Keeping up with The Joneses: The Social Media Changes...Daily

I got into a craze this weekend. First, to update a website (dcfpress.com) and get on board with the new widgets and sites related to social media. It took only a few hours - as I updated, uploaded, and connected back to those places, both new and old.

The landscape has changed so much since I first got going on this island of information overload.  When I first got into it, around 2003, my friend at the time was doing a soon-to-be social networking causality: inwyk.com. It was very active for awhile - about 5,000 users, which was big in 2003 - then, poof! it went into the dustbin of history. To the web designer's credit, he put A LOT into his baby then. It was just...too much to do by himself, nearly. (He got some marginal assistance - but never got the platform totally worked out. Had the LinkedIn and Facebook idea going on - just too focused on converting it into cash ASAP. The biz model had changed - social media was different.)

Today, I can do all of what his site wanted to do (2003, remember) with barely a thought. I updated my LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Scribd, Klout, Blogger, and Google+ accounts within a couple of hours. Then played (worked) on all of them. Like Moore's law, things are gettin' awfully fast.

Keeping up with the platforms and the modifying information, and sharing, is not so hard. Its the tour of 5-10 of them with the thought: do I live online, or out in the real world? To be clear, I was on a laptop, ostensibly to edit a book - never happened - instead, I was first doing the website edit, pulling down widgets (new), and looking for new ways to build a social media platform for future usage.

If you knew me, you would know how much different this is for me. I'd rather be playing baseball or basketball, or watching football. Or something else - more social, less techie. The phone thing is overdone - and I don't currently possess a super smart phone, (a bit retarded), I suppose.

Keeping up with all the social media world is at once a snap, but a chore, like doing laundry. If I am going to spread my verbal platform to the four spheres of social media - quick updates, long form posts, uploaded content, and social circles - I better get into the weekly habit. Like setting my fantasy football or baseball team. Just one more thing.


A closer for the week: A tight song I enjoy because it gets my blood pumping, a la the NBA pre-game.

Another electronica song I can boom loud and proud, if I owned a car that did that:

Star Trek: The New Frontier, the New Franchise

Last night, Star Trek opened in Lansing, IL to a sparse crowd. I mean sparse...like 25 people. However, the area is not known for being receptive to this sort of movie.

J.J. Abrams has taken over the Enterprise (NCC-1701) and the franchise that is Star Trek. With that weighty responsibility (for the Trekkies) Abrams exploits the one fundamental ingredient in Sci-Fi that is the most malleable to all these adeventures: Time.

Copious amounts of stories can be written, and undone, with the modification of the space-time line. Change of events, change of results. Like rolling a 1,000,000 sided dice to get a different outcome.

The Enterprise crew is everyone from the original series launched in the 1960s. This is an origin story, at first, but soon sets up the future events for the new director of the course of the Enterprise's adventures.

Cast

John Cho as Hikaru Sulu
Ben Cross as Sarek
Bruce Greenwood as Capt. Christopher Pike
Simon Pegg as Scotty
Chris Pine as James T. Kirk
Zachary Quinto as a young Spock
Winona Ryder as Amanda Grayson
Zoe Saldana as Nyota Uhura
Karl Urban as Dr. Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy
Anton Yelchin as Pavel Chekov
Eric Bana as villian Nero
Leonard Nimoy as Old Spock

Now, everything can be seen as far-fetched and difficult to understand in this origination story line. Roger Ebert, not always in his right mind, was playing his critiquing games on this classic. Which is always why it is annoying to please critics. They pick. They look for gaffs. They conjecture about what is wrong instead of what is RIGHT.

The cast pulled off an admirable job in framing this close enough to the 1960s characters while adding in the small amount of personal lives and new ticks that can be explored and elaborated on in future films.

And that is what I liked.

Technology is catching up to the Star Trek dream. Even the gritty scenes of the inside of the Enterprise seem a bit out of step with what is suppose to be happening in the 23rd century.

But it is the adventure of movies that makes a place like a Star Trek movie go where no movie has gone before...we hope.