JB Minton’s Published Essays
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Hacks Deserves Every Award It Gets, But It’s Not Better Than Ted Lasso
…they are two different comedies, and both are going head to head in the Emmys this year for Outstanding Comedy Series, so we’re forced to choose.
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Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash
Why I Wrote A Book About A Show That No One In America Can Watch
JB Minton Talks About His Book “Ey Up! An American Engages With This Is England”
Meditating on life through art of this caliber can heal the world. Analyzing art for appreciation can give each of us the mental and emotional tools we need to see each other as complex, living beings, not just symbols and segments to write off and attack. I composed this book in the spirit of peace and understanding. Anyone interested in those things would do well to read it and watch This Is England when they get the chance.
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This is a short plea for you to consider watching the CW show Superman & Lois. I’m going to make the call that this is my second favorite vision of Superman since Christopher Reeve starred in the Richard Donner vision back in the late 70s and early 80s.
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A Philosophy for Playing Returnal on Playstation5
What follows is a brief exposition on why it’s one of my most favorite video games that I’ve ever played.
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March 24, 2021
If You Love Comedy That Moves The World Forward, You Should Really Watch Brockmire
I have a baker’s dozen words to justify why you should spend sixteen hours of your valuable time, meted out in thirty-minute increments, to watch thirty-two episodes of this IFC comedy…
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February 26, 2021
Writing Software & Publishing Workflow For the Independent Author
No one software does everything necessary to get a book in someone’s hands (whether digital or paper). The effort to compose and design a book is equally intensive regardless of the end format. For me, it involves five separate applications…
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December 6, 2020
The Future Of Movies Is Still Sitting In Theaters: Why Cinema Is About To Get Much Better
The theater is the place where human beings come together to exercise their demons and understand how the best inside of us can conquer the worst fears that threaten us each and all. I see a bright future where home theaters will determine the quality of content that flows into community theaters and I believe the world will be a better place once we figure out which screen it makes sense to start watching the next blockbuster on and which one to finally reveal them on in five stories of glory like the trophies they are for this troubled species of ours.
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October 22, 2020
Watch Twin Peaks The Return To Grow Your Empathy
I want to tell you about the journey that I’ve been on the past three years as I’ve written and published the first comprehensive, scene by scene, second by second analysis of Twin Peaks Season 3 or The Return as it was marketed to Showtime viewers in 2017. I believe that watching and thinking about Twin Peaks will make you a better human being…
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October 4, 2020
Why You Should Read David Mitchell’s Novel Utopia Avenue
Utopia Avenue accomplishes one of the hardest tasks that any artist can take upon themselves, to create Art that is about creating Art that doesn’t become professorial and cold. For a novelist, that means telling a story on multiple levels. Utopia Avenue is The Hero’s Journey of an English band in the late 1960s that evolves from individual artists, with little more than talent and ambition, to a fully functional artistic machine at the top of their game on stage in San Francisco, just before the door to Hippie Love and Freedom gets slammed shut at Altamont, making way for the grey 70s to drain the color from our souls.
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July 26, 2020
If You Want To Learn How America Collapsed, You Should Watch The Wire (Part Two)
Season 2 of The Wire has been called, “The Death of Work in America.” The first 30 minutes of this show is a revelation in that it has nothing to do with the plot of the previous first season, but what happens will be revealed to deeply affect the scene of what happened in Season 1. By pulling out on the angle of the scene in Season 2 of The Wire, the writers and players were able to introduce more characters while expanding the scope of complexity for the problem these characters interacted inside. The end result is that the problem these characters face grows in complexity and danger and does not respond well to zero-sum solutions aimed at finite game rules.
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July 19, 2020
America On Paper
The Executive Branch is the most dangerous to the common citizen because it’s where the rifle of state power meets the rights of the Human Being. The Laws passed by The People should only be created and passed under the intent to evoke maximum luminosity of the Common Good, regardless of the identity of the human beings upon whose necks the weight of The Law settles.
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June 27, 2020
If You Want To Learn How America Collapsed, You Should Watch The Wire (Part Two)
How in the holy crazy hell did America just die in front of our eyes these past few months? Well, I’d argue that in a couple of decades, it’s going to look more like Dumbledore’s phoenix Fawkes, rising from its ashes after cataclysmic self-destruction but I’ve often been called an Over-Optimist. Regardless of which side of the political border walls we’ve constructed around each other in our minds, it’s very clear that America is undergoing a rapid period of systemic failure across all three branches of government. But it’s also a moral and spiritual failure that we’ve known about for decades but ignored the klaxons screaming in the ears of three generations.
