Now I’ve completely changed my mind. It’s great TV.

All the flaws are still there but, I can’t shake the image of Dany, who we thought would be a kind and wise Queen, cruelly and unnecessarily firebombing King’s Landing, either on whim or as a strategic decision.

It doesn’t matter why she did it, because that’s not what the episode was about. It was about putting yourself in the position of an average citizen of King’s Landing, a baker or blacksmith, watching your home and children burn because an orphan from across the sea decided she deserved to be queen and has a dragon to back her up.

Think that’s just fantasy? Ask someone who lived in Hiroshima or Syria or the Ukraine or Dresden or a Muslim who lives in China.

The central theme of Game of Thrones has always been that you don’t know who is going to win the game, but you surely know who loses, and those are the regular people unfortunate enough to be caught on the board when the gameplay starts.

I volunteer for the local Democratic club. Part of my responsibility for them has been to stream meetings live over Facebook, on our Facebook page. I use my iPhone XS for that. I want to stream it in landscape mode, of course, holding the phone horizontally.

My problem is I have not been able to do that. Facebook will only stream the video in portrait mode. It looks terrible.

I’ve done some googling on this subject, and found you have to start Facebook with the phone in landscape mode before starting the video; but even when I do that, the video insists on going in portrait mode. Have you encountered this problem and found a fix for it?

Separately but related: which do you find the best video platform for live video, Facebook or YouTube? I would prefer to switch to YouTube, but really I need to be where most of the community is.

I’m getting practice with the new camera, a Nikon D3500, my first DSLR

I bought a Nikon D3500 camera, my first DSLR. I took it to Lake Murray for a spin.

I am reading Shaft. I did not even know until recently that it was a novel instead of a movie.

When I read an old genre novel like that, I often have difficulty falling into it. I find myself thinking about the world the writer lived in, and the assumptions he makes, and the world and assumptions of the novel’s target audience. In this case, a lot of that is tied up with race and ethnicity of course — not just blacks but also Italians, and a little bit Jews. And there’s casual homophobia and the novel is sexist as hell. I’m not trying to see these things, they jump out at me and won’t get out of the way so I can just enjoy the story. Perhaps because the story is rather thin.

I’m making the novel sound worse than it is. It’s actually pretty good.

I had the same problem when I tried to read “The Skylark of Space” recently. “Skylark,” by E.E. Smith Ph.D. (that’s how the magazines always ran his byline), was the prototypical space opera, ancestor to Star Trek and Star Wars and the Expanse and all the rest. It was written in 1915-21, and published in 1929.

I was unable to stop marveling at a fully formed space opera written so long ago.

For example, the novel gets around relativity by simply having a character say that “Professor Einstein” was, of course, a genius, but he was wrong. And why not? The theory of relativity was still new and unproved then!

Short version: Instead of posting everything to mitchwagner.com… first and syndicating to mitchwagner.tumblr.com…, I’m going to start posting most of that stuff to mitchwagner.tumblr.com… directly. I’ll save mitchwagner.com… for more infrequent, important updates.

I’m not making any changes, for now, to Twitter/@mitchwagner and Facebook/Groups/ThingsMitchWagnerSaw, and hopefully people who subscribe to my daily newsletter won’t see a change either.

Longer version:

I’m moving my ephemeral activity to mitchwagner.tumblr.com…. That’s the vast quantity of links to news articles, memes, retro-ads, photos and illustrations, and other items of interest that until now I’ve posted daily to mitchwagner.com….

mitchwagner.com… is going to be a low-frequency blog, containing only content I’ve created — posts I’ve written, and photos and videos I’ve taken. Those tings will also be shared automatically to Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and my daily newsletter.

And I’ll continue to post the ephemera to Twitter/@mitchwagner and Facebook/Groups/ThingsMitchWagnerSaw, as I have been, as well as to my daily newsletter. Nothing there changes.

What this means to you, dear reader

Nothing changes if you follow me on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, or the email newsletter.

If you follow me on mitchwagner.com… and you like all the ephemera, you’ll need to add mitchwagner.tumblr.com… (or Twitter, Facebook or the email newsletter). For Tumblr, you don’t need to register, just bookmark that page. There’s also an RSS feed.

I post all the same content to all four places, but not always at the same time. So if you want to be sure to see everything, pick any one of those four places and you’ll be fine.

If you want to follow me in more than one place, well, have at it.

How long will this situation remain stable?

Forever, or until I get tired of it. I seem to enjoy fiddling with my social media setup as much as I do actually using it. I’ve switched to and away from Tumblr as my primary blogging platform several times over the years. It seems likely I will switch away again when I get distracted by something newer and shinier.

As for you, my dear readers; if you follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or the newsletter, just keep doing what you’ve been doing and you’ll be fine. If you follow me on mitchwagner.com…, and you want to keep seeing the ephemera, switch to one of those other platforms, and you’ll be fine.

Safety first from Damnthatsinteresting

What did I just watch from WTF

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you already have six blank notebooks at home.

— lowercase bitch (@TraceOddity) April 13, 2019

Source: reddit.com…

theoutline.com…

Dr Alan Gribben has spent 45 years cataloging every book Mark Twain read in his life, to discover Twain’s influences. Interesting article, but the journalist’s snobbishness set my teeth on edge. www.theguardian.com…

There is no such thing as an “average person.” If you measure the characteristics of a large population, and calculate the average of all of those statistics, you’ll find nobody matches the resultant description. www.thestar.com…

loseitblog.com…

John Wright was the estranged son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. John’s legacy is more modest than his father’s, but equally immortal and related to the family business. He invented Lincoln Logs. 99percentinvisible.org…

www.grubstreet.com…

I only skimmed the recent Twitter controversy about tipping, but it has led me to resolve to get more conscientious about tipping. I’ve gotten sloppy.

I’ve gotten in the bad habit of stiffing chambermaids if I don’t have singles in my wallet. I need to get singles when I check in to the hotel and put those singles aside to tip the chambermaid.

I’m already routinely tipping 20% at restaurants, but I tip on the card rather than cash – time to go back to tipping in cash, though I do hate to use cash.

Also, I’ve read elsewhere you should tip take-out and counter service restaurants 10%, and I’ve been doing that for the past few months. On the card, rather than cash.

Gah, I’m going to have to make a habit of carrying around singles, aren’t I? Feh.

Today I learned Jim Brown, a preacher from South Point, Ohio, claimed in May 1986 that the theme song for Mister Ed contained “satanic messages” if heard in reverse. en.wikipedia.org…

mentalfloss.com…

www.cultofmac.com…

Watch as this 173-pound golden retriever lost 100 pounds!

❤️pic.twitter.com…

— UberFacts (@UberFacts) April 10, 2019

This article is one of an occasional series of reminders I get that I live on a planet where alcohol is very important to many people. I like a drink now and then but I’m fine going without, and often do for weeks or months at a time. elemental.medium.com…