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.

Ann Widdecombe calls herself a bigot

Oh dear. It appears the Widdecopter has flown herself into another power line, this time in attempting to defend her bigoted views on gay marriage. Bigoted? Surely that's the very word she set out to distance herself from? After all, Ann has made her views clear on both issues - on gay marriage itself, and on what qualifies someone - in her eyes - as a bigot:

"The real bigots, those who really deserve to be described as such, the real extremists, the real nasties, are those who believe that those who dissent from their views have no right to do so and that the state itself should silence them."

Fair enough. Except Ann's view is that "the complementarity of a man and a woman in a union open to procreation is unique and cannot be replicated by other unions." That straight marriage represents some kind of ideal. And she does have some semblance of a point - in her eyes, straight couples can have children, gay ones can't - that's what makes them 'unique.' Admittedly that's because her own party is doing everything they can to stop gay couples adopting or getting custody, but that's not important to Ann right now. What's important to Ann is that good old straight, heterosexual marriage is 'special.' Well she has the right to that opinion, as long as it remains just an opinion. The wonderful thing about opinions is that everyone can have a few. And as she rightly stated, the real bigotry comes when someone tries to silence the opinion of another just because they don't like it. Like say, by supporting the continued ban on one type of marriage because you think another is special. That's right Ann. You said that believing others have no right to their opinions is bigotry, and then continued on to state why gay people have no right to their opinion. After all, if the opinion that gay people should be allowed to marry was a valid one, then they would have the right to do so. If they have the right to an opinion, they have the right to marry - it's only the dissent of people who disagree with them that stops them from doing so. Then you said believing "that the state itself should silence" those opinions is bigotry, and then made your case for the continuation of a statute-enforced ban on gay marriage by the state. If they have a right to marry, and you want the state to ban them from doing so just because you / your religion don't agree with it, your own argument at the conference kicks in. Seems fairly clear cut to me. You just called yourself a bigot on public record. Nobody else did; you did it all by yourself. sauce: Tory conference: Activist anger over gay marriage

One- Line Reviews

Apologies for the recent blackout. The list of drafts that greets me on my dashboard has let me diagnose the problem - I had become fixated on newsblogging, and launching into diatribes supported by links, evidence and bibliographies. In other words, all the things that made me hate writing back at university. Even now, I'm looking at the cursor blinking in front of me waiting for a naturally flowing subject to pop out of my subconscious, complete with references, point, structure and summary. Unfortunately my brain has to be wrestled into that shape. I have the organisation skills of a piss-up in a brewery, after the piss up. On the other hand, having seen what structure and references can do to the likeability of a piece, I am loath to become just another mouthpiece screaming into the void. With that in mind, here are some one-line reviews of things I have recently encountered: Minecraft: It's like OCD Porn. Help me. (9.5/10) The Social Network: Business people screw each other over, who knew. Also Justin Timberlake is perfectly cast as a massive douche. No 'splosions. (8/10) Double Entry Book-keeping: Functionality 9/10 - Fun -ohgodkillmenow/10 Co-Op Marinated Chinese Elmwood Chicken Skewers: Dry, but delicious. Good with a nice thick sauce, like gravy with sweet chilli added. (7.5/10) Game of Thrones: I CANNOT WAIT TO FIND OUT WHICH ONE SEAN BEAN PLAYS. IT'S TONY STARK, ISN'T IT. WAIT, NED STARK. WHO CALLS A FANTASY CHARACTER NED. OH MY GOD WOLVES (10/10) The Leveson Inquiry: Hoping they're at the mid-season lull, preparing for an explosive finale next week when David Cameron accidentally lets slip mid-question exactly how much Murdoch semen he ingested on the way to number 10. (5/10 with the potential to hit 9 next week). With that in mind I excuse myself, and slip back into the void. Incidentally, do feel free to leave a comment. The plugins are getting lonely.

