Every cliché fairy tale ends with the words "they lived happily ever after" - despite the fact the fairy tales compiled by the Brothers Grimm from whom we get most of our fairy tales never actually ended with those words, in fact I've written before how, many of those fairy tales were actually quite dark and disturbing. Still the idea that everything works out in the end is something that we try to hold onto in life, even when we have no evidence that points to that conclusion and we may even have a mountain of it that points to the opposite conclusion.
"They lived okay ever after" doesn't have the same ring to it, and there is a perception no-one would actually enjoy a story that ended with "And then they all died" or "The lived miserably ever after" - although I have to question whether that is really true, as I mentioned around Halloween most movies that focus on that time period or are released around then actively lead to those types of ending, the only difference being that there is a sort of schadenfreude that drives the desire to watch horror movies and scary movies, there's a strange juxtaposition that occurs where you're not satisfied as a viewer if it doesn't end badly.
I think one of the reasons why that cliché emerged and became so prevalent is because fairy tales are meant to depict a fantasy world, and people feel most comfortable with fantasy when it is unrealistic, on some level there is an understanding that life usually doesn't end happily, in fact when you stop and think about the fact that most people fear death, then the end of life is inherently something which as a society we don't view as being something happy. The idea of laughing at a funeral is intensely uncomfortable, even the concept of having a celebration of someone's life, with an actual party would be met with judgement from most people - at least from a western perspective, there are cultures where this is actually their practice when someone dies.
When we watch movies or TV shows, we always want to know how it ends. Even if we lose interest in the show itself or the plot or everything else, we often see it through to the end just to see how it ends and get closure. Life doesn't always give us that blessing, we lose people before we are ready, we don't always get a chance to say goodbye, we think of everything we wish we had the chance to tell them when they were still alive when they are gone. I love many people and I am sure that they know how much I love them, I know how much they love me, if I should die before them I think they'd know how I felt, and I think they'd know that I felt the love they showed for me, I wouldn't want them to regret anything.
In life all you can do is to do the best you can do. In the moment we make choices and we make decisions based on what we think is right, and you should never regret those choices. There will be things that you wish you had not done, or that you would never do again, but don't judge your past self and your decisions you made by what you know now and the experience you have gained, it's not fair on yourself to do this, everyone's vision is perfect in hindsight, but in the moment you can only do what you feel is right based on what you know.
2019 will come to an end, and 2020 will start anew, there is a belief that with the turn of the year that you should create resolutions and make changes but the truth is every day you live a life that is filled with choice, you don't have to wait for one special day each year to make a choice or to make a change, you can do it at any time. Don't mourn the loss of the past, don't worry about the problems of the future, celebrate the present for it is a gift and as long as you live it is a gift that you are blessed with every single day, every hour, every minute, every second, it is the best gift you will ever receive and it is entirely up to you what you do with it. So let go of the past, forget the future and live for today.
Happy New Year.
New
The word 'trope' has many meanings, but the one that is most relevant here is defined as "a significant or recurrent theme, a motif" which in this case can be used to describe recurring narrative structures. I've mentioned a website before called TV Tropes which is essentially an encyclopaedia of tropes detailing their history, their structure and characteristics, and listing works that incorporate that trope such as TV Shows, Music, Games, and Movies amongst others.
One of my favourite tropes is the 'Four-Temperament Ensemble' not in terms of its application but simply because of its ubiquity which makes it a prime example of the prevalence of recurring narrative tropes. There are a number of examples listed at the bottom of the article linked above. I won't go into details of the actual trope here as it's not relevant, you can click through and explore it for yourself if you have never heard of it before.
What this trope demonstrates however, through its ubiquity, is the fact that most forms of entertainment are derivative or they can at least be considered somewhat generic. In this case you can single out situational comedy (sitcom) TV shows and see that essentially the same story is retold countless times but with different characters and different settings - all sitcoms are essentially chicken soup, you can flavour it in many different ways, and incorporate many different ingredients, and try and add variety, but at the end of the day it is still chicken soup you are serving. Go beyond this and you can even argue that most scripted TV shows in general are essentially regurgitating story-lines, taking the leftover soup of previous shows and reheating it to see how much more you can get out of it.
The longer you've been around or the more you have consumed, the more apparent this becomes, if a hotel only serves chicken soup and you stay a few days you probably won't notice the limitation, but the longer you stay the more likely you will be to get bored of being served the same thing. I've written about the limitations of creativity before and how each person's experience of life is not as unique as they would like to think. In many ways these tropes demonstrate that not only are writers of these shows aware of the reality of this limitation, they actively reinforce it, like someone else coming along and opening another hotel the first thing they get their chefs to cook up is chicken soup. There are rarely TV shows that push the boundaries and go beyond what is known, and what is safe, and venture into completely uncharted territory.
This holds true across many different forms of entertainment. The games industry is another prime example of the limitation of creativity and the reuse of existing narrative tropes. There are even games like The Stanley Parable that take this concept to the extreme and break the fourth wall and tell the player directly, that yes, they're fully aware of this regurgitation so why not turn that in and of itself into a game? The Stanley Parable did this quite well, perhaps because it was so unapologetic and actively criticised itself, not trying to hide any of its flaws, instead throwing everything out there for the player to the point where arguably you don't actually "play" the game at all, instead you do everything but play the actual game, you are actively encouraged to deviate and distract yourself.
I don't watch soaps, the last time I sat down to watch an episode of a soap was well over two decades ago. When I did watch them, it was mostly because someone else was watching them and I didn't have much of a choice in the matter. Even then at such a young age I was able to recognise that the same stories were being told over and over again, to the point where you could see a storyline appear in one show, then weeks later, almost verbatim, the same storyline would appear in another. One of the limitations I recognised even then was that choosing to write about real people and real lives was very restricting when it comes to imagination, it has to be believable and it has to be possible or at least plausible for the viewer to get absorbed into the fictional world that is being portrayed.
I find myself increasingly asking for something new. As I grow older I find myself getting bored much more easily. The same tired storylines do not entertain me any longer, the same applies to games, and to movies etc. and even to a point the same concept can be applied to any part of our lives that incorporates variety and diversity - food for example eventually becomes boring and mundane when you find yourself craving something you have never seen before as opposed to everything that is on offer. You get to the point where you are hungry but you have no idea for what, and everything you think of does not appeal. This leaves you asking the question, when was the last time "new" really meant something completely new?
One of my favourite tropes is the 'Four-Temperament Ensemble' not in terms of its application but simply because of its ubiquity which makes it a prime example of the prevalence of recurring narrative tropes. There are a number of examples listed at the bottom of the article linked above. I won't go into details of the actual trope here as it's not relevant, you can click through and explore it for yourself if you have never heard of it before.
What this trope demonstrates however, through its ubiquity, is the fact that most forms of entertainment are derivative or they can at least be considered somewhat generic. In this case you can single out situational comedy (sitcom) TV shows and see that essentially the same story is retold countless times but with different characters and different settings - all sitcoms are essentially chicken soup, you can flavour it in many different ways, and incorporate many different ingredients, and try and add variety, but at the end of the day it is still chicken soup you are serving. Go beyond this and you can even argue that most scripted TV shows in general are essentially regurgitating story-lines, taking the leftover soup of previous shows and reheating it to see how much more you can get out of it.
The longer you've been around or the more you have consumed, the more apparent this becomes, if a hotel only serves chicken soup and you stay a few days you probably won't notice the limitation, but the longer you stay the more likely you will be to get bored of being served the same thing. I've written about the limitations of creativity before and how each person's experience of life is not as unique as they would like to think. In many ways these tropes demonstrate that not only are writers of these shows aware of the reality of this limitation, they actively reinforce it, like someone else coming along and opening another hotel the first thing they get their chefs to cook up is chicken soup. There are rarely TV shows that push the boundaries and go beyond what is known, and what is safe, and venture into completely uncharted territory.
This holds true across many different forms of entertainment. The games industry is another prime example of the limitation of creativity and the reuse of existing narrative tropes. There are even games like The Stanley Parable that take this concept to the extreme and break the fourth wall and tell the player directly, that yes, they're fully aware of this regurgitation so why not turn that in and of itself into a game? The Stanley Parable did this quite well, perhaps because it was so unapologetic and actively criticised itself, not trying to hide any of its flaws, instead throwing everything out there for the player to the point where arguably you don't actually "play" the game at all, instead you do everything but play the actual game, you are actively encouraged to deviate and distract yourself.
I don't watch soaps, the last time I sat down to watch an episode of a soap was well over two decades ago. When I did watch them, it was mostly because someone else was watching them and I didn't have much of a choice in the matter. Even then at such a young age I was able to recognise that the same stories were being told over and over again, to the point where you could see a storyline appear in one show, then weeks later, almost verbatim, the same storyline would appear in another. One of the limitations I recognised even then was that choosing to write about real people and real lives was very restricting when it comes to imagination, it has to be believable and it has to be possible or at least plausible for the viewer to get absorbed into the fictional world that is being portrayed.
I find myself increasingly asking for something new. As I grow older I find myself getting bored much more easily. The same tired storylines do not entertain me any longer, the same applies to games, and to movies etc. and even to a point the same concept can be applied to any part of our lives that incorporates variety and diversity - food for example eventually becomes boring and mundane when you find yourself craving something you have never seen before as opposed to everything that is on offer. You get to the point where you are hungry but you have no idea for what, and everything you think of does not appeal. This leaves you asking the question, when was the last time "new" really meant something completely new?
Comfort and Reassurance
Whenever I get a cold or I feel sick and need to take time to recover, I like to watch episodes of Gimme Gimme Gimme, a TV show written by Jonathan Harvey staring Kathy Burke and James Dreyfus. The show is a sitcom, one from a bygone era in British television when sitcoms still reigned supreme, before we became addicted to reality television. The show reminds me of my younger years because it aired between 1999 and 2000 when I was just leaving my childhood and entering into my teenage years. Up until then my only real memories of being sick were the days I would end up off school, lying on the sofa in my duvet usually with a bucket in front of me in case I threw up. I only really remember watching daytime TV when I was sick, I'd watch some quiz show, then Supermarket Sweep presented by Dale Winton who I loved, may he rest in peace.
Gimme Gimme Gimme is quite simple in its premise, there aren't that many episodes with 19 in total each a half hour it's entirely possible to watch the whole thing in one day if you watch them back to back even with breaks. There's a comfort in the familiarity of it though, and really it's become something I've done so often now that I've come to associate it with trying to recover from anything. It's not the only show I watch in this way, there are a lot of things online and a fair few that I have on DVD etc that I can watch whenever I want. There's a YouTube series called UNHhhh by Trixie Mattel and Katya Zamolodchikova a pair of drag queens that discuss all manner of things. There's very little consistency in the topics any of these shows actually address, but there's a believability to them, in the case of Gimme Gimme Gimme, it is scripted and it's not polished to the extent most TV shows are so you can believe it could actually happen and still find humour in it, as for UNHhhh, that is really just two people having an unscripted conversation about random things, it feels like two people you know just spending time with each other.
Podcasts have been entering my radar in moments like this too, where I can queue them up press play and sit and pass the time in a way that's both entertaining and sometimes informative. Podcasts I listen to are things like RuPaul and Michelle Visage's 'What's the Tee' again that takes the simple format of two people having a conversation about random things, joined by a different guest each episode. There's a comfort in listening to two people have a conversation, no music interrupting the flow, no gimmicks or games, just two people talking sharing their point of view, it can expand your mind and present thoughts and ideas that might not occur to you.
