After recently rekindling my love for the TV series Sex And The City, I discovered there was a prequel series created called The Carrie Diaries. I wasn't sure what to expect from the series, when I read the synopsis it simply said it follows the events in the life of Carrie Bradshaw in her teenage years. I was pleasantly surprised when I watched the series from start to finish to discover I quite liked it. This post isn't a review of the series however, instead the fact that I was surprised I would like the series made me stop to question why - was it just doubt that I held over the setting or the premise of the series, or was it something else.
In life we live in the present, we look to the future, and we sometimes get lost in our past. Through it all however, our past is usually the one thing we can actually be certain of, because it is written and unchanging. Our future is yet to be written and depends entirely on our present and the actions we take. When you watch a prequel however, all of this gets turned on its head. Instead of the future being the unknown, you know exactly how things end up.
In the case of The Carrie Diaries the events and conclusions of Sex And The City are set, they have already been written and played out. You know exactly where Carrie will end up, but that doesn't mean you know everything about her. Watching the series back, I was constantly anticipating breaks with canon, and there were a few but they were mostly minor and things which a creative writer could easily patch up if they ever made a third season of the series. As for the rest of the story which stays true to canon, the lack of detail the main series and movies had gone into in regard to Carrie's younger life left the writers with quite a bit of creative freedom. There were many stories they wrote and many more they could still write.
I've never actually written a prequel to anything. When I write works of fiction I tend to stick to linear progressions of time. I've elaborated on the past of characters before but referencing someone's past and actually depicting it are two very different things. I've often contemplated that question people often ask - "Would you want to know how and when you will die?" - and my answer has for the most part always swayed towards "No" mainly for the lessons learned from the tale of Cassandra, and the worry over whether the events would come to pass because of your actions, or indeed inactions. If someone handed you a book that told you your entire life story from birth to death would you read it? Maybe the reason we can't see the future is because it would torment us.
What prequels seem to demonstrate however is the fact that the entertainment we get from these stories and the intrigue that captures our attention and our imagination is ultimately centred around the journey, not the destination. With a prequel you already know the destination, and beyond the first few scenes you already know the start point, the story that is told focuses on the space in between the two. Maybe the reason we often have low expectations or even negative expectations for prequels is because they are the most true to life parts of the stories that captivate us. They don't hold that intrigue of how things end up, just like life, however grim it is to admit we all know we all end up in the same place at the end, it's a fate none of us can escape. Life is about the journey and its highs and lows and that's what a prequel is about too.
Perhaps if you apply the same observations of life to prequels you could say the reason we expect them to be crap is because we like to believe where we are now is a better place than we were. That our presents represent the higher standard we associate with the main series, and our pasts which seem less impressive by comparison represent the prequels - maybe we want to hold onto the belief that the future is always better than the past so desperately that it warps our perceptions to make us believe it should be.
Why I hate chuggers
Ever asked yourself "How much do chuggers get paid?" - I'll forgive you if the answer is no, because for me the answer was no too for quite a long time. For those who don't know what a chugger is, it's a portmanteau of "charity" and "mugger" and refers to any person who stands usually in the street and approaches random people for donations to charities. They often have charity goblets or just a bucket for the money to go into, however some go further than this and ask people in the street to set up direct debits to donate to a charity on a regular basis.
The reason I hate chuggers is because of that question and its answer. Up until last year I was like the majority of people who just walk passed chuggers and don't engage, finding them annoying more than anything but paying them very little thought beyond how to avoid them. That was until last year when a charity which shall remain nameless for legal reasons asked a friend to become a chugger. Now up until that point I never really stopped to think about that question, how much they get paid, so I am not sure what I actually thought the answer was. I guess in some respects since it is a charity you half expect the chuggers to be volunteers, but in most cases they are not. They are indeed paid.
Chuggers are generally paid on a commission basis, with the rate fluctuating depending on the amount they collect. This one charity which I will not name, employs its chuggers in London to stand in the streets with buckets collecting money. If they collect less than £75 in donations that day, they are paid 40% of what they collect, and if they collect more than £75 in that day they are paid 60% of what they collect. Yes, you read that right, they are paid from the donations, and yes, if it is over £75 they are paid more than half of the figure meaning more money goes to the chugger than the actual cause.
If you were to stand outside Oxford Circus and managed to collect £500 in that day, then you would earn £300 for the day from this particular charity with the remaining £200 going to the cause. Now in the interest of fairness I should state I have made posts in the past that have been critical of charities and the way they operate, particularly in reference to the senior staff members who are paid six figure salaries for their work. I take issue with being pressed to donate to a charity where the bulk of my money is going to the pockets of the people running the charity and not to the cause itself.
This was only one charity that paid 40%/60% to their chuggers, as far as others are concerned I am highly sceptical of their motives knowing this. I don't know how much other charities pay their chuggers but the fact it can be so high is enough in itself to deter me from ever donating a single penny to them. I do believe legislation is required to force charities to be transparent with their pay scales. The salaries of all workers within any charity should be publicly accessible, especially when those charities gain special tax status for the supposed work they do. "Chugging" meaning "Charity Mugging" is perhaps one of the most apt names for a job there ever was.
The reason I hate chuggers is because of that question and its answer. Up until last year I was like the majority of people who just walk passed chuggers and don't engage, finding them annoying more than anything but paying them very little thought beyond how to avoid them. That was until last year when a charity which shall remain nameless for legal reasons asked a friend to become a chugger. Now up until that point I never really stopped to think about that question, how much they get paid, so I am not sure what I actually thought the answer was. I guess in some respects since it is a charity you half expect the chuggers to be volunteers, but in most cases they are not. They are indeed paid.
Chuggers are generally paid on a commission basis, with the rate fluctuating depending on the amount they collect. This one charity which I will not name, employs its chuggers in London to stand in the streets with buckets collecting money. If they collect less than £75 in donations that day, they are paid 40% of what they collect, and if they collect more than £75 in that day they are paid 60% of what they collect. Yes, you read that right, they are paid from the donations, and yes, if it is over £75 they are paid more than half of the figure meaning more money goes to the chugger than the actual cause.
If you were to stand outside Oxford Circus and managed to collect £500 in that day, then you would earn £300 for the day from this particular charity with the remaining £200 going to the cause. Now in the interest of fairness I should state I have made posts in the past that have been critical of charities and the way they operate, particularly in reference to the senior staff members who are paid six figure salaries for their work. I take issue with being pressed to donate to a charity where the bulk of my money is going to the pockets of the people running the charity and not to the cause itself.
This was only one charity that paid 40%/60% to their chuggers, as far as others are concerned I am highly sceptical of their motives knowing this. I don't know how much other charities pay their chuggers but the fact it can be so high is enough in itself to deter me from ever donating a single penny to them. I do believe legislation is required to force charities to be transparent with their pay scales. The salaries of all workers within any charity should be publicly accessible, especially when those charities gain special tax status for the supposed work they do. "Chugging" meaning "Charity Mugging" is perhaps one of the most apt names for a job there ever was.
The Right To Try
What you know to be right and wrong, you know through your own experience. The conclusions you have drawn have been the result of your life experience. Other people have different lives and experience different things. Even when they experience the same things as you they may come to different conclusions. I have wrote of this many times on this blog but I want to reiterate something which seems relevant after recent events. People have the right to make their own mistakes. What you know, you have learned for yourself through your own mistakes. For others to learn the same lessons they must be allowed to make their own mistakes. Imposing your experience onto others is arrogant and patronising and is the same rhetoric you once experienced and denied when you set out to prove people wrong. When you had energy and hope and faith. You are old and tired and you have forgotten that optimism.
People need to be allowed to make their own mistakes not least for the purpose of learning but also for the sake of progression. No good ever came from sealing ideas to history and refusing to return to them. When the world moves on what was once discarded can be revitalised.
In 1989, a then optimistic man at the age of 33 proposed an idea and he was laughed at. The main stream media ridiculed him and his dream. He was derided and labelled a fool for what was perceived as an invention that was a complete waste of time. His name was Tim Berners-Lee, and his dream was the World Wide Web. Those who ridiculed him now laugh through the other side of their faces. His dream of a content distribution system that would utilise the Internet was realised and today stands as one of the most important inventions in all of human history.
Sometimes no matter how much opposition or lack of belief you have in your cause you have to ignore the world and pursue it. If that means ignoring 99.999% of the population who think you are delusional then that is what you must do.
What relevance does this have to recent events? Everything. While Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, he did not invent the Internet. For those uneducated in the difference, the World Wide Web is a software architecture, that allows distribution of web content. The Internet is a worldwide system of interconnected networks which that software utilises to deliver that content. The Internet was first invented by the military during the 1960s as ARPANET - the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. It was first opened up to private institutions in 1981 and later expanded in 1982 to incorporate the Internet Protocol Suite TCP/IP, which today most people know by two protocols part of that suite, IPv4 and IPv6.
