52 Weeks : 52 Goals

I've decided for 2025 to do a different take on New Year's Resolutions. In years gone by I used to make a few realistic goals for myself, things which I thought I could actually achieve in a year, and inevitably I failed to achieve those resolutions - I'm not even sure how many I have kept over the years. Then for a while I became vehemently opposed to the entire concept deciding that it was a tradition that set people up for failure, and only amplified misery and feelings of worthlessness.

73 Questions inspired by Vogue

I've always enjoyed those videos on Youtube where Vogue takes a random celebrity or someone of influence and asks them 73 questions in an effort to get to know them better. It's interesting to see how a person sees the world and even when they don't give simple answers, the response they give tells you a lot about the person and their priorities.

The actual questions asked varies in each video it's not the same 73 questions every time I believe, so I had a look around various blogs where people made their own posts and used those as the basis for this list. So here are my 73 Questions and their answers.

Procrastination

Procrastination gets quite a bad rap and I've been thinking about why that's the case. In a previous post I mentioned the fact that our society dominated by capitalism is obsessed with productivity and uses it to define our self-worth and I've come to the conclusion the derision for procrastination is just an extension of that obsession.

When you really stop and think about it, procrastination is the only true choice a human can make, because you're actively choosing to do something you want to do as opposed to something you're expected to do. When you're supposed to do something, or there's an expectation placed upon you, it's because it is a choice someone else has already made for you, the only thing you get to "choose" is whether to go along with it or not.

The Other Great Depression

Are you happy with your life? That should be a simple question to answer but for far too many, myself included, the answer is not so simple - not least of all being that the answer is often a dynamic variable rather than a constant. Whether I am happy with my life varies depending on when you ask me, morning, noon, or night, and a whole host of influences in my life that fluctuate with much less rhythm and routine.

I've felt like I am not alone in this view, when I look at my circle of friends there are few that are thriving, most are simply surviving, and at the age of 36 it pains me to admit that I have lost some people who didn't survive. I've written about my own complex relationship with suicide and my past attempts, and of the concept of survivor's guilt that leads me to question why I am still here and others aren't - others I thought stronger than me in almost every regard.

The repetition of life to the point of monotony with the absence of emotion to me is the hallmark of depression - there are many other ways to define it, which I think are also valid depending on the context, but this as much I can say is a sign of depression, when people are still alive but they aren't really living.

Dickotomy - The Dichotomy of Dick

As a gay man I have observed a strange phenomenon when it comes to the pursuit of dick both in my own behaviour and in the behaviour of other gay men. I am going to refer to this a the dichotomy of dick - or dickotomy.

The shortest explanation I can give, is that the more emotional potential a connection has, the more resistant we seem to be when it comes to sexual advances and their timings.

One thing I love about Bluesky is the communal acceptance that Horny-on-main is the default, this is enabled by the fact that you can tag posts as adult or nudity using labels and anyone who hasn't opted in to seeing posts of that nature won't see it. You have to enable adult content when you join, it's off by default.

Preserving Positivity

I spend a lot of time online, some of that time is spent by choice in my free time, the rest is by necessity as most of my disposable income comes from the internet. When you spend a lot of time online you get to see unsolicited opinions almost constantly, knowing these are opinions and not facts makes them easy to ignore but I do recognise that the ability to differentiate between opinion and fact is a point of critical thinking that people seem to be increasingly lacking.

When you can't tell the difference between an opinion and a fact it leaves you open to influence, some people make entire careers out of exploiting that point of ignorance, people we aptly refer to as influencers.

Power vs Power

I was born in 1988, so technically I am a child of the 80s yet the bulk of my childhood was spent growing up in the 90s. Even though the Internet existed for a few decades before I was born, the World Wide Web, the software application that has now become synonymous with the word "Internet" wasn't invented until the early 90s, it grew up and came of age alongside me which gives me and many of my generation a particular perspective when it comes to recognizing the potential that a technology can hold and the realisation of its application.

I grew up seeing some people fear the internet, surreptitiously some might admit that stance proved prescient, but from a more pragmatic mindset that ideological opposition was beyond prudent and decidedly pedantic. That fear lead them to resist the internet as much as they could, to the point that some of the older opponents in particular still don't use it, and whilst they live healthy and fulfilling lives without it, they do make their lives needlessly complicated and suffer from the self-imposed disadvantage that result.

