My mother once picked up a book called From a Certain Point of View, as a Christmas gift for me. It’s a collection of short stories set in the Star Wars universe. The book’s short stories tell the plot of Star Wars from the point of view of minor characters. For example, in the first story in the book, the captain of the escape brigade gets the point of view, which is neither the droids C-3P0’s or R2-D2’s, nor Princess Leia’s. It is the same plot as the first scene of the film.
The book is celebrating Star Wars‘ fortieth anniversary, so I am taking the understanding that the book is a 2017 volume. 2017 was the year of Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi.
The Last Jedi took a different point of view that was a departure from styles of the previous Star Wars films. It recreated Luke Skywalker as a figure afflicted with existential angst. The book only contains scenes from the 1977 Star Wars film with a yowl from Rogue One to begin the book.
I don’t know why I haven’t read it sooner. I think the interest in Star Wars for me returned with the Disney+ series The Book of Boba Fett. Thinking about the desert planet of Tatooine through the eyes of Boba Fett got me feeling good again about Star Wars. Boba Fett’s the character whom Lord Vader used to freeze and transport Han Solo back to Tatooine, to the palace of Jabba the Hutt in the second and third movies of the original trilogy.
Star Wars is an unusual fantasy. With the film, picturing each second from these brief tales ought to be a breeze.
The last 3 posts I published had more energy to them, I suppose, than what I had previously been trying. I did that by taking a post I’d been editing and breaking it into three parts. The anticipation for readers that there was more to come helped with the posts, I think.
Also, I used original photos for the posts, which are more interesting than stock photos, although I also enjoy selecting those, or photos saved from Google Images, if I want, in specific cases, to illustrate a film, for example. Here I am going to show fifteen original photos with copy. I am also including a story I’ve written. If you find the post agreeable, you’re welcome to like it, to comment, or to follow.
My mother taking my arm at a family wedding. It was the wedding of a sibling
I think my mother underestimates the satisfaction that I gain from my lifestyle. I think in this photo she is feeling self-conscious because she knows she is being photographed and we are trying to look nice. If she looks like regrets have occurred to her, and she didn’t say anything about it, I don’t know if that is what she was experiencing, if it is me that is causing remorse.
I remember looking through the shelves of the children’s section of the branch of the library where I most frequently got my books, as a kid. That library isn’t there anymore. As a child, I sometimes thought it would be great to grow up and be the kind of person that might write books and get them sent into libraries everywhere.
As it turned out, there is a lot of competition to be that kind of thing. What I positively didn’t anticipate was the popularity of Internet in the nineteen nineties going forward into the future.
With the invention of social media in the early 2000s, and in particular the gold rush on ebooks in the 2010s on Twitter, there is no reason I couldn’t have turned my hand to trying that kind of thing. Hindsight, as it’s said, is 20/20.
Today I renewed a five dollar donation to Wikipedia. While five dollars doesn’t sound like a lot, if enoug readers do that kind of thing it can make a world of difference. I felt good making the donation.
My father peering at the floor space that we intend to complete. Concerns about the strength of the floor of the church, my dad Peter mostly single-handedly rolled back the interior, you might put it, and found himself challenged by the handiwork might best suit the building’s needs. I’m meaning the church that for years maintained a congregation of the devout.
When we took on the operation at Maple Lawn Cemetery, my fathers seemed convinced that the building would fall in upon itself if we didn’t attempt repairs. The church had disbanded in the year 2006. While appearing nice from the outside, the building houses junk now, although it provides us with shelter when we are there in cold weather.
When I was in college, I learned the definition of the word amortization, costs incurred when necessities of a business go to seed. This is certainly an instance of amortization.
Completing a calculation in the field of Louth United Church
The riding mower in the photo is the first we one we had, which lasted several years. Although my dad is in the background, what I think he is doing, looking at the photo, is looking at his phone. The sign behind him, next to the tree is the sign that once indicated that you are at Louth United Church.
That’s the name of our Facebook page, too, Louth United Church and Maple Lawn Cemetery. You can see the vineyard across the way. https://www.facebook.com/LouthUnited/
My dad does things like measuring the lengths of cemetery plots so that families that own adjacent plots of land in the cemetery get their fair measure among the graves that have already been laid. I don’t know what occurred to him that I took this photo, but from the distance I am away from him, I think he must be checking his phone. We aren’t heavy into the phone arena at Maple Lawn. I do a lot of my social media and things of that nature on a desktop, decreasing functionality but also working with a fair handicap.
