Saturday, December 26, 2020

Chain re: action

(Highly unreliable list with significant crossover) 

 MULTIPLEX TOPS OUT LARGEST MASS TIMBER PROJECT AT LA TROBE UNIVERSITY :  EcoVoice – Environment News Australia

Tuesday, December 22, 2020

What pictures we see

It occurs to me that film - the financing of, directing of, acting in - doesn't happen unless there's a paying audience and, to this end, I sought to discover the state of cinema.

Screen Australia tells us, surprisingly

 The number of cinema screens in Australia has risen more than 150 per cent between 1980 and 2019, from 829 to 2,310.

After a dip in the eighties there was a surge. So much for postulating on the effect of movies being shown online and on subscription TV services. People will pay to go and see the latest blockbuster, a classic or a cult double feature, just as they have for more than a century.

Yes, I wanted to trace the historyFilm far predates television in Australia. 

I think the first feature film ever was Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906. Forty three years later, complaining about its late arrival compared to the UK and US, came the 'idiot box', hoping it would be like the ABC but with the caveat that there must be commercial choices as well.

 Australia's first cinema the Salon Lumière at 237 Pitt Street Sydney, was operating in October 1896, and showed the first Australian produced short film on the 27th October 1896.

The drive-in, it almost goes without saying, played a very important part in Australian culture. The usual format was a newsreel, a cartoon and two feature films with intermission where you could go to the canteen for choc tops. 

Again the chronology surprises, "the first drive-in theater" appearing five years after television.



Saturday, December 19, 2020

Channeled

I didn't include the radio stations as I wasn't sure whether they were just there because you can pick them up on the TV like you can on subscription television or whether they were mentioned as being produced by the same local broadcasters as the TV channels mentioned

*Of course, there are problems with having generic named stations of either kind. Which is the one referred to?   

II

In other news, I just realised the other day, when there was a national cabinet and he got mentioned, that I didn't know the Tasmanian premier as of 2020. His name is Peter Gutwein

Wednesday, December 09, 2020

Square ayes

That last list is a hodgepodge of community television, relay stations, rural channels.. the sort that can only work when you're seeking random patterns. Though the main channels ended up having stories about HQ in their respective cities. 

ABC Kids was, indeed, canned along with Fly TV. Various iterations have since emerged, so calling it closed is a little misleading.

I don't know if we pipped the Peaches. It does seem that there was nothing in our analogue history that hasn't been covered so no need to go state to state.

II

Are ratings capable of telling us with any accuracy whether Game of Thrones is the most watched, and which are the worst shows

Not wishing to participate in clan crowing about 'never having watched []', it's time to look in on what the other media made of television.

Newspapers, if they did express consternation about the second/third (?) challenger to their audience, saw merit in publishing a TV guide. There were competing magazines on the racks; TV Week and TV Times

Television makes an ideal subject for scholarly analysis in journal articles and such. 

Television shows itself (up)

Plays about television

Radio talks about television. Or at least it does on the ABC

I didn't get quite what I was looking for when I searched Usenet. A guide to downloading rather than just discussing. Not that discussion was ever missing from the newsgroups. Message boards where you get to discuss what's on tele are, of course, a thing. As is social media co-opting the viewing experience.

If you're not watching television, you can read a book about television.

We can talk about television stars on the radio but the close evolution of the two media blurs the lines: doesn't the chronology make it radio stars on television as we previously canvassed?

 TV channel websites have taken on a life of their own. 

TV series base themselves on books, plays and as spin-offs from movies. Plays based on television series are also a thing. Movies based on TV shows. Books using characters from popular television series; some quickly written for a mass audience and others with more weight. Comic books based on TV series. There is a natural flow between media - allowing for change in each adaptation.

III

Would television be a good medium for discussing or explaining programming languages? How would it compare in this respect to books and journals on the subject? Are they too abstruse for pop culture magazines? It doesn't sound like something that would suit theatre at all, nor the movie screen.

Such are the dynamics of this subject that searches reveal their use in TV apps.

TV Tropes tell us computers, for the most part, are dumb. There's nothing to C here.

Quora - a top spot to frequent to have all kinds of questions answered - also tells us what programming language(s) are used for programming TV. Kevin Lam 'spent several years developing streaming video players on multiple TV platforms including Roku, Android, web and Chromecast but not the physical TV sets themselves.' This expert knowledge tells us more about streaming television, even before he answers the question.

All of which is a worthy diversion from sharing what we did come here for: programs about programming languages.

If there's any relevance in mentioning The C Programming Language. 2nd Edition (Brian Kernighan, 1978) in the same breath as the first four paragraphs of this part in the blog post, this requires more evidenciary skills if you're really doing one of those degrees that encourages you to look for them in Mr. Robot or Person of Interest. A story can choose to invent its own language where those more sober-sided appraisals may not. Practical application does concentrate the mind.

The Guardian does the good job we would expect when rounding up articles on programming languages in the newspaper.

Software Engineering Radio
The Podcast for Professional Software Developers

likely completes our look at how the media apprehend programming languages
(Silicon Valley and The IT Crowd have not been and will not be watched to draw comparison. Nor Scorpion. Indeed, The IT Crowd is the only one of these shows I've seen and for its comedy, not its essay potential)