In the first post in this series I alluded to the tumult that I went through in 2004, during that time I met a lot of new people when I moved around and thanks to that expansion in my horizons I was also introduced to a lot of music that I hadn't explored before. One album came as a gift from one of the students in my class at college and that was 'Lest We Forget: The Best of Marilyn Manson' - this is one of the greatest hits albums I chose to include in this list because it includes a selection of songs from the artist that I love that otherwise I'd have to include several albums to get them all in.
My favourite track on the whole album is a cover of 'Personal Jesus' originally recorded by Depeche Mode. Personal Jesus meant a lot to me in particular it served as a way to process thoughts and feelings I that were still unresolved after my Grandfather had died earlier in the year, and in years to come when I lost other family members in particular when I lost my Grandmother it was again a track that I turned to when I couldn't process what I was feeling. In this vein (S)Aint also served as a way to resolve internal conflict that I had which it isn't really important to go into depth explaining right now suffice to say that most people who are raised in a religious environment reach a point where they have a crisis of faith and they need to find reconciliation either in accepting what you have come to reject or in accepting the new reality of abandoning that mindset - for me it was the latter and the struggle to define exactly what I believed when everything I had built up fell apart.
At 16 that's something I think most people aren't yet equipped to process - I am 31 now and I am still not able to fully process it and I don't know many people who could either. Sooner or later you come to accept that what you believe has to be defined by your own faith in whatever form that takes, some people throw themselves into fields of study and devoted themselves religiously [ironically] to that field of study and take the empirical knowledge and facts that exist within it as their new foundation to build their lives upon. Whatever works for you, personally even now years later there are few things in life that I believe can be taken as a given and a certainty upon which you can rely - I think in many ways this is why some people react to violently to new scientific discoveries and new data that contradicts decades old teachings, gender politics in particular as an example is something that changes as scientific understanding advances but even those who advocate scientific reason and fact based beliefs refuse to accept that change and hold to old erroneous conclusions as dogma - the reality being the ultimate realisation that religion isn't the problem, the problem is following something religiously, you have to be able to question everything and if you hold anything as sacrosanct then it stops being something that is resilient and built on logic and reason and transforms into something that is built on faith rather than facts.
There's nothing wrong with the latter for the record as long as you can accept that reality and understand that you can't expect others to accept it too if they don't share in that faith. Marilyn Manson in many ways for me represents controversy in its literal sense to contravene the verse or to disrupt the stream, that and the concept of questioning authority and pursuing your own free will and deciding for yourself what you believe in and yes the irony does not escape me that Brian Warner chose the name Marilyn Manson as a portmanteau of Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson the latter being a cult leader and cults embodying authority and conformity but that's the point of Marilyn Manson, it's supposed to be ironic and it's supposed to piss in the face of people who want to decide for you who and what you are.
Manson is inextricably linked to The Church of Satan, which for most people there will be an immediate aversion and the belief that it entails worshipping the Devil in the same way that Christians worship their depiction of God, but what The Church of Satan represents in reality is quite the opposite. Manson is a priest of the Church of Satan and understands the tenets that underpin its philosophy, and it's important to point out here it is a philosophy, if you swallow the apprehension and actually take the time to explore it in depth what Anton LaVey created was not unreasonable and again ironically as the case may be actually represents a belief system that most people actually implicitly live their life by even those who have never even heard of LaVey. In particular the concept of kindness to those who deserve it and vengeance rather than turning the other cheek - these are tenets most people actually live their lives by in practice, treating others with kindness until they give them a reason not to, and seeking revenge on those who wrong them. The LaVey doctrines ultimately prize free will and self indulgence and represent counter culture when culture itself doesn't deliver what it promises it's only natural that some people will find it when seeking out alternative beliefs and reassurance when they try to make sense of the world.
Toys
A catalogue arrived in the mail this morning, from a Toy store that I occasionally buy things from. They offer discounts on some games and things that other retailers don't so that's that main reason I am a customer, as for the rest of the catalogue 99% of it is irrelevant to me. What I do find interesting however is the fact that it contains many of the toys and the types of games that I played with when I was a child. I got my first PC when I was about 6 years old, an Amstrad CPC-464. That was really around the time that I started to abandon toys generally and focus on technology. Prior to age 6, most of the toys I played with as a kid were either construction based like Lego, puzzle based like a Rubik's Cube or jigsaws of which I had many, or they were designed for creating make believe worlds, like farming sets or motor cities where you created a world with people living in them going about their lives.
As I grew older and my fascination with technology grew, I got a lot of games consoles, most of which I would get a year or two after release. I would come home from school, finish my homework and then sit for hours playing those consoles until dinner was ready. My first console was a Sega Master System II with Alex Kidd in Miracle World built in - a game which to date I have never finished without the help of an emulator and save states. That was also the first console where I was introduced to Sonic the Hedgehog. Over the years I have played many different Sonic games, I still maintain the Master System version was the most difficult. I eventually got into Nintendo consoles too with time and was introduced to Mario games too, and again the first games I played, the SNES All Stars collection and Super Mario World still remain to be my favourite games from the franchise, followed by Super Mario Sunshine for the Gamecube which I know is much maligned.