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June 2, 2020
Five Steps To Saving Your Sanity in 2020
This has been an extraordinarily tough time for every human being alive right now. I have been blessed with the ability to work from home during this time, to have thankfully remained employed and productive, and I have actively tried to use this time and this experience to improve my mental and physical health. Reflecting on my behaviors and the lessons I’ve learned from them over these past three months, I wanted to share what I discovered and what my approach has been in the hopes that someone will gain some value.
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May 31, 2020
The Lesson Of The Vultures
America is no more complicated than this until we get to the behaviors our ancestors conducted against humans of darker skin colors. Then it gets complex and it's generally easier to become violent than it is to look at ourselves in the mirror of living history and listen with calm remorse, and then plan corrective actions and evasive strategem.
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May 30, 2020
Freedom Without Commitment To The Common Good is Just Half-Witted Anarchy
What happens when that solidarity of interest involves a community coming together to refrain from all activity that involves human beings congregating together in a common space? The needs of the individual supersede the laws of man in the case of a global pandemic because they threaten the social foundation upon which those laws were established, but their relationship is circular.
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May 24, 2020
What I’ve Learned From Three Years Of Daily Transcendental Meditation
I was nearly run off the road and it was my fault. I flipped the guy the finger. I looked at him across the lanes of highway traffic, looked him right in the eye, and mouthed the words my finger was already saying. And it nearly got me killed. Something had to change. I had to find a way to avoid my anger controlling my behavior, my life.
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December 8, 2019
The Emotional Portfolio
The primary organizing principle of the human species today lies in building one’s financial portfolio. David Milch’s incredible and short-lived television show Deadwood tells the story of what happens in a place without Law, when one organizing principle of society (Religion) is replaced by another, the pursuit of wealth embodied in the possession of gold. Now, over time gold as a symbol of wealth has been replaced by digital numbers in the cloud. The entire self worth of millions of human beings exists as figment numbers representing an abstract value so detached from reality that these digital billionaires have bought out the political and social machinery of human society to build defensive walls around themselves and hopefully wait out the coming tragedy that will be the poor turning on each other to determine who will serve and who will eat.
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August 24, 2019
Comparing The Lumineers “Angela” to Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs”
Both stories begin with dramatic exits from oppressive small-town life. Both stories end in a hotel with one person begging another one to stay as if they were kneeling at an altar. And both stories likely end up with everyone shattered because putting faith in another human as a source of one’s self-worth, well it just never ends well, does it?
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April 27, 2019
Why Cobra Kai Is One Of Most Important Shows To Watch Right Now
Let’s start with gratitude. Here’s a big Thank You to the writers and producers of this show. And of course thank you to the actors, all of them, but especially Ralph Macchio and a huge bad ass blast of “You’re awesome” showered on William Zabka, who has created one of the most complex and loveable anti-heroes of this generation from what seemed like a used up flat character villain from a sappy teenage drama that so many of us fell hopelessly in love with nearly 40 years ago.
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January 8, 2018
Twin Peaks has been called, “An Outsider’s Show.” As a network television product, Twin Peaks has never been given respect by the standard cadres of criticism and fanfare in the actual years of the show’s broadcast and Season 3 is no exception.
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September 20, 2014
Jim Norton Goes Deep On Technology & The Human Condition
I’ll admit my bias from the beginning. Jim Norton is my favorite comedian working today. First of all, we are the exact same height. Second, he expresses himself in violent words with an ocean of emotion and he does it without pissing off more than a couple of people in the audience after two hours of verbal blitzkrieg. That man deserves respect and that is just what he got from Columbus last night at the early show in the Funny Bone.
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June 1, 2014
The Day I Ran the American Dream: “A Meditation on Running And Individual Freedom”
I recently visited Washington D.C. for the first time. I was on a business trip and had an experience while running that has taken days for me to process. I’ve been wanting to write about the changes in my thoughts about the physical act of running since I published an article in 2013 titled “When Is It Okay To Call Yourself An Athlete?,” an article that was written in the heat of summer when I had just come back from a stay in Florida to the nearly insufferable heat and humidity of Ohio at it’s worst in hot weather. But that Summer, like all of them, eventually faltered into a warm Fall that quickly died and became a very nasty Winter in central Ohio. We get them every 11 years or so and because the Winter was an angry man shouting from the grave, I had to move my running into the windowed cave of a swanky gym in the Arena District where I would drive into the city at 5 AM and run a 5K each day and then head into work in downtown Columbus, Ohio.
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