Itâs Boxing Day here, but Christmas Day in a lot of places. And Autocade is about to hit 18,000,000 page views, in record time (under 7,000 to go at the time of writing, which it will comfortably hit within hours). Not a bad Christmas present in terms of the business.
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for 10th million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for 11th million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for 12th million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for 13th million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for 14th million)
February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for 15th million)
June 2019: 16,000,000 (four months for 16th million)
October 2019: 17,000,000 (four months for 17th million)
December 2019: 18,000,000 (just under three months for 18th million, from first week of October to December 26)
Weâre sitting on 3,981 entries. We might crack 4,000 in January, or, if the mood takes us, we could see the milestone before 2019âs out (it wouldnât be unprecedented to have a big updating session in the last week of December).
There was some sort of a surge during December, as detailed in my blog post on Christmas Eve, although generally traffic had been up over the last three months.
I really had hoped that for the next Bond, we wouldnât see âBrofeldâ.
Iâve never had a problem with M being a woman or Q being a nerd, but ignoring Flemingâs entire background for Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the Daniel Craig movies, and supplanting him into the Franz Oberhauser family as a foster brother to Bond, felt a step too farâa step, incidentally, that we have Sam Mendes to credit. We have yet another Bond villain, as penned by screenwriters Purvis and Wade, with Daddy issues, the same plot device used in The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day in the Brosnan era.
Looks like the third Austin Powers movie contributed something back to the cinematic Bond-lore, when we learn Dr Evil was really Dougie Powers. The ret-conning of the first three Craig Bonds in Spectre felt forced. And professional reviewers have said plenty. No Time to Die looks decent enough from the trailer, but once again weâre exploring back stories. While this may be how blockbusters do it in the 2010s and the start of the 2020s, I just really donât care about Brofeld and the silly world we find ourselves in now. The sooner they can get away from this tangent, the better, and as much as I liked Daniel Craig as Bond, Iâm looking forward to the start of the new actorâs tenure some time early next decade. Iâve no idea what the world would expect in cinematic tastes come 2023 or so, but letâs hope all the pieces fall together once more for a satisfying Bond entry, well away from Mendes.
Trivium that no one cares about: No Time to Die is the first James Bond movie to be released in a year ending in 0.
As a child of the 1970s, I was exposed to this English word: new. Now, before you say that that isnât anything special, for some reason, in the â70s, there was an obsession with newness. It wasnât like the news (by this I mean the plural of new) of Amsterdam or Zealand, but an adjective that was adapted to really emphasize that you should pay attention and consume, consume, consume.
Perhaps the earliest exposure was a Tomica model I had: the Blue Whale Crown. The base plate and box read âToyota New Crownâ. Even as a child, I wondered: what happens to the old Crown models? And what happens to this Crown model when a new new Crown comes out? It didnât matter: Toyota wanted us to live in the present and bask in the newness, and back in the early 1970s, this Crown certainly looked like nothing that had come from Toyota prior, or since. It was almost saying, âYes, we know it looks weird, but hey, itâs ânewâ, so that means itâs good!â
The real car flopped (relatively speaking; they still shifted plenty given top Japanese managers still needed transportation), and it was the last generation of Crown to be sold in the US, but to me it remains iconic, even if it is garish. After a mere three years on sale, very short even by Japanese standards, its âNewâ successor emerged in 1974 with all the idiosyncrasies gone. Conservatism ruled in this segment, at least till fairly recently. The old toys hung round, still ânewâ, so even if your parents bought you one in 1975 or 1976, you could still relish the adjective.
It wasnât a case of Japlish. It was all over television as well. When we emigrated here, the Anglophone television introduced me to The New Dick Van Dyke Show. Never mind that I had never seen the old Dick van Dyke show at this point. This was the white-haired man doing the New Zealand Fire Service PSAs. Everyone knew him. And why was it The New? Because we needed to be told that despite the same network in its home country (CBS), Dick van Dyke wasnât playing Rob Petrie, but a new character altogether. Please donât take this as a continuation of the previous one.
Here are the News:The New Dick Van Dyke Show; The New Perry Mason; and The New Avengers.