Liking games that didn't do that well or had poor critical response become something of a staple for me. One of my favourite games for the Master System was Asterix and Obelisk, for the SNES it was the Addams Family, and for the PSX is was Casper - the version where you explored Whipstaff Manor solving puzzles. Those games all represented puzzles, logic, reasoning, platforming, and exploration. All of these things have stayed with me as influence over what types of games I am drawn to most. Today one of the games I play most is Minecraft as it incorporates almost all of these elements in some way and provides you with the scope to create so much more.
Looking through the catalogue from this toy store however I do have to wonder how much the world has changed since I was a kid. I don't have children myself and I don't know anyone close to me who does. I can't really judge what it would be like raising a child today, but I would imagine there is much more pressure to introduce technology at a younger age. I do wonder how I would have handled that as a kid, even with the limits of technology at the time when I was a child, I did have what I would consider an obsession with games for a time, where all I wanted to do was play them and nothing else. Thankfully it wasn't really possible for me to do that in excess since I shared a bedroom and apart from the TV in the bedroom and the main TV in the living room there was nowhere else I could have played them - although for a time before we moved houses my Dad did build a sort of gaming grotto for me out of the unused space under the stairs.
Even as an adult I still have some of the physical toys I played with. I still have Rubik's Cubes, 3x3x3 and 4x4x4 variants, although they aren't the originals from my childhood those were long lost. I still have some of the teddies that I had when I was really young, mainly for sentimental reasons. I still have a few of my consoles too but I don't think any of them work anymore except the more recent ones. There is often the desire to buy all of those things again and hold onto them but if I did, they would take up a lot of space which I don't have - we live in a small house - and realistically I don't think I would actually use them enough to justify getting them, there would certainly be a novelty but I think it would wear off quite quickly and they would end up gathering dust as the originals had.
I find it fascinating when other people tell me what they held onto from their childhood, I've known people from either extremes, those that held onto everything and those that got rid of everything over the years. There are some things I wish I had looked after better and still had but again that would mostly be for sentimental reasons, not for practical reasons.
As I grew older and my fascination with technology grew, I got a lot of games consoles, most of which I would get a year or two after release. I would come home from school, finish my homework and then sit for hours playing those consoles until dinner was ready. My first console was a Sega Master System II with Alex Kidd in Miracle World built in - a game which to date I have never finished without the help of an emulator and save states. That was also the first console where I was introduced to Sonic the Hedgehog. Over the years I have played many different Sonic games, I still maintain the Master System version was the most difficult. I eventually got into Nintendo consoles too with time and was introduced to Mario games too, and again the first games I played, the SNES All Stars collection and Super Mario World still remain to be my favourite games from the franchise, followed by Super Mario Sunshine for the Gamecube which I know is much maligned.
Liking games that didn't do that well or had poor critical response become something of a staple for me. One of my favourite games for the Master System was Asterix and Obelisk, for the SNES it was the Addams Family, and for the PSX is was Casper - the version where you explored Whipstaff Manor solving puzzles. Those games all represented puzzles, logic, reasoning, platforming, and exploration. All of these things have stayed with me as influence over what types of games I am drawn to most. Today one of the games I play most is Minecraft as it incorporates almost all of these elements in some way and provides you with the scope to create so much more.
Looking through the catalogue from this toy store however I do have to wonder how much the world has changed since I was a kid. I don't have children myself and I don't know anyone close to me who does. I can't really judge what it would be like raising a child today, but I would imagine there is much more pressure to introduce technology at a younger age. I do wonder how I would have handled that as a kid, even with the limits of technology at the time when I was a child, I did have what I would consider an obsession with games for a time, where all I wanted to do was play them and nothing else. Thankfully it wasn't really possible for me to do that in excess since I shared a bedroom and apart from the TV in the bedroom and the main TV in the living room there was nowhere else I could have played them - although for a time before we moved houses my Dad did build a sort of gaming grotto for me out of the unused space under the stairs.
Even as an adult I still have some of the physical toys I played with. I still have Rubik's Cubes, 3x3x3 and 4x4x4 variants, although they aren't the originals from my childhood those were long lost. I still have some of the teddies that I had when I was really young, mainly for sentimental reasons. I still have a few of my consoles too but I don't think any of them work anymore except the more recent ones. There is often the desire to buy all of those things again and hold onto them but if I did, they would take up a lot of space which I don't have - we live in a small house - and realistically I don't think I would actually use them enough to justify getting them, there would certainly be a novelty but I think it would wear off quite quickly and they would end up gathering dust as the originals had.
I find it fascinating when other people tell me what they held onto from their childhood, I've known people from either extremes, those that held onto everything and those that got rid of everything over the years. There are some things I wish I had looked after better and still had but again that would mostly be for sentimental reasons, not for practical reasons.
It's Not Real
When you watch a soap opera, you know what you see on the screen is scripted, that it isn't real, and that everything it portrays is meant to entertain. That word, entertainment, is often assumed to be synonymous with enjoyment, that something has to be enjoyable to be entertaining. That's not true though, when you think about the history of entertainment, one of the oldest forms is theatre, and one of the most ubiquitous symbols with theatre and the arts that are associated with it are the masks of comedy and tragedy which originate in ancient Greece associated with Thalia and Melpomene the muses of comedy and tragedy respectively. These two muses and their masks represent both sides of one whole. Entertainment incorporates both sides when it wants to be realistic and true to life.