Many of the people I interact with on the Internet are elderly and sometimes lack some of the same insight I have into social media in 2021. It is funny, as, in the 2000s, I wasn’t adequately trained to get the work I wanted, when even people who landed office seats thanks to their good looks had, perhaps, less understanding of getting the job done than I have in my own right. Life isn’t fair in that regard.
I think of that when I consider my mother’s consternation for my lifestyle. While I believe she would prefer that I work a straight job, I don’t know how to convince her that what I do is right for me.
From the inside, a look at a window as night comes to take the light
Once Dad and I handled an afternoon funeral that ran so long, that afterward, it was turning to night by the time we wrapped things up. It was spooky. Both Dad and I felt it.
Inside the church, where I’d never yet been after nightfall, and have not been since, I though to take a photo of one of the windows in the twilight.
This is a photo I edited, two photos actually, one a photo of the church and cemetery in the snow, in wintertime, and one a picture of the sign, inserted into the picture as a whole. I thought it produced a neat visual effect.
A rowboat abandoned in the creek back behind the cemetery
My father pointed this out to me one day years ago. Someone dragged a rowboat, I presume, into the creek at the bottom of the hill behind the cemetery. I take it it was probably intended as landscape art, ingenius, I suppose, if laborious.
A book of photographs illustrating cemeteries
This was a Christmas gift from my mother several years ago. I also have a calendar beneath it, in the photo, and an old photo of a girlfriend’s bedroom, which I held onto from when that girlfriend gave it to me. You can see she was a creative soul.
Righting a headstone
More ingenuity, my father here has devised a contraption to get an old headstone upright. He has a mind for invention.
The street where I live
I took this photo to illustrate where I live, along with a caption I inserted that is meant to be a little cheeky and a little funny. I like how this photo turned out.
The interior of Louth United Church
Unfortunately, the interior of Louth United Church looks a little like this. Our repairs have never been completed. Occasionally I press my father for an idea of what will happen in the future, but he has never told me.
The strange globes of light in the air I can’t identify for certain, but I am not above the speculation that they could be informing the supernatural.
At home in my apartment, I took this selfie, which is blurry but not too bad, I don’t think. I have a look of intensity on my face which I have seen on myself in other photos of me.
A selfie with a Batman cap
I am channelling my inner cartoonist, you might say. This is a selfie which I coloured blue. I have a dopey smile on my face, and I am holding my face with my hand.
I think my idea is that it is a “night” selfie. That I am wearing the Batman insignia on my cap gave me the idea that I was in the act of being a creature of the night, like a vampire.
The Louth United Church sign after a car drove it.
We never found out who was responsible. When I made it known on Facebook, a few voices of outrage sounded at once. It was a lesson for me to watch the tone of what I project in a Facebook post.
We’ve never done the repair to the sign, so in a sense the damage became permanent.
My dad checking the lay-out of the cemetery
Dad here is looking for a specific grave, I think. You can see the back of the church in the background of the photo. That’s frost on the grass, if you didn’t know it is cold.
The colour tones of this photo have a pretty aesthetic to them, I think.
Digging a grave for a casket
If ever we need to dig a grave for a casket, my father rents a backho and handles the dig himself. I was on hand this time, too, and decided to take a photo of the action, although with the glow of the sunlight on him, and the distance from the camera, the image of my dad is out of focus.
Having put together here a sample of my photography, I thought I would go the extra mile and give you a draft of what my fiction can be like. It is only part of the story but I do have a complete draft that I am a little unwilling to post for free in the event that I could actually make something of the story. It is one of a few stories that I have written.
Having heard warnings but shaken them off, the main character refuses to heed the warnings and signs when they learn of the dark lord that steadily grows in power that seeks to consume all in their path.
“One for the books,” Jake Sullivan thought, “made the first bus for a change.” The bus rolled toward him where he was waiting at the stop half a block up from where he lived, Jake feeling glad that he had made the effort to get downstairs and to align him in the path of showing up at the office. He worked for Cryptodel, it was even kind of a choice job, in the sense that he did a lot of what he wanted and that there was a video game arcade around the corner among the magazine retailer and the laundromat. Jake was in his twenties and had held the job as a designer for two years, since finishing college and beginning his career in computers. Jake worked a lot, but that arcade grabbed his attention time and time again. It got purely mesmerizing for Jake when he started to win at whatever particular game he was playing at the moment when he was in there. Jake seldom put much distance between himself and computers, but he did like to forget about the hustle and frequently put himself in recreational visits to the arcade. The escape kept him happy.
The game Jake liked to play at the moment was Vanish into thin air, and it scrolled horizontally and Jake could see he was among rocks and vines beneath an expansive sky. He was jumping and running. Blinking occasionally, as he coolly manipulated the game environment with the joystick, Jake suddenly saw in front of him an unusual-looking tree, gnarled and knotted, and as weird as anything else he was interacting with inside the game.