Leopards and Leaders

I've been thinking about the concept of Leadership and what I think it means to me, after hearing other peoples' definitions of it I've realised that my definition differs quite starkly, whilst others define it in terms of vision, imagination, creativity, and direction, I define it in terms of conflict.

There is a difference between an opinion going unchallenged because there is no valid counter argument that anyone can think of, versus an opinion going unchallenged because of the nature of the person who holds it as they are perceived by others. I think of the gap between these two concepts is part of the reason why the Peter Principle exists, which if you're unaware of, the basic principle is that anyone in any job who is promoted for doing that job well will inevitably be promoted above their competence thereby guaranteeing that people always end up incompetent, doing jobs they're not actually good at doing.

Chapters

I think one of the biggest problems with the internet is continuity. Your online experience is continuous, there's no break, no stopping point, no logical partition. For everyone, with every platform you use, the presence you have on it grows and with that growth, the weight of what you contribute to that platform is carried with you.

Memories in real life fade for a reason, we hold on to what is important and we let go of the things that no longer serve us but the internet doesn't let you do that unless you go out of your way to make the conscious decision to "reset" your online presence but as a creator or as someone with a reputation that's pretty much impossible to do.

Momentary Relief

If you've been following my recent updates regarding my health this post is just a minor update, if you have no interest in that then feel free to skip it.

I still don't have the answers I wanted from Doctors, I don't have a diagnosis and that's the most frustrating part right now. I kept track of my diet for 6 months and how many times I threw up, in the end the total came to 36 which averages once or twice a week. I was prescribed a tablet called Pantoprazole to see if it would remedy the situation but for the two weeks I was on it I threw up every single day, so after consulting my Doctor we agreed to stop it.

The good news is that means it's probably not a stomach ulcer as Pantoprazole and all other -prazole tablets are a class of drugs called Proton Pump Inhibitors which act by lowering stomach acid levels. The fact this made my symptoms worse is a good indication this isn't a problem with stomach acid, and likely not an ulcer. This provided me with some relief mentally but it didn't last long as I still don't know what else it might be.

Sociological Imagination

Let's talk about Sociological Imagination. Quite simply, this concept is a measure of how deep you can imagine the impact of your actions and interactions on society more widely. Let's use a mug of coffee with 'Live. Laugh. Love.' printed on the side of it as an example.

If your Sociological Imagination is shallow then you will smell the coffee, taste the coffee, and drink the entire mug with little thought perhaps beyond whether it tastes good or bad, you may contemplate your existence or the day ahead and that's about all, you don't stop to really consider the mug of coffee.

If your Sociological Imagination is deep, then you will be able to look at that mug of coffee and see the engineering, economics, finance, industrial design, social, and cultural implications of your simple act of drinking that mug.

Telesocial Relationships

Fair warning I just need to vent so a lot of this post may seem repetitive and retracing old ground.

I live in a city that really has no business calling itself that because it's about the same size as a small town. City status in the UK is a bit of an odd concept because it has its traditions rooted in archaic practices rather than being relative to the size of the population or some other metric that would imply it has reached a certain milestone. This city in particular gained city status because of the number of cathedrals that were built in it, which again is quite an archaic concept but harkens back to the fact that the UK is technically a Theocracy as the Head of State is also the Head of the Church and as a monarch if you believe in the Divine Right of Kings supposedly was chosen by God to rule.

That's sort of a tangent to the main focus of this post but will become relevant later. I am gay, single, 36 years old, and did not expect to still be single at this point in my life if I am honest. Meeting guys here is difficult though, like I said this is essentially a small town and like any small town when you use apps or dating websites where you're inevitably presented with a grid, the faces on that grid might as well be static because they never change. When you've explored those options and come to the conclusion for each that either they're not interested in you or you're not interested in them, you're left with the conclusion that you're going to be single for the foreseeable future.

Sick and Tired

I never realised just how much I live in the past until I tried to practise speaking the languages I have been learning. I have quite a reflective and retrospective personality, which ironically in hindsight now seems obvious. This wasn't really brought to my attention though until I reached the units of the Duolingo Spanish course that deal with the past tense.