When you watch movies, and play games, likewise you know just as with scripted soap operas, what you see is not real, it is there for your entertainment, to make you feel happy or make you feel sad. I believe one of the reasons why the world can so often seem like a dark place devoid of hope is because we have much more sources of sadness readily available to us than we do sources of happiness. Take rolling news channels, these run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and almost every single story they cover is focused on something bad or sad that is happening in the world. There are no real equivalents of this for happiness. You can argue that a comedy channel would be the antithesis but I would argue those channels are more than negated by the plenitude of channels that exist devoted to rolling news, there are for more of the latter than the former, that's before you even get to the fact that comedy channels whilst being funny are not always happy, especially in the UK we have a penchant for black humour - making jokes about death and very dark subject matter.
If you wanted to turn on your Television and find something happy to watch for the next 24 hours, you'd be hard pressed to fill those 24 hours easily. If you wanted to be dejected by the world for 24 hours you would just switch on a news channel and sit and watch nothing else. What's even more depressing about this fact is that the latter you are almost guaranteed to be based in truth. Dismissing claims of fake news, the only other time you watch a news channel and see something that isn't true is when they cover an emerging story and are running with details that have not yet been fully confirmed or validated, or when you watch a news outlet that is so heavily politically biased that you can see how they spin every story to be a positive for their side or a negative for whoever their ideological opponents are.
There are TV shows however that claim to be true to life, reality TV as I have mentioned before has many problems not least of all the fact that most people who watch them believe reality means real, rather than imitation of real life. There is an important distinction there as many reality TV shows are heavily edited to create a narrative and make entertainment out of stories which on their own wouldn't be engaging enough for people to watch. Big Brother for example was often described as a case of the viewers being people sitting in a house watching people sitting in a house. That descriptor however reinforces the idea that you're watching people live the way they would live their lives in general, that's patently untrue though. If you knew there were dozens of cameras in your house watching your every move, you would act in a completely different way to the way you would if you were alone.
On the flip side there are shows that we watch which are not real, we know they are not, but they are presented in a way that they attempt to be realistic. Perhaps the best example of this would be entertainment franchises like WWE - World Wrestling Entertainment. The first reaction I often see people have whenever anyone talks about watching any WWE programme is "You know it's not real right?" like they are eager to be the one to tell a child Santa Claus doesn't exist and they want to see the reaction. Those same people though are the first to ignore others when they criticize them for caring about anything that is "reality TV"; I've seen arguments between people who watch Big Brother and people who watch WWE over which one is more realistic. I don't watch either but in the debate as to which is more realistic I would take the side of the latter as it doesn't claim to be real, the name itself tells you it's there for entertainment. People who watch it know full well that if they smacked someone across the face with a folding chair that person wouldn't stand up again and continue like nothing happened.
The willingness to believe that everything you see is real because someone tells you it is, without questioning it, I feel is quite dangerous. I have no surprise nor any astonishment at the state of politics around the world and the state of political discourse as a whole given this willingness. People have become too gullible and the violent reactions that emerge are in part down to the fact that people realise they have been turned into fools. If you treat people like idiots, you shouldn't expect logic and reason in their reactions, if you treat people like they are impulsive and easy to control, then you shouldn't be surprised when they react in unpredictable ways and fight against every measure of control that has been levied upon them. People are angry because you gave them something to be angry about, and whether or not it was real becomes irrelevant, they believed it was, so you have to suffer the consequence.
When you watch movies, and play games, likewise you know just as with scripted soap operas, what you see is not real, it is there for your entertainment, to make you feel happy or make you feel sad. I believe one of the reasons why the world can so often seem like a dark place devoid of hope is because we have much more sources of sadness readily available to us than we do sources of happiness. Take rolling news channels, these run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and almost every single story they cover is focused on something bad or sad that is happening in the world. There are no real equivalents of this for happiness. You can argue that a comedy channel would be the antithesis but I would argue those channels are more than negated by the plenitude of channels that exist devoted to rolling news, there are for more of the latter than the former, that's before you even get to the fact that comedy channels whilst being funny are not always happy, especially in the UK we have a penchant for black humour - making jokes about death and very dark subject matter.
If you wanted to turn on your Television and find something happy to watch for the next 24 hours, you'd be hard pressed to fill those 24 hours easily. If you wanted to be dejected by the world for 24 hours you would just switch on a news channel and sit and watch nothing else. What's even more depressing about this fact is that the latter you are almost guaranteed to be based in truth. Dismissing claims of fake news, the only other time you watch a news channel and see something that isn't true is when they cover an emerging story and are running with details that have not yet been fully confirmed or validated, or when you watch a news outlet that is so heavily politically biased that you can see how they spin every story to be a positive for their side or a negative for whoever their ideological opponents are.
There are TV shows however that claim to be true to life, reality TV as I have mentioned before has many problems not least of all the fact that most people who watch them believe reality means real, rather than imitation of real life. There is an important distinction there as many reality TV shows are heavily edited to create a narrative and make entertainment out of stories which on their own wouldn't be engaging enough for people to watch. Big Brother for example was often described as a case of the viewers being people sitting in a house watching people sitting in a house. That descriptor however reinforces the idea that you're watching people live the way they would live their lives in general, that's patently untrue though. If you knew there were dozens of cameras in your house watching your every move, you would act in a completely different way to the way you would if you were alone.