How do I make that vanish? Jake wondered as he came nearer. The tree was odd because of its incongruency with the other plant growth in the game, Jake could tell from his experience in the simulated game environment. There hadn’t been other trees looking like this one, and it indicated to him that this tree was likely special, being one of a kind and therefore significant. Jake expected to find a treasure chest beneath it. Suddenly the image of a hand appeared between him and the tree. Jake was amused.
The hand clenched, forming a fist, and then pointed, and Jake was startled. Instead of pointing at Jake’s avatar inside the game, the hand from the tree was pointing outward from the game to exactly where Jake was standing on the arcade floor, where he was comfortable and relaxed. The techie who had drawn the hand had done it in the sweeping curves of vector graphics, to be a shape in the game that was clearly representing an organic hand. How do I get inside the treasure chest? Jake wondered.
“Jump now,” Jake’s instincts told him, and his avatar rose into the air. The hand of the enemy opened then, palm up, and snatched Jake from out of the air. Jake thumped the game trying to get his alter-ego free, and it retreated, the vector-rendered 3D environment scrolling as Jake cheered mentally, his character free from its opponent’s grasp.
Jake blinked as his game icon steadied itself on the ground, only partially under his control, he felt. Bonus round? thought Jake. Light flashed about the video screen before Jake and it became visible what was opposing the character on the screen. It was tall walls of stone and a single source of light in the air, a flame in the air, guiding forward to where the bony humanoid had retreated to and the focus of Jake’s concentration. Jake began to proceed to the cave floor. Was there a “boss” near indicating progress had been made in the level? Friend or foe? Jake wondered.
Let’s make it foe, Jake reflected briefly, readying his high-power fireballs, levelled-up and sorcerous weaponry Jake had at his disposal. He looked at how he would explore the cave, when suddenly an instinct occurred to him that he hadn’t previously known was coming. What was that? Briefly adjusting his consciousness as his gaze scanned momentarily the arcade, he saw the sunlight behind her in the door peaked like a shaded window, the game in front of him asking him to fight briefly lost to him. He reevaluated what he was doing. “I was ahead that round,” Jake lamented out loud.
A cell phone ringing. A girl’s voice speaking cutting through the hubbub in the arcade.
Jake’s attention returned to the illumination of the game he favoured once more, asking him to play a reset round. He didn’t quite feel like jumping back into it. The girl he’d seen was on the phone.
“Spaceship,” Jake’s unconscious said to him. Was that sight real? Wait, he thought.
She was at the controls of a game twelve feet away, her attention completely intent, by all standards, on the game she wanted to play. She knew videogame action. There was something urgent about her intentions, something that clued to Jake that there was something different about this individual, something saying to him internally to pay attention.
The energy in the arcade was usually palpable, like a group of mostly aimless young men mulling about looking at games, sometimes with girlfriends among them, sometimes not. Jake seldom took much of an interest in what the others were doing, anyway, and he always had to leave before too long to get back to Cryptodel. This one was a little different. It was obvious, anyway, that despite whoever she was on the phone with, she was by herself, in a game arcade. The other factor Jake was aware of was how naturally controlling the game came to her. He was impressed, taking an almost childish interest in her.
Jake’s attention was diverted and he thought of leaving the arcade. An unusually pretty girl or not, he had work to do. With only a shade of reluctance, he stepped away from the game and strode outside, where the sunlight illuminated his vision the way only afternoon sunlight does, when the day has begun to go and, work notwithstanding, ultimately evening will come and the day will resolve as it always days.
It was fifteen yards to the office building of Cryptodel, a two-storey building completely occupied by the computer vendor. Inside Jake got on the lift and rose to the second floor, got out and walked down the hallway to the door to his office. Inside it was quiet as always and still, unlike the bustle that he’d mostly ignored in the street outside. He sat down at his desk, his computer blinking to life as he commanded it to boot. Information signals silently bouncing back and forth in the computer, it became as alive as a tool like that does and he opened a browser, waiting to resume his work. A notification window opened in the bottom right corner of the monitor for the computer and his attention briefly turned to that, as it was an odd message that reminded him, a touch, of the game he’d been enjoying playing.
“If you can get to your loved ones, it is highly advisable to take measures as though under a state of emergency.” A photograph of the heavens above was invisible with the odd message, where among the blue and white a NASA-looking vessel appeared to be kind of hanging in orbit, an irregularly oblong design with pyramid-shaped wings extended at either side of it.
