This month, January 2022, WordPress has kindly offered a blogging challenge, presenting a prompt for each day of the month to help bloggers, new and established alike, get into a mode of writing daily. I take a gander at it, since I appreciate composing, but am not, in every case, totally certain what road. I know that some bloggers become successful by capitalizing on trendy niches or that kind of thing, and that is great. They are welcome to their success. I mostly enjoy the exercise of writing, and I like the feedback I get from people who I manage to reach, who sometimes have a great sense of style to their own blogging.
I can remember doing well in high school English classes, and I was kind of neurotic, trying to write well and feeling I might be but not confident of success. I’ve altered my style since high school. For one thing, when I am blogging in my own “voice,” I tend to emphasize more simple meanings by what I say. There are a few reasons. A favourite quotation of mine is the Einstein quote where he is remembered to have said something like, “Unless you can explain it to an eight-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.” To meet that challenge, and I tend to fall into the trap of wordy sentences and poor word choice, as the grammar app Grammarly characterizes those problems, I try to keep my words simple and also, quirky I suppose, I don’t usually emphasize negative expressions, as in trying to make an explanation by outlining what an idea is not. I lean toward positive perspectives that set forth what I need to catch or explain, rather than taking contradicting worries out of the air.
I’d been focusing when I could on five more ways you can dispense with some of the time you’re putting into video research. If you do anything like that and if you think of consuming video content as being video research, then increasingly I don’t think there’s a consensus that anything like video research is useful. I’m looking back in time when there were different attitudes to video. I mean that it wasn’t as accessible as it today. It occurs to me I should argue that if you are committed to any research activity utilizing video, and there’s a ready workaround, you should concentrate on the workaround.
Aerial view of black board with the letter forming hello greeting concept
The first part for this post, about chasing an adherent to research, left off with points how you can turn some of your conclusions into blog posts. Or if you don’t have a blog, there’s somewhere you could start. I would like to make the point that the best conclusions you can form from watching a lot of videos can indeed be put somewhere, like in a blog, or a podcast, etc. For example, on Patrick Bet-David’s Valutainment on the internet, I watched Bet-David and Robert Greene discuss Greene’s latest bestseller. Bet-David pointed out that Greene sat down with three hundred books to write his latest book, for the pay-off. That’s the traditional sense of research that I don’t think you should disregard in any way. There is no way that you can eliminate the process of reading the page, or perhaps your Kindle, from the actual work of doing research. Sad but true.
The traditional sense of video is taking a video camera to a wedding and then selling it to the wedding party. The best research you can cultivate from a video of that kind is whether a particular family member was in attendance, or perhaps how the bridesmaids looked when they were standing side by side. Do you see many wedding videos, apart from celebrity weddings, that make it onto the Internet? I am not sure there are, particularly as the advent of the handheld video camera has given way to the smartphone camera. If you are a young person reading this, and you don’t relate to the idea of a videographer at a wedding, it isn’t that different from a professional photographer taking pictures. It is just that the videographer mingles with the wedding party and gets a little movie of the wedding.
I’m writing there about commercial consumer video, not expensive TV productions. The thing about the video you watch is that when it is a pricey production, I don’t think you can count on it for insight. Particularly when focusing on video production for TV, in the nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties, when the technology was useful enough to shoot material for television, and before computers were beginning to infiltrate it, there just wasn’t a lot of purely informative video. The novelty on being on video overshadowed a requirement, to be honest. As soon as the camera was recording, everybody was immediately acting at all times. That sounds like a polarized argument, but ninety-nine percent of the time if you were being paid to appear on camera, you were acting to do it. Speaking jovially, you had to nail it.
What happened in the mid-nineteen-eighties? Computer effects were beginning to be integrated into more and more of the ready video, which starts to become interesting for the possibility that more and better information could be communicated by video. With more information is born the reality that better information begins to come across. Purists might disagree, but fast-forward fifteen years and amateur video is not only more accessible but could also be edited on par with the best of people in the trade in previous decades. There had been an explosion of video on cable TV which meant more ways to deliver information by video. Did that mean you could derive better conclusions in the sense that by better I mean better located in reality? I think so. You always want the past back, once you’re past a certain age, but there is some logic, or I am doing my best to apply logic here.