On the flip side there are shows that we watch which are not real, we know they are not, but they are presented in a way that they attempt to be realistic. Perhaps the best example of this would be entertainment franchises like WWE - World Wrestling Entertainment. The first reaction I often see people have whenever anyone talks about watching any WWE programme is "You know it's not real right?" like they are eager to be the one to tell a child Santa Claus doesn't exist and they want to see the reaction. Those same people though are the first to ignore others when they criticize them for caring about anything that is "reality TV"; I've seen arguments between people who watch Big Brother and people who watch WWE over which one is more realistic. I don't watch either but in the debate as to which is more realistic I would take the side of the latter as it doesn't claim to be real, the name itself tells you it's there for entertainment. People who watch it know full well that if they smacked someone across the face with a folding chair that person wouldn't stand up again and continue like nothing happened.
The willingness to believe that everything you see is real because someone tells you it is, without questioning it, I feel is quite dangerous. I have no surprise nor any astonishment at the state of politics around the world and the state of political discourse as a whole given this willingness. People have become too gullible and the violent reactions that emerge are in part down to the fact that people realise they have been turned into fools. If you treat people like idiots, you shouldn't expect logic and reason in their reactions, if you treat people like they are impulsive and easy to control, then you shouldn't be surprised when they react in unpredictable ways and fight against every measure of control that has been levied upon them. People are angry because you gave them something to be angry about, and whether or not it was real becomes irrelevant, they believed it was, so you have to suffer the consequence.
Why does Evil exist?
When children ask you why there is evil in the world, there are a lot of answers that you can give. Some people will give religious answers, others will delve into psychology albeit in a simplified way that children can understand. For me personally the answer that I would give is not one that is particularly encouraging. The truth is Mankind was never taught to be evil, it is in our nature. There is a depiction from Chinese Philosophy of two twins known as Yin and Yang, the former is black, and the latter is white, the two are twisted together to create the Taichi symbol, whilst they represent darkness and light respectively, they each contain a smaller circle that holds part of their opposing twin, this represents that in everything good there is always bad and in everything bad there is always good.
When asked why there is evil in the world I would simply say that there is evil because there is good. If there was no evil there would be no good, they exist as a scale you can make any scale bigger or smaller you can cut it in half in an attempt to remove the bit you don't like but what you're left with becomes the new scale, the two ends become the new extremes. You can only eliminate one end of the scale entirely by eliminating the whole thing.
When you look at the world, it's very easy to find darkness. It's very easy to see everything that is wrong with it. The negativity stands out, but the fact that mankind survives and lives on is because despite what you are led to believe, there is as much good in the world as there is bad. It's easy to argue against this and say that there is much more bad than good and that there is no balance enforced by nature but I would argue this isn't true. There is a balance and it is more solidified than we think. There is no association between genders, male and female as to who is more likely to be good or bad, but we can take the divide between male and female as an example of something that you would think there would be no balance enforced by nature. You would be wrong however.
There are around 7 billion people on Earth right now and incredibly, the distribution of male to female is approximately 1:1, this is despite the prevalence of patriarchal society, and some countries fixation on preferring male children, and all manner of human intervention in fertility and birth rates etc. The human race is not alone, most species that reproduce via sexual intercourse result in the same population ratio of 1:1 in terms of binary genders - the idea of binary gender in and of itself is archaic but that's an issue that requires a much more lengthy explanation, the short explanation is that gender in humans isn't determined by XY pairing as it was once thought to be, it is determined by the SRX/SRY box genes which have hundreds of permutations which is just one reason why gender profiling is problematic but as I said that's a topic for another time.
You can take things which involve much wider scope for random variation like the Euromillions lottery balls and you will see the same conformity eventually arise. The Euromillions is a lottery where 5 regular balls numbered 1 to 50 are drawn and 2 lucky star balls numbered 1 to 12 are drawn. It was launched in 2004 and has remained largely unchanged since its inception. There are other lotteries that have been around a lot longer but the consistency of the rules for this one make it a good example to use. There is a website you can use called LottoNumbers which details the most overdue balls for the Euromillions lottery among others. Balls generally reach between 20 and 120 days without being drawn. You can also see the most common balls which details the balls that have appeared most often. What you will observe if you pay attention to both of these pages over time is that the numbers that appear in each changes quite often. There are no balls that remain in either page forever. A standard distribution is eventually achieved and a standard deviation also emerges as to how long a ball can go whilst being the least or most common to appear. In the end there is an even distribution that emerges.
Good and Evil we are raised to believe are the result of how we are raised, and come down to a case of nurture as opposed to nature - I don't believe this is true personally. I don't believe you can ever achieve world peace and Utopia, and I don't believe that the world could ever descend into total war and a Dystopia, you can call me naive for thinking that but I maintain even if you managed to cause it, in the end it wouldn't last. Whichever side you sought to eliminate will eventually emerge in time. I know this to be true because it has already happened, as I have said Mankind was never taught to be evil, it is in our nature, but likewise Mankind was never taught to be good either, that too is in our nature. Humanity is Yin and Yang, there is evil in the world because there are people in the world, and so long as there are people, there will be evil, but there is also good in the world, because there are people in the world, and so long as there are people, there will be good. You just have to find it, and focus on it, and if you want the world to be a better place then you need to create more good in the world.