“There’s… a spaceship? In the sky?” Jake looked more astutely at the computer notification, talking out loud to himself.
He opened his computer telephone software and selected Leo as the recipient, his friend. Six rings and the call was diverted to message-recording. “Stay safe, bro,” Jake said. “I’m in the office but I’ll call you back.”
Another quick call out and he got his wonderful girlfriend, Rosalie. “Hello?” she said breathlessly.
Rosalie was beautiful. Whenever he was near her, he felt inspired in a way different than working for Cryptodel inspired him. Rosalie was brunette, buxom and tasteful. She had more than her share of tech insight, which Jake loved about her, and her brown eyes when she looked at him spoke to him on the level of being soulful. He really was in love with her. They got along great with each other and when Rosalie spoke to him, he felt a rush that was better than just about anything else he had going on for him. He enjoyed his work, it was true, and he put in a lot of hours at it, but the time he had to be with her when the two of them were free and together, was some of the best times of his life. He felt like she was a very good part of his life.
“You know what’s happening?” Like Leo’s, it was voicemail. Jake wondered where’d she got to.
“This can’t be for real,” Jake said.
Outside in the street running past the Cryptodel office, the day was oddly quiet. Even the arcade, where often a pack of kids would be hanging out given the chance to play some choice videogames, was mostly quiet. Jake wasn’t aware of the locale any longer, but the girl coming out this minute might have continued to interest him, dedication to Rosalie or not. She was staring at her phone. Somebody had linked her into the news broadcast.
Another invasion… she was idly aware. If she’d cared more, she probably wouldn’t be alone. Ezezzud, the newcomer to Earth said his planet’s name was. Sounded grim. She needed something and she didn’t know what. Bicycling away, she felt oddly mixed up, as though something had intersected with her and she hadn’t bothered to notice. It wasn’t this business with the interplanetary visitor. Something in her instincts was talking to her. What was it saying?
Components, she decided. That’s what she had coming to her, fingers crossed. Might as well give it a go, she was thinking. You never knew what to expect.
Suddenly a male voice filled the air. “Sullivan,” said the voice. Was it from the computer?
“I am riding a Variable Atmospheric Light Bomber, with effectiveness so complex that experimentation is required to fulfill its capabilities. Your planet, Earth, will be at the mercy of a rapid assault of high-intensity if you refuse to assemble the hardware I need. I assure you this will be of relatively minimal trouble to you if you agree to cooperate with my wishes. The alternative is death for you and for every species of organism on this planet.”
Jake was emotionally and intellectually stunned by the threat he was hearing, and in Jake’s life he rarely gave up without a fight. “What is this all about?” he managed to ask.
“It is in your hands, Sullivan,” intoned the voice. It continued. “To bring to me what I need. You are in a rather unique position, among your kind, to have access to a very specific facility, that will give me back comprehensive control over my ship–and return to me the power to return home. If you want your planet to continue to exist, you must bring me the computer function you know as Hound Rippersnapper,” the voice finished, not without an impact.
In this case, the impact was the sound of rapid car-honking from down in the street, not an unusual sound. Hound Rippersnapper, Jake reflected. That’s April’s AR design. Cryptodel had at least a few advances in progress when it came to consumer computing. April was another programmer working at Cryptodel. As with any female in a male-dominated profession, April had to work hard to compete with the boys, and she did. She always went the extra mile at all times to make sure her work was as good as anything that her co-workers were doing. Hound Rippersnapper was her concept for an augmented-reality framework whose main facility was to be on top of an organization scheme for office environments which permitted layers of data to be explored and accessed through an AR infrastructure making working with data much more pliable than the functional apps that were more typical of what the Cryptodel bunch were working with. What would an alien creature want with something as relatively mundane as that? It must believe Hound Rippersnapper would give it restored power to the bomber spacecraft.
“What will you do with that?” Jake asked.
“I will use it to forward-drive, Jake,” the voice said. “To leave your skies and return to my own galaxy. Otherwise, there will be…” A pause permitted Jake’s attention to shift. “…Consequences.”
“No more than a half-hour, Neal, I mean it.” Something was occurring to Jake that made him think of more down-to-earth business than the conversation he was having with this… –alien monster? Was this for real?
“Just band me for a half-hour of access to her lab and I’ll be out of here before you know it.”
“There is no need for threats,” Jake said out loud, suddenly subdued. “I can get you Hound Rippersnapper. It’s still in the test stages, you understand. A brilliant design. Let me just get April on the phone and maybe I can explain to her what I need, putting Hound Rippersnapper into your hands. If that’s what you want…” Jake finished up by saying.
