t know what the likes of psychiatrist Sigmund Freud would have made of my bond with Ernie, but I don’t recall taking him out of the house, or anything like that. I think he merely kept me company when circumstances dictated that I be on my own.
It seems Mr. Mark Saltzman was asked if Bert & Ernie are gay. It's fine that he feels they are. They're not, of course. But why that question? Does it really matter? Why the need to define people as only gay? There's much more to a human being than just straightness or gayness.
My friend Ryan, made fun of me for wearing colorful new socks, in junior high. We weren’t friends long after he began that. It was, I think ,the year 1990.
Today is Barack Obama’s Birthday.
I’m sure his socks were impeccable.
About MTV
It made us or broke us when it came to the ladies. After all, for a boy that age, the playbook was only beginning to be written.
TV
Beginning August 1, 1981
August 1, 1981, New York, New York, United States
August 1 this year, 2021, observes the fortieth anniversary of the debut of MTV. I think this anniversary deserves more of a mention than it is receiving.
Britpop has a canon. Why not MTV?
It probably does, but not one that I hear of. It fascinates me.
Let me conjecture.
MTV
A TV station that is called Music Television, yet never plays any music.
Jane: really wanna check out the latest Iggy video I heard it was tight, turn on MTV and see if it’s on.
Erica: Bitch please, that network hasn’t played music videos since 1999. You will have to settle for that Vevo horse shit instead.
by MrHobbes69 June 26, 2014
I digress.
Halloween is the going entry for forty years of horror, I think
In movies, awfulness like the Halloween films, the movies that started with the executive exertion of John Carpenter, additionally forty years in, presently, readies a tremendous measure of conversation. It is hard to, even for me, an imaginative fellow myself might I add, to understand why there are so many timelines for the same story. That town Haddonfield, Illinois, shot in South Pasadena and Hollywood, California, never will be forgotten.
Star Wars is the clear contender for forty years of the best sci-fi
We haven’t quite got forty years from Star Wars Episode IV and its characteristic representation on YouTube. The representation of Star Wars on Youtube is positively immense; in terms of canon, the official entries for a universe like George Lucas’ Star Wars is truly stellar. The sequel trilogy crashed twice, back at Christmas 2017, and again for Christmas 2019.
Sometimes people hate on it; more often people love it, and it is quite frequently identified as the most significant storytelling to certain people’s childhood that to retcon the story is like a sacrilege.
Star Wars Episode IX
Vader threw the Emperor down an immense circular shaft in the recesses of deep space and the Rebel Alliance exploded Star Wars Return of the Jedi’s Death Star in 1983. Somehow in 2021, the Emperor returned amid the wreckage of the Death Star to battle both Kylo Ren, performed by Adam Driver, and Rey, acted by Daisy Ridley.
It looked like a climactic explosion that took the Death Star out of existence at the end of Return of the Jedi. Did wreckage persist?
1980’s sequel Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back turned forty last year, and at that time it got a considerable mention on their YouTube channel, and everywhere else on the Internet. One night lately I watched Empire Strikes Back for the first time in twenty-five years, right at home on Disney+. Right at home, I might add.
Superman is another enduring and innovative franchise
The Superman movies began in 1978 and following revivals like the 90s series Smallville, and the 2006 film Superman Returns, two years after Superman actor Christopher Reeves died, Superman returned in a big way for Batman vs. Superman, and in the Justice League films. Like Zod and his cohorts escaping their near-permanent imprisonment for Superman II in 1980, Superman was lucky to defeat them. RIP to Superman director Richard Donner (finished 1978).
MTV was an interesting journey. The 1970s are recognized as a time when privilege, gay rights and ecological developments contended with the Watergate embarrassment, the energy emergency and the continuous Vietnam War.
The eighties were a novel time for design, music, and film. During the 1980s, MTV was instrumental in advancing entertainers like Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince, who played in turn.