I know some people prefer visual experiences and prefer to watch vloggers and I had an interest in that for a while but there's a point of consciousness that I reached where I became too aware of the editing. With a podcast whether this is actually the case, I don't know, I don't really care, but, it feels much more natural. The podcasts I listen to it does feel like they just hit record and go for it. Too many videos on YouTube are polished and edited to the extent where they create an illusion that isn't relatable, the lack of mistakes or missteps only tells me they have probably done many takes for the same video until they got it right which makes the whole thing seem rehearsed and disingenuous. Most of the content that makes it onto this blog is pretty much unchanged from the first draft apart from fixing spelling mistakes here and there, and removing some stuff that doesn't make sense when I read it back to myself. For the most part though the content remains unchanged, I don't like the idea of heavily editing these posts because it would only create content that isn't an accurate representation of me.
In regards to YouTube personalities in general, one thing I hate about this attitude is the extent to which they are willing to go along with the lie they are telling. I know for a fact that a number of these channels, I won't name for legal reasons, who claim to be a one-man-band operation "it's just me and a camera" they often say, when in reality they are not working alone. I prefer the YouTube personalities who are open about the fact that there's more people involved than just them and a camera, that there's an actual editor who edits videos, they don't do it themselves, that they are part of networks run by large production companies and big name studios who are involved in marketing and creating the opportunities that they get to have on camera. "I was contacted by..." they often say implying that company reached out to them directly as an individual, when in reality it's been a case of two marketing departments discussing a collaboration.
There's a reassurance in familiarity, none of this is anything that would be familiar to me having never experienced it myself first hand, and I doubt there will be many people who watch their videos who can relate to what they see, instead longing for a life that seems as exciting and perfect as the one they see on screen, as the song goes, the sun always shines on TV. I don't relate to that. I like things that aren't as polished, or they are a lot more honest and open about the fact that it's heavily edited which is why I love the things I've mentioned here. I don't trust people who smile all the time, it makes me think they have something to hide. Life is full of ups and downs and you shouldn't believe anyone who tries to convince you they only experience one and not the other.
Gimme Gimme Gimme is quite simple in its premise, there aren't that many episodes with 19 in total each a half hour it's entirely possible to watch the whole thing in one day if you watch them back to back even with breaks. There's a comfort in the familiarity of it though, and really it's become something I've done so often now that I've come to associate it with trying to recover from anything. It's not the only show I watch in this way, there are a lot of things online and a fair few that I have on DVD etc that I can watch whenever I want. There's a YouTube series called UNHhhh by Trixie Mattel and Katya Zamolodchikova a pair of drag queens that discuss all manner of things. There's very little consistency in the topics any of these shows actually address, but there's a believability to them, in the case of Gimme Gimme Gimme, it is scripted and it's not polished to the extent most TV shows are so you can believe it could actually happen and still find humour in it, as for UNHhhh, that is really just two people having an unscripted conversation about random things, it feels like two people you know just spending time with each other.
Podcasts have been entering my radar in moments like this too, where I can queue them up press play and sit and pass the time in a way that's both entertaining and sometimes informative. Podcasts I listen to are things like RuPaul and Michelle Visage's 'What's the Tee' again that takes the simple format of two people having a conversation about random things, joined by a different guest each episode. There's a comfort in listening to two people have a conversation, no music interrupting the flow, no gimmicks or games, just two people talking sharing their point of view, it can expand your mind and present thoughts and ideas that might not occur to you.
I know some people prefer visual experiences and prefer to watch vloggers and I had an interest in that for a while but there's a point of consciousness that I reached where I became too aware of the editing. With a podcast whether this is actually the case, I don't know, I don't really care, but, it feels much more natural. The podcasts I listen to it does feel like they just hit record and go for it. Too many videos on YouTube are polished and edited to the extent where they create an illusion that isn't relatable, the lack of mistakes or missteps only tells me they have probably done many takes for the same video until they got it right which makes the whole thing seem rehearsed and disingenuous. Most of the content that makes it onto this blog is pretty much unchanged from the first draft apart from fixing spelling mistakes here and there, and removing some stuff that doesn't make sense when I read it back to myself. For the most part though the content remains unchanged, I don't like the idea of heavily editing these posts because it would only create content that isn't an accurate representation of me.
In regards to YouTube personalities in general, one thing I hate about this attitude is the extent to which they are willing to go along with the lie they are telling. I know for a fact that a number of these channels, I won't name for legal reasons, who claim to be a one-man-band operation "it's just me and a camera" they often say, when in reality they are not working alone. I prefer the YouTube personalities who are open about the fact that there's more people involved than just them and a camera, that there's an actual editor who edits videos, they don't do it themselves, that they are part of networks run by large production companies and big name studios who are involved in marketing and creating the opportunities that they get to have on camera. "I was contacted by..." they often say implying that company reached out to them directly as an individual, when in reality it's been a case of two marketing departments discussing a collaboration.
There's a reassurance in familiarity, none of this is anything that would be familiar to me having never experienced it myself first hand, and I doubt there will be many people who watch their videos who can relate to what they see, instead longing for a life that seems as exciting and perfect as the one they see on screen, as the song goes, the sun always shines on TV. I don't relate to that. I like things that aren't as polished, or they are a lot more honest and open about the fact that it's heavily edited which is why I love the things I've mentioned here. I don't trust people who smile all the time, it makes me think they have something to hide. Life is full of ups and downs and you shouldn't believe anyone who tries to convince you they only experience one and not the other.
Fandoms
You can ask me if I am a fan of something, it can be anything at all, I'm likely to say no, for the simple reason that I've never been comfortable with the term "fan" and never really understood what it meant to actually be one. When I was younger before the internet became so prevalent, if you liked something enough, you could join or start a fan club. Those were run by people who, to me, they had a fascination and a dedication for the things they were devoted to. So for example if you take singers, Fan clubs relating to singers would have information about the singer, and anything and everything that they were doing. Some were professionally run, some were amateur run, the former had a wealth of resources that were made available to them and in hindsight that could best be described as a form of direct marketing.
I was never interested in anything to the extent where I was willing to devote that much time and energy to it, to want to know literally everything about the person or the movie or the game or whatever was the focus of the fan club. To that end, I came to associate the concept of a fan being someone who was a member of those clubs. So even though there were things I liked and that I read a lot about, I never really considered myself a fan.
Today the bar for entry has been lowered quite a bit though. Today for most people to consider you a fan of something you just have to follow it or have an interest in it. This is where fandoms come into play. A fandom is a collective, usually disorganized or disoriented, comprised of all the people that consider themselves fans of something. There's an important distinction to be made here, in that these are people who self identify, rather than being people who others have identified as fans. These people form a kind of moderator or validator and depending on how weak or how strongly the sense of community is that emerged around that fandom they can react quite negatively if someone labels you a fan of something when they don't see you as being that. These are people who will insist to be a fan of a certain singer you have to own every album or to be fans of a certain actor then you have to have seen every movie they have been in. This is where the conflict and the drama arises which is yet another reason why I don't like the term and I actively avoid it.
The only reason I am aware of the way people react is because I watch a lot of YouTube videos, in particular I watch a lot of Let's Players, these are people who play through video games, recording their experience and upload it to YouTube for others to watch. If you have an interest in that sort of thing you probably know where I am going with this. From time to time you'll see a YouTube personality take a game and play through it quite innocently but in doing so they demonstrate the fact that it's either their first time playing the game, or they know very little about it. This is where it begins. The amount of hate that these people receive is unreal. When you take the time even just a few minutes to read through some of the comments below the video, the word cesspool seems quite appropriate.
There's a related channel, one that I have mentioned before run by a guy named Matthew Patrick aka MatPat called The Game Theorists, he also runs The Film Theorists which I have mentioned before particularly in reference to The Matrix. These channels take Games or Films, explore their cannon, and extend it with theories of their own as to alternate explanations or posing questions you might not have considered and then giving possible answers to them. Not surprisingly these channels step on the toes of fandoms quite a bit, and the response to those videos borders on psychotic.
In life you are meant to question things, you're meant to make mistakes, and you're meant to learn things as you go. Whenever you are presented with something that you are not allowed to question, that you must blindly accept, that is Dogma, and that is the tool of despots and dictators. Dogma actively enforces conformity and opposes any dissent. What people are demonstrating when they react so violently to questions is not their admiration or their devotion to the thing they are fans of, but rather their blind faith and indoctrination.
I'm not a fan nor do I want to be part of a fandom devoted to anything for the simple reason that I find this behaviour incredibly toxic and the only thing it achieves in the end is to make other people hate the thing you profess to be a fan of, I have seen this many times where fandoms become so poisonous that the things they are dedicated to end up suffering as a result. I've seen people who refuse to watch or even talk about TV shows particularly on social media for fear of being attacked, I've seen people who refuse to go to concerts because they fear for their physical safety if they went - you might consider this hyperbolic but if you take the time to ask people what their opinion of fandoms are in general, you'll see the prevailing opinion from anyone who isn't a part of them will be one that is incredibly negative.
There is a twisted irony in the fact that those who become so obsessed with their fandom do so out of the wanton desire for it to be sustained indefinitely when the reality is that almost all fandoms are centred around products for sale that need to be a commercial success, the more people you exclude, and the more people you turn off from the focus of your fandom, the less of a commercial success it becomes, and if your toxicity becomes so overwhelming that it becomes a commercial failure then it disappears entirely and you get relegated to a life sustained only by that which already exists with no hope of anything new. I realise for some people that is desirable but for most it is not. Obscurity eventually leads to obsolescence and replacement - a lot of those people will then move onto the next thing and behave in exactly the same way, never learning that it isn't society as a whole but their own community that poisoned the well.
I was never interested in anything to the extent where I was willing to devote that much time and energy to it, to want to know literally everything about the person or the movie or the game or whatever was the focus of the fan club. To that end, I came to associate the concept of a fan being someone who was a member of those clubs. So even though there were things I liked and that I read a lot about, I never really considered myself a fan.
Today the bar for entry has been lowered quite a bit though. Today for most people to consider you a fan of something you just have to follow it or have an interest in it. This is where fandoms come into play. A fandom is a collective, usually disorganized or disoriented, comprised of all the people that consider themselves fans of something. There's an important distinction to be made here, in that these are people who self identify, rather than being people who others have identified as fans. These people form a kind of moderator or validator and depending on how weak or how strongly the sense of community is that emerged around that fandom they can react quite negatively if someone labels you a fan of something when they don't see you as being that. These are people who will insist to be a fan of a certain singer you have to own every album or to be fans of a certain actor then you have to have seen every movie they have been in. This is where the conflict and the drama arises which is yet another reason why I don't like the term and I actively avoid it.
The only reason I am aware of the way people react is because I watch a lot of YouTube videos, in particular I watch a lot of Let's Players, these are people who play through video games, recording their experience and upload it to YouTube for others to watch. If you have an interest in that sort of thing you probably know where I am going with this. From time to time you'll see a YouTube personality take a game and play through it quite innocently but in doing so they demonstrate the fact that it's either their first time playing the game, or they know very little about it. This is where it begins. The amount of hate that these people receive is unreal. When you take the time even just a few minutes to read through some of the comments below the video, the word cesspool seems quite appropriate.
