When Pavement Sends You Running for Cover

Did you see Pavement at Reading Festival?

It is the oldest popular music festival in existence today. In the last five decades, Reading Festival has hosted big bands and acts, such as Nirvana in 1992, Paramore in 2014, and Metallica in 1997.

Reading ’92

If you want to listen to some nineteen-nineties-era rock that you could share with friends, you should have no problem finding Pavement’s discography. They are an unparalleled example of a fun, witty rock and roll band, that won accolades and a level of popularity that has helped their discography endure.

1. What happened?

It was on 23 August, during their two-week Europe tour with rock band Sonic Youth, that the band played at Reading, an approximately 40-minute set.

Pavement was a five-member band, although Stephen Malkmus, Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg, and Gary Young alone formed the band in 1989. Pavement recorded the music at Gary’s studio, Louder than you Think.

The song from those sessions includes Box Elder, seeming to be about leaving town in frustration, which enjoyed some interest. The Chicago record label Drag City handled it.

2. Why it was so awesome

On 23 August, ’91, the band was playing on the strengths of a 7″ single, Summer Babe (Winter Version), and three earlier EPs. The first full-length LP was a big deal, as Matador Records was working to help make Pavement a name for themselves. Meanwhile, Geffen Records was getting Sonic Youth major success, Sonic Youth having previously been shoegazers known for their song Death Valley ’69.

Both Sonic Youth and Pavement are influential music acts.

Death Valley ’69 (Sonic Youth, 1985) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1zPOcllS9Q

Refute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6C78dcy8-w

3. What the crowd thought

Despite obscurity in 1991, Pavement was becoming a success. Pavement’s most recent album now is Quarantine the Past, and the time seems right for both old songs and unseen material.

The unreleased songs from Pavement won’t be hard to find. Bandcamp is making it available in different formats in April. Besides the reissue of Spit on a Stranger from 1999, there is a set of all their music.

You don’t need to hear the complete collection if Pavement interests you. You could begin with Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, which is their best-known release.

4. What the band said about Reading

The members of Sonic Youth and Pavement became pretty good friends. When Malkmus turned his attention to Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, he sold a lot of units, but not as much of Pavement’s music after that found the same popularity.

Certainly, it would have been more difficult to make videos that would have been more popular with MTV audiences. Still, the two videos Pavement released with Wowee Zowee in 1995 were, in one instance, simply a bathtub filled with water, and, in the second one, the band appeared to be in a country-rock video, even though they were known for their straightforward rock music.

Perhaps Malkmus was being difficult. I like the Father to a Sister of Thought video, but Wowee Zowee obviously had little chance to break into the country music market, being an experimental rock album.

5. You can’t see them, but they were great!

You can get an idea of what they were like with the second CD from Slanted and Enchanted Luxe and Reduxe, where, for example, the discs include the song Frontwards from the Watery, Domestic EP, in both its studio recording and also played live, at Brixton Academy, in December of 1992.

An MTV video from 1995 of Pavement talking at Reading can be seen on YouTube. You can watch how they handled themselves when they are talking somewhat candidly.

Pavement is a band that you might find interesting if only for the sake of hearing songs that are both unique and entertaining. Like Range Life, from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, or In the Mouth a Desert, on Slanted and Enchanted. Artistically, Stephen Malkmus is competent.

“Thanks for coming to Reading Festival this year. As you probably already know, we’ve got a few of our most interesting acts playing live on the Main Stage: Arctic Monkeys, Rage Against The Machine and Megan Thee Stallion. We also have other great names, such as Bring Me The Horizon and Halsey.”

I’m joking, I’m not a Reading Festival emcee 😉 Those artists are apparently in for Reading this year, however.

16 Reasons the Attention Economy is the Bee’s Knees

“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.

Photo by Olu Eletu on StockSnap

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.

https://niagaraatlarge.com/2021/07/13/niagara-regional-police-investigating-fire-that-destroyed-historic-building-in-st-catharines/

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.

Photo by Vadim Sherbakov on StockSnap

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)

1. Nature is flourishing
2. We have enhancements in medication
3. Significant development is happening all the time
4. Expanded digitalization is happening just as fast
5. Distant, working, is a clear reality
6. Enhancements in instruction abound
7. Another gander, at the powerless and oppressed individuals from our general public, needn’t give us pause
8. Promising circumstances favour us
9. Co-operation and social support enable us
10. Co-activity and social help assist us
11. Picking who is imperative to us is a potential reality
12. Working on psychological wellness through helping other people is good for your wellbeing
13. Collaborations between regular citizens (not government nor police) is becoming a mainstay
14. Feeling of appreciation might be a new unique norm
15. Discovering delight has never been more possible
16. 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.

