keyboard

I’ve been trying to get more into photography recently.  I have no delusions that I am a “photographer” of any stripe, but like the rest of you, I find myself taking a lot of pictures these days, so I figure I might as well start paying more attention to the photograph…lighting, composition, et cetera).  The picture supra is of my keyboard.  It was given to me by Hayden McCabe in an effort to prevent me from having some kind of homicidal breakdown in the early part of this decade. And it has indeed been a life saver.  Anyway, I use that keyboard to make music.  I try to play at least 30 minutes day, but have some pretty grand aspirations about musical projects I’d like to do.  Really lofty shit: rock operas, concept albums.  I have books to write,  TV projects and movies to finish, riots to incite, revolutions to lead….but none of it is getting done.

I have been having (and presently have) significant anxiety about the amount of truly great entertainment that is suddenly available to all of us at any time, all the time.  Until fairly recently, cable companies were running the show.  They’ve been running the show for over 30 years.  Unfortunately for them, they have not really been forward thinking in any way on this.  And because they have been running the show for so long, they assumed they would simply always run the show.  ‘Twas always thus, and always thus shall be.  Because they thought that they were too big to ever fail, they made a lot of monstrous deals based solely on the assumption of permanence.  They’ve invested in technology which was myopic even in its hindsight.  That probably doesn’t make sense.  But that’s the reason that right now, in 2018, large cable companies are still rather pushing “bundle” deals that include a landline.  A LANDLINE!  Absolutely no one wants or needs another land line in 2018’s United States of America.  A sat-phone, sure, but a landline?  What the hell for?  Xfinity (back when it was Comcast) invested boatloads of money into the creation, acquisition, and improvement of fiber optic cables in an effort to do to the telephone industry what they had done to network TV:  relegate it to the past.  But the iPhone surprised everybody and instantly changed the entire playing field, and now exactly no one wants a goddamn landline, and they sure as hell aren’t going to pay for it.  They changed their name to Xfinity, but they’re stuck having to sell a product that they know their customers don’t want, i.e., landlines.  So the only way they can sell landlines to cell phone owners is to make the cable/internet/landline bundle cheaper than any cable/internet deal.  One of the features the company is presently touting is “Caller ID across your TV, tablet, and smartphone.” AND SMARTPHONE!  So your smartphone can tell you if you’re getting a call on your landline.  So you can presumably put down your smartphone and pick up the landline.  Morons.

Anyway, the whole point of this rant, if there is one, is that when the cable companies were running the show, the ubiquitous complaint was “400 channels and there’s never anything on.”  And we were paying $100/month for 400 channels of nothing.  Then the internet happened, and Netflix’s streaming happened, for a fraction of the cost of cable, giving us virtually total control of what we wanted to watch and when.  And that’s when everything went to hell.

Damn…I didn’t realize it was so late.  I’ve got to run.  Meet you back here soon, and I’ll finish this silly little rant then.

N.P.: “Safe and Sound” – Capital Cities

You may not leave a comment

Thank you for your interest, but as the headline says, you may not leave a comment. You can try and try, but nothing will come of it. The proper thing to do would be to use my contact form. What follows, well, that's just silliness.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>