The apparent irony is that the development of the computer industry accelerated at a much faster pace than did the growth of video. I’m tempted once more to stop, but it’s true that by the time video was in its golden years, the computer industry was spritely, pardon the pun, spritely and skyrocketing for many, many people. I don’t want to mislead you unfairly, but surely some blame for some of the big, really bad troubles that have hit people where there is free access to information lies with what’s just bad information. That caution gets sounded frequently, and where before I was tempted to stop then and there, now I really am going to stop.
I have promised one more post on the subject, with five remaining ways you might want to dodge video. You’re welcome to like, comment, and/or follow.
I am humbled by the attention I receive and I shall make some effort to reciprocate interest if I am lucky enough to make a tiny ripple in this pond. We need to go back to the future
In December my brother and his wife and kids gave me an unusual gift, a puzzle celebrating The Beatles’ music on The White Album.
The Beatles
The puzzle is unusual mainly for the fact that the cover of The White Album is entirely the color white, which makes the puzzle an exercise in assembling puzzle pieces all the color white. It is as if the wrong end of a game of chess game came down on you.
I have ten reasons I’m suggesting that success like what The Beatles enjoyed is actually a weak link in terms of what it means for individual success and how it is misleading. Four are presented here.
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Suzy Hazelwood MONOPOLY FOR MILLENNIALS MAKES NPCs CRY The YouTube channel Geeks + Gamers fascinates me. When Jeremy announced that he had fallen prey to a phishing spoof six weeks ago, I wanted to describe the problem in this post. Jeremy was distracted at the moment and made a rookie error, surrendering control of Geeks + Gamers for seventeen minutes until he could get it back in order. A second oversight occurred, when Jeremy neglected to secure his Google AdSense funding for the channel after the spoof. When he realized that an entire month’s worth of monies designated for Geeks + Gamers was stolen, he finally revealed what happened: My YouTube Channel Was Hacked, Money Lost – Learn From My Mistakes I’d been paying attention to Geeks + Gamers because I feel it protests and dissects conventional scholar on media. The Geeks + Gamers team typically tackle major film projects like the DC universe on film, or more often the Disney Star Wars trilogy, as though the success, usually financial, of studio film output speaks to the conclusion that if a film is not fun, that if it doesn’t “work” in terms of being appealing to an audience, the film is not so much a radical success as it is a weak link.
It didn’t matter to Jeremy that The Last Jedi is another splendid blockbuster in terms of the money it made for Disney; it was to him a complete letdown and something that was a disservice to the favorite films that remind him of his childhood, the Star Wars films. Disney Has Concerns About Star Wars After The Last Jedi It is interesting that while ostensibly the financial success of a film doesn’t mean the film is magical for Jeremy, when it comes to his YouTube channels, Geeks + Gamers and others, it is certainly a problem when a month’s loot is stolen, by cyber-crime means. I wish Jeremy and the other members of Geeks + Gamers hadn’t had to go through that.Halloween with Geeks + Gamers was interesting for the fact that Jeremy argued that very bold criticism of what he does with Geeks + Gamers had been declared, criticism that included the idea that “code words” were being communicated to Geeks + Gamers subscribers that subscribers should launch literal hate and violence at targets which Geeks + Gamers usually defame, a video you can watch here: NPC Star Wars Writer Continues To Lie and Spread False Information Jeremy responded firmly that Geeks + Gamers is in no way is supportive of violent attitudes in any situation, and further that Geeks + Gamers made no attempt to “boycott” the recent Star Wars film Solo, a position I’d heard Jeremy take before in a discussion how Solo ws lacklustre in terms of box office returns.
All this keeps me quite rapt about what this YouTube channel is saying about the Star Wars films–Geeks+ Gamers plays a role in backlash concerning the Rian Johnson Star Wars film The Last Jedi.