There's a related channel, one that I have mentioned before run by a guy named Matthew Patrick aka MatPat called The Game Theorists, he also runs The Film Theorists which I have mentioned before particularly in reference to The Matrix. These channels take Games or Films, explore their cannon, and extend it with theories of their own as to alternate explanations or posing questions you might not have considered and then giving possible answers to them. Not surprisingly these channels step on the toes of fandoms quite a bit, and the response to those videos borders on psychotic.
In life you are meant to question things, you're meant to make mistakes, and you're meant to learn things as you go. Whenever you are presented with something that you are not allowed to question, that you must blindly accept, that is Dogma, and that is the tool of despots and dictators. Dogma actively enforces conformity and opposes any dissent. What people are demonstrating when they react so violently to questions is not their admiration or their devotion to the thing they are fans of, but rather their blind faith and indoctrination.
I'm not a fan nor do I want to be part of a fandom devoted to anything for the simple reason that I find this behaviour incredibly toxic and the only thing it achieves in the end is to make other people hate the thing you profess to be a fan of, I have seen this many times where fandoms become so poisonous that the things they are dedicated to end up suffering as a result. I've seen people who refuse to watch or even talk about TV shows particularly on social media for fear of being attacked, I've seen people who refuse to go to concerts because they fear for their physical safety if they went - you might consider this hyperbolic but if you take the time to ask people what their opinion of fandoms are in general, you'll see the prevailing opinion from anyone who isn't a part of them will be one that is incredibly negative.
There is a twisted irony in the fact that those who become so obsessed with their fandom do so out of the wanton desire for it to be sustained indefinitely when the reality is that almost all fandoms are centred around products for sale that need to be a commercial success, the more people you exclude, and the more people you turn off from the focus of your fandom, the less of a commercial success it becomes, and if your toxicity becomes so overwhelming that it becomes a commercial failure then it disappears entirely and you get relegated to a life sustained only by that which already exists with no hope of anything new. I realise for some people that is desirable but for most it is not. Obscurity eventually leads to obsolescence and replacement - a lot of those people will then move onto the next thing and behave in exactly the same way, never learning that it isn't society as a whole but their own community that poisoned the well.
Merry Christmas
Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
It's Christmas time, and that means it's a time when so many traditions are upheld. One thing my family does every year is to watch a number of movies. 'National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation' is chief among them for my Mum and for my Brother. For me personally I always mark this time of year with a Harry Potter marathon - I know they're not strictly Christmas movies but there are Christmas scenes in most of them and they are always on TV at this time of year so I know I'm not alone in doing that. 'Christmas Carol: The Movie' the 2001 animated film adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic, starring Kate Winslet as the voice of Belle and Simon Callow as Charles Dickens and Ebenezer Scrooge is one of my favourite adaptations of the classic.
Surprisingly some of the movies people most associate with Christmas were not that appealing to me. I have seen 'Miracle On 34th Street' the 1994 adaptation with Mara Wilson and Richard Attenborough, I've also seen one of the older adaptations but I don't know which, regardless both were movies that I watched once out of curiosity but I didn't return to as there was no appeal. Likewise, the 'Santa Clause' movie and its sequels are movies that I'll watch if they're on but I wouldn't go out of my way to watch them.
For me Christmas is marked more by music more than anything though. I remember as a kid every year on Christmas week we would buy a TV Guide, it was the one time of year we actually bought the magazine, we would each spend time reading through the schedule and mark out what we wanted to watch. Today of course there are Electronic Programme Guides that come with TVs and Set Top Boxes for Sky and Freeview etc which doesn't feel the same if I am honest. I remember we would mark each show we wanted to see on TV and there would always be the search for those that were traditional for us to watch, the one that stands out most of all is 'The Snowman', a 26 minute animated film created in 1982 about a snowman that would melt your heart. The most memorable scene from the whole thing is a music performance by Peter Auty called 'Walking in the Air' - a song that would later be covered by a young Aled Jones three years later in 1985 and go on to be ubiquitous in the UK at Christmas for a time.
There was one more thing we would see on TV every year which became synonymous with the holiday season but you couldn't predict when it would air, although in later years they did advertise a time to see it - the Coca Cola advert, 'Holidays Are Coming' which would first air around November and every year the first time you heard it you knew Christmas was upon us. They tried replacing it in later years with a different advert containing polar bears but they weren't well received. Personally I don't know why they didn't just keep both, nevertheless the original returned to public applause. When I was a kid, the city I lived in actually reproduced the advert working with Coca Cola they had full scale articulated lorries that drove through the town, with the Christmas lights throughout the town set to come on as they passed through, I remember as a kid watching the parade and wondering how it was done. The experience was magical, and for me this time of year was always filled with magic, but this year has been an odd one.
This season is what you make of it, you can fall so easily into cynicism, to become disillusioned by consumerism and the focus on material possessions and wealth. For some of us though we try to remember the happiness and the moments of joy that made this time of year magical, we eat, drink, and be merry. The festive feeling hasn't yet come over me this year, and given that it is now Christmas Eve that's unusual for me. I'll still partake in the tradition and do all that I can to enjoy myself but I think this might be the first Christmas for me that really doesn't feel like Christmas at all - I hope this isn't a pattern.
With all that said, Merry Christmas!
It's Christmas time, and that means it's a time when so many traditions are upheld. One thing my family does every year is to watch a number of movies. 'National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation' is chief among them for my Mum and for my Brother. For me personally I always mark this time of year with a Harry Potter marathon - I know they're not strictly Christmas movies but there are Christmas scenes in most of them and they are always on TV at this time of year so I know I'm not alone in doing that. 'Christmas Carol: The Movie' the 2001 animated film adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic, starring Kate Winslet as the voice of Belle and Simon Callow as Charles Dickens and Ebenezer Scrooge is one of my favourite adaptations of the classic.
Surprisingly some of the movies people most associate with Christmas were not that appealing to me. I have seen 'Miracle On 34th Street' the 1994 adaptation with Mara Wilson and Richard Attenborough, I've also seen one of the older adaptations but I don't know which, regardless both were movies that I watched once out of curiosity but I didn't return to as there was no appeal. Likewise, the 'Santa Clause' movie and its sequels are movies that I'll watch if they're on but I wouldn't go out of my way to watch them.
For me Christmas is marked more by music more than anything though. I remember as a kid every year on Christmas week we would buy a TV Guide, it was the one time of year we actually bought the magazine, we would each spend time reading through the schedule and mark out what we wanted to watch. Today of course there are Electronic Programme Guides that come with TVs and Set Top Boxes for Sky and Freeview etc which doesn't feel the same if I am honest. I remember we would mark each show we wanted to see on TV and there would always be the search for those that were traditional for us to watch, the one that stands out most of all is 'The Snowman', a 26 minute animated film created in 1982 about a snowman that would melt your heart. The most memorable scene from the whole thing is a music performance by Peter Auty called 'Walking in the Air' - a song that would later be covered by a young Aled Jones three years later in 1985 and go on to be ubiquitous in the UK at Christmas for a time.
There was one more thing we would see on TV every year which became synonymous with the holiday season but you couldn't predict when it would air, although in later years they did advertise a time to see it - the Coca Cola advert, 'Holidays Are Coming' which would first air around November and every year the first time you heard it you knew Christmas was upon us. They tried replacing it in later years with a different advert containing polar bears but they weren't well received. Personally I don't know why they didn't just keep both, nevertheless the original returned to public applause. When I was a kid, the city I lived in actually reproduced the advert working with Coca Cola they had full scale articulated lorries that drove through the town, with the Christmas lights throughout the town set to come on as they passed through, I remember as a kid watching the parade and wondering how it was done. The experience was magical, and for me this time of year was always filled with magic, but this year has been an odd one.
This season is what you make of it, you can fall so easily into cynicism, to become disillusioned by consumerism and the focus on material possessions and wealth. For some of us though we try to remember the happiness and the moments of joy that made this time of year magical, we eat, drink, and be merry. The festive feeling hasn't yet come over me this year, and given that it is now Christmas Eve that's unusual for me. I'll still partake in the tradition and do all that I can to enjoy myself but I think this might be the first Christmas for me that really doesn't feel like Christmas at all - I hope this isn't a pattern.
With all that said, Merry Christmas!
My relationship with sleep
I've struggled with insomnia my whole life, you would think that means that I have likely slept a lot less than the average person has in the same amount of time that I have been alive, but that's not the case. Sleep for me is best described as a bank account. You start with a zero balance, and the more active you are, the more energy you expend, the further into the red your balance goes. For most people, each night they go to sleep, and they repay part of that debt they accrued and then they wake up the next day and repeat the process. That's how sleep is supposed to work.
For me and many people like me who suffer from insomnia, when each day comes to an end, sleep eludes us. Instead of repaying that balance each night, we stay awake not by choice, when we eventually sleep usually out of exhaustion, we repay part of the balance but not it all, as a result we stay in the red. With each passing day because you expend more than you repay the deficit grows until you have a debt of sleep which starts to impact your life. Like any overdraft on a bank account there is a charge for using it and staying overdrawn. That charge in regard to sleep is an impairment of cognitive function which strains your brain. The result is that your debt of sleep becomes persistent, never able to repay more to bring it back up, your mental functions begin to break down.
Like an overdraft with a bank account, there is a spending limit which you eventually reach, and once you hit it, you can't borrow any further. This is also true of sleep. The break down of mental capacity accumulates over time and when you eventually hit that limit to your sleep debt, a physiological shift occurs, one that causes a neurological shift in tandem. Depression sets in, at which point the brain elects to shut down all non-essential processing and enters a state of shallow processing. When depression takes full control the result is that insomnia is reversed to the opposite extreme. You sleep, in excess. You go from having nights where you could only sleep for 2 to 3 hours if you were lucky, to days and nights where you can sleep well over 12 hours at a time. For me personally the height of my insomnia results in 1 hour sleep duration, and the height of my depression results in me sleeping up to 17 hours, not surprisingly that leaves you with very little to do when awake other than what is necessary to stay alive.
During that period, the debt of sleep is repaid with instalments much higher than the minimum. If you attempt to disrupt this depressive state, which you can indeed be successful in doing, your insomnia eventually brings you back to your limit quite quickly because you didn't clear enough of the balance to be able to spend. If you let this depressive state run its course however you can end up in credit, you can sleep so much that you reach a point where you can actually function quite well on 2 hours sleep a night without much impact to you, of course that blissful period doesn't last long.
This is basically how my relationship with insomnia has progressed over the years. There is a physiological concept known as a circadian rhythm, this is the sleep-wake cycle that you live through. For most people they try to maintain a 16:8 ratio of hours awake to hours asleep. Interestingly, there have been sleep studies performed on humans that have shown evidence that the human body when allowed to adapt to its natural rhythm actually conforms to a circadian rhythm that amounts to longer than a 24 hour cycle, by intervals ranging from a few minutes to an extra hour. Since you can't make the day any longer there is a natural debt that will accrue when you try to conform to a 24 hour cycle. For the average person that amounts to around 10 minutes per day, so per week you need an extra 1 hour and 10 minutes sleep to compensate for the offset imposed by the fact there aren't enough hours in the day.
