Apples and Shares

I swear, I got in from shopping today intending to rant about Apple's hypocrisy concerning intellectual property. Actually no, that's a lie - I got into an argument on Facebook this morning, and was intending on spending my weekly Jeff Day playing Assassin's Creed when I got a call from the missus asking me to retrieve some D&D books from the loft, and now I realise I'm probably not going to get a Jeff Day this week, so I'm writing instead. Which in a roundabout way sets up the meat to the two-veg that has been this post so far. The content of the Apple rant was not important. What was important was how quickly it descended into talk of market forces, and how I'll never sway the market against them - people buy iPhones and iPads now because a lot of people have already bought iPhones and iPads. They're easy enough to use. Me, I prefer Android - specifically HTC's Sense implementation of it - and always will, especially now they've let us use the task switch button as a menu button. But I digress. When I rant about things, I'm not trying to change the world. I'm not even trying to change anyone's mind, because it would be pretty arrogant of me to think I know better than other people. But I feel a desire boiling up inside me to speak up and say when something is wrong. Apple did not invent the tablet. Not by a long shot. Neither did Microsoft, as seemed to be the implication by Facebook's truncated thumbnail of the image I posted. But everyone thinks they did, and it does annoy me.

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Why, is what I want to know. Why am I writing? Why are YOU writing, if you regularly do? Why, at the heart of it, do any of us sit down and start pecking away at set of plastic buttons on a daily basis? I mean the discussion was held on Facebook, so it wasn't motivated by money. It wasn't for the sake of friendly discussion, because it got fairly unpleasant between me and an old friend, as well as mildly unpleasant with my own brother. And it wasn't for the sake of correction, because I don't expect for one second for them to walk away from the experience changed by it. But still I wrote, and still I am writing now, because of that burning desire to be heard, to communicate with other people. An idea forms in my head and nags at me, picking away at my attention, demanding to be released. Scientifically it's possibly something to do with dopamine, endorphins and rewarding a good idea to share with my tribe and thus bolster our chances of survival. But the upshot of it is that in attempting to share the way I see the world, in refusing to let a common misconception slide, I annoyed two people this morning. And put in the same situation again, I don't know if I would have done any differently. I wonder what it is about the mind of a writer, that our thoughts can be so annoying that the first thing we want to do is inflict them on other people?

Back in the Loop

So, here we are, and here you are. Communicating telepathically across the internet once more. For those of you that are not aware, the current financial situation and a lack of success at finding a 'real' job have landed me in the awkward position of actually seeing writing as the most realistic career path ahead of me. I know, right? DAVID CAMERON *shakes fist.* So, initial redrafting of the pieces intended for Kindle is done - I now need to type up the changes, cross-check it against lecturer feedback and get it correctly formatted. If successful, I will have a collection of short stories based on my creative assignments from the three years at university. Anyway, I'm not very good at talking about myself, because my parents raised me to believe that if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. Otherwise, the site is finally falling into shape a little. Ads aren't too obtrusive, margins line up on the main W3C compliant browsers correctly, and it's stopped doing that annoying thing where the sidebar keeps popping up in the middle of the header. Hated that.