The Internet has existed for almost 50 years. The World Wide Web did not emerge until over 20 years later. The world changed. Technology progressed, attitudes changed, and the world was transformed as a result. There are many people alive today who were not even born when the Web was born. The demography of our society is changing and the generations that are emerging now deserve the opportunity to pursue their ideas as Tim Berners-Lee did. How likely you think they will be to achieve their goals is irrelevant. You had your chance and your opportunity, now it is theirs. What you failed to do, does not mean they will too. The ability to create the World Wide Web had existed for decades before Tim Berners-Lee had the vision to try. If he had accepted that he should not try to do what those before him had failed to do then we would not have the World Wide Web. We would not have Google, and you would not be able to read this post.
People need to be allowed to make their own mistakes not least for the purpose of learning but also for the sake of progression. No good ever came from sealing ideas to history and refusing to return to them. When the world moves on what was once discarded can be revitalised.
In 1989, a then optimistic man at the age of 33 proposed an idea and he was laughed at. The main stream media ridiculed him and his dream. He was derided and labelled a fool for what was perceived as an invention that was a complete waste of time. His name was Tim Berners-Lee, and his dream was the World Wide Web. Those who ridiculed him now laugh through the other side of their faces. His dream of a content distribution system that would utilise the Internet was realised and today stands as one of the most important inventions in all of human history.
Sometimes no matter how much opposition or lack of belief you have in your cause you have to ignore the world and pursue it. If that means ignoring 99.999% of the population who think you are delusional then that is what you must do.
What relevance does this have to recent events? Everything. While Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, he did not invent the Internet. For those uneducated in the difference, the World Wide Web is a software architecture, that allows distribution of web content. The Internet is a worldwide system of interconnected networks which that software utilises to deliver that content. The Internet was first invented by the military during the 1960s as ARPANET - the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. It was first opened up to private institutions in 1981 and later expanded in 1982 to incorporate the Internet Protocol Suite TCP/IP, which today most people know by two protocols part of that suite, IPv4 and IPv6.
The Internet has existed for almost 50 years. The World Wide Web did not emerge until over 20 years later. The world changed. Technology progressed, attitudes changed, and the world was transformed as a result. There are many people alive today who were not even born when the Web was born. The demography of our society is changing and the generations that are emerging now deserve the opportunity to pursue their ideas as Tim Berners-Lee did. How likely you think they will be to achieve their goals is irrelevant. You had your chance and your opportunity, now it is theirs. What you failed to do, does not mean they will too. The ability to create the World Wide Web had existed for decades before Tim Berners-Lee had the vision to try. If he had accepted that he should not try to do what those before him had failed to do then we would not have the World Wide Web. We would not have Google, and you would not be able to read this post.
The taste of Olives
Ten years ago if you had put an olive anywhere near my food I would have felt offended and grossed out. Today I quite like the taste, I occasionally have them on pizzas, and I have developed a hankering for Chocolate Olives which I had for the first time a few years ago on a trip to Paris. It's fascinating to me how your tastes can evolve over time. The things you love today, you might not even like in ten years time. Likewise there will be things you don't like now which you might come to like or even love in the future.
Staying open to new experiences is important to getting the most out of life. It's far too easy to let your past experiences dictate your future - far too easy to say no to something because of one bad experience. This applies to so many areas of our lives, not just taste in food but music, movies, books, but even to a point our taste in politics (if you can call it a taste). I know if you wound the clock back about fourteen years and put me in a room with my teenage self he'd probably not like me. That's not a judgement on the person I have become, or the person I was at the time, it's just a fact of life - life changes us.
We often find people we have disagreements with, opposing views, and differing beliefs, but through it all one thing remains constant: for the most part the reason they hold their view is because of their life experience. While some things you can look to psychology and argue whether they are inherent or environmental, "nature versus nurture" as the debate goes, there are other things that it is quite clear belong decidedly in one camp. First impressions often leave a considerable impact on our views. That first experience can lead to a cognitive bias resulting in a spiral of confirmation bias that causes you to focus on the points that reinforce what you believe and discard what you don't solidifying your perceptions. In the extreme this can lead a person to live in a reality entirely different to everyone else where two people can see a fact and interpret it completely differently.
Staying open to new experiences lets you avoid this. One area in particular which most people can probably relate to is customer service. If you take your mobile phone for example you have probably at some point had a discussion about tariffs, reception, and cost with people. You've likely also experienced that situation where you have had nothing but good experience with a particular service provider which other people then vehemently oppose because their experience was nothing but bad. Reality is rarely this simple, most people will have good and bad experiences, it's just that the first or the most prominent experience causes you to form a cognitive bias and all other experiences after it are then subjected to confirmation bias. Very few people are actually objective and consider all points of view, namely because people have a paralysing fear of being wrong.
What the argument over customer service can illustrate to us however is the fact that those companies continue to operate, and they continue to have customers, who continue to use their services. If one given interpretation of that company proved to be true, either negative or positive, that company would go bust, or hold a monopoly. The fact of the matter is they don't, and that's because everyone's experiences vary wildly. The reason that company you hate so much and can't understand how anyone would use because your experience was so bad, is still going, is because other people have completely different experiences to you. This is something we don't tend to stop and dwell on much in our day to day lives: other people have lives. Other people live entire lives without us, have sets of friends, family, employers, schools, and experiences. Sometimes they overlap with ours, sometimes they run parallel, and sometimes they cross our own.
It's easy to get caught in a downward, or indeed upward spiral. The hard part is recognising when we have been caught in that spiral. Sadly it's often years later that we gain the clarity, if at all, that our perceptions were warped. Sometimes it takes years before you look at someone and see them for who they really are, not for how you imagined them. Sometimes it takes years for us to lower our guard and take a chance on something again. So try and keep an open mind. Don't deny yourself olives.
Staying open to new experiences is important to getting the most out of life. It's far too easy to let your past experiences dictate your future - far too easy to say no to something because of one bad experience. This applies to so many areas of our lives, not just taste in food but music, movies, books, but even to a point our taste in politics (if you can call it a taste). I know if you wound the clock back about fourteen years and put me in a room with my teenage self he'd probably not like me. That's not a judgement on the person I have become, or the person I was at the time, it's just a fact of life - life changes us.
We often find people we have disagreements with, opposing views, and differing beliefs, but through it all one thing remains constant: for the most part the reason they hold their view is because of their life experience. While some things you can look to psychology and argue whether they are inherent or environmental, "nature versus nurture" as the debate goes, there are other things that it is quite clear belong decidedly in one camp. First impressions often leave a considerable impact on our views. That first experience can lead to a cognitive bias resulting in a spiral of confirmation bias that causes you to focus on the points that reinforce what you believe and discard what you don't solidifying your perceptions. In the extreme this can lead a person to live in a reality entirely different to everyone else where two people can see a fact and interpret it completely differently.
Staying open to new experiences lets you avoid this. One area in particular which most people can probably relate to is customer service. If you take your mobile phone for example you have probably at some point had a discussion about tariffs, reception, and cost with people. You've likely also experienced that situation where you have had nothing but good experience with a particular service provider which other people then vehemently oppose because their experience was nothing but bad. Reality is rarely this simple, most people will have good and bad experiences, it's just that the first or the most prominent experience causes you to form a cognitive bias and all other experiences after it are then subjected to confirmation bias. Very few people are actually objective and consider all points of view, namely because people have a paralysing fear of being wrong.
What the argument over customer service can illustrate to us however is the fact that those companies continue to operate, and they continue to have customers, who continue to use their services. If one given interpretation of that company proved to be true, either negative or positive, that company would go bust, or hold a monopoly. The fact of the matter is they don't, and that's because everyone's experiences vary wildly. The reason that company you hate so much and can't understand how anyone would use because your experience was so bad, is still going, is because other people have completely different experiences to you. This is something we don't tend to stop and dwell on much in our day to day lives: other people have lives. Other people live entire lives without us, have sets of friends, family, employers, schools, and experiences. Sometimes they overlap with ours, sometimes they run parallel, and sometimes they cross our own.
It's easy to get caught in a downward, or indeed upward spiral. The hard part is recognising when we have been caught in that spiral. Sadly it's often years later that we gain the clarity, if at all, that our perceptions were warped. Sometimes it takes years before you look at someone and see them for who they really are, not for how you imagined them. Sometimes it takes years for us to lower our guard and take a chance on something again. So try and keep an open mind. Don't deny yourself olives.
Disremembrance
There's a song I used to listen to in college called Disremembrance by Dannii Minogue. Putting aside whether you think she's a good singer or not, the song had lyrics that resonated with me at the time. The word itself isn't widely used and hasn't made it into most dictionaries, it is the compliment to disremember as remembrance is to remember. To disremember is to fail to remember, or to forget. Disremembrance is the act or process of forgetting.
Part of the lyrics read "You gave me the time, To change the memories, But if I forget myself, Will you remember me?" - the reason this resonated with me so much at the time was because college for me was really a period of transition from an old mentality to a new one. I became a different person through the years I spent in college. Something happened to me when I was much younger which I won't go into details here. It left me distrusting of others, cold and closed to the world, and for the most part it was the reason I became an introvert, having previously been an extrovert and wildly so. My time spent in college was marked by many changes, least of all the fact that I was surrounded by people for the first time who were there by choice. Up until then I had only been through compulsory education, surrounded by people who had no choice but to be there and for many of whom this was made no secret.