Over the years I've tried to figure out if my circadian rhythm was different and if I conformed to a shorter or longer day length would it make a difference. The surprising thing was the most effective solution for me personally was to use a 36 hour day, although that proves hard to maintain over the long term as everyday life gets in the way, things like work etc make it impractical. With a 36 hour day however I was able to live quite productively on an 18:18 ratio of being awake for 18 hours and sleeping for 18 hours at a time and this broke my cycle of insomnia and depression for a time. As I said, this wasn't practical to maintain in the long term. The only time I was ever able to do this was during the 3 months holiday I had each year for Summer break from school and college and University. Beyond those times the only other instances where this behaviour would emerge would be periods of unemployment or periods of freelance work where I could set my own time table and go with my own routine as opposed to conforming to someone else's.
The only real advice I can give when it comes to sleep for anyone who struggles with it is something I have said many times before - listen to your body. Sleep when you are tired, and if you can't sleep, then don't. Don't impose a routine on your body that it isn't willing to conform to. I've spoken to doctors over the years about my insomnia and the one piece of advice that comes up again and again is to ignore the duration and focus on the quality. 8 hours means nothing if it's poor quality, likewise you can survive on a lot less if you can make the most of what you get.
For me and many people like me who suffer from insomnia, when each day comes to an end, sleep eludes us. Instead of repaying that balance each night, we stay awake not by choice, when we eventually sleep usually out of exhaustion, we repay part of the balance but not it all, as a result we stay in the red. With each passing day because you expend more than you repay the deficit grows until you have a debt of sleep which starts to impact your life. Like any overdraft on a bank account there is a charge for using it and staying overdrawn. That charge in regard to sleep is an impairment of cognitive function which strains your brain. The result is that your debt of sleep becomes persistent, never able to repay more to bring it back up, your mental functions begin to break down.
Like an overdraft with a bank account, there is a spending limit which you eventually reach, and once you hit it, you can't borrow any further. This is also true of sleep. The break down of mental capacity accumulates over time and when you eventually hit that limit to your sleep debt, a physiological shift occurs, one that causes a neurological shift in tandem. Depression sets in, at which point the brain elects to shut down all non-essential processing and enters a state of shallow processing. When depression takes full control the result is that insomnia is reversed to the opposite extreme. You sleep, in excess. You go from having nights where you could only sleep for 2 to 3 hours if you were lucky, to days and nights where you can sleep well over 12 hours at a time. For me personally the height of my insomnia results in 1 hour sleep duration, and the height of my depression results in me sleeping up to 17 hours, not surprisingly that leaves you with very little to do when awake other than what is necessary to stay alive.
During that period, the debt of sleep is repaid with instalments much higher than the minimum. If you attempt to disrupt this depressive state, which you can indeed be successful in doing, your insomnia eventually brings you back to your limit quite quickly because you didn't clear enough of the balance to be able to spend. If you let this depressive state run its course however you can end up in credit, you can sleep so much that you reach a point where you can actually function quite well on 2 hours sleep a night without much impact to you, of course that blissful period doesn't last long.
This is basically how my relationship with insomnia has progressed over the years. There is a physiological concept known as a circadian rhythm, this is the sleep-wake cycle that you live through. For most people they try to maintain a 16:8 ratio of hours awake to hours asleep. Interestingly, there have been sleep studies performed on humans that have shown evidence that the human body when allowed to adapt to its natural rhythm actually conforms to a circadian rhythm that amounts to longer than a 24 hour cycle, by intervals ranging from a few minutes to an extra hour. Since you can't make the day any longer there is a natural debt that will accrue when you try to conform to a 24 hour cycle. For the average person that amounts to around 10 minutes per day, so per week you need an extra 1 hour and 10 minutes sleep to compensate for the offset imposed by the fact there aren't enough hours in the day.
Over the years I've tried to figure out if my circadian rhythm was different and if I conformed to a shorter or longer day length would it make a difference. The surprising thing was the most effective solution for me personally was to use a 36 hour day, although that proves hard to maintain over the long term as everyday life gets in the way, things like work etc make it impractical. With a 36 hour day however I was able to live quite productively on an 18:18 ratio of being awake for 18 hours and sleeping for 18 hours at a time and this broke my cycle of insomnia and depression for a time. As I said, this wasn't practical to maintain in the long term. The only time I was ever able to do this was during the 3 months holiday I had each year for Summer break from school and college and University. Beyond those times the only other instances where this behaviour would emerge would be periods of unemployment or periods of freelance work where I could set my own time table and go with my own routine as opposed to conforming to someone else's.
The only real advice I can give when it comes to sleep for anyone who struggles with it is something I have said many times before - listen to your body. Sleep when you are tired, and if you can't sleep, then don't. Don't impose a routine on your body that it isn't willing to conform to. I've spoken to doctors over the years about my insomnia and the one piece of advice that comes up again and again is to ignore the duration and focus on the quality. 8 hours means nothing if it's poor quality, likewise you can survive on a lot less if you can make the most of what you get.
Convenience vs Practicality
We like to think Convenience and Practicality are synonymous, that one must lead to the other, but in truth this isn't always the case. I was looking for a gift for someone and as is cliché there was that disclaimer "batteries not included" - side note, that movie of the same name was one of my favourites as a kid, although it hasn't aged well sadly, it's also a bit depressing that almost everyone in the main cast of the movie is dead now, but then it was 32 years ago and most of them were quite old at the time anyway. That little disclaimer though is often a point of inconvenience for most people, the reason it is there though is because most manufacturers don't know or can't guarantee how long their products will be in storage before they are bought.
If manufacturers did include batteries they'd likely be flat by the time you bought the product or would have a short shelf life. Unless the product comes with rechargeable batteries it would actually pose more frustration to the consumer to find out the batteries don't work - ask yourself how many times you have bought something that does come with a rechargeable battery and you actually followed the instructions that tell you to fully charge it before you use it for the first time as opposed to how many times you just used the product expecting it to work?
If you were to be asked to give a word that really is synonymous with convenience for you as a consumer, what word would you give? For me in my experience both as someone who has worked in retail in the past, and as a consumer myself, the word "immediate" is synonymous with convenience, that is to say people want things now, without delay, without having to wait, that is how convenience is now defined. The word itself however is supposed to mean something that is useful or of benefit to you, in that sense you can argue there is some parallel to the concept of practicality. In the traditional sense of the word convenience everything is measured by the amount of difficulty or the ease with which you can do something.
As for the word practicality, that too has become a misconception. We tend to think of practical things as being those that just work, but that's not the case either. In the traditional sense of the word, once again, it was defined as something else. Practicality was traditionally defined as something that is effective and does what it is supposed to do, there was no measure of difficulty involved. Whether something is simple or complex to use, whether you can just pick it up or whether you have to learn how to use it first, these never factored into the definition before, and yet these are now characteristics we apply to almost everything when we decide whether or not it is practical.
I am a programmer among many other things and the main measure of practicality that most users now have when it comes to software is whether or not they can figure out how to do something with it, not how efficiently or effective it is at doing its job. This creates a disparity between the end user and the designer.
The concepts of Convenience and Practicality although traditionally nothing to to with simplicity, immediacy, and ease of use, have now been transformed, they take on new meanings and you can see the evolution of language taking place. There are many words that today mean very different things to their original and distant past forms, we like to think that these changes happened long ago and that the language we use today has a constant meaning that doesn't evolve before our eyes, but the more you pay attention to the world, and yes, the older you become, the more you become aware of the changes that are happening all around us.
I realise that I mention age quite a bit, but this isn't done in terms of absolute values, I don't impose a figure that states once you reach age X you should have learned this or that, all I imply with these references to growing older is that life is the accumulation of experience, and whilst you can have many different experiences and you can be much more experienced in some fields than others despite being the same age, one simple truth remains: the longer you live, the more life experience you have. How much you learn along the way depends entirely on how much you pay attention to the world. Life will give you many lessons along the way, but they do not come in convenient forms, you have to expend some effort to discern the truth and the meaning from those lessons. Likewise your life is lived not through theory but through practice, your experience will come from the act of doing, and again the lessons and the true meaning of what you experience won't simply present itself, you'll have to stop and look at what you have experienced and try and find that meaning.
If manufacturers did include batteries they'd likely be flat by the time you bought the product or would have a short shelf life. Unless the product comes with rechargeable batteries it would actually pose more frustration to the consumer to find out the batteries don't work - ask yourself how many times you have bought something that does come with a rechargeable battery and you actually followed the instructions that tell you to fully charge it before you use it for the first time as opposed to how many times you just used the product expecting it to work?
If you were to be asked to give a word that really is synonymous with convenience for you as a consumer, what word would you give? For me in my experience both as someone who has worked in retail in the past, and as a consumer myself, the word "immediate" is synonymous with convenience, that is to say people want things now, without delay, without having to wait, that is how convenience is now defined. The word itself however is supposed to mean something that is useful or of benefit to you, in that sense you can argue there is some parallel to the concept of practicality. In the traditional sense of the word convenience everything is measured by the amount of difficulty or the ease with which you can do something.
As for the word practicality, that too has become a misconception. We tend to think of practical things as being those that just work, but that's not the case either. In the traditional sense of the word, once again, it was defined as something else. Practicality was traditionally defined as something that is effective and does what it is supposed to do, there was no measure of difficulty involved. Whether something is simple or complex to use, whether you can just pick it up or whether you have to learn how to use it first, these never factored into the definition before, and yet these are now characteristics we apply to almost everything when we decide whether or not it is practical.
I am a programmer among many other things and the main measure of practicality that most users now have when it comes to software is whether or not they can figure out how to do something with it, not how efficiently or effective it is at doing its job. This creates a disparity between the end user and the designer.
The concepts of Convenience and Practicality although traditionally nothing to to with simplicity, immediacy, and ease of use, have now been transformed, they take on new meanings and you can see the evolution of language taking place. There are many words that today mean very different things to their original and distant past forms, we like to think that these changes happened long ago and that the language we use today has a constant meaning that doesn't evolve before our eyes, but the more you pay attention to the world, and yes, the older you become, the more you become aware of the changes that are happening all around us.
I realise that I mention age quite a bit, but this isn't done in terms of absolute values, I don't impose a figure that states once you reach age X you should have learned this or that, all I imply with these references to growing older is that life is the accumulation of experience, and whilst you can have many different experiences and you can be much more experienced in some fields than others despite being the same age, one simple truth remains: the longer you live, the more life experience you have. How much you learn along the way depends entirely on how much you pay attention to the world. Life will give you many lessons along the way, but they do not come in convenient forms, you have to expend some effort to discern the truth and the meaning from those lessons. Likewise your life is lived not through theory but through practice, your experience will come from the act of doing, and again the lessons and the true meaning of what you experience won't simply present itself, you'll have to stop and look at what you have experienced and try and find that meaning.
Absent Posts
I've been asked before why I don't write about certain things here on this blog, I even dedicated a post to explaining some of the reasons why I choose not to. There is another reason why I don't write about certain things though and it's rather more practical than any personal misgivings, quite simply, some things aren't "juicy" enough to be able to write about in any great depth. I need something I can sink my teeth into and really think about for me to be able to write something of a decent length with any level of coherence.
