The thing that I love about Neighbahood is that it gets to be 😴 boring in a good way. As a social media platform it works best for the self-disciplined, for people who choose to give each other grace. I long for peace, wherever I may be. In this digital space or in reality.
E. Writer
TBH, I wished people used the forum. We need another IMDB. I miss that site. You could go there and just chat about movies or TV shows. Today's generation will never know the joys of going to see a moving and heading straight to IMDB to have a discussion about it with thousands of people posting about the same movie. And the only movie you're talking about is the forum for the movie you're posting about. I remember spending countless hours talking about movies. You can't really post on forums there anymore, but I do post user reviews on IMDB whenever I stream a TV show.
E. Writer I just looked, it was posted in "how to use this forum" under movie talk.
Roy Scarbrough That's an old one. I tried again in the Television category. It just disappeared on send.
E. Writer Oh maybe it didn't go through
Roy Scarbrough no. It appears I missed a step. Looks like you have to first create a separate "topic" within the "category." I didn't know to do that.
E. Writer Ohhh ok. Like a subject line.
I just took a quick spin around the solar system.
I enjoy watching the solar system via Nasa's EYE on the SOLAR SYSTEM page. It's a 3D rendering of the solar system. You can click and zoom in and out on each body, and read factoids about the planets and sun. while also manually moving 3D image relative to its position orbiting sun. You can control the layers, such as turning on the constellations, asteroids, and comments, turning off the trails (lines), or turning them on. I usually turn them all, leaving only the orbits.
E. Writer That had to be really cool. I had an experience back in 2007. I used a digital camera and placed a telescope lens over the camera lens and aimed it at the sky. I took a lot of pictures, and I saw these odd shapes, a bit fuzzy like TV snow but not as buzzy and close together. Some deep reds, etc. It was hard to see because the sky was dark. Some had odd shapes. So I had myspace at the time and I uploaded the images, while joking that I had captured an alien aircraft and zoomed in one some of the shapes. What I realized in hindsight was that, I was probably looking at stars and other celestial bodies with the extra zoomed in images that I took. I saw similar shapes on a show about the universe years later. I have tried to recreate the shots I took over the years with other cameras and telescope lenses, but I have never been able to do it. Even worse, that digital camera was nowhere near as close to as advanced as cameras today, including our phone cameras.
Alex Morton I was on the balcony a few years ago with my wife's cousin, John Moraitis, an actor who now lives in London and we were celebrating a call he'd just gotten gotten from his agent that he'd be playing the part of Lear in a production that would be touring England and then travelling to Japan. It was a night of celebration. As he told me about his joy, a huge, very bright object streaked across the sky, like nothing we'd ever seen. We never found out what it was, but every time I see him, it's the first thing we talk about. An interesting sidelight to this is that Mark Antokas, an old friend, just published a book called Another Noel about when they were young and he and John sold Christmas trees together on the streets of New York.
E. Writer Ahhh, the beauty and splendor of not being besieged by artificial light. I live in a state that is not besieged by too much light pollution but the problem is that we have cloudy skies, almost always at night. And so many trees, that I can never get a good angle. My backyard is pitch black at night. It's only a little over a quarter acre, but because there's nothing back there it's so dark. But with all of the trees back there towering, I can't get a good look at stars, which has rendered my telescope from every position almost useless. I have thought about going to the lake one night to point the camera, but there's the background skyline that would interfere.
Alex Morton
I shot the cover picture for Somewhere Else from my front yard in Ikaria.
E. Writer I did not realize that was a shot that you had personally taken. How cool.
Some of my favorite quotes:
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire.
The first quote is tells us how easily it is to be manipulated.
“Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, 1885
The quote above is about hardheartedness.
Alex Morton Mine is one from Henry Miller "Every day we slaughter our finest impulses."
E. Writer Our finest impulses rather than our worst.
For anyone whose children enjoyed my Penelope's children's books, I created a video game. It's called, Penelope's Strawberry Catch. I feel it plays better on the computer but you can also play on your phone. It's a cute game for the readers. I wanted to give children a place to find information on the books and have a great reason to stick around on the Penelope's official site between book releases for a more immersive and interactive experience with the Penelope character and stories.
https://penelopeprincessballerina.com/games/strawberrycatch.html