For fun, I put on about twenty-five songs that were in the MTV catalogue in ’81. I’m unsure Lou Reed was completely prepared for how MTV would change music. Even come 2021, I order the MTV TV channel, a retro channel to round out the mix of programming I get from communications provider Cogeco. Tell me who’s boss, baby…
Funny fright flick Ghostbusters is making a return
I usually enjoy ties to the past. For instance, come October, Ghostbusters Afterlife is set to shake up crowds. The 80s, some might say, was the best decade ever.
Ghostbusters rocked comedy starting in 1984 when it received its theatrical release. Funny dialogue and plot devices plus the supernatural theme and special effects make it a great movie.
Back to the Future is a heavy hitter
I couldn’t say whether Back to the Future is a kids’ film, yet the typical rating for films is that C8 demonstrates a film or TV or game that is for children who ought to have effectively arrived at the age of eight. I think that’s what Back to the Future is rated. I again watched the scene when Doc Brown explains, to Marty McFly, that the inventor, Doc Brown, has built a time machine inside a DeLorean sports car.
It is droll. It enjoyed a resurgence in Season 3 of the Netflix series Stranger Things.
It feels to me like Batman never left
I think Batman in 1989 was rated PG, meaning that the parents of underage kids attending the movie must have their parents’ to put the experience of watching the PG movie into a family context. Pondering that is one explanation I once in a while lament the choice to avoid considering a youngster.
I was captivated by Batman as a twelve-year-old, and I envisioned turning into a reprobate like The Joker. I was able to read some of the more adult Batman comics that were in print and successfully selling at the time.
The Killing Joke is a great story. So is Batman: Year One, which is a series of issues, in Detective Comics, “rebooting” the origin story of Batman, although I don’t know honestly if “reboot” was a coined word in the eighties… I must be too young…
I remained interested in the second and third movies in the Batman franchise. 1995’s Batman Forever is underestimated, I think. The popular opinion of Gotham, now on Netflix, is that it is a great TV series, and I agree that Gotham is superb.
Lou Reed’s song A Perfect Day is in the Gotham series when the Penguin is coming into his own…
The music
Lou Reed delivered perhaps the worst music of his career
I enjoy it. Albums like Legendary Hearts and Mistrial, the video presence of Lou Reed, now older and more mellow one might say (especially if you have heard Reed’s remarks on the Take No Prisoners double-LP during the introduction to one of his Velvet Underground songs), demonstrates a personality that by now is so recognizable that it is somewhat lackluster in the face of what MTV was doing.
Was Reed a great dancer? He certainly was footloose. He employed longtime Velvets devotee Robert Quine for a new guitar presence on 1982’s The Blue Mask and nominally again for 1983’s Legendary Hearts, scornfully mixing him out of the finished album while retaining his name on the album jacket.
Andy Warhol remained an active presence
Warhol is of course a legend and known to buy whatever goodie did interest him, appearing often on MTV before his untimely death in 1987.
NYC began to evince itself, apart from its excellent theatre and theatrical politics, a city well-represented in the media, which some days depicted its Burroughs as havens for fiendish, delirious, magnificent drug addicts and other homeless. The Naked Lunch is a 1959 novel by American essayist William S. Burroughs. I am not sure Lou Reed did enough to identify himself as that “other” Godfather, however, well-reviewed his 1982 LP The Blue Mask was received. “Take the blue mask down from my face and look me in the eye…” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHOBZixJOtg
The addict William Lee takes on different assumed names, from the U.S. to Mexico, in the long run to Tangier and the illusory Interzone. His excursion begins in the U.S. where he is escaping the police looking for his next fix.
The novel was remembered for Time’s “100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005”.¹
Images of street life in the Big Apple
Suddenly a definition of music culture was ready and available to all who might pursue an interest in it. It is amazing what happened in the 1980s around the world and I start to feel stunned should I probe into it. I am so sorry about 9/11.