For Geeks + Gamers to become a successful YouTube channel, it meant starting from basics and building a subscriber basis and becoming a success, with people watching the videos and comment and so on. If Geeks + Gamers were reviewing music, instead of films, and it was fifty years ago, perhaps they would have spoken about The White Album. Instead, they are speaking out, frequently, about The Last Jedi, in a way which makes it completely clear that they regard Episode VIII of Star Wars as rubbish.When I watched The Last Jedi when it arrived on Netflix, I enjoyed it and even felt moved. The mods of Geeks + Gamers had no such experience. Instead, they despise the film and regale in making that clear rather than taking a positive spin on something that’s an extension to something they loved in childhood.I would guess that Geeks + Gamers take such a broad interest in film criticism that they feel they can succeed with a successful YouTube channel. The idea of success they have is different from the idea of success that’s reflected in something like the fiftieth-anniversary of The White Album, or in the success of the blockbuster The Last Jedi.
The mods of Geeks + Gamers don’t seem to see The Last Jedi as a success at all because they despise it so much. Their YouTube channel extrapolates messages like that Star Wars has been mostly reduced to rubbish, or that the DC comics universe could similarly face a death grip in the cinema. I believe I had misunderstood Geeks + Gamers with my belief that Geeks + Gamers doesn’t desire or see any value in success at the level of the “blockbuster”; instead they expound on problems in entertainment which is compromised by identity politics in the entertainment that they criticize. Now that I understand some more about Jeremy’s point of view, it has me feeling a touch more informed about how identity politics show up in entertainment.
To them, The Last Jedi is a weak link. They wouldn’t aim for that kind of success in their own lives, for example. It is notable, having learned of their misfortune with a phishing spoof, that their success has been compromised by their own position as a good-sized YouTube channel.
Photographer: Rawpixel.com In addition, an example of underhandedly reacting to what’s been said on Geeks + Gamers is the shout-out they gave Mike Zeroh after film director Rian Johnson mean-spiritedly called out Zeroh who is devoted specifically to exploring what’s going on in Star Wars. The Mike Zeroh channel is Zeroh’s speculation about “behind the scenes” in Star Wars. In the initial days of shooting Episode IX of Star Wars, Johnson, reflecting on Twitter about what he was accomplishing with his Star Wars film, referred to YouTube’s Mike Zeroh as being a zero, although Johnson later apologized.
It is the same kind of weak link that exists when Geeks + Gamers tackles Star Wars because for all the enthusiasm Mike Zeroh puts into anticipating Star Wars, Mike Zeroh has personally explained that he feels The Last Jedi is a poor effort. Mike Zeroh Vs Rian Johnson… Thank you Rian Again!!!
I was amused by The White Album puzzle game I got from my brother and his family. I am also grateful for the opportunity to share these opportunities. I am glad if you have read this. You’re welcome to “like,” to “follow,” and/or to comment.
Yesterday the website ZDNet reported that researcher Sam Thomas speaking at the Bsides technical security conference in Manchester alerted attendees that WordPress has been rendered vulnerable to a bug for the entire duration of the last year. While the situation hasn’t been exploited by attackers, Thomas sounded a concern with WordPress that will require a patch. This is the first, I believe, that it has been reported, which is a fact, I suspect, that lends itself to the possibility that there could be an upset connected to this WordPress bug and the suggestion of vulnerability
In a different light on what’s happening in the blogosphere, I would like to say here that I think of myself as a reasonably well-informed individual. I have an interest in being active with a blog, with Facebook, and with Twitter.
What’s come up is that the seventeenth of August, 2018, is a celebratory day for nonprofit businesses. Despite the caveat at the start of the post, it can be said that if you’re unaware of the significance of August 17, 2018, it is that this is National Nonprofit Day.
I thought I would write something to mark the occasion. I personally am part of a business that has a not-for-profit status.
About nonprofits, National Nonprofit Day recognizes people who contribute to organizations who generally rely on charitable funding to keep going. There are a lot of needs that would be underserved if it weren’t for nonprofits. Funding for not-for-profits helps with needs that otherwise would go unmet, which is great because it helps deal with active problems.
I help care for a not-for-profit cemetery that is small but pretty, named Maple Lawn.
Here is a recent photo. Me, my dad Peter and his brother, my uncle, Dave, run the cemetery.