When asked why there is evil in the world I would simply say that there is evil because there is good. If there was no evil there would be no good, they exist as a scale you can make any scale bigger or smaller you can cut it in half in an attempt to remove the bit you don't like but what you're left with becomes the new scale, the two ends become the new extremes. You can only eliminate one end of the scale entirely by eliminating the whole thing.
When you look at the world, it's very easy to find darkness. It's very easy to see everything that is wrong with it. The negativity stands out, but the fact that mankind survives and lives on is because despite what you are led to believe, there is as much good in the world as there is bad. It's easy to argue against this and say that there is much more bad than good and that there is no balance enforced by nature but I would argue this isn't true. There is a balance and it is more solidified than we think. There is no association between genders, male and female as to who is more likely to be good or bad, but we can take the divide between male and female as an example of something that you would think there would be no balance enforced by nature. You would be wrong however.
There are around 7 billion people on Earth right now and incredibly, the distribution of male to female is approximately 1:1, this is despite the prevalence of patriarchal society, and some countries fixation on preferring male children, and all manner of human intervention in fertility and birth rates etc. The human race is not alone, most species that reproduce via sexual intercourse result in the same population ratio of 1:1 in terms of binary genders - the idea of binary gender in and of itself is archaic but that's an issue that requires a much more lengthy explanation, the short explanation is that gender in humans isn't determined by XY pairing as it was once thought to be, it is determined by the SRX/SRY box genes which have hundreds of permutations which is just one reason why gender profiling is problematic but as I said that's a topic for another time.
You can take things which involve much wider scope for random variation like the Euromillions lottery balls and you will see the same conformity eventually arise. The Euromillions is a lottery where 5 regular balls numbered 1 to 50 are drawn and 2 lucky star balls numbered 1 to 12 are drawn. It was launched in 2004 and has remained largely unchanged since its inception. There are other lotteries that have been around a lot longer but the consistency of the rules for this one make it a good example to use. There is a website you can use called LottoNumbers which details the most overdue balls for the Euromillions lottery among others. Balls generally reach between 20 and 120 days without being drawn. You can also see the most common balls which details the balls that have appeared most often. What you will observe if you pay attention to both of these pages over time is that the numbers that appear in each changes quite often. There are no balls that remain in either page forever. A standard distribution is eventually achieved and a standard deviation also emerges as to how long a ball can go whilst being the least or most common to appear. In the end there is an even distribution that emerges.
Good and Evil we are raised to believe are the result of how we are raised, and come down to a case of nurture as opposed to nature - I don't believe this is true personally. I don't believe you can ever achieve world peace and Utopia, and I don't believe that the world could ever descend into total war and a Dystopia, you can call me naive for thinking that but I maintain even if you managed to cause it, in the end it wouldn't last. Whichever side you sought to eliminate will eventually emerge in time. I know this to be true because it has already happened, as I have said Mankind was never taught to be evil, it is in our nature, but likewise Mankind was never taught to be good either, that too is in our nature. Humanity is Yin and Yang, there is evil in the world because there are people in the world, and so long as there are people, there will be evil, but there is also good in the world, because there are people in the world, and so long as there are people, there will be good. You just have to find it, and focus on it, and if you want the world to be a better place then you need to create more good in the world.
Music Monday #1: Love Angel Music Baby by Gwen Stefani
I wanted to write some posts for this blog that were a little different to the other topics I have covered so far. I realise that a lot of the topics I cover can be quite heavy and whilst that is a place where my mentality thrives, and I find comfort there, it's not where my mind resides all the time. I do have other interests but I haven't really shared those much on here so I wanted to change that. When it came to thinking about what I could share one of the first things that came to mind was my love of Music. It should be stated right off the bat my taste in Music is somewhat strange to most people in that it ranges quite a bit, there are artists you would never associated that sit side by side in my music library and they're played just as much as each other.
I wanted to lay a few ground rules in this first post, just to keep things simple for now, these posts will be made every Monday with the aim being to post 52 for 2020. Each post will focus on a particular album and the only real rule I have is not to include compilation albums with the exception of greatest hit compilations. The reason I made this rule is because I love Dance, Trance, Electronica, and genres of music closely related to them, these make up a chunk of my library but they are almost entirely compilations that have a mix of artists featured on them and my ratings for those individual artists vary quite a bit so without going through the albums track by track it wouldn't give a fair depiction of what I like and what I don't. Greatest Hit albums are an exception as they tend to be centred around a single artist and they provide a greater accuracy when it comes to how my opinion of the album reflects my opinion of the artist. The only other rule should go without saying but for the sake of clarity, these are all albums that I like, by artists that I like, I won't be featuring anything in these posts that I don't actually listen to.
To that end, the first album I wanted to feature is 'Love Angel Music Baby' by Gwen Stefani. This album was released in November 2004, I was three months into my Diploma at College when it was released, I bought it the same day that I bought Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code which at the time had been out for over a year but had been a book that I was reluctant to read if not for any other reason than the fact it felt over hyped. The reason I mention the book in tandem with this album though is because I read the book whilst listening to this album on repeat - that's not unusual for me I do that quite a lot music helps me think and it helps me focus, I know for most people the opposite is true and that they find it a distraction but this was never really the case for me. If I want to use one sense in particular, I find that repetitive distraction of the other senses helps create a sort of bubble of concentration where everything else gets drowned out.
