Parasocial Relationships

Human beings have been able to take photos for about 200 years, and we have been able to record and broadcast video for about 100 years now, but access to both of these technologies in their nascence was heavily restricted by means. In effect you needed to be wealthy to use either technology. It was 1839 when the first consumer camera came to market at a cost of around $7,000 in today's money. The pursuit of photography as accessible to the everyday consumer did not emerge until the 20th century. It was also during this time several decades later that the first consumer camcorders came to market which similarly carried a high price of entry before later falling to a more affordable level.

It was really in the 1980s when consumer electronics experienced an explosion in popularity that most people will have bought their first cameras and camcorders that were intended to be kept and reused. Even with access to this technology growing it wasn't until around the early 2000s with the rise of camera phones predating smart phones that a similar explosion in photography happened, later amplified by the emergence of the smart phone and much higher quality image processing.

Cake or Death?

I believe there are two types of gay guys, those that want cock first and a connection second, and those that want a connection first and cock second. This division is something that has become incredibly visible within the community because it's often viewn through the lens of "the apps" [Grindr, Hornet, Scruff, Romeo, etc] which are very much geared towards those that want cock first and a connection second, whilst there are far fewer apps and services that cater to those that want a connection first, in fact the only two that really come to mind are Romeo and POF - the main reason I would say Romeo offers this is because you can explicitly set on your profile through a status what you're looking for, sex, dates, friends, chat etc, so it is dual functional. As for POF - Plenty of Fish, that is a dating site whose general schtick has always been to market itself as a match-making service with personality tests and things to try and match you with someone else, the efficacy of this we can discuss another time.

Unrequited Friendship

Much ado has been made over the years when it comes to the concept of unrequited love. I've been on both sides of that tête à tête so I have seen that story play out to its bitter end. I don't believe enough has been said however on the concept of unrequited friendship. The idea that a friendship exists and persists because of the efforts of one but not both sides.

It's easy to think that a friendship would fall apart quite quickly if one person didn't make any effort, the other would lose interest eventually, but unrequited friendships persist for the same reason that unrequited love often persists, that is, there isn't a complete lack of interest from one side but rather a trickle of interest that pales in comparison to the river of emotion that comes from the other side.

Seasons, Reasons, And Just For The Teasing

There's a guy on YouTube who makes ASMR videos who I am enamoured with. I discovered his channel about a year ago now, and everything about him is entrancing. His voice, his demeanour, his smile melts my heart. I had admired him from a distance for some time but my neurodivergent ways took over in the end, I spent some time looking through his social media to learn a bit more about him as a person, partly out of curiosity but also partly as a way to get over that crush.

He lives in France, that's where he's from; I assume he lives in Paris but he's never actually said in a video or anywhere else as far as I can see. He has made videos in some Paris landmarks though, which is why I have that assumption. He's around the same age as me, but again I only know this because of some of the things he's mentioned, he's never actually shared his age. I came across a few interesting coincidences though in some of the stories that he has told.

Toxic Positivity

Toxic positivity sounds like a bit of an oxymoron when you first hear the term, you stop and ask yourself how something positive can ever be toxic, but the concept doesn't attack the act of being positive in itself but rather the denial of negativity. To put it another way, in Greek legend, Daedalus crafted wings for himself and his son Icarus made from feathers and wax. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the Sun but Icarus threw caution to the wind when he took flight and despite all warnings flew too close to the Sun, the heat melted the wax and he fell to his death.

You will have no shortage of people in your life telling you that you can't do something, criticism comes easy to most people. I've written before about how as human beings we're conditioned to focus on things that are wrong and ignore the things that are right because problems need to be solved, solutions do not. There will be times when you come across the opposite however, often described in a rather derogatory way as cheerleaders, their raison d'etre is to build you up and give you motivation and the belief that you can achieve anything you put your mind to with enough determination and hard work.