“With that strategy, I anticipate resistance,” said Degub.
“What? Resistance? No, April will understand. I know her.”
“You must do things a different way.”
“A different way? I can’t just stroll into April’s workstation, and put Hound Rippersnapper in my pocket and walk out. I need her sign-off.”
“There will be no sign-off,” said Degub. “You must act as catpurse in this matter. You must steal Hound Rippersnapper for me and bring it here for me to recoordinate.”
“Recoordinate? Okay, I’ll just get a key pass from our security office and go in quietly and get it. I can do that.” The offices at Cryptodel were protected by remote security officers who could look in to see when and where doors were unlocked and by who.
“Good,” Degub intoned. “Don’t let me down, Sullivan. The fate of your planet is on your shoulders.”
“I thought that’s what that was,” Jake quipped. “Let me get somebody from our security team. Don’t worry about a thing. And please, try not to detonate any bombs in our solar system. You’ll have an army of government if I know a thing or two about bureaucracy. It just won’t be pretty.”
“Get me Hound Rippersnapper,” Degub said.
Under the circumstances–Degub claiming he would spare Planet Earth in exchange for Hound Rippersnapper–Jake was starting to feel worked up. It wasn’t that different from playing Bomber in the arcade, he told himself. Degub had been persuasive, though. It wasn’t just the threat of complete planetary destruction that had Jake worried, it was the fact that Jake personally was chosen to take care of this.
In another neighbourhood in the city, in Phat City Café, a certain arcadehead sat and ate her soup. There was something different than what she normally felt playing at the arcade. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it…
On the phone with Cryptodel’s security agency, Jake got a person in no time. That’s what they paid them for. It was Neal, who Jake didn’t know personally but understood the protocols established to keep Cryptodel’s offices secure.
“Neal, how are you?” Jake asked. “Keeping tabs?”
“Well, yes, Jake. Everything all right?”
“Yes and no, Neal, yes and no. It’s April, Neal. She asked me to grab something from her station.”
“Let me just call there and see if anyone answers.”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure she’s there. She just asked me if I would come by and get what she needs.”
“Let’s see, Jake, I’ll just give her a ring.” Jake could tell Neal wasn’t aware of the situation.
“To tell you the truth, Neal, I was kind of hoping to surprise her. I didn’t want to come back here but something occurred to me that I can put with her pet project that might just sell it to upper management and make it a go.”
“Really?” Neal crowed. “Upper management. Now, what do you know?”
Neal must like her, Jake thought. “It sure would help her out, Neal, and you know she could use a home team advantage. Budgeting, you know.”
“Well, I know, Jake, but I”m not really sure… I mean, I haven’t had any advance warning that April was even making a pitch. It’s not like she’s said anything.”
“Well, she is and she has, Neal, to me. It isn’t nice being turned down when your heart’s in it, eh, Neal? And you know, if I could work some magic, it could make a real impact on her future here at Cryptodel.”
“I always did like that April,” Neal said. “Sure would be nice if she was planning on sticking around.”
“She is real nice, I know, Neal. Just think about it. I mean, I just need the key pass to her lab and if I could get in there… Well, then, who knows what the future might hold? I could drop a friendly remark.”
“Well, tell you what, Jake, why don’t I just put a time-sensitive access code on your key pass that will band into her security lock. You can get in and out of there as long as the access code is active. How much you think you’ll be up there?”
“No more than a half-hour, Neal, I mean it. Just band me for a half-hour of access to her station and I’ll be out of here again before you know it.”
“I always did like that April,” said Neal. “Sure, I can do this for you, Jake, just give me your membership ID for your keycard and I’ll put on an access code override.”
“I appreciate it,” Jake said, “I appreciate it more than you know.”
Diagnostics for Jake’s keycard complete, it was now authorized for an hour of access to April’s lab, having the understanding, between Jake and Neal, that Jake was doing April a favour for the company.
Keycard ready, Jake made his way to the lift which would take him up to where the engineering staff at Cryptodel had their workstations. Jake was counting on access to Hound Rippersnapper.
The software was at the other end of the floor, in April’s station, he reflected. Making his way to her door, Jake swiped his card for access and the door to her station opened.
In Cryptodel, the laboratories, which number two, were secured with excellent keycard technology. Both “operators” of the keycard system had specific accesses to different parts of the building, and as April was the other senior technician at Cryptodel she had private access to her station, which meant that Jake was not supposed to be there at all. He tried not to think that Planet Earth could be on the verge of major trouble, but that seemed to be the case and if he wanted to avert the threat of destruction, he needed to get in April’s lab and get Hound Rippersnapper.