Love Angel Music Baby is one of those albums where I love almost every track - there are are only a handful of albums I can actually say I love every track and a few will feature in these posts. The track I love most is called Serious but the album is perhaps best known for Hollabeck Girl, Harajuku Girls, or What You Waiting For. This album for me was Gwen Stefani's peak, her magnum opus, an album that only 1 other came close to which will be featured later in this list. It's been 16 years now since the album was released and to me it hasn't aged a day, every track still has relevance for me, each one evokes a different feeling and triggers memories of people and places that make me feel happy for the most part so it still remains as a go-to album when I want something to try and get into that mindset.
2004 was a tumultuous year for me my Grandfather passed away close to the start, we moved house in the middle of the year, and I started college in September, I turned 16 that year and experienced so many changes and rebirths several times over that I can't look back at that year and find anything really that was static, it represents a period of flux for me or flames when the proverbial Phoenix was reborn and rose from the ashes. Love Angel Music Baby is one of those albums that will feature prominently in my library and I can't imagine I'll ever grow tired of it or ever want to get rid of it.
I wanted to lay a few ground rules in this first post, just to keep things simple for now, these posts will be made every Monday with the aim being to post 52 for 2020. Each post will focus on a particular album and the only real rule I have is not to include compilation albums with the exception of greatest hit compilations. The reason I made this rule is because I love Dance, Trance, Electronica, and genres of music closely related to them, these make up a chunk of my library but they are almost entirely compilations that have a mix of artists featured on them and my ratings for those individual artists vary quite a bit so without going through the albums track by track it wouldn't give a fair depiction of what I like and what I don't. Greatest Hit albums are an exception as they tend to be centred around a single artist and they provide a greater accuracy when it comes to how my opinion of the album reflects my opinion of the artist. The only other rule should go without saying but for the sake of clarity, these are all albums that I like, by artists that I like, I won't be featuring anything in these posts that I don't actually listen to.
To that end, the first album I wanted to feature is 'Love Angel Music Baby' by Gwen Stefani. This album was released in November 2004, I was three months into my Diploma at College when it was released, I bought it the same day that I bought Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code which at the time had been out for over a year but had been a book that I was reluctant to read if not for any other reason than the fact it felt over hyped. The reason I mention the book in tandem with this album though is because I read the book whilst listening to this album on repeat - that's not unusual for me I do that quite a lot music helps me think and it helps me focus, I know for most people the opposite is true and that they find it a distraction but this was never really the case for me. If I want to use one sense in particular, I find that repetitive distraction of the other senses helps create a sort of bubble of concentration where everything else gets drowned out.
Love Angel Music Baby is one of those albums where I love almost every track - there are are only a handful of albums I can actually say I love every track and a few will feature in these posts. The track I love most is called Serious but the album is perhaps best known for Hollabeck Girl, Harajuku Girls, or What You Waiting For. This album for me was Gwen Stefani's peak, her magnum opus, an album that only 1 other came close to which will be featured later in this list. It's been 16 years now since the album was released and to me it hasn't aged a day, every track still has relevance for me, each one evokes a different feeling and triggers memories of people and places that make me feel happy for the most part so it still remains as a go-to album when I want something to try and get into that mindset.
2004 was a tumultuous year for me my Grandfather passed away close to the start, we moved house in the middle of the year, and I started college in September, I turned 16 that year and experienced so many changes and rebirths several times over that I can't look back at that year and find anything really that was static, it represents a period of flux for me or flames when the proverbial Phoenix was reborn and rose from the ashes. Love Angel Music Baby is one of those albums that will feature prominently in my library and I can't imagine I'll ever grow tired of it or ever want to get rid of it.
INR6.39
Amazon has a programme called the Kindle Direct Publishing Select Fund - KDP Select. The programme in a nutshell allows authors - like me - to make their books available for free to anyone who is a member of Kindle Unlimited or who borrows the book through the Kindle Owners' Lending Library - KOLL.
Every month I receive an email from Amazon Accounts Payable that lets me know a payment is on its way. There's a payment report that lets you see how much money is coming your way. This month I logged in and found I was to be paid INR6.39 - forgive me for not knowing the Indian Rupee to Pound Sterling exchange rate off the top of my head, I had to use Google to get an estimate of how much that was. The answer, £0.07 which first of all, it seems pointless to even pay that, the cost of processing the payment is probably more than the payment itself, second of all, the way KDP Select works is that every month Amazon sets aside so many millions of dollars for the fund. In that same month the total number of pages read across all books on all platforms by all authors around the world [you get the point] - every page read, is divided into the fund to return a price per page. You as an author are then paid an amount based on how many pages of your books people read.
Owing to the way this works, it's not unusual to get varying sized payments from Amazon. However £0.07 made me stop and think, first of all, I'm flattered someone in India actually showed an interest in my work, I can't for the life of me think why though. Second of all I dug into the reports dashboard on KDP and found that there were a grand total of 12 pages read from one of my books - again the title in particular has left me wondering "why?" not least of all why 12 pages?
