Dear Facebook

Dear Facebook.

Stop it.

People have been doing silly things again. I speak of the ridiculous things people are doing to videos. People start with a cell phone video, in portrait. There are usually several things wrong with this. Firstly, apparently people have forgotten that we have two eyes and that they are not in a vertical alignment (i.e. a 9:16 ratio). Rather, we have two eyes in a horizontal format (a 16:9 ratio). Well, you’re in luck: your phone will allow you to shoot horizontally (in a 16:9 format). Use this feature! This travesty of the vertical video is usually accompanied by the dreaded distortion. People, do not shout at your cell phone. It has a microphone that is not designed to handle that level of volume. When you shout at your cell phone while it is recording, you record the distortion. When you post that recording to facebook, you induce all those who watch it to suffer the awful audio. In the words of the popular meme: DO NOT WANT.

When other people get hold of these videos, some try to correct the mistakes of the previous authors. In doing so they put filters on the sides of these videos, expanding them from a 9:16 ratio to an old style square ratio, 4:3. I’ll give them a 10/10  for trying, but you didn’t quite get it the whole way. It is a better ratio than 9:16, but it hasn’t solved the original problem.

Unfortunately, this is not the only misguided attempt that ends in a 4:3 ratio. Some heathens have taken to putting text above and below good looking well produced 16:9 videos, making them into 4:3 videos, thus going backwards in technology. They put this text on in such a way that it cannot be easily removed from the video thinking that they know better than the producer of the original video. Sadly the captions that they espouse are often far less useful than they intend, and could quite happily sit in the comments.

And now for the worst of it. I have seen some videos that began life as a 9:16 video, had the sides added to it, and then had the aforementioned captions, resulting in a truly heinous video.

These crimes against vision continue to go unpunished and uncommented on by large amounts of the populous - but no longer! I stand against these awful videos. I scroll past them and would, were it possible to do so, dislike them.

Mostly what I do is get hot under the collar about them.

I understand that there are many other problems with Facebook, but this is the one that I have chosen to write about in this rant.

That is all

The Movies

The Movies

I love the movies. I enjoy the experience, the sound, the food, but most of all I like seeing a movie for the first time and taking as much in as I can.

I enjoy the trailers with all the new things I haven’t seen. I like the anticipation and expectation of them, and I like being able to keep up with the conversation on Facebook and other avenues.

New Zealand is usually pretty good at keeping up with movies, if not TV. But recently there has been an exception to this. I speak of the several month delay to the arrival of John Wick: Chapter 2.  For those not in the know, John Wick is a movie series in which there is a goodly amount of physical action, clever quips and a nice world in which criminals pay for things in gold coins that have an unspecified value.

John Wick: Chapter 2 was released in the US on Valentine’s Day – Feb 14 for those who forget such things. Usually NZ is at most a week or 2 late and on the very odd occasion (think Lord of the Rings) we get it even sooner than the US. But with this movie, it’s not early, it’s not even a couple of weeks later. No, no. This movie is three months late. But not to worry – this is not the first time this has happened. Some of you may know that, on occasion, I “acquire” movies from various sources. In this particular case, I was browsing DVDs that had been released in the US to get a good idea of what might be available.

I came across a movie that I had not previously seen. Priest. I had not seen the previews, hadn’t seen it in the movies nor seen any other advertising for it. So I watched a few trailers and thought that I would be interested in watching the movie proper, but before I did that I thought it prudent to ask the cinemas if it was coming soon and if I had just somehow missed the trailer round. So I called around and asked if they had screenings or were intending to screen in the near future, and finally if they had even heard of it. The answer was no on all counts. So I “acquired” the movie and watched it. It was a good copy, straight from DVD, so 5.1 surround sound, great picture for the time, and it was enjoyed.

Thus added to my movie collection, it was forgotten about for a while. I don’t like to watch movies too much too close together lest they become boring to me. Six months later, such as is my practice, I was watching a movie at the cinemas, when lo and behold, there was a trailer of a movie that I recognised. You guessed it – Priest was finally coming to the movies in New Zealand. Bear in mind that this wasn’t the movie that I saw in the cinemas but rather the trailer, something to be followed up about two months later by the movie proper.