Shame

Shame is an emotion that I discuss with other people quite a bit, as a gay man I can say that it is something that is baked into our culture, something that most gay men would rather didn't exist at all I hasten to add. My interpretation of shame is slightly different to most people in that it's rare that I feel shame for anything, it does happen from time to time but for the most part I don't feel it. The reason for that is because I recognised at quite a young age that shame is not an emotion that originates within the self, it is an emotion that is put there by someone or something else.

I think one of the major criticisms of organised religions and belief systems is the idea that they are set up primarily to control and manipulate others, this idea stems from the fact that almost all of these systems at their core have a concept of shame and one or more religious texts which define what is shameful and subsequently encourages their adherents to shame others who deviate from their definition of normalcy. This concept isn't limited to religion however, I went to an all-boys Primary School and High School both were Private Schools maintained by the Catholic Church so I have an intimate understanding of indoctrination and the rigidity of these belief systems. I don't deny this is a problem within religion as a concept more broadly, and I don't apologise for it because it can't be justified.

Eye to A.I.

When you ask people to draw a line between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence the definition most people use is that one imitates the other, or that one is the original and the other is the duplication. Is that really a fair assessment of what we actually interact with? Whilst most AI models at present are based on large volumes of human generated data which they then process and use to structure their responses, there's no guarantee this will remain the case in future, in fact you could argue that there is a guarantee that it won't.

When you look at data as a resource you can track its production over time and assert that production of data has grown at exponential rates. Humanity in the last few years alone has produced more data than it did throughout its entire history up until that point. That might be something you would protest at first but when you stop and think about it, with few historical records that were kept in the past there wasn't an emphasis on documenting everything in the way that such an emphasis now exists.

Random

I watched one of those Vogue 73 Questions videos recently and one of the questions they asked was if you had a superpower what would it be? Of all the questions they asked, this one stood out the most because it touches upon some very deep issues that most people have which then informs their choice. You can be superficial and think that there isn't much meaning behind the choices people make, that they are random, but that's not strictly true. Human beings have a remarkable incapacity to act with true randomness, something which I think in the modern era has become quite unnerving to many who sit and reflect upon the nature of the human condition.

What do I mean by the nature of the Human Condition? Well quite simply the state of being human. There's no lack of stories in the news and splashed across social media discussing AI right now and what that means for the future of humanity but this post isn't about pondering where AI could lead us but rather looking back and reflecting upon the fact that we don't completely understand how we got here.

Trist

Alone with your thoughts is not a place to be
When your mind is a prison you can never be free
An idle state feeds the guilt of inaction
So we seek anything to serve as distraction

Always coming, never going, always waiting, never knowing
A life of certainty sounds like a dream to me
The reality a debt of emotion and wealth, both forever owing
Oh how we long for a world that once more feels free

Our age of innocence and ignorance is gone
Replaced by awareness of all that goes wrong
We swim in the sea of sorrow and trist
And drown in the memory of the chances we missed

Life is a game without a save state
How to win is the question we all sit and ponder
One move throws the game and we realise too late
With no way to win we're left but to wander

Duolingo rant

I love learning languages and learning about different cultures. I've used many tools over the years to try and develop my language skills with varying levels of success. Duolingo is far and away one of the most effective language learning tools but it's not without its limitations.

One of the things I don't like about Duolingo is that it relies on momentum to be effective. If you break that momentum then you start to fail miserably and the whole experience can become disheartening and discouraging very quickly. What I mean by momentum, is your continued use of the site. This is built into the design with the emphasis placed on daily streaks. Users are encouraged to return daily to complete lessons in their course or to practice for a few minutes at least to keep their streak alive. The longer your streak becomes the more imperative that impulse becomes. Now there are ways to freeze your streak and take a day or two off from lessons but there's a danger when you do this that you will lose the impulse to continue.

My Latest Project: The Tarot Trifecta

For the past 6 months or so I have been working on a book about Tarot Cards and I've finally published it. I've chosen a separate pen name for this publication, Caesar Devine, as it doesn't really fit with anything I have written under my current name S J Doran which so far has mostly been LGBTQ oriented fiction. I've also created a separate webpage for it where I will post Tarot related content, so if you're interested in learning more about Tarot cards you can hop over to caesardevine.com to find out more.