Music by itself is pretty cheap
MTV was 24/7, and the most I ever made out of possibilities for 24/7 were somewhat hampered by a shortage of comfortable space. I had days that I watched late-night cable TV with an absence of proper audio in favor of music recordings. There could have been possibilities.
While rock music is one of the electric things in the world, we enjoy it in controlled, cool environs, not the great outdoors… with rare exceptions. Someone with a passion for outdoor festivals could speak to you about it.
Remove it to the littlest club, and you have an intimacy that is unmatched, speaking generally, between artist and patrons. The result is like love.
The aftermath. The result imperial
When the restraint against more adult themes came to an end, films that previously had entertained fierce legends about the sights on camera, as with The Texas Chain-saw Massacre depicting Ed Gein chasing and slaughtering people.
In the interim, grim scary movies caused much displeasure against chaste and, dare I say, sane members of society. Whether to put the seeds of rebellion amid the reels of one-dimensional characterizations and poorly-plotted forgettable mire, there was so much box office to be had with films that sunk little previous investment and returned fortunes at the box office.
The devil won, dare I say.
The “dome” crowning these indulgences served another purpose, to elevate what remained of quality endeavours high up on the landscape. For entrants unwilling to descend to the depths of hell but not glorious enough to reach the upper echelon, the spread of lowbrow crime films began like spurts of blood from bullet holes to dot the landscape, forming what should amount to a canon of disreputable fun, if there isn’t such a canon in place already the scope of which is unknown to me. Sometimes it is the best-laid plans of men that curtail our best effort…
A shallow foothold, youth culture was strong as it ever had been, a generation following the sons and daughters of the dawn of love, in a morass to excel at the continuing breakdown of norms and conventions while enjoying the best that the beginning of the triumph of art in the hands of the masses would bring.
Art would soon be disposable, and yet we still have MTV…
The radio format remains consistent. The composition of the song goes a little unchanged, despite the efforts of gifted upstarts who would challenge it. What dictated tastes to the new unwashed was the resale of the same values as what just came before, coupled with the Renaissance of everything new and cool, everything under the sun.
Before long it was soon not even the twentieth century anymore. Time kept running like a river.
Despite everything that came and went about the shape of the media that housed music, the venues that assembled and entreated it, MTV remained like a light on the house of TV. If there was a certain kind of hipster in the house, it was a reasonable certainty that MTV would be there as well. There was no comparable TV channel that could effectively replace MTV.
It proved enduring.
Like a ray of light cast from a pier to the tides under darkness, MTV remains a go-to for information, like who’s who and what it takes to be a part of the culture, and for the hipster that valued the influences of the past recast anew and now again relevant, a weave of customs that never left you, that had never gone away. It remains for you to groove to, to think a little about and to ignore when necessary.
You are the controller; the best of the best is at your command. It is a game of electric crosshairs and you are the sergeant-at-arms.
Paper cups
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References
¹ Lacayo, Richard. “All-TIME 100 Novels”. Retrieved 15 November 2016 – via entertainment.time.com.
“Most of us really aren’t horribly unique. There are 6 billion of us.
“Put ’em all in one room and very few would stand out as individuals. So maybe we ought to think of worth in terms of our ability to get along as a part of nature, rather than being the lords over nature.”
–Herbert Simon, 1916–2001, market analyst
Simon was an American financial expert who won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978 for his commitments to financial matters. Simon set the “bottleneck,” which limits both what we can see, and what we can do. Current financial matters are generally founded on Simon’s thoughts.
Simon was granted the prize in financial matters for his examination into the interaction inside monetary associations. Fast forward to 2021, and the Internet is sometimes summed up as a whole with the phrase attention economy, and the expression arguably was begotten by therapist, market analyst, and Nobel Laureate, Herbert Simon. In a compelling book, Administrative Behavior (1947), Simon tried to supplant tradition, demonstrating—in an idea—a methodology that perceived different components.