In English class my teacher once said to us that you often have to write a skeleton first and then go back and add the keek. That word might be new to some people, it's a slang word from Northern Ireland that basically means shit. I find the fact that the word also exists as slang for many different things in other countries to be rather amusing. In some countries it means something very good, and there's even a social network named after that term, regardless the colloquialism remains. What my English teacher was trying to tell us was that you write the core story line and progress the plot first, and then go back later to add in the detail and fill it out. Most stories you read can be gutted quite substantially and still maintain their core narrative, there are even abridged versions of some classics that attempt to do just that.
I set myself a target word count for posts I create on this blog. It was initially 500 words per post +/- 250, but I later increased that to 1,000 words +/- 250 again to give myself some room for manoeuvre. That word count has felt much more appropriate and I have been able to cover quite a lot of topics in the level of detail that I feel strikes a balance between too much and too little to make it just right. As I've said before there are some things I could write a 10,000 word dissertation on with relative ease, and still have much more that I want to write about. There are other topics however where my thoughts are very limited in reference to the subject. These are usually things that either I don't know much about or I feel are simple concepts that are self evident and don't require much explanation.
In the case of topics where I don't know much about them to begin with, sometimes I will do some research and my interest grows to a point where I have enough ideas to be able to write something of reasonable length that has something I want to say, but at other times, either before doing any research or even after doing some initially, I realise it's not something I really care about. If I don't care about it then I'm not going to write about it. That doesn't mean that I won't consider ideas that other people mention to me in passing, it just means that it either hasn't occurred to me or it's really just something I know of but never spent much time thinking about.
I do recognise that there is a desire to know what people think about many things, there will always be something that someone will think about and they'll want to know if they are alone in their thoughts or if others agree with them. As flattering as I find it when people want me to be the one to lead those conversations I do have to say it's not very difficult to start a blog, the two easiest platforms to use are Blogger and Wordpress, the former is run and hosted by Google for free, and the latter you can either download for free and install on a server of your own, or you can get a hosted version at Wordpress.com, the latter of which despite first impressions does actually have a free variant you can use if you want, so either way you can do it at no monetary cost to yourself. You don't even have to know about coding, HTML or anything like that, these platforms are Content Management Systems, if you can use GMail to send emails then you'll be fine with Blogger's interface it's not that much different. There are templates and styles you can choose from too so you never have to deal with anything nitty gritty under the hood if you don't want to.
I would encourage anyone who has been inspired by anything I have written to consider starting their own blog and start putting their own ideas out there into the Universe. You would be surprised by some of the feedback you will get from people. I have been writing blogs for years now, this blog is one of many different iterations that have come and gone as I try something new each time. Every time I always find that someone will find an interest in what you write, and it is often the posts you think no-one would be interested in reading at all that turn out to do the best. There can be negative responses, but those are a minority, and most platforms offer you a way to block or moderate content, you can turn comments off entirely through Blogger for example, or set them to require approval before they are posted. You can choose how much you want to expose yourself to the world, but I would say, the more avenues you open up for positivity to reach you, the more you get in return when you send it out into the world.
In English class my teacher once said to us that you often have to write a skeleton first and then go back and add the keek. That word might be new to some people, it's a slang word from Northern Ireland that basically means shit. I find the fact that the word also exists as slang for many different things in other countries to be rather amusing. In some countries it means something very good, and there's even a social network named after that term, regardless the colloquialism remains. What my English teacher was trying to tell us was that you write the core story line and progress the plot first, and then go back later to add in the detail and fill it out. Most stories you read can be gutted quite substantially and still maintain their core narrative, there are even abridged versions of some classics that attempt to do just that.
I set myself a target word count for posts I create on this blog. It was initially 500 words per post +/- 250, but I later increased that to 1,000 words +/- 250 again to give myself some room for manoeuvre. That word count has felt much more appropriate and I have been able to cover quite a lot of topics in the level of detail that I feel strikes a balance between too much and too little to make it just right. As I've said before there are some things I could write a 10,000 word dissertation on with relative ease, and still have much more that I want to write about. There are other topics however where my thoughts are very limited in reference to the subject. These are usually things that either I don't know much about or I feel are simple concepts that are self evident and don't require much explanation.
In the case of topics where I don't know much about them to begin with, sometimes I will do some research and my interest grows to a point where I have enough ideas to be able to write something of reasonable length that has something I want to say, but at other times, either before doing any research or even after doing some initially, I realise it's not something I really care about. If I don't care about it then I'm not going to write about it. That doesn't mean that I won't consider ideas that other people mention to me in passing, it just means that it either hasn't occurred to me or it's really just something I know of but never spent much time thinking about.
I do recognise that there is a desire to know what people think about many things, there will always be something that someone will think about and they'll want to know if they are alone in their thoughts or if others agree with them. As flattering as I find it when people want me to be the one to lead those conversations I do have to say it's not very difficult to start a blog, the two easiest platforms to use are Blogger and Wordpress, the former is run and hosted by Google for free, and the latter you can either download for free and install on a server of your own, or you can get a hosted version at Wordpress.com, the latter of which despite first impressions does actually have a free variant you can use if you want, so either way you can do it at no monetary cost to yourself. You don't even have to know about coding, HTML or anything like that, these platforms are Content Management Systems, if you can use GMail to send emails then you'll be fine with Blogger's interface it's not that much different. There are templates and styles you can choose from too so you never have to deal with anything nitty gritty under the hood if you don't want to.
I would encourage anyone who has been inspired by anything I have written to consider starting their own blog and start putting their own ideas out there into the Universe. You would be surprised by some of the feedback you will get from people. I have been writing blogs for years now, this blog is one of many different iterations that have come and gone as I try something new each time. Every time I always find that someone will find an interest in what you write, and it is often the posts you think no-one would be interested in reading at all that turn out to do the best. There can be negative responses, but those are a minority, and most platforms offer you a way to block or moderate content, you can turn comments off entirely through Blogger for example, or set them to require approval before they are posted. You can choose how much you want to expose yourself to the world, but I would say, the more avenues you open up for positivity to reach you, the more you get in return when you send it out into the world.
Don't be cheap!
In my last post I wrote about gift giving, and how the price of a gift doesn't determine its value or its significance and I stand by that statement. I also said that when people buy me gift certificates it depends on the person who bought it as to whether or not the amount would offend me. These two statements do appear to contradict themselves so perhaps it's worth explaining how I reason this out in my mind.
There are people who are incredibly wealthy in life, and I don't mean in the sentimental riches of love and friendship, I mean they have money. People like Jeff Bezos, who dances with Carlos Slim, and Bill Gates for pole position on the rich list who have more money than sense. These are people who realistically would never spend their wealth in their lifetime. Bill and Melinda Gates at least signed up the the Giving Pledge, a pledge that over 180 billionaires signed where they made the commitment to give away more than half their wealth in their lifetime to philanthropic causes.
That represents an extreme, and at the other end you have people who live day to day, who have to save literally every penny they have in order to be able to eat and heat themselves. Of these two people, the former giving a £100 gift certificate would mean virtually nothing to them, it's such a small number that it's insignificant. For the latter, to give you a gift of the same cost at £100 has a value that is almost immeasurable, to the extent where I would actually refuse the gift because I know they can't afford it and I would not feel right at all about accepting it.
Then there are the people in the middle, who labour under a delusion that they can become the former just by holding onto money. No billionaire in history has made their wealth by sticking it in the bank and sitting on it. Every single person who has ever became a billionaire did so by investing, acquiring, inventing, and all manner of entrepreneurial endeavour or through inheritance that leads back to one of those four. To amass great wealth, you need to be in business, with an income that you increase until it provides that wealth for you. You will never become a billionaire working 9 to 5, saving every penny in the bank and living a life where you spend as little as possible, the only thing you will achieve is to live a miser's life.
To that end, I see money as something which if you have it, you should spend it. That's not to say you should spend every penny, you should be wise about your finances. You should make investments and think of your future but you should not be afraid to actually spend it. When you have that level of wealth your disposable income alone is more than most people will make in their lifetime, hoarding it achieves nothing in the long run, you can't take it with you when you die and if that wealth remains unspent in your family for generations what's the point of it in the first place other than separating you from the rest of humanity? Do you think you can elevate yourself to an inhuman state if you make enough money? The story of 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens is one that left a lasting impression on me, not least of all because of the fact Dickens is one of my favourite authors, but because of the truth that he taps into when he created the character of Ebenezer Scrooge. The tale is one that is a warning to people that in life the world will treat you the way that you treat it. If you are a miser like Scrooge was, you will never experiences the true riches that life has to offer - and this time I do mean that in the sentimental sense. The state of the world right now and the hatred that exists within it is the product of the division that exists in society and the wealth that has been hoarded by those at the top. As that divide widens, the discontent of those on the receiving end will grow.
Christmas is a time of year where I feel more than any other, you get to see the true character of a man, or a woman, or a person, or whatever pronoun you want to identify as, the point being, your true nature is displayed for all to see. They say this time of year is one filled with cheer and good will to all mankind - that's not just a cliché that comes from stories of old, it is a truth that comes from the desire that lies within everyone to believe that they are a good person, and that this time of year is when you're expected to show that more than any other - of course if you've ever been Christmas shopping on Christmas week and seen people willing to slit each other's throats to get to the front of the queue when buying a Turkey then you'll be disillusioned with that sentiment and see it for what it really is, a bloodbath of consumerism.
Those behaviours however are borne of the stress and the expectations that we put on ourselves. This time of year is one more than any other when it is inevitable that you will have to spend money, and there's very little you can do to avoid it. Don't become obsessed with saving money at a time when you really can't achieve anything significant in the process, like a miser the only thing that you will gain is misery, that's where that word comes from, it's Latin root literally means "wretched" - so don't be cheap unless you want to be a wretched human being. Spend what you can afford to spend and be mindful of those around you who can't afford to spend anything.
There are people who are incredibly wealthy in life, and I don't mean in the sentimental riches of love and friendship, I mean they have money. People like Jeff Bezos, who dances with Carlos Slim, and Bill Gates for pole position on the rich list who have more money than sense. These are people who realistically would never spend their wealth in their lifetime. Bill and Melinda Gates at least signed up the the Giving Pledge, a pledge that over 180 billionaires signed where they made the commitment to give away more than half their wealth in their lifetime to philanthropic causes.
That represents an extreme, and at the other end you have people who live day to day, who have to save literally every penny they have in order to be able to eat and heat themselves. Of these two people, the former giving a £100 gift certificate would mean virtually nothing to them, it's such a small number that it's insignificant. For the latter, to give you a gift of the same cost at £100 has a value that is almost immeasurable, to the extent where I would actually refuse the gift because I know they can't afford it and I would not feel right at all about accepting it.
Then there are the people in the middle, who labour under a delusion that they can become the former just by holding onto money. No billionaire in history has made their wealth by sticking it in the bank and sitting on it. Every single person who has ever became a billionaire did so by investing, acquiring, inventing, and all manner of entrepreneurial endeavour or through inheritance that leads back to one of those four. To amass great wealth, you need to be in business, with an income that you increase until it provides that wealth for you. You will never become a billionaire working 9 to 5, saving every penny in the bank and living a life where you spend as little as possible, the only thing you will achieve is to live a miser's life.