The bulk of the course leading up to that point deal with the present tense and to a very limited extent some future tense statements but you generally construct nonsensical statements and learn grammar and syntax organically through a process of osmosis - this is intentional, Duolingo has posted on their blog a few times detailing their ethos and their approach to teaching, the absurdity of the sentences is supposed to make them stand out in your mind, of course the drawback is that they are sentences you're never going to use.

The Need To Know

Some things we want to share, there will never be a right time to do that, some things people will never be ready to hear, but that doesn't mean they won't be able to handle what you have to say. Understanding the difference between these two things is something it took me the better part of a decade to grasp. The desire to live your life openly is noble and virtuous to a point but it isn't altruistic because intensity of the emotions we carry and the weight of the memories we hold aren't the same for everyone, just because we can shoulder that burden doesn't mean that everyone else can.

Sometimes in life you have to simply decide whether you're ever going to share something at all and if the answer is yes, then the time is now because there will never be a "right" time to do it, and if you wait for that to happen you will only amplify the anxiety associated with sharing that truth. If the answer is no then you have to learn to let go of your past and let go of that burden because carrying it with you forever also increases anxiety but in a much more generalised way. "Ambient" anxiety comes from an unease with your sense of self, and how it fits into the environment you exist within.

The Wrong Impression

If you judge the value of a person's life based on the contents of their trash can you'd be forgiven for thinking their life is nothing but waste. Most people know not to do this because there's a general consensus and convention agreed upon that a trash can is for, trash. When it comes to things that have many different use-cases however, your own use-case informs your judgement of others whether they use it the same way or not.

If you judge others lives by what they post on social media, you'll form an impression of their life that most of the time isn't accurate. Part of the reason for the inaccuracy is because of that lack of convention, there is no collective agreement as yet reached by humanity as to what social media should actually be used for, and ironically despite it's name it often ends up being antisocial and divisive more often than it unites.

Indecision

I live in the UK, so every observation I make about US politics is made as an outsider who is not involved in the political machine and has no say in its outcome. Having said that, the influence of the US on the global stage both economically and politically make it almost impossible to ignore. Some of us don't actively follow US politics but whether we follow it or not, we inevitably hear about it.

There are those that say the US is an exception, this whole concept has an entire field of political science devoted to it, rather aptly called US Exceptionalism. Personally I consider it complete bollocks, most of the justifications used for proposing its existence stem from gross misunderstandings and deliberately misconstruing the birth of other nations or how they formed. US exceptionalism posits that the US came into existence due to a unique combination of societal and political factors not shared with other nations so the observations of other nations' political systems don't apply to the US - which again to reiterate is patently untrue.

Language Quirks

A programming language and a spoken language share many things in common. They both have a lexicon, that is, a collection of words that form that language. In spoken languages that lexicon is basically everything that's in the dictionary and all the slang and informal expressions that don't make it into the final publication. In programming languages the lexicon is essentially the reserved words that the language uses to refer to the functionality that it provides.  Spoken languages have complex grammatical rules for the order of words and how they come together, while programming languages have syntax and orders of operation that determines how what you have written is interpreted by the compiler or the interpreter depending on the language.

I first learned to program when I was 6 years old, in BASIC on an old Amstrad PC, I can't remember how old I was when I first tried to learn another spoken language. The only definitive answer I can give is at the age of 11 when I started High School each Form Class studied a language, my Form Class studied Irish for 5 years and when I left High School I was fluent. That was 20 years ago this year, and although I still have the certificates that say I am fluent, I can barely string a sentence together because I have had zero use for the language in the last two decades. Each year in High School was divided into 4 Form Classes, 2 of those studied Irish and 2 studied French, I would rather have studied French if I am honest as I would have been able to actually use it.

Social Sexual Dichotomy

When I was younger, my friends and I posited a theory that people in their social lives tend to serve the opposite role when it comes to their sex lives. That is to say, if you are extroverted in your social life you tend to be submissive and introverted sexually, whilst those who tend to be introverted in their social lives often turned out to be dominant and extroverted sexually, there will of course always be exceptions to the rule but this generally held true based on our observations.

If you've been following this blog for a while you'll know that I've been going through a journey of self-discovery as of late, or rather a journey of rediscovery as I have taken to re-evaluating the beliefs that I've been holding onto and trying to figure out if they still serve me, whilst also examining my own personality and trying to figure out how much of that is my authentic self and how much of it is simply routine, repetition, habit, and in some cases expectation.

