Comments for From Pine View Farm

Comment on Tumblr Is a Very Strange Internet Place by Frank

Frank — Mon, 20 May 2013 03:22:07 +0000

I would never consider trying it out. It is in my "I don't care" category.

As regards "social networking," I have concluded that it's neither "social" nor "networking." It's an attempt to lock persons in, not to let them free.

I don't think it's generational. I think it's intellectual.

You've either got an intellect or you don't.

No matter. Yahoo will find a way to render it irrelevant. It's what they do.

Comment on “Best Health Care in the World” by George Smith

George Smith — Mon, 20 May 2013 00:08:12 +0000

Like I wrote, my parents — who were full of bullshit about “America” — had the best healthcare money could buy. Only occasionally do I wish they were still alive so I could mock them over it. Corporate America bred the capacity for empathy out of the place, replacing it with a bootlicker’s paradise.

Comment on Tumblr Is a Very Strange Internet Place by George Smith

George Smith — Sun, 19 May 2013 20:59:11 +0000

I tried it out to try and get a feel for what it could do. It has a lot of drawbacks. First is the logrolling circle-jerk nature of social networking in which you -must- ‘follow’ other people to even hope to start a readership. With the naturally attendant phenomenon, like Twitter, where people ‘follow’ you and quickly ‘unfollow’ because they’re trying to massage numbers. What also happens then is the blog windowpane fills up with worthless junk, all picture spam, and the only way to get a handle is to unfollow or ‘ignore’ individuals. That’s like the Facebook “news feed.” Second, all the Tumblr software does is recommend other picture blogs, or individual pix. Life on-line, to me — anyway, is not just a daily swarm of most reblogged pictures and sucking up. There are entire demographics of people who are not well-suited to social networking, in fact, are ill-suited for it. I am one of them. I don’t make friends easily and am certainly not much into logrolling. And Tumblr, as a blogging platform or a website anchor just wasn’t my kind of thing. The interesting part of it is that so many others feel so strongly that it is a great thing. I suppose it is generational. I’m old.

Comment on Tumblr Is a Very Strange Internet Place by Frank

Frank — Sun, 19 May 2013 20:32:31 +0000

I think that's a fairly good generalization. Like all generalizations, though, there are the exceptions, such as PoliticalProf and Contradict Me, but PoliticalProf is considering another platform. The fellow who runs ContradictMe, though, started with a photo site.

(Afterthought: I would hesitate to characterize a generation based on the users of a particular internet mouth-shooting-off thingee.)

I find the "walled garden" aspect of Tumblr quite offensive. If I have to log in to comment on something, unless I know it's a site that has suffered attacks, I simply will not comment, though I may point and laugh from a distance. I make exceptions for a few sites, such as the Booman Tribune and Brendan Calling, because I know the proprietors from my Philly DL days and know they have good reasons wanting authentication.

I am also leery of third-party "comment management" systems. They smell too much like data-miners for me.

Comment on Tumblr Is a Very Strange Internet Place by George Smith

George Smith — Sun, 19 May 2013 19:49:51 +0000

Karp has focused on building the company’s user base for its minimalist blogging platform while leaving for later the question of earning money, a pattern typical for young Internet companies, …
I looked at the capability and minimalist doesn’t quite do it justice. It’s good for quickly posting pictures and swipping, or “reblogging” them from others, nothing else. It’s “discussions” consist of “notes” which are simply slug lines that appear after a post if someone else has “liked” or “reblogged” your post. If it’s social networking it’s in the most atomized sense, as plankton socially network among themselves. No one knows anyone else on Tumblr, period. They just either “follow,” “like” or “reblog.” It is an utterly silent, almost speechless environment of millions, all doing the same thing. In a way, it is a perfect milieu for our time, a venue where no one has to look anyone else in the eye or say a word to them, even, just hit a “like” or “reblog” button. Hundreds of thousands don’t even put titles on their blogs which one quickly sees by all the “untitled” slugs at the top of the so-called “blog,” the place where it usually says “put yer damn name here” in the default installation. Perhaps the genius of it is that its worthless owner — who was making 13 million a year on it and now will be wealthier than Lichtenstein — figured out there were hundreds of millions of people, most of them young, with almost no desire to talk to other human beings or interact in any other way than posting pictures through a single push-button app, and only those pictures also reblogged the most by everyone else as mute as them. Internet plankton, krill, vast schools of digital shrimp, it’s the only thing I can come up with to describe it. Since I’m a word and language person I find anything that’s totally wordless and devoid of language in the extreme completely inhuman. That someone recognized, or lucked into, a program that attracts millions of such people is proof of something, I’m not sure what, but not anything good. What’s most depressing about it is the suspicion that it’s the future, the final endpoint decades from now, where everything is just the pushing of an app button a smartphone and your entire existence is defined or eliminated by the count of rebloggings and followers..

Comment on “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!” by Frank

Frank — Sat, 18 May 2013 18:40:53 +0000

I think that's part of it.

The other part I'd suggest is that movies about the current war have not done particularly well at the box office; movies are ultimately escapes, and they are too close to home. World War II movies did poorly during WWII (and well afterwards), Viet Nam movies did poorly during Viet Nam (and better, but not great, afterwards), Korea movies did poorly during Korea, and so on.

Hollywood is ultimately all about the box office, which means almost never taking chances.

Comment on Who’s Stupid(er) Now? by George Smith

George Smith — Sat, 18 May 2013 14:47:16 +0000

Yep, this drips stupid. “I just think there’s too much hysteria right now with guns,” he said.

Comment on “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!” by George Smith

George Smith — Sat, 18 May 2013 04:51:46 +0000

I’ve a philosophical question that has to do with art and entertainment, one I’ve been mulling over for a blog entry. Why hasn’t Hollywood dealt with a dystopian USW future drama that has something to do with our present reality?
It does zombies, natural disasters, cosmic events. Walking Dead, which I like, based on a comic book, is a huge hit. But it has no relevance. Revolution, which was about electromagnetic pulse doom, which was a semi hit, but had nothing to do with anything normal. Last Resort, which was canceled mid-season, which I liked, was about a political coup that resulted in a nuke strike on Pakistan. Because it was canceled before a full run it never made any real sense.
But no one has touched a second civil war, or the collapse of a country riven by extreme internal division. If I’m not missing something. We can have cable reality shows out the wazoo about preppers and their scenarios of civilization’s collapse, and they’re all extreme right wingers, but nothing at all where the practical ramifications of national paralysis and decay as a result of increased radicalization and open conflict are explored in drama.
Why? Well, I’ll answer my own question. Hollywood is afraid, as many are, bullied into silence. They’re afraid of anything that would show a specific tribe of Americans as bad.
It really isn’t that hard to come up with an escalating plot on a cool civil war (and that’s what we have — a cool or Cold Civil War) and love and life among the decline and ruins. Yet they won’t grasp it.

Comment on “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!” by Frank

Frank — Sat, 18 May 2013 04:00:29 +0000

They have drunk their own Kool-Aid. To be blunt, they are no longer a political party, they are a racist mob. All they are missing is the sheets and hoods.

The question is binary:

What will they destroy first: the country or themselves?

I am not sanguine.

Comment on “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!” by George Smith

George Smith — Fri, 17 May 2013 23:02:06 +0000

Eventually they’ll have nowhere to go but to try and impeach the president. And that will be the battle of Gettysburg in Civil War 2, and they’ll lose again. But there will be a terrible cost. The GOP seems to really not understand they’re playing with fire the more they are seen as a national lynching party for the first legitimately elected black president.