To that end, I see money as something which if you have it, you should spend it. That's not to say you should spend every penny, you should be wise about your finances. You should make investments and think of your future but you should not be afraid to actually spend it. When you have that level of wealth your disposable income alone is more than most people will make in their lifetime, hoarding it achieves nothing in the long run, you can't take it with you when you die and if that wealth remains unspent in your family for generations what's the point of it in the first place other than separating you from the rest of humanity? Do you think you can elevate yourself to an inhuman state if you make enough money? The story of 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens is one that left a lasting impression on me, not least of all because of the fact Dickens is one of my favourite authors, but because of the truth that he taps into when he created the character of Ebenezer Scrooge. The tale is one that is a warning to people that in life the world will treat you the way that you treat it. If you are a miser like Scrooge was, you will never experiences the true riches that life has to offer - and this time I do mean that in the sentimental sense. The state of the world right now and the hatred that exists within it is the product of the division that exists in society and the wealth that has been hoarded by those at the top. As that divide widens, the discontent of those on the receiving end will grow.
Christmas is a time of year where I feel more than any other, you get to see the true character of a man, or a woman, or a person, or whatever pronoun you want to identify as, the point being, your true nature is displayed for all to see. They say this time of year is one filled with cheer and good will to all mankind - that's not just a cliché that comes from stories of old, it is a truth that comes from the desire that lies within everyone to believe that they are a good person, and that this time of year is when you're expected to show that more than any other - of course if you've ever been Christmas shopping on Christmas week and seen people willing to slit each other's throats to get to the front of the queue when buying a Turkey then you'll be disillusioned with that sentiment and see it for what it really is, a bloodbath of consumerism.
Those behaviours however are borne of the stress and the expectations that we put on ourselves. This time of year is one more than any other when it is inevitable that you will have to spend money, and there's very little you can do to avoid it. Don't become obsessed with saving money at a time when you really can't achieve anything significant in the process, like a miser the only thing that you will gain is misery, that's where that word comes from, it's Latin root literally means "wretched" - so don't be cheap unless you want to be a wretched human being. Spend what you can afford to spend and be mindful of those around you who can't afford to spend anything.
Gifts
They say never to look a gift horse in the mouth, but if the Trojans had done just that, they would have seen the Greeks inside and their city wouldn't have fallen. It's that time of year when we search for the perfect present for other people and it is inevitable that we will receive presents from others that we just don't want. Contrary to popular opinion I don't believe you should be grateful for every gift you receive, that mentality is one that makes the assumption that the gift was given in good faith and that isn't always the case. There's a fine line between humour and being snide when it comes to giving other people gifts that aren't serious, and I've been on the receiving end of the latter before. To that end, I don't think you should be afraid to reject a gift you don't want, either by giving it back to the person that give you it or by giving it to someone else who might actually like it, or a charity shop, or the bin.
Like the Trojan Horse, not all gifts are sincere and not all gifts are worth accepting. There are some things in general that I am reluctant to accept from other people, money is perhaps the easiest example. In my experience money is never given without expectations attached to it, there is always something more at play, something the person wants in return, and if you're comfortable with that then go ahead and take it, but if you're not comfortable or it's not immediately clear what that is then I would say to exercise caution.
I realise this may sound rather cynical given that it's Christmas time, and to be honest it is, and I don't make excuses for that. For me when I buy people gifts I put thought into what I am getting someone, I buy something that I think they would actually like or that they would actually use, and as a last resort I've buy someone a voucher or a gift certificate so that they can buy something for themselves - I don't like doing that, as it is basically an admission of defeat and a way of saying, I didn't know what to get you, and this is what you are worth to me.
I'm not offended by people who buy me gift certificates as a present, that at least shows me that they have a basic idea of what I would like, they just couldn't narrow it down to something specific. As for the amount, that really depends on the person, if I know they don't have a lot of money then I wouldn't pass any judgement on the value - gifts don't have to cost the Earth to be meaningful. Some of the best gifts I have ever been given didn't cost a lot of money, and although not at Christmas time, the best thing another person ever did for me was to buy flights for me at extremely short notice so that I could attend my Uncle's funeral, which I paid back, but the gesture meant so much more than the price, you can't put a price on what that meant to me.
Conversely, the worst gift I ever received was something that was rather insulting and abysmal, I won't say what it was because they would know who they are if they read this, suffice to say nobody ever give me something like that before and I am glad that nobody ever did again. We exchanged presents once and never again.
I realise that buying presents for people can be incredibly difficult if you don't know the person well enough to be able to pick something meaningful. Without sounding contrite I do have to ask whether you should be exchanging presents in the first place. The tradition itself has a lot of significance attached to it, and when it comes to gifts where you exchange monetary value, like giving someone money and they also give you money, there doesn't seem to be any point in doing that. If you both buy each other a £50 gift certificate, the only thing you've achieved is forcing each other to spend money which isn't a good thing, and seems to defeat the entire purpose to begin with.
Put some thought into the gifts you buy this year, think about the person you are buying a gift for, and above all else do not commit the cardinal sin of buying a gift that you would want to receive because in almost all cases that doesn't work out well in the end, you are different people and want different things, show them you appreciate them and think about the message your gift sends, spend time thinking about it because they're more than likely going to spend more time thinking about what you got them than you did when buying it.
Like the Trojan Horse, not all gifts are sincere and not all gifts are worth accepting. There are some things in general that I am reluctant to accept from other people, money is perhaps the easiest example. In my experience money is never given without expectations attached to it, there is always something more at play, something the person wants in return, and if you're comfortable with that then go ahead and take it, but if you're not comfortable or it's not immediately clear what that is then I would say to exercise caution.
I realise this may sound rather cynical given that it's Christmas time, and to be honest it is, and I don't make excuses for that. For me when I buy people gifts I put thought into what I am getting someone, I buy something that I think they would actually like or that they would actually use, and as a last resort I've buy someone a voucher or a gift certificate so that they can buy something for themselves - I don't like doing that, as it is basically an admission of defeat and a way of saying, I didn't know what to get you, and this is what you are worth to me.
I'm not offended by people who buy me gift certificates as a present, that at least shows me that they have a basic idea of what I would like, they just couldn't narrow it down to something specific. As for the amount, that really depends on the person, if I know they don't have a lot of money then I wouldn't pass any judgement on the value - gifts don't have to cost the Earth to be meaningful. Some of the best gifts I have ever been given didn't cost a lot of money, and although not at Christmas time, the best thing another person ever did for me was to buy flights for me at extremely short notice so that I could attend my Uncle's funeral, which I paid back, but the gesture meant so much more than the price, you can't put a price on what that meant to me.
Conversely, the worst gift I ever received was something that was rather insulting and abysmal, I won't say what it was because they would know who they are if they read this, suffice to say nobody ever give me something like that before and I am glad that nobody ever did again. We exchanged presents once and never again.
I realise that buying presents for people can be incredibly difficult if you don't know the person well enough to be able to pick something meaningful. Without sounding contrite I do have to ask whether you should be exchanging presents in the first place. The tradition itself has a lot of significance attached to it, and when it comes to gifts where you exchange monetary value, like giving someone money and they also give you money, there doesn't seem to be any point in doing that. If you both buy each other a £50 gift certificate, the only thing you've achieved is forcing each other to spend money which isn't a good thing, and seems to defeat the entire purpose to begin with.
Put some thought into the gifts you buy this year, think about the person you are buying a gift for, and above all else do not commit the cardinal sin of buying a gift that you would want to receive because in almost all cases that doesn't work out well in the end, you are different people and want different things, show them you appreciate them and think about the message your gift sends, spend time thinking about it because they're more than likely going to spend more time thinking about what you got them than you did when buying it.
Mixing Senses
Sticking with the theme of senses and our experience of the world, there is one last concept I would like to mention and that is the idea of mixing senses. I don't mean this in the sense of listening to music whilst you eat to boost the taste etc, although that is interesting in and of itself, the focus of this post will instead be involuntary experiences of one sense triggered by another. The best example I can give of this is Synaesthesia.
Synaesthesia occurs when an individual perceives colour where it doesn't exist, triggered by other senses. Things like hearing certain sounds can make the perceiver see colours this in particular is known as Chromesthesia. For me personally although not documented in most resources on Synaesthesia, I experience a mixing of taste and smell. The two senses can trigger one another for me.
These experiences are involuntary, someone without Synaesthesia cannot induce it, at least there exists no evidence that this is possible. The reaction that occurs is neurological and does not form any part of our conscious mind, it's not something we can control.
The idea of using senses as stimuli however, to trigger feelings or experiences in others is something that has become prevalent in society. Music has become ever more present in everything we watch on TV, shows that never had soundtracks to scenes before have jumped on this bandwagon. There is a belief that to make any content more engaging, you have to incorporate multimedia. Perhaps that is another reason why Audio Books have become quite popular as they take an experience that was once limited only to sight and transform it into something that incorporates sound instead.
Whilst Synaesthesia is an example of this response happening on an involuntary and in most cases unintentional level, it does raise an interesting question of whether or not this would be used as a form of entertainment if it could be triggered in people who have never experienced it in their lives. If the growth in ASMR videos is anything to go by, people are certainly willing to experiment. Although as someone who experiences ASMR I am acutely aware of the problem of immunity. Like any sensation that is intended to be unexpected and sporadic, if you are exposed to it in excess you become somewhat numb to it. This causes immunity to that feeling until you have gone without it long enough to experience it again.
If there were a way to induce Synaesthesia in people who do not ordinarily experience it, in essence "Acquired Synaesthesia" I do have to wonder whether they would develop a similar immunity, if that would even matter at all. As far as ASMR is concerned, I believe that many people who watch it don't experience the sensation at all or they watch in excess until they no longer experience it but in both cases continue to watch purely for entertainment purposes. How many people watch 3D movies without 3D glasses and miss out on the experience it was intended to produce?
When it comes to the soundtracks added to TV shows and Movies in an effort to evoke emotional connections, I feel I am numb to that at this point. Such attempts are often so transparent that they fail miserably. For me this can be likened to old comedy shows where the production was filmed in a studio without an audience and a laugh track was added later in post-production. The only thing this managed to do was to highlight to me the disparity between what I found funny and what they producers found funny about those shows. It's rare that I would actually laugh at the same time as a laugh track, but that was supposedly the purpose in the beginning, to tell the viewer what is meant to be funny and what is not. For those that were more susceptible to this, I have to wonder to what extent their sense of humour is organic versus being a result of being told what to find funny.
Mixing senses is a very interesting concept for me, but it is something that I think has to remain organic. Any attempt to induce it will eventually lead to a level of manipulation that I feel uncomfortable with, especially if it were to become as prevalent as existing attempts to manipulate people with music, not just on TV shows and Movies, but in shops and public places too, especially at this time of year where almost everywhere you go you are bombarded with Christmas music to inspire holiday cheer and encourage you to spend more. I love Christmas but I can see how this can be too much for some people, the feeling of being reduced to that of Pavlov's Dog who was conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell.
Synaesthesia occurs when an individual perceives colour where it doesn't exist, triggered by other senses. Things like hearing certain sounds can make the perceiver see colours this in particular is known as Chromesthesia. For me personally although not documented in most resources on Synaesthesia, I experience a mixing of taste and smell. The two senses can trigger one another for me.
These experiences are involuntary, someone without Synaesthesia cannot induce it, at least there exists no evidence that this is possible. The reaction that occurs is neurological and does not form any part of our conscious mind, it's not something we can control.