From August to Auguste

The Thinker by Auguste Rodin

When I left the house this morning everything was covered in a thick blanket of fog. It looked like Silent Hill but without the horrific undertones. Trees have been losing their leaves here for a couple of weeks now and the sides of the roads near the palace are covered in a carpet of brown leaves that are still crunchy and haven't quite begun to mulch just yet. Autumn is well and truly under way and I feel a sense of comfort, as an albino I don't do well in heat and the change of season offers me a chance to relax.

The start of September also means that the last of the schools to return for the new term have opened up again. Despite the added traffic in the morning time this causes, it also offers a further sense of relief, because around half 9 in the morning when the school day is under way practically every shop in town is dead. I've made a few changes in my personal life, some of which have already paid off, and a few more I'll have to wait a few weeks to see the outcome of, but I have a tentative sense of hope. I managed to negotiate a settlement of an old debt and saved myself £1,500 in the process which give me a sense of relief I haven't felt in quite some time.

I don't want to tempt fate, especially with October on the horizon, a month that historically has been quite shitty for me, although last year it was okay-ish, it's hard to tell at times whether you really are a victim of disproportionate negative experiences or if you're just focusing on them too much.

ATTA - My latest obsession

I recently watched a playthrough by Gab Smolders of a game called 'ATTA Spot the Oddities in the Strange Hotel' by Idea Fruition which is available as early access through Steam. I was intrigued by their playthrough and decided to buy the game for myself and I'm kind of obsessed with this game at the moment.

I love games like The Witness, Manifold Garden, Antichamber, and Superliminal that all share one thing in common, they create complexity by layering simplicity. Each game starts with a simple mechanic and introduces rules or encourages different ways to use the same mechanic to get different results. What you end up with is a game that can at times seem very complicated but is not beyond your comprehension if you break it down into its individual layers. In The Witness you do this by analysing a puzzle panel and noting which mechanics are present then accounting for each when deriving a solution.

ATTA is a game that has a very simple mechanic, the player enters a hallway on floor 10 that serves as a template that they must observe, they then progress to floor 9 where some things have been changed, their task is to count how many things changed - spot the difference. At the end of the hallway you enter an elevator and input the number you counted, if you get it right you advance to the next floor down and if you get it wrong then the floor is reconfigured and you try again. Reach floor 1 to finish the game.

Version 2

If you've been following my blog for a while you'll know that this year has been one of change for me, not by choice but because of incidents and circumstance, most notably my health. Discovering my allergy to Rapeseed Oil [Canola Oil as it is known in the US] has fundamentally changed my diet, I haven't eliminated certain food groups entirely though, as some people suggested. I think there was an expectation from some that I would go the route of Gluten-free Vegan Non-Dairy but to be honest that is far too much work. Instead I've tried to eliminate Rapeseed Oil from my diet as much as I can, and accepted that some of it will make it through regardless and I just have to mitigate the consequences.

The unintended side effect of reevaluating my entire diet was the subsequent reevaluation of my life itself. I don't mean that in the sense of ending it, although if you have read some of my recent posts you'll know that idea weighs heavy on my mind anyway and has done long before this debacle. No I mean reevaluing my life in terms of trying to figure out what I actually want. Trying to rebuild my diet with substituted foods forced me to think about what I like and dislike about the foods I was eating, the flavours, the tastes, the textures etc, things which I hadn't paid much attention to for quite some time.

Reincarnation Again

A friend of mine recently attended a wedding where the couple getting married were followers of Kardecist Spiritism which among its many tenets holds a belief in reincarnation and a belief in an immortal soul that experiences life through many iterations in order to achieve an angelic state as the culmination of its existence.

I have thought about the concept of reincarnation many times from many different perspectives, namely the notion that it is perhaps the most scientifically compatible religious view being that the first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed it can only be transferred from one form into another; the notion of persistence of being albeit in an altered state after death isn't scientifically implausible, there's just the small complication of the existence of the soul being something that is speculated but has no empirical proof.

Never the one to look at things through rose coloured glasses, always the one to find the darkness, my natural thought process with this veers off to ask a question, if reincarnation is possible then how do you account for population growth?