As I understand the industry of Big Tech, in 2021, web designers often work on websites that advertise banners for revenue.
A phone call this week, the two of us in a small Canadian town, surprised me with the news that a downtown building, closed since 2018, had burned to street-level. An active Internet user, who has a blog that shows ads to readers, recounted what happened in his blog.
I am sorry that the building burned down, but that I was quickly clued up by social media, I am happy to indulge in feeling is the bee’s knees.
If you don’t know a lot about data privacy, and you wonder how your web searches seem to translate into similar ads on websites you use, it is because you have been observed searching, and advertisers wish to help you spend your money. There are steps you can take to reclaim data privacy, but you should be aware of where and what you do on the Internet, so that you can own your progress, if you liken browsing the Internet to, say, an adventure game.
I’ve thought about data privacy before. Facebook has had a scandalous history of data privacy betrayals, as when they employed Cambridge Analytica to help them unfairly sway the result of the 2016 run for the White House. The effort to cheat didn’t succeed, but the vote was a very narrow divide.
The deceit delivered by Cambridge Analytica led a giant blow to Facebook’s reputation, and was very hard on Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica had been trying to manipulate voters into thinking as the manipulative computer firm was paid to lead people to think.
Many computer users, you probably know, use VPN technology to disguise their location, by relaying their decisions on the Internet through a route that presents a fake location that an uninformed spy might take as your actual physical location (and not the location that you have).
Another retrofitting solution is to use a software scan, like Superantispyware, to detect tracking cookies, which show you ads that have targetted your behaviour on the Internet. Superantispyware deletes those cookies and shakes that control the advertisers have on you.
⦁ Getting personal
Something as simple as resolving to speak honestly can have profound and upbeat results. Herbert Simon was a therapist–I spoke with more than one caseworker when I was living out my twenties, and what guidance they provided, I still remember things they said to me, to this day, years later.
Inspired by those, like Rick and Tony and Pam, I am for this post listing what might help “counsel” individuals who are perhaps new to the attention economy, so they are not shorted by their own expectations.
⦁ Observations about the world (propelled by Herbert Simon)
Nature is flourishing
We have enhancements in medication
Significant development is happening all the time
Expanded digitalization is happening just as fast
Distant, working, is a clear reality
Enhancements in instruction abound
Another gander, at the powerless and oppressed individuals from our general public, needn’t give us pause
Promising circumstances favour us
Co-operation and social support enable us
Co-activity and social help assist us
Picking who is imperative to us is a potential reality
Working on psychological wellness through helping other people is good for your wellbeing
Collaborations between regular citizens (not government nor police) is becoming a mainstay
Feeling of appreciation might be a new unique norm
Discovering delight has never been more possible
Having an effect is, straight up, a reality
The world is a strange and wonderful place. When you consider, for example, co-activity, you might reflect that every person is truly an individual, and many people have talents that really help highlight other people’s strengths. While there are of course powerless and oppressed individuals, if you can get a smartphone and learn how to effectively use it, you are as powerful an individual as ever walked the Earth, in some regards.
Even with only a few social accounts, your potential is rather excellent. A philosophy of industry isn’t always discussed with words you could charactertize as “holistic,” but someone with an adequate command of many many realities about life, and how to do right, for both themselves and others, can be completely excellent.
Check out Canadian musician and recording artist Rick White’s new album Where it’s fine
⦁ Contrarily bound by confusion (to contrast)
My pinned tweet describes how AI has become an excellent tool, in many applications, for providing useful content recommendations. AI can look at what you’ve done before, on a specific service, and can guide you to more good content, to be enjoyed, and that you want to share.
My aim in circling data is to be helpful, to arrive at information relevant to what you might be searching for now, and I am additionally marginally important for my dad’s business, the Maple Lawn burial ground he focuses on all year, with some assistance from family and friends.