Tonight, I watched Logan, a good movie in a series of good movies, well-acted, well told, and a pleasure to watch. At the end - I always stay to the end - there was a tag. Something to the effect that the movie was produced by hundreds of people and took hundreds of thousands of man hours to make. I respect this – some of my friends help in the creation of just such movies and as such I do my best to go and see these movies in the cinemas so that I may have the maximum amount of enjoyment and see it – the way it was meant to be seen.

New Zealand Cinemas have denied me this when it comes to John Wick 2.  Now, in an age before the internet, before instant communications and before e-mail, chat rooms and message boards, this would not have been a problem. I simply would have perhaps heard about it from one or two travellers and maybe the odd hitchhiker. I would have keenly anticipated it, and enjoyed the showing when it eventually did show.

But this is not the world we inhabit. We mastered the early days of dial up, we suffered through the screeching whine of our 14.4k modems, we paid the exorbitant fees for internet by the megabyte, then by the gigabyte, and have finally arrived at some halfway decent plans that facilitate easy communication with the rest of the world.

We now live in a world where it is possible to watch sports games from other countries live, as they happen, on your own computer. So when my friends and I were watching the super bowl, a game from America that I still don’t understand, one of the things that I enjoyed the most was the movie trailers that were part of the advertising. These go for something crazy like a million dollars an ad. One such ad was for John Wick 2.

Now this one I had done right: I had seen the trailers on YouTube, and I had talked to my friends and we’d decided that when it was time we would go and see it together. The ad in question included a release date, that of Feb 14. Knowing New Zealand cinemas as I do, I was prepared to wait a couple of weeks, so I looked in the movie cinemas’ “coming soon” listing and was horrified to discover that the movie wasn’t anywhere on the list.

And guess what. Turns out that if I wanted to, I could watch John Wick online already. Granted, at present, the only copies are bad cam rips of theatre screenings. But my fear is that once again, New Zealand cinemas will not screen the movie until after a good, high definition version of it is available online. If this is the case, I will have another decision to make, as, while doing other things to the house, I recently installed a sound system that will rival most.

Perhaps the cinemas will learn their lesson soon.

Perhaps not.

Trust

I have recently been flummoxed by the amount of crap that people take as fact just because someone they know has posted it. No fact checking, no research, just an all too quick share with a shocked face or a counter rant with malice and hatred. This phenomena seems to be becoming more prevalent since the recent election in the United States. Now the assertion that must come following a statement like this is to which side I choose , regardless of the fact that I personally have no sway over the election nor sway over and who vote in it, yet it seems everyone must choose a side and be judged by it.

So for the record I would, having been given the option, not have voted for the new president. This notwithstanding, the election itself and the sheer mass of ignorance and willingness on either side to believe any and all statements that prop up their chosen side at the expense of the other is astounding

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This has led me to follow a number of new sites, chief among them – Snopes. This has, quite of itself, produced an interesting effect. Having followed a fact checking site, I now see more “facts” that require checking as snopes posts them on their wall that all might know. Some of these rumours purported as fact have me truly scratching my head, a recent rumour said that a particular state in the US had passed a law that allowed rapists to sue their victims.

Now this in of itself is a ridiculous idea, but this was so widely reported and believed, largely by the people of America, that snopes had to publish a post about it on their facebook wall to inform their subscribers that it was not the case.

I’ m not sure how to express the emotion that allows people to believe such things with such ease, so quickly and with such vigour that they would lose friends arguing over a point that in the end may be fictitious. But for a little fact checking these people might maintain a friendship, the problem is that it is not just one sided, people on both side must believe this inaccuracy.

The other problem in this new world is Trump. Regardless of politics or where you stand on that scale, Trump has put out facts that have been shown to be incorrect simply but putting up previous video of his other statements next to his current ones. In today’s world of cameras and computers in every pocket, on every street post and in every dairy, there is simply no way for a man given the attention he asks for to believe that he is able to say one thing one week and another the next and not be called on it.

Add this to an already muddled and quick to believe world and you come to the fundamental problem. What or who can you trust.

My advice to you, dear reader is to take a little from here and a little from there, figure out what you believe for that is what you will be tested upon in the end. Find the truth, hold on to it, do not be swayed easily from your convictions by the latest fad, opinion or you tube sensation. Be sure about what you are going to say before you say it, take a little time before reacting, do some research into things – check snopes or somewhere else you trust. To quote from the musical chess, “never be the first to believe, (but) never be the last to receive.”