Studying in a very different atmosphere I became more sociable. I opened up just a little bit more and I met people who would leave a profound impact on my life. I spoke for the first time to others about what happened and for the first time I felt like I was able to inch myself back towards being myself. While I could never change what happened to me because the past is done and can't be undone, the present was still a choice. I had a life I was living and the choices I made determined my future. The present would become the past and that made me attempt to rebuild. I knew that the present I shaped would eventually become my past and by virtue to shape my present would be to shape my past in the image I wanted. With the help of others I was able to find some happiness and joy in my life and created lasting memories.
At the time the lyrics resonated with me because they were the life I was living. The people around me gave me the time to change my memories. They gave me the hope and the opportunity to create a better future for myself. Through it all that question lingered though, if I ever forgot who I was and abandoned the path I was creating, would they remember me? Would they remember the person I wanted to be and keep me on that path? Would they remember me at all if we parted ways, would they ever look back on the time we shared together and think of me or would I be missing from their memories.
The idea of being forgotten is something that I struggle with. While I am still an introvert, that isn't my true nature. When I am comfortable and you observe me at my best you'd say I was an extrovert. At times when I push myself I can still play that role quite convincingly. The trouble is I still don't feel myself again even after all these years. I opened up a lot more through my years at university and met yet more people that made me feel much more confident about being myself and to an extent I have been able to hold onto that at least. I have interest and I have passions and I have things that are geeky or nerdy and I do explore them without worrying what others think. The fact this blog exists is testament to the fact I am comfortable with complete strangers reading it and forming opinions of me without worrying what they are. I know some people will find an affinity with my writing and I know others will find it pretentious or find fault or flaw with it and dismiss it.
I don't concern myself with those opinions however because without sounding arrogant the only opinion that matters is my own. You might say that is arrogant but at the end of the day I am sharing my life on this blog and as such having an opinion on it is to have an opinion on my life, and while you are free to form opinions of other peoples' lives, you have no right to tell anyone how to live their life. So as far as my life is concerned, and yours for that matter, the only opinion that matters is our own.
When it comes to looking at the future however it's worth remembering that the future is yet to come, and the past is long since passed. The person you are today is not the person you were, and while in many cases you might be the person you wanted to become, and in some cases you won't all that matters is who you want to be now, not who you wanted to be then. We change as we grow and our experience shapes our growth. The things we once wanted, as we grow can become completely opposing to what we want now. We can dream of being a certain person and grow and realise the reality is the worst thing we'd ever want for ourselves. It is in that moment you have to realise you always have the freedom to change your mind.
There's another song called Sunscreen by Baz Luhrmann with the lyric "Don't feel guilty if you don't know what to do with your life, The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't" - that last part as I have grown older has made me of the opinion that perhaps we're not meant to know what we want to do with our lives at all? Maybe that's the point. Maybe life is meant to be about figuring it out, and that the only universal truth is that you never do, no matter how close you think you are there's always another day to live and when it eventually ends no matter how full your life was there will always be a thought of "I wish I had..." because we can at least agree that it's not possible to do everything, no matter how hard we try, so we shouldn't beat ourselves up when we can't.
Part of the lyrics read "You gave me the time, To change the memories, But if I forget myself, Will you remember me?" - the reason this resonated with me so much at the time was because college for me was really a period of transition from an old mentality to a new one. I became a different person through the years I spent in college. Something happened to me when I was much younger which I won't go into details here. It left me distrusting of others, cold and closed to the world, and for the most part it was the reason I became an introvert, having previously been an extrovert and wildly so. My time spent in college was marked by many changes, least of all the fact that I was surrounded by people for the first time who were there by choice. Up until then I had only been through compulsory education, surrounded by people who had no choice but to be there and for many of whom this was made no secret.
Studying in a very different atmosphere I became more sociable. I opened up just a little bit more and I met people who would leave a profound impact on my life. I spoke for the first time to others about what happened and for the first time I felt like I was able to inch myself back towards being myself. While I could never change what happened to me because the past is done and can't be undone, the present was still a choice. I had a life I was living and the choices I made determined my future. The present would become the past and that made me attempt to rebuild. I knew that the present I shaped would eventually become my past and by virtue to shape my present would be to shape my past in the image I wanted. With the help of others I was able to find some happiness and joy in my life and created lasting memories.
At the time the lyrics resonated with me because they were the life I was living. The people around me gave me the time to change my memories. They gave me the hope and the opportunity to create a better future for myself. Through it all that question lingered though, if I ever forgot who I was and abandoned the path I was creating, would they remember me? Would they remember the person I wanted to be and keep me on that path? Would they remember me at all if we parted ways, would they ever look back on the time we shared together and think of me or would I be missing from their memories.
The idea of being forgotten is something that I struggle with. While I am still an introvert, that isn't my true nature. When I am comfortable and you observe me at my best you'd say I was an extrovert. At times when I push myself I can still play that role quite convincingly. The trouble is I still don't feel myself again even after all these years. I opened up a lot more through my years at university and met yet more people that made me feel much more confident about being myself and to an extent I have been able to hold onto that at least. I have interest and I have passions and I have things that are geeky or nerdy and I do explore them without worrying what others think. The fact this blog exists is testament to the fact I am comfortable with complete strangers reading it and forming opinions of me without worrying what they are. I know some people will find an affinity with my writing and I know others will find it pretentious or find fault or flaw with it and dismiss it.
I don't concern myself with those opinions however because without sounding arrogant the only opinion that matters is my own. You might say that is arrogant but at the end of the day I am sharing my life on this blog and as such having an opinion on it is to have an opinion on my life, and while you are free to form opinions of other peoples' lives, you have no right to tell anyone how to live their life. So as far as my life is concerned, and yours for that matter, the only opinion that matters is our own.
When it comes to looking at the future however it's worth remembering that the future is yet to come, and the past is long since passed. The person you are today is not the person you were, and while in many cases you might be the person you wanted to become, and in some cases you won't all that matters is who you want to be now, not who you wanted to be then. We change as we grow and our experience shapes our growth. The things we once wanted, as we grow can become completely opposing to what we want now. We can dream of being a certain person and grow and realise the reality is the worst thing we'd ever want for ourselves. It is in that moment you have to realise you always have the freedom to change your mind.
There's another song called Sunscreen by Baz Luhrmann with the lyric "Don't feel guilty if you don't know what to do with your life, The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't" - that last part as I have grown older has made me of the opinion that perhaps we're not meant to know what we want to do with our lives at all? Maybe that's the point. Maybe life is meant to be about figuring it out, and that the only universal truth is that you never do, no matter how close you think you are there's always another day to live and when it eventually ends no matter how full your life was there will always be a thought of "I wish I had..." because we can at least agree that it's not possible to do everything, no matter how hard we try, so we shouldn't beat ourselves up when we can't.
Scratching The Surface
As a writer I know from experience that there is a plethora of books out there which are decidedly obscure. It's not so much a case of the writer intentionally writing a book that they did not want to enter the mainstream media - although that is sometimes the case with niche marketing - instead it's just been a case that the books for the most part went unnoticed. This got me thinking about how deep our culture goes and how shallow we tend to be when we venture into it. Whether it's music, movies, games, books, or even blogs, there's a lot to be said about the sheer depth of content that exists which very few people have ever consumed.
I've touched on these issues before on this blog. I wrote about how our bubbles can limit our experiences and close our minds to new experiences. I wrote about favouritism and how it too can also trap us inside bubbles of content consuming the same thing over and over again because we like it in an everlasting positive feedback loop. I've been thinking more about authors and actors being examples of this behaviour. In a previous post I spoke about Will and Grace and how it was one of my favourite TV shows so naturally that was a starting point in an experiment. Reading back through my post I picked out Veronica Cartwright who played Jack's mother in Will and Grace. I've seen her appear in a few TV shows and Movies over the years, so I decided to take a look at her IMDB article to test my theory. As I expected, reading through the list of shows and movies she has been in, the vast majority I have never heard of, and a minority I have but do not recall her appearing in it or her character. There are a few surprising entries too, for one, I love 'The Witches of Eastwick' yet I was completely oblivious to the fact there was a TV series made from the story in 2009 which she was in.
This isn't an attempt to undermine Cartwright's career, this is simply proving a point, one which you can then go on to prove repeatedly with any actor you want really. Even when you pick actors who with no disrespect to Cartwright, had much more successful careers, you still find that the vast majority of the roles they have played you've never heard of either. This isn't about a frame of reference, although age and experience will play a small role in what you recognise in those lists, this is about the fact that people have lives. That's something we tend to forget quite a bit. These actors have careers that span many years, many decades for some, through which they were not always successful, they were not always headliners, and they certainly weren't always paid well for their work. You can pick the most famous actor you can think of and read through their filmography and the same thing holds true. Just as with the books that are banished to obscurity, most of these titles are banished there too.
