Events in our lives come and go and we find ourselves in places we would otherwise never venture surrounded by people we would never meet under different circumstances. Consider applying for a job at a company whose services you personally would never want or have call to use - working at a PR company, a media outlet or a commercial insurance company for example. In these situations we meet people whose paths would never cross our own. We live in bubbles, admittedly they vary in size but they generally have a limit, an edge beyond which people are unknown to us.
Forming friendships with people you meet through circumstance can be quite hard. Where we have multiple shared interests with people and our paths are likely to cross we find it easier to find a common ground; but when we find ourselves placed in the company of people who are completely unknown to us the only thing we can take for granted is that we are both there for the same reason - although even that can be quite difficult to assert at times.
Of the people I have known the longest in my life the majority are people who I would have met through any number of ways, who were known to me before I met them or known to people who were already close to me. Of the people I have met through circumstance - and to be clear by circumstance I mean the only reason you come together is that you were put together, and made no effort to meet that person in particular - none have managed to stay in my life. One or two have tried, and I do recognise their efforts, and in no way do I wish to seem arrogant but I don't believe they could have stayed in my life no matter how hard they tried. There has to be a joint effort for it to work.
The only people who have managed to stay in my life are people I truly believe I would have met anyway - if things had been slightly different and we had never met when we did then something else would have brought us together. You can jump to the conclusion that I don't like stepping outside of my "bubble" and I don't mind if you do because I certainly don't think I am the only one - as I said we all have bubbles and we rarely venture beyond them. It's only when they overlap and they join to create a bigger bubble that they expand. Proximity alone is not enough and perhaps the biggest fear that holds people back from stepping beyond their bubble is that they can pop - one prick steps into your bubble and the whole world can come crashing down.
I have been deleting contacts from my phone and generally cleaning house. After deleting hundreds of old emails and text messages I've archived a lot and sent a lot straight to the bin but it got me thinking about each of the people I was deleting and how I met them. About a dozen or so were from my University days - none of which I have spoken to in years. A handful were from College who survived the first purge a few years ago but I have now fallen out of touch with. There's no ill feeling harboured for anyone I deleted though we're just in different places now than we once were. It's always strange though when you look back at the person you were when you knew them and think about how different your life is now. The thoughts and opinions we have on trivial things change, the music you once loved no longer appeals or the movies you were once in awe of now seem low rent.
I'd like you to think about the people in your life and how you met them. Consider if things had been different would you still have met through other means? How many people have you met through circumstance and stayed in touch with?
Counting
How would I kiss your lips let me count the ways,
How long must I wait for you let me count the days,
What I would do for you numbers cannot surmise,
Would you see the love I hold within my eyes?
My heart skips a beat for even it defies time,
Racing forward toward the day when you will be mine,
When I will hold you close within my arms,
As my knees feel weakened by your boundless charms.
How long must I wait for you let me count the days,
What I would do for you numbers cannot surmise,
Would you see the love I hold within my eyes?
My heart skips a beat for even it defies time,
Racing forward toward the day when you will be mine,
When I will hold you close within my arms,
As my knees feel weakened by your boundless charms.
Frustration
I am a cynical person. I admit that openly. I am the person I have become through the experiences I have had in life. Increasingly I am feeling the bitter taste of rejection. I did get down over it but that was short lived, the sadness has been replaced with anger, not borne of rage but borne of the animosity for those that think they know what is best for you.
I am 25 years old and I think it is incredibly patronising to think you can judge 25 years of experience in 15 minutes. I also think it is insulting when people tell you that you are "the perfect candidate" and then reject you anyway. "There was nothing more you could have done, we've just gone with someone else" - actual feedback I received on an interview.
Paranoia is a sickly thing, more so when that paranoia is based on assumptions you have no way of proving or disproving.
I am gay - I do not know how obvious that is to other people who meet me, I have no way of knowing as everyone I know, knows I am gay so their responses are biased.
I have a disability - I know this one at least is visible when you meet me.
I am a man - something we in the western world like to be told is an advantage in gaining employment and that its harder for women to get a job, I honestly don't know how true that is though.
I am young - this is obvious and there's nothing I can do about it, I can't grow old quicker.
There are 4 points about me, some obvious some maybe not so - they often play on my mind as reasons for rejection - the trouble is if one or more of those reasons were the motivation behind your rejection, it's very hard to prove.
I went for an interview at a company which shall remain nameless for legal reasons, but everyone that worked for it that I came into contact was a woman. They are the company that gave the feedback that there was nothing I could have done better - feedback I had to chase the company to provide I might add. Feedback which in the process of chasing every contact I was passed on to was a woman. Was I turned down because I am a man? I don't know - could I prove it if it was the case? No probably not.
I went for another interview some time ago with a different company who I believe rejected me because of my disability. I had to chase them for feedback too not just on the initial interview but on the recruitment process I made it through. In the end the feedback they gave was the same as the company above, that there was nothing more I could have done and nothing negative they had to say. I am convinced that my disability was the reason I was rejected. How do I prove that? I can't.
I went for another interview with another different company, this one was 2 days ago. I received a rejection today and received feedback which was tantamount to "you would be wasted in this company, you can do better" - that right there is perhaps the most infuriating response I have had to date - someone that knows and recognises the barriers that you face but then turns around and raises the same barriers. I'm not getting any younger, and when a company won't even accept you for an entry level position it really is frustrating, so frustrating.
I am 25 years old and I think it is incredibly patronising to think you can judge 25 years of experience in 15 minutes. I also think it is insulting when people tell you that you are "the perfect candidate" and then reject you anyway. "There was nothing more you could have done, we've just gone with someone else" - actual feedback I received on an interview.
Paranoia is a sickly thing, more so when that paranoia is based on assumptions you have no way of proving or disproving.
I am gay - I do not know how obvious that is to other people who meet me, I have no way of knowing as everyone I know, knows I am gay so their responses are biased.
I have a disability - I know this one at least is visible when you meet me.
I am a man - something we in the western world like to be told is an advantage in gaining employment and that its harder for women to get a job, I honestly don't know how true that is though.
I am young - this is obvious and there's nothing I can do about it, I can't grow old quicker.
There are 4 points about me, some obvious some maybe not so - they often play on my mind as reasons for rejection - the trouble is if one or more of those reasons were the motivation behind your rejection, it's very hard to prove.
I went for an interview at a company which shall remain nameless for legal reasons, but everyone that worked for it that I came into contact was a woman. They are the company that gave the feedback that there was nothing I could have done better - feedback I had to chase the company to provide I might add. Feedback which in the process of chasing every contact I was passed on to was a woman. Was I turned down because I am a man? I don't know - could I prove it if it was the case? No probably not.
I went for another interview some time ago with a different company who I believe rejected me because of my disability. I had to chase them for feedback too not just on the initial interview but on the recruitment process I made it through. In the end the feedback they gave was the same as the company above, that there was nothing more I could have done and nothing negative they had to say. I am convinced that my disability was the reason I was rejected. How do I prove that? I can't.
I went for another interview with another different company, this one was 2 days ago. I received a rejection today and received feedback which was tantamount to "you would be wasted in this company, you can do better" - that right there is perhaps the most infuriating response I have had to date - someone that knows and recognises the barriers that you face but then turns around and raises the same barriers. I'm not getting any younger, and when a company won't even accept you for an entry level position it really is frustrating, so frustrating.
Tempting Fate
It's October 25th, and although there are still 5 days left in this month - a lot can happen in 5 days - I can't help but feel like I owe an apology to it. That may sound crazy and I hold my hands up and admit that freely; but a few days into this month I called it Cuntober. I called it that because I've had a few bad Octobers in my life and so have my family.
For me personally I've had financial burdens dumped on me - something that repeated itself this year. People have died in my family in Octobers past - again something that repeated itself this year with the passing of my Great Uncle a few days ago. I've had heartaches, lost people who I thought would be in my life forever but for various reasons we parted ways, some happily, some not so much.
The start of this month wasn't good and I was bracing myself for a month of Hell because that's what we do when we have bad experiences in our past - we let them influence our present and dictate our future. For all that has happened though, this month hasn't been the worst. Therein lies the tempting fate - I do not want to jinx myself but this month has thrown hurdles at me as the previous Octobers did too but one thing has changed - my reactions. Last October was deeply depressing for me when I got a job and then lost it in the blink of an eye. The year before I parted ways with someone I wanted to be in my life forever. That really choked me up at the time, partly because I thought he was amazing but mainly because he was there at a time when I really needed someone. Thankfully we're still in touch and it doesn't hurt to know that he's happy which is such a big thing for me. If you know me at all the one thing you will never protest is that all I want from and for the people in my life is for them to be happy.
My reactions have changed though. Maybe you can call that maturity, or maybe you can call it unbridled cynicism, whatever it is though I think it's positive. At least for me it is. I'm dealing with things in a much more productive way.
October this year has not been rosy. A lot has happened that I am not happy about. I will be glad when this month is over so I can move on but the idea that I can harbour resentment towards something as arbitrary as a date range on a calendar now seems to be so infantile. I know I am not alone though. I know this month has kicked a few people in the nuts too - and to them I wish that things get better, I wish I could do more but I can't. There have been a few positives in this month for me, one or two were short lived though, and there are still potentials. The potentials could go either way though, so ask me in a week how the month went and I'll let you know but for now I'm trying to focus on whatever I can salvage.
For me personally I've had financial burdens dumped on me - something that repeated itself this year. People have died in my family in Octobers past - again something that repeated itself this year with the passing of my Great Uncle a few days ago. I've had heartaches, lost people who I thought would be in my life forever but for various reasons we parted ways, some happily, some not so much.
The start of this month wasn't good and I was bracing myself for a month of Hell because that's what we do when we have bad experiences in our past - we let them influence our present and dictate our future. For all that has happened though, this month hasn't been the worst. Therein lies the tempting fate - I do not want to jinx myself but this month has thrown hurdles at me as the previous Octobers did too but one thing has changed - my reactions. Last October was deeply depressing for me when I got a job and then lost it in the blink of an eye. The year before I parted ways with someone I wanted to be in my life forever. That really choked me up at the time, partly because I thought he was amazing but mainly because he was there at a time when I really needed someone. Thankfully we're still in touch and it doesn't hurt to know that he's happy which is such a big thing for me. If you know me at all the one thing you will never protest is that all I want from and for the people in my life is for them to be happy.
My reactions have changed though. Maybe you can call that maturity, or maybe you can call it unbridled cynicism, whatever it is though I think it's positive. At least for me it is. I'm dealing with things in a much more productive way.
October this year has not been rosy. A lot has happened that I am not happy about. I will be glad when this month is over so I can move on but the idea that I can harbour resentment towards something as arbitrary as a date range on a calendar now seems to be so infantile. I know I am not alone though. I know this month has kicked a few people in the nuts too - and to them I wish that things get better, I wish I could do more but I can't. There have been a few positives in this month for me, one or two were short lived though, and there are still potentials. The potentials could go either way though, so ask me in a week how the month went and I'll let you know but for now I'm trying to focus on whatever I can salvage.
The Speed Of Time
They say time flies when you're having fun and that it drags when you're bored out of your mind or when you're waiting for something - like a package being delivered. The last week or so time has really been dragging for me, which is frustrating because this year to date has literally flown by for me. I have to question whether it has really been ten months already but it has, and I know the C word is dreaded but Christmas will be here before you know it. So it's incredibly frustrating that time has to slow down now!
There are a few things I am waiting for, the next week or so will be quite busy for me but for all I have to do, a lot of it I really would like to get over and done with pretty quickly. If time really does slow down when we want it to speed up, and speeds up when we want it to slow down, then why can't we just want the opposite in order to make it happen? How is it that our perception knows when we are sincere in which we want - more than that if we ultimately get the thing we want least, does that apply to other parts of our lives?
I've wrote about The Secret before on this blog and said that I know how it works but there are moments like this that make me doubt that judgement and question whether that hokum has some truth to it. I am in no way converted in making this admission I still think it's a load but still most bull shit has some basis in truth.
There are a few things I am waiting for, the next week or so will be quite busy for me but for all I have to do, a lot of it I really would like to get over and done with pretty quickly. If time really does slow down when we want it to speed up, and speeds up when we want it to slow down, then why can't we just want the opposite in order to make it happen? How is it that our perception knows when we are sincere in which we want - more than that if we ultimately get the thing we want least, does that apply to other parts of our lives?
I've wrote about The Secret before on this blog and said that I know how it works but there are moments like this that make me doubt that judgement and question whether that hokum has some truth to it. I am in no way converted in making this admission I still think it's a load but still most bull shit has some basis in truth.
Silence and Patience
You open your mouth but no sound escapes, the lyrics you mouth speak volumes that would shatter even the coldest heart of stone, yet the words that no-one hears are not silenced by the hand of another but by your own. Silence is your friend, you have known him all your life he has offered you protection, promises of a life worth living and above all else, peace. He has whispered sweet nothings in your ear that no-one else can hear, with a voice that carries no sound. He seduces you, enticing you with everything in life you desire. His brother, Patience, stands behind you, forever in the corner of your eye, never in your direct line of sight, you feel his embrace, but it is not one of love it is one of control. He binds your hands and holds you in place, Silence lies in front of you, Patience behind.
They are weak. One word is all it takes to break them both, one word brings Silence to his knees while Patience cowers, trembling at your sight as you look down upon him and see him for what he really is. Silence and Patience pray upon you, keeping you in your place, rooted to the ground where you can do no harm to their world. Their world it is true holds everything you desire, but they never intended to share it with you, your place was set in stone, there you would stand for all eternity.
Strength comes from within, and power comes from your voice, when you learn to use it then you will inherit the power to change the world. The world was never changed through patience and silence, for they breed complacency and conservation, to which change is orthogonal.
They are weak. One word is all it takes to break them both, one word brings Silence to his knees while Patience cowers, trembling at your sight as you look down upon him and see him for what he really is. Silence and Patience pray upon you, keeping you in your place, rooted to the ground where you can do no harm to their world. Their world it is true holds everything you desire, but they never intended to share it with you, your place was set in stone, there you would stand for all eternity.
Strength comes from within, and power comes from your voice, when you learn to use it then you will inherit the power to change the world. The world was never changed through patience and silence, for they breed complacency and conservation, to which change is orthogonal.
Epiphany - Again
Epiphany is something I have written about quite a lot - that moment of sudden realisation that makes everything clear to you. I've written about it in the context of problems we try to solve and then almost give up only to find that moment occur that makes us realise the solution.
There is another epiphany though that I haven't written about and that's the type that causes you to re-evaluate your life. By that I don't mean where you are right now, I mean your past and what you have done. Epiphany in this context can completely rewrite our past, when we suddenly realise things we were oblivious to before. These moment of epiphany can almost rewrite history and it can make you very paranoid.
I've had a moment of epiphany that's made me re-evaluate my life during high school and college. There are seminal events in my life I now have to re-evaluate and think about from an entirely new perspective and that perspective is considerably more negative than I had already - which for me is quite disturbing because my perspective was already quite negative to begin with.
Seeing things from your own point of view you can only assess how those events affected you directly and how they made you feel. When you look at them from another point of view though, especially those events involving other people you have to re-evaluate how those events affected them too, and most importantly the interaction that occurred and the intended consequences of each side.
I realise I am being cryptic so I'll give you a fictional example. Imagine you and another person out hunting and they missed their shot narrowly missing you. Heated words would exchange more than likely and apologies exchanged. You would dismiss that event as being an accident and the other person being careless. You would be upset and angry. Now imagine a few years pass and you find out that they didn't like you as a friend as much as you had thought. Consider then how you would look back on that event and wonder - was that shot intentional? Did they try to kill you?
If you follow the example above then you will know where I am coming from, the events of our past and how they affected us, and what we thought of those events can be completely rewritten when we are given another point of view - finding out they didn't like you makes you re-evaluate the event and consider the possibility that it wasn't an accident that they almost hit you, but rather it becomes an accident that they missed you.
This fundamental change is something only epiphany can cause, paranoia can make us think of ulterior motives, but only epiphany can make us re-evaluate the event in context, because epiphany does not take just that event into account but every other linked event and every other memory that could be drawn in to the equation - like a brainstorming session where all the different ideas are pooled together and pieced together like a jigsaw.
I said I've had a moment of epiphany and it has indeed made me re-evaluate quite a significant portion of my life. If proves to be true then it turns me into something I never wanted to be.
I feel like my soul has been ripped from my body right now. I feel like my conscience transcends space and time and that I have been disconnected. I have had out of body experiences before but this is quite different. I can see more than I ever wanted to see and I am not sure I am comfortable with it.
There is another epiphany though that I haven't written about and that's the type that causes you to re-evaluate your life. By that I don't mean where you are right now, I mean your past and what you have done. Epiphany in this context can completely rewrite our past, when we suddenly realise things we were oblivious to before. These moment of epiphany can almost rewrite history and it can make you very paranoid.
I've had a moment of epiphany that's made me re-evaluate my life during high school and college. There are seminal events in my life I now have to re-evaluate and think about from an entirely new perspective and that perspective is considerably more negative than I had already - which for me is quite disturbing because my perspective was already quite negative to begin with.
Seeing things from your own point of view you can only assess how those events affected you directly and how they made you feel. When you look at them from another point of view though, especially those events involving other people you have to re-evaluate how those events affected them too, and most importantly the interaction that occurred and the intended consequences of each side.
I realise I am being cryptic so I'll give you a fictional example. Imagine you and another person out hunting and they missed their shot narrowly missing you. Heated words would exchange more than likely and apologies exchanged. You would dismiss that event as being an accident and the other person being careless. You would be upset and angry. Now imagine a few years pass and you find out that they didn't like you as a friend as much as you had thought. Consider then how you would look back on that event and wonder - was that shot intentional? Did they try to kill you?
If you follow the example above then you will know where I am coming from, the events of our past and how they affected us, and what we thought of those events can be completely rewritten when we are given another point of view - finding out they didn't like you makes you re-evaluate the event and consider the possibility that it wasn't an accident that they almost hit you, but rather it becomes an accident that they missed you.
This fundamental change is something only epiphany can cause, paranoia can make us think of ulterior motives, but only epiphany can make us re-evaluate the event in context, because epiphany does not take just that event into account but every other linked event and every other memory that could be drawn in to the equation - like a brainstorming session where all the different ideas are pooled together and pieced together like a jigsaw.
I said I've had a moment of epiphany and it has indeed made me re-evaluate quite a significant portion of my life. If proves to be true then it turns me into something I never wanted to be.
I feel like my soul has been ripped from my body right now. I feel like my conscience transcends space and time and that I have been disconnected. I have had out of body experiences before but this is quite different. I can see more than I ever wanted to see and I am not sure I am comfortable with it.
Data Logging
I read a BBC News article titled "Web porn: Just how much is there?" - something admittedly I would not have expected the BBC to even cover in the first place. The article content didn't interest me much as I have read various estimates and guesstimates on this over the years and in my own experience you find porn in the places you would least expect - more than that the definition of porn itself is one that is not that clear, you would likely argue for instance that Youtube does not contain porn but that really comes down to what you define as porn, if we are talking about things you find sexually arousing and what you can masturbate to then for quite a lot of people yes there is porn to be found even on a site that officially does not allow it.
This is getting beside the point though, what did interest me about the article was this rather curious quote:
"According to estimates from Scandinavian research centre Sintef, 90% of all the data the human race has ever produced has been generated in the past two years"
Now if we ignore the debate about when the Human race was born and simply go with the one thing we can probably agree on - the birth of civilisation, which is marked to have been around 10,000 BC, that means that we as a race have lived in some form of civilised society for the past 12,000 years give or take. To consider the possibility that in the last 2 years alone we have generated more data than humanity did in the preceding 11,998 years is something that at first is quite unbelievable.
However, considering this quote and taking time to reflect on it, I do have to ask, is it really that unbelievable? I mean we live in a world that is connected like never before. There is an unprecedented amount of monitoring and logging of data to be processed - both authorised and unauthorised, through consensual agreements like your ISP's right to log every connection you make, to espionage and snooping. Computers themselves are a remarkable testament to how fast we are progressing now than at any other point in history. Beyond our habits on a PC though our day to day lives consist of fountains of information generation. Every single thing we buy is logged in some way or another, anywhere you get a receipt a copy of that transaction is stored in the computers of that retailer. From food to phone bills.
The question is raised - does this actually represent an increase in production or are we simply living in a time where the data we generate is recorded? i.e. did people thousands of years ago generate just as much it was just not recorded? We only have to look at our own society and see things that we had the capacity to record for a long time but never bothered - weather records from hundreds of years or thousands of years ago for example. It would have been simple enough to record a brief summary of the weather day by day for future generations to reference. Instead we end up in the situation where a lot of our historical records only mention events that were abnormal.
That does inspire another question though, maybe we should consider taking a leaf out of our ancestors' books and consider whether we really need to record everything that can be recorded - i.e. consider what is and is not noteworthy and only record that which is and discard the rest. The only problem I can foresee with that is that future generations would likely end up in the same situation as we are now - they might one day want to draw on records of something we decided wasn't noteworthy; maybe our ancestors thought "Oh no-one is going to care what the weather was like every day, don't bother writing that down"
The question remains, should we really be recording everything we can just because we can?
This is getting beside the point though, what did interest me about the article was this rather curious quote:
"According to estimates from Scandinavian research centre Sintef, 90% of all the data the human race has ever produced has been generated in the past two years"
Now if we ignore the debate about when the Human race was born and simply go with the one thing we can probably agree on - the birth of civilisation, which is marked to have been around 10,000 BC, that means that we as a race have lived in some form of civilised society for the past 12,000 years give or take. To consider the possibility that in the last 2 years alone we have generated more data than humanity did in the preceding 11,998 years is something that at first is quite unbelievable.
However, considering this quote and taking time to reflect on it, I do have to ask, is it really that unbelievable? I mean we live in a world that is connected like never before. There is an unprecedented amount of monitoring and logging of data to be processed - both authorised and unauthorised, through consensual agreements like your ISP's right to log every connection you make, to espionage and snooping. Computers themselves are a remarkable testament to how fast we are progressing now than at any other point in history. Beyond our habits on a PC though our day to day lives consist of fountains of information generation. Every single thing we buy is logged in some way or another, anywhere you get a receipt a copy of that transaction is stored in the computers of that retailer. From food to phone bills.
The question is raised - does this actually represent an increase in production or are we simply living in a time where the data we generate is recorded? i.e. did people thousands of years ago generate just as much it was just not recorded? We only have to look at our own society and see things that we had the capacity to record for a long time but never bothered - weather records from hundreds of years or thousands of years ago for example. It would have been simple enough to record a brief summary of the weather day by day for future generations to reference. Instead we end up in the situation where a lot of our historical records only mention events that were abnormal.
That does inspire another question though, maybe we should consider taking a leaf out of our ancestors' books and consider whether we really need to record everything that can be recorded - i.e. consider what is and is not noteworthy and only record that which is and discard the rest. The only problem I can foresee with that is that future generations would likely end up in the same situation as we are now - they might one day want to draw on records of something we decided wasn't noteworthy; maybe our ancestors thought "Oh no-one is going to care what the weather was like every day, don't bother writing that down"
The question remains, should we really be recording everything we can just because we can?
Ask or be asked?
I had a rather interesting conversation tonight about marriage, since it's quite likely that it will soon be legalised for same sex couples here in the UK - the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) bill is currently resident in the House of Lords, after a committee, report, and third reading it will return to the House of Commons where it will be addressed for the final time before it becomes law.
A question arose in our conversation of who we would prefer to ask the question and I had to think for a moment. In a heterosexual couple, it's traditional for the male to propose, with the exception of leap year proposals where a female would propose to the male. That was tradition something which many have said has little influence today - however I would argue that of all the women I have known every one of them wanted to be asked rather than asking. Rather interesting when Civil Partnerships came along I had never considered the question of who would ask - namely because I would not of had a Civil Partnership, I want to get Married.
Who would be the one "expected" to propose then? Well in any gay couple regardless of gender there won't be a 'man' and a 'woman' - any preconceived notions of gay men or lesbians conforming to this binary pairing should be put out of your head, our relationships don't work like that, no matter what you may have been led to believe.
There is perhaps a question of Psychology, that perhaps whichever partner is the most socially dominant would be the one to ask, but even this I find hard to use as a rule of thumb because as I have said in other posts on this blog, our social and sexual standing is often reversed - those who are dominant socially are often submissive sexually. You could perhaps say that sexual dominance should determine who asks, but even that is hard to do as sex and love aren't the same thing.
Then perhaps there should be a third standing, an aggregate position that combines your social and sexual role and produces your overall standing in the relationship as a whole? The problem with this is that there are a lot of factors beyond social and sexual roles in a relationship that would determine your overall position. There is also the question of whether you should be in one position or the other at all - the argument that a balanced relationship would see both partners as equal and therefore neither as being dominant or submissive, in other words, equal.
The problem with that is we don't get an answer to our question, who should be the one to ask? I would argue that your inclination to ask would be based both on a selfish consideration of your own desire, and a selfless consideration of whether your partner is ready - marriage is a big step.
Personally I think I would rather be asked than be the one to ask. Having said that anyone who knew me that intimately would tell you that it would be hard to tell when I was ready and it would also be a bad idea to ask too soon [yea, I know, I have issue but so does everyone whether they admit it or not] the result is that I would most likely end up being the one who would ask, not out of personal desire but out of necessity.
There is the romantic element which is the most compelling, whilst most of the above takes the stance of debating being the one to ask, there is a romanticism to be found in the idea of being asked. Most straight guys will never have dreamed or fantasised about being asked, many straight girls will have though. For a gay person though there is no predisposition of that nature, either or both could have grown up dreaming of being asked. That puts you in the position where one would have to give up that dream to be with the one they love.
Love can move mountains, and there is no limit to what we will sacrifice for someone we truly love, and so we end up back at square one. Who should be the one to ask? Or rather, who will be the one to ask?
A question arose in our conversation of who we would prefer to ask the question and I had to think for a moment. In a heterosexual couple, it's traditional for the male to propose, with the exception of leap year proposals where a female would propose to the male. That was tradition something which many have said has little influence today - however I would argue that of all the women I have known every one of them wanted to be asked rather than asking. Rather interesting when Civil Partnerships came along I had never considered the question of who would ask - namely because I would not of had a Civil Partnership, I want to get Married.
Who would be the one "expected" to propose then? Well in any gay couple regardless of gender there won't be a 'man' and a 'woman' - any preconceived notions of gay men or lesbians conforming to this binary pairing should be put out of your head, our relationships don't work like that, no matter what you may have been led to believe.
There is perhaps a question of Psychology, that perhaps whichever partner is the most socially dominant would be the one to ask, but even this I find hard to use as a rule of thumb because as I have said in other posts on this blog, our social and sexual standing is often reversed - those who are dominant socially are often submissive sexually. You could perhaps say that sexual dominance should determine who asks, but even that is hard to do as sex and love aren't the same thing.
Then perhaps there should be a third standing, an aggregate position that combines your social and sexual role and produces your overall standing in the relationship as a whole? The problem with this is that there are a lot of factors beyond social and sexual roles in a relationship that would determine your overall position. There is also the question of whether you should be in one position or the other at all - the argument that a balanced relationship would see both partners as equal and therefore neither as being dominant or submissive, in other words, equal.
The problem with that is we don't get an answer to our question, who should be the one to ask? I would argue that your inclination to ask would be based both on a selfish consideration of your own desire, and a selfless consideration of whether your partner is ready - marriage is a big step.
Personally I think I would rather be asked than be the one to ask. Having said that anyone who knew me that intimately would tell you that it would be hard to tell when I was ready and it would also be a bad idea to ask too soon [yea, I know, I have issue but so does everyone whether they admit it or not] the result is that I would most likely end up being the one who would ask, not out of personal desire but out of necessity.
There is the romantic element which is the most compelling, whilst most of the above takes the stance of debating being the one to ask, there is a romanticism to be found in the idea of being asked. Most straight guys will never have dreamed or fantasised about being asked, many straight girls will have though. For a gay person though there is no predisposition of that nature, either or both could have grown up dreaming of being asked. That puts you in the position where one would have to give up that dream to be with the one they love.
Love can move mountains, and there is no limit to what we will sacrifice for someone we truly love, and so we end up back at square one. Who should be the one to ask? Or rather, who will be the one to ask?
Dance of Despair
Empty dreams and silent screams,
The music dies as a lone man cries,
The night has been and met its end,
In a world void of hope yet masked in smiles
Nothing is ever what it seems,
Ignore the mask yet meet the eyes,
Every stranger is a potential friend,
But not if your soul within torment riles
Take my hand come and dance with me,
If just for one night set your soul free
The music dies as a lone man cries,
The night has been and met its end,
In a world void of hope yet masked in smiles
Nothing is ever what it seems,
Ignore the mask yet meet the eyes,
Every stranger is a potential friend,
But not if your soul within torment riles
Take my hand come and dance with me,
If just for one night set your soul free
When should you buy content?
With the range of services you can use online like NetFlix that let you watch as many TV Shows and Movies as you want, or subscription based music services that let you listen to whatever you want whenever you want there is a question you need to ask - when should you buy content?
Buying content is defined in the traditional sense that is you pay a price and get the content to keep. Whereas renting content can be defined as buying a subscription for access to content which allows you to access the content so long as you are subscribed, but you don't get to keep it, so when your subscription ends so does access to the content.
In the two scenarios, the former, buying content, without a doubt will cost the most in the long term. The latter will cost less, the only catch is that when you stop your subscription you can't access the content.
Buying content only makes sense if you are going to watch the content hundreds of times or you need access to it without an internet connection. I say this because when most people buy DVDs for instance they don't watch every DVD they own hundreds of times. In fact some DVDs you own you've probably only watched once or twice at the most.
We have over a hundred DVDs, I know people that have extensive collections that take up entire rooms, but really there's only so many times you can watch every one of them. Even if you don't do anything but watch DVDs all day and all night there will still be a limit to the number you can conceivably watch. There comes a point were you will have redundant content. That is content that you have, but don't need, and probably never use.
If you have 200 DVDs and you paid £15 for each one then you will have spent £3,000 on DVDs. NetFlix membership costs £6 per month, with the first month free. For the cost of your DVDs you could have paid for 500 months + 1 free of NetFlix, that's 41 years and 9 months. Now consider the fact that membership of £6 per month gives you access to NetFlix entire library with near unlimited usage. When you compare the two scenarios, the latter, renting content, makes more sense economically arguably it leads to greater freedom in content choice as well.
Now I realise this entire blog post sounds like an advert for NetFlix but the concept doesn't just apply to it, it applies to a number of other things. I do question whether in a world that seems to push people towards buying things, how much could we save if we rented things instead? Consider your car. If you buy a car that car becomes your sole responsibility, your upkeep. You need to pay for repairs, it likely costs a fortune in the first place. Consider the cost of renting a car instead. You rent the car for a fixed term and then rent another. You get a new car each time. Repairs and upkeep are the responsibility of the company you rent it from. Really the only thing you pay for is the rent and the fuel.
I live in a Western country, arguably one that is considered capitalist and one that promotes the capitalist idea of the ownership of private property but truth be told I have to question whether it actually makes sense to buy things and own them as opposed to renting and using them. Movies are just an example of this idea.
Buying content is defined in the traditional sense that is you pay a price and get the content to keep. Whereas renting content can be defined as buying a subscription for access to content which allows you to access the content so long as you are subscribed, but you don't get to keep it, so when your subscription ends so does access to the content.
In the two scenarios, the former, buying content, without a doubt will cost the most in the long term. The latter will cost less, the only catch is that when you stop your subscription you can't access the content.
Buying content only makes sense if you are going to watch the content hundreds of times or you need access to it without an internet connection. I say this because when most people buy DVDs for instance they don't watch every DVD they own hundreds of times. In fact some DVDs you own you've probably only watched once or twice at the most.
We have over a hundred DVDs, I know people that have extensive collections that take up entire rooms, but really there's only so many times you can watch every one of them. Even if you don't do anything but watch DVDs all day and all night there will still be a limit to the number you can conceivably watch. There comes a point were you will have redundant content. That is content that you have, but don't need, and probably never use.
If you have 200 DVDs and you paid £15 for each one then you will have spent £3,000 on DVDs. NetFlix membership costs £6 per month, with the first month free. For the cost of your DVDs you could have paid for 500 months + 1 free of NetFlix, that's 41 years and 9 months. Now consider the fact that membership of £6 per month gives you access to NetFlix entire library with near unlimited usage. When you compare the two scenarios, the latter, renting content, makes more sense economically arguably it leads to greater freedom in content choice as well.
Now I realise this entire blog post sounds like an advert for NetFlix but the concept doesn't just apply to it, it applies to a number of other things. I do question whether in a world that seems to push people towards buying things, how much could we save if we rented things instead? Consider your car. If you buy a car that car becomes your sole responsibility, your upkeep. You need to pay for repairs, it likely costs a fortune in the first place. Consider the cost of renting a car instead. You rent the car for a fixed term and then rent another. You get a new car each time. Repairs and upkeep are the responsibility of the company you rent it from. Really the only thing you pay for is the rent and the fuel.
I live in a Western country, arguably one that is considered capitalist and one that promotes the capitalist idea of the ownership of private property but truth be told I have to question whether it actually makes sense to buy things and own them as opposed to renting and using them. Movies are just an example of this idea.
Hatred Reborn
There was a time, when 'hate' was an extreme word, when it was only used to mean what it meant. To hate something truly meant to truly hate. Today hate and dislike have become synonymous. I blame this for the extremities in our world. When did we become so extreme that anything we disliked it was socially acceptable to say we hated it? Has real hatred become acceptable in society because we have forgotten how to define the difference between things we dislike and things we hate?
Spend 10 minutes on any forum or social network or a site like youtube open to comments and you quickly see that negative moderation seems to have died. I say negative as positive moderation still exists, for that I blame or I guess I should say thank, facebook. Through the popularisation of the word 'like' facebook has managed to keep the word like in our vocabulary and in such a way that it makes it true to its definition. The valuation of a "like" on facebook is negligible. It means nothing more than what it states, that someone has a moderately positive view of whatever it is they "liked" - it doesn't mean they love it, and it doesn't really signify any deep rooted emotional attachment to a brand - although if you follow social marketing spiel you'd believe "likes" were the holy grail of marketing.
No. 'like' on facebook is a moderate indicator of positive opinion. It means "I don't mind XX" - as a result like, and love, still exist in our vocabulary as distinct entities. They still exist as differentiable levels of positive accord. Dislike and hate however have melded into one common meaning, that now acts as a catch-all to the point where expressing the sentiment "I don't like XX" is by many viewed as a remark of hate. For this I could arguably turn to facebook again, this time unquestionably the correct term would be 'blame' - they are to blame for this, they contributed to this wholeheartedly. Facebook has never had a "dislike" button, despite the multitude of efforts by members over the years urging the network to create one.
As a result it is my view that 3 levels exist today:
I like this
I love this
I hate this
People have forgotten how to say "I don't like this" without it having to mean anything at all other than a simple statement of whether or not you feel positive or negative about something.
Where's the line between dislike and hatred? Or rather where was it? Well that's rather easy to answer, again it comes down to the role of active and passive emotion. Disliking something was a passive emotion, "I don't like this, but meh I don't care" whereas hatred was an active emotion "I hate this, and I am gonna make sure the whole world knows" - the latter is the problem we find ourselves with. There is no moderate negative emotion anymore, it is always extreme.
There will of course be people who read this and disagree, and I welcome that, I would argue that you are in a minority however, and I would even go so far as to say that this is self evident as you will likely already know this. You may be moderate, but you will surely know from experience that your moderation is rare online. "We do exist" is something that becomes increasingly harder to convince people to believe.
Spend 10 minutes on any forum or social network or a site like youtube open to comments and you quickly see that negative moderation seems to have died. I say negative as positive moderation still exists, for that I blame or I guess I should say thank, facebook. Through the popularisation of the word 'like' facebook has managed to keep the word like in our vocabulary and in such a way that it makes it true to its definition. The valuation of a "like" on facebook is negligible. It means nothing more than what it states, that someone has a moderately positive view of whatever it is they "liked" - it doesn't mean they love it, and it doesn't really signify any deep rooted emotional attachment to a brand - although if you follow social marketing spiel you'd believe "likes" were the holy grail of marketing.
No. 'like' on facebook is a moderate indicator of positive opinion. It means "I don't mind XX" - as a result like, and love, still exist in our vocabulary as distinct entities. They still exist as differentiable levels of positive accord. Dislike and hate however have melded into one common meaning, that now acts as a catch-all to the point where expressing the sentiment "I don't like XX" is by many viewed as a remark of hate. For this I could arguably turn to facebook again, this time unquestionably the correct term would be 'blame' - they are to blame for this, they contributed to this wholeheartedly. Facebook has never had a "dislike" button, despite the multitude of efforts by members over the years urging the network to create one.
As a result it is my view that 3 levels exist today:
I like this
I love this
I hate this
People have forgotten how to say "I don't like this" without it having to mean anything at all other than a simple statement of whether or not you feel positive or negative about something.
Where's the line between dislike and hatred? Or rather where was it? Well that's rather easy to answer, again it comes down to the role of active and passive emotion. Disliking something was a passive emotion, "I don't like this, but meh I don't care" whereas hatred was an active emotion "I hate this, and I am gonna make sure the whole world knows" - the latter is the problem we find ourselves with. There is no moderate negative emotion anymore, it is always extreme.
There will of course be people who read this and disagree, and I welcome that, I would argue that you are in a minority however, and I would even go so far as to say that this is self evident as you will likely already know this. You may be moderate, but you will surely know from experience that your moderation is rare online. "We do exist" is something that becomes increasingly harder to convince people to believe.
Online Life Expectancy
Twice in as many days now the concept of online life expectancy has cropped up in conversation - for a definition use the following:
Now these are mostly self inflicted terminations, there are however a plethora of reasons as to why a website available and accessible today might not be around in years to come. Websites that run on a profit basis such as Facebook and Google will be around as long as their owners can maintain a profit margin, this is not necessarily for want of greed, these sites have large user bases and the hardware and software for that matter that is required to keep them operational costs a significant amount to maintain. Websites over the years have changed, updates to websites and redesigns have seen some content completely deleted, others integrated into other services. Even in the latter case the movement of content can be as bad as deletion. You need to be certain that those who looked in the former place will find their content in the latter.
It is for this reason perhaps most of all that we should be aware of our Online Life Expectancy. If we have content we want to make available to the world for-evermore then we need to develop contingency plans and failsafes that can preserve content. I don't mean in the event of data loss etc as that will already be taken care of by backup and restore policies etc - I mean to develop a repository based approach that allows us to store all of our content in services that will be maintained, this ultimately means we will have to pay for this privilege as so long as you are willing to pay then your content can be kept safe - rather like using a real world lock-up or self-storage facility, places with little to no overheads who simply charge for the use of their storage. These services are usually extremely low risk, I don't know of any real world storage facilities that went out of business.
The spark that started this fire of intrigue came from reading a BBC news article about the British Library who plan to archive the Internet, the project will cover 4.8 million websites. This in itself isn't too surprising really there have been a number of services that aim to archive the Internet, one notable example is the WaybackMachine what was surprising however was that Richard Gibby from the British Library stated that presently the assumed life expectancy of web content is just 75 days.
Article: 'Libraries to store all UK web content' - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22028738
75 days being approximately 2 and a half months give or take, this at first seems quite short but when I think about it, this really isn't that hard to believe. Save for a few massive websites in terms of their content catalogue and their user-base, emerging websites tend to have short lives or they rocket to fame. Of course there will be those that buck the trend and those that rise slowly but even forums and lesser known social networks will have an archive system, and a life expectancy for posts. In the case of forums I would even go so far as to say that some content is "current" and is continually updated whilst other content is abandoned and left to be buried in the nether regions of the forum only to be found by random google searches.
75 days is not a long time when you stop and think about it. Even with a blog or a social network like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc, there is an expected length of time someone will go back over your posts or tweets. You don't expect people to go back and read your every tweet, indeed for some people on twitter with hundreds of thousands of tweets that would be rather time consuming - and actually rather difficult as I have explained previously twitter only caches your profile for a limited time, all older tweets are inaccessible except by search and direct links, so you would need a link or search term for every single tweet. So at least as far as twitter is concerned old content is not really accessible, and if you tweet often enough your twitter feed can go back as little as 2 weeks. Suddenly 75 days doesn't seem like such an exaggeration.
Facebook's timeline feature arguably made older content more readily accessible, but in doing so I am still yet to discover how many people went back and deleted a tonne of old posts. I know a few people whose profiles from a few years ago looking back would be cringe worthy even for them to read, I am sure they at least would have pruned their old posts.
So the question is, how long can you reasonably expect your content to be available on a given website?
Online Life Expectancy is the duration of time a web page or web site is expected to stay online before being replaced, updated or closed.My blogs are an example of websites which are not expected to remain online forever. I say this as I have mentioned numerous times that I often go through phases where I remove content and rework things. My facebook profile was another prime example, having been deleted last June almost 6 years worth of content went with it.
Now these are mostly self inflicted terminations, there are however a plethora of reasons as to why a website available and accessible today might not be around in years to come. Websites that run on a profit basis such as Facebook and Google will be around as long as their owners can maintain a profit margin, this is not necessarily for want of greed, these sites have large user bases and the hardware and software for that matter that is required to keep them operational costs a significant amount to maintain. Websites over the years have changed, updates to websites and redesigns have seen some content completely deleted, others integrated into other services. Even in the latter case the movement of content can be as bad as deletion. You need to be certain that those who looked in the former place will find their content in the latter.
It is for this reason perhaps most of all that we should be aware of our Online Life Expectancy. If we have content we want to make available to the world for-evermore then we need to develop contingency plans and failsafes that can preserve content. I don't mean in the event of data loss etc as that will already be taken care of by backup and restore policies etc - I mean to develop a repository based approach that allows us to store all of our content in services that will be maintained, this ultimately means we will have to pay for this privilege as so long as you are willing to pay then your content can be kept safe - rather like using a real world lock-up or self-storage facility, places with little to no overheads who simply charge for the use of their storage. These services are usually extremely low risk, I don't know of any real world storage facilities that went out of business.
The spark that started this fire of intrigue came from reading a BBC news article about the British Library who plan to archive the Internet, the project will cover 4.8 million websites. This in itself isn't too surprising really there have been a number of services that aim to archive the Internet, one notable example is the WaybackMachine what was surprising however was that Richard Gibby from the British Library stated that presently the assumed life expectancy of web content is just 75 days.
Article: 'Libraries to store all UK web content' - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22028738
75 days being approximately 2 and a half months give or take, this at first seems quite short but when I think about it, this really isn't that hard to believe. Save for a few massive websites in terms of their content catalogue and their user-base, emerging websites tend to have short lives or they rocket to fame. Of course there will be those that buck the trend and those that rise slowly but even forums and lesser known social networks will have an archive system, and a life expectancy for posts. In the case of forums I would even go so far as to say that some content is "current" and is continually updated whilst other content is abandoned and left to be buried in the nether regions of the forum only to be found by random google searches.
75 days is not a long time when you stop and think about it. Even with a blog or a social network like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc, there is an expected length of time someone will go back over your posts or tweets. You don't expect people to go back and read your every tweet, indeed for some people on twitter with hundreds of thousands of tweets that would be rather time consuming - and actually rather difficult as I have explained previously twitter only caches your profile for a limited time, all older tweets are inaccessible except by search and direct links, so you would need a link or search term for every single tweet. So at least as far as twitter is concerned old content is not really accessible, and if you tweet often enough your twitter feed can go back as little as 2 weeks. Suddenly 75 days doesn't seem like such an exaggeration.
Facebook's timeline feature arguably made older content more readily accessible, but in doing so I am still yet to discover how many people went back and deleted a tonne of old posts. I know a few people whose profiles from a few years ago looking back would be cringe worthy even for them to read, I am sure they at least would have pruned their old posts.
So the question is, how long can you reasonably expect your content to be available on a given website?
Google it!
I don't like it when people tell me to use Google when I ask a question. By saying this you don't encourage me or anyone else to go and solve their own problems, you just encourage people not to talk to you. "Google it" is one of the most unhelpful things you can say. For one, often the main reason someone asks you in the first place rather than just googling it is because they want someone to explain it and they regard you as someone knowledgeable of the field or someone who they think might know and understand the answer, there's a difference between finding an answer and understanding it.
There are a lot of teachers that don't seem to grasp this concept, nowhere is this more evident than at University. During my time at University there were a number of lecturers who gave this response, there was one in particular who more or less, every response they gave was "google it" - no, this University charges £3,000 [now £9,000 - that's $13,500] a year in "tuition" fees - you fucking explain the problem don't tell your students to "google it" - google is not an explanation. You're essentially saying "pay me for a service I don't actually provide".
Beyond University however this mentality still persists. In academia and in life when I am confronted with a person who responds like this I will stop talking to you period. If we lived in a society where we simply didn't answer any question at all that the answer to could be found online we would very quickly descend into a level of existence where we don't communicate with one another.
More than this, there's the issue of discussion to be considered, knowing and understanding the answer isn't the end of the matter, contemplation comes next, and by extension derivation of new knowledge and ideas based on what we know and what we could add. Discussion of ideas is integral to human growth, knowing the answer and understanding it should not mean that you do not continue to ask questions, if you did stop you would be accepting blind faith - I hear the answer, the explanation seems reasonable, I won't bother questioning this any further, I'll just accept it. That's quite a dangerous mentality as it makes you easily manipulated. If your "depth of questioning" is known, then in order to make you believe a complex lie the author only needs to prepare enough evidence to convince you of that depth.
"Google it" encourages shallow thinking there are various aspects of Google that highlight this, including but not limited to the number of pages of search results you're willing to sift through. Anyone who uses Google for the first time soon learns to accept the idea that "The answer will be on the first page or maybe the second, if it's not then change the search term" - everything else is irrelevant. Don't look deeper, don't question or explore further, you asked a question you just want the answer and nothing else.
The rise of sites like wikipedia feed this mentality, even to the point where many google searches return the wikipedia article for that term as the top result, yet the number of people beyond academia who would actually pursue the citation sources in a wikipedia article is minute - I know this because the number of times I have clicked a citation link to find a 404 page or a parked domain is quite high. People accept what they see at face value and don't explore deeper. I say beyond academia in this context because within academia you are discouraged from using wikipedia as a source - do people stop using it? No, they still use it, they just use the citation links as sources instead, and when you reach a 404 or a parked domain you just look for another article or google it.
There are a lot of teachers that don't seem to grasp this concept, nowhere is this more evident than at University. During my time at University there were a number of lecturers who gave this response, there was one in particular who more or less, every response they gave was "google it" - no, this University charges £3,000 [now £9,000 - that's $13,500] a year in "tuition" fees - you fucking explain the problem don't tell your students to "google it" - google is not an explanation. You're essentially saying "pay me for a service I don't actually provide".
Beyond University however this mentality still persists. In academia and in life when I am confronted with a person who responds like this I will stop talking to you period. If we lived in a society where we simply didn't answer any question at all that the answer to could be found online we would very quickly descend into a level of existence where we don't communicate with one another.
More than this, there's the issue of discussion to be considered, knowing and understanding the answer isn't the end of the matter, contemplation comes next, and by extension derivation of new knowledge and ideas based on what we know and what we could add. Discussion of ideas is integral to human growth, knowing the answer and understanding it should not mean that you do not continue to ask questions, if you did stop you would be accepting blind faith - I hear the answer, the explanation seems reasonable, I won't bother questioning this any further, I'll just accept it. That's quite a dangerous mentality as it makes you easily manipulated. If your "depth of questioning" is known, then in order to make you believe a complex lie the author only needs to prepare enough evidence to convince you of that depth.
"Google it" encourages shallow thinking there are various aspects of Google that highlight this, including but not limited to the number of pages of search results you're willing to sift through. Anyone who uses Google for the first time soon learns to accept the idea that "The answer will be on the first page or maybe the second, if it's not then change the search term" - everything else is irrelevant. Don't look deeper, don't question or explore further, you asked a question you just want the answer and nothing else.
The rise of sites like wikipedia feed this mentality, even to the point where many google searches return the wikipedia article for that term as the top result, yet the number of people beyond academia who would actually pursue the citation sources in a wikipedia article is minute - I know this because the number of times I have clicked a citation link to find a 404 page or a parked domain is quite high. People accept what they see at face value and don't explore deeper. I say beyond academia in this context because within academia you are discouraged from using wikipedia as a source - do people stop using it? No, they still use it, they just use the citation links as sources instead, and when you reach a 404 or a parked domain you just look for another article or google it.
Assumptions
Common misconception - Games Developers play their own games.
Reality: Beyond testing this is rarely true.
Developers rarely play their own games, even when they do they won't play them nearly as much as any of their fans. The thing is developing a game is rather like writing a novel. When you spend so much time working on it and fine tuning the details of the story and the events that occur etc the "map" of the story becomes second nature. When you spend that much time on something it becomes rather like riding a bicycle, something which you don't really forget. Going back to things you did years ago, looking at the code it may seem like it is written in another language but the moment you start playing the game the storyline comes back to you. No matter how much depth you add, the reality is that once you know the inner workings and how it ends there's little enjoyment to be found.
The fun and the challenge for a developer is perpetuated by the development process. For a Game developer playing the product is not the game, coding the product is the real game, the source of all challenges and obstacles to be overcome. Looking back at code and adapting it, adding in new features and changing the world of a game, that is where the fun is to be had as a developer when it comes to old games. Consumers for a long time never got to experience this but more and more there are titles that open up development albeit in and incredibly simplified manner through editors and tools like the steam workshop etc - these store the potential to turn a gamer into a developer and in my view they should be encouraged.
Now there will be those that will argue, citing the "Myspace effect" where essentially people who really shouldn't venture into these fields will do so, resulting in some sub standard games being produced, akin to the wannabe web designers aplenty that pimped out their profiles when Myspace decided to allow full HTML. To them I argue that this is a necessary evil. If youtube was a closed platform we would not have half of the quality content that it contains today. Youtube does have a lot of crap on it and finding the gold can be a challenge in itself, if you will youtube is the modern day equivalent of prospecting, you set out to find something worthwhile in a myriad of garbage.
The problem here is not the fact that people can try, the problem is the way we rank their efforts and if you can find a solution to that problem then you will be worth a fortune, you will be the next Google, which in many ways achieved this with their search engine for finding websites, but even Google can't tell you what is interesting and what is crap. Google relies on many things but it has not achieved the ability to judge quality. Google+ and a number of other services run by Google have been aimed at finding ways to achieve this but they rely on people and their collective judgement and the sad reality is that we can be victims of our judgement. Popularity often ends up succumbing to a positive feedback loop and many websites over the years have become popular simply for being popular. Facebook is a prime example, it was once a useful service, but today the validity of its popularity is questionable.
I don't say this as a desire to appear in any way a hipster I simply state the truth that a lot of people have realised: when you step back and look at the services we use, are they really the best of what is on offer or are we using them simply because they are what is popular? A social network by its nature has to be popular to be successful if it's not popular you can't really use it, which makes it incredibly hard, almost impossible to choose an alternative.
Reality: Beyond testing this is rarely true.
Developers rarely play their own games, even when they do they won't play them nearly as much as any of their fans. The thing is developing a game is rather like writing a novel. When you spend so much time working on it and fine tuning the details of the story and the events that occur etc the "map" of the story becomes second nature. When you spend that much time on something it becomes rather like riding a bicycle, something which you don't really forget. Going back to things you did years ago, looking at the code it may seem like it is written in another language but the moment you start playing the game the storyline comes back to you. No matter how much depth you add, the reality is that once you know the inner workings and how it ends there's little enjoyment to be found.
The fun and the challenge for a developer is perpetuated by the development process. For a Game developer playing the product is not the game, coding the product is the real game, the source of all challenges and obstacles to be overcome. Looking back at code and adapting it, adding in new features and changing the world of a game, that is where the fun is to be had as a developer when it comes to old games. Consumers for a long time never got to experience this but more and more there are titles that open up development albeit in and incredibly simplified manner through editors and tools like the steam workshop etc - these store the potential to turn a gamer into a developer and in my view they should be encouraged.
Now there will be those that will argue, citing the "Myspace effect" where essentially people who really shouldn't venture into these fields will do so, resulting in some sub standard games being produced, akin to the wannabe web designers aplenty that pimped out their profiles when Myspace decided to allow full HTML. To them I argue that this is a necessary evil. If youtube was a closed platform we would not have half of the quality content that it contains today. Youtube does have a lot of crap on it and finding the gold can be a challenge in itself, if you will youtube is the modern day equivalent of prospecting, you set out to find something worthwhile in a myriad of garbage.
The problem here is not the fact that people can try, the problem is the way we rank their efforts and if you can find a solution to that problem then you will be worth a fortune, you will be the next Google, which in many ways achieved this with their search engine for finding websites, but even Google can't tell you what is interesting and what is crap. Google relies on many things but it has not achieved the ability to judge quality. Google+ and a number of other services run by Google have been aimed at finding ways to achieve this but they rely on people and their collective judgement and the sad reality is that we can be victims of our judgement. Popularity often ends up succumbing to a positive feedback loop and many websites over the years have become popular simply for being popular. Facebook is a prime example, it was once a useful service, but today the validity of its popularity is questionable.
I don't say this as a desire to appear in any way a hipster I simply state the truth that a lot of people have realised: when you step back and look at the services we use, are they really the best of what is on offer or are we using them simply because they are what is popular? A social network by its nature has to be popular to be successful if it's not popular you can't really use it, which makes it incredibly hard, almost impossible to choose an alternative.
Active and Passive Vegetarianism
To my knowledge these terms don't exist, if they do then ho hum. I'd like to coin these terms if they don't and I would like to define them as follows.
If you are presented meat on a plate that no-one else is going to consume, and you reject it, everything you protest as the grounds against meat consumption becomes senseless as a direct consequence of your rejection. If you reject the meat of an animal that is already dead and has already been processed then you make that the animal died for nothing. By rejecting meat on what is essentially a political motivation you are being incredibly selfish. Rejecting meat in a situation where you were not the person with purchasing power will not make the animal come back to life and it will not result in a reduction of worldwide meat consumption as you weren't the person that bought it and therefore have absolutely no effect on the purchasing habit of whoever did.
A passive vegetarian should abstain from buying meat therefore reducing the amount of money spent buying meat and the amount of meat that is purchased consequently reducing demand. In situations where you do not have purchasing power your abstention has absolutely no effect on the purchasing habits of the person who did.
An active vegetarian is one that outright rejects meat completely in all situations. This I see as pointless. If an animal is already dead, and someone has already bought it and cooked it, whether I eat it or not will have no effect on whether or not more will die - it will however determine whether the food is wasted. Active vegetarianism is a first world political choice that is incredibly selfish.
An active vegetarian does not eat meat at all, they object to the consumption of meat for whatever grounds they may.The difference here is that a passive vegetarian may consume meat. Now the reason I think these terms need to exist is basically down to the mentality of the vulture which I have discussed before. In a nutshell my argument is this: I accept that you object to the cultivation of animals for consumption but if you are a guest in someone's home or if you are offered meat and you reject it, if that food is not consumed by someone else it will be wasted and wastage of meat to someone who truly objects to the cultivation of animals should be a higher priority than your abstention.
A passive vegetarian does not purchase meat at all, they object to the cultivation of animals for consumption.
If you are presented meat on a plate that no-one else is going to consume, and you reject it, everything you protest as the grounds against meat consumption becomes senseless as a direct consequence of your rejection. If you reject the meat of an animal that is already dead and has already been processed then you make that the animal died for nothing. By rejecting meat on what is essentially a political motivation you are being incredibly selfish. Rejecting meat in a situation where you were not the person with purchasing power will not make the animal come back to life and it will not result in a reduction of worldwide meat consumption as you weren't the person that bought it and therefore have absolutely no effect on the purchasing habit of whoever did.
A passive vegetarian should abstain from buying meat therefore reducing the amount of money spent buying meat and the amount of meat that is purchased consequently reducing demand. In situations where you do not have purchasing power your abstention has absolutely no effect on the purchasing habits of the person who did.
An active vegetarian is one that outright rejects meat completely in all situations. This I see as pointless. If an animal is already dead, and someone has already bought it and cooked it, whether I eat it or not will have no effect on whether or not more will die - it will however determine whether the food is wasted. Active vegetarianism is a first world political choice that is incredibly selfish.
The Illusion of Wealth
If you are poor or have been in the past then you will already know everything I am going to say here. This post is for the benefit of people who "think" they have money and have never experienced what it is to be poor.
Wealth is an illusion and one of the easiest to pull off. Making your life look more successful or more comfortable than it is, in itself is an art form.
If you have money you will believe that you should live "within your means" because you are deluded into this belief that you should deny yourself what you want because you haven't "earned it" and need to save for it. The reality is this is a dead end, you can spend your life saving, be my guest but you will never become rich through saving money it doesn't work like that. If you want to become rich you need to spend your money, in particular you need to spend it in things that will give you a return - investments. You won't become rich by simply putting every penny in a bank and if you think you can then you are in for a bad time.
If you don't have much money then there is one thing that will become apparent very quickly - it is not possible to live within your means. Now there will be people that argue with me here and quite frankly I don't care what you think because I know this to be true from experience, not just my own but the experience of countless others, from all income levels. The fact is if you have to work to be able to live, then you will never be able to live within your means, you will always have to resort to using financial services to help you through life. You'll need a loan for a big purchase, you'll need a mortgage to buy your house, you'll need a credit card to budget you outgoings and pay for things while you wait for your pay-check to come in.
Personal debt in the UK levels over 1.4 trillion pounds. [£1,400,000,000,000]
That averages £21,212 per person given the UK's population of 66 million people. We live in debt.
If you are poor then you will know all about the options you have to buy things you don't have the money for, the various pathways to credit that exist. And if you are poor then you will use them. Your "neighbour with a 42 inch TV" will not have paid for it outright they will be using credit to get it, and with catalogues offering a £1,000 TV for less than £10 a week with an initial 12 month payment holiday I would hardly consider that TV to be any indication of their wealth.
This is the problem with this country and perceived wealth, if you "think" you have any degree of wealth you immediately begin to judge other people by your own standards and think that people are living life in the lap of luxury at your expense. I have often seen people say "people on benefits are better off than people in work" - that's bullshit and you know it so shut the fuck up, if you actually believed it you'd quit your job and live the high life. You don't believe it though you just want to complain and you want to be smiled upon by those above you for victimising those below you.
This childish shit was meant to stop when we left school and started behaving like adults but it seems that some people didn't get the message.
With the level of animosity in this country towards those on benefits I actually want this country to crumble, if it means that people actually learn some humility then I am willing to accept the austerity to achieve it. Unemployment in the UK is continuing to rise if you look at the real unemployment counts rather than the ones the papers cite which only account for those who have been unemployed for less than 6 months. The long term unemployed figure in the UK is continuing to rise. There has not been significant investment and there has not been enough done to provide a viable economic future. So bring on the triple dip recession I embrace it with open arms, bring on 25% unemployment levels like those in Spain, bring the UK back into the 1980s.
The number of young people aged 16-24 without a job rose to 993,000 over the last three months, taking the youth unemployment rate to 21.2%. In a month and a half I will turn 25 and drop out of these figures, as will thousands of others. I owe Student Loans Company £30,000+ in debt that's from before the fees increased, had I studied today I would owe £50,000+ by now. I have not been able to get a graduate job since graduating University. I graduated 4 years ago and I have applied for over 1,200 jobs since then, of these applications less than 1% even bothered to reply, both of their own accord and to enquiries made in follow-up. There are millions of people in this country who need to experience what it is to be unemployed and claim benefits because there are millions of people who really have no idea what it is really like and I think it's time you found out.
Wealth is an illusion and one of the easiest to pull off. Making your life look more successful or more comfortable than it is, in itself is an art form.
If you have money you will believe that you should live "within your means" because you are deluded into this belief that you should deny yourself what you want because you haven't "earned it" and need to save for it. The reality is this is a dead end, you can spend your life saving, be my guest but you will never become rich through saving money it doesn't work like that. If you want to become rich you need to spend your money, in particular you need to spend it in things that will give you a return - investments. You won't become rich by simply putting every penny in a bank and if you think you can then you are in for a bad time.
If you don't have much money then there is one thing that will become apparent very quickly - it is not possible to live within your means. Now there will be people that argue with me here and quite frankly I don't care what you think because I know this to be true from experience, not just my own but the experience of countless others, from all income levels. The fact is if you have to work to be able to live, then you will never be able to live within your means, you will always have to resort to using financial services to help you through life. You'll need a loan for a big purchase, you'll need a mortgage to buy your house, you'll need a credit card to budget you outgoings and pay for things while you wait for your pay-check to come in.
Personal debt in the UK levels over 1.4 trillion pounds. [£1,400,000,000,000]
That averages £21,212 per person given the UK's population of 66 million people. We live in debt.
If you are poor then you will know all about the options you have to buy things you don't have the money for, the various pathways to credit that exist. And if you are poor then you will use them. Your "neighbour with a 42 inch TV" will not have paid for it outright they will be using credit to get it, and with catalogues offering a £1,000 TV for less than £10 a week with an initial 12 month payment holiday I would hardly consider that TV to be any indication of their wealth.
This is the problem with this country and perceived wealth, if you "think" you have any degree of wealth you immediately begin to judge other people by your own standards and think that people are living life in the lap of luxury at your expense. I have often seen people say "people on benefits are better off than people in work" - that's bullshit and you know it so shut the fuck up, if you actually believed it you'd quit your job and live the high life. You don't believe it though you just want to complain and you want to be smiled upon by those above you for victimising those below you.
This childish shit was meant to stop when we left school and started behaving like adults but it seems that some people didn't get the message.
With the level of animosity in this country towards those on benefits I actually want this country to crumble, if it means that people actually learn some humility then I am willing to accept the austerity to achieve it. Unemployment in the UK is continuing to rise if you look at the real unemployment counts rather than the ones the papers cite which only account for those who have been unemployed for less than 6 months. The long term unemployed figure in the UK is continuing to rise. There has not been significant investment and there has not been enough done to provide a viable economic future. So bring on the triple dip recession I embrace it with open arms, bring on 25% unemployment levels like those in Spain, bring the UK back into the 1980s.
The number of young people aged 16-24 without a job rose to 993,000 over the last three months, taking the youth unemployment rate to 21.2%. In a month and a half I will turn 25 and drop out of these figures, as will thousands of others. I owe Student Loans Company £30,000+ in debt that's from before the fees increased, had I studied today I would owe £50,000+ by now. I have not been able to get a graduate job since graduating University. I graduated 4 years ago and I have applied for over 1,200 jobs since then, of these applications less than 1% even bothered to reply, both of their own accord and to enquiries made in follow-up. There are millions of people in this country who need to experience what it is to be unemployed and claim benefits because there are millions of people who really have no idea what it is really like and I think it's time you found out.
Another rant . . .
I really don't know why I read comments on news sites or on youtube etc they often make my blood boil and they leave me annoyed wondering how people can be so ignorant. Today I read this article on BBC News:
Prince's Trust: Poor IT skills hurt youth job chances
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21747206
I agree with the article and I find the statistics that it has unearthed to be something of a concern. That's not what annoyed me. I read the comments and an Editor's pick, not just any comment in the list but one actually picked by a moderator to be a top comment said:
Most programming jobs in the UK ask for 2 years industry experience, some ask for 3, some ask for 5 and yes I have even seen some that ask for 10 years experience in an industrial setting. This is what is wrong with the technology industry in the UK and the Government is completely ignorant of this fact and is not doing anything to persuade or motivate employers to take on graduates without experience.
Now you can use the training argument, or the settlement argument that says a company would have to train a graduate or settle them into a new way of doing things - this argument is bullshit. Every company is different, Company A will not operate the same way as Company B, having years of industrial experience means nothing, all candidates once employed will have to adapt to their new surroundings and the argument that those who have done this before will be better able to cope is invalid. Simple Psychology can tell you that people learn and develop bad habits, if anything the more experience you have the more bad habits you will have. The longer you have worked in the industry the more adamant you will be of wanting to use "my way of doing it" as opposed to the company's way. A graduate is a blank slate they haven't developed any of these habits and they are still open to learning new ways of doing things, what you are asking for when you ask for years of experience in reality is a candidate that will be reluctant to do things differently.
There are countless government schemes that have been developed to help people into work that have all failed. There are even scheme now in the UK which are abysmal in they record but are still championed by the idiots who decide policy that affects industry they have never dared to enter. Sit the current Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith down in front of a computer and ask him to write a Hello World program in C++ and I guarantee you he will not have a clue how to do it and he is the one that is in charge of these policies. While we are at it I'd like you to read the Education section of Iain's Wikipedia article, Equally the current Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills Vince Cable equally as culpable in these matters would neither likely be able to complete the task.
Prince's Trust: Poor IT skills hurt youth job chances
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21747206
I agree with the article and I find the statistics that it has unearthed to be something of a concern. That's not what annoyed me. I read the comments and an Editor's pick, not just any comment in the list but one actually picked by a moderator to be a top comment said:
We desperately need more computer programming graduates in this country...This pissed me off so much because it is completely uninformed and it is in fact a fallacy. The problem this country has when it comes to the technology industry is not a lack of graduates. We have thousands of unemployed graduates in this country and a lot of them are Computer Science graduates, the vast majority of which have academic experience of programming. The problem is not a shortage of graduates it is a shortage of companies that are willing to employ graduates.
Most programming jobs in the UK ask for 2 years industry experience, some ask for 3, some ask for 5 and yes I have even seen some that ask for 10 years experience in an industrial setting. This is what is wrong with the technology industry in the UK and the Government is completely ignorant of this fact and is not doing anything to persuade or motivate employers to take on graduates without experience.
Now you can use the training argument, or the settlement argument that says a company would have to train a graduate or settle them into a new way of doing things - this argument is bullshit. Every company is different, Company A will not operate the same way as Company B, having years of industrial experience means nothing, all candidates once employed will have to adapt to their new surroundings and the argument that those who have done this before will be better able to cope is invalid. Simple Psychology can tell you that people learn and develop bad habits, if anything the more experience you have the more bad habits you will have. The longer you have worked in the industry the more adamant you will be of wanting to use "my way of doing it" as opposed to the company's way. A graduate is a blank slate they haven't developed any of these habits and they are still open to learning new ways of doing things, what you are asking for when you ask for years of experience in reality is a candidate that will be reluctant to do things differently.
There are countless government schemes that have been developed to help people into work that have all failed. There are even scheme now in the UK which are abysmal in they record but are still championed by the idiots who decide policy that affects industry they have never dared to enter. Sit the current Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith down in front of a computer and ask him to write a Hello World program in C++ and I guarantee you he will not have a clue how to do it and he is the one that is in charge of these policies. While we are at it I'd like you to read the Education section of Iain's Wikipedia article, Equally the current Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills Vince Cable equally as culpable in these matters would neither likely be able to complete the task.
How would democracy die?
I believe, that ethics and morals are matters of opinion and can not be considered to be fact nor can they be considered to be self-evident. 1000 years ago it was believed to be fair and right and true that men should be allowed a voice with which to vote while women were denied the same privilege. Today we think this unjust.
Whilst I agree with that assertion I disagree with any claim that this is self-evident. To claim self-evidence in this or any other matter concerning ethics or morals is to deny the fact that what is fair and right and true is defined by what the majority confer and agree to be fair and right and true. 1000 years ago people held the view that their state of affairs was just. They did not perceive any unfairness in their state. There will always be a minority who do not agree with the definition of the day, and perhaps once in every generation an individual or group will challenge these definitions and seek to redefine our perception of the world.
To look back and wonder how anyone could believe that this was fair can be unfathomable to generations of today; further, to think that there were women who believed this to be fair can escape the comprehension of many, but we know this is true. We know there were people who did not agree but we also know that the majority were complacent and accepted the definition of the day.
We think of voting today, in the western world the right to live in a democracy is one that is asserted with such vigour that many are willing to wage war and die in the name of defending it. They name those who challenge this view as opponents, would-be oppressors and the most common, terrorists. Whilst that definition might fit in some cases, the reality is that the definition of the day is not at risk from outside opponents, it is at risk from ourselves. We give up so much willingly when you stop and think about it, to hold such anger towards someone with an opposing view is quite laughable.
In 1000 years, perhaps 100 maybe less our world will change beyond our recognition, as it has throughout history. What we believe today will be ridiculed by future generations with the same vigour that the generation of the moment scorns those of millennia past. It may be quite unimaginable for people to think that they will give up democracy but the reality is that you relinquish the burden of responsibility and the right to make decisions everyday. We are surrounded by technology that is advancing, evolving much quicker than we are as a race. We delegate decision making to this technology. This is self-evident of that there is no question and no challenge from I as I make no judgement on the morality of this observation.
Every time you open your browser, visit google, type in a query and press enter, you relinquish the responsibility of having to look for yourself. You see a page of results, with millions found you choose from the first 5 results 99% of the time - why? "because it found what I wanted?" - yes, and no, it found an result to match your query, but most of the time what you see in those results is not what you wanted, you wanted an answer, and google gave you something that would satisfy that desire - the result is actually irrelevant. How is it irrelevant? If it is what you were looking for how can it be irrelevant? That's simple - if you knew what you were looking for you wouldn't have asked google in the first place. You asked google because you didn't want to do it yourself, you gave up the right to do it for yourself.
As technology becomes ever more intrusive in our lives we can see this process of relinquishing control become ever more intimate. On google play and on the Apple App store there are several "smart" alarm apps. These are apps you tell what time you want to be awake by, and then go to sleep. The app uses the accelerometer in your phone to monitor your movements in your sleep and determine when you are in an R.E.M. Cycle or deep sleep and when you are in a shallow sleep. The app attempts to wake you as close to your alarm time as it can whilst timing the alarm with a moment of shallow sleep to make you wake up relaxed and refreshed. One of these apps as an example claims to have over 30 million users. How many of those use it on a daily basis? How many people have relinquished control of their sleep pattern to a phone. Think about that for a moment. Their phone decides when they wake up - and for these people their phone will be the last thing they used just before going to sleep. We don't control technology anymore, technology controls us.
It is foreseeable that this may come to a point where say your waste is monitored by a computer, which communicated with a smart cooker that can print food comprised of the nutritional content you are lacking, in a form that looks visually pleasing and is deemed to be tasty to you based on past eating experiences. Imagine a world where you don't even decide what to eat anymore a computer does it for you. With all these things, people still adamantly protest to the idea that they will surrender democracy. It is not unreasonable to say that one day we could live in a society where people no longer control government, instead computers make the decisions. A world where political bias no longer influences policy, instead policy is decided purely on a results plus reward aggregation.
It may seem unfathomable now, and you may bark for such ideas biting on your beliefs but the reality is that any response to this position will equal in parallel the response that you would receive from someone in your position 1000 years ago if you were to describe to them the state of the world as it is today. My words are not fact, they are not intended to be prophecy they are merely intended to highlight the possibilities that lie in our future and the delusions we have of our present spurred on by our own arrogance.
Whilst I agree with that assertion I disagree with any claim that this is self-evident. To claim self-evidence in this or any other matter concerning ethics or morals is to deny the fact that what is fair and right and true is defined by what the majority confer and agree to be fair and right and true. 1000 years ago people held the view that their state of affairs was just. They did not perceive any unfairness in their state. There will always be a minority who do not agree with the definition of the day, and perhaps once in every generation an individual or group will challenge these definitions and seek to redefine our perception of the world.
To look back and wonder how anyone could believe that this was fair can be unfathomable to generations of today; further, to think that there were women who believed this to be fair can escape the comprehension of many, but we know this is true. We know there were people who did not agree but we also know that the majority were complacent and accepted the definition of the day.
We think of voting today, in the western world the right to live in a democracy is one that is asserted with such vigour that many are willing to wage war and die in the name of defending it. They name those who challenge this view as opponents, would-be oppressors and the most common, terrorists. Whilst that definition might fit in some cases, the reality is that the definition of the day is not at risk from outside opponents, it is at risk from ourselves. We give up so much willingly when you stop and think about it, to hold such anger towards someone with an opposing view is quite laughable.
In 1000 years, perhaps 100 maybe less our world will change beyond our recognition, as it has throughout history. What we believe today will be ridiculed by future generations with the same vigour that the generation of the moment scorns those of millennia past. It may be quite unimaginable for people to think that they will give up democracy but the reality is that you relinquish the burden of responsibility and the right to make decisions everyday. We are surrounded by technology that is advancing, evolving much quicker than we are as a race. We delegate decision making to this technology. This is self-evident of that there is no question and no challenge from I as I make no judgement on the morality of this observation.
Every time you open your browser, visit google, type in a query and press enter, you relinquish the responsibility of having to look for yourself. You see a page of results, with millions found you choose from the first 5 results 99% of the time - why? "because it found what I wanted?" - yes, and no, it found an result to match your query, but most of the time what you see in those results is not what you wanted, you wanted an answer, and google gave you something that would satisfy that desire - the result is actually irrelevant. How is it irrelevant? If it is what you were looking for how can it be irrelevant? That's simple - if you knew what you were looking for you wouldn't have asked google in the first place. You asked google because you didn't want to do it yourself, you gave up the right to do it for yourself.
As technology becomes ever more intrusive in our lives we can see this process of relinquishing control become ever more intimate. On google play and on the Apple App store there are several "smart" alarm apps. These are apps you tell what time you want to be awake by, and then go to sleep. The app uses the accelerometer in your phone to monitor your movements in your sleep and determine when you are in an R.E.M. Cycle or deep sleep and when you are in a shallow sleep. The app attempts to wake you as close to your alarm time as it can whilst timing the alarm with a moment of shallow sleep to make you wake up relaxed and refreshed. One of these apps as an example claims to have over 30 million users. How many of those use it on a daily basis? How many people have relinquished control of their sleep pattern to a phone. Think about that for a moment. Their phone decides when they wake up - and for these people their phone will be the last thing they used just before going to sleep. We don't control technology anymore, technology controls us.
It is foreseeable that this may come to a point where say your waste is monitored by a computer, which communicated with a smart cooker that can print food comprised of the nutritional content you are lacking, in a form that looks visually pleasing and is deemed to be tasty to you based on past eating experiences. Imagine a world where you don't even decide what to eat anymore a computer does it for you. With all these things, people still adamantly protest to the idea that they will surrender democracy. It is not unreasonable to say that one day we could live in a society where people no longer control government, instead computers make the decisions. A world where political bias no longer influences policy, instead policy is decided purely on a results plus reward aggregation.
It may seem unfathomable now, and you may bark for such ideas biting on your beliefs but the reality is that any response to this position will equal in parallel the response that you would receive from someone in your position 1000 years ago if you were to describe to them the state of the world as it is today. My words are not fact, they are not intended to be prophecy they are merely intended to highlight the possibilities that lie in our future and the delusions we have of our present spurred on by our own arrogance.
Gay Porn
Although this post is about gay porn, what I say here can be applied to any sexuality really.
I have never understood how people can follow porn with the same devotion as any other part of the entertainment industry. Now maybe that's down to my perception that you generally don't sit down and watch porn like you watch a normal movie, its not such a passive act - if you watch porn you're usually quite "active" masturbating. There's no point in being coy here let's be frank.
How anyone for example can name porn stars off the top of their head, and the titles of the movies they have been in - if we can call them that - is odd to me. What's even more odd to me when I was a young closeted gay man porn never entered my life, it wasn't until I was an adult. Now that's the age you're supposed to begin watching if you decide to, but let's be honest for most people that's not the case. To see gay guys now in their late teens and early 20s who know so much about gay porn it just seems so warped. I have nothing against porn, I admit I do watch it, but to these guys those porn stars are becoming their idols.
To base your perception of what you want to be; what you want to look like; what you want a guy to look like; perhaps most obviously as far as porn is concerned: what you want your sex life to be like; to base all of this on what you see in porn I think is incredibly warped.
Porn is incredibly unrealistic and when you start having sex and become sexually active that truth becomes self evident really fast.
In cinema in general, we watch movies with actors and actresses we come to love and follow their careers avidly. In this realm however it is a lot more obvious to us that what we see is fiction and the ideals these movies portray are methods of escape and indulgence - the way porn should actually be seen. You do not expect to be able to do most things you see in a regular movie. It is even becoming more prevalent that you should not expect the places you see in movies to actually exist or if they do, certainly not to expect them to look like they do on-screen.
With all this considered, my own prevailing mindset is one that reduces porn to the status of a utility - to be used in certain circumstances of need, not something to be considered a hobby or an interest.
Now I realise this post is sounding quite judgemental. I apologize for that, it's not what I intend. I have no problem with porn and I have no problem with people who follow it in this manner, I certainly don't want to judge you for it. This post is an expression of confusion. I don't understand what motivates people to "follow" porn - but "don't" and "can't" are two different things and maybe I'll come to understand this at some point.
I guess the only thing I can really add is to me sex is something intimate, whereas porn is something I have never viewn as intimate, maybe that's the reason I don't grasp this mentality, maybe people who "follow" porn see it as something intimate.
I have never understood how people can follow porn with the same devotion as any other part of the entertainment industry. Now maybe that's down to my perception that you generally don't sit down and watch porn like you watch a normal movie, its not such a passive act - if you watch porn you're usually quite "active" masturbating. There's no point in being coy here let's be frank.
How anyone for example can name porn stars off the top of their head, and the titles of the movies they have been in - if we can call them that - is odd to me. What's even more odd to me when I was a young closeted gay man porn never entered my life, it wasn't until I was an adult. Now that's the age you're supposed to begin watching if you decide to, but let's be honest for most people that's not the case. To see gay guys now in their late teens and early 20s who know so much about gay porn it just seems so warped. I have nothing against porn, I admit I do watch it, but to these guys those porn stars are becoming their idols.
To base your perception of what you want to be; what you want to look like; what you want a guy to look like; perhaps most obviously as far as porn is concerned: what you want your sex life to be like; to base all of this on what you see in porn I think is incredibly warped.
Porn is incredibly unrealistic and when you start having sex and become sexually active that truth becomes self evident really fast.
In cinema in general, we watch movies with actors and actresses we come to love and follow their careers avidly. In this realm however it is a lot more obvious to us that what we see is fiction and the ideals these movies portray are methods of escape and indulgence - the way porn should actually be seen. You do not expect to be able to do most things you see in a regular movie. It is even becoming more prevalent that you should not expect the places you see in movies to actually exist or if they do, certainly not to expect them to look like they do on-screen.
With all this considered, my own prevailing mindset is one that reduces porn to the status of a utility - to be used in certain circumstances of need, not something to be considered a hobby or an interest.
Now I realise this post is sounding quite judgemental. I apologize for that, it's not what I intend. I have no problem with porn and I have no problem with people who follow it in this manner, I certainly don't want to judge you for it. This post is an expression of confusion. I don't understand what motivates people to "follow" porn - but "don't" and "can't" are two different things and maybe I'll come to understand this at some point.
I guess the only thing I can really add is to me sex is something intimate, whereas porn is something I have never viewn as intimate, maybe that's the reason I don't grasp this mentality, maybe people who "follow" porn see it as something intimate.
Balance
There's something in life that has always puzzled me and that is the balance we strike between give and take. I know that some people are inherently generous and others are inherently greedy. There are those that will give freely without any thought of what they get in return. The generosity of these people knows no bounds. On the other hand the people who are greedy, take all that they can and want even to take more. They have no thought for the person who gives and in the end consume all that they can when they can equally with a depth that knows no bounds.
This binary view isn't one that fits with the world well, to be more accurate there needs to be 2 more personalities added to the mix. That is if you can consider greed and generosity as personality traits. These two more personalities that we add are the frivolous giver and the glutton. These two differ from their extreme counterparts in that their respective traits do have bounds. For the frivolous giver he will give without any thought for the future but he has a limit he will eventually reach, a point where he stops and recounts his finances as it were, and upon realisation of his overspend enters into an emotional recession, retracting his generosity, almost to the point of becoming a miser. The glutton equally has a tipping point - the point they reach when they have consumed more than they ought, to use the eating analogy his stomach swells to the point of bursting, at which point he snaps back and pukes up everything he ate losing everything that he lapped up so greedily. In that aftermath the glutton will pass through a period of fasting, where consuming anything at all turns his stomach.
In many respects gluttony and frivolity come together as yin and yang, swapping places occasionally, you see the good in the bad, and the bad in the good, but only for a time, before both return to their overwhelming nature.
I would consider myself generous, but I would also consider my generosity to reach a limit - quite a high limit I will admit but it does exist. In this respect I can only conclude that I am the frivolous giver. The problems that arise then are the moments when you realise that your emotions are spent. In that moment the prevailing personality is inverted. The question is, when this happens and you find yourself derailed, how do you get back on track?
This binary view isn't one that fits with the world well, to be more accurate there needs to be 2 more personalities added to the mix. That is if you can consider greed and generosity as personality traits. These two more personalities that we add are the frivolous giver and the glutton. These two differ from their extreme counterparts in that their respective traits do have bounds. For the frivolous giver he will give without any thought for the future but he has a limit he will eventually reach, a point where he stops and recounts his finances as it were, and upon realisation of his overspend enters into an emotional recession, retracting his generosity, almost to the point of becoming a miser. The glutton equally has a tipping point - the point they reach when they have consumed more than they ought, to use the eating analogy his stomach swells to the point of bursting, at which point he snaps back and pukes up everything he ate losing everything that he lapped up so greedily. In that aftermath the glutton will pass through a period of fasting, where consuming anything at all turns his stomach.
In many respects gluttony and frivolity come together as yin and yang, swapping places occasionally, you see the good in the bad, and the bad in the good, but only for a time, before both return to their overwhelming nature.
I would consider myself generous, but I would also consider my generosity to reach a limit - quite a high limit I will admit but it does exist. In this respect I can only conclude that I am the frivolous giver. The problems that arise then are the moments when you realise that your emotions are spent. In that moment the prevailing personality is inverted. The question is, when this happens and you find yourself derailed, how do you get back on track?
Feeling Emotional
I'm not having a good day. In fact I'm feeling quite down at the moment. Like always though when I feel like this I seek an outlet to vent my emotions. That outlet changes sometimes I write, sometimes I draw, sometimes I cook but in all these cases the outlet is a vent for emotions that are rooted in my actions. Today though it is not my actions that have brought me down but the actions of others. When this is the case I try to escape with somewhat more passive outlets, watching movies, playing games or listening to music.
At the moment I am listening to music - 'Memory Of A Dream' by Tenishia featuring Chris Jones. The song is quite sad really but in moments like this it's sad music that I listen to, I don't quite like bottling things up, I prefer to stop and let myself feel what I need to feel so I can move on. I know to some this can be seen as a form of wallowing self-pity and paint a negative view of someone but the truth is, as negative the view is, we are creatures of emotion and our lives are defined by the ups as well as the downs, so I take no shame in this at all.
If show me your life, and it is one filled with smiles and never a single moment of upset, sadness, or general moodiness then I'll show you the door. I do not trust people who only show their positive emotions and deny the negative ones exist. I am not wishing ill fate on you it is just a fact of life that shit happens. People who smile all the time are hiding something. Whether its something their afraid of the rest of the world knowing, or something they are afraid to admit to themselves, in either case your silence hurts, you more than anyone else. If you never open your heart you will never truly experience love or compassion.
So the next time you feel sad or down or upset, screw the idea that you have to smile for the world, you're allowed to feel emotion, be sad, be down, be upset - you'd be surprised who actually cares. I know some people exploit this, I know some people seek attention from anyone or anything they can, I know that not everyone who expresses emotion is sincere, but this, all of this can be applied to happiness too, there are people who portray false positive emotion in the name of seeking attention too - that fact doesn't stop you being happy when you truly feel it now does it? So why should that stop you expressing the opposite when you truly feel it?
Some of the most influential people throughout history, artists, musicians, philosophers, humanitarians, and ordinary people who had just had enough, were empowered by their emotions. We have great musicians who wrote great music borne of happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, confusion, love, and all that lie in between. We have artists who created great works that have inspired countless generations their motivations are equally as varied and represent both sides of the spectrum, positive and negative, arguably the negative can sometime be so much more powerful, a song of love is moving, but there is something deeply moving and intimate about a song of heartbreak.
Never be afraid to feel your emotions.
At the moment I am listening to music - 'Memory Of A Dream' by Tenishia featuring Chris Jones. The song is quite sad really but in moments like this it's sad music that I listen to, I don't quite like bottling things up, I prefer to stop and let myself feel what I need to feel so I can move on. I know to some this can be seen as a form of wallowing self-pity and paint a negative view of someone but the truth is, as negative the view is, we are creatures of emotion and our lives are defined by the ups as well as the downs, so I take no shame in this at all.
If show me your life, and it is one filled with smiles and never a single moment of upset, sadness, or general moodiness then I'll show you the door. I do not trust people who only show their positive emotions and deny the negative ones exist. I am not wishing ill fate on you it is just a fact of life that shit happens. People who smile all the time are hiding something. Whether its something their afraid of the rest of the world knowing, or something they are afraid to admit to themselves, in either case your silence hurts, you more than anyone else. If you never open your heart you will never truly experience love or compassion.
So the next time you feel sad or down or upset, screw the idea that you have to smile for the world, you're allowed to feel emotion, be sad, be down, be upset - you'd be surprised who actually cares. I know some people exploit this, I know some people seek attention from anyone or anything they can, I know that not everyone who expresses emotion is sincere, but this, all of this can be applied to happiness too, there are people who portray false positive emotion in the name of seeking attention too - that fact doesn't stop you being happy when you truly feel it now does it? So why should that stop you expressing the opposite when you truly feel it?
Some of the most influential people throughout history, artists, musicians, philosophers, humanitarians, and ordinary people who had just had enough, were empowered by their emotions. We have great musicians who wrote great music borne of happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, confusion, love, and all that lie in between. We have artists who created great works that have inspired countless generations their motivations are equally as varied and represent both sides of the spectrum, positive and negative, arguably the negative can sometime be so much more powerful, a song of love is moving, but there is something deeply moving and intimate about a song of heartbreak.
Never be afraid to feel your emotions.
Leagues
I've never liked the idea of leagues. "He's out of your league", "She's out of his league", or "He'd never be interested in me, he's out of my league" - I don't like this saying because it promotes the idea that you or someone else isn't good enough or not worthy enough to fall in love with - which to me is complete bullshit.
I have always believed that you can fall in love with anyone. That is in no way a judgement of your morality or promiscuity, love and lust are not the same thing and where the former is concerned the truth is that Love really is blind. If you base your potential relationships purely on what someone looks like or the lust you feel when you first meet them, that relationship is doomed to failure in my eyes. Lust is like hunger, once satisfied the sensation dies. Love is never satisfied, Love always leaves you wanting more. To be entirely crude, lust is the want for sex, once fulfilled the object of lust is no longer needed - Love is the desire that remains, you have sex and you hold one another and want to stay in that moment forever more. Of course in practice you can't do that, but Love is not defined by sex, you can love anyone or anything, you can love people you would never have sex with, and love things it's not even possible to have sex with . . . hmm don't dwell on the semantics of that one too long . . .
The point I was trying to make is that today a guy told me they liked a guy he had met and I said that he should show him rather than telling me, his response was that he didn't want to, because this guy was out of his league, that they'd probably end up being just friends. Love is blind, sometimes it has to bump into something for it to realise. If you stand still and refuse to explore the world around you, the chances of Love finding you are going to be very slim. You need to give Love a chance. Of the people I know in relationships the longest have been those that knew each other first, and fell in love. There is a string of failed relationships that I have seen that all began with people who met for the sole purpose of sex.
I'm not singling out the gay community here, if you have any preconceptions about gay people being more promiscuous than straights I'd ask you to drop them now, the only reason this lie is perpetuated is that gay promiscuity is more visible, probably in part due to what seems to be the world's preoccupation with what gay people do with one another. I've always thought that was displacement really, people being preoccupied with gay sex and making it an issue because their own sex lives are so disturbed they feel guilt they need to project onto others - just look at the Catholic Church.
Straight people are equally as promiscuous and I have seen many guys and girls too who sleep around, having countless one night stands and flings. This post has become somewhat of a condescending rant, which wasn't the intention, but I can't help but feel that people need to stop judging themselves so harshly. We judge ourselves with such temerity convincing ourselves that others judge us cruelly when in reality, most people couldn't give a shit. We are incredibly self absorbed, that we refuse to admit that even to ourselves. We project judgement, not at others, but at ourselves because we feel that's the way others will treat us. No-one is "out of your league"
- And I do realise it may seem as though I am getting ahead of myself, jumping straight to 'Love' when discussing dating or even just meeting someone. Really though, 'Like' and 'Love' are two points on the same scale, they may be a fair bit apart but Love is one extreme of the scale, the end goal, equally hate and dislike are the opposites but also part of the same scale.
I have always believed that you can fall in love with anyone. That is in no way a judgement of your morality or promiscuity, love and lust are not the same thing and where the former is concerned the truth is that Love really is blind. If you base your potential relationships purely on what someone looks like or the lust you feel when you first meet them, that relationship is doomed to failure in my eyes. Lust is like hunger, once satisfied the sensation dies. Love is never satisfied, Love always leaves you wanting more. To be entirely crude, lust is the want for sex, once fulfilled the object of lust is no longer needed - Love is the desire that remains, you have sex and you hold one another and want to stay in that moment forever more. Of course in practice you can't do that, but Love is not defined by sex, you can love anyone or anything, you can love people you would never have sex with, and love things it's not even possible to have sex with . . . hmm don't dwell on the semantics of that one too long . . .
The point I was trying to make is that today a guy told me they liked a guy he had met and I said that he should show him rather than telling me, his response was that he didn't want to, because this guy was out of his league, that they'd probably end up being just friends. Love is blind, sometimes it has to bump into something for it to realise. If you stand still and refuse to explore the world around you, the chances of Love finding you are going to be very slim. You need to give Love a chance. Of the people I know in relationships the longest have been those that knew each other first, and fell in love. There is a string of failed relationships that I have seen that all began with people who met for the sole purpose of sex.
I'm not singling out the gay community here, if you have any preconceptions about gay people being more promiscuous than straights I'd ask you to drop them now, the only reason this lie is perpetuated is that gay promiscuity is more visible, probably in part due to what seems to be the world's preoccupation with what gay people do with one another. I've always thought that was displacement really, people being preoccupied with gay sex and making it an issue because their own sex lives are so disturbed they feel guilt they need to project onto others - just look at the Catholic Church.
Straight people are equally as promiscuous and I have seen many guys and girls too who sleep around, having countless one night stands and flings. This post has become somewhat of a condescending rant, which wasn't the intention, but I can't help but feel that people need to stop judging themselves so harshly. We judge ourselves with such temerity convincing ourselves that others judge us cruelly when in reality, most people couldn't give a shit. We are incredibly self absorbed, that we refuse to admit that even to ourselves. We project judgement, not at others, but at ourselves because we feel that's the way others will treat us. No-one is "out of your league"
- And I do realise it may seem as though I am getting ahead of myself, jumping straight to 'Love' when discussing dating or even just meeting someone. Really though, 'Like' and 'Love' are two points on the same scale, they may be a fair bit apart but Love is one extreme of the scale, the end goal, equally hate and dislike are the opposites but also part of the same scale.
My Year Of The Dragon
So Chinese New Year came a few days ago and with it the Year Of The Dragon came to an end. As a Dragon baby I had been looking forward to 2012 as a chance to make changes and hope for new things - well in many respects I got what I hoped for but things didn't pan out the way I expected. This post is in a way my year in review.
Last February I was in a different place emotionally than I am now, back then I felt quite alone, despite having people around me it didn't make much difference to me. I felt trapped and while I still do to an extent it's not as imposing as it was back then. I've made a few changes in the last year to my life one of which was to scrap all social networks. I left twitter - twice actually, yea that was complicated - and I left facebook, and I left a few online forums I was a member of and I even scrapped this blog. For a while it was taken down completely. I had a change of heart where the blog was concerned and restored it, and on twitter, I gave it another chance - although a recent post highlighted the fact I still wasn't completely comfortable keeping it. It's staying for now, but I'm still in two minds.
Scrapping social networks proved effective for me as it cut out a lot of people who were "in" my life but weren't part of it; by that I mean they would be involved in it, inevitably ask questions or judge me for what I had or had not done and that was annoying for me. I value my privacy and I value having the freedom to make my own decisions without having to explain myself every step of the way. Social networks, facebook in particular in this respect I found quite invasive. Since scrapping them however I have spoken to people a lot more, people who I wanted to keep in my life. If anything scrapping "social" networks made me less anti-social.
I volunteered working for a charity. I worked there for a few months, the work was fulfilling, it was a pretty easy job and I was happy doing it. If anything had it been paid I would have done it as a real job. The charity work eventually ended when I was offered a job in a different company that in hindsight I shouldn't have taken. That job didn't work out well in the end and was nothing it promised to be, nevertheless it taught me a lesson that I needed to learn - as difficult as it was at the time to accept.
After that job didn't work out I got quite depressed and found myself thrown back to the same place I was last February. It took a while for that to ease off. During that time though I had a number of arguments with people that resulted in me leaving yet more people behind and out of my life. The only pick-me-up from last year was the Christmas season. Normally I am quite active, and contribute a lot, as I love to cook, and there's nothing I love more than Christmas. As I have said before Christmas to me and my family has pretty much lost all Religious significance, it's more a tradition now, and one that I will continue for years to come. To me it's about togetherness, being surrounded by the people you love and people who love you.
2012 had a lot of ups and downs, the highest point for me ironically was the point I got the job that didn't work out, I had left my CV in that morning, and as I was on my way to the charity job, not even to the end of the street I got a phone-call asking me to come for an interview that day. I went for the interview, and it was a few days later I was offered the job. I guess that they had asked for an interview so quickly, and that they had replied so quickly after the interview should have made me think "Why?" - in hindsight things always look obvious.
The low point of 2012 probably wasn't the depression but actually when I got Tonsillitis, I don't like tablets in the slightest, I avoid Doctors usually and if I am ever sick I usually want to "ride it out" but that wasn't really an option. I wrote a post shortly after professing my love for the NHS'
So I guess 2012 was filled with ups and downs, quite possibly more down than up. As for my Year Of The Dragon, that was bumpy right to the bitter end, with January smacking me in the face with a bill for the better part of a grand - not so happy days. So here we are now, Year Of The Snake. Will it be any better?
Oh and if you find the idea of the Chinese zodiac somewhat laughable or the idea of astrology in general laughable I have only one question for you really: Have you ever made a New Year's resolution, if so how is it any different, what's so special about Dec 31st/Jan 1st that makes you question life set goals or reassess the year that just passed?
After all that if you would like a pick-me-up post then try last year's single on Valentine's Day post.
Last February I was in a different place emotionally than I am now, back then I felt quite alone, despite having people around me it didn't make much difference to me. I felt trapped and while I still do to an extent it's not as imposing as it was back then. I've made a few changes in the last year to my life one of which was to scrap all social networks. I left twitter - twice actually, yea that was complicated - and I left facebook, and I left a few online forums I was a member of and I even scrapped this blog. For a while it was taken down completely. I had a change of heart where the blog was concerned and restored it, and on twitter, I gave it another chance - although a recent post highlighted the fact I still wasn't completely comfortable keeping it. It's staying for now, but I'm still in two minds.
Scrapping social networks proved effective for me as it cut out a lot of people who were "in" my life but weren't part of it; by that I mean they would be involved in it, inevitably ask questions or judge me for what I had or had not done and that was annoying for me. I value my privacy and I value having the freedom to make my own decisions without having to explain myself every step of the way. Social networks, facebook in particular in this respect I found quite invasive. Since scrapping them however I have spoken to people a lot more, people who I wanted to keep in my life. If anything scrapping "social" networks made me less anti-social.
I volunteered working for a charity. I worked there for a few months, the work was fulfilling, it was a pretty easy job and I was happy doing it. If anything had it been paid I would have done it as a real job. The charity work eventually ended when I was offered a job in a different company that in hindsight I shouldn't have taken. That job didn't work out well in the end and was nothing it promised to be, nevertheless it taught me a lesson that I needed to learn - as difficult as it was at the time to accept.
After that job didn't work out I got quite depressed and found myself thrown back to the same place I was last February. It took a while for that to ease off. During that time though I had a number of arguments with people that resulted in me leaving yet more people behind and out of my life. The only pick-me-up from last year was the Christmas season. Normally I am quite active, and contribute a lot, as I love to cook, and there's nothing I love more than Christmas. As I have said before Christmas to me and my family has pretty much lost all Religious significance, it's more a tradition now, and one that I will continue for years to come. To me it's about togetherness, being surrounded by the people you love and people who love you.
2012 had a lot of ups and downs, the highest point for me ironically was the point I got the job that didn't work out, I had left my CV in that morning, and as I was on my way to the charity job, not even to the end of the street I got a phone-call asking me to come for an interview that day. I went for the interview, and it was a few days later I was offered the job. I guess that they had asked for an interview so quickly, and that they had replied so quickly after the interview should have made me think "Why?" - in hindsight things always look obvious.
The low point of 2012 probably wasn't the depression but actually when I got Tonsillitis, I don't like tablets in the slightest, I avoid Doctors usually and if I am ever sick I usually want to "ride it out" but that wasn't really an option. I wrote a post shortly after professing my love for the NHS'
So I guess 2012 was filled with ups and downs, quite possibly more down than up. As for my Year Of The Dragon, that was bumpy right to the bitter end, with January smacking me in the face with a bill for the better part of a grand - not so happy days. So here we are now, Year Of The Snake. Will it be any better?
Oh and if you find the idea of the Chinese zodiac somewhat laughable or the idea of astrology in general laughable I have only one question for you really: Have you ever made a New Year's resolution, if so how is it any different, what's so special about Dec 31st/Jan 1st that makes you question life set goals or reassess the year that just passed?
After all that if you would like a pick-me-up post then try last year's single on Valentine's Day post.
The Sands of Time
If you could go back and change your past, or prevent yourself from doing something that you regret, would you do it? More important than that, is the question: would you want to remember what you changed?
Consider for a moment that you had the power to travel back and forward along your own timeline, turning or returning to any given point in your life, retaining all memories that you have. Now if you jumped back to say 10 years ago and you remembered everything that you had experienced and could change whatever you want, let's assume that you change something. Would you want to remember what you change, and everything from that point onward in your life that you "already" experienced, or would you want it to sever the connection to your old timeline, leaving you back in that moment, with the event changed but only with the memories to that moment.
Here's an example, let's say you were hurt by someone you met 9 years ago and you regretted meeting them and all that you came to experience. You have the chance to go back to the point in your life 10 years ago. You can make a change in your life that ultimately means that you will never meet them. So you make that change. Would you want to remember everything you had experienced, or would you want your life to be "reset" to that moment, effectively writing off the 10 years you had experienced and all recollection.
Would you choose to remember or would you choose to forget?
I'm not really interested if you would choose to forget, what I am interested in is those who say they would choose to remember, because to me, if you choose to remember it, then it still happened. If you choose to forget, then no-one will remember it, and you have the possibility that history could repeat itself. Choosing to forget is in effect rewriting history, it is as if it never happened. Whereas if you choose to remember, you are only really making a change in your life - albeit one in the past that has far reaching consequences but it's still on the face of it only a change in your life, as if it was a change you made in the present not undoing anything just taking a new outlook on life.
I guess the question is, for those who would long to go back and change something in their past, if you would choose to remember it, what's the difference between going back in time, or just accepting your past in the present and moving on? Is it the want to recover lost years of your life? Or maybe it's not the fact that you forget or remember it, rather it's that you want the other person forget?
Time fascinates me, and the possibility of time travel is something that throws up many questions I like to contemplate. Some of these questions though often bring about a realisation of the present more than the possibilities for the future or the memories of the past.
Consider for a moment that you had the power to travel back and forward along your own timeline, turning or returning to any given point in your life, retaining all memories that you have. Now if you jumped back to say 10 years ago and you remembered everything that you had experienced and could change whatever you want, let's assume that you change something. Would you want to remember what you change, and everything from that point onward in your life that you "already" experienced, or would you want it to sever the connection to your old timeline, leaving you back in that moment, with the event changed but only with the memories to that moment.
Here's an example, let's say you were hurt by someone you met 9 years ago and you regretted meeting them and all that you came to experience. You have the chance to go back to the point in your life 10 years ago. You can make a change in your life that ultimately means that you will never meet them. So you make that change. Would you want to remember everything you had experienced, or would you want your life to be "reset" to that moment, effectively writing off the 10 years you had experienced and all recollection.
Would you choose to remember or would you choose to forget?
I'm not really interested if you would choose to forget, what I am interested in is those who say they would choose to remember, because to me, if you choose to remember it, then it still happened. If you choose to forget, then no-one will remember it, and you have the possibility that history could repeat itself. Choosing to forget is in effect rewriting history, it is as if it never happened. Whereas if you choose to remember, you are only really making a change in your life - albeit one in the past that has far reaching consequences but it's still on the face of it only a change in your life, as if it was a change you made in the present not undoing anything just taking a new outlook on life.
I guess the question is, for those who would long to go back and change something in their past, if you would choose to remember it, what's the difference between going back in time, or just accepting your past in the present and moving on? Is it the want to recover lost years of your life? Or maybe it's not the fact that you forget or remember it, rather it's that you want the other person forget?
Time fascinates me, and the possibility of time travel is something that throws up many questions I like to contemplate. Some of these questions though often bring about a realisation of the present more than the possibilities for the future or the memories of the past.
I'll bet you think this post is about you!
It probably is.
I over-think things and over-analyse things a lot, and I always believed that was a bad thing to do - or at least that's what everyone told me. I was thinking about this however and after chatting with my good friend Ryan who would openly admit that he over-thinks things too, I had a thought; we both perceived this as something bad or wrong or something that you should try not to do, but is that really the case?
When I stopped to think about it, I don't actually know anyone that doesn't over-think things. How often they do it or admit to doing it however is another matter - but I don't actually know anyone who has never over-thought something or had a moment when someone said something or did something that they then thought about in excess, often ending with them having an in depth conversation about what happened and what things actually meant.
The Psychologists among us, or more specifically the Behavioural Psychologists will side with me on one point - that what we do is rarely if ever random. Everything we do is motivated by our thoughts, intuitions, desires, motivations, and aspirations etc. Whether we are conscious of the reason we do something or not, there is almost always a rationale behind the behaviour. We eat because we are hungry or because we are low on energy - we rarely eat for the sake of eating. Even people who eat all the time will have a motivation for doing so, whether that be something physical or emotional - we don't always eat consciously, sometimes we eat for the sake of routine and pay little attention to what we are doing or if we were actually hungry in the first place.
In following with all of this, our actions and our words are often chosen for a reason, whether we give it conscious forethought or if our actions are motivated by our subconscious what we say is inexorably linked to what we want, or how we feel. So every little thing you say in conversation, no matter how insignificant you think it is, it has a motivation behind it. So if we accept that we are all guilty of over thinking things, consciously or not, then you have to ask yourself is it actually wrong to over analyse what someone else does? If someone else has said something to you that may seem insignificant at first, even if they never meant it to be anything more than a passing remark, surely you should feel no guilt about contemplating why they said it, or even what might have lead them to think about it in the first place.
So going back to the title of this post, when someone makes a passing remark and you dismiss it thinking "oh they don't mean me" or "hmm do they mean me?" the answer is more than likely yes, they do. Carly Simon once wrote a song called 'You're so Vain' with the infamous line "I'll bet you think this song is about you" - nowhere is this over-analysis psyche more apt than in the critique of the lyrics, despite the chorus in jest that someone might be so self-absorbed to believe they'd write about them, if you actually read the rest of the lyrics the song is indeed about them.
I over-think things and over-analyse things a lot, and I always believed that was a bad thing to do - or at least that's what everyone told me. I was thinking about this however and after chatting with my good friend Ryan who would openly admit that he over-thinks things too, I had a thought; we both perceived this as something bad or wrong or something that you should try not to do, but is that really the case?
When I stopped to think about it, I don't actually know anyone that doesn't over-think things. How often they do it or admit to doing it however is another matter - but I don't actually know anyone who has never over-thought something or had a moment when someone said something or did something that they then thought about in excess, often ending with them having an in depth conversation about what happened and what things actually meant.
The Psychologists among us, or more specifically the Behavioural Psychologists will side with me on one point - that what we do is rarely if ever random. Everything we do is motivated by our thoughts, intuitions, desires, motivations, and aspirations etc. Whether we are conscious of the reason we do something or not, there is almost always a rationale behind the behaviour. We eat because we are hungry or because we are low on energy - we rarely eat for the sake of eating. Even people who eat all the time will have a motivation for doing so, whether that be something physical or emotional - we don't always eat consciously, sometimes we eat for the sake of routine and pay little attention to what we are doing or if we were actually hungry in the first place.
In following with all of this, our actions and our words are often chosen for a reason, whether we give it conscious forethought or if our actions are motivated by our subconscious what we say is inexorably linked to what we want, or how we feel. So every little thing you say in conversation, no matter how insignificant you think it is, it has a motivation behind it. So if we accept that we are all guilty of over thinking things, consciously or not, then you have to ask yourself is it actually wrong to over analyse what someone else does? If someone else has said something to you that may seem insignificant at first, even if they never meant it to be anything more than a passing remark, surely you should feel no guilt about contemplating why they said it, or even what might have lead them to think about it in the first place.
So going back to the title of this post, when someone makes a passing remark and you dismiss it thinking "oh they don't mean me" or "hmm do they mean me?" the answer is more than likely yes, they do. Carly Simon once wrote a song called 'You're so Vain' with the infamous line "I'll bet you think this song is about you" - nowhere is this over-analysis psyche more apt than in the critique of the lyrics, despite the chorus in jest that someone might be so self-absorbed to believe they'd write about them, if you actually read the rest of the lyrics the song is indeed about them.
Something from my teenage years
If you know me then you'll know most of the music I like has some sort of meaning to me, so I'll leave it for you to guess why I like this track.
Segregation
For a long time I quite despised the idea of segregation, on whatever grounds it may be. I used to think it was always a bad thing. I used to think in particular when it came to LGBT issues and the Gay Community specifically that segregation was the worst thing that anyone could ever want as it promotes minoritization. That's what I used to think, but lately I have come to question whether this is really the case.
I have been a member of several forums online, I have run several blogs in my time and I have run a few websites. I have been a member of various social networks over the years from those that catered to "anyone and everyone", those that catered to "everyone" and had sections for groups like an LGBT section, to those that catered solely for the LGBT community or the Gay community. Through it all I had maintained that LGBT people shouldn't have to segregate themselves from society, that they shouldn't have to back themselves into a corner - now, there will be many LGBT activists that would argue they fight for the opposite but I call them hypocrites and the reason I do so is in the name - "LGBT" Activist - these people willingly segregate themselves and specialise in the political area of LGBT activism and anything that affects LGBT people - that IS segregation in itself. If you opposed segregation in the way you claim, you would be a pro-LGBT politician who dealt with many things, LGBT issues would not occupy the majority of your work.
I am no longer arguing that segregation is a bad thing, in fact I think the opposite is true and I have come to realise this for a number of reasons but the first would be twitter. If the twitter box is still on this blog you should see it to the right, depending on when you read this I would not be surprised if I had deleted it by then. The reason twitter has contributed to this change in view is down to an experiment I carried out. I created 2 accounts, one that was just generalised and I posted anything and everything to, and the other was gay. Everything was gay, the bio, the backgrounds, the profile picture, the lot. I gave it one week. The general account had 20 followers after 1 week and the gay one had almost 150. The general one encountered a number of people who were just generally argumentative, trying to sell something, obsessing over "follow back", or purely after increasing their follower count. I had a few conversations on the general account and a fair few more on the gay account. The guys on the gay account were friendly, talkative, not judgemental at all despite my expectations being the contrary.
I have deleted the general account, and only have the gay account still running as a second twitter account to my main actual account [which should be in the box on the right]. The experiment served its purpose however and I tried to figure out why. I have been trying to approach this from a Psychological viewpoint and to that end I have a theory. One which could be tested, if I had the energy or someone else did. My theory is that people like to belong to a group, and within a group they are more comfortable being themselves. In general on twitter people are quite disconnected - save for celebrities who usually only follow a few people they know through their work or personally - but ordinary twitter users are just people. They may have a few friends following them, and I question what impact that has, as it may actually cause more apprehension than ease. Moving on, as an ordinary twitter user you connect only with people you follow or follow you when you or they tweet about something you like. This means you form a lot of micro-relationships based on different likes and dislikes and end up with a mass of followers who are eclectic.
I think that's a bad thing, because ultimately there is no common ground among your followers or the people you follow and inevitably there will be disagreements, arguments and a lot of conflict. People do get quite nasty towards one another on there. So if all this implies disconnection then connection can be implied when there is a common understanding, and I believe I have proof to show for that theory. I have already mentioned celebrities, who arguably don't count as normal twitter users as most often their tweets are a % of their own and a % of their management. Their followers however are a good example of group mentality and this is exemplified at its strongest when you look at the likes of Lady GaGa and Justin Bieber. Their fans are arguably a collective. Beliebers as they call themselves will have a Bieber avatar, a Bieber bio, a Bieber background, tweet Bieber youtube videos, tweet Bieber lyrics, retweet anything Justin Bieber tweets, and retweet any tweet their Belieber friends tweet. They are so influential they create hashtags that trend, almost every day there's a Bieber related tweet. All this inspires hatred from the rest of twitter and why? I'll leave that one for you to answer.
Whether you like Bieber or not his followers do twitter right, they have a common ground, they have something they all agree on, their relationships are built on it and everything else is secondary. Every Belieber feels like part of the collective and that inclusion is what gives them a reward and propels them to the level of followers they achieve.
So what has this got to do with segregation? Well I used to view segregation as a form of discrimination, and it is, when it's forced onto you or imposed by someone outside of your control - but it is not when you elect to segregate yourself. When you do this, you choose to surround yourself with people that you have something in common with, even if it is something that you would argue shouldn't be the sole basis for a relationship and I agree, but you need to stop seeing it as the cornerstone and view it as part of the foundations.
Five years ago if you had told me that a gay guy could find love on a site like Gaydar I would have laughed in your face but it is possible. I know many reading this who know of Gaydar's reputation will laugh at me and to you I simply say, as long as you see it that way you'll never be able to use it properly. I don't think anyone who uses Gaydar expects to fall in love on Gaydar but it can be used to find someone that you might one day fall in love with. If you are fixated on the end result and skip over all the steps in between you will never get what you want. You can't expect to jump and land a mile away at your goal, there's a road along the way you have to walk. I'm not saying it's going to be fun all the time and I am not saying there won't be times when you will want to turn back, all I am saying is that the idea that you are going to find what you are looking for in the wider world is maybe harder than you give it credit. If you wanted to buy a game, you would be most likely to find it in a shop that sells games or a toy store - just because a department store is massive and sells everything including the kitchen sink doesn't mean you're going to find it there. There are so many areas in our lives where we embrace segregation and think nothing of it, we only protest when the thought of segregating ourselves is suggested.
I have been a member of several forums online, I have run several blogs in my time and I have run a few websites. I have been a member of various social networks over the years from those that catered to "anyone and everyone", those that catered to "everyone" and had sections for groups like an LGBT section, to those that catered solely for the LGBT community or the Gay community. Through it all I had maintained that LGBT people shouldn't have to segregate themselves from society, that they shouldn't have to back themselves into a corner - now, there will be many LGBT activists that would argue they fight for the opposite but I call them hypocrites and the reason I do so is in the name - "LGBT" Activist - these people willingly segregate themselves and specialise in the political area of LGBT activism and anything that affects LGBT people - that IS segregation in itself. If you opposed segregation in the way you claim, you would be a pro-LGBT politician who dealt with many things, LGBT issues would not occupy the majority of your work.
I am no longer arguing that segregation is a bad thing, in fact I think the opposite is true and I have come to realise this for a number of reasons but the first would be twitter. If the twitter box is still on this blog you should see it to the right, depending on when you read this I would not be surprised if I had deleted it by then. The reason twitter has contributed to this change in view is down to an experiment I carried out. I created 2 accounts, one that was just generalised and I posted anything and everything to, and the other was gay. Everything was gay, the bio, the backgrounds, the profile picture, the lot. I gave it one week. The general account had 20 followers after 1 week and the gay one had almost 150. The general one encountered a number of people who were just generally argumentative, trying to sell something, obsessing over "follow back", or purely after increasing their follower count. I had a few conversations on the general account and a fair few more on the gay account. The guys on the gay account were friendly, talkative, not judgemental at all despite my expectations being the contrary.
I have deleted the general account, and only have the gay account still running as a second twitter account to my main actual account [which should be in the box on the right]. The experiment served its purpose however and I tried to figure out why. I have been trying to approach this from a Psychological viewpoint and to that end I have a theory. One which could be tested, if I had the energy or someone else did. My theory is that people like to belong to a group, and within a group they are more comfortable being themselves. In general on twitter people are quite disconnected - save for celebrities who usually only follow a few people they know through their work or personally - but ordinary twitter users are just people. They may have a few friends following them, and I question what impact that has, as it may actually cause more apprehension than ease. Moving on, as an ordinary twitter user you connect only with people you follow or follow you when you or they tweet about something you like. This means you form a lot of micro-relationships based on different likes and dislikes and end up with a mass of followers who are eclectic.
I think that's a bad thing, because ultimately there is no common ground among your followers or the people you follow and inevitably there will be disagreements, arguments and a lot of conflict. People do get quite nasty towards one another on there. So if all this implies disconnection then connection can be implied when there is a common understanding, and I believe I have proof to show for that theory. I have already mentioned celebrities, who arguably don't count as normal twitter users as most often their tweets are a % of their own and a % of their management. Their followers however are a good example of group mentality and this is exemplified at its strongest when you look at the likes of Lady GaGa and Justin Bieber. Their fans are arguably a collective. Beliebers as they call themselves will have a Bieber avatar, a Bieber bio, a Bieber background, tweet Bieber youtube videos, tweet Bieber lyrics, retweet anything Justin Bieber tweets, and retweet any tweet their Belieber friends tweet. They are so influential they create hashtags that trend, almost every day there's a Bieber related tweet. All this inspires hatred from the rest of twitter and why? I'll leave that one for you to answer.
Whether you like Bieber or not his followers do twitter right, they have a common ground, they have something they all agree on, their relationships are built on it and everything else is secondary. Every Belieber feels like part of the collective and that inclusion is what gives them a reward and propels them to the level of followers they achieve.
So what has this got to do with segregation? Well I used to view segregation as a form of discrimination, and it is, when it's forced onto you or imposed by someone outside of your control - but it is not when you elect to segregate yourself. When you do this, you choose to surround yourself with people that you have something in common with, even if it is something that you would argue shouldn't be the sole basis for a relationship and I agree, but you need to stop seeing it as the cornerstone and view it as part of the foundations.
Five years ago if you had told me that a gay guy could find love on a site like Gaydar I would have laughed in your face but it is possible. I know many reading this who know of Gaydar's reputation will laugh at me and to you I simply say, as long as you see it that way you'll never be able to use it properly. I don't think anyone who uses Gaydar expects to fall in love on Gaydar but it can be used to find someone that you might one day fall in love with. If you are fixated on the end result and skip over all the steps in between you will never get what you want. You can't expect to jump and land a mile away at your goal, there's a road along the way you have to walk. I'm not saying it's going to be fun all the time and I am not saying there won't be times when you will want to turn back, all I am saying is that the idea that you are going to find what you are looking for in the wider world is maybe harder than you give it credit. If you wanted to buy a game, you would be most likely to find it in a shop that sells games or a toy store - just because a department store is massive and sells everything including the kitchen sink doesn't mean you're going to find it there. There are so many areas in our lives where we embrace segregation and think nothing of it, we only protest when the thought of segregating ourselves is suggested.
Shall I compare thee to a . . .
In generations past it was customary to display one's affection and desire for another through an act of romance. While today these acts still exist there is one such act that has all but died. The Love Letter. It's rather heart warming to think of the concept, to take the time to write with pen and paper in your own hand the feelings you have for another. The act in itself was often long lived. Beyond the initial reading of the letter by the recipient, love letters were often kept for years maybe even for a lifetime. Their presence a treasured possession and the reflection and nostalgia that arose when reading them years later were emotions that perhaps future generations might not experience.
As technology has advanced so too have our behaviours. Today it would be less common to write a love letter, and more common to write perhaps a love email, text, tweet, or some other electronic communication. One might ask why would you do this when you can tell the person directly? Well the same question could be asked of love letters, they were often sent between people who could see one another if they wanted, even those who lived together would gift a letter to the other, the purpose is the act of affection it represents and the romantic nature of the gesture.
Do you save your emails? Keep every one a crush writes to you? What about texts? As for social networks like twitter and Facebook, keeping what is written on these sites relies on two things, firstly as the posts are written by the other person, on most sites you rely on them not deleting it, and secondly the site itself needs to continue to run in order for you to use it. It may seem rather inconceivable to some that there will come a day when Facebook or Twitter would shut down for good, but they are businesses at the end of the day and they need to make a profit to continue operating, these sites will not last forever, if and when they stop being profitable they will close.
The days of keeping letters that were carefully written with love and affection it seems are gone. This makes it easier for us to forget the past - that's not always a bad thing but some things are worth remembering, and ink on paper fades more slowly than memories.
As technology has advanced so too have our behaviours. Today it would be less common to write a love letter, and more common to write perhaps a love email, text, tweet, or some other electronic communication. One might ask why would you do this when you can tell the person directly? Well the same question could be asked of love letters, they were often sent between people who could see one another if they wanted, even those who lived together would gift a letter to the other, the purpose is the act of affection it represents and the romantic nature of the gesture.
Do you save your emails? Keep every one a crush writes to you? What about texts? As for social networks like twitter and Facebook, keeping what is written on these sites relies on two things, firstly as the posts are written by the other person, on most sites you rely on them not deleting it, and secondly the site itself needs to continue to run in order for you to use it. It may seem rather inconceivable to some that there will come a day when Facebook or Twitter would shut down for good, but they are businesses at the end of the day and they need to make a profit to continue operating, these sites will not last forever, if and when they stop being profitable they will close.
The days of keeping letters that were carefully written with love and affection it seems are gone. This makes it easier for us to forget the past - that's not always a bad thing but some things are worth remembering, and ink on paper fades more slowly than memories.
The World(s) keep(s) on turning
There exists a religious belief that posits that there are multiple worlds within which man can dwell, 7 being the most frequent incarnation. He is born into the first world which is filled with turmoil and tumult. There are lessons in life which he must learn. If he succeeds then he will ascend to the next world. If he fails then he must try again. This process continues, all the while if man should fail spectacularly then he will descend into the preceding world. There is no world beyond the first world, it is the lowest level upon which man can live.
Now there is a question of interpretation here. I would posit that there are two main interpretations of this theory and which you choose will ultimately decide if you see yourself as an individual or as part of a collective.
In the individualistic interpretation these worlds are interpreted literally as separate distinct worlds, be they planets in this Universe, other Universes, or different planes of existence, whatever way you look at it. In this belief you live as a single person, and embark on a journey of self discovery and seek enlightenment as your ultimate goal - or in other words to reach the seventh world.
In the collectivist interpretation these worlds are not interpreted literally but rather interpreted as levels in our advancement as a race. In this interpretation our history can be seen as our path that we walk together. The various points in our history when things in our past reflected our most cruel nature, such as medieval torture devices for example can be seen as a lower point in our journey. In essence, we once lived within the first world.
Whichever interpretation you subscribe to, individual or group, the question exists, if true, which world do we now live within? It cannot be denied as a species within the last two hundred years alone we have come quite a long way. Although that is not necessarily shared equally among everyone on this planet it is something that inevitably affects everyone on this planet.
Now there is a question of interpretation here. I would posit that there are two main interpretations of this theory and which you choose will ultimately decide if you see yourself as an individual or as part of a collective.
In the individualistic interpretation these worlds are interpreted literally as separate distinct worlds, be they planets in this Universe, other Universes, or different planes of existence, whatever way you look at it. In this belief you live as a single person, and embark on a journey of self discovery and seek enlightenment as your ultimate goal - or in other words to reach the seventh world.
In the collectivist interpretation these worlds are not interpreted literally but rather interpreted as levels in our advancement as a race. In this interpretation our history can be seen as our path that we walk together. The various points in our history when things in our past reflected our most cruel nature, such as medieval torture devices for example can be seen as a lower point in our journey. In essence, we once lived within the first world.
Whichever interpretation you subscribe to, individual or group, the question exists, if true, which world do we now live within? It cannot be denied as a species within the last two hundred years alone we have come quite a long way. Although that is not necessarily shared equally among everyone on this planet it is something that inevitably affects everyone on this planet.
Happy New Year!
It's now 2013 so yay for that! I thought I would share this video it is the London 2012-2013 New Year's Fireworks display as broadcast on the BBC.
And for the benefit of my readers and anyone else here is the playlist for the New Year's Eve Fireworks Display - at least what appears in the video, it ends before the display actually finished.
And for the benefit of my readers and anyone else here is the playlist for the New Year's Eve Fireworks Display - at least what appears in the video, it ends before the display actually finished.
Nero :: Me And You
Willy Moon :: Yeah Yeah
Depeche Mode :: Personal Jesus
Electric Light Orchestra :: Mr Blue Sky
Coldplay vs. Katy Perry :: Wide Awake In Paradise
RaKalid ft. Aaron Compton :: Wait For Me
[ vocal break ]
Sam and the Womp :: Bom Bom
[ vocal break :: Psy - Gangnam Style ]
Florence And The Machine :: Spectrum
Queen :: We Will Rock You
[ vocal break :: Prince Charles' Jubilee Speech ]
Gary Barlow & The Commonwealth Band featuring Military Wives :: Sing
[ vocal break :: The Queen's Jubilee Speech ]
Ellie Goulding :: Anything Could Happen
[ vocal break :: David Cameron's Olympic Speech ]
[ vocal break :: Boris Johnson's Olympic Speech ]
Dizzee Rascal :: Bonkers
One Direction :: Live While We're Young
Swedish House Mafia feat. Tinie Tempah :: Miami to Ibiza
Willy Moon :: Yeah Yeah
Depeche Mode :: Personal Jesus
Electric Light Orchestra :: Mr Blue Sky
Coldplay vs. Katy Perry :: Wide Awake In Paradise
RaKalid ft. Aaron Compton :: Wait For Me
[ vocal break ]
Sam and the Womp :: Bom Bom
[ vocal break :: Psy - Gangnam Style ]
Florence And The Machine :: Spectrum
Queen :: We Will Rock You
[ vocal break :: Prince Charles' Jubilee Speech ]
Gary Barlow & The Commonwealth Band featuring Military Wives :: Sing
[ vocal break :: The Queen's Jubilee Speech ]
Ellie Goulding :: Anything Could Happen
[ vocal break :: David Cameron's Olympic Speech ]
[ vocal break :: Boris Johnson's Olympic Speech ]
Dizzee Rascal :: Bonkers
One Direction :: Live While We're Young
Swedish House Mafia feat. Tinie Tempah :: Miami to Ibiza
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