Good hobbies should be cultivated. I feel the attention economy is awesome. In particular, video, both big-budget presentations and little user videos, is widely available. A little music can help, too.
When AI is employed for reasons that include helping to provide good content recommendations, as, for example, when you are on YouTube, quality YouTube videos, though controlled with measures that can feel extreme, are recommended to viewers, by an AI algorithm.
YouTube launched in February 2005.
…”In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
–‘Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World’ in Martin Greenberger (ed.) Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (1971), 315 pages, index, sources
1: to make as if for the first time something already invented and reinvents the wheel
2: to remake or redo completely
3: to bring into use again
Reinvention, in the year 2021, is one way to move out of our present circumstances. It is no mystery that the future will not be the same as was intended.
There is an undercurrent of happiness again these days. Just surviving has become like a triumph, and love may prove the order of the day.
A worldwide perception of a second chance come is rare, and the future is unwritten; here is an age of miracles. You should reinvent thoroughly and carefully.
Governance could at this time be set free by Big Tech, or it could be screwed down like a bench at a bus stop intended not to be stolen.
In Canada, it is debated whether Canadian media on the Internet could get paid, with Bill C-10 ready to put Canadian content front and centre on sites where it is not now automatically top-tier content, kind of a detriment if you don’t wish a Canadian flavour every time you want a user video recommendation. Nor should Canadian viewer recommendations get like the offerings of AI bots behind walls at HQ, or further like that, as I suppose they may already be.
Take the case of Canadian comedian and broadcaster Tom Green, who has lately been highlighting his YouTube channel with a vlog showcasing a drive he did from LA to Ottawa. It is a singular vlog.
Watching Green offer reflections alone in the US desert, about the planet getting back to to a pre-pandemic normal, Green, whom I remember in Road Trip directed by Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, raised the point of how adaptation, not the adaptation of literature to film, but the adaptation you can utilize, being how you could save the endeavours you want for yourself to succeed in the face of unknown days. You start confidently and your handle on what we are facing will strengthen your resolve. I think Green is going, possibly, from the field of comedy, into music.
Without being afraid of having dropped the ball, I am having some trouble relating to the concept of schools as we understand them now, leaving behind their classrooms on campuses without that experience. Goodness, excited about the future opening up for us, if it is not ultimately restricted by forces that we neither foresee coming nor welcome.
There must sometimes be a natural intelligent design for learning–that there could never be would be a very remote possibility. Intelligent design occurs frequently enough that I can not be discouraged from believing what we have is merely a happy accident.
I sometimes wish that, when I once considered affording myself some of the opportunities youth brings, I could have opted for hard work, in light of the big picture. At age seventeen I could have begun to become marketable for the reason, chiefly, of challenging myself to appeal to social norms. Opportunities most frequently available are now changing in nature, while content, as Bill Gates said, could well remain king.
Recently, last year and this year, my posts, each to a recollected song, under the nominal tutelage of Jim Adams, were rejected, when Adams decided he no longer welcomed my participation. That is fine, as my reflections helped me get better organized, and of my several posts for Song Lyric Sunday, even if the posts were finally met with dismay, most of them were useful in their own right.
Beginning again the last few weeks, with a new temperament, how now in the days of yesteryear, when I came up with observations that grew from insights that author Jeff Goins introduced, bestselling author of The Art of Work, with notes on Facebook about how to blog. They never demanded a lot of work, but by now with a little work, they keep my little readership alive.
I don’t mind resuming the approach with which I began in 2012. Without a proper book, or even trying to write a proper book, I might be accused of taking in a blog of this shape and style, mine, without effective longtime goals.
But The Art of Work is the bestseller in Jeff Goins’ hand, about people who carved out singular paths for themselves, and it’s a wonderful book. I doubt it was written in the bathroom at parties.
If this does not work, then, let this be Finding Courtesies in Handfuls of Garden Flowers.
The Myth of the Independent Blogger and How I Learned to Love It 