The question is, why do we stick to such a small frame of reference, and why do we rarely venture beyond it? Does the answer lie in Psychology? Perhaps we find comfort in the familiar and choose not to explore the unknown? Maybe we are just lazy and don't want to have to think or research what to read or watch and want whatever is the easiest to pick up - which is usually whatever mainstream media provides. Even when you use services like Netflix or Spotify you can quickly become aware of the wealth of content that you've never consumed before, and with the latter showing the popularity of content among listeners you can see which tracks are the least played.
There are rarities however, those who have a keen interest in one specific person, whether they be author, actor, singer, or simply someone whose career provides interest. These people who have a fascination tend to explore every inch of that interest. You may be someone who can name every movie a particular actor has been in, or every winner of the Eurovision Song Contest in order, but beyond those fascinations the depth of information you would have to memorise to know this about everyone is so great that you could spend a lifetime trying to learn it all and you would barely scratch the surface.
As a gay man there is one area that I would like to explore to a much greater extent and that is the genres of LGBT TV shows and Movies. Here too I admit I am guilty of staying on the surface. I have seen about 50 LGBT Movies and the bulk of those come up over and over again when you try finding other LGBT movies to watch, top 10 articles, even top 20 and top 100 articles ranked by personal preference repeat the same titles over and over. One thing is quite clear, there are a lot more than this that were created. When you venture into the gay indie movies there are many which never gained any great deal of exposure. When you ask people to name LGBT movies they usually come up with the same titles, 'Another Gay Movie', 'Milk', 'Eating Out', 'Bound', and 'Brokeback Mountain' I hear the most from Americans I ask, and 'Beautiful Thing', 'History Boys', and 'Weekend' for the British readers. I'll leave the politics of which are better for another post.
Try and explore a little more. Go beyond the surface and dig down a little deeper. You never know what diamonds are waiting to be discovered.
I've touched on these issues before on this blog. I wrote about how our bubbles can limit our experiences and close our minds to new experiences. I wrote about favouritism and how it too can also trap us inside bubbles of content consuming the same thing over and over again because we like it in an everlasting positive feedback loop. I've been thinking more about authors and actors being examples of this behaviour. In a previous post I spoke about Will and Grace and how it was one of my favourite TV shows so naturally that was a starting point in an experiment. Reading back through my post I picked out Veronica Cartwright who played Jack's mother in Will and Grace. I've seen her appear in a few TV shows and Movies over the years, so I decided to take a look at her IMDB article to test my theory. As I expected, reading through the list of shows and movies she has been in, the vast majority I have never heard of, and a minority I have but do not recall her appearing in it or her character. There are a few surprising entries too, for one, I love 'The Witches of Eastwick' yet I was completely oblivious to the fact there was a TV series made from the story in 2009 which she was in.
This isn't an attempt to undermine Cartwright's career, this is simply proving a point, one which you can then go on to prove repeatedly with any actor you want really. Even when you pick actors who with no disrespect to Cartwright, had much more successful careers, you still find that the vast majority of the roles they have played you've never heard of either. This isn't about a frame of reference, although age and experience will play a small role in what you recognise in those lists, this is about the fact that people have lives. That's something we tend to forget quite a bit. These actors have careers that span many years, many decades for some, through which they were not always successful, they were not always headliners, and they certainly weren't always paid well for their work. You can pick the most famous actor you can think of and read through their filmography and the same thing holds true. Just as with the books that are banished to obscurity, most of these titles are banished there too.
The question is, why do we stick to such a small frame of reference, and why do we rarely venture beyond it? Does the answer lie in Psychology? Perhaps we find comfort in the familiar and choose not to explore the unknown? Maybe we are just lazy and don't want to have to think or research what to read or watch and want whatever is the easiest to pick up - which is usually whatever mainstream media provides. Even when you use services like Netflix or Spotify you can quickly become aware of the wealth of content that you've never consumed before, and with the latter showing the popularity of content among listeners you can see which tracks are the least played.
There are rarities however, those who have a keen interest in one specific person, whether they be author, actor, singer, or simply someone whose career provides interest. These people who have a fascination tend to explore every inch of that interest. You may be someone who can name every movie a particular actor has been in, or every winner of the Eurovision Song Contest in order, but beyond those fascinations the depth of information you would have to memorise to know this about everyone is so great that you could spend a lifetime trying to learn it all and you would barely scratch the surface.
As a gay man there is one area that I would like to explore to a much greater extent and that is the genres of LGBT TV shows and Movies. Here too I admit I am guilty of staying on the surface. I have seen about 50 LGBT Movies and the bulk of those come up over and over again when you try finding other LGBT movies to watch, top 10 articles, even top 20 and top 100 articles ranked by personal preference repeat the same titles over and over. One thing is quite clear, there are a lot more than this that were created. When you venture into the gay indie movies there are many which never gained any great deal of exposure. When you ask people to name LGBT movies they usually come up with the same titles, 'Another Gay Movie', 'Milk', 'Eating Out', 'Bound', and 'Brokeback Mountain' I hear the most from Americans I ask, and 'Beautiful Thing', 'History Boys', and 'Weekend' for the British readers. I'll leave the politics of which are better for another post.
Try and explore a little more. Go beyond the surface and dig down a little deeper. You never know what diamonds are waiting to be discovered.
I like your work, but I don't like you
In a recent post I discussed how the walls between personal and professional life are falling down due to social media. In a continuation of this thread I would like to look at another area where this disappearing divide is changing our impressions of people. I am a writer, and I have a number of stories published on Amazon, but if you looked at my social media accounts or this blog it might be a little difficult for you to know that. The reason I don't share my work on here is because for the most part I like to keep that side of my life professional and this side personal.
In much the same way that I feel employers should be limited in how much of a person's private life they allow to influence decisions they make concerning that employee, I also feel there's a limit to how much a reader should know about an author. There's a very big difference for me between being a fan of someone and being a fan of their work and the two don't always go hand in hand.
For a start there are quite a few authors who I enjoy reading specific titles from but I do not go beyond those titles. As an example Dan Brown who wrote The Da Vinci Code; while I like The Da Vinci Code as a book and the movie adaptation, I don't like Dan Brown as an author beyond this title. I have tried to read other books by him and the only one of interest was Angels and Demons but I preferred the movie adaptation, the book felt too similar to The Da Vinci Code to get engrossed in it. I also tried reading Digital Fortress, something which took me months to complete for the simple reason that the author's lack of knowledge on the subject matter was excruciatingly painful to read. The only reason I finished it in the end was because there aren't many books I don't read the whole way through to give it a chance, even if I think it's crap, it has to be crap in the extreme for me to abandon it.
Beyond other works these people have created however, a lot of the time their social media accounts branch out and show you glimpses of other parts of their lives. Taste in music, movies, games, among other less controversial topics as well as the controversial topics such as politics, and personal opinions on contentious issues. I find when it comes to content creators and their content I like to draw a line between the two and try not to cross it. I try to draw that line with myself too which is why there are no links to my books here on this blog and why I don't share them on twitter. I have only shared links to them with people who have expressed an interest privately.
This post came about mainly due to some of the political views expressed by authors on twitter and the assertion that I would agree with them because I liked their work, which to be clear is not the case. Which in many ways I think is a pity because if I had discovered them as a person first, I probably would have never explored their work which brings us back to the original post on personal vs professional life. In many ways as an employer uses the internet to find background on a potential employee and then judges whether they should hire them based on what they find rather than their actual work, the same thing applies to content creators online. Readers are your potential employers since they buy your work to consume it, so what they find online will influence their decision. You could write the best story in the world, if many people disagree with your political opinions they'll never bother reading your work.
Being able to dismiss this as a non-issue is only something you can do if you are either already widely known, or if you have no desire to be so. It's like a small business starting out, when they are new every single review matters, a single one-star review can bring your reputation right down to nothing. A McDonald's with 10,000 reviews spread across the board is not going to be impacted by a handful of negative reviews, but an independent burger company starting out will be impacted heavily by low reviews. Whether you like it or not when you are an author your name is your brand, and everything you do under that name impacts that brand (which is why I use a pen name when publishing). You should learn a lesson from the business world. There have been numerous high profile cases of businesses throwing their brands behind political parties or political positions and paying the price afterwards for example Chick-fil-a or Chipotle.
In much the same way that I feel employers should be limited in how much of a person's private life they allow to influence decisions they make concerning that employee, I also feel there's a limit to how much a reader should know about an author. There's a very big difference for me between being a fan of someone and being a fan of their work and the two don't always go hand in hand.
For a start there are quite a few authors who I enjoy reading specific titles from but I do not go beyond those titles. As an example Dan Brown who wrote The Da Vinci Code; while I like The Da Vinci Code as a book and the movie adaptation, I don't like Dan Brown as an author beyond this title. I have tried to read other books by him and the only one of interest was Angels and Demons but I preferred the movie adaptation, the book felt too similar to The Da Vinci Code to get engrossed in it. I also tried reading Digital Fortress, something which took me months to complete for the simple reason that the author's lack of knowledge on the subject matter was excruciatingly painful to read. The only reason I finished it in the end was because there aren't many books I don't read the whole way through to give it a chance, even if I think it's crap, it has to be crap in the extreme for me to abandon it.