The idea of using senses as stimuli however, to trigger feelings or experiences in others is something that has become prevalent in society. Music has become ever more present in everything we watch on TV, shows that never had soundtracks to scenes before have jumped on this bandwagon. There is a belief that to make any content more engaging, you have to incorporate multimedia. Perhaps that is another reason why Audio Books have become quite popular as they take an experience that was once limited only to sight and transform it into something that incorporates sound instead.
Whilst Synaesthesia is an example of this response happening on an involuntary and in most cases unintentional level, it does raise an interesting question of whether or not this would be used as a form of entertainment if it could be triggered in people who have never experienced it in their lives. If the growth in ASMR videos is anything to go by, people are certainly willing to experiment. Although as someone who experiences ASMR I am acutely aware of the problem of immunity. Like any sensation that is intended to be unexpected and sporadic, if you are exposed to it in excess you become somewhat numb to it. This causes immunity to that feeling until you have gone without it long enough to experience it again.
If there were a way to induce Synaesthesia in people who do not ordinarily experience it, in essence "Acquired Synaesthesia" I do have to wonder whether they would develop a similar immunity, if that would even matter at all. As far as ASMR is concerned, I believe that many people who watch it don't experience the sensation at all or they watch in excess until they no longer experience it but in both cases continue to watch purely for entertainment purposes. How many people watch 3D movies without 3D glasses and miss out on the experience it was intended to produce?
When it comes to the soundtracks added to TV shows and Movies in an effort to evoke emotional connections, I feel I am numb to that at this point. Such attempts are often so transparent that they fail miserably. For me this can be likened to old comedy shows where the production was filmed in a studio without an audience and a laugh track was added later in post-production. The only thing this managed to do was to highlight to me the disparity between what I found funny and what they producers found funny about those shows. It's rare that I would actually laugh at the same time as a laugh track, but that was supposedly the purpose in the beginning, to tell the viewer what is meant to be funny and what is not. For those that were more susceptible to this, I have to wonder to what extent their sense of humour is organic versus being a result of being told what to find funny.
Mixing senses is a very interesting concept for me, but it is something that I think has to remain organic. Any attempt to induce it will eventually lead to a level of manipulation that I feel uncomfortable with, especially if it were to become as prevalent as existing attempts to manipulate people with music, not just on TV shows and Movies, but in shops and public places too, especially at this time of year where almost everywhere you go you are bombarded with Christmas music to inspire holiday cheer and encourage you to spend more. I love Christmas but I can see how this can be too much for some people, the feeling of being reduced to that of Pavlov's Dog who was conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell.
Realism
In a previous post I wrote about the limitation of human experience through our senses and how machines pose an interesting question of how much more of the world they could experience given how easy it is to give them new senses. There is another element to this thought experiment that I didn't touch on because it is a topic in and of itself. That element is the definition of what is real. This is a question that has entire branches of psychology and philosophy devoted to answering that question but it's not as straight forward as you would think.
Let's take an example, most people would say that what is real is what they can perceive through their five senses, through sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. If I was to present to you something that looked like a bear, sounded like a bear, smelt like a bear, felt like a bear, and if you managed to get close enough to taste it and knew what a bear tasted like, assume it tastes like one too, would you say it is real? You'll probably be smart enough here to respond not with a yes or no answer but to say "it depends" in that you want me to define what is real in this sense. Yes, the bear does exist and is right in front of you, but you're probably more interested in whether or not it is a real bear or whether it is an animatronic or some other form of technological imitation of what you define as a "real" bear.
The interesting thing about this example is that you define what is real by what meets your expectations, not what meets your sensations. Even though you can sense everything that you would sense when met with a real life bear, you still want to know whether it is biological or mechanical in nature. That's a good thing because it demonstrates a critical mind and inquisitive nature, but it's also a bad thing because it illustrates how you are sceptical in an environment where you are predisposed to being sceptical. If I was not around, and you were to meet the same thing in the middle of a forest, on your own, with no-one else around, and nowhere to run to for shelter, would you react the same way? Would you stop and think about whether or not it is an actual bear, or whether it might be something made to convince you it is? Most people with their wits about them will make the assumption it is real and act on impulse in order to survive.
In situations where you abandon your critical mind and your scepticism, what is actually real in the sense of being what it portends to being becomes irrelevant, instead you rely only on your senses. This brings us down to a more basic, primitive state of being where anyone who wishes to convince us something is real when it is not, needs only to convince our five senses that this is the case. Arguably in the example above you don't even need to convince all five, most people would get nowhere near the bear to touch it, and it would be quite bizarre to try and lick it to see what it tastes like. That leaves sight, sound, and smell. The last one, again, most people won't get close enough to smell it, nor would they know what a bear smelt like to begin with, so you can cross that one off too. The reality emerges that what is real in this situation is limited only to what you can see and hear. Those two senses are very easy to trick. It's not hard to produce noise especially if you have the equipment at hand to do it, and it's also not hard to create a lifelike model of a bear, which is conveniently big enough to hide the aforementioned equipment.
The movie 'The Matrix' takes this idea to a different level, incorporating a philosophy known as 'The Brain In A Vat' which postulates that every sense the human body has is an interpretation of electrical signals by the brain and that it would theoretically be possible to suspend a human brain in a vat and attach electrodes that could feed it the signals it expects to receive, making it possible to convince that brain that it is living in a world that it can see, smell, taste, touch, and hear, even though none of it is real and the brain doesn't even have a body.
Whilst not taking the idea to that extreme, there are examples within our world of instances where we see and hear things that aren't there. If you have bad experiences with drugs, or if you have a mental illness such a Schizophrenia, the combination of visual and auditory hallucinations can make you see and hear things that aren't there. This is a concept that is quite unnerving for me because it demonstrates how much we rely on our senses to know what is and is not real. In the movie 'Alice Through The Looking Glass' there is a scene where Alice wakes up in a mental institution where she was brought after she returned from Underland [the canonical name of the place she refers to a Wonderland] and nobody in our world believed anything she was saying. There is something incredibly unnerving about that scene for me because there's a question that arises there for Alice as to how much faith she has that what she experienced was real, as opposed to the idea that it was a delusion and none of it actually happened. In the original movie from the franchise and the original story by Lewis Carroll, Alice did awaken at the end as if from a dream which leaves the whole thing ambiguous as to whether or not Underland actually exists.
Staying with the theme of Alice, the idea that you can't always trust your senses is not only limited to illusions and attempts to make us see or hear or feel things that aren't there. There is actually a real neurological condition known as Alice in Wonderland Syndrome named after the story it is a rare condition where the sufferer has an experience where their senses alter their perception of the world, they can feel much bigger or much smaller than they actually are, resulting in a warped spatial awareness that causes them to see things grow or shrink rather like Alice when she grew and shrank and the world around her changed size. This is something that is purely perceptive though, the body doesn't actually change size of course, only the perception of the world shifts.
Can you trust your senses? Are you capable of believing things which you cannot experience or prove without those five senses? As I mentioned in my previous post, the human body can actually sense much more than those five basic senses, things like temperature, orientation, gravity, and sense of self awareness etc extend our experience beyond those five senses so why are we so eager to define what is real and what is not by what we can experience through them alone?
Let's take an example, most people would say that what is real is what they can perceive through their five senses, through sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. If I was to present to you something that looked like a bear, sounded like a bear, smelt like a bear, felt like a bear, and if you managed to get close enough to taste it and knew what a bear tasted like, assume it tastes like one too, would you say it is real? You'll probably be smart enough here to respond not with a yes or no answer but to say "it depends" in that you want me to define what is real in this sense. Yes, the bear does exist and is right in front of you, but you're probably more interested in whether or not it is a real bear or whether it is an animatronic or some other form of technological imitation of what you define as a "real" bear.
The interesting thing about this example is that you define what is real by what meets your expectations, not what meets your sensations. Even though you can sense everything that you would sense when met with a real life bear, you still want to know whether it is biological or mechanical in nature. That's a good thing because it demonstrates a critical mind and inquisitive nature, but it's also a bad thing because it illustrates how you are sceptical in an environment where you are predisposed to being sceptical. If I was not around, and you were to meet the same thing in the middle of a forest, on your own, with no-one else around, and nowhere to run to for shelter, would you react the same way? Would you stop and think about whether or not it is an actual bear, or whether it might be something made to convince you it is? Most people with their wits about them will make the assumption it is real and act on impulse in order to survive.
In situations where you abandon your critical mind and your scepticism, what is actually real in the sense of being what it portends to being becomes irrelevant, instead you rely only on your senses. This brings us down to a more basic, primitive state of being where anyone who wishes to convince us something is real when it is not, needs only to convince our five senses that this is the case. Arguably in the example above you don't even need to convince all five, most people would get nowhere near the bear to touch it, and it would be quite bizarre to try and lick it to see what it tastes like. That leaves sight, sound, and smell. The last one, again, most people won't get close enough to smell it, nor would they know what a bear smelt like to begin with, so you can cross that one off too. The reality emerges that what is real in this situation is limited only to what you can see and hear. Those two senses are very easy to trick. It's not hard to produce noise especially if you have the equipment at hand to do it, and it's also not hard to create a lifelike model of a bear, which is conveniently big enough to hide the aforementioned equipment.
The movie 'The Matrix' takes this idea to a different level, incorporating a philosophy known as 'The Brain In A Vat' which postulates that every sense the human body has is an interpretation of electrical signals by the brain and that it would theoretically be possible to suspend a human brain in a vat and attach electrodes that could feed it the signals it expects to receive, making it possible to convince that brain that it is living in a world that it can see, smell, taste, touch, and hear, even though none of it is real and the brain doesn't even have a body.
Whilst not taking the idea to that extreme, there are examples within our world of instances where we see and hear things that aren't there. If you have bad experiences with drugs, or if you have a mental illness such a Schizophrenia, the combination of visual and auditory hallucinations can make you see and hear things that aren't there. This is a concept that is quite unnerving for me because it demonstrates how much we rely on our senses to know what is and is not real. In the movie 'Alice Through The Looking Glass' there is a scene where Alice wakes up in a mental institution where she was brought after she returned from Underland [the canonical name of the place she refers to a Wonderland] and nobody in our world believed anything she was saying. There is something incredibly unnerving about that scene for me because there's a question that arises there for Alice as to how much faith she has that what she experienced was real, as opposed to the idea that it was a delusion and none of it actually happened. In the original movie from the franchise and the original story by Lewis Carroll, Alice did awaken at the end as if from a dream which leaves the whole thing ambiguous as to whether or not Underland actually exists.
Staying with the theme of Alice, the idea that you can't always trust your senses is not only limited to illusions and attempts to make us see or hear or feel things that aren't there. There is actually a real neurological condition known as Alice in Wonderland Syndrome named after the story it is a rare condition where the sufferer has an experience where their senses alter their perception of the world, they can feel much bigger or much smaller than they actually are, resulting in a warped spatial awareness that causes them to see things grow or shrink rather like Alice when she grew and shrank and the world around her changed size. This is something that is purely perceptive though, the body doesn't actually change size of course, only the perception of the world shifts.
Can you trust your senses? Are you capable of believing things which you cannot experience or prove without those five senses? As I mentioned in my previous post, the human body can actually sense much more than those five basic senses, things like temperature, orientation, gravity, and sense of self awareness etc extend our experience beyond those five senses so why are we so eager to define what is real and what is not by what we can experience through them alone?
