children of the sun

The Mysterious Cities of Gold
The series first aired in English in the United States on the Nickelodeon cable network from June 30, 1986 to June 29, 1990.

So I watched it when I was in high school. The song is the main part I remember liking about it.

Original opening and theme song:

Video title: Mysterious Cities of Gold
Posted by: Peter Gabriel
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcH_ZTF6smY
Date posted: Feb 20, 2006



New 2012 series - it looks quite good based on the below! I may have to watch it. Someday.

Video title: Mysterious Cities of Gold Season 2 English Theme
Posted by: Misha Wisha
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwvr6Lwhzyg
Date posted: Jul 25, 2013


The Mysterious Cities of Gold Opening Multilanguage Comparison

Below, a very good live performance of the theme song!

Video title: Mysterious Cities of Gold Theme
Posted by: Fil hill
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_kvOSQQ1uE
Date posted: Apr 4, 2020



Here is a different song which seems to be based on the show. The video gives a good overview of the series:

Video title: Children of the Sun - Thomas Bergersen (Mysterious Cities of Gold )
Posted by: Astrotema
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UApLq2C_9rM
Date posted: Jun 28, 2017

sites that sell MP3s, and audio quality

This is a follow-up to my entry about Amazon's MP3 sales interface.

After making that post, I had found this thread:
Has Amazon stopped allowing the 30second sampling of digital music?
One person commented:

"I just got off an Amazon chat with a member of the "dedicated team working on this." Shine wrote, "We haven't removed it permanently. It will be back soon. It has been temporarily removed as our website is getting redesigned in a better way. So, we can expect that option of playing sample music very soon."

Now today I see that the functionality is back again. Amazon's digital music pages let you preview the songs. There are also links again for buying the albums and individual songs. But there's no mention of adding songs to a cart. So I'm not sure yet if the MP3 cart functionality is still there, or if it only lets you buy and download one item at a time.

.

If everything else were the same, I'd prefer buying MP3s somewhere other than Amazon. When music is available on bandcamp, I get it from there as Bandcamp is known to give artists a good deal. And I had found that 7digital is an alternative to Amazon for a lot of the music that isn't available on bandcamp.

But now I'm not sure if the MP3 quality is the same for Amazon vs 7digital.

For this same song from the same album, the Amazon sample sounds much better to me than the 7digital sample:
https://www.amazon.com/Theme-Mysterious-Cities-Gold/dp/B006ITBSE4/
https://us.7digital.com/artist/london-music-works/release/music-for-big-kids-1523739


I've previously determined that I don't need super-duper quality sound files, as I struggle to notice any difference between MP3s encoded at V2 and V9. So if I can tell a difference in the above samples, the worse one must be really bad quality.

But maybe the quality is only bad on the sample, and not on the actual file you get to download. I wonder, and might buy one just to find out.

YouTube stopped sending email notifications

I logged into YouTube in my other browser to leave some "likes" on some of these videos. The main YouTube page showed a video posted recently by one of the channels I'm subscribed to. I started watching it and then realized I haven't gotten any email notifications from YouTube in a long time, to let me know of new videos posted by the people I'm subscribed to.

YouTube Will Stop Sending Email Notifications to Alert Channel Subscribers to New Content

...as of August 13th, 2020, YouTube will no longer send out email notifications to your channel subscribers whenever you upload a new video.

According to YouTube's internal data, less than 0.1% of these emails are ever opened, while users have also complained that such notifications are an annoyance in their ever-cluttered inboxes.

"We didn't see any impact to watch time when we experimented with turning off these emails."

Gah! It stands to reason that I'd be in the 0.1% of anything, yet again.
Although when I got the emails, I didn't click the links in them as that would open them in the wrong browser. And I didn't necessarily load the images in those emails. So they probably weren't even counting me in the 0.1% even though I did use the emails to let me know when there was new content available for me to watch.

And of course it didn't impact watch time, because I watch so much other junk. But now I won't be notified of the good content I specifically subscribed to??!! Gah!

And not to mention, it's been hard in the past to keep getting the emails too, because it seems that they never *did* send them by default. I had to go into the settings and select to receive emails for each channel that I was subscribed to. So why they wouldn't still keep that as an option if you *choose* it...

:: the world makes no sense ::

Gee, I wonder if there's a third-party service that would be able to check your YouTube subscriptions for you, and email you whenever something new has been posted...

Oh, and I just realized that YouTube never bothered emailing *me* to let me know about this, either as someone who posts videos on YouTube or as someone who watches them. Which of course, as YouTube doesn't CARE about those 0.1% of viewers, why would they?