Beyond other works these people have created however, a lot of the time their social media accounts branch out and show you glimpses of other parts of their lives. Taste in music, movies, games, among other less controversial topics as well as the controversial topics such as politics, and personal opinions on contentious issues. I find when it comes to content creators and their content I like to draw a line between the two and try not to cross it. I try to draw that line with myself too which is why there are no links to my books here on this blog and why I don't share them on twitter. I have only shared links to them with people who have expressed an interest privately.
This post came about mainly due to some of the political views expressed by authors on twitter and the assertion that I would agree with them because I liked their work, which to be clear is not the case. Which in many ways I think is a pity because if I had discovered them as a person first, I probably would have never explored their work which brings us back to the original post on personal vs professional life. In many ways as an employer uses the internet to find background on a potential employee and then judges whether they should hire them based on what they find rather than their actual work, the same thing applies to content creators online. Readers are your potential employers since they buy your work to consume it, so what they find online will influence their decision. You could write the best story in the world, if many people disagree with your political opinions they'll never bother reading your work.
Being able to dismiss this as a non-issue is only something you can do if you are either already widely known, or if you have no desire to be so. It's like a small business starting out, when they are new every single review matters, a single one-star review can bring your reputation right down to nothing. A McDonald's with 10,000 reviews spread across the board is not going to be impacted by a handful of negative reviews, but an independent burger company starting out will be impacted heavily by low reviews. Whether you like it or not when you are an author your name is your brand, and everything you do under that name impacts that brand (which is why I use a pen name when publishing). You should learn a lesson from the business world. There have been numerous high profile cases of businesses throwing their brands behind political parties or political positions and paying the price afterwards for example Chick-fil-a or Chipotle.
Backwards
Like many people I often find myself with a procrastination problem. I've read many articles on this that propose supposed solutions but the truth I feel is simply that procrastination at its core is natural. I know that many people will offer a plethora of negative implications associated with procrastination, and I don't make any attempt to deny those. However, to say that we avoid, or do not need any and all things which have negative implications on our lives is delusional, because we don't. No-one no matter how devout they may be to different ideologies and regimes will uphold those to a perfect record. In other words everybody slips.
While I was born and raised Christian and have since abandoned organised religion in search of my own spiritual path, there are moments when some semblance of truth can be found in teachings that ironically most people who preach never actually follow. If you take Christianity as a whole, the religion is mostly defined by what you are not supposed to do and the eternal ramifications. Religion is in many ways an archaic form of legislature. Setting out an expanse of rules and regulations you are supposed to follow, punishments and sentences for breaking those, and in some cases predictions of what society will become.
The last point we can dismiss for the moment because it's a topic in and of itself. As for the rules and regulations which people should follow and the consequences, when you return to the time period when these were constructed they represent the mentality of the generation that existed. Not only does it represent what they thought, but it also gives an insight into what people of that time saw as problems. By this I mean, what was considered a sin was influenced by what people of the time saw as counter-productive.
It can be tempted to look at the world as it is today and say things are getting worse. To say that crime is rising, and that people are increasingly hateful but is that really true? As a gay man I have had the discussion of how much homophobia exists and whether it has increased or decreased etc over the years. At the moment my view is that it has done neither. I have flitted back and forth between thinking it rose and fell, but to be honest I think in reality it's remained more or less constant for thousands of years. One of the things people quote when they are homophobic is a verse in the Bible that denounces homosexuality, conveniently discarding the rest of the book that says a mountain of other things are abominations that people are perfectly comfortable with - shaving, divorce, working on Sunday [or Saturday depending on your interpretation] as examples. Moving beyond the attack itself if you look at the fact that verse exists you can deduce that thousands of years ago when men wrote that book and decided to victimise an entire group of people, you can assert homophobia existed, and not just on a small scale but on a wider scale that encompassed the establishment.
I realise many cultures and groups at the time didn't have a problem with it, but I would argue using Gay Marriage as an example that LGBT rights are not uniform today after thousands of years. Society as a whole seems to fluctuate, and while some people like to perpetuate the idea that we are moving forward as a race, I have to question whether that is really true. Racism as another example, was considered legal by the Bible. This is testament to the mentality that existed which viewed other people as "lesser" depending on certain characteristics, gender, race, social class etc. Now while you can point to the changes in laws over the years that have led the way to giving people rights they did not once have, the problem is a law does not change opinion. You can make something illegal but that doesn't change the mindset of people holding that view. Instead they find other ways of expressing their view without breaking those laws, or by breaking those laws in ways they avoid being caught in doing so.
Slavery might be illegal, but the mentality held by those with backward mindsets who view people as lesser still exists and it hasn't waned in its strength. The animosity held towards people who are LGBT at its core centres around the fact that it is viewed as being counter-productive in a much more literal sense. Two men or two women can't reproduce, and because of this LGBT people are seen as lesser and we are viewed as failing to contribute to the human race. Slavery was a way of subjugating other people into subservience. A way of exploiting people to achieve a level of power, often with the intent of carrying out manual labour or some other type of work without recompense.
The problem with these mentalities is that they are fundamentally flawed. Much as we view procrastination as something negative, the truth is no matter what you do you are always being productive - that may not be directed at the task it is intended to be directed at but it's still there. When you avoid doing work to play games or consume some other form of entertainment you are contributing to other industries. When you spend hours scrolling through social networks to avoid doing what you were supposed to be doing you are still being productive, it's just that what you produce isn't necessarily of benefit to you.
While two LGBT people may not be able to have children, they can adopt. That may not increase the population but it provides parents for children that otherwise would have none. If they use surrogates they have children with people who would otherwise have none. When you don't have children at all your life is not wasted, there is more to life than reproducing and there is more to be given to the good of humanity as a whole than just increasing its number.
Slavery actively prevents people from contributing anything to society as a whole; when you have no freedom you can't pursue ideas that can lead to new paradigms. When you are not paid for your work at all you can't contribute to an economy, you can't consume, you can't help businesses grow. By extension corporate-slavery is a very real problem, maximising profits and minimising wages is ultimately a catch-22, if every business made their workers broke, they would very quickly go bust, because customers and employees are not mutually exclusive, and every customer you have while they may not be employed by you, the majority will be employed by someone.
I've deliberately tiptoed over morality and ethics in this post because those are something that I feel are fluid. You just have to look at television to see how this is true. There are many television shows from decades past which would never get commissioned today and would shock younger generations that such things were ever allowed on television. "Respectable" broadcasters had television shows that were openly racist. This isn't one way however, this goes in both directions. There are television shows which were much more liberal in the past which would never get commissioned today. In the UK as examples, Black and White Minstrels were once acceptable on broadcasters like the BBC - this was openly racist but considered normal for the time and had little objection. On the obverse, there were comedies such as Gimme Gimme Gimme which were commissioned by the BBC at the time but would never make it onto television today because it's considered risqué.
British television has become increasingly conservative, there was a recent furore on twitter over comments made in response to a gay kiss on Coronation Street - this isn't a one off thing, this is endemic to the backward direction television is moving, which, in keeping with this post, is representative of society as a whole. We now live in an atmosphere where television shows depicting benefit claimants in an attempt to enrage public sentiment toward them is considered normal. Shows like Benefit Street, and Can't Pay We'll Take it Away exploit some of the most vulnerable people in society for the purpose of entertainment, yet their broadcasters think this is funny and don't have a problem with doing it. If you took this sick mentality across the pond to the USA you'd have TV shows like "Death Row" showing people living in prison on death row with the live finale being their execution. People are fucked up, this is the reality of the world we live in, morality and ethics are fluid and they are fluctuating right now in ways that are transforming our society into something many of us will look at with the same disdain as the shows we look back on and ask how the fuck did people ever agree with that.
The UK has become increasingly conservative politically and culturally, and it's not showing any signs of reversing. it's not progressing us forward it's taking us backwards and the solution is not to offer the same fucking thing because that's the problem.
While I was born and raised Christian and have since abandoned organised religion in search of my own spiritual path, there are moments when some semblance of truth can be found in teachings that ironically most people who preach never actually follow. If you take Christianity as a whole, the religion is mostly defined by what you are not supposed to do and the eternal ramifications. Religion is in many ways an archaic form of legislature. Setting out an expanse of rules and regulations you are supposed to follow, punishments and sentences for breaking those, and in some cases predictions of what society will become.
The last point we can dismiss for the moment because it's a topic in and of itself. As for the rules and regulations which people should follow and the consequences, when you return to the time period when these were constructed they represent the mentality of the generation that existed. Not only does it represent what they thought, but it also gives an insight into what people of that time saw as problems. By this I mean, what was considered a sin was influenced by what people of the time saw as counter-productive.