Van Dyke, in his autobiography, recounts a fan coming up to him berating him for leaving Laura (Mary Tyler Mooreâs character from the earlier The Dick Van Dyke Show), so itâs not as though the qualifier worked; goodness knows how the same fan would have computed The Mary Tyler Moore Show, on the same night as The New Dick Van Dyke Show. Maybe that was proof that Rob had left Laura or vice versa and they were forging ahead with their separate lives. The New Dick Van Dyke Show wasnât alone. A couple of years later, there was The New Perry Mason (1973), starring Monte Markham in the title role (though no one ever called him âNewâ). The Fred Steiner theme was nowhere to be heard. Iâve seen a few of these, and they are pretty good in a 1970s sort of wayâwhich is to say more exterior filming and more flash cars (product placement was growing) on the back lot and on location. To make it more confusing, when Perry Mason returned in a bunch of TV movies in the 1980s, starting with Perry Mason Returns, it wasnât Markham, but original actor Raymond Burr once more. You see, it wasnât The New Perry Mason Returns. The New Perry Mason starred a different actor, so I can comprehend its Newness, and at least the presence of another actor underscored this. It didnât do that well, which is probably why hardly anyone remembers it. Probably more people remember Markham as the Seven Million Dollar Man. Iâm not kidding.
One that I do remember extremely well was The New Avengers, in 1976. Again, given when I was born, I had no exposure to The Avengers, but The New Avengers was a favourite of mine then, and I bought the DVDs when I saw them decades later. Unlike the other two series, this was a direct continuation, though it wasnât explained just how John Steed returned to Earth after Tara King blasted them both into space when they had their Endgame in 1969; but we do know they enjoyed Laurent Perrier champagne when they got back. Itâs a third definition of new as far as the TV shows were concerned, with the same motive: if you want to be seen as in, hip and groovy, come watch the new.
Perhaps more obscure were one-off TV movies: Halloween with the New Addams Family (1977), which had the same cast (grandmother aside, as actress Blossom Rock was ill), and where the new serves no useful purpose other than attempting to sell us on newness where there is none; and The New Maverick (1978), which sees the return of James Garner as Bret and Jack Kelly as Bart, though thereâs no sign of Roger Moore as Beau (presumably too busy being James Bond) and Robert Colbert as Brent, but it did introduce a first cousin once removed called Ben Maverick (Charles Frank). I imagine Ben is the new Maverick, and a short-lived TV series, Young Maverick, did appear afterwards.
No one really did much more New shows after thisâit seemed to be a 1970s phenomenon. With one exception: CI5: the New Professionals in the 1990s, an attempt to recapture the glory days of The Professionals but winding up more like episodes of Bugs. There, new sort of meant old, reminding us that some of the writing and directing was out of step with late 1990s’ audience expectations; and, with the greatest of respect, showed that certain parties were past their prime. By then, we had had seven episodes of Bodyguards, which perhaps showed how a modern-day Professionals might be. All that needed was to be âladdifiedâ for the FHM audience, at least in theory, and certainly, after 9-11, there may have been some scope for an élite, globally coordinated, anti-terrorist squad (which is what The New Professionals suggests the fictional CI5 unit morphed into, probably to accommodate its backers and the South African location filming in some episodes). But in 1998, there was less of an appetite for revival shows, especially when the top-rated series were ER and Friends, and the Americans were a year away from The Sopranos. Britain, meanwhile, was gripped with the tension of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and the FHM lads were more than catered for by Babes in the Wood.
PS., December 6: How could I forget this item of regular childhood viewing? From the US, in 1979.
In the last month, maybe the last few weeks, my likes on Instagram have halved. Interestingly, Lucireâs Instagram visits have increased markedly. But as I use my own account more than a work one, I can see the trend there a bit more clearly.
Itâs not unlike Facebook, which, of course, owns Instagram. While I havenât used it for personal updates since 2017, I maintain a handful of pages, and I still recall earlier this decade when, overnight, engagement dropped 90 per cent. It never recovered. Facebook, like Google, biases itself toward those who can afford to pay, in the great unlevelling of the playing field that Big Tech is wont to do.
They know that theyâre structured on, basically, a form of digital drug-taking: that for every like we get, we get a dopamine hit, and if we want to maintain those levels, we had better pay for them and become junkies. But hereâs the thing: what if people wake up and realize that they donât need that hit any more? I mean, even Popeye Doyle got through cold turkey to pursue Alain Charnier in French Connection II.
Iâve written about social media fatigue before, and the over-sharing that can come with it. More than once I blogged about being âFacebooked outâ. And as you quit one social medium, itâs not too hard to quit another.
Iâve made a lot of posts on Instagram but I value my privacy increasingly, and in the period leading up to the house move, I began doing less on it. And without the level of engagement, whether thatâs caused by the algorithm or my own drop in activity, Iâm beginning to care less, even if Instagram was more a hobby medium where I interacted with others.
And since I have less time to check it, I actually donât notice that I have fewer likes when I open the app. I only really know when I see that each photo averages 15 likes or so, when figures in the 30s and 40s were far more commonplace not very long ago.
So whatâs the deal? Would they like us to pay? Iâm not that desperate. I donât âGram for likes, as it was always a hobby, one that I seem to have less time for in 2019. I never thought being an âinfluencerâ on Instagram was important. The novelty has well and truly worn off, and as friends depart from the platform, the need to use it to keep them updated diminishes. In the last fortnight I recorded three videos for friends and sent them via Smash or Wetransfer, and that kept them informed. You know, like writing a letter as we did pre-email, but with audio and video. Instagram just isnât that vital. Email actually serves me just fine.
As I said to a friend tonight, even Twitter seems expendable from oneâs everyday habits. Especially after March 15 here. You realize that those who are already arseholes really want to stay that way, their life ambition probably to join certain foreign-owned radio stations to be talking heads. But since they lack the nous, the best they can manage is social-media venting. And the good people want to remain good and have the space to live their lives happily. So why, I began wondering, should we spend our time getting our blood pressure up to defend our patch in a medium where the arseholes are, by and large, gutless wannabes who darenât tell you have of the venom they write to your face? Does anyone ever put a Stuff commenter up on a pedestal and give them respect? While there are a great many people whom I admire on Twitter, and I am fortunate enough to have come into their orbit, there are an increasing number of days when I want to leave them to it, and if they wish to deal with the low-lifes of this world, it is their prerogative, and I respect them for doing something Iâm tiring of doing myself. Twelve years on Twitter is a long time. At the time of writing, Iâve made 91,624 Tweets. Thatâs a lot.
Unlike the arseholes, each and every one of these decent human beings have successful lives, and they donât need to spend their waking moments dispensing hate toward any other group that isnât like them in terms of genitals, sexual orientation, race or religion. And, frankly, I can contact those decent people in media outside of social.
Maybe the fear of Tweeting less is that we believe that the patients will overrun the asylum, that weâre the last line of defence in a world where racists and others are emboldened. That if we show that good sense and tolerance prevail, as my grandfather and others wanted to do when they went to war, then those who harbour unsavoury thoughts toward people unlike them might think twice. I canât really argue with that.
But I wonder whether Iâll be more effective outside of social. I publish magazines, for a start. They give me a platform others do not have. I donât need to leave comments on articles (and over the years, I havenât done much of that). And I have websites I visit where I can unwind, away from the shouting factories of American Big Tech. Most of us want to do good on this earth, and the long game is I may be better off building businesses Iâm good at rather than try to show how much smarter I am versus a talentless social media stranger.
No, Iâm not saying Iâm leaving either medium. I am saying that Iâd rather spend that time on things I love to do, and before 2007 I had enough to do without sharing. Some of the colleagues I respect the most have barely set foot in the world of social, and right now I envy just how much time they have managed to put into other important endeavours, including books that are changing lives.
Big Tech must know the writing’s on the wall.
PS.: From a discussion with the wonderful William Shepherd when he read this on Twitter (the irony is not lost on me given the subject).âJY
One thing about Twitter, it never sleeps. So when I can't sleep, it is an easy way to waste the early morning. 4:15 in LA, hey Jack.
"Last line of defense" is a good way to phrase it. Or, at least know when they have gone totally crazy from their own venomous rage.
My feeling is there will be an exodus soon but I donât know why yet. My online activity on Facebook is not unlike my forum activity during Bush 43. And I know itâs diminishing here and on Instagram.
I remember on Vox, I was happy blogging to an audience of strangers, and I wonder whether something similar is going to be the next creative outlet for people, especially as workâlife balance becomes more important, and the US â20 election cycle heats up.
The media will give politics wall-to-wall coverage, the consequence being that the public tires of it when going on to social media platforms. At some point, self-preservation has to kick in and that rage is going to do no one any good. The bots will also put people off.
We almost never plan which car winds up being the x hundredth model entered into Autocade, and here’s proof.
The humble, boxy Mazda Demio (DY) was the 3,800th entry in Autocade. It makes a nice change from all the SUVs that have found their way on to the database in recent months, even if it isn’t the most inspiring vehicle.
The vehicles either side of the Demio weren’t terribly interesting, either: the Sol E20X (the Volkswagen badge-engineered JAC iEV7S) and the current Fit-based Honda Shuttle. But if you want to be complete (we want to, even if we’re far away from it), you have to include the everyday workhorses.
This is how big an Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei nerd I am.
Three years ago (April 7, 2016), we were introduced to Daniel Roesner as Paul Renner in âCobra, ĂŒbernehmen Sieâ. There is a flashback scene dated April 7, 1996 when Paul and Semir meet for the first time, with Paul as a child.
There are a few problems with the scene.
If it was April 1996, then it would have been around the events of âTod bei Tempo 100â, and Semir looked quite different:
His goatee only begins appearing in episode 33 (production order), âEin Leopard lĂ€uft Amokâ (October 1, 1998), and the BMW 3er with the registration NE-DR 8231 made its first appearance the episode before, âDie letzte Chanceâ (which was actually shown later, on October 8, 1998).
Also in âCobra, ĂŒbernehmen Sieâ, Semir is on the radio to Andrea, when Andrea was not working for PASt in 1996. She made her first appearance in âRache ist sĂŒĂâ (November 18, 1997).
I can understand star ErdoÄan Atalay being reluctant to shave his goatee for the flashback, but it would have thrilled fans if he called to base for Regina and not Andrea.
RTL Above: From the first episode after the half-season break, ‘Endstation’. All three men have, at some point, played the sidekick on Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei: ErdoÄan Atalay, who was hired to play second banana in the third episode but has since become the star of the show; Rainer Strecker, the man whom Atalay replaced, here guesting and playing another role altogether; and Daniel Roesner, who is currently Atalay’s co-star in the series, and who also had played another role prior to this one.
One for the Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei fans. Our groupâthe largest on Facebook and, ironically, the one run mostly by non-Germansâsaw this question from Tim Gottschall:
Kann mir mal bitte jemand erklÀren warum es bei Cobra 11 schon 42 DVD Staffeln gibt aber jetzt im TV die 33 Staffel lÀuft? Also damit auch die neuen Folgen
This has always annoyed me. At Action Concept, this is still season 23.
This has been compounded by certain episodes from new seasons being mixed in as the existing season was airing (e.g. production seasons 6 to 12) and episodes being shown out of order.
According to production blocks (with overlaps explained above):
Season 1: episodes aired between March 12 and April 30, 1996 (episodes 1â9)
Season 2: March 11, 1997 to June 4, 1998 (episodes 10â31)
Season 3: October 1, 1998 to May 6, 1999 (episodes 32â47)
Season 4: December 16, 1999 to December 14, 2000 (episodes 48â63)
Season 5: April 5, 2001 to April 11, 2002 (episodes 64â80)
Season 6: April 18, 2002 to April 10, 2003 (episodes 81â97)
Season 7: September 11, 2003 to April 29, 2004 (episodes 98â110)
Season 8: March 25 to November 18, 2004 (episodes 111â25)
Season 9: February 10, 2005 to April 20, 2006 (episodes 126â41)
Season 10: April 27 to November 16, 2006 (episodes 142â57)
Season 11: March 22 to November 1, 2007 (episodes 158â68)
Season 12: September 20, 2007 to April 24, 2008 (episodes 169â79)
Season 13: September 4, 2008 to April 9, 2009 (episodes 180â94)
Season 14: September 3, 2009 to April 22, 2010 (episodes 195â209)
Season 15: September 2, 2010 to April 14, 2011 (episodes 210â22)
Season 16: September 15, 2011 to April 19, 2012 (episodes 223â38)
Season 17: September 6, 2012 to April 18, 2013 (episodes 239â53)
Season 18: October 24, 2013 to May 15, 2014 (episodes 254â67)
Season 19: October 9, 2014 to April 30, 2015 (episodes 268â82)
Season 20: September 10, 2015 to May 26, 2016 (episodes 283â98)
Season 21: September 1, 2016 to May 18, 2017 (episodes 299â317)
Season 22: September 14, 2017 to May 3, 2018 (episodes 318â36)
Season 23: September 13, 2018 to date (episode 337 to date)
However, according to how Cobra 11 aired, all but the (short) first block were shown with a break in betweenâpresumably due to labour laws there that required casts to have a break otherwise they would be overworked. So if you divide each of the seasons above into two, except for the first, then we are up to âseason 43â. This is the numbering the DVDs use. As to âseason 33â, I understand RTL used to follow the production numbering, but eventually diverged from it, so itâs a mixture of the âstudioâ numbering and the âbroken seasonâ numbering.
I realize no one outside the fan community for this show will really care, but as this is my personal and business blog, a wide variety of subjects is covered. And for those fans who may stumble across this, I hope the above helps settle some questions.
The latest model to appear on Autocade today: the Mazda CX-30.
Itâs March, which means Autocade has had another birthday. Eleven years ago, I started a car encyclopĂŠdia using Mediawiki software, and itâs since grown to 3,600 model entries. The story has been told elsewhere on this blog. What I hadnât realized till today was that Autocadeâs birthday and the World Wide Webâs take place within days of each other. The inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, still believes that it can be used as a force for good, which is what many of us hoped for when we began surfing in the 1990s. I still remember using Netscape 1·2 (actually, I even remember using 1·1 on computers that hadnât updated to the newer browser) and thinking that here was a global communicationsâ network that could bring us all together. Autocade, and, of course, Lucire, were both set up to do good, and be a useful information resource to the public. Neither sought to divide in the way Facebook has; Google, which had so much promise in the late 1990s, has become a bias-confirmation machine that also pits ideologies against each other.
The web, which turns 30 this week, still has the capacity to do great things, and I can only hope that those of us still prepared to serve the many rather than the few in a positive way begin getting recognized for our efforts again.
For so many years I have championed transparency and integrity. People tell us that these are qualities they want. Yet people also tell surveys that Google is their second-favourite brand in the world, despite its endless betrayals of our trust, only apologizing after each privacy gaffe is exposed by the fourth estate.
Like Sir Tim, I hope we make it our business to seek out those who unite rather than divide, and give them some of our attention. At the very least I hope we do this out of our own self-preservation, understanding that we have more to gain by allowing information to flow and people to connect. When we shut ourselves off to opposing viewpoints, we are poorer for it. As I wrote before, American conservatives and liberals have common enemies in Big Tech censorship and big corporations practising tax avoidance, yet social networks highlight the squabbles between one right-wing philosophy and another right-wing philosophy. We New Zealanders cannot be smug with our largest two parties both eager to plunge forward into TPPA, and our present government having us bicker over capital gainsâ tax while leaving the big multinationals, who profit off New Zealanders greatly, paying little or no tax.
A more understanding dialogue, which the web actually affords us, is the first step in identifying what we have in common, and once you strip away the arguments that mainstream media and others drive, our differences are far fewer than we think.
Social media should be social rather than antisocial, and itâs almost Orwellian that they have this Newspeak name, doing the opposite to what their appellation suggests. The cat is out of the bag as far as Big Tech is concerned, but there are opportunities for smaller players to be places where people can chat. Shame itâs not Gab, which has taken a US-conservative bent at the expense of everything else, though they at least should be applauded for taking a stance against censorship. And my fear is that we will take what we have already learned on social mediaâto divide and to pile on those who disagreeâinto any new service. As I mentioned, Mastodon is presently fine, for the most part, because educated people are chatting among themselves. The less educated we are, the more likely we will take firm sides and shut our minds off to alternatives.
The answer is education: to make sure that we use this wonderful invention that Sir Tim has given us for free for some collective good. Perhaps this should form part of our childrenâs education in the 2010s and 2020s. That global dialogue can only be a good thing because we learn and grow together. And that there are pitfalls behind the biggest brands kids are already exposed toâwe know Google has school suites but they really need to know how the big G operates, as it actively finds ways to undermine their privacy.
The better armed our kids are, the more quickly theyâll see through the fog. The young people I know arenât even on Facebook other than its Messenger service. It brings me hope; but ideally Iâd like to see them make a conscious effort to choose their own services. Practise what we preach about favouring brands with authenticity, even if so many of us fail to seek them out ourselves.