Photo by Amar Saleem on StockSnap

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.

https://www.maplelawncemetery.org/24701.html

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

In addition

Photo by Lenharth Systems on StockSnap

TiVo expands IP licence with Google https://advanced-television.com/2021/07/08/tivo-expands-ip-licence-with-google/

I’m not a guy asking you to spend on cryptocurrency 🙂 That can lose you enormous cash.

You’re welcome to like my post, and to follow, and comment.

I hope you don’t think I’m playing games. (It’s against policy.)

https://www.facebook.com/findingenvirons
https://twitter.com/findingenvirons
https://www.facebook.com/LouthUnited/

Deriving Inspiration from Marvel Avengers: 14 Common Misconceptions You Can Correct

Marvel Avengers Alliance Redux-Alpha 3 preview!

I’ve decided to return to my explanation of the Marvel Comics game Marvel Avengers Alliance, through the “lens” of the renowned treatise on military strategy, The Art of War.

Photographer:
Suzy Hazelwood

1. The Laying of Plans, Calculations and Estimations

In Marvel Avengers Alliance, you have to “earn” gold, and this is achieved by spending money (such as $5 on ten “gold”). Gold can be exchanged for command points. A combination of silver, which is available for free in the game, and command points together, train your superheroes at the ready–so that they go up a level.

2. Waging War – The Challenge

The game Avengers Alliance consists of a number of challenges between its “bosses,” who are wicked opponents to the Avengers, and yourself and your heroes. Come each time you defeat a “mini-boss” or a “boss” you have won a game mission, and the next mission awaits. That’s the gist of the game, which is good fun.

3. Attack by Stratagem or Planning Offensives

In the game, you have a ready store of gear, supplies and more so that with “research”, carried out inside the game, your superheroes at the ready can advance to more dangerous fights than they have previously taken on. You can also recruit heroes and send them into battle (when they are not “busy” getting you silver) at the outset of each fight, so that you have enough superheroes at the ready.

4. Tactical Dispositions or Positioning

Tactical determinations aren’t a major concern in Marvel Avengers Alliance, but there are opponents against whom you must battle, that protect their own by getting in the way of your attacks.

5. Energy & Direction

There is an energy component to Marvel Avengers Alliance which restricts you by the number of fights you can lose, at which point you need to wait until your energy comes back. Or, if you have energy in reserve to use, which is an extra in the game, you can bring your energy back instantly.

6. Weak Points and Strong / Illusion versus Reality

The game is entirely about illusion, and the superheroes at the ready are the Avengers, who you know from comics, and film. The Avengers have many illusory powers which they wield. Likewise, the villains are monstrous!

7. Maneuvering and Dealing with Direct Conflict

Typically, the fights of the game are three against three, or occasionally fewer. The maneuvering in battle consists of directing your team’s attacks so that the enemies are reduced to zero and fade away.

8. Variation in Tactics aka The Innumerable Changes

Your team has their equipment and superpowers so you can choose your tactics while in the heat of battle. That’s a major part of the game, and if that kind of diversion interests you, Avengers is good fun.

9. The Army on the March / Moving the Force

To collect silver, which goes with training and research, you can send heroes to various parts of the world as it is understood in the game, where your heroes spend time “policing,” which plays into the game to help with your advancement.

10. Terrain or Situational Positioning

The game doesn’t include a terrain component, which is good because the app would be all the more challenging. Each fight resembles good or evil at the centre of the fight.

11. The Nine Situations / Terrains

Author Elish Bul-Godley discusses Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu in: Why Wall Street Loves “The Art of War” – A 13 Point Plan To Mastering Business Strategy, and if you have a thirst for combat, perhaps Sun Tzu’s strategy will appeal to your better judgement.  Bul-Godley quotes Sun Tzu saying: “Strike at its head, and you will be attacked by its tail; strike at its tail, and you will be attacked by its head; strike at its middle, and you will be attacked by head and tail both.”  Indeed, often your fights will be against a trio of evildoers, and you have to decide how best to attack your enemies.

12. The Attack by Fire

Fire-dealing weaponry is part of the game, and an arsenal is available both to you (who is the “Agent” in the game), and to the superheroes who have fire attacks at their disposal.

13. The Use of Spies / Intelligence

Fortunately, Intelligence, by which you gain information, factors into the game as much as the story does, keeping the fights coming, as a mission is always ready for your heroes.

14. There is no #14

Sun Tzu must have won the war at 13, for The Art of War stops there.

Sky opening on the horizon

If you have an interest in a game like Marvel Avengers Alliance, feel free to blog about it and I shall enjoy reading you!