Formerly Louth United Church, St. Catharines
We don’t specifically receive funding for what we do. We got involved a few years ago when Peter opted to take responsibility for a cemetery whose trustees no longer wished to care for it. Since then we have opted to care for the grounds and to handle burials.
My dad worked for many years at the municipal cemetery in the city. We generally attend to the cemetery grounds once a week, on Wednesdays, and we do additional work as needed.
There’s a church on the cemetery grounds. The United Church of Canada congregation which filled it disbanded from this church of ours in 2006. It may sound like we’re carrying out a selfless endeavor, but there are a few advantages, in addition, that I can think of.
Running the cemetery doesn’t require a huge amount of input or direction. I am on hand to do some of the grounds keeping, and I also put it in time doing research and the like as the cemetery SMM. My dad does a lot of the work that requires expertise tied to the particulars of operating a cemetery.
While many not-for-profits would operate on a fulltime basis, we write our own hours and we mostly look in our own pockets for what we need to spend. I recently returned to the popular 4 Hour Work Week book by entrepreneur Timothy Ferriss for the third time now and you can view, if you like, my thoughts on it as the following blog post I wrote
We cover our costs and contribute to the cemetery if someone wants a grave here, or if a funeral needs to be conducted and we do this out of a sense of goodwill.
I remain partial to the notion that if I write a blog there will be a little additional interest in what I say.
I look at Twitter, https://twitter.com/findingenvirons …because of Twitter’s use as an information tool. I don’t limit my interests on Twitter to what we do at the cemetery. I explore a variety of interests outside what would otherwise be confined to a very limited niche.
Cemetery operation is too specialized, I think, to confine a Twitter account to that sole purpose.
Photographer: Rawpixel.com
I don’t feel that time is lost carrying out service at the cemetery. The time that’s devoted to being part of a small not-for-profit rather than working in a career in sales or the like is meaningful and, even better, enjoyable. I feel that limiting one’s energy to a volunteer position is time invested in oneself.
With the trade-off of what might be a better living secondary to time invested in the cemetery, I feel like I have something personal to me that I do, although I know a lifestyle like this is certainly not for everyone. I continue to look at the work from the standpoint that it is a lucky opportunity. There are drawbacks but I don’t want to emphasize them here in this post.
Furthermore, I appreciate that National Nonprofit Day celebrates nonprofits, people who work hard to make a difference. When Maple Lawn highlights for people what we’re doing, such as on our Facebook page for the cemetery, we often get positive responses for the care we take to keep the cemetery looking nice. Visitors to our Facebook page reward us that way.
Photographer: Wilfred Iven
People who work in not-for-profits may not always feel that benefactors give them the credit that they deserve, but it doesn’t mean not-for-profit employees don’t find satisfaction in what they do. I am sure that among not-for-profit personnel, many of them welcome August 17 and celebrate their work accordingly, and that’s what I’m writing about in this post. I usually represent what we’re doing at the cemetery in positive terms, which is how I try to frame it.
That is to say, I think of myself as an optimist rather than as a pessimist, despite the solemnity of the atmosphere of a cemetery. If you relate, you’re welcome to “like,” to “follow,” and/or to “comment.” In November, I will try to respond specifically to the occurrence of Giving Tuesday, the day that charities work especially hard to raise funds.
I realize there may not be such a sense of urgency that a cemetery like ours needs additional assistance, but you never know unless you ask if there is some unknown avenue to improve the standard of work in our hands. It is probably the right idea to look into getting additional help at the same time that similar organizations are delving into the same. Autumn is the time of year for it.
I hope to continue working at the cemetery while playing the additional role of nurturing Facebook and Twitter, writing here on WordPress, and otherwise keeping a hand in at our not-for-profit. Thank you for visiting my blog.
Please do not be alarmed by the idea that there is a bug in WordPress that could, in theory, render you in jeopardy if you maintain a blog with WordPress. Actually, it has been kept under wraps for an entire year.
There have been no specific problems made aware of that ZDNet reported and there is no indication that the bug will actually be exploited in the name of enemy action, however so easy a target exists. I know with this attention to the issue WordPress will respond with a patch.
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The Myth of the Independent Blogger and How I Learned to Love It 