I don't normally question this sort of thing, for a start I don't normally drill down through my reports to actually get an idea of who reads my books, that's not why I wrote them. It's like analytics here on this site, they are there because Blogger - the site that hosts this blog - provides them. I never look at those either. I know some people will scold me for that and decry me for not putting more effort into search engine optimization and all the rest of it. Let me make one thing clear though, I know all about those things, I've used them professionally, I choose not to use them here because I genuinely don't care. I mean no offence to anyone reading this blog, I am happy you are here, but this blog is very much treated like a diary that I write in that I happen to leave open online for anyone to read. I have said before I would continue to write for this blog whether I got 1 reader or 1 million, or none at all, that's not the point.
The same is true to an extent with my books, I write them in the hope that they will help someone, and they do provide an income but it's not an income I rely on. I have to say though £0.07 is the smallest single payment I have received from Amazon and I found the whole thing amusing. Even more comical is the idea that before direct deposit payments were supported, Amazon used to send actual cheques. If I had received a cheque from Amazon for 7p I think I would have actually kept it rather than depositing it purely for the novelty of having something that seems so ridiculous.
If anyone at Amazon KDP should happen to read this blog post, I'd love the option on the payments section of the reports dashboard to donate the money to charity, if that had been there that's probably what I would have done in this instance.
Every month I receive an email from Amazon Accounts Payable that lets me know a payment is on its way. There's a payment report that lets you see how much money is coming your way. This month I logged in and found I was to be paid INR6.39 - forgive me for not knowing the Indian Rupee to Pound Sterling exchange rate off the top of my head, I had to use Google to get an estimate of how much that was. The answer, £0.07 which first of all, it seems pointless to even pay that, the cost of processing the payment is probably more than the payment itself, second of all, the way KDP Select works is that every month Amazon sets aside so many millions of dollars for the fund. In that same month the total number of pages read across all books on all platforms by all authors around the world [you get the point] - every page read, is divided into the fund to return a price per page. You as an author are then paid an amount based on how many pages of your books people read.
Owing to the way this works, it's not unusual to get varying sized payments from Amazon. However £0.07 made me stop and think, first of all, I'm flattered someone in India actually showed an interest in my work, I can't for the life of me think why though. Second of all I dug into the reports dashboard on KDP and found that there were a grand total of 12 pages read from one of my books - again the title in particular has left me wondering "why?" not least of all why 12 pages?
I don't normally question this sort of thing, for a start I don't normally drill down through my reports to actually get an idea of who reads my books, that's not why I wrote them. It's like analytics here on this site, they are there because Blogger - the site that hosts this blog - provides them. I never look at those either. I know some people will scold me for that and decry me for not putting more effort into search engine optimization and all the rest of it. Let me make one thing clear though, I know all about those things, I've used them professionally, I choose not to use them here because I genuinely don't care. I mean no offence to anyone reading this blog, I am happy you are here, but this blog is very much treated like a diary that I write in that I happen to leave open online for anyone to read. I have said before I would continue to write for this blog whether I got 1 reader or 1 million, or none at all, that's not the point.
The same is true to an extent with my books, I write them in the hope that they will help someone, and they do provide an income but it's not an income I rely on. I have to say though £0.07 is the smallest single payment I have received from Amazon and I found the whole thing amusing. Even more comical is the idea that before direct deposit payments were supported, Amazon used to send actual cheques. If I had received a cheque from Amazon for 7p I think I would have actually kept it rather than depositing it purely for the novelty of having something that seems so ridiculous.
If anyone at Amazon KDP should happen to read this blog post, I'd love the option on the payments section of the reports dashboard to donate the money to charity, if that had been there that's probably what I would have done in this instance.
Numerology
As human beings there are a lot of things that we have managed to define and catalogue when it comes to the Universe, its structure and its workings. For all we have managed to discern however, there is a great deal we do not know. Despite the desire to approach the process of discovery with logic and reason, through method and rationale, there is an inevitability in all of us to hold a degree of superstition. We become wary of certain things, even when we know and understand that such wariness is illogical and has no basis in truth. Still of all, superstition persists.
One such area that I find fascination is the study of Numerology. Up there with Astrology and many other supernatural inclinations, Numerology is one of those things which has no basis in any Scientific study. Although perhaps Numerology is the closest supernatural curiosity to actual Scientific study as it is more structured and less subjective than the other divinations. Still Numerology is something which is never linked to causality, only ever linked to correlation and coincidence, but as they say, correlation does not imply causation.
Nevertheless, I find the use of Numerology and the study of this art as something of interest. Two of my favourite branches of Psychology are Behavioural Psychology and Cognitive Psychology. The former deals with how our behaviour is rationalized and the latter deals with our thought processes. The two are closely linked and one can often lead to the other and vice versa. What I find fascinating about Numerology is ultimately the question of whether beliefs, desires, intentions, and expectations affect outcomes to the extent where false positives appear and cognitive bias occurs, or to put it simply, bad things happen because we expect them to and may be unconsciously causing them to happen, or whether there is any real correlation or causation at play.
I have said before, when it comes to the lottery, you are just as likely to win with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, as you are with any other 6 numbers chosen at random. For some reason numbers pose something of an anomaly in our minds when it comes to processing probability and reason. Despite the above statement being statistically true, we still want to insist such a series is less likely to occur than any other 6 random numbers.