Oddly Satisfying
What is satisfaction? If you ask Google to define it, the definition it gives first is "fulfilment of one's wishes, expectations, or needs, or the pleasure derived from this" which covers quite a few things. What interests me most however is the idea of pleasure derived from your expectations. I've wrote about YouTube videos before that are quite pleasurable to watch, mostly in the context of ASMR, however, there are other videos, completely unrelated to ASMR that provide similar feelings although not tingly, they do still evoke a pleasure that can be rather addictive.
There's one such series of videos that share titles to the effect of "the most satisfying video" their content varies quite a bit. What all of these videos have in common however is a shared rhythm, precision, and repetition. Some involve humans working, but most focus on machines, production lines, automation etc where the same task is completed over and over, with the same precision and the same pace throughout. The consistency appeases you expectations and it is like your mind has turned into a dog and someone has sat down and started stroking it.
There are also antagonistic videos that purport to be the most unsatisfying video that show the exact opposite, things going wrong, breaking, dominoes that don't continue their chain, Rube Goldberg Machines that don't actually work, and many more.
There's something oddly satisfying about seeing everything move exactly the way you expect it to, and the consistency with which that action repeats. I wanted to know why this was the case, if there was some psychological reason behind why these videos are so satisfying to watch, and unfortunately I wasn't able to find anything conclusive. Despite my best efforts googling the topic and looking for research papers, there was nothing I could find that aptly described what those videos were and the effect they have.
To that end I have a theory as to why they are satisfying. I believe when we look at things in general whatever they are, whether still or video based, our brains try to process the content and make it orderly and organized. The more chaotic the visual stimuli is the more the brain has to work to process it. I believe that the reason these videos and images of symmetry and perfect precision all provide such satisfaction is simply that they provide the least effort to process. Everything in a neat and tidy order is makes processing it swift and efficient. In many ways you could consider this to be a mental representation of the difference between a fragmented and a defragmented hard drive, when the latter is achieved there is much less effort needed to retrieve anything you want from it.
I don't have any evidence to back this up, but what this represents in a way is an example of things that are "ungoogleable" in other words, language in itself is inefficient at describing what you want to find and as a result it becomes very hard to search for through search engines like Google because despite the idea that those search engines help you discover things, the reality is you have to know what to search for in the first place if you want to use them to find anything. Google in this regard is a courier, not a curator. It fetches what you ask it to, it doesn't present content to you that you didn't ask it for - except for adverts and the plethora of Google services they try to sell you.
Even ASMR although unrelated, it too experienced the same problem. Most people who watch videos of it now, experienced it long before they knew what it was, and until it was given a name and knowledge of it became more widespread, it was very difficult to search for. Searching for things like "tingly videos" and "tingling sensation" among many other terms wouldn't have proven very fruitful up until a few years ago when ASMR gained the traction and the exposure that it did which caused the community that centres around it to emerge.
I have to wonder what name or point of reference will emerge in time for these types of oddly satisfying videos and whether it will have similar success of whether it will remain an obscure interest. The Internet is an unpredictable place at times so there's no real way to predict any of this with certainty.
There's one such series of videos that share titles to the effect of "the most satisfying video" their content varies quite a bit. What all of these videos have in common however is a shared rhythm, precision, and repetition. Some involve humans working, but most focus on machines, production lines, automation etc where the same task is completed over and over, with the same precision and the same pace throughout. The consistency appeases you expectations and it is like your mind has turned into a dog and someone has sat down and started stroking it.
There are also antagonistic videos that purport to be the most unsatisfying video that show the exact opposite, things going wrong, breaking, dominoes that don't continue their chain, Rube Goldberg Machines that don't actually work, and many more.
There's something oddly satisfying about seeing everything move exactly the way you expect it to, and the consistency with which that action repeats. I wanted to know why this was the case, if there was some psychological reason behind why these videos are so satisfying to watch, and unfortunately I wasn't able to find anything conclusive. Despite my best efforts googling the topic and looking for research papers, there was nothing I could find that aptly described what those videos were and the effect they have.
To that end I have a theory as to why they are satisfying. I believe when we look at things in general whatever they are, whether still or video based, our brains try to process the content and make it orderly and organized. The more chaotic the visual stimuli is the more the brain has to work to process it. I believe that the reason these videos and images of symmetry and perfect precision all provide such satisfaction is simply that they provide the least effort to process. Everything in a neat and tidy order is makes processing it swift and efficient. In many ways you could consider this to be a mental representation of the difference between a fragmented and a defragmented hard drive, when the latter is achieved there is much less effort needed to retrieve anything you want from it.
I don't have any evidence to back this up, but what this represents in a way is an example of things that are "ungoogleable" in other words, language in itself is inefficient at describing what you want to find and as a result it becomes very hard to search for through search engines like Google because despite the idea that those search engines help you discover things, the reality is you have to know what to search for in the first place if you want to use them to find anything. Google in this regard is a courier, not a curator. It fetches what you ask it to, it doesn't present content to you that you didn't ask it for - except for adverts and the plethora of Google services they try to sell you.
Even ASMR although unrelated, it too experienced the same problem. Most people who watch videos of it now, experienced it long before they knew what it was, and until it was given a name and knowledge of it became more widespread, it was very difficult to search for. Searching for things like "tingly videos" and "tingling sensation" among many other terms wouldn't have proven very fruitful up until a few years ago when ASMR gained the traction and the exposure that it did which caused the community that centres around it to emerge.
I have to wonder what name or point of reference will emerge in time for these types of oddly satisfying videos and whether it will have similar success of whether it will remain an obscure interest. The Internet is an unpredictable place at times so there's no real way to predict any of this with certainty.
Destructive Education
I've mentioned education a few times on this blog and the fact that I don't like the one-size-fits-all approach where everyone is expected to learn the same way. The truth is there are many different ways that you can study or teach a subject and some people will prefer one style more than another. The reasons most forms of education don't factor these into their programme is for one or both of the following reasons, either they don't have the resources whether financial, human, technological, or the amount of time they have etc, or the other reason is because they have a standardized curriculum that they have to adhere to with teaching methods that are prescribed by some authority or regulator that they can't overrule.
There are many different theories that centre around learning styles and teaching approaches, most of these are based on research and experimentation that have never been put into practice at scale and because they have never been tested they are never adopted. This is a classic catch-22 like wanting a job to get experience but needing experience to get a job.
The three main methods of learning that I focus on when I think about approaches to studying involve audio/visual, logical/semantic, and physical/kinaesthetic study. The first is perhaps the simplest to understand, you watch someone demonstrate what you want to learn, or you sit and listen to someone speaking about the subject you are learning, I associate these most heavily with the concept of theoretical learning, because there is no practice involved. The second approach is that of logic and semantics, I consider this to be an approach that involves some practice but in a way that is structured, so in this scenario you are given a task, rules and instructions, and you try and complete the task. You're still working with theory but in a way that it is underpinned and reinforced with practice.
The last approach is that of physical or kinaesthetic learning, this is an approach that is best described as trial and error. It is almost entirely practical with minimal guidance, instead of being told how to do everything, you figure it out as you go along, with someone to provide explanation when you reach something you can't figure out on your own.
Each of these approaches vary in their potential application, you aren't going to be able to use a physical approach to learning about certain subjects because they are theoretical in nature, likewise there will be some subjects where you can't gain an understanding without practising what you are learning.
These are just three approaches, there are many more, such as individual versus cooperative learning, whether you work best alone or as part of a group. I believe education could be made much more effective if the bodies administering the education programmes were to assess their students on learning style and then group students based on those learning styles. In my experience most approaches to education resort to the basic approach of having students sit and listen to someone speaking. I never really found that engaging and I lost interest very quickly when the subjects I was being taught were boring to me. The way that I learn best is through practice, either physical if possible or through logic and semantics.
There is one last approach to study that I would like to mention and that is the concept of rote learning. This is where you repeat something ad nauseum until you can recite it from memory. I despise this method of education because you aren't being taught anything about the subject matter, you're just being taught to remember something and even at that it's a case of mental exhaustion that I believe can actually damage a student's cognitive functions. I have wrote before about the concept of burn out and the physiological and neurological process that occurs in the mind when this happens, I said at the time how bad this is for your mental health and I stand by my assertion that rote learning is dangerous because you are actively pursuing that mental state for the sake of remembering something. If you took this to an even greater extreme, most people never forget traumatic experiences because they stay with them for the rest of their lives, if someone suggested making education as traumatic as possible as a means to ensure retention, how quickly would you be met with criticism? Why is such unhealthy behaviour tolerated in some education systems because that's the way they have always been delivered. I'd like to see statistics that compare education systems that used rote learning to the frequency of mental health disorders within the population of those countries as a whole and see if there is a correlation.
There are many different theories that centre around learning styles and teaching approaches, most of these are based on research and experimentation that have never been put into practice at scale and because they have never been tested they are never adopted. This is a classic catch-22 like wanting a job to get experience but needing experience to get a job.
The three main methods of learning that I focus on when I think about approaches to studying involve audio/visual, logical/semantic, and physical/kinaesthetic study. The first is perhaps the simplest to understand, you watch someone demonstrate what you want to learn, or you sit and listen to someone speaking about the subject you are learning, I associate these most heavily with the concept of theoretical learning, because there is no practice involved. The second approach is that of logic and semantics, I consider this to be an approach that involves some practice but in a way that is structured, so in this scenario you are given a task, rules and instructions, and you try and complete the task. You're still working with theory but in a way that it is underpinned and reinforced with practice.
The last approach is that of physical or kinaesthetic learning, this is an approach that is best described as trial and error. It is almost entirely practical with minimal guidance, instead of being told how to do everything, you figure it out as you go along, with someone to provide explanation when you reach something you can't figure out on your own.
Each of these approaches vary in their potential application, you aren't going to be able to use a physical approach to learning about certain subjects because they are theoretical in nature, likewise there will be some subjects where you can't gain an understanding without practising what you are learning.
These are just three approaches, there are many more, such as individual versus cooperative learning, whether you work best alone or as part of a group. I believe education could be made much more effective if the bodies administering the education programmes were to assess their students on learning style and then group students based on those learning styles. In my experience most approaches to education resort to the basic approach of having students sit and listen to someone speaking. I never really found that engaging and I lost interest very quickly when the subjects I was being taught were boring to me. The way that I learn best is through practice, either physical if possible or through logic and semantics.
There is one last approach to study that I would like to mention and that is the concept of rote learning. This is where you repeat something ad nauseum until you can recite it from memory. I despise this method of education because you aren't being taught anything about the subject matter, you're just being taught to remember something and even at that it's a case of mental exhaustion that I believe can actually damage a student's cognitive functions. I have wrote before about the concept of burn out and the physiological and neurological process that occurs in the mind when this happens, I said at the time how bad this is for your mental health and I stand by my assertion that rote learning is dangerous because you are actively pursuing that mental state for the sake of remembering something. If you took this to an even greater extreme, most people never forget traumatic experiences because they stay with them for the rest of their lives, if someone suggested making education as traumatic as possible as a means to ensure retention, how quickly would you be met with criticism? Why is such unhealthy behaviour tolerated in some education systems because that's the way they have always been delivered. I'd like to see statistics that compare education systems that used rote learning to the frequency of mental health disorders within the population of those countries as a whole and see if there is a correlation.
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