The Tarot Trifecta is available now only on Amazon

The Tarot Trifecta at Amazon.com

The Tarot Trifecta at Amazon.co.uk

Breaking The Circle

I think about the concept of confidence quite a bit, mainly because I have social anxiety and I have struggled with my self-confidence or lack of it for many years. In that time I have read many books around the subject but one text in particular has stood out, perhaps most surprisingly it isn't a book about anxiety at all but rather a book about Cold Reading that had a generic extract that at first pass was so specific I thought it had been written for me personally, but that was the point. The extract served to demonstrate how statements that seemed precise and personal were actually generic when you stepped back and considered them objectively, free from the original context in which they were made.

Whilst the purpose of this extract was to demonstrate the effectiveness of confidence trickery, the key take away for me was the fact that the specific insecurities the passage referred to were considered generic which alluded to the wider experiences that people have; or more succinctly the prevailing relationship to confidence that people have in general. If a fear of being judged and what other people might think of you is considered generic in this regard, then it had to be a fear that everyone, or at least the vast majority of people had.

10 tips to get the most out of Spotify

I have written a lot in the past about anxiety and depression, and the various coping mechanisms that I have used. Distraction techniques in particular have their successes and their failures; but in any case they are still useful.

Two of the ways I distract myself from anxiety, trying to prevent myself from over-thinking, are by playing games, or by listening to music. For the former I use Steam and for the latter I use Spotify. As part of my recent reflective mood I went back to take a look at my Spotify Wrapped from 2022 and wanted to share some tips on how to get the most out the app.

For context here are a few highlights from my 2022 wrapped. I spent 27,854 minutes spent listening to music, higher than 83% of other listeners in the UK. My most played track was 'Nothing Breaks Like A Heart - Darren Porter Remix' by Raz Nitzan which I played 208 times. I played 2,404 songs in total spanning 2,154 artists, so I think it's fair to say I get more than my moneys-worth out of the service.

Déjà vu

If you read my previous post you'll not be surprised to learn that I haven't been in a great place mentally for the past few days. I've been trying to make decisions about my future and where I want to go from here. In an attempt to understand where I am and how I got here I decided to look back at my journey. I have had several blogs over the years, all of which have been purged from the internet for various reasons, but I have backups of a few of them that were lucky to survive the hard drive crash a few years ago. The most popular of those blogs had over 600 posts when I took it down so there was quite a wealth of content to dive into.

Upon reflection I can honestly say that I have grown as a person for one simple reason, I hated what I read. It's not that any of it was particularly offensive or grating, far from it, most of it was quite benign, but that was part of the problem. I've always stressed the little things and let the big things take care of themselves, and my past writing really shows that. I didn't like what I read because most of it alluding to my daily struggles and although I am sure many people took comfort in knowing they weren't alone when they read it, for me looking back it just dredges up memories I would rather forget.

The Burden of Proof

I've been in two minds when it comes to just how much of this story I want to share but to be honest at this point I feel somewhat lost and unsure what to do. I don't expect a response to this post, I just wanted to put it out there into the Universe, if not for any other reason than maintaining my own sanity.

Almost a year ago I applied for a job and heard no reply; that's pretty standard as many job-seekers will tell you, the courtesy of a reply even a rejection seems to be something of a bygone era at this point. I originally thought nothing of this, it was just another application in a long line of applications that had been ignored. Then 5 months went by and out of nowhere I got an invitation for an interview. Now I know some places have backlogs but 5 months seems like quite the delay between a closing date and an invitation for an interview.

Steven has just signed in

The world has changed a lot in the last 20 years but one thing has remained constant and that is our desire to connect. In a recent post I wrote about the nostalgia for social media that actually served its purpose in creating social connections. I have thought about this a lot, the question of a world without social media and I've realised the emphasis on connections we form online today is very much public in nature. Whether you define that boundary as encompassing the world in its entirety of a limited subset of people from within it, the focus remains the same, to engage in a way that others can see.

