Remember a dream you had. #bloganuary

I have had a recurring dream in which I live in an apartment beneath a vampire’s castle. The dream appears similar to the remake of the film Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nach, directed by Werner Herzog in 1979, and to Norman Bates’ house in Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1960. It is always frightening returning to the house, and I never have an opportunity to move out of that home.

Werner Herzog

I referred to the dream moods website. “To see a house in your dream represents your own soul and self,” dream moods says. You have specific areas of your home that reflect different aspects of your personality.

When you dream of an old, rundown house, it represents your old beliefs, attitudes, and how you used to feel. Your current situation may be triggering old attitudes and feelings. The old house may also represent your need to update your thinking style. When you see messy or dilapidated houses in your dreams, something in your own life might be in chaos. There may be some emotional or psychological clutter affecting you. For you to recover control, you need to relinquish these sentiments.

Having a dream of a haunted house signifies unfinished business in your personal life, such as unresolved grief or unresolved emotions.

This fantasy, which has come to me recurringly for a couple of days all at once, and at various times, is generally somewhat delightful and somewhat unnerving. I live in apprehension about the house, but then I can’t abstain from returning, as the place of the beast is the place where I reside.

My sister Kaite, years and years ago, encouraged me to look into the meaning of my dreams with the gift of a dream dictionary book. Although I’ve long since lost the book, I enjoyed probing into what some dreams I was having could mean.

When I am writing, my mother has also advised me to reflect on my dreams.

WordPress Discover: Dish

To help out bloggers, Ben Huberman at WordPress has reopened the Discover challenges.  Each day, for April 2020, a Discover challenge is going up first thing in the morning.  Today’s challenge is the subject “dish.”

Funny, I think of “dishing it,” giving dirt.

What Huberman means is food.  In high school, I took Tuesday noon hours at my grandparents’ house, that is, the house of my mother’s parents.  Each Tuesday I went for a grilled cheese sandwich, a glass of chocolate milk, and a candy bar.

My grandmother and I would sit at her kitchen table, with the company of the dog, a black Schnauzer named Ebony, and my grandfather emerging from the rec room in the basement to grab his lunch and take it back down, to where he could watch TV.  A charmed life.

Photographer:
Suzy Hazelwood

It’s a powerful memory because a meal like that, though simple, got me out of the high school mindset, and into a family role.  Other days of the week, I’d sit in the cafeteria to eat, and then make my way into the school library, perhaps, or to one of the classrooms.

My grandmother enjoyed seeing me.  She felt I was brilliant.  My grandparents were getting on in years, so evenings for them meant watching television themselves.

I think we sometimes talked about the kind of thing we were watching.  I didn’t mind.  I liked the dog.

It was energetic and friendly and enjoyed the scraps.  Maybe more time inside the high school would have been better, and maybe less time, too.  

The time went fast, as time often seems to.  I personally think I was terrible, nurturing the wrong interests and similarly foolish pursuits.

If I could relive those years, I’d do things differently.  Hindsight is 20/20.

I visited my grandmother every week, for years to come.  Even in her senior years, she was a lively old lady about who people cared.

I am glad I didn’t do worse in life, denigrating the family line.  She bid me not to worry.

When asked to address a “dish,” my grandma’s grilled cheese plate is what I remember.  I was glad for it every week.

A Difficult St. Patrick’s Day

It’s the end of March and two weeks ago was St. Patrick’s Day for 2020. The weather in Southern Ontario was reasonable in light of expectations. I found myself spending less time on Facebook. My sister telephoned me a couple of times.

A cousin of my mother, Cathie, along other lovely people, with a hobby of genealogy, ending with a nice account of the Irish my mother’s side of the family has. It looks like this St. Patrick’s Day, 2020, I’ll be a little less Irish.  It looks grim.

Photographer:
Tiago Almeida

change

the act or instance of making or becoming different.

I wish a lot of things were different, but I never would have chalked up the possibility of experiencing our pandemic catastrophe in my own life.  I read of environmental warnings, like that there could be, say, eight years until the damage to the planet caused by humans becomes irreversible, or that global warming will cause sea levels to rise, however active God is on the picture at large. I don’t know how human beings will fare.