He tried a knock in case April was there. The resulting silence told him she was not. “Spacecraft troubles,” Jake said to himself, not wondering if Degub was listening. “I’m going in there.”
Inside April’s work quarters, the room was neat and clean, around the perimeter of which were a number of computer components and, apart from those, sink, door to the bathroom, and desk. Hound Rippersnapper was the name of the design April had come up with the end result in mind of providing a comprehensive VR organizational structure for office managers to better structure their employees. Jake knew April was ambitious, and that she was working so hard on this project to climb the corporate ladder at Cryptodel. Jake didn’t envy the hard work she did for the company, but frequently had lunch with her at Phat City and found her charming. She was also well-liked at Cryptodel.
Her Hound Rippersnapper was the VR facsimile of a spreadsheet or a database, depending on what application you required. Jake knew from past conversations with April that the beta version was finished. And he knew from what Degub had instructed him that he needed to take Hound Rippersnapper, as it were, to the stars.
The heroine mistakenly burns the evidence, believing it to be the forgery.
Looking around the lab, Jake could see which was the master of the systems working there and he sat down on the chair at her desk, where April sat to do her most focused of work. “I got to make this quick,” Jake said. He logged in. An outpouring of letters and numbers ran across the monitor that was central to April’s station. Jake himself was really quite a good programmer, and he knew a little about circumventing digital security, in addition to busting ass at the arcade where’d been playing earlier.
If his presence in April’s computer was detected, Jake could get into trouble. It was a possibility Jake would get caught, but there was a chance he wouldn’t. He was hoping for the latter eventuality.
Jake was thinking solely about what he had to do. He manipulated April’s computer files with relative ease, understanding intuitively what to do, as he knew April was as good a programmer as he was, although he didn’t like to admit it. He needed to transfer Hound Rippersnapper to a flashdrive, so that he could provide it to the alien for its spacecraft, and optimistically, spare the Earth from Degub’s threat of destruction. Hound Rippersnapper began to write to the flash drive in the node, and Jake tried to relax as he grappled mentally with the severity of the objective he was undertaking.
Ontario is on target to meet its objective of getting 65 percent of grown-ups before the month’s over, and there is good faith it very well outperform.
They expect that May 24, around 2,490 drug stores provincewide will offer Pfizer and Moderna. There ought to in the long run be around 280,000 traveling through the network every week, authorities said.
Here on WordPress, occasionally I find specific bloggers to be interesting for me. One guy like that is Jim Adams, who has a blog and who has planned blog prompts.
Jim has an interest in music and knowledge to share.
I recall the previous winter when my father brought up to me that the sharing I was doing online didn’t appear to be excessively important, as should have been obvious. I help out my father with his business.
While I enjoy Facebook and Twitter, the day he offered that criticism about my content, I was a little miffed. I know that my dad clowns, but I tried to look past that, to see if I could think of a better approach. I tried chancing to utilize the focus right now that Jim has been providing.
I’ve been blogging since MySpace, kind of a wow. On WordPress, I have done some posting with a bit of humour to it, and in the months since my dad said that to me about how I seem on social, I eventually decided I still wasn’t too far off the mark.
There aren’t too many “rules” for running a social presence.
For November 29, 2020, Jim’s prompts include: “bird.” The late Leonard Cohen made the song Bird on the Wire.
By the mid-1960s, Cohen started to form rock and pop melodies. He had already written an expansive amount of writing, both poetry, and novels.
He studied at McGill in Montreal and made a name for himself through the sixties. Cohen kind of burned out about that stuff in the early nineteen seventies, but music came to him his whole career. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame enlisted Cohen in 2008, and Leonard Cohen got a Grammy Award in 2010.
Bird on the Wire is on the record Songs from a Room, released April 1969, and is like a poem set to the sound of Cohen’s guitar. The title Songs from a Room is very simple, understating the mastery of the music.
Songs from a Room LP
Being able to enjoy something from the years before I was born is lucky, as hearing Bird on the Wire is an experience that has power to it, sentimental. Strange song title, eh? A listener feels like the hardships of life have been met by others just the same, whether more talented, or more fortunate.
Not to sound presumptuous, but Bird on the Wire is great that way. Leonard Cohen got into music as a popular singer when he was losing interest in writing. Wikipedia says that Bird on the Wire is a country song, a detail which surprises me, and reading that, I thought additionally that the song just has a simplicity that sets it apart from other country songs.
The country genre of music isn’t something I understand, and maybe neither is the language of love, but when I was in college, I got to study, one semester, Canadian music. Country music in the Canadian Prairies is a favourite choice of many resident Canadians.
