Musings of me @adamcobb - Tumblr Blog

whenever i remember that literally over the border you can buy alcohol in a store between 10pm and 10am and not even be charged 5p for a bag i get very quietly sad inside

what kind of bubble am i living in… … … … [sad eiffel 65 swelling in the bg]

adamcobb

It's a 24 hour paradise here in Wycombe you know! (Except that big shops only being open for 6 hours on a Sunday thing. That sucks).

miss-vortex

If real life was like The Sims

so-very-cool

I will high five you over and over until I wet my pants!

kristythomas

my laziness an procrastination reached a new level when i realised that my quiet and shy nature meant that everyone tended to just assume i’d either a. done the homework or b. genuinely not been aware of the homework’s existence

lies. all lies. i basically spent high school replaying spyro the dragon and rping on harry potter boards and doing absolutely nothing of any worth

adamcobb

That bit was the best. Except Mrs Smart, she saw right through me. Leno (sweet, sweet Leno) had no idea...

sexsteffy

adamcobb

these caps give me feels I feel bad about

#teen wolf

Media Relations and Shooting Sprees.

Coverage of mass shootings is a particularly nasty news media trope. Their rarity; graphic awfulness and multiplicity of angles makes them an irresistible target for a 24 hour news media trying to fill hours and hours of airtime on ever decreasing budgets.

In many ways this is nothing news, look back to the Dunblane school shooting in 1996 and there are familiar elements: the live nationwide broadcast of a memorial service which everyone watched without really knowing why; the harrowing interviews with the newly bereaved; the search for an easy explanation. One thing has changed in recent years however and that is that the killers control the media narrative.

The first obvious example of this is the Columbine massacre of 1999. The two killers there produced a video justifying their actions which was, inevitably, picked up by media and played repeatedly. The format and words are remarkably similar to the video wills recorded by suicide bombers in the Middle East which Al Jazeera and others were so routinely called out for airing at the beginning of the never-ending War on Terror.

Witness the difference in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings. The killer there sent an entire multimedia manifesto to NBC News which quickly put parts of it to air (after stamping the obligatory NBC NEWS EXCLUSIVE banner in the top left hand corner). In a long, rambling statement the shooter identifies himself as a representative for the dispossessed and justifies the unjustifiable. This presentation offered the shooter notoriety which he did not deserve and it sent out a clear (and disturbing) message to any future copycats. Get your media relations right and you can not just take innocent lives but also get your incoherent ramblings on the 24 hour news networks for days on end.

Which brings us to the Santa Barbara shooter, who got round the problem of NBC exclusivity and its censoring of the more (relatively speaking anyway) disturbing parts of his manifesto (he had used profanity, which was beyond the pale at NBC despite the fact that it is an organisation willing to broadcast such a package in the first place) by uploading it directly to YouTube. Within hours (more likely minutes) of its discovery it had been re-embeded on countless other websites. The best (worst) example so far is the Daily Mail website which only allows you to view it after subjecting you to a trailer for a violent movie, yes they’re profiting directly from this video. Hurrah for capitalism! At this moment the shooter’s face is staring out at you from the homepages of (among others) BBC News, Mail Online, The Daily Telegraph and CNN. Not only is he notorious but he has been allowed to control the debate. We are living in a world where a killer’s seven minute rant in which he blames women daring to make choices for his decision to kill is not only allowed to remain available but is broadcast on CNN every hour. We have pieces analysing his ‘jet set lifestyle’ (apparently he sat in lie-flat business class) in the style of one of those Sunday Times magazine articles which takes you round Davina McCall’s house. In 24 hours he has gained more notability than most of us could expect from a lifetime of good, honest work. How anyone can claim we’re not laying the foundations of a copycat attack.

The solutions to this kind of thing are many and multiple (gun control would be a start) but the media needs to accept its role in propagating a culture in which some have developed the alarming habit of going on killing sprees to make their point. Until that happens (and it won’t happen soon) we can only play the morbid guessing game of ‘Where next?’.

#Adam pretends he's a guardian columnist #santa barbara #Shooting #media

kristythomas

"it’s like, wow, this is an RP where finn, blaine, and sebastian are triplets and they have lots of sex! who wants to play the robotic cat?!"

my palhoncho tipsily explains his experience of glee actor tags

adamcobb

I'm still mad about this stuff interrupting my stream of Harry Shum Jr. and Nolan Gerard Funk photos.

kristythomas

one of my friends just announced that a serious reason she wants to go to our new year festivities is because she went to the optician’s today and got a bottle of contact lens fluid that is “party-sized”

The introduction to my review of Glee 5x01. Can you tell I'm trying to avoid actually writing about it?

Welcome back everybody. We hope you had a relatively pleasant summer and spent lots of time watching good, improving pieces of television (if you didn’t then The Ascent of Man is only £14.50 on Amazon, there’s still time!). If you didn’t have time to watch at least two virtually identical BBC natural history programmes and a National Geographic documentary that wasn’t Air Crash Investigation then may the lord have mercy on your soul because you’re about to subject yourself to season five of Glee and I’m not even sure if every David Attenborough series ever made (except Song Hunter) is enough to make up for this.

#glee

"Out of all the people out there you hook with a CATHOLIC DUDE" - Sarah on my choices

#lydiablaine