It can be tempted to look at the world as it is today and say things are getting worse. To say that crime is rising, and that people are increasingly hateful but is that really true? As a gay man I have had the discussion of how much homophobia exists and whether it has increased or decreased etc over the years. At the moment my view is that it has done neither. I have flitted back and forth between thinking it rose and fell, but to be honest I think in reality it's remained more or less constant for thousands of years. One of the things people quote when they are homophobic is a verse in the Bible that denounces homosexuality, conveniently discarding the rest of the book that says a mountain of other things are abominations that people are perfectly comfortable with - shaving, divorce, working on Sunday [or Saturday depending on your interpretation] as examples. Moving beyond the attack itself if you look at the fact that verse exists you can deduce that thousands of years ago when men wrote that book and decided to victimise an entire group of people, you can assert homophobia existed, and not just on a small scale but on a wider scale that encompassed the establishment.
I realise many cultures and groups at the time didn't have a problem with it, but I would argue using Gay Marriage as an example that LGBT rights are not uniform today after thousands of years. Society as a whole seems to fluctuate, and while some people like to perpetuate the idea that we are moving forward as a race, I have to question whether that is really true. Racism as another example, was considered legal by the Bible. This is testament to the mentality that existed which viewed other people as "lesser" depending on certain characteristics, gender, race, social class etc. Now while you can point to the changes in laws over the years that have led the way to giving people rights they did not once have, the problem is a law does not change opinion. You can make something illegal but that doesn't change the mindset of people holding that view. Instead they find other ways of expressing their view without breaking those laws, or by breaking those laws in ways they avoid being caught in doing so.
Slavery might be illegal, but the mentality held by those with backward mindsets who view people as lesser still exists and it hasn't waned in its strength. The animosity held towards people who are LGBT at its core centres around the fact that it is viewed as being counter-productive in a much more literal sense. Two men or two women can't reproduce, and because of this LGBT people are seen as lesser and we are viewed as failing to contribute to the human race. Slavery was a way of subjugating other people into subservience. A way of exploiting people to achieve a level of power, often with the intent of carrying out manual labour or some other type of work without recompense.
The problem with these mentalities is that they are fundamentally flawed. Much as we view procrastination as something negative, the truth is no matter what you do you are always being productive - that may not be directed at the task it is intended to be directed at but it's still there. When you avoid doing work to play games or consume some other form of entertainment you are contributing to other industries. When you spend hours scrolling through social networks to avoid doing what you were supposed to be doing you are still being productive, it's just that what you produce isn't necessarily of benefit to you.
While two LGBT people may not be able to have children, they can adopt. That may not increase the population but it provides parents for children that otherwise would have none. If they use surrogates they have children with people who would otherwise have none. When you don't have children at all your life is not wasted, there is more to life than reproducing and there is more to be given to the good of humanity as a whole than just increasing its number.
Slavery actively prevents people from contributing anything to society as a whole; when you have no freedom you can't pursue ideas that can lead to new paradigms. When you are not paid for your work at all you can't contribute to an economy, you can't consume, you can't help businesses grow. By extension corporate-slavery is a very real problem, maximising profits and minimising wages is ultimately a catch-22, if every business made their workers broke, they would very quickly go bust, because customers and employees are not mutually exclusive, and every customer you have while they may not be employed by you, the majority will be employed by someone.
I've deliberately tiptoed over morality and ethics in this post because those are something that I feel are fluid. You just have to look at television to see how this is true. There are many television shows from decades past which would never get commissioned today and would shock younger generations that such things were ever allowed on television. "Respectable" broadcasters had television shows that were openly racist. This isn't one way however, this goes in both directions. There are television shows which were much more liberal in the past which would never get commissioned today. In the UK as examples, Black and White Minstrels were once acceptable on broadcasters like the BBC - this was openly racist but considered normal for the time and had little objection. On the obverse, there were comedies such as Gimme Gimme Gimme which were commissioned by the BBC at the time but would never make it onto television today because it's considered risqué.
British television has become increasingly conservative, there was a recent furore on twitter over comments made in response to a gay kiss on Coronation Street - this isn't a one off thing, this is endemic to the backward direction television is moving, which, in keeping with this post, is representative of society as a whole. We now live in an atmosphere where television shows depicting benefit claimants in an attempt to enrage public sentiment toward them is considered normal. Shows like Benefit Street, and Can't Pay We'll Take it Away exploit some of the most vulnerable people in society for the purpose of entertainment, yet their broadcasters think this is funny and don't have a problem with doing it. If you took this sick mentality across the pond to the USA you'd have TV shows like "Death Row" showing people living in prison on death row with the live finale being their execution. People are fucked up, this is the reality of the world we live in, morality and ethics are fluid and they are fluctuating right now in ways that are transforming our society into something many of us will look at with the same disdain as the shows we look back on and ask how the fuck did people ever agree with that.
The UK has become increasingly conservative politically and culturally, and it's not showing any signs of reversing. it's not progressing us forward it's taking us backwards and the solution is not to offer the same fucking thing because that's the problem.
Colourful Emotions
Winter is coming - although for now we are stuck in Autumn, one of my least favourite seasons. I quite like Winter and I have a certain fondness for Spring. Summer I was never really fussed on, the only reason I liked it when younger was because of the extended break from school for holidays. The reason I was never keen on Summer however is primarily down to fashion. I prefer Winter clothes, I feel a lot more comfortable in them and I can't wait for the weather to get cold enough to get back into my hoodies.
Thinking about Winter clothes I have felt my wardrobe is in need of an upgrade. At the moment it is dominated by basic bitch black. As much as I love wearing black clothes, it does get a bit generic after a while. This got me thinking about colours and emotions. Specifically what a colour says about you. I've read articles that centre around this idea and to be honest I have never really put much stock into them. I did hear someone say they were feeling blue however and when I thought about that and the fact that I understood they intended it to mean they were feeling sad, I began to think about what emotions I would associate with colours.
Just as a point however, spoken and written, the emotion is conveyed, but I am still not convinced I connect the visual colour to these emotions. Nevertheless I thought of the obvious ones first. Red I would associate with anger, Green with envy, Blue with sadness - which is surprising since so many products seem to choose this as their default go-to colour. In fact Blue as a generic colour is something we learn about in Human Computer Interface Design, it is considered the least offensive and most "neutral" colour you can use when designing an interface - the reason Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook et al chose it as the staple of their logos and their site designs initially. If the default colour implies a default emotion, what does it say about the human race that our default emotion is sadness.
There are others that are harder to define, Orange for example isn't easy to associate an obvious emotion with, likewise Yellow, although personally I'd consider that a 'happy' colour but I don't think everyone would agree with me. Purple, and White too are harder to define.
I realise for some people the choice of colour they wear will be less about the statement they want to make, and more about the aesthetic or colour coordination that they try to achieve when picking out what to wear, however, motivation isn't something that is always obvious. The reason why you did something is usually the last thing people think about, with the first thing being what you did and how it impacted them or the impression it made on them.
I'm in the mood for change, so for now I am simply left contemplating a colour scheme.
Thinking about Winter clothes I have felt my wardrobe is in need of an upgrade. At the moment it is dominated by basic bitch black. As much as I love wearing black clothes, it does get a bit generic after a while. This got me thinking about colours and emotions. Specifically what a colour says about you. I've read articles that centre around this idea and to be honest I have never really put much stock into them. I did hear someone say they were feeling blue however and when I thought about that and the fact that I understood they intended it to mean they were feeling sad, I began to think about what emotions I would associate with colours.
Just as a point however, spoken and written, the emotion is conveyed, but I am still not convinced I connect the visual colour to these emotions. Nevertheless I thought of the obvious ones first. Red I would associate with anger, Green with envy, Blue with sadness - which is surprising since so many products seem to choose this as their default go-to colour. In fact Blue as a generic colour is something we learn about in Human Computer Interface Design, it is considered the least offensive and most "neutral" colour you can use when designing an interface - the reason Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook et al chose it as the staple of their logos and their site designs initially. If the default colour implies a default emotion, what does it say about the human race that our default emotion is sadness.
There are others that are harder to define, Orange for example isn't easy to associate an obvious emotion with, likewise Yellow, although personally I'd consider that a 'happy' colour but I don't think everyone would agree with me. Purple, and White too are harder to define.
I realise for some people the choice of colour they wear will be less about the statement they want to make, and more about the aesthetic or colour coordination that they try to achieve when picking out what to wear, however, motivation isn't something that is always obvious. The reason why you did something is usually the last thing people think about, with the first thing being what you did and how it impacted them or the impression it made on them.
I'm in the mood for change, so for now I am simply left contemplating a colour scheme.
Personal vs Professional
In the last 5 to 10 years through the rise of social networks, many people have made their personal lives visible online to people who traditionally would have very little insight into their life. I am not speaking here about some random guy on the other side of the planet, but rather a little closer to home. With the rising visibility of your personal life to your employers, many people have found themselves in a position where their employers look at them not only as an employee but as an actual person. This can be good in many ways but more often than not, this new level of insight turns very negative.
