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Save the world from home
— in your spare time!
Disintermediation means cutting out the middle-man, and, by teaching you a new way of thinking about human nature and about your own unique self, Man Alive! puts you in charge of your own philosophical affairs.The book's objectives are precise and concise: To take the claim of justice away from the state, the mantle of intellectual authority away from the academy and the experience of reverence away from the church. It puts all of those things back where they belong — in your mind. There is no middle-man on truth.
More by Greg Swann
FREE Willie
A 100% FREE collection of some of the best of the Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie stories. You will want to read all of my books, but here is a cost-free way to get started.Buy my books at Amazon.com
Shyly’s delight
Work, play and love like a Labrador.
Print | Kindle
Nine empathies
Apprehending love and malice.
Print | Kindle
Father’s Day
More Married. More Husband.
More Father. More Man.
Print | Kindle
Loving Cathleen
A Love To Live Up To
Print | Kindle
Sun City
Loved ones die. Life goes on.
Print | Kindle
Losing Slowly
How Las Vegas lost its mojo – and how to get it back
Print | Kindle
Christmas at the speed of life...
Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie's Christmas stories
Print | Kindle
The Unfallen
A love story
Print | KindleMy other writing isn't collected in one place, but here's a shopping list for finding the best of it:
- Greg Swann writes – fiction and early essays.
- PresenceOfMind.net – a weblog I maintained in the early years of the new millenium.
- BloodhoundBlog – a national real estate weblog I started and contribute to. Much of the content there will be real estate related, but everything I write is focused on the self, and this is best represented in the longer essays.
- SplendorQuest.com – a weblog devoted to celebrating the uniquely human life.
New at SelfAdoration.com- Silent cinema in three quick glances: Emily Brownbangs at the conception of guile.
- Love at first sight, twenty-five years later: Someone to thrive with.
- My only points of disagreement with Ayn Rand, libertarianism and scholarship in general: Everyone has been wrong about everything, going back forever.
- Ayn Rand and me – why my homework is late…
- An infinity of souls.
SplendorQuest done socially
Memo to Hollywood: Your time is up. No one will pay a premium price for a leering, sneering wink.
A comment from an LA Times story insisting that TV is not either dead:
Paul G Newton at 11:46 PM December 03, 2012
I believe that the networks will, no must, embrace the new media. In the past few years I went from making films occasionally to creating online content myself with budgets in the $300 range (yes it shows but come on!). We write our own scripts and film them with great cameras like DSLR’s and GoPro’s. The qualities of my films are not the same as the networks, YET! Five years ago I would not have even been able to dream of filming with any quality at all. Now, I am using the same technology used in Act of Valor and other Major Films! In Five more years I EXPECT to be creating the same quality as the studios without the costs and posting online where I will be selling my own advertising. The Networks and Cable companies are about to be overrun with competition. THANK GOD FOR IT! Why do I say that? I say that because the Major Movie Networks keep making sequels instead of original content. What happened to the glory days of taking a chance with the (more…)
Start the day dancing: Common People by William Shatner
Further notice: This video is a perfect expression of YouTube as an art form. This is pitch perfect satire playing off of a pitch perfect satire of a pitch perfect rock ’n’ roll tune. This is art for the ages.
Mall crawling: It’s looking a little more like Christmas at the Arrowhead Towne Center Mall.
I’m continuing to mall crawl this Christmas season, because it’s interesting to me. Sunday afternoon I spent some time at the Arrowhead Towne Center in Glendale, AZ, a 1.2 million square foot regional mall in a relatively upscale neighborhood in the northwest quadrant of metropolitan Phoenix. Unlike last week’s dour visit to MetroCenter, the Arrowhead mall, as it is called, was relatively busy. The contrasts of which stores were and were not jumping was interesting, and we’ll come back to that, but before all that is the simple fact that Arrowhead is still “in,” in fashion terms, where MetroCenter is palpably “out.”
Witness: Actual people cruising the mall:
Santa had business, too…
Including a short line of people waiting to have their pictures taken.
Even so, many stores had plenty of empty on display:
But there were real people all over the place, and I noted not one vacant storefront.
And the pet store is an actual business, not a branch of the government.
Macy’s was moderately busy…
As were some specialty stores…
But the only crowds I have seen anywhere this Christmas were at the Apple Store…
Meanwhile, Sears was a void, yet again…
Big sale, no buyers.
But it ain’t just Sears. This is a lowish-brow Wal-Mart later Sunday afternoon:
And the (more…)
Start the day dancing: Tonight Will Be Fine by Teddy Thompson
Start the day dancing: Past the Point of Rescue by Hal Ketchum
Start the day dancing: I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever) by Stevie Wonder
No one is coming for Christmas: The lonely life of a sad-sack Santa at the EmptyCenter Mall.
“Can I go ho-ho-home now?”
Oh, yes. That’s Santa Claus sitting all alone — and not just for a little while — at the MetroCenter Mall in northwest Phoenix. MetroCenter is a super-regional mall, 1.4 million square feet of retail space, with five anchor stores, a huge food court and a multi-plex cinema. And it’s withering before your very eyes.
Behold the emptiness…
Perhaps 60% of the space is vacant, including two of the anchor stores, with many storefronts bearing this admonition of wishful thinking:
Two stories of spacious, modern retailing luxury and a clientele, on a weekday afternoon in the middle of the Christmas season, that wouldn’t fill a school bus.
Santa and his helpers are swarmed by nobody…
And the emptiness stretches on forever…
All action, no traction…
At Sears, where America doesn’t shop…
And doesn’t shop…
An doesn’t shop…
And here, where no one shops…
There are no book stores left inside MetroCenter, and even the pet store is a Potemkin Village, a rescued animal adoption center run by the county:
This is a mall that used to be mobbed at Christmas. It was murder to drive anywhere near it, and the county sheriff ran a posse of horse-mounted deputies in the outer parking lots to protect-and-serve people stuck walking a (more…)
Start the day dancing: Seven Year Ache by Rosanne Cash
Big duh technology tip: Film that testimonial, YouTube it, then share the link with your client.
A while back, I wrote a post on BloodhoundBlog about using pocket-sized video cameras to record and propagate video testimonials. That kind of job is now better done by smartphone video cameras, but you can still buy a Flip camera
Any way you capture the video, here is the procedure I talked about then:
1. Capture the video. Because you’re doing an interview, you can guide the testimonial to elicit the information you want to convey to other clients.
2. Post the video on your YouTube page.
3. Embed the YouTube video on your testimonials page. (I have code that will place a randomly-selected miniaturized-video, as pictured above, in your weblog’s sidebar, so that your clients see a different testimonial every time they come to visit.)
Here is the big duh I left out of that original post:
4. Share the link to the YouTube video with the subject of the testimonial.
When you made the film, you told your clients that you wanted for them to share the news of their good experience with their (more…)