Quote of the Week...from Benjamin Franklin

Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.        ...Benjamin Franklin

Of course, ol' Ben didn't live in today's bustling culture of digitalization, where technology that was supposed to liberate us is actually shackling us into more and more commitments to fit within a shrinking available time period.  Tack onto that the fact that, while in Franklin's time the concept of a "day" was closely tied into the cycles of the sun with the daytime's lightness and the nighttime's darkness, the day, at least in the cyberworld, is "on" for 24 hours, nonstop...including streaming entertainment and video games.  I wonder whether this is a contributing factor to the tendency for formerly late-night businesses operating in the real world to shut down much earlier...of course, Covid got the ball rolling in that direction with a subsequent shortage of available staffing that hasn't since completely abated.  It can be a struggle to try and keep one's calendar clear amid the many calls for commitment to different things, while at the same time that this digital bombardment is happening never before have people felt so disconnected, unrecognized and irrelevant.  Maybe you're an exception to this trend...good for you. But I don't see this going in a good direction as the concepts of "news" and "reality" have become so digitally twisted that our democracy and freedoms may be in dire peril during the next few years while autocratic demagogues run rampant and unchecked.  But back to Benjamin Franklin: it's coming down to having to be a bit of a jerk around others to assert myself and live my life in today's allotted span that I have set out for myself.  Otherwise, today will turn into tomorrow and then the next day and then the next week, month, year, decade...until I am no longer around to look back with regret on the wasted past... 

Quote of the Week...from Steve Jobs

Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.            ---Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs (1955-2011) co-founded Apple and led the company as a pioneer in the new digital information age.  I never did go for the Apple line of products...probably my loss. Since today is Jobs' birthday, I decided to check out some of his quotes...he's got a lot of good ones, but I settled on the one above.  Whether you're a leader or just some ordinary "Bill" like me getting through life, each day carries with it a multitude of choices, decisions that sometimes have a trivial nature, but often can change the direction of your life in a profound way.  I have to be centered on my own thinking process and have enough confidence to make those decisions, at times acknowledging that I might be in error but never going against my strongest convictions just to fit in with others who convey a more aggressive manner to express their opinions.  I'm a big fan of the Desiderata line "Avoid loud and aggressive people, they are vexatious to the spirit".   That doesn't mean I feel the need to pick an argument with those I disagree with, but I've long grown past the time when I gave a hoot about what the background of other people thought of me...at least beyond a certain point.  Each of us has to chart our own course according to the values we individually hold dear.  But that doesn't not mean forsaking community and close relationships: it does mean establishing in an honest way who we really are to those we care for and love the most...which is actually a way to demonstrate deep respect for them.  Of course, if you're a complete lowlife jerk, it might behoove you to forget what Jobs said and listen for a change to those other opinions...

How About Digitally Switching James Bond Actors in Old Films?

Over the years I've been a big viewing fan of the James Bond film series, which at this point with last year's No Time to Die totals some 26 movies (including 1983's Never Say Never Again and excluding the '67 farce Casino Royale).  There have been six different actors playing Bond: Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig...each with his own distinctive appearance, personality, and mannerisms.  I've often wondered how a certain movie might look had a different actor appeared in it...I can't see anyone but Connery starring in Goldfinger and Thunderball.  But I have a sneaking suspicion that for most if not all of the rest of the flicks, the other actors would fit the bill appropriately although the movie's tone might change a bit.  Now, with the computer technology available to change people's appearance and insert them into places they've not been, wouldn't it be cool to go down a menu of James Bond movies and watch, say The Spy Who Loved Me and pick Daniel Craig as the Bond for it, or see how Roger Moore looks in Die Another Day?  The main movie I'm interested in is 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which originally starred George Lazenby...his portrayal of Bond, although probably truer to James Bond creator and author Ian Fleming in his books, was a bit different than the larger-than-life near-supermen of the others...let's see how Pierce Brosnan would have done in his shoes.  The idea of digitally substituting actors in old movies sounds extremely fun and worth pursuing, although copyrights, licensing, contracts and other legal entanglements will probably keep it from fruition, whether the technology to perform this feat is as yet possible or not.  On the other hand, our reality is already being severely tested in the media with the manipulation of images...brave new world!

Rereading George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire Series at High Speed

Anticipating, perhaps unrealistically, that George R.R. Martin's long-awaited next volume in his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, titled The Winds of Winter, will come out some time next year as he has expressed, I decided to reread the series' first five rather lengthy books.  In doing this I'm checking each of them out from my library on audiobook and listening to them at high speed...sometimes as fast as 2.7 times normal speed.  I can do this because I already read through the same material before...what I'm essentially doing is bringing what I already knew back up to date in my memory.  I've already gone through A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords, and have just begun the fourth book, A Feast for Crows.  Had this series come out, say...40 years ago, I would have been unable to play the audiobooks on high speed since they all would have been in analog form and speeding them up would have made them sound too high-pitched.  I never did watch the Game of Thrones television series on HBO, which went far beyond Martin's progress in writing his books and concluded everything...apparently much to the chagrin of both viewers who disliked the outcome and those, like myself, who were holding out for the books.  I don't know whether the author will conform to the TV series version or digress from it but I do enjoy his narrative and characters a lot...maybe I will read that 2018 prequel novel of his titled Fire & Blood if his Winds of Winter publication is further postponed...it's already nine years since the publication of Book #5, titled A Dance with Dragons, and Martin needs to finally get on with it.  Maybe when I've finished rereading these first five books I'll get down to sharing my reactions...with a notice at the top of that article warning about some serious plot spoilers contained therein...