Casper

Nothing makes you feel quite as old as trying to find somewhere to stream a TV show or Movie from your childhood only to discover that it is nowhere to be found. There are different ways to mark when the seasons start in the Northern Hemisphere but where I live you can feel the seasons click, autumn is setting in and with the first few leaves falling I wanted to take some time to reconnect with a season that I've overlooked for many years.

If you had to describe me as a season, Winter is undoubtedly my vibe, when everything is dark and dead, covered in snow and silent that is when I am at my happiest. Autumn on the other hand has been a season I have a love hate relationship with. I think part of that comes from the years of hating school and the inextricable link that the end of Summer and the beginning of Autumn has with the feeling of obligation rather than excitement. Autumn was a season I associated with oppression in a way, the end of a period of liberation that as a child felt like it lasted forever, and yet, never long enough.

The Death of Detail

I use Skype to keep in touch with a close friend that I've known for some 15 years now. We met on a forum back in the days when they actually served a purpose. Forums fell by the wayside along with much of the earlier attempts by millennials to create social spaces online. After meeting on a forum we spent years chatting through MSN before that too fell by the wayside. I've been thinking a lot about these applications and the purpose they served, and whilst there are modern equivalents they all lack the soul of their predecessors.

When you look at the modern design of software one thing stands out, or rather nothing stands out, and that's exactly the problem. There has been a movement in the last twenty years to promote minimalist design when it comes to software, everything is flat, and uses whitespace or I guess you'd call it blackspace now since everything has a night mode or dark mode and that's increasingly used as the default interface.

If I had to describe Skype's design I'd call it businesslike because that's really what it has become. It has 3 billion registered users which is almost half the planet, and 300 million monthly active users which is almost the population of the United States. It's not hard to see why Microsoft wanted to acquire it in the first place and from a business perspective wanting to use it in place of MSN was a decidedly corporate decision.

Authenticity

The word 'authority' by its very nature is loaded with positive and negative connotations, admittedly more negative than positive. In the sense of positive definitions of authority, it is defined as having knowledge and understanding of a subject matter to the point where you can speak on it with confidence. You are for instance an authority to speak on the story of your lived life experience and all that it entails. Whether you can be considered an authority on things like engineering, aviation, politics, economics, or any other subject matter, ultimately comes down to a question of knowledge and experience, which when combined form wisdom.

Authority as a writer is a very interesting concept because ultimately your area of expertise is writing itself, with everything else being considered your background - in other words, knowledge and experience that relates to anything other than writing. Where this distinction rears its head most often is the idea of authenticity in writing. I am a gay, white, man - that last one I use loosely as I'd consider myself more non-binary but that's a topic of conversation to be had some other time. As a gay white man, there are personalities and life experiences that I can write about with authenticity because I can consider myself an authority on those experiences because they are my lived experiences. As a writer however if you only ever write characters from one perspective or one personality, what you write is likely to be very boring.

Achievement

When you watch an award show like the Oscars, there are individual and group awards given out to actors and production for the creative works they contributed to, from best actor, best picture, best original score, best visual effects, etc, in total there are 24 categories using the Oscars as an example. The Academy Awards also occasionally give out honorary awards not part of these 24, the one I find most interesting is the Lifetime Achievement award which is an award that honours the actor's entire career rather than a specific role.

The reason I find this award interesting isn't because I have a vested interest in any particular actor, on the industry more broadly, but rather the concept of rewarding a lifetime of work as a concept. When you ask the question, what has a person achieved in their lifetime, the answers you get will vary quite a bit, informed primarily by the aspirations and the priorities of those you ask. Those who are career-oriented for instance will usually answer the question by first identifying the field a person worked in and what they contributed to that field.

Someone Else's Dream

My life didn't pan out the way I thought it would, but then again I am not entirely sure how I thought it would pan out to begin with. When I reached the lowest point of my teenage years I tried to take my own life unsuccessfully. I survived and whilst I have spoken about this and the impact it has on your mental health at length in the past there is another shift in mentality that happens in the aftermath and that is the abandonment of your future, or at least the sense of ownership over it.

At this point in my life now 36 there have been other attempts and each one failed by virtue of the fact I am still here. I don't consider myself alive by determination or a sense of self preservation, there have been multiple near death experiences I have had where through no act of my own I survived - the question of why, is something I often ponder but never come up with an answer to, except to conclude that I am alive because someone or something wants me to be, this is the only way I can rationalise the fact that I am still here whilst I have lost many more people than I care to admit to suicide, sickness, and injury among other things.