I can infer that Bird on the Wire could be a favourite of many who can remember 1969. It was years before I was born.
There is something about cowboy music, that we’ve adopted in Canada, that reflects how life in the Prairies shaped up. The first herders calling themselves “cowboys” got to the Canadian prairies in the 1870s, riding up from the US territories of Idaho and Montana.
The romantic image of the cowboy emerged around this American subculture. British Columbia “buckaroos” likewise sooner or later adopted the cowboy appearance.
I doubt that Cohen identified with being a cowboy; he was a novelist, poet and musician. He identifies, I think, with the archetype of a cowboy’s passion. I think of the scene in the Hollywood movie City Slickers, where Billy Crystal’s Mitch Robbins character plays the harmonica at the campfire.
Curly, Jack Palance’s character, interrupts the music.
Mitch Robbins: [Playing harmonica]
Curly: Put that away.
Mitch Robbins: [Stops, then resumes playing harmonica]
Curly: I said, put that away!
Mitch Robbins: Hey you know, the first time I tried to talk to you, you embarrassed me. So I teased you a little bit which maybe I shouldn’t have done, so I’m sorry.
And now you’re sitting over there playing with your knife, trying to frighten me – which you’re doing a good job. But if you’re gonna kill me, get on with it; if not, shut the hell up – I’m on vacation.
City Slickers
Wikipedia explains that before writing Bird on the Wire, Cohen carefully structured the song, before committing it to tape. To tell the truth, before I read Wikipedia’s description, I hadn’t thought that the song would be identified as a country song.
Cohen’s music is usually in the genres of folk, and soft rock. Romantic country music doesn’t meld with the other interests in music I have thought of. If Bird on the Wire is a country song, it breaks, I think, with the tradition of country music that country music fans enjoy.
It’s unique that way. I wonder if a country song should be simple, but distinctive. The answer isn’t straightforward.
Sometimes answers to questions like that turn up unexpectedly, even if it isn’t initially clear where to begin, to get an answer to the question. A post like this one, doing the research and writing the content, helps me understand better something that already interests me, the music. Also, maybe somebody else interested in this blog challenge thought to say something about this specific song.
I first heard Bird on the Wire when I was in high school, the twelfth grade or so, on a simply dubbed audio cassette.
Leonard Cohen passed on November 7, 2016 (aged 82).
I saw him once in concert. It was terrific.
Here are the lyrics to the song, followed by the song itself, in a video.
The Little Mermaid is a site which entertains bloggers who bring together their thoughts on a theme suggested by the moderator. These tea parties, the setting for discussion, began several months ago. The Little Mermaid is on a new site now, found at https://www.thelittlemermaid.site/tag/tea-party For the tea party, March’s theme is fashion.
Personally, I am fashion-challenged, by which I mean I haven’t let fashion out of my bag. I don’t have a memorable sense of fashion.
Aiming to define fashion reminds me, for example, of an Internet dating profile, where a user is invited to assess his sense of fashion in a field drawn from a list of narrow but conventional approaches.
I wish I’d made the decision to dress better when I was younger. If you don’t invest in yourself, how can you expect anyone else to? In a media-hungry capitalist structure, it is important to be “cool” by wearing a wardrobe that both help you feel good about being seen in the street and identifies your lifestyle to people who speak with you.
I believe it’s important, and I would have liked to be more fashionable.
A rule for wear is that clothes must mostly fit. This sounds obvious, but it isn’t necessarily easy to determine that clothes which cultivate a brand for you are far superior to dressing at random.
I am less interested in making an outfit look good than I am, I feel, non-discerning about social mores. That’s how I haven’t let it out of my bag.
I do experience mild anxiety about looking shabby when I ought to be feeling fine, but something in my psychology prevents me from being able to coordinate a wardrobe. That’s kind of funny, eh?
I hope you are not disappointed. You are welcome to click “like,” to follow my blog, and/or to leave a comment.
The Little Mermaid’s tea parties provide inspiration and heighten my interest in others for who her tea parties are likewise attractive.
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
I think of The Beatles being a radical success in music history, given the enormity of their popularity, even decades later.However, how does that view of The Beatles relate to contemporary ideas about success, and how it is won?
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 the individual to pursue preconceived notions of success and how it is misleading. The first four were presented in a previous blog post. The remaining six are presented here.