A Great Information Chasm Cuts Right Through My Life

At age 64 I belong to the historically unique group of people who have one foot of their lives squarely within the digital era and one foot squarely outside it...right now there are a lot of us, but like the almost extinct group of folks who experienced World War II, there will be a time when we're all gone and everyone alive will have the span of their chronological lives covered by computer technology and the Internet.  How does my life in this respect differ from my younger friends and the generations preceding me?  Let me explain about this great information chasm...

A few days ago I subscribed to an online service displaying old newspapers from years gone by, as they appeared in print.  Among these papers was the local Ft. Lauderdale rag, and it covered the years I went to school there and a few thereafter.  Just browsing through them I would occasionally see a picture or article with a familiar name from school...one who made repeat appearances was Jim, whom I knew very well for 11 years from the 2nd through 12th grades as we were in the same year in school and grew up living close to each other.  I already knew he had tragically passed away from complications relating to cancer in 1998 and that he had developed a penchant and talent for poetry in his adult life.  On the tribute website for him was mention of a book containing some of his poems.  I went to Amazon and Google and there is not a trace of its title and very little if anything about this remarkable man.  Yet he only left this Earth 22 years ago, but it might as well have been 220 since his work was largely done before mass digitalization revolutionized communications.  Contrast that with this blog of mine, a daily journal of general interests begun in 2007: you can easily find it on a Google search, but only because it's on this side of the great digital divide.  And that's what I'm discovering with my perusals of the old newspapers: these people I went to school with and closely knew...some in friendship and regrettably some in enmity...seemed to have suddenly just fallen off the planet.  The advent of Facebook did perform a service in that several "resurfaced" from the anonymity that assimilation into the masses and the march of the years had placed them under, and I respectfully recognize that probably many people wish to remain there.  Ol' Jimbo, I'm confident, would have loved the opportunities that social media gives us today to reconnect...but the information chasm has now left his significant voice largely and sadly on the other side...

People in my generation, like me, can develop an ongoing digital history of ourselves but it only naturally extends to the edges of the advent of digitalization...to go beyond further back in time requires special efforts such as digitalization of old pictures and, in my case, taking advantage of old newspapers online and blogging while recounting old memories.  Life is now openly being reported and recorded on a daily basis...and it all remains in the great digital cloud...while life before this era, as it retreats further and further into the past, becomes exponentially more of a mystery shrouded in uncertainty with its evidence stored away in boxes in dusty rooms.  I wonder whether at some point, probably later this century, people will look back at the transformation of the 20th into the 21st century as a kind of cliff beyond which information drastically drops off.  Maybe today is the time to try to salvage some of it while some of us who were there can remember it.  I like the successful efforts to digitalize old music recorded before CDs, but with literature we're way, way behind on reaching the same level of progress.  I wonder if anyone knows where I can get a copy of Arrival: One or Only?...

Market and Sell All Short Stories for Kindle as Individual Items

With the advent of the digital revolution, it is clear that the music industry has vastly outpaced that of the printed media.  When the compact disc rose to prominence in the 1980s, there was no comparable technology for books.  Eventually, Kindle and its imitators emerged, but the overwhelming majority of books that have been published are not available in a digitalized format...yet we've had the ability for some time now to purchase just about any individual song for download...even from old "out-of-print" albums...for $1.29.  Try that with out-of-print short stories on Kindle!

Over the years, I amassed quite a collection of old science fiction short stories.  For example, I have the entire 25-volume Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories, spanning the years from 1939 through 1963 and collected and published in the 1970s and 80s, and edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Isaac Asimov...these books are all out-of-print now.  To me and many others, this was the "golden age" in science fiction short story writing, and these books contain many of my all-time favorite works in this genre.  Yet try to find those favorites on Amazon...even if I can, in all probability they are inseparably attached inside larger, expensive collections.  Why can't I go down a list of an author's works and purchase and download on my Kindle the specific ones I want, in the same way I would order a musical act's individual songs from their listed discographies?  After all, short stories are copyrighted one-by-one, not as inextricable parts of a whole...so I don't see how the question of royalties would be a problem.  Amazon itself proclaimed a new policy of selling short stories as individual purchases in 2013, but here we are four years later and there are still precious few to select from.  I don't understand why it is so easy to sell digital music this way, but not digital stories.  After all, the technology is in place to accomplish this and it can only be a win-win situation for companies like Amazon, the authors and copyright owners, and of course devoted readers like me...