Déjà vu

Sometimes I stumble across videos on youtube that were recorded during the pandemic but had nothing to do with it and off hand comments mention things going on in the world at that time and for a moment I have to remind myself "oh yeah, that actually happened" - I don't think I am alone in that mentality. When people talk about blacking things out from their mind there is this idea that a complete hole in your memory is left behind but that's not usually how trauma works.

The easiest way to visualise memory as a concept is to imagine a net hanging from the ceiling, each time you learn something new it gets tied onto that net but the rope isn't very tight, over time it slips. The more important a memory is, the more connections it establishes with other memories, more ropes are used to tie it to the net, the more ropes there are, the more connections we establish, the less likely we are to forget that memory.

Pop goes another bubble

55 years ago in 1969 the US government developed a computer network called ARPANET which stood for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, it was the first of its kind, although computer networks which allow computers to communicate with each other had been around for almost two decades by that point, ARPANET was the first to span a wide geographic area. ARPANET evolved over many decades, today we know it simply as the Internet. This is the story of the hardware that underpins everything we do online, including the fact that you're reading this post right now.

The software on the other hand took a while longer to evolve. Various applications designed to use the internet came and went. Attempts to utilise the Internet to connect consumers came to market, had limited success, and failed. From the ability to order food through the Internet which had limited success in the 1970s and 1980s it wasn't until 1989 when a researcher named Tim Berners-Lee whilst working at CERN developed the World Wide Web, a client-server system that allowed a server to host a document and clients to connect and retrieve it.

Underthinking

Not to be one to use derogatory language but to quote a friend "Stupid people learn languages quicker than smart people because they aren't afraid to use the language, smart people are afraid of getting it wrong" - I have read studies that used less derisive language to make the same claim and it has made me reflect on some of the things I have achieved in my life in an attempt to try and identify the mindset I occupied when I did them.

Mental Dexterity

I haven't been productive at all in the last few weeks and as is typical there is a spiral of guilt that inevitably ensues when I feel like my life has been stagnant for too long. I've been thinking about this a lot lately but in particular it has been dwelling on my mind since I watched a video on YouTube, the latest episode of the Smosh Mouth Podcast which is normally hosted by Amanda Lehan-Canto and Shayne Topp, but as Shayne is currently on vacation Angela Giarratana filled in as co-host. In it they discussed vacations and what people are like to vacation with. Angela made an off-the-cuff comment where she said "If you have to ask whether you deserve something the answer is yes, because being alive is hard"

Under Their Influence

In a recent post I talked at length about the idea that I have had an impact on other peoples' lives without stopping to think whether that was positive or negative in the moment. When I finally reached the bottom of the rabbit hole that thought process lead me down, as I turned and contemplated the climb back to sanity, I thought about the question in reverse - namely, who has had an influence on my life that I haven't stopped to unpack, or that I have been ignorant to all this time?

I have PTSD because of a lot of fucked up things that happened to me when I was young, the guy that did it to me springs to mind first and foremost as he has undoubtedly had the biggest impact on my life, but he doesn't fit the remit of the question - whose influence have I been ignorant to, and with him at least I have spent the better part of 30 years trying to unpack and mitigate the effects of what he did.

Pandemics and Polls

When it comes to political polling here in the UK I generally don't trust it, primarily because I joined a prominent polling organisation several years ago and left less than a week later having seen the bias in its methodology first-hand. From survey questions with no option to disagree, viable alternatives removed, questions framed to lead you to an answer, to questions that were nothing more than propaganda often with wrong or misleading "facts" included, it was clear this organisation was set up to influence opinion rather than measure it.

There is a trend of polls deviating significantly from election results for most of the non-campaign periods, only for those polls to narrow during the campaign period until the final few polls close to the day of the election present realistic results. To be clear I don't think this is a case of voting intention suddenly changing within the space of a few weeks, I think most people have already made up their mind who they want to vote for long before that period; no what I think is actually happening is that polling organisations serve less biased questions closer to the election day to get a result that's actually accurate in order to safeguard their reputations.