Streaming services
Netflix is the leader of the pack, I believe, for video streaming. They devote an enormous budget to original content and their selection of existing content is good. That said, Disney is in the streaming video service market. Netflix in my region is compatible with my Tivo, as are other video streaming services. The selection of videos on Netflix is good. I want to step out of the chain of logic to ask if that implies that Tubi, a free video streaming service also compatible with my Tivo is a weak link. Netflix is a completely enjoyable experience and Tubi is likewise an extra addition to the Tivo I use. It isn’t too hard to say which could be better assessed to be a radical success, in the future. That said, while Netflix has been successful remaining ahead of the curve, Tubi is probably under far less pressure. Does Tubi’s relative weak link status mean that it isn’t a success? It is free to use.
Photographer: Rawpixel.com
Going forward with the theory that radical success means enormous difficulty, consider the contender that could grab much of Netflix’ market share, Disney. Disney is unlikely to be going anywhere, given its weight as an entertainment brand, being known for its films, television, toys and theme parks.
Which of the two, Netflix or Disney, will be more of the radical success–that a good streaming service can be? Or will they both amount to great success? Disney has built in family appeal, given its products are for both adults and kids alike. Netflix has been building that kind of appeal from scratch, but persistently. Will either Netflix or Disney be a weak link? It seems important to me that entertainment be good, when it is accessed, or experienced.
Netflix has a reputation for spending extravagant amounts of money on shows and films. Disney already has an enormous built-in capacity for success in the future, in addition to plans for its video streaming service.
3. I started this post by saying there is a fiftieth-anniversary release of The White Album coming 11/9. From what I understand about music streaming services, Spotify has a great conversion rate bringing customers from free use of Spotify onto the premium version. I would ask, if taken to task, whether Spotify will be a “weak link.”
From everything I can say, music with Spotify is magnificent. It seems to be an awesome service.
It is understood that The Beatles essentially recorded The White Album live to 8-track tape, and for everything they’d done in the name of their music, they were in fact recording music that would be a bit of a farewell to their fans. If less scrutiny was being given to the music emerging on The White Album, would The Beatles have lasted longer? And recorded songs for longer than they did? I think it is possible, for when something is intended to be “perfect,” it is often a departure the way a pinnacle climbed must then be descended.
US Politics
4. If you are following my argument, you might guess that the weak link I’m referring to is the former President of the United States, Donald Trump. An example of someone about who there is much to decry that could be a weak link is the President.
As he is someone who was a TV star, I think it is worth mentioning here the radical success that he is known for enjoying and how at the same time the President has mounting problems that he is both a radical success, being wealthy and commanding power, but also a “weak link” in that he could bring down the whole show if he is not effective. President Trump has a knack for appearing with ferocious emphasis again and again in the news, and yet he faces so much criticism and real-life repercussions and consequences that I think he makes a great example of a “weak link” who is at the same time a radical success.
The President brings to mind so many components and elements of radical success gone wrong that it is becoming clearer all the time that the President of the United States is an extremely divisive man. Donald Trump Says China Remix
Photographer: Diego Jimenez
Motivated to Entrepreneurship
5. The ninth reason I want to assert that a weak link can be very much undermining is the idea that if you begin to succeed as an entrepreneur you can find yourself under more pressure than you ever anticipated facing. Making money is many people’s idea of success, but you usually have to put in years of work to make your dreams come true. And in this scenario, ironically, you yourself could be the weakest link if you don’t meet obstacles well.
Unless you keep improving, day in and day out, you could end up being the weak link in your organization simply owing to the fact that your luck could change. If you have found a strategy that makes you King Midas, turning everything you touch to gold, if all of a sudden your luck changes, you may now be suddenly be faced by weakness. The Secret to Self-Motivation | Gary Vaynerchuk’s GREATEST Motivational Speech Ever!
Aerial view of computer laptop on wooden table
You need to keep improving and being good. Everything that took you somewhere is behind you; you have to continue to make great decisions. I suspect you’ll see for yourself if you falter.
6. The final reason I want to take back to Geeks + Gamers. If you have someone, like Jeremy, who is comfortable discussing games, films, and sports, an articulate individual, who sees success coming from YouTube, from a Facebook group, from Twitch I suppose, who challenges who is at the top, as with The Last Jedi, I think it is a philosophical note to say that if you are at that pinnacle, there is any number of reasons your descent will be hastened by those who come after you. You have to reach that pinnacle in excellent form; and you have to leave it in such a way that it endures, that there could be a fiftieth-anniversary, that there could be another billion-dollar blockbuster, that there could be a second term. This is all vital, from a philosophical standpoint, what must be done if radical success, like the kind that spreads all around the globe, is to be achieved and then preserved. CLICKBAIT : A YOUTUBE STORY
If you have read this, please feel free to “like,” “follow,” and/or comment.
The Myth of the Independent Blogger and How I Learned to Love It 