The Drama of Flight

Keith Ward

Pre-Flight
Joined
Jan 8, 2019
Messages
74
Location
Westminster, MD
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Druvanius
This essay about flying, by the great screenwriter and playwright David Mamet, is wonderful. As a fellow (slightly less well known) writer, I totally get this. The romance of flying is the perfect platform for those who also like to write. They just -- go together.
 
I couldn't deal with all the flashing ads on the website.
 
Thanks for posting!
 
I couldn't deal with all the flashing ads on the website.

Yep. With a print magazine, you can mentally block out ads. With online rags, it is impossible to block out flashing and video ads. I hate them.
 

Huh. I don't have any of that on my cheap Galaxy Tab A, and it looked like this (just like yours but without all the dead space to both sides]:

Screenshot_20190202-194039.jpg
 
Could be some optimization going on for tablet reading? I forget how quiet the web is sometimes with ad-blocking enabled. Here's part of the site on my machine with most of the ad-blocking disabled:

Screenshot from 2019-02-02 20-24-02_Small.png
 
Check out some of the blocked stuff on that page, and this is only maybe half of the blocked items. There's a bad word in there, am I allowed to post that?

Screenshot from 2019-02-02 20-32-52.png
 
Also, I'm completely fine with supporting good content (I maintain a subscription to Flying magazine), but I refuse to be annoyed by gee-gaws and blinky doos, not to mention being tracked everywhere I go online.
 
I saw this article in the latest issue of the print magazine, and enjoyed it. Nice to see something a little different in there

I give credit to Flying Mag for making an effort to keep the magazine fresh and interesting

..more philosophically, there is something artistic about flying.. many people enjoy both flying and sailing, flying and writing, etc. There is something romantic to aviation and these "hobbies" (flying, sailing writing) all have romantic elements to them
 
The reality is that all those ads and all that annoying junk is what allows the content to be created, however. Nobody likes it -- especially the writers and editors who create the content. But without it, that content wouldn't exist. (I was a newspaper and magazine journalist for many years, and have been directly impacted by the collapse of the industry because of the Internet.) It's an unfortunate reality.
 
I don't mind ads on webpages, I understand something has to pay for it, but the constant flashing and flickering and videos that start as soon as the page loads just make people leave and not come back.
 
I don't mind ads on webpages, I understand something has to pay for it, but the constant flashing and flickering and videos that start as soon as the page loads just make people leave and not come back.
Dana, yeah, that's an excellent point. There is a line that can be crossed, and companies need to know when they're driving people away. I used to *hate* the pop-ups on one of my old sites that happened every single time someone visited. We called them "interstitials". It's a name that still grinds my teeth.
 
Thanks. Didn't know you were a local, welcome to PoA.
 
I couldn't deal with all the flashing ads on the website.

If you have a iPhone/iPad just hit the book button

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One way to get me to stop looking at a site on my tablet is to have one of those annoying "you have won..." sites overwrite what I am trying to look at and not go away (nor give me an option to say "NO"). I just back space until I'm back to the main site I was looking at (usually, if not always, Facebook). They lost a reader that time. I hate those annoying things.
 
Was hoping the essay would help me enjoy flying more, as I am a reluctant right seater and word person. Will have to try some Nevil Shute. I’ve found Langewiesche the Elder, with Stick and Rudder, to fairly seamlessly merge good prose with the actual mechanics and physics of flying for the non-technical person, which is oddly comforting. Langewiesche the Younger, however, is poetic but really too ethereal.
 
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