To consider attacks between warring groups the world over, hellbent on decreasing each other to iotas, to very small pieces, I think also police and military unfairly treat peaceable citizens, because the police loathe the skin colour or addiction, behaviour that doesn’t toe the line for the safety of the public.  I think about these now and again, yet I hadn’t thought of what really descended three months ago. It is hard to contextualize that.

I always do my best to enjoy St. Patrick’s Day, as so many do with aplomb and style.  I welcome the end of winter. We are all called on to be, not so much Godfearing, as instead socially distant from one another.

Good on us all the same, that we can find solidarity in separating from one another, in a fashion that, like the lot of the unlucky addict, is no fault of our own.

Photographer:
Peter Hershey

We will have to come up with new measures to survive, and we have to do it at a time when I am sure many of us would be happier celebrating St. Patty’s in the usual fashion, wearing the colour green, and staying out late.  We’re told to stay out of bars and restaurants and nightclubs and still young people want to go to those kinds of haunts. I want to be young myself, but not to the extent I want to risk sacrificing growing old.

I wanted to think about a superb St. Patrick’s Day, and although I recall it every year, I don’t know I could say that any specific March festivity was better than some other.  A number of them were beautiful and left me feeling blessed. I am grateful to The Lord.

1998 occurs to me, becoming 21 years of age.  However, against how this spring is going, I don’t think the excitement of taking a visit back in time is going to especially cause me to feel better. I like to enjoy speaking a kind word at certain times, because a little kindness sprinkled in the mix, while not reversing the uncertainty that we’re facing, does help temper the darkness.

I would like to wish you a happy St. Patrick’s Day, dreadful or not.

St. Patrick’s Day isn’t to be overlooked, obviously.  Go with the luck of the Irish! Let’s have a safe spring!

You’re of course welcome to comment and to follow.  All the best to you, and to your loved ones.

Find us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/LouthUnited

We’re also on Twitter https://twitter.com/findingenvirons

I enjoy social media.

10 Reasons Radical Success is the Weakest Link Part I

Updated November 22, 2018

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.

Beatles’ White Album: Five myths the 50th anniversary deluxe edition puts to the test

 

Photographer:
Little Visuals

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.

Photographer:
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.

Twitter Refreshing How the Platform Looks and Making It Easier

I struggled to find satisfaction in a post I wrote June 15, 2017, although by now I’m better at the task, I feel.

The WordPress Daily Prompt for that day was the word “Total,” and what for me was the “total” mind-blowing news was that Twitter was undertaking a major step on route to what a lot of Twitter users hoped would mean success for the social media platform. That sounds dramatic, but Twitter did become visibly different. As German social media and blogging expert Susanna Gebauer reported again, on February 28, 2018, it could have meant the end of Twitter, or instead improved chances of success as a social media platform. (Last updated: 2019/11/26) In short, I wonder will it turn out like Myspace, or Yahoo!, or will it keep its status as an enjoyable user service.

I am obviously on Twitter and I enjoy it. Look here:

https://twitter.com/findingenvirons

What’s more, I am sharing links both to an article which explains the change which happened, and also to Susanna’s post which explains where Twitter was coming from with the change, on the twenty-third of March, to restrict Twitter users with several accounts from automating the same tweet more than once.

I myself slowed down on how I was tweeting by dramatically slowing down how often I would twee.  It would be a gigantic bummer if Twitter failed, and I continue to hope Twitter stays alive and well.

Photographer:
Eneida Nieves

If you’re not on Twitter, maybe you should consider joining. It can be a lot of fun. I am curating this post to improve its accuracy, to provide Susanna Gebauer’s February 28 blog post, and because if you do find this note relevant, you’re welcome to, “like,” “follow,” and/or “comment” this blog post.

Thank you for noticing, and all the best to you in your personal life, and in business.

Source: Twitter’s Fight Against Spam, Bots and Bulk Tweeting – And Why You Need To Know About It

#RIPTwitter

Just joking

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