In reflection I have come to realise that the death of platforms like MSN marked the point where this shift first occurred. In the days of MSN the emphasis was on one-to-one connections. You created an account and could add as many people as you liked but your conversations were one-to-one and private. Group conversations could be created but these were session based, ending when you closed the application requiring you to recreate them if you wanted to continue a conversation in a group. Despite the fact that apps like WhatsApp and Signal exist to fill the gap formed by the absence of the likes of MSN there is a fundamental difference between the two - you had to sign in to MSN. If you didn't sign in then you couldn't be reached, you weren't constantly connected available on demand.

From a distance

We are more connected today than we have ever been as a society. That level of interconnection comes with many benefits and many drawbacks. There's a lot to be said about the always-on state of the internet and the extent to which we make ourselves available to others but I feel those conversations have been somewhat exhausted in recent years.

The Covid-19 pandemic had many transformative impacts on society as a whole but I think the necessity of working from home and blurring of personal and professional boundaries brought significant attention to the need to division and distinction between the two.

What would a world without social media look like?

What would a world without social media look like? You might think that question is easy to answer, citing historical precedent attempting to make the case that a time before social media existed should form the basis of the answer, but that would be dismissive. In the last 20 years social media has fundamentally changed our society and left a lasting impression upon all of us, even those who don't actively use it have been affected by it.  A post-social world would not look like our pre-social world.

One thing is for sure though in my mind, the golden age of social media is dead. That's not to say it will disappear overnight, far from it in fact. When we look at other forms of media like television, film, music, and magazines, they have all had periods in time we refer to as their golden age, in some cases multiple. Their golden age, defined predominantly by the peak of our consumption of that form of media lasted for a similar period of time. Despite each of these forms of media now existing post-peak they are still present, still producing content, and we still consume them in significant quantities. The power and influence that they once held however has now been put in check.

The Static Evolution of a Restless Mind

What you know is not fixed, it is fluid, forever changing. When we learn, we add to what we know, but sometimes we chip away at the foundation we once thought would stand the test of time. When I was younger I liked to observe more than participate in social situations. I would watch intently always present in the moment, when others thought that I was miles away or lost in thought, I was processing everything that I perceived. The intergenerational conflict that I now realise is perpetual, was something in particular that amused me. Even as a teenager I was able to comprehend that change was abrasive and that people always resisted it, even when they were able to recognise that change was in their best interests, their self doubts and their desire to hold onto the past for good or for bad, made them hesitant.

With age I have come to realise that your attitude to change depends a lot on your frame of reference. As a teenager, for me and my peers the world we knew was the one we were experiencing in that moment. Growing up in Northern Ireland there was a lot of reflection and a great importance placed on remembering the past, but what was exceptional about my adolescence was that remembrance was not borne of nostalgia and longing for bygone years, it was very much a warning; the past was not something my generation romanticised it was something we never wanted to return to. The outcome of that atmosphere was the nurturing of an entire generation that was focused on the future instead.

1999

Sometimes songs that are meant to inspire happiness can be the saddest songs of all. The holiday season came and went and with it a cloud of depression descended upon me. I was never like this in the past, Christmas was one of my favourite times of the year. I used to look forward to it, even when I grew up and the season lost its magic, I still found joy and happiness in the decorations and the festivity. I was always a believer in the season of good will and kindness to all, I don't know when that changed. Perhaps it didn't change but rather the darkness that swells in the undercurrent has grown with age to the point where that energy isn't enough to compensate for it anymore.

I'm struggling this year more than I ever have emotionally, the extreme swings have given way to a long slow decline. I was listening to a song that wasn't even a Christmas track just one that Spotify decided to recommend '1999' by Charli XCX, despite the intention to drum up nostalgia for a simpler time, the track had the opposite effect on me. 1999 wasn't a good year for me, it's not something I'd particularly want to repeat if I am honest. The idea of going back to a time of innocence is intoxicating because ignorance is seductive it offers a false promise of protection from the horrors of the world but that's all it is, a false promise.