Episode #342: The Sputtering By-Product Of Wood Pulp: Newspapers

Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you. This was taken in mid August at my local Dollar Tree store. I won't even show you what I found the next aisle just yet, but you can probably guess on the first try.

For those of you who may not know anything about my previous employer beyond the fact that I am a retired govt employee, my very first job with he state of Connecticut was helping prepare old CT newspapers for microfilming (preservation).

Short info dump: back in the late 80's/early 90's, CT, along with dozens of other states, received grant money from the feds to catalog/microfilm old local newspapers from the 18th through the 20th century.

History lesson: during that extended time period, local newspapers is where you really got the nitty gritty of local town life, both the good, the bad and the fugly (any true crime podcast with integrity will often use local media sources for the bulk of their research).

Back then, local newspapers were, more often than not, the purveyor of good solid journalism. If you wanted a good take on a particular event that was maybe covered in a regional paper with a short paragraph, local was the way to go.

Unfortunately, by the late 1980's/early 1990's, all of that good journalism slowly made its way to the sewer system, as consolidation started taking place and it was not for the better. Just like today, where less than six companies control AM/FM radio and the podcast world nationwide, back then you had a lot of companies scoop up and purchase small town weeklies to make 'money' and to promote uniformity.

One of the most egregiously crass companies (in my opinion) that help accelerate the trend of "all the news that you will read will be printed", was a media company called The Journal Register Company. Apparently, they thought that dominating the market would bring them credibility.

Problem was, they went about it in such as horrendously bad way, that they made everyone else that you would have a low opinion of, look good.

Lets use my home state of Connecticut as an example of what this company did to the majority of the weeklies (and a couple of dailies) that they ultimately acquired.

Prior to being bought out by JRC (now 21st Century Media), the average weekly in Connecticut was between 48-72 pages and cost about 75 cents to $1 per issue (this was in the 1990s). Each one was unique to the community they served.

After being bought by JRC, the following changes were made:

1. the page count was slashed to 16 +/- pages with a 25%/75% ratio of print to ads (larger percentage to ads), plus a 50% price increase.
2. the masthead was changed to conform to a particular corporate standard. In other words, no individuality that would make the paper unique to the town.
3. what little news was published wasn't really local, but more regional than anything else.

We had a wonderful weekly in my town, but the corporate mandate gutted the newspaper so thoroughly that they turned it into a free weekly mass mailed before they quietly discontinued the title.

Now if I want local news that's fit to read, my fix is divided between a classified weekly that gets mailed out to a tri-town area that features 6-10 pages of local town news; and a monthly magazine that has local and syndicated news (mostly all purpose like home improvement, medicine, etc), with spotlights on various residents and businesses.

My state is simply a large sample of what this company did to the media properties that they had acquired. I believe this uniformity, plus other corporate malfeasance, led to the downfall of this company, and ultimately led it to being acquired and rebranded.

This kind of crappy corporate behavior, in my opinion, is a majority contributing factor to why the American media is on such a downward spiral to irrelevance. You don't treat subscribers as a commodity that can be bought and sold, and express shock (SHOCK, I SAY!) when people go elsewhere for their news.

This kind of bull fritters is why I stopped being a newspaper consumer going on now for two decades, and instead get my news fix elsewhere, where I can get more bang for my dollar.

Have a fantastic week, and remember, newsprint is a fantastic way to waste your money that could be better used on that Dunkin' Donuts mocha latte with a shot of espresso.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #341: Eighteen Years? Eighteen Years! Eighteen Years.

Memory Monday: Back when my life had structure, but no real meaning, we would take pics of random happenings at work. For example, this fine outstanding example of an unhealthy work lunch. Except the apple. Even now I still have a piece of fruit with my lunch.

Imagine if you will, it's 2008, and on the advice of your cyber friends, you decide to start a blog. And you call it Cedar's Mountain, based on the mountain you live across from. And you're happy as a pig slopping away in their sty, because you found a place where you can write to your heart's content.

You first start off with a punishing pace of two blog posts a day, every other day. Six months of burnout convinces you to drop your output to once a day every other day. You maintain that pace for a number of years and all is good.

Gradually though, the spark that kept you going starts to dim, so initially you change your posting output to revive that spark; then when that stopped working, you create another blog for your writing output. That seems to do the trick, and with that spark revived, you decide to create a picture blog, which was soon followed by an adult-oriented blog and a short story blog.