The more attentive among you and more superstitious among you will have already been slightly triggered by the previous paragraph owing to the three sixes mentioned within it. This is yet another factor in this field of study - the religious and cultural significance of the numbers we fixate upon. This causes bias when humans are asked to give random numbers, with a particular persistence and importance given to the number 7.
There are others that we commonly associate with bad luck, like the number 13 or the number 23. Both of these are seen to be bad - the former however is deemed to be good luck within my family which adds yet another element to consider here - the way we are raised and any Psychological conditioning that you can ascertain based upon it.
Other numbers people choose to fixate upon tend to be related to mathematical concepts. In the world of technology for instance most counting and arithmetic inevitably involves binary, the only number system that computers understand at a native level. This gives rise to patterns that are centred around the number 2 and its powers, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, and 1024 are perhaps the most prevalent.
Whilst all of these deal with the concept in itself, the curiosity and the case for observation and study comes when these numbers are incorporated into peoples' lives. Taking 13 as an example, there are between 1 and 3 occurrences of the date Friday the 13th per year, depending on the day of the week that the year started on, and whether or not it is a leap year. The rarity of such an event gives it more visibility when it occurs. The day in itself is widely believed to be one of bad luck. 2020 will have two occurrences, one in March and one in November.
Someone, somewhere will experience bad luck on those days, by simple virtue of the fact that every day, someone, somewhere has bad luck, and those days are no different. As I said before though, what I find interesting is the question of whether people will fixate on the fact that bad luck coincides with the date, or whether somehow they unconsciously cause it to happen because they expect something to go wrong on that date, Numerology attempts to rationalise this speculation with explanations offered where correlations occur, the more people experience bad luck on Friday the 13th the more Numerology would assert that the date is likely to be the cause.
I am yet to find any real use for Numerology however beyond the mere entertainment and the satisfaction of curiosity both of which are fed by seeing the correlation of data, if you're interested in an example of this a good place to start would be the Lincoln Kennedy correlations of which there are quite a few and countless articles exist breaking those down but I'd recommend the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Blog post from 2007 that focuses on these connections.
One such area that I find fascination is the study of Numerology. Up there with Astrology and many other supernatural inclinations, Numerology is one of those things which has no basis in any Scientific study. Although perhaps Numerology is the closest supernatural curiosity to actual Scientific study as it is more structured and less subjective than the other divinations. Still Numerology is something which is never linked to causality, only ever linked to correlation and coincidence, but as they say, correlation does not imply causation.
Nevertheless, I find the use of Numerology and the study of this art as something of interest. Two of my favourite branches of Psychology are Behavioural Psychology and Cognitive Psychology. The former deals with how our behaviour is rationalized and the latter deals with our thought processes. The two are closely linked and one can often lead to the other and vice versa. What I find fascinating about Numerology is ultimately the question of whether beliefs, desires, intentions, and expectations affect outcomes to the extent where false positives appear and cognitive bias occurs, or to put it simply, bad things happen because we expect them to and may be unconsciously causing them to happen, or whether there is any real correlation or causation at play.
I have said before, when it comes to the lottery, you are just as likely to win with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, as you are with any other 6 numbers chosen at random. For some reason numbers pose something of an anomaly in our minds when it comes to processing probability and reason. Despite the above statement being statistically true, we still want to insist such a series is less likely to occur than any other 6 random numbers.
The more attentive among you and more superstitious among you will have already been slightly triggered by the previous paragraph owing to the three sixes mentioned within it. This is yet another factor in this field of study - the religious and cultural significance of the numbers we fixate upon. This causes bias when humans are asked to give random numbers, with a particular persistence and importance given to the number 7.
There are others that we commonly associate with bad luck, like the number 13 or the number 23. Both of these are seen to be bad - the former however is deemed to be good luck within my family which adds yet another element to consider here - the way we are raised and any Psychological conditioning that you can ascertain based upon it.
Other numbers people choose to fixate upon tend to be related to mathematical concepts. In the world of technology for instance most counting and arithmetic inevitably involves binary, the only number system that computers understand at a native level. This gives rise to patterns that are centred around the number 2 and its powers, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, and 1024 are perhaps the most prevalent.
Whilst all of these deal with the concept in itself, the curiosity and the case for observation and study comes when these numbers are incorporated into peoples' lives. Taking 13 as an example, there are between 1 and 3 occurrences of the date Friday the 13th per year, depending on the day of the week that the year started on, and whether or not it is a leap year. The rarity of such an event gives it more visibility when it occurs. The day in itself is widely believed to be one of bad luck. 2020 will have two occurrences, one in March and one in November.
Someone, somewhere will experience bad luck on those days, by simple virtue of the fact that every day, someone, somewhere has bad luck, and those days are no different. As I said before though, what I find interesting is the question of whether people will fixate on the fact that bad luck coincides with the date, or whether somehow they unconsciously cause it to happen because they expect something to go wrong on that date, Numerology attempts to rationalise this speculation with explanations offered where correlations occur, the more people experience bad luck on Friday the 13th the more Numerology would assert that the date is likely to be the cause.
I am yet to find any real use for Numerology however beyond the mere entertainment and the satisfaction of curiosity both of which are fed by seeing the correlation of data, if you're interested in an example of this a good place to start would be the Lincoln Kennedy correlations of which there are quite a few and countless articles exist breaking those down but I'd recommend the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Blog post from 2007 that focuses on these connections.
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