theblackninja 2.0

Blogging is such an interesting concept.  I remember when one of my good friends refused to get a cell phone because it was too, "trendy".  Now everyone has one.  It's hard to survive without one.  You can't find a pay phone anywhere.

fringed sagebrush

 The other day, I was looking around for a pay phone and all I could find were places where there used to be a phone.  Well, maybe blogging is like that. Maybe there will come a time when there are no more regular media outlets and the entire media structure is a network of bloggers who linkback each other all day long.

I was reading a science fiction book the other day and one of the stories was about a future like that where a couple of people orchestrated large groups of bloggers so that they would develop patterns together and give their viewers a sense of consistency.  If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.  Large groups of people would tend to think alike, especially if they worked together.

forsythia cuttings

 So, the story was about a particular reporter, or blogger, or whatever you want to call these future media personnel, who wanted to report about things that nobody cared about.  It was all about his 'morals'.  So, one day, a famous person who was from the same small asian country as him decided to give him a boost and grant him an interview.  In the blogging world, this would be like suddenly moving from working on a small environmental blog, to interviewing jessica simpson or something.  I don't know.  It was a sad story because the person just gave up on the whole thing instead of coming up with a winning solution.

moringa cups

 It's one thing when a story is intriguing or something, but it is just way too frustrating when a story ends with some lame, expected kind of an ending where you're just thinking, "Damn, how tacky was that?".  Well, that's how I felt about that stupid story, someone came up with a great idea and then didn't have the strawberries to finish it with the same kind of inspiration that it was started with.

moringa in bloom

In the story, the reporter just gave up or something, because they were frustrated that the system wouldn't let them act however they wanted, like they're some kind of ultimate human that can do whatever they feel like and we should all just tell them hooray and thank you for not sitting in a corner somewhere and waiting to die.  I'm thinking a better ending would have involved him finding a way to make his idea culpable.

For instance, he wanted to write about butterflies that were becoming extinct.  Maybe he could have made a site all about butterflies and how cool they are and generate a lot of interest in butterflies, and then, later, after the people were looking at the butterflies, he could have made a little post, like, "oh, by the way, butterflies are awesome, and there are some butterflies that are going extinct, and this is what you can do about it."

paulownia seedlings

 It does no good to complain about something.  People don't really care about things that they can't do anything about.  Why should anyone care about some butterflies that are being killed if they can't do anything about it.  What are they supposed to do, feel bad about something that really doesn't have anything to do with them?  How stupid would that be?

Can you imagine a tv show about all the things that you should feel bad about?  I guess it would be called the evening news in some places.  I was watching the news the other day and apparently there was some lady that was found dead in her apartment and she had been dead a long time, and nobody cared.  Now I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure things like that happen all the time.  I can't figure out why they would have that on the news and not have any news about the kids who built an electric car that can travel at the equivalent of 300 miles per gallon, or the people that built an electric car that can travel 600 miles on one charge.

moringa crop

Now that's news.  I would watch the news all the time if it had cool stuff like that on it.  I don't watch the news at all now days.  I used to watch the evening news, and then one night I noticed that as the night got later and later, the sounds from the news got more and more intense.  Once I noticed that, it was all over.  I couldn't watch any of the news shows without thinking about how stressful it was just to learn about what was, "going on" in the world.  It's absolutely silly.

If you ask me, people  who produce stuff like that should be forced to sit and watch at least the show which they produce.  Everyone involved, from the janitor on down to the people who make the graphics and sort through the advertisements.  They should have to sit and watch it every night.  Once they can tolerate their own work, night after night, then the show would probably be worth watching.

moringa oleifera

 As it stands, I'm pretty sure that most of them don't even watch the show once.  They produce the cool 3D logos and the crazy theme songs and then they go watch leave it to beaver, or barney or something.

What kind of a crazy world do we live in where people work all day on something and their goal isn't to make something that they would like to watch, but something that they can inflict on someone else.  You know how you can tell a successful drug dealer from a bad dealer?  A good dealer never takes their own product.  I guess the analogy of dope dealer is only applicable to people who produce media if they are producing something that is bad.  Is it good to be entertained?

fringed sagebrush

I would say that it is a positive thing to be entertained.  When you are entertained, your creative brain is free to enjoy itself, whereas a brain that is deadlocked in the battle for ultimate supremacy can only become more like darth vader.  Darth vader was a cool dude in my book, but he wasn't very good at innovating or producing creative solutions to difficult problems.  He could track down the rebels in any corner of the galaxy, but he probably couldn't figure out how to get his truck started with a ball point pen and a bottle of soda like McGyver could back in the day.

santolina

Now that was a guy who could take care of business.  If there was a problem, he would figure out how to solve it.  He could disarm a nuclear reactor with a chocolate bar and some rock salt.