Work / Life Balance

It's been more than a week since my last post, and I struggle (thanks to the real world) to find time to update. This is not a situation I wanted to find myself in, nor did I think it was a situation I would find myself in, after the last three years of solid dossing about. But there we go. Work / life balance is tough enough at the best of times, but when you try and add a third 'dreams' option, it all sort of goes a bit wrong, like Prince Philip welcoming a visiting dignitary - you can struggle as long as you want, but eventually something horrible is going to happen. But I am, oddly, more determined than ever to keep hacking away at it, because it's the only way to retain some semblance of balance. Speaking of which: http://www.itv.com/news/2012-05-02/an-electricians-view-on-what-sparked-a-tory-backlash/

"At that time, he’d concluded Labour was failing to get to grips with the benefits system which was rewarding too many people who, in his view, did not deserve it and were not, like him, getting up at the crack of dawn each morning to bring money home for his family."

What's funny is that the electrician's initial reasoning for voting Tory was out of spite at those who he saw as 'sponging' from his taxes. But now that the government has branded his handouts as sponging, he's getting upset. Turns out it's easy to judge other people based on assumptions, but when you're on the recieving end of it, it's not so funny. The grammar is a bit odd as well, making it seem like he wants everyone in the country to bring home money for his family. But I digress. What really nags at me is the wording - people who don't get up 'at the crack of dawn each morning.' I - for reference - don't get up at the crack of dawn. I don't work late in the evenings, and I don't take work home. And you know what? That's healthy. That's sane. It's absolutely correct that I should have the right to spend my spare time relaxing and winding down. Taking life at a slower pace leads to less hasty decisions, a longer lifespan through avoiding stress, and a greater ability to look at the world without jealousy or spite toward those who avoid your pitfalls. If everyone was more in control of their own priorities, I can't help feeling there'd be less anger, less stress, and less people on the Jeremy Kyle show. But it almost seems as though people are determined to poison the lives of others, dragging everyone else down to their level to make things equal. But 'fair' does not have to mean everyone else's lives suck as much as yours. It's like the furore over public sector pensions. A lot of the red-tops got upset and asked why government workers should be getting something 'special.' The thing is, they're not. They're getting a good entitlement to a pension that everyone used to have before the Maxwells of the world decided pensions were an optional extra they could cull to net themselves another yacht full of prostitutes (an expense I believe you can still write off as taxable under the heading 'yachtstitutes'). We are not slaves, and the best proof of this is that we do have choices over how to spend what little time God gave us on this earth. Some choose to throw that time into a career. That's their choice. It's not mine, nor should it have to be. Getting up at the crack of dawn and working through 'til sunset is not something people should be expected to do, and yet it seems to be on the rise. Unpaid overtime, travelling to work, the great '37.5 hours a week' trick... To employers it seems fine to ask to you to put in the extra work, because they do too. Of course they do. That's why they're paid more. To compensate them for the extra work they're taking on. But it almost seems that the idea of money as compensation for effort or goods has been forgotten; it's just a thing that we all want more of, and expect more of as we 'rise' through the corporate pyramid. Now, it's gotten to the point that the people at the top are making millions, and for what? To sit in comfortable offices with secretaries filling out their paperwork, attending lunches and shirking responsibility down the chain when it all goes tits up. Getting up at the crack of dawn makes sense at the top of the pyramid, it doesn't at the bottom. If the economic truism 'time is money' really applies, then when companies cut into your time, you're getting a stealth pay-cut. But more and more, it seems that we're pushing backwards into an age where people are the property of their employers, and it's thanks largely to this creeping re-balancing of misery from people who want to see things 'fair.' You know, 'Redistributed evenly.' 'Shared.' Wait, no, that's Socialism. The tabloids hate socialism, so it can't be that. I'll leave you with this from Michael Crichton:

"Thirty thousand years ago, when when men were doing cave paintings at Lascaux, they worked twenty hours a week to provide themselves with food and shelter and clothing. The rest of the time, they could play, or sleep or do whatever they wanted... Twenty hours a week, thirty thousand years ago... I want people to wake up!"

- Michael Crichton, 'Jurassic Park'

Just imagine what you could get done in your spare time if you only worked twenty hours a week.