Did you know that the predecessor to Beyond the Rhetoric was a humble Geocities site called Now That’s Entertainment? Following that fun little tidbit, this week’s speedlink has a dash of nostalgia mixed in with all sorts of ways to keep entertained.
In the case of Zach Rosenberg, he’s sad that his son will never get to enjoy playing video games at the arcade the same way that he did in his youth. I also grew up as an arcade brat and while those stained carpets and sticky controls left a lot to be desired, there is something incredibly satisfying about placing your quarter on the ledge of a Street Fighter II cabinet to indicate you’ve got next.
As much as I enjoy listening to music, I’ve never been any good at making music. Some of my friends are far more talented, in that regard, and one fine example is Damien Riley. The teacher also happens to be a guitarist and he recently posted his original song “Weathering” on his blog for your entertainment. He reunited with his old “The Resolution” band mates for this recording.
Music as a hobby and as a supplementary source of income is one thing. When you’re a professional like Jeremy Lim, you approach the business in a different kind of way. Just as I get hired for freelance writing gigs, Jeremy gets hired to score and soundtrack a variety of works. For instance, he’s responsible for what you hear behind A Brit and a Broad. He used “Uncharted” for the introductory video and a custom track for the Vancouver video.
As kids, story time is naturally one of the best forms of entertainment. We think we’re telling wholesome stories, but as Henry Elliss points out, the true nature of classic fairy tales may teach some undesirable lessons. Goldilocks taught us that it’s okay to break into a home, for example, and Little Red Riding Hood indicates that talking to strangers is perfectly safe, because another random stranger will always save you from harm.
And for a final little piece of entertainment, Christopher Stork travels several years into the future. There, we eavesdrop on a support group for kids of daddy bloggers. I have to admit that I have struggled with how much of Adalynn’s life I want to share online and the idea of having your entire life on the Internet is going to be a real problem for the current generation of children. What’s your take on the matter?
I started my blog with the intention of chronicling my life with my kids as they grow up. I ditched the idea when I started to think about what it would be like for them once they were teenagers.
And I’m still not entirely decided on the subject, because the world our kids will have 10, 20, 30 years from now is different from the one we have now and even more different from when you and I were children.
I wrote a post on exploiting your kids on the Internet before my daughter was born and I’m not sure I’ve made any firmer decision since that time. I nabbed her domain and Twitter handle, because it’s better to have it than not, but I’m not sure how either of those will look a few years from now.
Geocities… haven’t heard that in a while.
I had two sites, actually. The first one I started in the late 90s and it was a wrestling fan site. The second one was more blog-ish, but I manually updated everything with HTML, because WordPress didn’t exist.
I remember you talking about the Geocities site more than once Michael, but I don’t remember the Wrestling fan site thing. We definitely have more in common than we would think my friend. Did I ever mention that I was part of the Memphis wrestling scene when Randy Savage, the Moondogs, Tommy Rich, the Fabulous Ones and the Mouth of the South Jimmy Hart were there?
I ran the restaurant connected to the hotel that they stayed at over the weekend, during TV tapings. I became friends with the Moondogs (Larry Lathan) and he brought the others to the hotel. We did TV tapings at the hotel, I sat with Miss Elizabeth on Monday nights at the MidSouth Arena. I even got to be part of a loser leave town match when the Moondogs had signed with the WWWF at the time and they used it as the angel to get out of the area.
I miss those times.
Yes, I recall you mentioning your involvement with pro wrestling. Very cool. You might be interested to know that I got my “start” with online writing by joining what were called “e-feds” at the time. They were effectively fictional wrestling federations where we’d create characters, write interviews and that sort of thing. I was just a teenager at the time.