Rights

Rights
Over the past little while, we have been hearing a lot about rights: the right to live somewhere, the right to a democracy, the right to clean water, the right to do what you want with your own body, women’s rights, men’s rights, children’s rights. The list goes on.

So I thought I would devote some time to this subject. I enjoy a number of these rights; I get to choose my own government, and occasionally the form of it. I get to drink clean water, eat clean food. I’m reasonably sure, without checking, that I enjoy all of the rights outlined by the United Nations.

What, however, gives me these rights? Well, the UN would argue that I obtain these rights merely by being born. But what gave me the right to be born? Honestly, I am not sure that there is an answer to this particular question, but born I was, and here I am now, exercising another of my rights, that of free speech. Now this one I think is probably one of the most misunderstood and widely abused rights that we have.

It’s an interesting one, the right to free speech. It is largely cited by those protesting something, those who are unhappy with the status quo or the injustices they perceive that the current rules or laws or system have against them. What is notable about such people is that they often have no allowance for others to enact their same right to free speech if it is opposing the former thought.

And this gets to the heart of what it is that I wish to speak of this evening. The primary problem with rights is that they assume you are given something without needing to give anything back. But the problem with that theory is that all things must come from somewhere. If I have a right to speak, it implies that you must be silent; if I have a right to clean water, it means that someone must clean it for me; if I have a right to an internet connection (it’s a thing, check it out here), then someone must provide it for me.
What I mean to say by all this is that rights are not ours without cost. While the UN may say I have a right to this or that and the founding document of the country I live in may say I have rights to other things, and that these rights are free for me, they ultimately must cost someone something at some point. Now, with this in mind, I think you can take the position that to give a right to one person you must take a right from someone else, in one form or another.

I realise that this will be an unpopular thought for some, but what I am trying to do here is not to strip rights or belittle them, but merely to get the thought process moving. To think about what we take for granted, to question not necessarily the system, laws or rules, but what we demand from them.

Think about what it costs to enact the rights for some trumpet to sound as loud as it pleases and in doing so show great disregard for every other trumpet that may wish to use that same right. For example, I have a right to clean water, but if I open a fire hydrant and drain the mains supply, others may take offence at their sudden inability to take a shower. All I am doing, however, for the purpose of the argument, is exercising my right to clean water.

Who is in the right in this case? Have I denied others their right by claiming my own? Can you allow me my rights at the expense of yours? How far would you go to protect my rights? At what point do you start to claim your rights over mine? What can be done and whose right is more right?

That’s what it comes down to in the end. When the chips are down, when what I want, and am guaranteed, impinges on what you want, where are you going to side?

An Odd Place

An Odd Place

I’m not sure quite where I am at the moment. I mean, I know that physically  I’m sitting in my chair, watching a movie and writing, but, still, I have been thinking recently about where I am, where I’m going and why, and I have come to the conclusion that I’m not sure where I am.

I’m kind of employed at the moment. I have a semi-regular gig with a streaming company, but it is only semi-regular. I’m saving up for my container idea, but I’m not there yet. I’m getting ready for Festival One but it’s not for two weeks. There are quite a few things like this at the moment, things that are halfway through yet not quite ready, or requiring something that I have no control over.

I’m sure everyone has periods like this. But this assurance has not helped me to alleviate my feelings of anticipation, or paranoia, or dread, or whatever this is. It’s an odd state of being this; I’m not quite sure what to focus on. Should I be looking to concentrate on a more fulltime job? Should I be looking to save more money and get my container idea?

Life feels like it should be a bit easier. I am aware that without struggle we cannot learn and that the best experiences are often the hardest. But these facts just do not help me.

So this is me – in an odd place, not quite sure what comes next or where to go from here. Questions run around inside my head – do I choose one path and focus on that? Do I try and split my focus, multitask and make the best of everything? Or do I choose a new path and go along with the New Year splurge that is currently invading my facebook feed?

So many things to choose from and yet I’m not sure that if I had an answer I would be sated. I feel like I would question it, its origin, the reasonability of it, the path it would lead me down. I’m not sure I could trust it, rely on it, or follow the path suggested by it.

Then again – perhaps this is a phase; perhaps I will just slop out of it when I get my next gig. The question my non-committal mind asks me though is what if I don’t. And so I am returned to my original dilemma.

I know that this is a shorter post than usual but perhaps it’s because of the way I’m feeling – I’m just not sure quite what to say.