In the gay world "fat" is an ugly word. I suppose in the straight world it is too, but in the straight world those that are conscious of their weight more often than not are women. Straight men don't pay that much attention to their actual weight but focus instead on having a six-pack. In gay world however weight is a number, a statistic, and at times it seems more important to gay men in narrowing down suitors than what someone actually looks like.
This is more visible and easier to demonstrate online than in-person. The latter seems to afford some degree of lenience. When you set up a profile on dating sites however you are prompted to fill out a profile of statistics. Those statistics at the end of the day are filters. What you put is going to determine whether someone on the site even sees your profile at all. That's a bit unsettling. It means if you don't fall into a given range of "acceptability" then you're not even seen.
When you visit one of these sites it is inevitable that you will filter people like this. You see a site prompt you by saying 25,000 profiles match your criteria - the first thing you do is not to try and view them all but to narrow it down. The filters come out in force and you enter your "ideal" values for a partner. That's where the problem arises. A number is just that, a number. It's not a story, it's not an explanation, and more often than not it is not realistic, nor is it an accurate representation of the person you have pictured.
Let's say you are a 5 foot 7 inch man. If you are of average build then you'd aim to be 10 stone to 11 stone to be "healthy" according to the Body Mass Index - BMI. [1.7m, 151 lbs / 68kg]
The problem with this is that it does not factor in body type, and muscle to fat ratio. This does play a big part in determining whether the person is a healthy weight. A pound of muscle is much denser than a pound of fat. Let's take another example:
John Cena, a rather famous wrestler is just over 6 foot [1.85m], and weighs 17 stone 13 pounds [251lbs / 114 kg], according to the Body Mass Index, John Cena is Obese. Now looking at his picture you will be no means argue he is anything but Obese. He's an exquisite specimen of fitness. However if you were to see a dating profile without his picture and saw an almost 18 stone, 38 year old man, most gay men would pass without a second notion. Now you can argue if he included a picture you wouldn't - but that only assumes you get to even see the picture, those filters we mentioned earlier would automatically filter out John Cena because he's not in your ideal definition of a healthy weight.
Therein lies the problem - we apply our own standards to other people and fail to realise that what applies to us might not apply to others. We assume that because we are a certain height and a certain weight that anyone else should have the same proportions as us to be healthy - assuming we actually think we ourselves are healthy.
The question is why do we do this? In the real world we don't stop someone before they speak to us and ask them what weight they are, how tall they are, and the plethora of statistics we look for and filter by online. We don't do it in those situations but at the same time we do still narrow people down to a lesser extent in the real world. Why do we like to say no more than we like to say yes? Is it the genuine desire to reduce the possible number of people making Mr Right easier to find? Or is it something else? I've wondered about this and I have a theory. We like to reject others because it makes us feel good. The more people we say no to the "higher" we elevate ourselves. We see a site with 25,000 profiles and enter our filters and get it down to 1,000 and we feel some pleasure in thinking 24,000 people weren't "good enough" for us. We want people to be interested in us, and to be in the position to say no, because it makes you feel desirable. Dismissing those 24,000 people makes you feel good but what does it achieve?
Gay Dating Online
The internet makes many things easy. Convenience often comes at a cost though. When it comes to gay dating sites they make it easier to say no than it is to say yes - or, to be more accurate, it makes it easier to say nothing at all. There's nothing wrong with the realisation that you're not that into someone, or that they aren't what you are looking for, but in the real world if you lose interest in someone or if you just aren't interested at all then you have the obligation to show common courtesy by letting the other person know. When it comes to the online world however it's far too easy just to delete a message and never even reply. To ignore someone completely.
I have been on both sides of this, and to be honest most people are passive aggressive, they do it because they don't want to confront the other person, because inevitably they will ask you to justify your decision - something which reminds me of that episode of the Simpsons where the town joins a cult and they watch a brain washing film and any time someone stands up a spotlight shines on them and a voice says "You're free to leave but do you mind telling us why?" - this puts you in an awkward position of having to nail down feelings and emotions into concise articulations. The truth is "it just doesn't feel right" is a sentiment you can feel but in writing it leads to more questions than it answers. So instead people just avoid it all together and don't say anything at all - or block. The latter I never saw the point of, except in cases of abuse but even then it's not effective for the same simple reason - they can create another account, or in some cases the site explicitly says they have blocked you. Back in the days of MSN if you blocked someone you just appeared offline. They couldn't actually know for sure whether you were offline or whether you had blocked them.
This convenience of cowardice - and I admit that's what it is, even though I have been on both sides - is something that encourages negative behaviour in people. In the case of being the one to ignore someone, it discourages the development of effective social skills to deal with this kind of conflict and encourages you to simply stick your head in the sand and pretend it never happened. More fool us as this leaves us ill prepared to confront situations like this in the real world. If anything the physical barrier the internet provides should encourage you to learn how to do this in a safer environment. The real world is a lot more risky in terms of the threats that exist.
My experiences of online dating are limited to the gay world, so I can't comment on the straight, but I would assume the same problems exist. As for the actual process of dating online I have a fair few horror stories of my own when it comes to that, and a few that were somewhat happy, although they didn't end with the stereotypical 'happy ever after' - much to my disappointment.
I have been on both sides of this, and to be honest most people are passive aggressive, they do it because they don't want to confront the other person, because inevitably they will ask you to justify your decision - something which reminds me of that episode of the Simpsons where the town joins a cult and they watch a brain washing film and any time someone stands up a spotlight shines on them and a voice says "You're free to leave but do you mind telling us why?" - this puts you in an awkward position of having to nail down feelings and emotions into concise articulations. The truth is "it just doesn't feel right" is a sentiment you can feel but in writing it leads to more questions than it answers. So instead people just avoid it all together and don't say anything at all - or block. The latter I never saw the point of, except in cases of abuse but even then it's not effective for the same simple reason - they can create another account, or in some cases the site explicitly says they have blocked you. Back in the days of MSN if you blocked someone you just appeared offline. They couldn't actually know for sure whether you were offline or whether you had blocked them.
This convenience of cowardice - and I admit that's what it is, even though I have been on both sides - is something that encourages negative behaviour in people. In the case of being the one to ignore someone, it discourages the development of effective social skills to deal with this kind of conflict and encourages you to simply stick your head in the sand and pretend it never happened. More fool us as this leaves us ill prepared to confront situations like this in the real world. If anything the physical barrier the internet provides should encourage you to learn how to do this in a safer environment. The real world is a lot more risky in terms of the threats that exist.
My experiences of online dating are limited to the gay world, so I can't comment on the straight, but I would assume the same problems exist. As for the actual process of dating online I have a fair few horror stories of my own when it comes to that, and a few that were somewhat happy, although they didn't end with the stereotypical 'happy ever after' - much to my disappointment.
I miss True Blood
I'm a binge-watcher. When I discover a show that I like I'll watch the whole thing, or as much as I can in one go and keep it up until I've seen it all. When I first got into Game of Thrones it was to my behest, spurred on by a friend I worked with, when I watched a few episodes I was hooked and I followed through. I had to catch up at the time as the latest season was about to air and I had 3 to catch up on. I'm quite good at avoiding things entirely when I am not interested, and up until then I had no idea what the show was actually about.
I have always had an affinity for Vampire lore. I read Bram Stoker's Dracula - which I found infuriating but I think the main reason for that was because of the time period it was set in, the chauvinist attitudes were insinuating and made me seethe with the desire to slap some of the male characters, I digress - the story was frustrating too though because of how little the characters knew of vampires, but you can't hold that against the author when he was the first to create a work centred around them. Over the years though I have explored many series that focused on Vampires. From the cheese of Vampire Academy to the cream of True Blood. The latter I have been missing lately.
A few months ago I watched the first episode of The Vampire Diaries - yes, a little late to the party here too - and I liked what I watched. I made my way through the seasons but it went stale quite quickly for me. I followed through, watching every episode up to date and my over arching opinion is that this is mediocre at best. True Blood was so much better to me, but I guess the creators of The Vampire Diaries would probably have been prepared for the comparisons before they ever produced a pilot. The Vampire Diaries vs True Blood is a no-contest for me, True Blood wins hands down. The problem though is when something is good, it becomes hard to match. This is something that's been true of many things not just Vampire Serials but throughout the entertainment industry as a whole. Our expectations over time have been raised, and when we return to older works we find them hard to embrace. In the same way that returning to Bram Stoker's classic was frustrating, we find it hard to go back to simpler times.
I get this with a lot of things I remember watching when I was younger. I loved Charmed and could not get enough of it, yet last year when I took the notion of binge-watching the whole series again I couldn't make it more than a few episodes in - Nostalgia it seems is very good at making our memories far happier than the reality. I said in a previous post that I was contemplating the nature of life crises, mid and quarter, if it's true to say that our nostalgia makes things seem happier than they were then perhaps it could be true to say the same of people. Maybe we weren't as happy as we think we were, and maybe the people we miss are more-so the idea, as opposed the reality. If that's true then it would mean the reality of longing for days that have passed is even more depressing as the days you recall never actually happened - not as you imagine them anyway. Isn't that a sombre thought?
I have always had an affinity for Vampire lore. I read Bram Stoker's Dracula - which I found infuriating but I think the main reason for that was because of the time period it was set in, the chauvinist attitudes were insinuating and made me seethe with the desire to slap some of the male characters, I digress - the story was frustrating too though because of how little the characters knew of vampires, but you can't hold that against the author when he was the first to create a work centred around them. Over the years though I have explored many series that focused on Vampires. From the cheese of Vampire Academy to the cream of True Blood. The latter I have been missing lately.
A few months ago I watched the first episode of The Vampire Diaries - yes, a little late to the party here too - and I liked what I watched. I made my way through the seasons but it went stale quite quickly for me. I followed through, watching every episode up to date and my over arching opinion is that this is mediocre at best. True Blood was so much better to me, but I guess the creators of The Vampire Diaries would probably have been prepared for the comparisons before they ever produced a pilot. The Vampire Diaries vs True Blood is a no-contest for me, True Blood wins hands down. The problem though is when something is good, it becomes hard to match. This is something that's been true of many things not just Vampire Serials but throughout the entertainment industry as a whole. Our expectations over time have been raised, and when we return to older works we find them hard to embrace. In the same way that returning to Bram Stoker's classic was frustrating, we find it hard to go back to simpler times.
I get this with a lot of things I remember watching when I was younger. I loved Charmed and could not get enough of it, yet last year when I took the notion of binge-watching the whole series again I couldn't make it more than a few episodes in - Nostalgia it seems is very good at making our memories far happier than the reality. I said in a previous post that I was contemplating the nature of life crises, mid and quarter, if it's true to say that our nostalgia makes things seem happier than they were then perhaps it could be true to say the same of people. Maybe we weren't as happy as we think we were, and maybe the people we miss are more-so the idea, as opposed the reality. If that's true then it would mean the reality of longing for days that have passed is even more depressing as the days you recall never actually happened - not as you imagine them anyway. Isn't that a sombre thought?
Starting Over
I'm not new to the internet, nor am I new to blogging, but every now and then you find that urge to scrap everything and start over. Right now I am filled with that urge. I have been for a while. It's not just an impulse, this I know for sure as it has been months now for me, living with this feeling.
I was once told that in decades passed people had mid-life crises and that in the modern age with the pace of life quickening we have them sooner now. The idea of a "quarter life crisis" was something I laughed off in my early 20's mainly because I never let things weigh me down that much. I was a lot more impulsive when I was younger, I would rise to things much more than I do now. "Scrappy" is probably an apt definition but at the time I would have resented you for calling me that. As I have got older though more and more I find myself just wanting a quiet life. In doing that though I have become complacent with many things and let them mount up over time. The baggage I have gathered has been something of a burden.
I'd like to be one of those people that just drops everything and runs off to join the Tibetan Monks or goes away to find themselves. The problem is I burden myself with guilt much more than I should. I feel responsible for people and things despite the fact I am young, single, never married, have no children, have no financial commitments other than student loans and various debts I amounted over the years. As for my possessions many of them I could probably do without but I hold onto the mentality of "what is mine will always be mine" and I tend to form deep sentimental attachments to the things I keep. I have had people say to me that I no longer own my possessions, that they own me, and I must confess to an extent it is true.
This isn't a post to sit and whine about my life, and complain about how bad I have it - I have a good life, I know that. There are a lot of people that are a lot worse off than me; but the thing is, if you let the fact someone is worse off than you stop you from confronting the things that are making you unhappy you might as well resign yourself from life altogether. I don't mean to end it all, I just mean to give up caring entirely. If you weigh up the validity of your emotions by their extremity in comparison to others you will never feel anything other than moderation ever again. Why would you ever feel happiness when there will be many people out there who are far happier than you?
The point of this post is to illustrate one thing - me. This is who I am and it's the best description of me and my thought process you can get, far more than anything I could ever write to summarise my ethos in life and my interests. This is what I do, I think. Way too much at times. I think up, I think down, I think forwards, I think backwards, if you can think about it I probably have too, and if I haven't I would be eager to, so don't be shy. "Have you ever", "Would you ever", "Did you know", and "Do you think" are the best openings you could ever make in a conversation with me.
I will aim to update this blog at least once a week, more if I can manage it.
I was once told that in decades passed people had mid-life crises and that in the modern age with the pace of life quickening we have them sooner now. The idea of a "quarter life crisis" was something I laughed off in my early 20's mainly because I never let things weigh me down that much. I was a lot more impulsive when I was younger, I would rise to things much more than I do now. "Scrappy" is probably an apt definition but at the time I would have resented you for calling me that. As I have got older though more and more I find myself just wanting a quiet life. In doing that though I have become complacent with many things and let them mount up over time. The baggage I have gathered has been something of a burden.
I'd like to be one of those people that just drops everything and runs off to join the Tibetan Monks or goes away to find themselves. The problem is I burden myself with guilt much more than I should. I feel responsible for people and things despite the fact I am young, single, never married, have no children, have no financial commitments other than student loans and various debts I amounted over the years. As for my possessions many of them I could probably do without but I hold onto the mentality of "what is mine will always be mine" and I tend to form deep sentimental attachments to the things I keep. I have had people say to me that I no longer own my possessions, that they own me, and I must confess to an extent it is true.
This isn't a post to sit and whine about my life, and complain about how bad I have it - I have a good life, I know that. There are a lot of people that are a lot worse off than me; but the thing is, if you let the fact someone is worse off than you stop you from confronting the things that are making you unhappy you might as well resign yourself from life altogether. I don't mean to end it all, I just mean to give up caring entirely. If you weigh up the validity of your emotions by their extremity in comparison to others you will never feel anything other than moderation ever again. Why would you ever feel happiness when there will be many people out there who are far happier than you?
The point of this post is to illustrate one thing - me. This is who I am and it's the best description of me and my thought process you can get, far more than anything I could ever write to summarise my ethos in life and my interests. This is what I do, I think. Way too much at times. I think up, I think down, I think forwards, I think backwards, if you can think about it I probably have too, and if I haven't I would be eager to, so don't be shy. "Have you ever", "Would you ever", "Did you know", and "Do you think" are the best openings you could ever make in a conversation with me.
I will aim to update this blog at least once a week, more if I can manage it.
Turn left
There's an episode of Doctor Who where Donna Noble (played by Catherine Tate) was forced to make one simple change in her timeline, turning right instead of left at an intersection, and her entire life changed as a result. Of course during the episode everything is rectified thanks to Rose Tyler (played by Billie Piper) and she eventually turns left again and restores her timeline.
I've been thinking about this concept for a while now, more so lately after some big changes in my personal life. Some people call it the butterfly effect, where one tiny change leads to other small changes that eventually cause monumental shifts in your timeline. Like the people who have survival stories from September 11, where they missed a bus or a train or ran late and because of it never made it to work on time and likely are alive today for that sole reason.
There have been a number of points in my life where these choices have occurred for me, where one tiny adjustment would in time cause monumental shifts in the eventual outcome. The most poignant for me as it is quite literally down to a single word was when I first started school. I was 5 years old and went with my parents to the school I wanted to go to and had an interview with the Principal. Due to when my birthday fell I had a choice of which year I could start into with the school, either the class above or the class below. As was the case with so many things in my life my parents let me decide for myself and asked me to pick. I only needed to say one word, which year I wanted. I chose the class above and everything led to where I am today.
The thing that blows my mind about turning left is how different things could be if you turn right instead. If I had uttered a single word instead of the one I did and chose the class below, my life would have completely changed. I likely would never have met any of the people I did. It would have been a year later that I went to college if I even went, the same with University and from my time at both of those I know the chance that I would have mixed with anyone other than my year was very slim. I wouldn't have lived with the same people in halls of residence as I had either. The impact those changes could have made on my life is untold. As for work for that matter, as it was one of my flatmates that got me my first job, I likely would never have worked there either or even met anyone I did - consequently they went into administration after a year of me working there [through no fault of my own] so I would not have even had the chance to work there.
Outside of school and work the people I mixed with may have stayed the same for the most part, I might have even been closer to some of them than I am. Moving house would have been delayed by a year as that was purposely delayed until I finished school so that would have taken an extra year, and at that point we probably would have moved to a different house than we did.
To delve a little deeper into the dark side of my life, some of you know some of the details of what happened to me when I was younger, most of you do not. I often wonder if that would even have happened if I had made that one small change, if we would even have met. So much of who I am and the problems I have in life are inexorably linked to what happened and if you suddenly took that away my life might be completely different. I say "might", I am almost completely convinced it would. Not being so paranoid and being able to actually trust people would monumentally shift the course of my life and the decisions I made through its course.
Something to think about. Every choice has an impact on our lives no matter how big or how small they may seem in the moment, they can completely change your life.
I've been thinking about this concept for a while now, more so lately after some big changes in my personal life. Some people call it the butterfly effect, where one tiny change leads to other small changes that eventually cause monumental shifts in your timeline. Like the people who have survival stories from September 11, where they missed a bus or a train or ran late and because of it never made it to work on time and likely are alive today for that sole reason.
There have been a number of points in my life where these choices have occurred for me, where one tiny adjustment would in time cause monumental shifts in the eventual outcome. The most poignant for me as it is quite literally down to a single word was when I first started school. I was 5 years old and went with my parents to the school I wanted to go to and had an interview with the Principal. Due to when my birthday fell I had a choice of which year I could start into with the school, either the class above or the class below. As was the case with so many things in my life my parents let me decide for myself and asked me to pick. I only needed to say one word, which year I wanted. I chose the class above and everything led to where I am today.
The thing that blows my mind about turning left is how different things could be if you turn right instead. If I had uttered a single word instead of the one I did and chose the class below, my life would have completely changed. I likely would never have met any of the people I did. It would have been a year later that I went to college if I even went, the same with University and from my time at both of those I know the chance that I would have mixed with anyone other than my year was very slim. I wouldn't have lived with the same people in halls of residence as I had either. The impact those changes could have made on my life is untold. As for work for that matter, as it was one of my flatmates that got me my first job, I likely would never have worked there either or even met anyone I did - consequently they went into administration after a year of me working there [through no fault of my own] so I would not have even had the chance to work there.
Outside of school and work the people I mixed with may have stayed the same for the most part, I might have even been closer to some of them than I am. Moving house would have been delayed by a year as that was purposely delayed until I finished school so that would have taken an extra year, and at that point we probably would have moved to a different house than we did.
To delve a little deeper into the dark side of my life, some of you know some of the details of what happened to me when I was younger, most of you do not. I often wonder if that would even have happened if I had made that one small change, if we would even have met. So much of who I am and the problems I have in life are inexorably linked to what happened and if you suddenly took that away my life might be completely different. I say "might", I am almost completely convinced it would. Not being so paranoid and being able to actually trust people would monumentally shift the course of my life and the decisions I made through its course.
Something to think about. Every choice has an impact on our lives no matter how big or how small they may seem in the moment, they can completely change your life.
Common, Technical, and Existential
Alice: "I could never marry you"If you rely upon common knowledge you'll interpret this conversation to mean that Bob will die single, never having married, and that Alice would die never having married Bob but perhaps marrying someone else. That interpretation relies upon common knowledge as you infer the meaning based on what you see, hear, and think or feel. You see a conversation, you hear what is said, and you interpret meaning based on what you think it was intended to mean, or what you feel it was intended to mean.
Bob: "I will never marry anyone but you"
Some of you will have sensed where this post was headed and chose to interpret the conversation literally. Those of you who chose this option fall into the category of technical knowledge, that is to say you base your understanding of the world on what you can see and do not rely on your thoughts and feelings but rather on the logical deductions you can extract. In the conversation about you would assert that 'could' is a future conditional and as such modifies the meaning of the sentence. "Could be" implies a chance that something might happen, this is easy to follow for most people, however "Could never be" is interpreted incorrectly by most people to mean "Will never" when in reality even when 'could' is used in conjunction with 'never' there is still a chance that it may happen due to the conditional nature of 'could' therefore the logical conclusion someone of a technical mind will make from this conversation is that Alice may or may not die single, having married or not married Bob, whereas Bob who asserted "will never" commits to that fate and either marries Alice or never marries anyone.
Those of you with an existential mind will have ignored the common and the technical interpretations entirely and instead posed a series of questions in an attempt to determine a more resolute answer to the question being posed. That is to say those of an existential mindset discard assumptions and thoughts and feelings entirely and instead look for evidence, and past experiences to draw upon to form a conclusion. Those with this mindset would have asked first why Alice said what they did, and whether or not they meant it. Whether the conditions that led them to say it could change in time and whether that could change the possible outcome. In short those of an existential mind dismiss the statements entirely and state that no knowledge can be extracted from the conversation.
Which of these three mindsets you rely on most gives an insight into you as a person and your thought process. Simple parallels can be drawn to say that those who were common minded would be the most social and least academic, those who were technical would be the most logical and calculating, whilst those who were existential would be the most artistic and creative from all three.
The problem is as can be demonstrated by the fact you know so little about Alice and Bob other than their names, is that we make assumptions. Without knowing all the information there is to know there are no conclusions that can actually be conclusive, everything is speculation. The truth is until both Alice and Bob die and the outcome is then immutable, there can be no conclusion drawn that is binding. There are many pieces of information that can not be derived from what you have read alone, you can't assert gender for example, beyond gender normative assumptions based on the names. You can't assert age either, and a more interesting one, you can't even assert species or classification for either Alice and Bob, you assume they are human because they can speak but even at that there are many animals that can mimic speech, and there are robots and computers that can be programmed to do so too. When you begin to think about what you do not know you realise how much of our daily lives we base on assumptions, and how little we actually think about we see, hear, and do.
Forget it
About two weeks ago one of my hard drives crashed. Without warning, it just quietly died. My first reaction was disappointment followed by frustration as I started the long list of possible reasons it died. It's an external hard drive so there are a few things I had to rule out. After going through the list there's only one possible reason left and to verify it I had to order some spare parts online. They haven't arrived yet but if they don't work then the drive is lost to me and all the data on it.
There was about 500 GB of data on the drive, and initially the big things that have been lost sprang to mind, ISOs for various pieces of software I use - some of those are backed up thankfully, some are not. My entire music collection which was about 15 GB that was perhaps the first thing I thought of, some of it I can get back from iTunes, and the physical stuff too but a lot of it I can't get back - not through any legal means. For the music at least I've resorted to Spotify for the time being. The things that have hit home the hardest though are the things you can't replace. Photos and Videos mainly of people, places, and things from years gone by.
I know what you're thinking - it's my fault for not backing it up. Well the thing is, the hard drive was the backup. A few months ago I backed everything up to it before upgrading to Windows 10, I deleted partitions on my hard drive and moved things around then installed Windows 10, since then I hadn't got round to copying everything back onto the PC, partly because I was unsure of Windows 10 at first and partly because it was more convenient to keep it on the external drive.
What has been lost though is quite a lot of irreplaceable data. Beyond the photos and videos I mentioned, everything from my University years, and my College years was on it, both work and play. There were also a lot of things I wrote, as some of you will be aware I am a writer, I do write much more than this blog. The published works at least I could get back from Amazon Kindle's Publishing centre so I have copies of those, but it was the unfinished, and unpublished work that I lost, including a novel I've been writing for the last 2 years. I have older copies of it backed up in other places but I've lost the last 6 chapters or so because I neglected to update the backups.
This whole experience has made me re-evaluate what data I hold onto myself. I used to be quite against cloud storage but reluctantly I have moved to it now for some data that's not confidential as such. One of the more unusual things I lost in this experience is people. I don't keep every phone number I ever had in my phone, the people I didn't speak to anymore I deleted from the phone long ago. Their numbers however were in a spreadsheet and there's no prizes for guessing where that was saved. To be clear none of the numbers I lost were people I contact regularly anymore. It's interesting for me to sit and ponder though that without those numbers I have now been completely cut off from them. For a handful that's for the best. For the rest I don't know what to think. For a few I am down about losing, but at the same time the fact that we haven't spoken in a while is telling me to let it go.
To give a rough idea of figures, I have made some estimations:
Music: 5,000 mp3 files roughly, this isn't my entire music collection as I had deleted a tonne a while ago.
Writing: This one is harder to estimate, my shortest novel is 10,500 words roughly and there's a few others, coupled with archived blog posts [from other blogs no longer active] plus my coursework from University, College, and my dissertation. In all I would estimate around 1 million words of writing would be conservative.
Photos: This is about 1,000 which thanks to my social media abstinence [with the exception of Twitter] can't be found anywhere else.
Videos: These were never uploaded there weren't many, about 10 if even that.
Software: The biggest chunk of this is about 50 GB of Microsoft applications I got for free from Microsoft through MSDNAA which you can't access anymore once your account closes after graduation so I can't recover any of this.
Phone numbers: There's about 100 of those, but in all honesty I am not that fussed about the majority, we haven't spoken in years anyway and it's unlikely I would have contacted them. There's about 10 guys though I feel sad about losing. One or two I had crushes on, one or two I was a lot closer than that with at one point but we drifted apart for various reasons. One of them made it quite clear he didn't want to speak to me again anyway.
This is where the question of forgetting things comes into play. There's a lot I have lost because of this but a lot of it is just data that I was holding onto - hoarding if you will. For the music at least, Spotify is doing its best right now, I've even discovered some new music with it which has managed to lift my spirits to the point where I am considering paying for premium - I'm not entirely sure it's worth it for me though as the adverts aren't that invasive after a while you forget about them. The things I wrote I can write again, they may not be as good, they may be better, they will be what they will be. The memories of the people and places I went to will remain even if I don't have the photos and videos anymore. In a way this is making me question the permanence of digital data versus the fading of memory - we forget the things that aren't that important, maybe some data should be the same, maybe you should just forget it.
There was about 500 GB of data on the drive, and initially the big things that have been lost sprang to mind, ISOs for various pieces of software I use - some of those are backed up thankfully, some are not. My entire music collection which was about 15 GB that was perhaps the first thing I thought of, some of it I can get back from iTunes, and the physical stuff too but a lot of it I can't get back - not through any legal means. For the music at least I've resorted to Spotify for the time being. The things that have hit home the hardest though are the things you can't replace. Photos and Videos mainly of people, places, and things from years gone by.
I know what you're thinking - it's my fault for not backing it up. Well the thing is, the hard drive was the backup. A few months ago I backed everything up to it before upgrading to Windows 10, I deleted partitions on my hard drive and moved things around then installed Windows 10, since then I hadn't got round to copying everything back onto the PC, partly because I was unsure of Windows 10 at first and partly because it was more convenient to keep it on the external drive.
What has been lost though is quite a lot of irreplaceable data. Beyond the photos and videos I mentioned, everything from my University years, and my College years was on it, both work and play. There were also a lot of things I wrote, as some of you will be aware I am a writer, I do write much more than this blog. The published works at least I could get back from Amazon Kindle's Publishing centre so I have copies of those, but it was the unfinished, and unpublished work that I lost, including a novel I've been writing for the last 2 years. I have older copies of it backed up in other places but I've lost the last 6 chapters or so because I neglected to update the backups.
This whole experience has made me re-evaluate what data I hold onto myself. I used to be quite against cloud storage but reluctantly I have moved to it now for some data that's not confidential as such. One of the more unusual things I lost in this experience is people. I don't keep every phone number I ever had in my phone, the people I didn't speak to anymore I deleted from the phone long ago. Their numbers however were in a spreadsheet and there's no prizes for guessing where that was saved. To be clear none of the numbers I lost were people I contact regularly anymore. It's interesting for me to sit and ponder though that without those numbers I have now been completely cut off from them. For a handful that's for the best. For the rest I don't know what to think. For a few I am down about losing, but at the same time the fact that we haven't spoken in a while is telling me to let it go.
To give a rough idea of figures, I have made some estimations:
Music: 5,000 mp3 files roughly, this isn't my entire music collection as I had deleted a tonne a while ago.
Writing: This one is harder to estimate, my shortest novel is 10,500 words roughly and there's a few others, coupled with archived blog posts [from other blogs no longer active] plus my coursework from University, College, and my dissertation. In all I would estimate around 1 million words of writing would be conservative.
Photos: This is about 1,000 which thanks to my social media abstinence [with the exception of Twitter] can't be found anywhere else.
Videos: These were never uploaded there weren't many, about 10 if even that.
Software: The biggest chunk of this is about 50 GB of Microsoft applications I got for free from Microsoft through MSDNAA which you can't access anymore once your account closes after graduation so I can't recover any of this.
Phone numbers: There's about 100 of those, but in all honesty I am not that fussed about the majority, we haven't spoken in years anyway and it's unlikely I would have contacted them. There's about 10 guys though I feel sad about losing. One or two I had crushes on, one or two I was a lot closer than that with at one point but we drifted apart for various reasons. One of them made it quite clear he didn't want to speak to me again anyway.
This is where the question of forgetting things comes into play. There's a lot I have lost because of this but a lot of it is just data that I was holding onto - hoarding if you will. For the music at least, Spotify is doing its best right now, I've even discovered some new music with it which has managed to lift my spirits to the point where I am considering paying for premium - I'm not entirely sure it's worth it for me though as the adverts aren't that invasive after a while you forget about them. The things I wrote I can write again, they may not be as good, they may be better, they will be what they will be. The memories of the people and places I went to will remain even if I don't have the photos and videos anymore. In a way this is making me question the permanence of digital data versus the fading of memory - we forget the things that aren't that important, maybe some data should be the same, maybe you should just forget it.
Online Trust
When you meet someone online and you get to know them, it's very hard to determine their depth of feeling. By this is mean the extent to which they actually care about you. Now it's easy to be consumed by cynicism and say that nobody online really cares about you and write everyone off, but speaking from experience that is not strictly true. Even beyond the people who have cared about me there are people I care about who I've never actually met. That's a strange concept to me because I'm from that awkward in between generation that experienced life with and life without the Internet whereas those before and after lived without it and with it respectively.
For those who lived without the Internet, the same apprehension exists when thinking about friendships and relationships in general that we form online. Trust is something that is not easily placed. On the other side those that have only lived with the Internet there as a higher level of comfort and greater degree of normality in building a friendship with someone you have never and may never actually meet.
We live in a modern world and our complex communication networks make it a very small place. Being thousands of miles away isn't the barrier it once was. No the main barrier in online communication isn't distance anymore it's the lack of physical presence. The lack of unconscious communication. Body language etc. I have said before in other posts with myself as an example and my relationship with you my readers, that you only know what I choose to tell you, and the only things which are communicated are what I choose to communicate and what you can infer from that. We don't consciously hide things but we make no conscious effort to hide them either when it comes to our faults, our insecurities, or simply the things about ourselves that we just don't like. Case in point your profile picture will reflect what you are comfortable sharing and mask anything you are not. That comprehensive review we carry out in such a short period of time after we take a selfie to decide whether or not to delete it is a highly compressed example of this thought process and behavioural pattern.
As a result of this the impressions we perceive, the opinions we build, and the conclusions we draw often end up being misinformed, or outright uninformed. The things which in person may be blatantly obvious we can end up being completely oblivious to online. The point of all this is to bring back the focus onto the question, how do you tell how genuine someone is being and determine the depths of their feelings?
For those who lived without the Internet, the same apprehension exists when thinking about friendships and relationships in general that we form online. Trust is something that is not easily placed. On the other side those that have only lived with the Internet there as a higher level of comfort and greater degree of normality in building a friendship with someone you have never and may never actually meet.
We live in a modern world and our complex communication networks make it a very small place. Being thousands of miles away isn't the barrier it once was. No the main barrier in online communication isn't distance anymore it's the lack of physical presence. The lack of unconscious communication. Body language etc. I have said before in other posts with myself as an example and my relationship with you my readers, that you only know what I choose to tell you, and the only things which are communicated are what I choose to communicate and what you can infer from that. We don't consciously hide things but we make no conscious effort to hide them either when it comes to our faults, our insecurities, or simply the things about ourselves that we just don't like. Case in point your profile picture will reflect what you are comfortable sharing and mask anything you are not. That comprehensive review we carry out in such a short period of time after we take a selfie to decide whether or not to delete it is a highly compressed example of this thought process and behavioural pattern.
As a result of this the impressions we perceive, the opinions we build, and the conclusions we draw often end up being misinformed, or outright uninformed. The things which in person may be blatantly obvious we can end up being completely oblivious to online. The point of all this is to bring back the focus onto the question, how do you tell how genuine someone is being and determine the depths of their feelings?
Where have you been?
I understand some of you will be wondering this, and I must apologise but as with the tradition of my previous posts I won't be giving specifics. Suffice is to say there was something I took a break to focus my energy on in order to achieve and I am happy to say it worked. As for what that is exactly, I won't be saying.
What this experience has taught me however is that the division of energy is something we do not pay enough attention to in our lives. We all feel tired at times and feel that there isn't enough time in our lives to do the things we want to do. Unfortunately that feeling is more often than not, more than just a feeling, it is a reality. The fact remains for many people there just aren't enough hours in the day, and I am no exception. It is for this reason I have been re-evaluating the things I do with my time and cutting out the things that are not necessary.
This blog will continue to have sporadic updates but for the foreseeable future it will not be returning to a regular posting schedule. I don't want to promise that and not be able to deliver it. Writing is something I love to do and I never intend on stopping. What I choose to write and where I choose to write it however needs to be addressed. While it may appear that this blog would seem easy to maintain, there is a lot more behind the scenes that goes into maintaining it. All of this takes time and energy which at the moment I just don't have, as my energy is being devoted to something far more important.
What I would like to say to those who read my posts regularly is to hear my message of awareness. Take a moment and sit back and think about everything you do with your time and think about the energy you spend. There are many things we do that consume our time and energy without us ever realising it. The more we enjoy the things we do the less scrutiny we apply to it and the less aware we become of how much time and energy it actually consumes.
Twitter is something which I have used, abandoned, and returned to many times. I maintain my view on this - in order for twitter to be worthwhile you need to devote time to it. My tweets have been less and less lately as my time is consumed by other things. However like this blog I don't want to get rid of it entirely either. I will continue to use it and update sporadically.
I will leave you with only one piece of advice and it comes from a character in a TV show, 10 points if you know who:
"The best way to achieve a goal is to devote 100% of your time and energy to it"
What this experience has taught me however is that the division of energy is something we do not pay enough attention to in our lives. We all feel tired at times and feel that there isn't enough time in our lives to do the things we want to do. Unfortunately that feeling is more often than not, more than just a feeling, it is a reality. The fact remains for many people there just aren't enough hours in the day, and I am no exception. It is for this reason I have been re-evaluating the things I do with my time and cutting out the things that are not necessary.
This blog will continue to have sporadic updates but for the foreseeable future it will not be returning to a regular posting schedule. I don't want to promise that and not be able to deliver it. Writing is something I love to do and I never intend on stopping. What I choose to write and where I choose to write it however needs to be addressed. While it may appear that this blog would seem easy to maintain, there is a lot more behind the scenes that goes into maintaining it. All of this takes time and energy which at the moment I just don't have, as my energy is being devoted to something far more important.
What I would like to say to those who read my posts regularly is to hear my message of awareness. Take a moment and sit back and think about everything you do with your time and think about the energy you spend. There are many things we do that consume our time and energy without us ever realising it. The more we enjoy the things we do the less scrutiny we apply to it and the less aware we become of how much time and energy it actually consumes.
Twitter is something which I have used, abandoned, and returned to many times. I maintain my view on this - in order for twitter to be worthwhile you need to devote time to it. My tweets have been less and less lately as my time is consumed by other things. However like this blog I don't want to get rid of it entirely either. I will continue to use it and update sporadically.
I will leave you with only one piece of advice and it comes from a character in a TV show, 10 points if you know who:
"The best way to achieve a goal is to devote 100% of your time and energy to it"
Reasoning
If you and someone else want the same thing, should it ever matter if the reasons why are the same?
As an example, let's say you and your partner are in a relationship and you both want to be exclusive, both sexually and romantically. Should it matter whether the reasons why you both want the same thing match up, or does it only matter that you both want the same thing?
In an attempt to answer that question I have considered a number of view points and the one I have settled on is that the motivation is as important as the desire, but more importantly the intent is perhaps the most crucial point.
Desires are relatively simple they can be defined loosely as what we want. Wanting the same thing is a good way to build cooperation but it is short lived and it is very weak in terms of forging bonds. Motivations are as important as they give us an idea of how people react to events in their lives. Our desires are after all just responses to circumstances. The easiest example to give is the desire to be rich which is motivated by poverty - actual or perceived.
If you want to know how someone might act in the future the best place to start is their past. In our relationship example you want to know why they want the same thing so you can get an idea of how that desire will evolve. Intent is the most important aspect here, while desire serves to answer what we want, and motivation serves to answer why we want it, intent serves to answer what we will do when we get it. A Past, Present, and Future scenario.
The underlying issue for me personally in all of this is whether or not what you both want can or will lead to conflict in the future. Understanding what we want, why we want it, and what we intend to do with it can give us a clearer picture of whether or not conflict is likely to arise. Take an extreme example of a weapon of mass destruction. The atomic bomb for example. During its development there were a number of competing projects by different nations all with the same goal, to engineer a working atomic bomb. This is an example of a shared desire. What we know from history is that although the desire was the same, the motivation and the intent were different. I'll go no further on this as it will likely cause division.
In our relationship example you need to understand all three aspects and determine whether they might cause conflict. If they are likely to do so, then you should discuss this before you get what you want, as having it before you discuss it will add unnecessary pressure and could lead to resentment.
As an example, let's say you and your partner are in a relationship and you both want to be exclusive, both sexually and romantically. Should it matter whether the reasons why you both want the same thing match up, or does it only matter that you both want the same thing?
In an attempt to answer that question I have considered a number of view points and the one I have settled on is that the motivation is as important as the desire, but more importantly the intent is perhaps the most crucial point.
Desires are relatively simple they can be defined loosely as what we want. Wanting the same thing is a good way to build cooperation but it is short lived and it is very weak in terms of forging bonds. Motivations are as important as they give us an idea of how people react to events in their lives. Our desires are after all just responses to circumstances. The easiest example to give is the desire to be rich which is motivated by poverty - actual or perceived.
If you want to know how someone might act in the future the best place to start is their past. In our relationship example you want to know why they want the same thing so you can get an idea of how that desire will evolve. Intent is the most important aspect here, while desire serves to answer what we want, and motivation serves to answer why we want it, intent serves to answer what we will do when we get it. A Past, Present, and Future scenario.
The underlying issue for me personally in all of this is whether or not what you both want can or will lead to conflict in the future. Understanding what we want, why we want it, and what we intend to do with it can give us a clearer picture of whether or not conflict is likely to arise. Take an extreme example of a weapon of mass destruction. The atomic bomb for example. During its development there were a number of competing projects by different nations all with the same goal, to engineer a working atomic bomb. This is an example of a shared desire. What we know from history is that although the desire was the same, the motivation and the intent were different. I'll go no further on this as it will likely cause division.
In our relationship example you need to understand all three aspects and determine whether they might cause conflict. If they are likely to do so, then you should discuss this before you get what you want, as having it before you discuss it will add unnecessary pressure and could lead to resentment.
That was my idea!
I've had a number of ideas over the years that I have researched only to find that it has already been done. In some cases what has already been achieved surpasses what I had intended, but in others it falls short of what I would have wanted. In these scenarios I don't think either should discourage you from pursuing an idea. Competition is healthy and leads to choice. Failure to have competition leads to monopolization and exploitation, even extortion.
Moving away from the competitive aspect however there is something which is at play here which I have often taken issue with. There is an idea that what you imagine has to be original to be worthy of merit or credit. I take issue with this for a number of reasons but the crux of my argument is simply, if you had no idea that it already existed, and you were not influenced by he existing idea, then you should be given merit for what you can come up with, and in some cases you should still be credited with the idea - even if it was already done.
As an example the modern day battery was largely developed as a result of a complex process of engineering, it stems from the Leyden Jar described by Benjamin Franklin in 1748. This is an example of an individual who had an idea and was given both merit and credit for it, as they were seen as the first person to create it, and did so with no previous exposure to the concept.
However this was not the first battery that existed. There have been several others throughout history and the most notable is the Baghdad Battery dating as far back as 250 BC, some 2,000 years before Franklin had the same idea. The use of the Baghdad Battery does not change what it could be used for - it was capable of being used for electroplating gold and silver however this is now dismissed as its possible use for the time period; this dismissal does not change the design of the object however, what it was capable of, and crucially it does not change the fact that it was a battery.
Who should be given credit and who should be given merit for creating the battery? If you pick one over the other I would say you are showing bias. Both are deserving, regardless of who was first, and regardless of how they intended their creations to be used. They both had the same idea, independent of one another. The inventive process and the creativity and ingenuity should be praised in itself, and should not be validated nor invalidated by which came first.
Moving away from the competitive aspect however there is something which is at play here which I have often taken issue with. There is an idea that what you imagine has to be original to be worthy of merit or credit. I take issue with this for a number of reasons but the crux of my argument is simply, if you had no idea that it already existed, and you were not influenced by he existing idea, then you should be given merit for what you can come up with, and in some cases you should still be credited with the idea - even if it was already done.
As an example the modern day battery was largely developed as a result of a complex process of engineering, it stems from the Leyden Jar described by Benjamin Franklin in 1748. This is an example of an individual who had an idea and was given both merit and credit for it, as they were seen as the first person to create it, and did so with no previous exposure to the concept.
However this was not the first battery that existed. There have been several others throughout history and the most notable is the Baghdad Battery dating as far back as 250 BC, some 2,000 years before Franklin had the same idea. The use of the Baghdad Battery does not change what it could be used for - it was capable of being used for electroplating gold and silver however this is now dismissed as its possible use for the time period; this dismissal does not change the design of the object however, what it was capable of, and crucially it does not change the fact that it was a battery.
Who should be given credit and who should be given merit for creating the battery? If you pick one over the other I would say you are showing bias. Both are deserving, regardless of who was first, and regardless of how they intended their creations to be used. They both had the same idea, independent of one another. The inventive process and the creativity and ingenuity should be praised in itself, and should not be validated nor invalidated by which came first.
Giant Aliens
Here's a question for you to ponder, what size would an alien be?
To answer that question you need to define a few things, let's start by saying we mean intelligent alien life, not just bacterial or microbial form. Next we need to define what scale we would use to measure their size. Let's use a single Human as our method of measurement. So in this case a "giant" alien would be one that is considerably larger than a human maybe 10 times as an example.
We have to stop and think for a moment, what size do we expect an alien would be, and whether that is realistic to assume. In terms of humanity our size is largely determined by gravity here on Earth. If gravity were to be stronger then humans would get shorter as a result and likewise if gravity were to be weakened we would become taller as a result. When you stop and think about that you can make assumptions of an alien's size dependent on the planet that it originated on and the gravity of that planet. The problem with that assumption is that we are not the only species on this planet and there are many which are considerably larger or considerably smaller than humans by comparison.
This brings us back to square one, as there are many variable to consider here, why is it that in science fiction, even in the realms of science fact which actually takes the possibility seriously, our vision of an alien is always proportional in size to a human? Is that even realistic to assume? Given the likelihood that life exists what is the likelihood that it would look anything like us?
This all inspires another big question - or a small question to be more precise: what if aliens do exist and in reality they are incredibly small by human standards? What if aliens exist 100th the size of a human - would we even detect their spacecraft enter our atmosphere? Would we notice their descent, and crucially would the even be able to communicate with us? Imagine if we found a planet 1,000 times the size of Jupiter inhabited be a race of aliens that were 100 times our size. How would you even get them to notice you? Would you even be able to communicate with them?
If you make assumptions based on technological advancement and assume they discover much of the same technology that we have such as Radio Frequency Communication then consider the idea of trying to communicate with a radio antenna 100, maybe even 1,000 times the size of our own - it would be impractical for us to even create a transmitter capable of generating a signal with enough power to be noticeable. As for the idea that they would spot our communication that relies on minute barely detectable signals being scrutinized. How much attention do we pay to such minute fluctuations ourselves?
There is also the intriguing question of whether or not the human race would be prejudiced and deem an alien race so small as being insignificant - that prejudice would likely be the same we would face if we found a race considerably larger than us.
To answer that question you need to define a few things, let's start by saying we mean intelligent alien life, not just bacterial or microbial form. Next we need to define what scale we would use to measure their size. Let's use a single Human as our method of measurement. So in this case a "giant" alien would be one that is considerably larger than a human maybe 10 times as an example.
We have to stop and think for a moment, what size do we expect an alien would be, and whether that is realistic to assume. In terms of humanity our size is largely determined by gravity here on Earth. If gravity were to be stronger then humans would get shorter as a result and likewise if gravity were to be weakened we would become taller as a result. When you stop and think about that you can make assumptions of an alien's size dependent on the planet that it originated on and the gravity of that planet. The problem with that assumption is that we are not the only species on this planet and there are many which are considerably larger or considerably smaller than humans by comparison.
This brings us back to square one, as there are many variable to consider here, why is it that in science fiction, even in the realms of science fact which actually takes the possibility seriously, our vision of an alien is always proportional in size to a human? Is that even realistic to assume? Given the likelihood that life exists what is the likelihood that it would look anything like us?
This all inspires another big question - or a small question to be more precise: what if aliens do exist and in reality they are incredibly small by human standards? What if aliens exist 100th the size of a human - would we even detect their spacecraft enter our atmosphere? Would we notice their descent, and crucially would the even be able to communicate with us? Imagine if we found a planet 1,000 times the size of Jupiter inhabited be a race of aliens that were 100 times our size. How would you even get them to notice you? Would you even be able to communicate with them?
If you make assumptions based on technological advancement and assume they discover much of the same technology that we have such as Radio Frequency Communication then consider the idea of trying to communicate with a radio antenna 100, maybe even 1,000 times the size of our own - it would be impractical for us to even create a transmitter capable of generating a signal with enough power to be noticeable. As for the idea that they would spot our communication that relies on minute barely detectable signals being scrutinized. How much attention do we pay to such minute fluctuations ourselves?
There is also the intriguing question of whether or not the human race would be prejudiced and deem an alien race so small as being insignificant - that prejudice would likely be the same we would face if we found a race considerably larger than us.
Time goes by so quickly
I definitely think our perception of time changes with age. To the point where I think time accelerates the older you get. I remember when I was a kid and I would get summer holidays from school. We would finish first week of June and start back first week of September. Those 3 months lasted an eternity. You could do so much in that time. You could sleep late, get up and still have a whole day to do whatever you wanted.
I spent hours with mates and hours playing on my consoles and my computer. We spent hours playing games in the streets. The one thing there wasn't a lack of was time.
I'm older now and while I do have a lot more obligations in life, I do still have more or less the same amount of time when I get a break as I did when I was younger. It doesn't feel the same however, time runs out quicker, and everything you do ends too soon. It's been 7 months of this year so far and that has flown by in the blink of an eye. 3 months lasted an eternity as a kid but now it passes like a week or two felt back then.
There are times when our perception of time elongates and we feel like time is dilating - "A microwave minute is longer than a normal minute" - when we are waiting for something. That scrutiny of time seems to affect how quickly it passes.
I know some people will be thinking this is all in the mind, but what if it's not? The Heisenberg uncertainty principle causes some peculiar behaviour, it states that the more precisely you observe momentum the more erratic position will become and vice versa, as demonstrated by the beam of light between two pieces of card experiment - the more you narrow the card the light projection gets smaller and smaller until it starts to expand contravening intuition.
What if a similar principle applies to time itself, what if time itself dilates the more precisely you observe it? The inverse would be true that the less you observe time the faster it would become. We know the saying, "time flies when you're having fun" and consider it a behavioural quirk but what if there is an effect being caused by a principle of physics we have not yet defined? What if time really does accelerate the less attention you pay to it? You climb into bed at night and you fall asleep and you wake the next day, you feel like only just few moments passed, what if that really were true and time accelerated while you slept? If this was true and we knew it then how could we use that to our advantage?
I spent hours with mates and hours playing on my consoles and my computer. We spent hours playing games in the streets. The one thing there wasn't a lack of was time.
I'm older now and while I do have a lot more obligations in life, I do still have more or less the same amount of time when I get a break as I did when I was younger. It doesn't feel the same however, time runs out quicker, and everything you do ends too soon. It's been 7 months of this year so far and that has flown by in the blink of an eye. 3 months lasted an eternity as a kid but now it passes like a week or two felt back then.
There are times when our perception of time elongates and we feel like time is dilating - "A microwave minute is longer than a normal minute" - when we are waiting for something. That scrutiny of time seems to affect how quickly it passes.
I know some people will be thinking this is all in the mind, but what if it's not? The Heisenberg uncertainty principle causes some peculiar behaviour, it states that the more precisely you observe momentum the more erratic position will become and vice versa, as demonstrated by the beam of light between two pieces of card experiment - the more you narrow the card the light projection gets smaller and smaller until it starts to expand contravening intuition.
What if a similar principle applies to time itself, what if time itself dilates the more precisely you observe it? The inverse would be true that the less you observe time the faster it would become. We know the saying, "time flies when you're having fun" and consider it a behavioural quirk but what if there is an effect being caused by a principle of physics we have not yet defined? What if time really does accelerate the less attention you pay to it? You climb into bed at night and you fall asleep and you wake the next day, you feel like only just few moments passed, what if that really were true and time accelerated while you slept? If this was true and we knew it then how could we use that to our advantage?
Wasted Effort
The feeling of a wasted effort is one of the most annoying and disparaging feelings I can have. Annoying in that the realisation that the time and effort I have put into something is wiped out in an instant, and disparaging in that it completely negates everything you did, reducing your work to nothing.
There are many ways in which this can happen but perhaps most of all for me as a programmer is when this happens as the result of bad design. Online in the websites we use, and offline in the programs and apps we use. "save early and save often" is quoted by many who have fallen victim to this inadequacy and the negative ramifications that is has. Whether it is a document you spend the better part of an hour on and click save only to have to program crash or a in image you spend ages editing and save multiple versions only to realise the original has been replaced.
A bad software designer criticises the user. If a piece of software behaves in a way that is counter-intuitive it is not the fault of the user for not expecting the software to behave that way, it is the fault of the designer for creating a piece of software that does not do what it is expected to do. This applies to websites too - which I believe now constitute software in themselves but that is another post entirely.
This post came about as the result of an experience I had with a website tonight. I won't name it for legal reasons, notably the fact I want to bash the shit out of it. I used this website which provides a tool which is "free" to use - this was made abundantly clear before I began using it, what the website neglected to mention was that you need an account in order to save your work - which requires registration, which was indeed free, that's not my qualm. My qualm is the fact that you enter the site, click "get started" which launches the app in-browser for you to use. I then proceed to do so, spending quite some time on a project, and when finished I clicked the "Save and download" option - I must clearly state here it is not possible to save as you go along, only possible to save once you are finished and ready to download. That should have been the first red flag for me, however, I naively decided that was probably to do with server bandwidth etc and had some technical reason. So I went to work on my project and when I was happy with it I clicked save and download, at which point it said I needed an account, there were two options, either login, or create an account. So as I had no account yet, I clicked create an account. Filled out the registration etc and when done I was relieved, then dismayed. You can probably guess what happened. The project I was working on was now blank. Everything lost.
I have to say this is infuriating. This is bullshit design. This is an incredibly bad experience that will lead me never to use the site again. When you click "Save and download" you expect the fucking thing to save. When it says you need an account at that stage you assume it will save the progress and attribute it to the account you create or the one you log into. You assume that if it did not, then it would have told you that you need an account before it let you use the fucking app in the first place. At no point did the site say your progress would be lost if you did not log in before you start. I even went back to check, if it had said and I did not see, but no, it hadn't. This has pissed me off.
There are many ways in which this can happen but perhaps most of all for me as a programmer is when this happens as the result of bad design. Online in the websites we use, and offline in the programs and apps we use. "save early and save often" is quoted by many who have fallen victim to this inadequacy and the negative ramifications that is has. Whether it is a document you spend the better part of an hour on and click save only to have to program crash or a in image you spend ages editing and save multiple versions only to realise the original has been replaced.
A bad software designer criticises the user. If a piece of software behaves in a way that is counter-intuitive it is not the fault of the user for not expecting the software to behave that way, it is the fault of the designer for creating a piece of software that does not do what it is expected to do. This applies to websites too - which I believe now constitute software in themselves but that is another post entirely.
This post came about as the result of an experience I had with a website tonight. I won't name it for legal reasons, notably the fact I want to bash the shit out of it. I used this website which provides a tool which is "free" to use - this was made abundantly clear before I began using it, what the website neglected to mention was that you need an account in order to save your work - which requires registration, which was indeed free, that's not my qualm. My qualm is the fact that you enter the site, click "get started" which launches the app in-browser for you to use. I then proceed to do so, spending quite some time on a project, and when finished I clicked the "Save and download" option - I must clearly state here it is not possible to save as you go along, only possible to save once you are finished and ready to download. That should have been the first red flag for me, however, I naively decided that was probably to do with server bandwidth etc and had some technical reason. So I went to work on my project and when I was happy with it I clicked save and download, at which point it said I needed an account, there were two options, either login, or create an account. So as I had no account yet, I clicked create an account. Filled out the registration etc and when done I was relieved, then dismayed. You can probably guess what happened. The project I was working on was now blank. Everything lost.
I have to say this is infuriating. This is bullshit design. This is an incredibly bad experience that will lead me never to use the site again. When you click "Save and download" you expect the fucking thing to save. When it says you need an account at that stage you assume it will save the progress and attribute it to the account you create or the one you log into. You assume that if it did not, then it would have told you that you need an account before it let you use the fucking app in the first place. At no point did the site say your progress would be lost if you did not log in before you start. I even went back to check, if it had said and I did not see, but no, it hadn't. This has pissed me off.
It's been done before
When I talk to people about writing, and specifically when I talk to them about ideas to write about, one of the common criticisms that I often hear is "it's been done before" - which they often assert as a reason not to pursue the idea at all. The problem I have with this is the idea that innovation is the only valid form of production, which is inherently flawed as an argument.
You tend not to think of writing as a production process, due to the industrial connotations of the word. You tend to think of production as something that is reserved for factories that produce physical products for consumers. The reality however is that production in and of itself is a much broader concept. Production is anything that results in a product. That product is anything that can be consumed. Consumption can be defined in a wide variety of ways. It doesn't have to be something you can eat, drink, or wear etc. It can be something you watch, read, look at, or even something you just think about. Movies, books, artwork, and even simply ideas are all products to consume.
Originality, however noble by intent, is restrictive. If you are not able to use what already exists as a foundation to build on then you will literally back yourself into a corner where you have to constantly reinvent the wheel. Taking an existing idea and developing it helps to evolve the concept. If you restrict a concept to that of its inception you effectively halt evolution.
You should not be afraid to take an idea that has been done before and use it, provided you have something new to add to it. If you can evolve the idea then do so; as with evolution in the physiological sense only those advancements that prove beneficial are retained. So too with your work, it shall be retained and grow, if people like what you do with it.
You tend not to think of writing as a production process, due to the industrial connotations of the word. You tend to think of production as something that is reserved for factories that produce physical products for consumers. The reality however is that production in and of itself is a much broader concept. Production is anything that results in a product. That product is anything that can be consumed. Consumption can be defined in a wide variety of ways. It doesn't have to be something you can eat, drink, or wear etc. It can be something you watch, read, look at, or even something you just think about. Movies, books, artwork, and even simply ideas are all products to consume.
Originality, however noble by intent, is restrictive. If you are not able to use what already exists as a foundation to build on then you will literally back yourself into a corner where you have to constantly reinvent the wheel. Taking an existing idea and developing it helps to evolve the concept. If you restrict a concept to that of its inception you effectively halt evolution.
You should not be afraid to take an idea that has been done before and use it, provided you have something new to add to it. If you can evolve the idea then do so; as with evolution in the physiological sense only those advancements that prove beneficial are retained. So too with your work, it shall be retained and grow, if people like what you do with it.
God versus God
There are two types of people in this world, those that believe in a God or Gods, and those who believe they are God. The latter does not imply the same dominion and power as the former however.
What I mean in the sense of the latter is that those who deny the possibility of a God or Gods are ultimately people who assert that they are God, as far as their own lives are concerned at least. While some may have delusions of grandeur that extend beyond their own life the majority are more self centric. Being God of their own lives they assert that every single thing that they do is either the result of their own action or the action of others and that this is where the puck stops. It goes no higher. While this is based on logic and reasoning it does not account for many other things which they often assert as being random or coincidence.
In my own experience I quite like the quote of Sherlock [BBC Series]:
Mycroft Holmes: "Oh, Sherlock, what do we say about coincidence?"
Sherlock Holmes: "Universe is rarely so lazy"
This is my reasoning for many things - what is random is rarely random it may appear as such but it is not, it is part of a larger sequence that you have not rationalised. As a programmer I assert this more than anything as I know for example with computers it is not possible to generate a random number at all it is only possible to produce pseudo-random numbers through increasingly complex algorithms that derive results that create a series of numbers with a distribution that is ever more increasingly closer to a truly random sequence even to the point where the two can become mathematically indistinguishable however the point remains persistent never being dismissed - with the algorithm in hand and seed used to commence it you can systematically reproduce the exact same series of numbers as many times as you wish.
To extend this beyond programming and the restrictions of computing, entering instead into the realm of Physics this same idea has been proposed in the field of determinism, in the form of Laplace's Demon whereby, however unlikely, if you were to know the exact position of every single atom in the Universe at this moment, and where to know their previous positions, you could predict their every movement from now until the end of time. While there are many problems with this theory as too with the pseudo-random limitations of computing the same point still remains: complexity does not negate connectivity. Two points should not be considered disconnected even if their connection is infinitely complex. Limiting the validity of connectivity by complexity is naive and shows a lack of reasoning - or to be more accurate, a limitation of reasoning.
This all relates to the God v God concept insofar as to say that those who believe that they are entirely responsible for actions are attempting to exempt themselves from cause and effect, refusing the idea that their actions can be the effect resulting from an outside cause unknown to them. This by definition is to assert that you are above the laws of this Universe - in other words you are a God. To accept your humanity and deny the inference of deism is to accept that you are not accountable for every single action you take and that others are not accountable for every single action they take either. While those of a religious disposition label such coercions as demonic, their reasoning is an abstract realisation of the reality that many actions we undertake are not the result of our own reasoning, but the effect of an outside cause.
There is a third type of person however it is one that has not yet been realised. It is one that is slowly emerging in the world with the growth of agnosticism, but they are yet to bridge science and religion successfully. While I consider myself on the religious side more so for the spiritual element, less so for the organised religion component [of which I do not follow any] I am not in a position to bridge the two. While I have strong beliefs that stem from both sides and I have found harmony and resolution between many of these points, there are many more that still sit in stark opposition. Until there comes a time when the two can converse without resorting to conflict they will remain in opposition. That time is drawing nearer however with the growth of agnosticism and with the realisation that both sides are guilty of causing conflict. Religion and Science have both attacked one another like warring nations.
A balance can be found. Only those who are willing to accept peace can resolve conflict. Sadly conflict is in human nature and as much as we have strived to overcome our animalistic impulses this nature is one that we still find hard to escape. Those that say one side or the other have spawned conflict and assert that in the absence of it, there would be no conflict are naive. In the absence of either side people would simply find another reason to cause conflict - Science and Religion combined are not the sole causes of Wars throughout history, there have been many others, territory, culture, race, ethnicity, and economic paradigm, to name but a few. The real issue is conflict itself and the sadistic side of human nature that desires it.
What I mean in the sense of the latter is that those who deny the possibility of a God or Gods are ultimately people who assert that they are God, as far as their own lives are concerned at least. While some may have delusions of grandeur that extend beyond their own life the majority are more self centric. Being God of their own lives they assert that every single thing that they do is either the result of their own action or the action of others and that this is where the puck stops. It goes no higher. While this is based on logic and reasoning it does not account for many other things which they often assert as being random or coincidence.
In my own experience I quite like the quote of Sherlock [BBC Series]:
Mycroft Holmes: "Oh, Sherlock, what do we say about coincidence?"
Sherlock Holmes: "Universe is rarely so lazy"
This is my reasoning for many things - what is random is rarely random it may appear as such but it is not, it is part of a larger sequence that you have not rationalised. As a programmer I assert this more than anything as I know for example with computers it is not possible to generate a random number at all it is only possible to produce pseudo-random numbers through increasingly complex algorithms that derive results that create a series of numbers with a distribution that is ever more increasingly closer to a truly random sequence even to the point where the two can become mathematically indistinguishable however the point remains persistent never being dismissed - with the algorithm in hand and seed used to commence it you can systematically reproduce the exact same series of numbers as many times as you wish.
To extend this beyond programming and the restrictions of computing, entering instead into the realm of Physics this same idea has been proposed in the field of determinism, in the form of Laplace's Demon whereby, however unlikely, if you were to know the exact position of every single atom in the Universe at this moment, and where to know their previous positions, you could predict their every movement from now until the end of time. While there are many problems with this theory as too with the pseudo-random limitations of computing the same point still remains: complexity does not negate connectivity. Two points should not be considered disconnected even if their connection is infinitely complex. Limiting the validity of connectivity by complexity is naive and shows a lack of reasoning - or to be more accurate, a limitation of reasoning.
This all relates to the God v God concept insofar as to say that those who believe that they are entirely responsible for actions are attempting to exempt themselves from cause and effect, refusing the idea that their actions can be the effect resulting from an outside cause unknown to them. This by definition is to assert that you are above the laws of this Universe - in other words you are a God. To accept your humanity and deny the inference of deism is to accept that you are not accountable for every single action you take and that others are not accountable for every single action they take either. While those of a religious disposition label such coercions as demonic, their reasoning is an abstract realisation of the reality that many actions we undertake are not the result of our own reasoning, but the effect of an outside cause.
There is a third type of person however it is one that has not yet been realised. It is one that is slowly emerging in the world with the growth of agnosticism, but they are yet to bridge science and religion successfully. While I consider myself on the religious side more so for the spiritual element, less so for the organised religion component [of which I do not follow any] I am not in a position to bridge the two. While I have strong beliefs that stem from both sides and I have found harmony and resolution between many of these points, there are many more that still sit in stark opposition. Until there comes a time when the two can converse without resorting to conflict they will remain in opposition. That time is drawing nearer however with the growth of agnosticism and with the realisation that both sides are guilty of causing conflict. Religion and Science have both attacked one another like warring nations.
A balance can be found. Only those who are willing to accept peace can resolve conflict. Sadly conflict is in human nature and as much as we have strived to overcome our animalistic impulses this nature is one that we still find hard to escape. Those that say one side or the other have spawned conflict and assert that in the absence of it, there would be no conflict are naive. In the absence of either side people would simply find another reason to cause conflict - Science and Religion combined are not the sole causes of Wars throughout history, there have been many others, territory, culture, race, ethnicity, and economic paradigm, to name but a few. The real issue is conflict itself and the sadistic side of human nature that desires it.
How much do you have in common with your 16 year old self?
11 years have passed since I turned 16. My birthday was my last day of high school - well, the last day of classes in high school, I had exams among other things in time after that day. I had a few close friends who despite telling them pretty much everything else, never knew I was gay. I was in a class with guys I didn't connect with partly because I kept everyone at a distance from me but partly because they kept a distance from me too which at the time I was quite grateful for. Outside school I lived in a small town which didn't have a lot to do for young people, and being under 18 in the UK a lot of things were off limits. I wasn't the sort of kid that flouted those kinds of laws and neither were the guys I hung around with at the time. I was planning on going to college, and the plan after that was University.
Fast forward to today and high school which was a nightmare for me in many respects is well behind me. College was a lot more enjoyable than I thought it would be and I met a lot of people I really connected with which really brought me out of my shell. I went to University in the end but the degree I chose turned out to be a disappointment. It wasn't anything like I imagined it would be and it didn't help me with my career prospects at all. I had a few jobs since and learned a lot, the long period between graduation and my first actual job [full time, not part time as the others were] was long. For a time I thought I would be unemployed forever but that was pessimism at it's core. While the jobs I had did not work out, they did teach me a lot about who I am and more importantly they showed me where my limits really were and what I can do. I know now what I am capable of and what I am not and that will work to my benefit in future.
My circle of friends was almost completely replaced only 2 managed to survive the cull and they became closer to me than anyone. When I came out to my friends, those that supported me stayed and those that didn't I cut off. It was a shame that I had to say goodbye to everyone that I did but it was needed for me to be comfortable with who I was. I focus on the negatives enough myself I don't need other people to make me feel worse about that. The 2 that managed to stay are the 2 people I have known the longest and beyond them others that entered my life went through periods where they either accepted who I was or they feigned interest for a while then lost contact. Today I am happy with my circle of friends because they all know the real me and I can tell them anything.
I am in many ways different from the person I was when I was 16, but there are many things that still hold true. We still share the same interests, while they have grown and others have been added, I still enjoy the games, movies, and TV shows I did when I was 16. My taste in food has evolved, and become a little more extreme. I always loved spicy food but as I have got older I like it even hotter. The things I liked I've revelled in and the things I didn't like I've abandoned almost completely. My music taste has fluctuated a bit, I do still listen to some of what I listened to back then but a lot of it was quite depressing so that's become less of a staple for me.
I would say I am a lot happier than I was back then. 16 was by no means my lowest point, that was several years before and the recovery from it was slow and at times an uphill climb that I struggled with. I have a fair bit left to climb to become the person I want to be at the top of the hill, but that climb has been made easier by the people in my life and by the mentality that I have adapted. Being so open about my life and bearing all to people made me vulnerable but it also made me braver for it. I'm not the person I was, and I don't have a lot in common with him anymore but deep down we are the same. The layers change and the fashion is restyled but at it's core, the heart that beats is the same heart.
Fast forward to today and high school which was a nightmare for me in many respects is well behind me. College was a lot more enjoyable than I thought it would be and I met a lot of people I really connected with which really brought me out of my shell. I went to University in the end but the degree I chose turned out to be a disappointment. It wasn't anything like I imagined it would be and it didn't help me with my career prospects at all. I had a few jobs since and learned a lot, the long period between graduation and my first actual job [full time, not part time as the others were] was long. For a time I thought I would be unemployed forever but that was pessimism at it's core. While the jobs I had did not work out, they did teach me a lot about who I am and more importantly they showed me where my limits really were and what I can do. I know now what I am capable of and what I am not and that will work to my benefit in future.
My circle of friends was almost completely replaced only 2 managed to survive the cull and they became closer to me than anyone. When I came out to my friends, those that supported me stayed and those that didn't I cut off. It was a shame that I had to say goodbye to everyone that I did but it was needed for me to be comfortable with who I was. I focus on the negatives enough myself I don't need other people to make me feel worse about that. The 2 that managed to stay are the 2 people I have known the longest and beyond them others that entered my life went through periods where they either accepted who I was or they feigned interest for a while then lost contact. Today I am happy with my circle of friends because they all know the real me and I can tell them anything.
I am in many ways different from the person I was when I was 16, but there are many things that still hold true. We still share the same interests, while they have grown and others have been added, I still enjoy the games, movies, and TV shows I did when I was 16. My taste in food has evolved, and become a little more extreme. I always loved spicy food but as I have got older I like it even hotter. The things I liked I've revelled in and the things I didn't like I've abandoned almost completely. My music taste has fluctuated a bit, I do still listen to some of what I listened to back then but a lot of it was quite depressing so that's become less of a staple for me.
I would say I am a lot happier than I was back then. 16 was by no means my lowest point, that was several years before and the recovery from it was slow and at times an uphill climb that I struggled with. I have a fair bit left to climb to become the person I want to be at the top of the hill, but that climb has been made easier by the people in my life and by the mentality that I have adapted. Being so open about my life and bearing all to people made me vulnerable but it also made me braver for it. I'm not the person I was, and I don't have a lot in common with him anymore but deep down we are the same. The layers change and the fashion is restyled but at it's core, the heart that beats is the same heart.
He's not Gay he's married
Within the LGBT community from the outside you would be forgiven for thinking there is unity and that our community is concrete without cracks. The truth is there is a helluva lot of division within the LGBT community and internal conflict.
To begin with there's the name "LGBT" and those that argue for it to be shortened or lengthened. Those that advocate shortening take the point that Trans issues are a matter of gender and identity not a matter of sexuality and think the community should incorporate LGB people only. Historically the T community in itself was included as those within it experience much of the same discrimination as LGB people with the same outward hostility. As more rights are won for LGB people the division is accentuated, as Trans issues linger on unresolved there are those in the LGB community who are less willing to support the T community in return for the support they were given in the past.
Those that advocate the expansion to LGBTQ or LGBTI+, or any other addendum, argue that many other smaller communities should be incorporated into one whole. These smaller communities cover those who are Asexual, or Intersex, or who have no specific label choosing to identiy simply as Queer.
Side note, the word Queer in itself has been embraced by many within the LGBT community as a term of unity, an umbrella, catch-all term. As for the derogatory connotations those only exist in how the word is used not in the word itself due to the empowerment movement.
Even within the LGB communities there is division. On the outside it is easy for many people who have no real exposure to theese communities to label all gay men as effeminate and think that they would be very close to women in general and that there would be little conflict. This is far from the truth however. Misogyny is rife in the gay communities. There are large swathes of Gay men who are very misogynistic and have a very low opinion of women. They are not without recourse however as there are many women within the lesbian community who are outwardly hostile to all men regardless of sexuality for this reason.
Then there's the 'G' community which despite being "Gay" a word which can apply to any homosexual regardless of gender, tries to claim the word for Gay Men alone. Within that community there is further division between effeminate, often camp gay men, and butch gay men or as many choose to identify as "Masc" meaning masculine. The hatred that exists between these factions of gay men is immense. I have wrote about this before when Russell Tovey made his controversial comments.
All this addresses the LGT and + communities. Then we come to the Bi community, one that is somewhat phantom in its existence within the larger LGBT community for many reasons. First and foremost there exists a stigma and a stereotype within the LGBT community and beyond it that perceives bisexual men and women as being "on the road to gay" or "have not made their mind up yet" both of which are incredibly diminutive. I am a gay man and I know what I am because I know who and what I am attracted to. The idea that someone is incapable of knowing that is incredibly insulting it is as much of an insult as those that say to you when you first come out as gay "you haven't met the right woman yet" - fuck off.
The reason I wrote this post is not just to stand up for bisexual people and assert their sexuality should not be demeaned but to refute the idea that marriage changes your sexuality. This is bullshit. I have known bisexual men who have got married only to have themselves branded the sexuality that corresponds to their spouse - gay if they married a man and straight if they married a woman. That's infuriating. Their sexuality does not magically change. They are still bisexual.
Many times I have seen people ask if someone I know or a celebrity is gay only to have "nah he married a woman" as the response to say "he's straight" and end speculation. The fact they got married does not determine their sexuality. Who they married does not determine their sexuality.
To begin with there's the name "LGBT" and those that argue for it to be shortened or lengthened. Those that advocate shortening take the point that Trans issues are a matter of gender and identity not a matter of sexuality and think the community should incorporate LGB people only. Historically the T community in itself was included as those within it experience much of the same discrimination as LGB people with the same outward hostility. As more rights are won for LGB people the division is accentuated, as Trans issues linger on unresolved there are those in the LGB community who are less willing to support the T community in return for the support they were given in the past.
Those that advocate the expansion to LGBTQ or LGBTI+, or any other addendum, argue that many other smaller communities should be incorporated into one whole. These smaller communities cover those who are Asexual, or Intersex, or who have no specific label choosing to identiy simply as Queer.
Side note, the word Queer in itself has been embraced by many within the LGBT community as a term of unity, an umbrella, catch-all term. As for the derogatory connotations those only exist in how the word is used not in the word itself due to the empowerment movement.
Even within the LGB communities there is division. On the outside it is easy for many people who have no real exposure to theese communities to label all gay men as effeminate and think that they would be very close to women in general and that there would be little conflict. This is far from the truth however. Misogyny is rife in the gay communities. There are large swathes of Gay men who are very misogynistic and have a very low opinion of women. They are not without recourse however as there are many women within the lesbian community who are outwardly hostile to all men regardless of sexuality for this reason.
Then there's the 'G' community which despite being "Gay" a word which can apply to any homosexual regardless of gender, tries to claim the word for Gay Men alone. Within that community there is further division between effeminate, often camp gay men, and butch gay men or as many choose to identify as "Masc" meaning masculine. The hatred that exists between these factions of gay men is immense. I have wrote about this before when Russell Tovey made his controversial comments.
All this addresses the LGT and + communities. Then we come to the Bi community, one that is somewhat phantom in its existence within the larger LGBT community for many reasons. First and foremost there exists a stigma and a stereotype within the LGBT community and beyond it that perceives bisexual men and women as being "on the road to gay" or "have not made their mind up yet" both of which are incredibly diminutive. I am a gay man and I know what I am because I know who and what I am attracted to. The idea that someone is incapable of knowing that is incredibly insulting it is as much of an insult as those that say to you when you first come out as gay "you haven't met the right woman yet" - fuck off.
The reason I wrote this post is not just to stand up for bisexual people and assert their sexuality should not be demeaned but to refute the idea that marriage changes your sexuality. This is bullshit. I have known bisexual men who have got married only to have themselves branded the sexuality that corresponds to their spouse - gay if they married a man and straight if they married a woman. That's infuriating. Their sexuality does not magically change. They are still bisexual.
Many times I have seen people ask if someone I know or a celebrity is gay only to have "nah he married a woman" as the response to say "he's straight" and end speculation. The fact they got married does not determine their sexuality. Who they married does not determine their sexuality.
It's not new, but it's new to me
I have spoken before about content creation in the media, referring specifically to children's television as an example. I made a point that content generation wasn't dropping because the market no longer existed, but rather that demand was returning to an organic level free from over saturation.
No matter what niche you are interested in, for most people at some point it will go mainstream and become over saturated. After a while the growth stagnates and the mainstream interest moves on and your interest returns to being niche again.
This has happened a lot and today when you switch on a TV - which I avoid as I use catch up services instead - you will see a lot of programming that's all very similar. This in part is due to the fact that networks have moved away from creating something new and moved into finding something new. The distinction here being in years gone by, a network would pilot programmes and run a limited number of episodes and pick up the ones that do well for further production. That doesn't happen as much anymore instead they use market research to find out what people like and then create content centred around that. This discards the idea that people can like something they haven't seen or thought about before, and perpetuates the idea that you need to regurgitate what already exists.
If you are going to do this and not risk creating something completely new then I have a better suggestion. Revive older shows. I don't mean looking through your own back catalogue and picking something out, I mean looking at what people have seen before and reviving what they haven't. We are an ever increasingly global society but that globalisation is not retrospective. I can name several old TV shows from the UK like 2.4 Children which people in the UK will have heard of [some younger readers perhaps not] but people in other countries will not. Likewise there will be old TV shows from those countries that no-one will have heard of in the UK - the majority at least. This creates the assertion, it's not new, but it's new to me - or to be more precise, it's not new, but it will be something your viewers haven't seen before.
You don't have to rebroadcast the old shows, which I know some networks would be wary of as they think they look dated - you can remake the show in its entirety, the scripting etc will already be done for you all you need is a refresh of some references to bring it up to date and push it out again. As for the criticism of the remake against the old versions, only those who have seen it before - who are not the target audience - would be likely to criticise. The remainder will be subjective or objective as the case may be.
This extends far beyond TV into many other areas of our lives however. We tend to think of our past as something that we have been through and forget about - save for a few choice moments or particularly traumatic experiences; but when you meet someone for the first time you know nothing about their past and everything they have been through and the same goes for them and you. What you tell one another and choose to share isn't new to you and might even be quite boring to you now, but it's new to them and you will often find they think it's fascinating. The reason being we think we all go through the same experiences but we don't and even when something happens we both experience, the way we deal with it or react to it varies. What you did next is often more interesting than what happened in the first place.
So like TV networks and the media in general, don't try and appeal to what people like because you'll find they are so often bored of it because they have seen it all before. Be yourself and do what you like to do and share the things you used to do and used to love as much as you share what you do now, because your past is old to you but it's new to me. So don't be afraid to be different or do something which is not mainstream because people will respond to it. Things which are different stand out more than the things that are the same. As I said in other posts we are conditioned when young to think this is bad and then told the opposite as we get older. Learning to accept this as you get older can be hard but it's the way you should have been all along. They say with age you reach a point where you stop giving a fuck and be yourself whether people like it or not - that point is when you realise who likes you for being you.
No matter what niche you are interested in, for most people at some point it will go mainstream and become over saturated. After a while the growth stagnates and the mainstream interest moves on and your interest returns to being niche again.
This has happened a lot and today when you switch on a TV - which I avoid as I use catch up services instead - you will see a lot of programming that's all very similar. This in part is due to the fact that networks have moved away from creating something new and moved into finding something new. The distinction here being in years gone by, a network would pilot programmes and run a limited number of episodes and pick up the ones that do well for further production. That doesn't happen as much anymore instead they use market research to find out what people like and then create content centred around that. This discards the idea that people can like something they haven't seen or thought about before, and perpetuates the idea that you need to regurgitate what already exists.
If you are going to do this and not risk creating something completely new then I have a better suggestion. Revive older shows. I don't mean looking through your own back catalogue and picking something out, I mean looking at what people have seen before and reviving what they haven't. We are an ever increasingly global society but that globalisation is not retrospective. I can name several old TV shows from the UK like 2.4 Children which people in the UK will have heard of [some younger readers perhaps not] but people in other countries will not. Likewise there will be old TV shows from those countries that no-one will have heard of in the UK - the majority at least. This creates the assertion, it's not new, but it's new to me - or to be more precise, it's not new, but it will be something your viewers haven't seen before.
You don't have to rebroadcast the old shows, which I know some networks would be wary of as they think they look dated - you can remake the show in its entirety, the scripting etc will already be done for you all you need is a refresh of some references to bring it up to date and push it out again. As for the criticism of the remake against the old versions, only those who have seen it before - who are not the target audience - would be likely to criticise. The remainder will be subjective or objective as the case may be.
This extends far beyond TV into many other areas of our lives however. We tend to think of our past as something that we have been through and forget about - save for a few choice moments or particularly traumatic experiences; but when you meet someone for the first time you know nothing about their past and everything they have been through and the same goes for them and you. What you tell one another and choose to share isn't new to you and might even be quite boring to you now, but it's new to them and you will often find they think it's fascinating. The reason being we think we all go through the same experiences but we don't and even when something happens we both experience, the way we deal with it or react to it varies. What you did next is often more interesting than what happened in the first place.
So like TV networks and the media in general, don't try and appeal to what people like because you'll find they are so often bored of it because they have seen it all before. Be yourself and do what you like to do and share the things you used to do and used to love as much as you share what you do now, because your past is old to you but it's new to me. So don't be afraid to be different or do something which is not mainstream because people will respond to it. Things which are different stand out more than the things that are the same. As I said in other posts we are conditioned when young to think this is bad and then told the opposite as we get older. Learning to accept this as you get older can be hard but it's the way you should have been all along. They say with age you reach a point where you stop giving a fuck and be yourself whether people like it or not - that point is when you realise who likes you for being you.
A Different World Online
The Internet is a strange place. You get to see and experience things that you would otherwise never do. You also get to meet people who likewise you would never have met otherwise. In this context I define 'meet' as either online or offline, it doesn't have to be one or the other it can be either or both.
I'm 27 and by my age my parents had got married, had their first child and bought their first house, that was a different time though, and a different world. While some of the things they did like that illude me and many in my generation, there are many things we have and that we do now that they did not. For one not just online but offline too we are more mobile. It does not break the bank to fly to another country anymore, while the level of comfort you want to live in might, the opportunity is there and with the likes of couch surfing you can visit another country and stay with someone for free, all it will cost is the travel.
In terms of connectivity many people say we are anti-social now and that we don't talk to each other anymore. I don't think that's true, I think we talk to one another more than we did - it's just less likely that the people we talk to will actually be physically close to us. The Internet is a barrier that many embrace, it allows you to open up to some people more than you would because you think they are on the other side of the world and you'll likely never meet them face to face so you can be as honest as you want, there'll be less consequence. Whereas the people that live around us are there and they likely will be for some time, so we don't want to damage what little relations we have with them.
I embraced the Internet in this way as a young gay man. I lived in a very socially conservative atmosphere, where there was a paralysing fear of anyone ever finding out I was gay. I did tell a few people but they were very few in number and only ever guys who I was convinced were gay too, or who outed themselves to me first. The Internet connected me with like-minded people and showed me that I was not alone. While that desire to reach out for people to connect with was originally driven by my sexuality it is not guided by it alone anymore. Now when I reach out it is to form connections with people who share my interests in other areas. There is the expectation that the people around you won't be interested in the same things you are, mainly caused by their lack of expression of interest in them.
If you like something a lot and you don't know anyone else that does, the first place you're likely to go is the internet. Social media where you like, favourite, share, and comment on the things you have an interest in, forums if you can find them, blogs if you are a reader, even running one of your own if you are a writer [*waves hand* hi] - to that end you do meet people online who share your interests and you don't have to feel shame in what you like.
I have met many people online over the years, each for various different things. When I wanted to learn Spanish I posted an ad looking for a tutor who'd be willing to teach me for free and I got the response I was looking for and spent months chatting to different guys one from Argentina, one from Brasil, and one surprisingly, from Germany. It helped me improve my Spanish but not to the level I had wanted as we inevitably ended up talking about other things and found out we shared a lot of other interests, the professional capacity we had met in turned to friendship. They were people I would never have met. I would never have travelled to any of those countries and even if I had the chance we would have met would have been slim. In fact one of them lived in London for a year while I was there at University - years before we met online. So we lived in the same city for a time completely unaware of one another's existence.
We live on a much more global scale, and with that the pool of people we can connect with expands from our small communities we live in to the world as a whole - or at least the world with Internet. The list of countries I have met people online from and got to know has grown. Those I can remember are listed at the end of this post. The point of this post is to encourage people to be more social online. Social networking has the capacity to connect people, some sites like facebook were a lot better at that in their early days, they are less social today and have become more anti-social. That's one of the things I like about twitter, it's still quite open and you can still engage with people you've never met before and find you have a connection.
The people I have met and got to know have been from:
United Kingdom, Ireland, Argentina, Australia, Brasil, Canada, China, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain, The Netherlands, Ukraine, United States of America.
Apologies if you're not in the list, this is all I could recall off the top of my head, I am convinced I have forgotten a few - that in itself will be another post.
I'm 27 and by my age my parents had got married, had their first child and bought their first house, that was a different time though, and a different world. While some of the things they did like that illude me and many in my generation, there are many things we have and that we do now that they did not. For one not just online but offline too we are more mobile. It does not break the bank to fly to another country anymore, while the level of comfort you want to live in might, the opportunity is there and with the likes of couch surfing you can visit another country and stay with someone for free, all it will cost is the travel.
In terms of connectivity many people say we are anti-social now and that we don't talk to each other anymore. I don't think that's true, I think we talk to one another more than we did - it's just less likely that the people we talk to will actually be physically close to us. The Internet is a barrier that many embrace, it allows you to open up to some people more than you would because you think they are on the other side of the world and you'll likely never meet them face to face so you can be as honest as you want, there'll be less consequence. Whereas the people that live around us are there and they likely will be for some time, so we don't want to damage what little relations we have with them.
I embraced the Internet in this way as a young gay man. I lived in a very socially conservative atmosphere, where there was a paralysing fear of anyone ever finding out I was gay. I did tell a few people but they were very few in number and only ever guys who I was convinced were gay too, or who outed themselves to me first. The Internet connected me with like-minded people and showed me that I was not alone. While that desire to reach out for people to connect with was originally driven by my sexuality it is not guided by it alone anymore. Now when I reach out it is to form connections with people who share my interests in other areas. There is the expectation that the people around you won't be interested in the same things you are, mainly caused by their lack of expression of interest in them.
If you like something a lot and you don't know anyone else that does, the first place you're likely to go is the internet. Social media where you like, favourite, share, and comment on the things you have an interest in, forums if you can find them, blogs if you are a reader, even running one of your own if you are a writer [*waves hand* hi] - to that end you do meet people online who share your interests and you don't have to feel shame in what you like.
I have met many people online over the years, each for various different things. When I wanted to learn Spanish I posted an ad looking for a tutor who'd be willing to teach me for free and I got the response I was looking for and spent months chatting to different guys one from Argentina, one from Brasil, and one surprisingly, from Germany. It helped me improve my Spanish but not to the level I had wanted as we inevitably ended up talking about other things and found out we shared a lot of other interests, the professional capacity we had met in turned to friendship. They were people I would never have met. I would never have travelled to any of those countries and even if I had the chance we would have met would have been slim. In fact one of them lived in London for a year while I was there at University - years before we met online. So we lived in the same city for a time completely unaware of one another's existence.
We live on a much more global scale, and with that the pool of people we can connect with expands from our small communities we live in to the world as a whole - or at least the world with Internet. The list of countries I have met people online from and got to know has grown. Those I can remember are listed at the end of this post. The point of this post is to encourage people to be more social online. Social networking has the capacity to connect people, some sites like facebook were a lot better at that in their early days, they are less social today and have become more anti-social. That's one of the things I like about twitter, it's still quite open and you can still engage with people you've never met before and find you have a connection.
The people I have met and got to know have been from:
United Kingdom, Ireland, Argentina, Australia, Brasil, Canada, China, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain, The Netherlands, Ukraine, United States of America.
Apologies if you're not in the list, this is all I could recall off the top of my head, I am convinced I have forgotten a few - that in itself will be another post.
Work and Pay
The word 'work' has a very broad definition. In terms of employment we tend to think of work as the duration of time we are reimbursed for through wage. However the time we devote to work often extends beyond what we are actually paid for doing. In many jobs there will be requirements that take up personal time as well as the time we spend at our place of work.
If you think of a rugby player for example, their main place of work ultimately is the grounds and the pitch they play on, and the time they spend at work is the length of the match they play. Except in their job there is also training, both structured and scheduled as part of a team, as well as unstructured and unscheduled such as working out at the gym.
If you take another example such as a comedian, they are paid for the gigs they perform at. Those performances can be short as part of a larger show maybe 15 minutes, or they can be long as an entire show on their own, and hour maybe more. They are paid for the time they are on stage and the number of tickets they managed to sell. They're not paid directly for the time and effort they spend writing material and rehearsing it to themselves and to people they try out their material on.
Would you rather work in a job where you were paid a lot for a short period of time worked, or be paid the same amount for a longer period of time? Bearing in mind with the former, you'd be expected to put more effort in outside work, not doing so would reflect in the quality of your work. Assume in the latter you did not have to do much outside.
To break that down with figures, would you rather:
Work 40 hours a week for £15k p.a. with no work needed to be completed outside those hours. How good or bad you are at your job won't affect your pay grade, and you get to keep your job as long as you are competent, something which is ultimately decided by someone other than you.
or
Work 1 hour a week for up to £15k p.a. depending on performance, the better you are at your job the more you make, the more natural that work is to you the less time you need to devote to preparation. Make no preparation and perform badly and you will earn very little if anything, so ultimately it's up to you to decide how much effort you put in.
Admittedly there are less jobs that offer the latter, and it is less secure. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the worse option from the two. The third option would be a job that combines the two and offers a base salary and base expectations with the provision of higher pay depending on performance.
Which would you prefer?
If you think of a rugby player for example, their main place of work ultimately is the grounds and the pitch they play on, and the time they spend at work is the length of the match they play. Except in their job there is also training, both structured and scheduled as part of a team, as well as unstructured and unscheduled such as working out at the gym.
If you take another example such as a comedian, they are paid for the gigs they perform at. Those performances can be short as part of a larger show maybe 15 minutes, or they can be long as an entire show on their own, and hour maybe more. They are paid for the time they are on stage and the number of tickets they managed to sell. They're not paid directly for the time and effort they spend writing material and rehearsing it to themselves and to people they try out their material on.
Would you rather work in a job where you were paid a lot for a short period of time worked, or be paid the same amount for a longer period of time? Bearing in mind with the former, you'd be expected to put more effort in outside work, not doing so would reflect in the quality of your work. Assume in the latter you did not have to do much outside.
To break that down with figures, would you rather:
Work 40 hours a week for £15k p.a. with no work needed to be completed outside those hours. How good or bad you are at your job won't affect your pay grade, and you get to keep your job as long as you are competent, something which is ultimately decided by someone other than you.
or
Work 1 hour a week for up to £15k p.a. depending on performance, the better you are at your job the more you make, the more natural that work is to you the less time you need to devote to preparation. Make no preparation and perform badly and you will earn very little if anything, so ultimately it's up to you to decide how much effort you put in.
Admittedly there are less jobs that offer the latter, and it is less secure. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the worse option from the two. The third option would be a job that combines the two and offers a base salary and base expectations with the provision of higher pay depending on performance.
Which would you prefer?
Can you handle the truth?
Is there ever a place in life for false pretences? When someone treats you well and you thank them for it you feel gratitude and you feel a degree of happiness. When you later find out their efforts were insincere and that underneath the amicable projection they actually hated you - that hurts more than someone outright telling you so from the beginning.
I'm not deluded I know that not everyone in life is going to like you, and in fairness I gave up on that idea long ago. I don't expect everyone to like me, I expect to be treated with some respect. If you don't like me I would rather you said so, then I know where I stand. That to me is honesty, whereas the false pretence feels deceptive.
When someone is a cunt and quite openly admit to being so, you know what to expect from them. In a strange way you can trust them more than anyone else because you know if they don't agree with something or they have any negative thought they will share it. When someone acts nice on the surface but underneath they are a cunt, that is deceptive. By nature they are hiding things from you. Those people are harder to trust. This is one of the reasons I stand by my stance, that I do not trust people who smile all the time and are always happy. It is a fact of life that things will go wrong, and you will have bad days. It happens and we deal with it. Bottling that up and not sharing your emotions in moments like that casts you in the light of a closed heart.
The question however still stands, should you care what anyone really thinks of you and how they really feel? Or should you only care about how they treat you and act towards you?
Is it important to feel loved by someone who genuinely loves you, or is it enough to feel loved by someone who actually hates you but treats you as if they loved you? From your point of view unknowing of the truth they both look and feel exactly the same, and for those we trust, the latter won't even cross our minds as a possibility.
I'm not deluded I know that not everyone in life is going to like you, and in fairness I gave up on that idea long ago. I don't expect everyone to like me, I expect to be treated with some respect. If you don't like me I would rather you said so, then I know where I stand. That to me is honesty, whereas the false pretence feels deceptive.
When someone is a cunt and quite openly admit to being so, you know what to expect from them. In a strange way you can trust them more than anyone else because you know if they don't agree with something or they have any negative thought they will share it. When someone acts nice on the surface but underneath they are a cunt, that is deceptive. By nature they are hiding things from you. Those people are harder to trust. This is one of the reasons I stand by my stance, that I do not trust people who smile all the time and are always happy. It is a fact of life that things will go wrong, and you will have bad days. It happens and we deal with it. Bottling that up and not sharing your emotions in moments like that casts you in the light of a closed heart.
The question however still stands, should you care what anyone really thinks of you and how they really feel? Or should you only care about how they treat you and act towards you?
Is it important to feel loved by someone who genuinely loves you, or is it enough to feel loved by someone who actually hates you but treats you as if they loved you? From your point of view unknowing of the truth they both look and feel exactly the same, and for those we trust, the latter won't even cross our minds as a possibility.
The Importance of Writing
When I was younger I tried keeping a diary. I didn't get very far with it. I tried again over the years but the most I ever got to was a month. I kept a diary when I worked as a volunteer and some of the things in it are really interesting, not because of how I felt at the time but because of what happened later that completely changed the tone of the diary from happiness to delusion. Delusion caused by what I believe to be genuine support and assurance that was later found out to be false and ridicule. The whole experience now has left me quite unwilling to do anything for charities as a result.
What these diaries represent however is what they were intended to do, that is they documented my thoughts and feelings that I had at the time of writing. With all of these diaries however they were abandoned for many different reasons but the one thing they all shared was quite simply that I did not think what I had to write at the time would be relevant to me in the future and I did not think I would want to read them at all. While I have not followed through with any of my diaries or the journals I tried to keep as well, this blog on the other hand has lasted quite a bit. Even though it has had a few very distinct appearances over the years from the black and red darkness that it began with to the explosion of colour that was the tie dye background, up until today which is a lot more simplistic; and even though it has been purged a few times and brought back it's still managed to hang around.
The reason that is so remarkable for me is because my old diaries are long gone as are my journals. They were physical - admittedly a little more difficult to recover if you decide to get rid of them, nigh impossible depending on how you did it. This is digital, which is a blessing and a curse at the same time. Blessing in that they are more resilient in digital form, but a curse in that they are remarkably easy to lose forever. Paired with my diaries and journals there were hundreds of word documents I had written all of which were lost when one of my old computers crashed catastrophically. More still were lost in an accidental reformat of a hard drive I realised I had not backed up. The blogs however hang around a little longer for the simple reason that they are hosted on other services that are more redundant. This one is on blogger for example.
Blogger itself is interesting for me as this is not my first blog. I have had about 8 or 9, I can't remember them exactly now and I am sure I have probably missed a few. They all had different themes though except for this one. This one exists for me to write and nothing more. Apart from that there is no guaranteed theme to posts. They represent all the things that go through my head and the issues I want to share my thoughts and feelings on. They also serve indirectly as a diary. While I don't talk about specifics of my life on here as I would in a diary which is private, there are posts on here that allude to private thoughts and the connections and associations within them remain, to the point where I can read them and remember what was going on in my life at that moment in time. Likewise there are many posts that despite having no names or mention of specific people in them, are inexorably linked to them. There are poems about specific guys on here and posts about specific people and how their lives and circumstances inspired me to write.
My English teacher once told me to write, even if you think what you write is crap or to borrow her terminology "keek" then you still need to write. Even if you scrap it after you wrote it and start again you have to write and keep writing. The importance of writing is something that I have kept with me throughout my life thanks to her. It has stood by me through a lot because it is a form of self therapy, it is a an outlet for thoughts and feelings, it allows you to process grander thoughts that on their own would be too much to think about. It helps you work through things bit by bit and above all else it helps you to clear your mind of things that are bothering you, because once it is written and preserved you can stop thinking about things a lot easier than it is to do through will power alone.
The other thing that is important about writing is that it inspires you to read. That might not seem logical at first but I assure you the most well written people I know are also the most well read. Conversely the most well read I wish would write because the things that go on inside their heads are fascinating to me. If you are a writer you will be a reader, there is no denying that. Whether you read prose or if you stick to non fiction or publications you will be a reader. More so in recent years there is also the side of reading what people think which has become a lot easier with the likes of twitter. Whereas you would study peoples' behaviour before and learn through quiet observation, we now get to read what you actually think without leaving it to guesswork. There are a lot of writers on twitter and while many of them are there for promotion, if you look at how active they are on twitter they do read and reply to quite a bit.
The only other thing about writing I would add is something that has often been said about writing - that it is a socially accepted form of talking to yourself. This is true and I don't even know how to convey the importance of this but it really does help with processing your thoughts and feelings, especially those that go against the rest of your personality and cause you to be hypocritical in nature. To give those thoughts to a character that can vocalise them, which you can then contradict freely as another character helps to resolve internal self struggle.
What these diaries represent however is what they were intended to do, that is they documented my thoughts and feelings that I had at the time of writing. With all of these diaries however they were abandoned for many different reasons but the one thing they all shared was quite simply that I did not think what I had to write at the time would be relevant to me in the future and I did not think I would want to read them at all. While I have not followed through with any of my diaries or the journals I tried to keep as well, this blog on the other hand has lasted quite a bit. Even though it has had a few very distinct appearances over the years from the black and red darkness that it began with to the explosion of colour that was the tie dye background, up until today which is a lot more simplistic; and even though it has been purged a few times and brought back it's still managed to hang around.
The reason that is so remarkable for me is because my old diaries are long gone as are my journals. They were physical - admittedly a little more difficult to recover if you decide to get rid of them, nigh impossible depending on how you did it. This is digital, which is a blessing and a curse at the same time. Blessing in that they are more resilient in digital form, but a curse in that they are remarkably easy to lose forever. Paired with my diaries and journals there were hundreds of word documents I had written all of which were lost when one of my old computers crashed catastrophically. More still were lost in an accidental reformat of a hard drive I realised I had not backed up. The blogs however hang around a little longer for the simple reason that they are hosted on other services that are more redundant. This one is on blogger for example.
Blogger itself is interesting for me as this is not my first blog. I have had about 8 or 9, I can't remember them exactly now and I am sure I have probably missed a few. They all had different themes though except for this one. This one exists for me to write and nothing more. Apart from that there is no guaranteed theme to posts. They represent all the things that go through my head and the issues I want to share my thoughts and feelings on. They also serve indirectly as a diary. While I don't talk about specifics of my life on here as I would in a diary which is private, there are posts on here that allude to private thoughts and the connections and associations within them remain, to the point where I can read them and remember what was going on in my life at that moment in time. Likewise there are many posts that despite having no names or mention of specific people in them, are inexorably linked to them. There are poems about specific guys on here and posts about specific people and how their lives and circumstances inspired me to write.
My English teacher once told me to write, even if you think what you write is crap or to borrow her terminology "keek" then you still need to write. Even if you scrap it after you wrote it and start again you have to write and keep writing. The importance of writing is something that I have kept with me throughout my life thanks to her. It has stood by me through a lot because it is a form of self therapy, it is a an outlet for thoughts and feelings, it allows you to process grander thoughts that on their own would be too much to think about. It helps you work through things bit by bit and above all else it helps you to clear your mind of things that are bothering you, because once it is written and preserved you can stop thinking about things a lot easier than it is to do through will power alone.
The other thing that is important about writing is that it inspires you to read. That might not seem logical at first but I assure you the most well written people I know are also the most well read. Conversely the most well read I wish would write because the things that go on inside their heads are fascinating to me. If you are a writer you will be a reader, there is no denying that. Whether you read prose or if you stick to non fiction or publications you will be a reader. More so in recent years there is also the side of reading what people think which has become a lot easier with the likes of twitter. Whereas you would study peoples' behaviour before and learn through quiet observation, we now get to read what you actually think without leaving it to guesswork. There are a lot of writers on twitter and while many of them are there for promotion, if you look at how active they are on twitter they do read and reply to quite a bit.
The only other thing about writing I would add is something that has often been said about writing - that it is a socially accepted form of talking to yourself. This is true and I don't even know how to convey the importance of this but it really does help with processing your thoughts and feelings, especially those that go against the rest of your personality and cause you to be hypocritical in nature. To give those thoughts to a character that can vocalise them, which you can then contradict freely as another character helps to resolve internal self struggle.
Positive Pessimism
Being pessimistic is seen as negative and it is seen as being something that is generally associated with unhappy people. I refute that view for a number of reasons but the main reason is the most identifiable trait of a pessimist - that they expect the worst case scenario. It is wrongly assumed that most pessimistic people expect this scenario because it is what they want, this is not true, what we want and what we expect are two different things. If you always expect to get what you want then you're setting yourself up for misery.
The purpose of expecting the worst case scenario is not to be negative at all. The purpose is to be prepared and to be ready for that outcome. Being prepared for an outcome that never happens is not a bad thing. When you expect the worst case scenario, everything else becomes a positive. If you hold the middle ground like an optimist and expect the median or better then you cut the scope of your positivity. To the extreme the compliment of a pessimist is a perfectionist - who expects the best possible outcome; this drastically reduces the scope of their positivity.
If I have a random number generator that can pick numbers between 1 and 100, and offer you prizes of appropriate value associated with each number, with number 1 being the only one without a prize, then:
A pessimist will expect #1
An optimist will expect around #50 or above
A perfectionist will expect #100 with the best possible prize
In terms of probability of happiness we can then say:
The pessimist has a 99% chance of being happy and 1% chance of being indifferent, with 0% chance of disappointment. This is because they expect #1 so if they get it they will get what they were expecting therefore not be disappointed. Everything else is a positive therefore brings a degree of happiness.
The optimist has a 50% chance of being happy and a 49% chance of being disappointed and 1% chance of being indifferent. This is because #1 to #49 are less than they expected therefore bring disappointment, #50 is right where they expect, bringing indifference, and #51 to #100 inclusive bring something better than expected therefore bringing happiness.
The perfectionist is an odd one as they have no indifference, they are not happy with anything less than #100, but getting #100 makes them happy - as opposed to indifference of the others when they get what they expect. They therefore have a 1% chance of happiness and a 99% chance of disappointment.
The purpose of pessimism is not to want or desire negativity, it is simply to brace for it and prepare, everything else then becomes a positive. People think that pessimists lead unhappy lives, while I have down days no more than anyone else I would feel, I am generally a very happy person and can be quite content with what I have. I did say what you expect and what you want are two different things though, expecting negative outcomes is not to say that is what I want, far from it. I want what everyone else does - to grow and to experience new things and to have more than I have. The only difference is every little thing that improves is appreciated by a pessimist. Of course this also means that the worst possible outcome also affects their willingness to make a decision to the point where they become overly cautious and do not risk anything they are not prepared to lose.
Someone who expects negativity and wants negativity is not a pessimist. They're a cynic. A cynical mindset can be quite destructive.
To quote Oscar Wilde on the definition of a Cynic,
"A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing."
To quote G B Stern on the importance of pessimism existing:
"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute."
Finally a quote from myself:
"Pessimism is not inherently a bad thing, you just need to recognise when it is holding you back and when you need to put it aside to move forward."
The purpose of expecting the worst case scenario is not to be negative at all. The purpose is to be prepared and to be ready for that outcome. Being prepared for an outcome that never happens is not a bad thing. When you expect the worst case scenario, everything else becomes a positive. If you hold the middle ground like an optimist and expect the median or better then you cut the scope of your positivity. To the extreme the compliment of a pessimist is a perfectionist - who expects the best possible outcome; this drastically reduces the scope of their positivity.
If I have a random number generator that can pick numbers between 1 and 100, and offer you prizes of appropriate value associated with each number, with number 1 being the only one without a prize, then:
A pessimist will expect #1
An optimist will expect around #50 or above
A perfectionist will expect #100 with the best possible prize
In terms of probability of happiness we can then say:
The pessimist has a 99% chance of being happy and 1% chance of being indifferent, with 0% chance of disappointment. This is because they expect #1 so if they get it they will get what they were expecting therefore not be disappointed. Everything else is a positive therefore brings a degree of happiness.
The optimist has a 50% chance of being happy and a 49% chance of being disappointed and 1% chance of being indifferent. This is because #1 to #49 are less than they expected therefore bring disappointment, #50 is right where they expect, bringing indifference, and #51 to #100 inclusive bring something better than expected therefore bringing happiness.
The perfectionist is an odd one as they have no indifference, they are not happy with anything less than #100, but getting #100 makes them happy - as opposed to indifference of the others when they get what they expect. They therefore have a 1% chance of happiness and a 99% chance of disappointment.
The purpose of pessimism is not to want or desire negativity, it is simply to brace for it and prepare, everything else then becomes a positive. People think that pessimists lead unhappy lives, while I have down days no more than anyone else I would feel, I am generally a very happy person and can be quite content with what I have. I did say what you expect and what you want are two different things though, expecting negative outcomes is not to say that is what I want, far from it. I want what everyone else does - to grow and to experience new things and to have more than I have. The only difference is every little thing that improves is appreciated by a pessimist. Of course this also means that the worst possible outcome also affects their willingness to make a decision to the point where they become overly cautious and do not risk anything they are not prepared to lose.
Someone who expects negativity and wants negativity is not a pessimist. They're a cynic. A cynical mindset can be quite destructive.
To quote Oscar Wilde on the definition of a Cynic,
"A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing."
To quote G B Stern on the importance of pessimism existing:
"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute."
Finally a quote from myself:
"Pessimism is not inherently a bad thing, you just need to recognise when it is holding you back and when you need to put it aside to move forward."
What is the difference between a Robot and a slave?
If you had a robot that was completely autonomous and possessed an artificial intelligence that surpassed human intelligence, what would you get it to do for you? Assuming you could make it work all day and all night and do whatever you want, cooking and cleaning etc, what else would you get it to do?
If that robot has a fully developed artificial intelligence and is capable of understanding everything we say, is capable of doing everything we can do, and looks just like us, then at what point would you feel guilt about getting it to do anything for you? If you say no guilt at all because it is a machine and therefore not deserving of the same rights as humans then you put yourself into a rather awkward position.
The things most people would get a robot to do, are the same things that centuries ago, in some cases only decades - and in some countries to this day - people used slaves to do. To live with a servant that is not paid, does not have freedom of will, must do what you say, and above all else who you treat as inhuman, and undeserving of the same rights as you, is by definition a Master and their Slave.
The mental attitude you hold towards a robot is the same attitude that slavers held towards slaves - they do not recognise them as human. While the justification for this in terms of robots is because they are made from synthetic constructs crafted by man, if they can understand what you tell them, and they can think for themselves, and they are self-aware, then they are alive. Regardless of their origin. As our technology progresses, the closeness of android construction will become to human anatomy is inevitable.
At what point does it stop being something that mimics life, and becomes real life? Without accepting that humans have souls, you assert that we are no more than machines - incredibly complex machines created by nature through a process of evolution through natural selection - but still, just machines. The argument that we are organic and they are synthetic only holds true so long as they are made from synthetic materials - which in the long term is unsustainable. Natural construction would eventually replace synthetic construction. If a robot is to be durable it needs to be made from active materials that are going to regenerate in time, the only way to do that is to create constructions that use naturally occurring materials that it can grow itself. In plain English, robots will eventually be made of flesh and bone. We can already grow protein in a lab, to the extent that we can produce a burger with meat that was not taken from an animal, we will eventually have robots that are flesh and bone.
If that robot has a fully developed artificial intelligence and is capable of understanding everything we say, is capable of doing everything we can do, and looks just like us, then at what point would you feel guilt about getting it to do anything for you? If you say no guilt at all because it is a machine and therefore not deserving of the same rights as humans then you put yourself into a rather awkward position.
The things most people would get a robot to do, are the same things that centuries ago, in some cases only decades - and in some countries to this day - people used slaves to do. To live with a servant that is not paid, does not have freedom of will, must do what you say, and above all else who you treat as inhuman, and undeserving of the same rights as you, is by definition a Master and their Slave.
The mental attitude you hold towards a robot is the same attitude that slavers held towards slaves - they do not recognise them as human. While the justification for this in terms of robots is because they are made from synthetic constructs crafted by man, if they can understand what you tell them, and they can think for themselves, and they are self-aware, then they are alive. Regardless of their origin. As our technology progresses, the closeness of android construction will become to human anatomy is inevitable.
At what point does it stop being something that mimics life, and becomes real life? Without accepting that humans have souls, you assert that we are no more than machines - incredibly complex machines created by nature through a process of evolution through natural selection - but still, just machines. The argument that we are organic and they are synthetic only holds true so long as they are made from synthetic materials - which in the long term is unsustainable. Natural construction would eventually replace synthetic construction. If a robot is to be durable it needs to be made from active materials that are going to regenerate in time, the only way to do that is to create constructions that use naturally occurring materials that it can grow itself. In plain English, robots will eventually be made of flesh and bone. We can already grow protein in a lab, to the extent that we can produce a burger with meat that was not taken from an animal, we will eventually have robots that are flesh and bone.
Why are fun and games considered childish?
Have you ever heard the expression "They're having a second childhood" used to describe someone and their behaviour? If you have then it will most likely have been used in the context where the subject is doing something that is typical of childhood. This raises a question though as to what exactly constitutes being childish.
When I was a kid for example, games consoles were something that were reserved for the younger generation. Older people didn't play with them, partly I guess due to the fact that consoles had not been around that long but also due to a lack of interest from older people. As I have grown though the expectation that we will out grow these things has not materialised. Games consoles are as popular with the older generations as they are with younger gamers. However something strange has happened in terms of the games and their intended audiences. Many older gamers prefer older games, the games they played when they were younger, and new games that are intended for a younger audience - like Pokémon for example. Vice versa, the games that are intended for older gamers appeal more to younger gamers, like Grand Theft Auto. Now there are exceptions and this is by no means a certainty, it's just an observation that many people have made.
Going beyond games however there are many things that as we get older we look back on and want to do again. Things which people label as childish, interests in board games etc. While adult experiences like alcohol and sex often get combined with those games to become drinking games like Scrabble Shots and Drunk Chess etc this doesn't change the fact that at the core you're trying to recapture the feelings of your youth - most notably the fun of it. Yet there still exists this impression that doing so is seen as childish, escapism, and juvenile. Since when did we decide that being grown up meant that life wouldn't be fun anymore? The more you take the joy out of life and breed boredom and dissatisfaction the more resentful and ultimately depressing life becomes. You can work and play, there is a place for both in life.
We have more concerns as we grow older than we did when we were kids, there are many things we now have to think about that kids never have to; but that shouldn't mean that you need to abandon the way you looked at the world when you were younger. Growing old is not a choice, but acting old is. When you tire of life, life becomes tiring. When you are excited by life, life becomes exciting.
When I was a kid for example, games consoles were something that were reserved for the younger generation. Older people didn't play with them, partly I guess due to the fact that consoles had not been around that long but also due to a lack of interest from older people. As I have grown though the expectation that we will out grow these things has not materialised. Games consoles are as popular with the older generations as they are with younger gamers. However something strange has happened in terms of the games and their intended audiences. Many older gamers prefer older games, the games they played when they were younger, and new games that are intended for a younger audience - like Pokémon for example. Vice versa, the games that are intended for older gamers appeal more to younger gamers, like Grand Theft Auto. Now there are exceptions and this is by no means a certainty, it's just an observation that many people have made.
Going beyond games however there are many things that as we get older we look back on and want to do again. Things which people label as childish, interests in board games etc. While adult experiences like alcohol and sex often get combined with those games to become drinking games like Scrabble Shots and Drunk Chess etc this doesn't change the fact that at the core you're trying to recapture the feelings of your youth - most notably the fun of it. Yet there still exists this impression that doing so is seen as childish, escapism, and juvenile. Since when did we decide that being grown up meant that life wouldn't be fun anymore? The more you take the joy out of life and breed boredom and dissatisfaction the more resentful and ultimately depressing life becomes. You can work and play, there is a place for both in life.
We have more concerns as we grow older than we did when we were kids, there are many things we now have to think about that kids never have to; but that shouldn't mean that you need to abandon the way you looked at the world when you were younger. Growing old is not a choice, but acting old is. When you tire of life, life becomes tiring. When you are excited by life, life becomes exciting.
Opinions
Do you ever feel like you are expected to have an opinion on everything? Like "I don't know" isn't an acceptable answer. The admission that you don't know something is often seen as a weakness. The more people know something that you don't, the more you are made to feel like an idiot.
Intelligence is something that is hard to quantify. The original aim of IQ tests were to derive an intelligence quotient; this quotient was a measure of your mental age compared to your physical age. Your mental age was charted against that of your peers. The average would return a 100 point IQ anything less was deemed to be underdeveloped, and anything more was deemed to be overdeveloped. The aspiration was to have an IQ above 100.
The trouble with these tests both then and now is that intelligence is hard to actually measure. Knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing. Just because you know a lot does not make you smart. Knowing pi to 5,000 places does not make you smart, it just means you have a good memory or you are using a mnemonic to help you.
So, what does make you intelligent? If we return to the world of computing and programming as I so often do in these posts, and return to the study of artificial intelligence, then we can look at the definition used there. In this context intelligence is marked by the ability to adapt to a new situation to achieve a goal. It can also include defining that goal where it has not been specified. If we apply that to humans then intelligence needs to be measured by placing people in a new situation and observing their behaviour. Give them a task they have never done before and evaluate their performance.
In this context, previous experience, although may be beneficial, does not imply a higher level of intelligence. Likewise all irrelevant knowledge no matter how abundant would also have no bearing. So if that's the case why do we still feel like an idiot when we don't know something, or why do other people try to make you feel that way?
Lack of knowledge and lack of an opinion should not constitute idiocy, nor should lake of experience imply incompetence. When you think about this in regards to employment, the traditional model of job description, application form, interview, offer and acceptance, are not at all suited to finding the ideal candidate. In reality the ideal model would be one that incorporated a practical element, where the candidate actually tries the work and is assessed based on their performance.
Intelligence is something that is hard to quantify. The original aim of IQ tests were to derive an intelligence quotient; this quotient was a measure of your mental age compared to your physical age. Your mental age was charted against that of your peers. The average would return a 100 point IQ anything less was deemed to be underdeveloped, and anything more was deemed to be overdeveloped. The aspiration was to have an IQ above 100.
The trouble with these tests both then and now is that intelligence is hard to actually measure. Knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing. Just because you know a lot does not make you smart. Knowing pi to 5,000 places does not make you smart, it just means you have a good memory or you are using a mnemonic to help you.
So, what does make you intelligent? If we return to the world of computing and programming as I so often do in these posts, and return to the study of artificial intelligence, then we can look at the definition used there. In this context intelligence is marked by the ability to adapt to a new situation to achieve a goal. It can also include defining that goal where it has not been specified. If we apply that to humans then intelligence needs to be measured by placing people in a new situation and observing their behaviour. Give them a task they have never done before and evaluate their performance.
In this context, previous experience, although may be beneficial, does not imply a higher level of intelligence. Likewise all irrelevant knowledge no matter how abundant would also have no bearing. So if that's the case why do we still feel like an idiot when we don't know something, or why do other people try to make you feel that way?
Lack of knowledge and lack of an opinion should not constitute idiocy, nor should lake of experience imply incompetence. When you think about this in regards to employment, the traditional model of job description, application form, interview, offer and acceptance, are not at all suited to finding the ideal candidate. In reality the ideal model would be one that incorporated a practical element, where the candidate actually tries the work and is assessed based on their performance.
Vesting Authority
If a friend tells you not to use a particular brand of electronics, due to poor quality and a high risk of fire, you will most likely ignore them. There are a lot of factors that go into that decision but in most cases for most people we'll ignore them. If another friend a week later who is a fireman tells you not to use the same brand and reiterates the same reasons then you will be more likely to listen to them. This is because we associate authority with job roles. We think because it's their job they know more about it.
There is however something else at play here. If a friend who works in retail said the same thing again you would not be likely to listen. Even though in their job they might see a lot of complaints about their products, returns, or even product recalls. The fireman gets precedence because they are in a professional role. There is an assumption we make, whether we do so consciously or not, we think that professionals are less likely to be incompetent in their job. We think that they don't skive off, they don't cut corners, they are good at their job, and that they know everything about their work. Yet when you say this out loud you realise that sounds short sighted, and overly optimistic.
Ultimately the decision we make is defined by faith. We accept the authority of the people we have faith in. For those who are religious, who have faith in a higher power, for them there is no authority higher than that power. A little closer to the ground the same thing happens with the people whose authority we accept. We believe the fireman because we have faith in them, and believe that everything we said above is true. Except that's not objective faith, it's blind faith. It's blind because we don't question it. At the end of the day the jobs these people do, professional or not, are still jobs. It's an uncomfortable thought for us to have that Doctors, Teachers, Nurses, Firemen etc, can have a job they treat the way we treat our own. The way someone in an office can hate their job some days, can put off work, or do things they really don't want to. We have this idea with professional jobs this does not happen. Why? Some jobs can seem dangerous to us, but when it becomes routine, and you do it every day, you become desensitized and you eventually look at that job the same way you look at any other job.
I have worked in healthcare before, and when I did it opened my eyes to the humanity of the people that work within it. Your Doctor is a person like anyone else and their job will be like any other job, there will be days they love it and days they hate it. As for proficiency I care not to comment at this time, you can infer what you like from the tone of this post.
When you put faith in a professional, we can explain the reason why they get priority over others with simple maths. If you listened to the first friend, you would be putting faith in them and them alone. When you put faith in a professional you put faith in them, their manager, any professional body they belong to, and the organisation they work for. This hedges the faith you are placing on them across several other people. The problem I have with that is that you are having faith in people you have never met, likely never will meet, and know nothing about. In the case of the manager, they are just that, you should know from your own experience the varying efficiency and effectiveness of managers. Most are bad for the simple reason that they commit the cardinal sin of managing - that the people you manage have to do things your way - what works for you might not work for someone else, you need to recognise that to manage people effectively.
As for the professional body, with those in most cases you register and you rarely have any interaction with them. It can be years between contact and even then it can be trivial. The idea that a professional body actively monitors your work is misguided. As for the organisation they work for, in their case the manager is actually the one responsible for highlighting problems. Most organisations are ignorant to their staff's problems, and they are most ignorant to problems with management as the critique never makes it up the ladder of responsibility.
While it is possible to have faith in all of these people, the idea that being in a certain job gives you authority over the subject matter is flawed. "I should know, it's my job" is not a persuasive argument for me. It's anecdotal and as such should contribute no more to convincing me than someone's personal experience would be. There is the question of confidence that underlies all of this, that is to say that those who work in a given job become more confident in speaking about it, and we are more likely to believe someone who tells us something with confidence.
If you want me to listen to you then you will need to give me a reason to do so. Doing something as a job is not reason enough for me. If you are good at your job and understand what it is you do then you will be able to explain the reasoning behind what you tell me. If you can't explain why you should do something, that it's just something you have been told not to do, that isn't merit enough for me to listen.
There is however something else at play here. If a friend who works in retail said the same thing again you would not be likely to listen. Even though in their job they might see a lot of complaints about their products, returns, or even product recalls. The fireman gets precedence because they are in a professional role. There is an assumption we make, whether we do so consciously or not, we think that professionals are less likely to be incompetent in their job. We think that they don't skive off, they don't cut corners, they are good at their job, and that they know everything about their work. Yet when you say this out loud you realise that sounds short sighted, and overly optimistic.
Ultimately the decision we make is defined by faith. We accept the authority of the people we have faith in. For those who are religious, who have faith in a higher power, for them there is no authority higher than that power. A little closer to the ground the same thing happens with the people whose authority we accept. We believe the fireman because we have faith in them, and believe that everything we said above is true. Except that's not objective faith, it's blind faith. It's blind because we don't question it. At the end of the day the jobs these people do, professional or not, are still jobs. It's an uncomfortable thought for us to have that Doctors, Teachers, Nurses, Firemen etc, can have a job they treat the way we treat our own. The way someone in an office can hate their job some days, can put off work, or do things they really don't want to. We have this idea with professional jobs this does not happen. Why? Some jobs can seem dangerous to us, but when it becomes routine, and you do it every day, you become desensitized and you eventually look at that job the same way you look at any other job.
I have worked in healthcare before, and when I did it opened my eyes to the humanity of the people that work within it. Your Doctor is a person like anyone else and their job will be like any other job, there will be days they love it and days they hate it. As for proficiency I care not to comment at this time, you can infer what you like from the tone of this post.
When you put faith in a professional, we can explain the reason why they get priority over others with simple maths. If you listened to the first friend, you would be putting faith in them and them alone. When you put faith in a professional you put faith in them, their manager, any professional body they belong to, and the organisation they work for. This hedges the faith you are placing on them across several other people. The problem I have with that is that you are having faith in people you have never met, likely never will meet, and know nothing about. In the case of the manager, they are just that, you should know from your own experience the varying efficiency and effectiveness of managers. Most are bad for the simple reason that they commit the cardinal sin of managing - that the people you manage have to do things your way - what works for you might not work for someone else, you need to recognise that to manage people effectively.
As for the professional body, with those in most cases you register and you rarely have any interaction with them. It can be years between contact and even then it can be trivial. The idea that a professional body actively monitors your work is misguided. As for the organisation they work for, in their case the manager is actually the one responsible for highlighting problems. Most organisations are ignorant to their staff's problems, and they are most ignorant to problems with management as the critique never makes it up the ladder of responsibility.
While it is possible to have faith in all of these people, the idea that being in a certain job gives you authority over the subject matter is flawed. "I should know, it's my job" is not a persuasive argument for me. It's anecdotal and as such should contribute no more to convincing me than someone's personal experience would be. There is the question of confidence that underlies all of this, that is to say that those who work in a given job become more confident in speaking about it, and we are more likely to believe someone who tells us something with confidence.
If you want me to listen to you then you will need to give me a reason to do so. Doing something as a job is not reason enough for me. If you are good at your job and understand what it is you do then you will be able to explain the reasoning behind what you tell me. If you can't explain why you should do something, that it's just something you have been told not to do, that isn't merit enough for me to listen.
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