I often see on social networks a disclaimer to the effect of "The views and opinions expressed here are my own and they do not reflect the views of my employer" with many people seemingly under the delusion this disclaimer excuses them of accountability or indemnifies their employers for their behaviour. In the UK at least this is not the case. I am not sufficiently versed in US law to advise on legality in that jurisdiction but considering the fact there are many states in the USA where you can still be legally fired for being gay I would very much doubt they were any different with this disclaimer and its complete lack of utility.
I have worked for large employers before and dealt with staff training that revolved around the use of social media and what a person says and does on that media. I can say categorically with the legal advice I have been given in the past by several legal teams for these employers, this disclaimer has no use as a legal defence at all. Employment tribunals held in the name of employees who were fired for comments they made on social media are common place in the UK, and increasingly people are becoming aware of this and the fall of the wall between personal and professional life.
I have written before on this blog about prospective employers using information about candidates they find online when considering when to hire someone, this is in many ways a continuation of that scrutiny. Being hired is not the end of the scrutiny from your employer, what you say and do in your own personal life on social media and elsewhere can still impact your professional life and lead to at the extreme dismissal or legal action being taken against you.
The question is where should this line be drawn? At what point does an employer invade your right to privacy and your right to a private life? If what you say and do has no impact on your ability to carry out the duties of your post then does an employer have a right at all to even know what you do outside work?
This is not an easy question to answer for many reasons. First and foremost for me is the fact I can see both sides of the argument. I have seen people particularly in the public eye, some very high and widely publicised people, who say or do things which make me deeply uncomfortable with the fact they hold a given position. I have seen people who arguably could still do their jobs despite the opinions and comments they made in social media but still the fact they made them in the first place is able to let you know much more about the actual person. Likewise on the other hand I have seen people who were fired, or who "resigned" from their posts after certain media incidents revolving around their actions on social media which have left me thinking their position was determined solely on popularity rather than ability.
The question remains, where do you draw the line between personal and professional life? Do you even draw a line at all?
I often see on social networks a disclaimer to the effect of "The views and opinions expressed here are my own and they do not reflect the views of my employer" with many people seemingly under the delusion this disclaimer excuses them of accountability or indemnifies their employers for their behaviour. In the UK at least this is not the case. I am not sufficiently versed in US law to advise on legality in that jurisdiction but considering the fact there are many states in the USA where you can still be legally fired for being gay I would very much doubt they were any different with this disclaimer and its complete lack of utility.
I have worked for large employers before and dealt with staff training that revolved around the use of social media and what a person says and does on that media. I can say categorically with the legal advice I have been given in the past by several legal teams for these employers, this disclaimer has no use as a legal defence at all. Employment tribunals held in the name of employees who were fired for comments they made on social media are common place in the UK, and increasingly people are becoming aware of this and the fall of the wall between personal and professional life.
I have written before on this blog about prospective employers using information about candidates they find online when considering when to hire someone, this is in many ways a continuation of that scrutiny. Being hired is not the end of the scrutiny from your employer, what you say and do in your own personal life on social media and elsewhere can still impact your professional life and lead to at the extreme dismissal or legal action being taken against you.
The question is where should this line be drawn? At what point does an employer invade your right to privacy and your right to a private life? If what you say and do has no impact on your ability to carry out the duties of your post then does an employer have a right at all to even know what you do outside work?
This is not an easy question to answer for many reasons. First and foremost for me is the fact I can see both sides of the argument. I have seen people particularly in the public eye, some very high and widely publicised people, who say or do things which make me deeply uncomfortable with the fact they hold a given position. I have seen people who arguably could still do their jobs despite the opinions and comments they made in social media but still the fact they made them in the first place is able to let you know much more about the actual person. Likewise on the other hand I have seen people who were fired, or who "resigned" from their posts after certain media incidents revolving around their actions on social media which have left me thinking their position was determined solely on popularity rather than ability.
The question remains, where do you draw the line between personal and professional life? Do you even draw a line at all?
Privacy
How much of yourself do you share online? This isn't an easy question to answer for me because it has varied throughout my life. I've been exposed to technology from a very young age. At age 6 I had an Amstrad CPC-464 which I learned to program in BASIC on. There's never been a time since then that I haven't had at least one computer. Right now there are two desktops and two laptops in my house, reluctantly I got rid of a few older computers - 3 laptops and 3 desktops to be exact - because they were taking up space. I stripped them for parts of course before I had the rest taken to an electronics dump. Being exposed to technology for so long has made me very conscious of what it can do - or, what it can be used for.
I first got Internet access when I was 11 years old, it was dial-up internet provided by BT Click through a pay and go service. You got charged per minute rather than data used. One of the first things I learned about online, from a friend of my Mum, was a site called pogo that had lots of games you could play. Each game was accompanied by a chat room. I focused mainly on chess and checkers [draughts as I always called it] and rose up through the leader-board on the site. When we were creating the account for it though, my Mum's friend told me never to use my real name, because you never know who you are talking to online. That mentality being the first impression of the Internet stuck with me for a long time, even to an extent today.
It's not like my parents were shy of technology, well, Dad was to an extent although you wouldn't think it now. He spends most of his time online looking at cars, that's one of the things he's really interested in. Mum prefers Facebook, and inevitably they argue over their laptop. As a kid though, we never had Internet, and Mum didn't have to use it for her work before then. So everything I knew I learned initially from Mum's friend. Years later in high school I would expand on that knowledge through what little was covered in the GCSE ICT course the school ran, but to be honest it focused much more on using Microsoft Office than anything. This was a time when Google was still relatively new. College and University would further top up that knowledge and the rest was self taught.
I explored the internet for myself with the back of my mind echoing what I had been told. Years later at college when various social networks of the time mainly Bebo and MySpace were the flavour of the day, I avoided them. I chose to avoid them because I didn't like the idea of documenting my life for the world to see. That mentality is still with me today. Even here on this blog there are scarce details specific to my actual life and I'd rather it stayed that way. I saw people post hundreds of pictures of drunken nights out and things, you really wouldn't - or shouldn't - want anyone to ever see. Things which said people have long since deleted. If I had the malice, or the malcontent to capitalise on that foresight I would have made copies of everything. Nevertheless I could tell more or less what people would eventually delete when the regret for posting it in the first place had sunk in. It was unreal to me the number of people in University who I saw with Facebook profiles covered in similar photos, who in their final years purged the lot to make themselves look respectable for graduating and looking for work.
All this is naieve, because it assumes that you will retain control over what you post, and that's just not the case. Once you put something into the public domain there's no way to prevent it being copied. Those people on twitter who try to be funny and create original comedy and humour to share know this all too well. The second something gains any traction it is copied and reposted to an endless stream of accounts that are only obsessed with getting as many retweets and likes as they possibly can. Taking twitter as an example, this platform is inherently public. It is perhaps the most public platform of all social networks, except maybe youtube. With Twitter there are hundreds of sites that catalogue tweets and media you post. When you delete something from twitter, if it was tweeted some time ago in all likelihood there are copies of it scattered across these sites. One of the stupid things I often see "anon" twitter account do is post "#picslip" and a picture of themselves which they then remove after a certain time. The reason this is stupid is because for a start, that image is still accessible to anyone who saved the direct URL of the image, twitter deletes the tweet, it does not delete the image from the content delivery network. I have tested this in the past with tweets I posted then deleted, and 6+ months later the image is still accessible - I have previously pointed out the fact that Facebook also does this too, and that "privacy" settings on Facebook only apply to the page, not the image file. As long as you have the direct URL you can still see the image. It's actually possible with someone's Facebook profile ID [a string of numbers used by the API] to see every photo they ever posted even if you aren't friends with them and don't even have a Facebook account, even if they deleted the image, even if they deleted their profile.
I am not a normal person when it comes to computers and the internet as you can probably tell. I've studied Computing through to University and I have been programming for almost as long as I can read. I know some APIs like the back of my hand. I know all too well what you can do when you really want to online. The bottom line here is that if you don't want something to be public forever, don't share it online. Period. This is the reason I don't have social network profiles anymore, the reason I don't post an endless stream of selfies, the reason for the most part my private life is just that - private.
I know some people will call me paranoid and to be honest I don't really care. At the end of the day you don't really know me, the real me, you only know what you have seen online of me. If you don't know me personally you can't be sure any assumptions you have made about me are accurate, and by extension you can't even assume anything I have said in this post is actually true. However, I can't be sure of that for you either, which is part of the reason why I take most things online at face value. However I would draw up a point here that although you may be thinking I am abnormal for my mentality, the truth is, I am honest about what I do online. The same can not be said of everyone and while you may look at me on one hand and another person with an endless stream of selfies and seemingly vast amounts of information about them online for you to trudge through there's a question for you to contemplate - how much of that is true?
The bottom line here is that I try not to judge people online by how much they share, but rather by the nature of what they share. The people on twitter who are genuine and worth following, for me, are the people who don't chase numbers. Who aren't trying to "grow" their accounts to reach a certain number of followers or get a set number of likes - in other words people who have nothing to gain from lying. I know that's not a guarantee they are telling the truth but it does make it more likely in my view.
