Microsoft did a virtual-reality/augmented-reality thing to make video meetings look more like physical meetings
You get an avatar that sits at a table or – for bigger meetings – in a virtual lecture hall, with your own video-captured face on it.
I’m skeptical.
I got the new Facebook layout yesterday evening. That’s late – many people were getting it months ago, weren’t they?
I like it. It reminds me of Google+.
I like the new notifications layout.
I’ve lost the ability to format text in posts, which I had for a couple of months. No big deal.
But the Facebook News Feed is still a cluttered mess and inconvenient to use. And the News Feed is the only part of Facebook that interests me.
I want to be able to get notifications for comments separately from likes and reactions.
Also, I want to be able to create lists of friends, groups and pages where I see EVERY post made by members of that list, sorted reverse-chronologically by the time of the post.
Neither of these things is possible.
I’m not a Boomer. I’m Generation Jones
Generation Jones is the younger cohort of boomers. We are a separate generation, raised in the recession of the 70s in very early 80s, rather than the prosperous decades following World War II.
We have a different attitude and different pop-culture icons than our older peers.
Jeffrey I Williams writes at the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2014:
Generation Jones is an actual thing. It refers to the second half of the baby boom, to a group of people born roughly from 1954 to 1965.
We might be grouped with the baby boomers, but our formative experiences were profoundly different. If the zeitgeist of the boomers was optimism and revolution, the vibe of Gen Jones was cynicism and disappointment. Our formative years came in the wake of the 1973 oil shock, Watergate, the malaise of the Carter years and the Reagan recession of 1982. Above all, we resented the older boomers themselves — who we were convinced had things so much easier, and in whose shadow we’d been forced to spend our entire lives.
The fact that most people have never even heard of Generation Jones is the most Generation Jones thing about Generation Jones.
Not My Generation www.chronicle.com/article/G…
Also, from Jennifer Finney Boylan, at the New York Times last month:
Donald Trump (who is, it should be noted, an older boomer) has been a fraud on so many levels, but if there’s anything authentic about him, it’s his air of grievance. It may have been this, Mr. Pontell says, that made Jonesers vote for him in 2016. Hillary Clinton, to them, was the epitome of older baby boomer entitlement, and if Mr. Trump stood for anything, it was for the very things Gen Jones most identifies with: jealousy, resentment, self-pity.
There’s a word in Ireland, “begrudgery.” Padraig O’Morain, writing in The Irish Times, says: “Behind a lot of this begrudgery lies the unexamined and unspoken assumption that there is only so much happiness to go around. And guess what? The others have too much and I have too little.”
Mr. Jones and Me: Younger Baby Boomers Swing Left www.nytimes.com/2020/06/2…
We watched Hamilton last night and 1776 tonight. That’s five hours and 25 minutes of movies. My butt has declared independence.
My reaction immediately before watching “Hamilton:” “Nearly three hours? You’ve got to be kidding me!”
After one hour: “I sort of like it.”
After watching the whole thing: “I liked it, but did not love it.”
This afternoon I listened to the soundtrack. I guess I love it.
The 1776 drinking game: Take a drink — of rum — every time John Adams says “Good God!” or “Incredible!”
The first movie I saw in a theater
A friend asked her Facebook friends what was the first movie that they remembered seeing in a theater.
I dug through the IMDB to find some of the earliest movies I remember seeing in theaters and enjoying. They include Doctor Doolittle, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the Love Bug and the Jungle Book. They came out in 1967-68.
Also at about that time I remember a movie with Sammy Davis Jr. — I probably had no idea who he was when I first saw the movie, but I recognized him later, in memory. For most of my life I remembered one or two scenes of that movie and how much I enjoyed it but I couldn’t remember the name of the movie or what it as about.
I remembered Sammy was in a castle and that the movie was a comedy. I remembered one scene where he was shouting out a window. Not a lot to go on, but enough for Google:
“Salt and Pepper.” It’s from 1968 and also stars Peter Lawford.
After discovering the body of a murdered female agent in their trendy Soho, London nightclub, groovy owners Charles Salt and Christopher Pepper partake in a fumbling investigation and uncover an evil plot to overthrow the government. Can our cool, yet inept duo stop the bad guys in time?
Here’s the trailer on YouTube:
Sammy Davis Jr. plays Salt and Peter Lawford plays Pepper. Get it?
It’s not a children’s movie, but I expect my Mom wanted to see it and so she dragged my Dad and me and my brothers. I remember my parents hated it and my brothers were too young to get it, but I loved it. I thought Sammy and Peter Lawford were cool. Which they absolutely were, but the movie looks like a turkey.
📓📽
I like that the instructions for Hot Pockets say I should “prep” it first. Like sticking a thing in a cardboard sleeve makes me a chef.
I’ve had to teach myself how to read books again. When I was a kid and into my 20s I read books voraciously, but beginning in my 40s I transitioned to a diet of articles and status updates consumed on the Internet.
Listening to a recent Ezra Klein podcast yesterday, he talked about the need to spend an hour or more of uninterrupted reading – get into a deep reading state, to truly absorb information and make connections. I suppose I did that yesterday, got in a good hour of reading. But I switched between two books — a history and a science fiction novel. Does that count?
For most of my life, I’ve followed Theodore Roosevelt’s reading style. He read voraciously and widely, and just kept books with him at all times and read when he could, even if it was just for a minute. People who worked with him at the White House said that if he even had a minute or two between meetings in the Oval Office, he’d pull out a book and read for whatever seconds or minutes he had available.
When I was a kid, I read sitting on the couch when my family was around me watching TV. I can’t do that anymore. If the TV is on, it pulls me in.
Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime associate, has been charged with enticement of minors.
This could get interesting. It seems likely she knows everything Epstein knew about the proclivities of powerful men.
“Trump’s gaffe seems all the more ironic given that in other parts of the interview, he talks about how he believes protestors taking down statues don’t understand the history behind the statues.”
I wish Trump put as much energy into protecting live Americans as he does for dead Confederates and Vladimir Putin.
The Decline of the American World
Other countries are used to loathing America, admiring America, and fearing America (sometimes all at once). But pitying America? That one is new.
Tom McTague looks at the US from Britain, with a view that’s harsh, but ultimately loving and optimistic.
That’s how I feel about the US these days as well.
As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve been reading ancient history recently, and that tells me the US is still a very young country. I believe our best days are ahead of us. But we’re in a dark time now – maybe the darkest since the Civil War – and the worst may still be to come.