But like before, that spark starts to fade a little, so again you tweak the amount of weekly posting that you perform and life becomes good.

~~~~

Imagine if you will, it's 2026, and surprisingly to the people that know you, you're still blogging. Your output is down to one post per week, but you're still feeling good. Then one day, while you're posting a link to Meta, because Meta long ago dropped a feature that allowed you to submit your RSS feed and have it automatically update to your friend's news-feeds, a though suddenly appears in your frontal lobes. You peruse it and it asks a question: how many blog posts did you write?

Curiosity piqued, I meander through all seven blogs that I have created in the past 18 years {tabs above give a brief synopsis for four of them}:

Cedar's Mountain

Books By G.B. Miller

Pictures For Smarties

Flashing Georgie's Shorts

It's Always Saturday In Suburbia

Father Nature's Corner

I Have Stories!

And counted up all of the posts that I had written for all seven of those blogs. After seeing the finals total on my calculator, my jaw dropped, figuratively speaking.

2,017 blog posts in 18 years. Or, if you're a number obsessed weird stats nerd like I am, this averages out to 112.05 posts per year, or 252.125 posts per blog.

While both of these stats sound amazing on paper, you have to remember the slanted reality: I started with six to eight posts per week in 2008, and by 2026 I was down to one post per week. In a specific example, from December 2018 thru early August 2026, I produced a total of 358 posts just for the blog you're currently reading. And my book blog only has one actual post {but lots of tabs} after I had done a clean-up/overhaul of that blog's content.

Still, 2,017 posts is nothing to sneeze at. At the bare minimum, it shows how much I've pivoted over those 18 years when it came to finding topics to write about. From work to my writing, from music to books, humor to general observations, and everything else that you can reasonably think off, became fodder {in a good way} for six of my seven blogs.

In a weird parallel universe, my blogs became a text version about nothing. The only common thread throughout those eighteen years of merriment was me, myself, and I.

Truth be told, even though my blogging is a serious extension of me as a person and as a writer, and I do enjoy blogging as a creative outlet, I'm not quite sure how long I should continue doing this. Eighteen years is a long time, and in fact, those years spent blogging is almost half the time I've spent being married {currently sitting at 37 years, almost as long as most federal politicians have been in office}.

But, in the very old children's song goes, I will have to continue putting one foot in front of another, and see where this blogging journey of mine takes me.

Who knows, maybe someday it will earn me an all expense paid trip to Butte, Montana!

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #340: We Be World Building 2.026 {4}

I'm still doing the occasional hike in the mountain, as some of my leg strength is reappearing due to the p.t. I've been taking for the past month.

Read part one here, part two here, part three here.

And now for the 4th and final installment of my world building series

There were two more crucial elements that I needed to add to my world building: sentients and the alternative lifestyle.

In regards to the former, I will simply say that ever since I first saw the concept in Star Trek DS9, I became utterly fascinated and enthralled, and I was determined to integrate that concept into my stories, which I've done with some success over the years.

Now onto the topic of the latter: alternative lifestyles.

I made a conscious decision early on to portray those who are practicing members of the alternative lifestyle as realistically as possible. I also decided early on to have them face real world problems associated with that alternative lifestyle. I personally do not have an issue with those who are "L", "G" or "B", which is why I wrote a few of my characters as such.

Now I had those characters face real world scenarios/issues that one could realistically go through in their lifetime, with varying degrees of complexities.

Like staying in the closet with only a select group of others knowing who you really are, and having to wear a facade out in public.

Or perhaps, you're not quite sure if you are or aren't, but also you're not quite that ready to delve any deeper yet.

Perhaps you're 100% a member of that alternative lifestyle, yet you choose to perhaps experiment just once to see what it was like, aka 'scratching that itch," and to get it out of your system.

Or perhaps, you live in a society where it's quietly tolerated so long as you're discrete about it (a modified Don't Ask, Don't Tell).

And I did some research into how certain cultures/societies handled that particularly thorny issue. Did they have total acceptance? Did they have total rejection? Was it a mixture of both? I tried to sprinkle answers to those questions throughout the series, because I do believe that fictional stories should contain snapshots of what the real world often reflects and what the writer's personal views are.

At my age (61) and because of the era I had grown up in, I have a tendency to see things in B & W motif. That is to say, very cut and dried. But that isn't to say that how we go through life influences that B & W motif, because it does.

And that makes me a more well rounded person in the long run.

~~~~~~~

I sincerely hope you have enjoyed my mini-series on world building as much as I enjoyed writing it, and I certain enjoyed sharing a tiny sliver of what makes me tick as a writer.

Have an enjoyable week!

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #339: We Be World Building 2.026 {3}

I have seemed to hit the mother load of deer encounters in the past calendar month, as this pic was part of a group of seven (plus video) that I took on one of my twice daily walks back in late July. He/she were approx 150 feet away from me when I took the pics, happily munching away on the greenery that you see in the foreground. I believe the encounter lasted about three minutes or so, before I thanked them and took my leave.

Read part one here, part two here.

The first thing we needed to do was to build a society that was not only both regressive and progressive at the same time, but also had both feet entrenched in the old way of doing things (traveling by horse) and the new way of doing things (telepathy, sentients and computers, etc).

Step one: we immediately pitched the idea of a foreign country and changed it to being a planet in another galaxy system. This was done because I had used a tunnel (think wormhole from Star Trek) early on as a method of transportation.

Step two {a}-Progressive: based on my knowledge of world history, we turned the Pod Planet (as it was now called, again based on my early novella) into a strictly matriarchal line of succession.

Step two {b}-Regressive: again drawing on my knowledge of world history, the Queen had no real power, as a select group of men pulled the strings, like a puppeteer who controlled a marionette. Also, sex was crassly weaponized, in that if you perform this humiliating duty, you will receive a nominal increase in power.

Step three {a}-modern society: the kingdom implemented/used the latest technology, e.g. computers, video surveillance, and the latest in modern medicine.

Step three {b}-old fashioned society: the main mode of transportation was horse flesh; the population had the look and feel of an agrarian society at the beginning of the industrial revolution, yet was not.

One way you can look at step three, is as a rudimentary steampunk theme, with a mixture of modern and old fashioned elements being shown as societal norms.

Now with the next few societal steps, you really can't pigeonhole them strictly into the progressive/regressive categories, you have to be more flexible in your thinking.

For example, I had to create a brand new language for the Pod Planet, because you can't have the denizens of another planet simply speaking English. So I created one that sounded like a mix of a clicky-clack toy, a bicycle bell, and a toot whistle.

But I did add a few twists, one of which was that all citizens must be conversationally proficient in Pod and I also made the planet bilingual. Another that I had added in, which I took inspiration from all the regional dialects here in the US, was different dialects of the Pod language that were not based on where you live, but on what your class status was.

to be continued

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved