Herz aus Glas (Heart of Glass)

I suppose that for tens of thousands of years the possession of esoteric knowledge proved rather fruitful, and could generate unique industry which in turn supplied steady work for brave inhabitants. 

It still does in many instances your ideas can generate bountiful incomes, although if they create planet saving envirotechnologies it's also cool to eventually share them with your community for free.

In Herz aus Glas (Heart of Glass), a medieval town is resonantly known for its ruby glass, which it manufactures with artistic grace and reliable marketable old school intensity.

But the only one who definitively knows how to authentically and genuinely produce it, passes without having shared the code, or indeed transmitted it to another.

Panic doesn't immediately set in although tensions slowly start to run high, the factory owner finding mad solutions which the agile workforce swiftly deems barking. 

The factory burns there's no other industry the local clairvoyant's sent to jail for predicting it.

A grim look at the distraught middle ages.

Indirectly championing scientific culture.

Environmental progress and industry finding ingenious ways to boldly progress hand in hand, I've recently joined some online groups which consistently share new green technologies.

Steady employment - something to do - still remains of paramount cultural importance, jobs gained mathematically balanced with those lost to nimbly cultivate immersive interactivity. 

It always amazes me how hard people work and routinely commit to standards of excellence, and I've lived and worked in almost every province and territory, the Canadian and Québecois work ethic internationally outstanding.

New ideas - innovative strategies - reflexively emerging each and every day, to outwit debilitating fatigue and intuitively enable freedom and longevity.

We're lucky to have such a colossal country so much of which remains largely unexplored, such a shame we can't grow food in winter, but the cold temperatures do keep the ideas a' flowing.

I imagine if given the time the resolute workers in Herz aus Glas, would have figured out how to make the Ruby and diligently proceeded to keep the doors open.

By constantly experimenting till they precisely found the missing ingredient like none other.

Likely making other marketable discoveries along the way.

Strongly investing in research & development.

Glass

Mystery Men aside, I imagine superhero films would be less compelling (or less profitable) if they focused on the lives of people who don't defy scientific law, even if random acts of kindness or diligent commitments to stable routines also aptly reflect agile superheroics, in their own more modest less celebrated ways, inasmuch as many routines lack regular confrontations with mindblowing exceptions.

I remember briefly watching at work one day while a team of three people carried an awkwardly shaped new countertop up a narrow awkward flight of stairs, for instance, and an hour later I noticed they were still working.

In my foolish mind I thought, "why aren't they finished yet, it doesn't look that complicated," before reprimanding myself for assholism and listening in on their conversation.

They were patiently and rationally discussing how to move the heavy object up the stairs carefully to avoid injury, which of course made sense, and explained why they were taking so long.

It's rare when I move large heavy objects so when I do so I carelessly don't worry about injury.

But if you move them around for 40 hours a week for 10 to 40 years and you don't take your time to patiently think about what you're doing, you likely will sustain injury, and therefore it makes sense to proceed cautiously and think things through.

Always.

Nothing you learn in your youth really prepares you for middle-age and the routines you find yourself cultivating at times.

I'm lucky to have a lot of variability in my life and to work with cool people, as I have been for the last decade or so, but middle-age still isn't like school, you don't progressively pass from one grade to the next and have your whole life reimagined each year based upon pedagogic and biological transformations, different stages, it's more like a big 40 year block of time, an extended megastage that's full of change and diversity but at times is somewhat predictable.

But it's precisely the lack of exception that makes it exceptional once you figure that out, the ability to endure sure and steady predictability from one day to the next, to handle different variations while maintaining a reliable theme, and to do it for an incredibly long period of time.

Little things making a phenomenal difference.

Whether it's a film, a new type of hot sauce, a new dress, or ordering the same thing off the menu every time, it doesn't get old if you don't let it, if you let disaffection age you.

Everyone understands there's a big difference between carrying something up a flight of stairs and being a neurosurgeon, or a politician, but sometimes I think neurosurgeons and politicians forget how difficult it can be to carry awkward things up flights of stairs, for years, although I'm sure it's by no means endemic.

The end of Glass celebrates superheroics gone viral online, attempts to suppress them having been outmasterminded.

True, David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and Keven/Patricia/Hedwig/The Beast etc. (James McAvoy) do have otherworldly abilities, and it would have been cool if Dunn had turned out to be his/her father, but the ending's so like the genesis of Twitter and YouTube that I couldn't help thinking they were standing in for magical unrehearsed postmodern superheroics, randomly disseminated upon the worldwide net.

It's another superhero film that contemplates the nature of superheroics and therefore adds more philosophical finesse to the genre, with hints of The Secret History of 'Twin Peaks', Under the Silver Lake, and Iron Man peppered throughout, and nimbly unreels like a full-on indy.

I liked the characters and the plot and the ways in which Unbreakable has found a way to situate itself within the post-Iron Man maelstrom, and McAvoy's outstanding, but it was the ending and its Twitteresque reflections that I enjoyed the most, and seeing Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson (Elijah Price) at it again I suppose.

So many things you never would have heard about thirty years ago pop up on Twitter and YouTube every day.

It's a fascinating worldwide change.

As accessible as your local library.

Stable, steady, unpredictable variation.

Is there a project out there that's codifying YouTube?

Who's writing that book?

Could you finish a page without becoming obsolete?

Like you need a multicultural team of librarians working full-time around the globe just to capture Tuesday, March 8th, 2016.

Categorically driven inherent impossibility.

Infinity conceptualized.

There's nothing quite like it.