I am drawn to people who don't go out of their way to depict themselves as flawless and their lives as perfect - because that right there is a massive red flag. Nobody is happy all the time, shit happens, that's part of life. You will have days when you feel like shit and that's perfectly normal. I don't trust people who smile 100% of the time, it makes me think they are hiding something. I know that sounds cynical and again, I don't care, it's just how I feel.
I first got Internet access when I was 11 years old, it was dial-up internet provided by BT Click through a pay and go service. You got charged per minute rather than data used. One of the first things I learned about online, from a friend of my Mum, was a site called pogo that had lots of games you could play. Each game was accompanied by a chat room. I focused mainly on chess and checkers [draughts as I always called it] and rose up through the leader-board on the site. When we were creating the account for it though, my Mum's friend told me never to use my real name, because you never know who you are talking to online. That mentality being the first impression of the Internet stuck with me for a long time, even to an extent today.
It's not like my parents were shy of technology, well, Dad was to an extent although you wouldn't think it now. He spends most of his time online looking at cars, that's one of the things he's really interested in. Mum prefers Facebook, and inevitably they argue over their laptop. As a kid though, we never had Internet, and Mum didn't have to use it for her work before then. So everything I knew I learned initially from Mum's friend. Years later in high school I would expand on that knowledge through what little was covered in the GCSE ICT course the school ran, but to be honest it focused much more on using Microsoft Office than anything. This was a time when Google was still relatively new. College and University would further top up that knowledge and the rest was self taught.
I explored the internet for myself with the back of my mind echoing what I had been told. Years later at college when various social networks of the time mainly Bebo and MySpace were the flavour of the day, I avoided them. I chose to avoid them because I didn't like the idea of documenting my life for the world to see. That mentality is still with me today. Even here on this blog there are scarce details specific to my actual life and I'd rather it stayed that way. I saw people post hundreds of pictures of drunken nights out and things, you really wouldn't - or shouldn't - want anyone to ever see. Things which said people have long since deleted. If I had the malice, or the malcontent to capitalise on that foresight I would have made copies of everything. Nevertheless I could tell more or less what people would eventually delete when the regret for posting it in the first place had sunk in. It was unreal to me the number of people in University who I saw with Facebook profiles covered in similar photos, who in their final years purged the lot to make themselves look respectable for graduating and looking for work.
All this is naieve, because it assumes that you will retain control over what you post, and that's just not the case. Once you put something into the public domain there's no way to prevent it being copied. Those people on twitter who try to be funny and create original comedy and humour to share know this all too well. The second something gains any traction it is copied and reposted to an endless stream of accounts that are only obsessed with getting as many retweets and likes as they possibly can. Taking twitter as an example, this platform is inherently public. It is perhaps the most public platform of all social networks, except maybe youtube. With Twitter there are hundreds of sites that catalogue tweets and media you post. When you delete something from twitter, if it was tweeted some time ago in all likelihood there are copies of it scattered across these sites. One of the stupid things I often see "anon" twitter account do is post "#picslip" and a picture of themselves which they then remove after a certain time. The reason this is stupid is because for a start, that image is still accessible to anyone who saved the direct URL of the image, twitter deletes the tweet, it does not delete the image from the content delivery network. I have tested this in the past with tweets I posted then deleted, and 6+ months later the image is still accessible - I have previously pointed out the fact that Facebook also does this too, and that "privacy" settings on Facebook only apply to the page, not the image file. As long as you have the direct URL you can still see the image. It's actually possible with someone's Facebook profile ID [a string of numbers used by the API] to see every photo they ever posted even if you aren't friends with them and don't even have a Facebook account, even if they deleted the image, even if they deleted their profile.
I am not a normal person when it comes to computers and the internet as you can probably tell. I've studied Computing through to University and I have been programming for almost as long as I can read. I know some APIs like the back of my hand. I know all too well what you can do when you really want to online. The bottom line here is that if you don't want something to be public forever, don't share it online. Period. This is the reason I don't have social network profiles anymore, the reason I don't post an endless stream of selfies, the reason for the most part my private life is just that - private.
I know some people will call me paranoid and to be honest I don't really care. At the end of the day you don't really know me, the real me, you only know what you have seen online of me. If you don't know me personally you can't be sure any assumptions you have made about me are accurate, and by extension you can't even assume anything I have said in this post is actually true. However, I can't be sure of that for you either, which is part of the reason why I take most things online at face value. However I would draw up a point here that although you may be thinking I am abnormal for my mentality, the truth is, I am honest about what I do online. The same can not be said of everyone and while you may look at me on one hand and another person with an endless stream of selfies and seemingly vast amounts of information about them online for you to trudge through there's a question for you to contemplate - how much of that is true?
The bottom line here is that I try not to judge people online by how much they share, but rather by the nature of what they share. The people on twitter who are genuine and worth following, for me, are the people who don't chase numbers. Who aren't trying to "grow" their accounts to reach a certain number of followers or get a set number of likes - in other words people who have nothing to gain from lying. I know that's not a guarantee they are telling the truth but it does make it more likely in my view.
I am drawn to people who don't go out of their way to depict themselves as flawless and their lives as perfect - because that right there is a massive red flag. Nobody is happy all the time, shit happens, that's part of life. You will have days when you feel like shit and that's perfectly normal. I don't trust people who smile 100% of the time, it makes me think they are hiding something. I know that sounds cynical and again, I don't care, it's just how I feel.
Fifteen Minutes
There have been many TV shows I have watched in my time that have gone from bad to better, and many more that went from bad to worse. It's rare however, that some shows go from good to bad. When it happens it's usually a series that was fictional and the writers changed. That was until recently when increasingly I have observed this trend in reality television.
The premise of most reality TV shows is to capture just that - reality. The problem is that many of these shows seem to be particularly susceptible to this fall from good to bad. The reason I think this is the case is because often the qualifier for entry to these shows has no set definition. By that I mean most of these shows don't require the "contestants" to have any notable experience or any requirement other than a desire to be on the show.
When you have a show that sets out initially to show reality when it is as yet unknown, they find people who are real and authentic. If we use Big Brother as an example the very early seasons had people who were unknown, and they took part in a show that was as yet unknown, who showed an interest in the premise of the show, not influenced by how many people would see the show. Then as seasons progressed and the show became more popular, the widespread nature and appeal grew to a point where most people applying to the show had no interest in the premise whatsoever and simply had a desire to be famous. They would be on TV for their fifteen minutes and they would try and milk that for all it was worth.
The problem with this is that the quality of the programme and its entertainment value declines, yet because the popularity continues to rise it causes a positive feedback loop which continues until a critical point is reached when the quality of the programme and the entertainment value is so low that it collapses and people abandon it entirely. This has been happening more and more with reality TV shows. A similar process happens with TV shows that start out as niche targeting a specific audience which then grow until they alter the premise of those shows to the point where they become generic and they eventually lose momentum - something which I have long predicted for shows like the Big Bang Theory which started out with a premise that is now almost non-existent.
There are a few shows which I hope will not succumb to these trends but I fear ultimately they will. I've become more aware when watching shows that focus on a particular skill or talent, that the contestants as seasons progress become progressively worse at those, and increasingly rely on personality and theatrics to garner a following to gain fame rather than pursue the premise of the show at all.
The premise of most reality TV shows is to capture just that - reality. The problem is that many of these shows seem to be particularly susceptible to this fall from good to bad. The reason I think this is the case is because often the qualifier for entry to these shows has no set definition. By that I mean most of these shows don't require the "contestants" to have any notable experience or any requirement other than a desire to be on the show.
When you have a show that sets out initially to show reality when it is as yet unknown, they find people who are real and authentic. If we use Big Brother as an example the very early seasons had people who were unknown, and they took part in a show that was as yet unknown, who showed an interest in the premise of the show, not influenced by how many people would see the show. Then as seasons progressed and the show became more popular, the widespread nature and appeal grew to a point where most people applying to the show had no interest in the premise whatsoever and simply had a desire to be famous. They would be on TV for their fifteen minutes and they would try and milk that for all it was worth.
The problem with this is that the quality of the programme and its entertainment value declines, yet because the popularity continues to rise it causes a positive feedback loop which continues until a critical point is reached when the quality of the programme and the entertainment value is so low that it collapses and people abandon it entirely. This has been happening more and more with reality TV shows. A similar process happens with TV shows that start out as niche targeting a specific audience which then grow until they alter the premise of those shows to the point where they become generic and they eventually lose momentum - something which I have long predicted for shows like the Big Bang Theory which started out with a premise that is now almost non-existent.
There are a few shows which I hope will not succumb to these trends but I fear ultimately they will. I've become more aware when watching shows that focus on a particular skill or talent, that the contestants as seasons progress become progressively worse at those, and increasingly rely on personality and theatrics to garner a following to gain fame rather than pursue the premise of the show at all.
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