I did something stupid

They say if you look back on your past and you don't cringe then you haven't grown. I've been thinking about this a lot lately and the nature of intelligence. I mentioned in a previous post that there's a difference between intelligence in the sense of intellect and intelligence in an emotional sense. In either domain intelligence isn't defined by what you know or don't know, that defines knowledge. Intelligence isn't defined by your experience either, that combines knowledge with practice and subsequently leads to wisdom which combines yet more knowledge with that experience.

Intelligence is defined instead by our approach to solving problems and making sense of situations. Our intelligence is most evident when we apply it to novel situations where prior knowledge doesn't help. So if that's how you define intelligence, how would you define stupidity? If it is the opposite of intelligence and therefore is not a lack of knowledge, a lack of wisdom, or a lack of experience, then what is it? If intelligence is the way we think about things then stupidity in its truest form would be defined as acting without thinking at all which leads us to the conclusion that there's a fine line between impulse and stupidity, if there is a line at all.

A Key Change

The latest series of Doctor Who continues to air on BBC with new episodes landing every Saturday here in the UK and with each new episode the discourse surrounding this season grows tiresome. Whilst there has been a lot of love for the direction the show is taking, and that love is in the majority, there is a vocal minority that is trying to perpetuate the idea that the show is in decline or that the quality of the writing has reached an all time low. What I find sad about these comments is not whether there's any validity to them but the reality that they are made by people who are in denial.

Doctor Who is a TV show and like all TV shows it is written with its audience in mind. As a writer you consider first and foremost what demographic you want to appeal to and in the case of light entertainment and shows of this nature, that demographic is predominantly defined by age.

Unrealistic Expectations

If you are human then ignore this post.

A Boring Life

I can't remember how old I was when I first took an interest in writing but I remember being in primary school at age 6 when poetry and creative writing were first introduced as part of my school work. The stories I wrote at that age weren't exactly Shakespearean in calibre that much I can remember, but the stories themselves are lost to time. I didn't have the foresight to keep everything I wrote at that age, I wasn't exactly fond of school and there was no impetus to preserve the memory of it. I've mentioned before how I was bullied and ostracised for being different, mainly due to my disability caused by my visual impairment but I'm sure more than a few had already figured out I was gay as much as I was in denial at the time and believed that nobody could tell.

As a gay man when you are in the closet it can be hard to tell whether the people around you really are oblivious to your sexuality or if you live in a glass closet and the people around you just don't care. When you first come out there are always those who claim to have always known but they never gave any indication, and those who claim they never suspected and yet they were often the ones who spent the most time nudging you closer to that decision to share that part of your life with them.

The Last Night

If you ask most people how far north the United Kingdom is you will get a myriad of responses most of which will be wrong. Even for those of us who actually live here there is a surprising misconception that lies in part thanks to the difficulty of representing the Earth, a 3 Dimensional object on a map which is a 2 Dimensional object. The problem is that loss of the third dimension necessitates the loss of accuracy, some information has to be lost in the process of flattening the globe. There's an interesting video on YouTube by Map Men - Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones that discusses this concept in detail and the implication it has on the accuracy of the maps we use every day.

Being a Prude by Profession

I am a slut, or rather I'm a retired slut as my sex life is non-existent right now due to everything else that's going on. If you've been following my recent posts you will know that I've been considering a career change for some time. Among the myriad of variables to factor into this decision, the social ramifications are something that I find fascinating, particularly how your choice of career can impact your sex life. In pursuit of information regarding this goal I've been researching what funding is available here in the UK to retrain. Beyond the degree apprenticeship programme which I previously mentioned I've been looking at studying at University full time and whether that is a viable route.

If you already have a degree in the UK you can't normally access student loans, those cover the cost of first degrees only, there are however some limited exceptions. Most of these exceptions are careers where there is a shortfall or the qualification also leads to a professional accreditation. Once again that moniker "professional" rears its head in the context of employment which irks me to no end. In this case however the definition of professional is defined simply as a job that requires registration and qualification in order to pursue. Among these include Architects, Dentists, Doctors, and Teachers. None of these professions interest me.

Artificial Incompetence

In an ideal world the careers we pursue would be guided by our strengths, our aptitude would determine our success and we would be rewarded with merit for how good we are at doing our jobs. This concept is known as meritocracy and it's usually primarily in the context of governments, namely those which claim to appoint people to their key positions based on ability and proven track records. If you've paid attention to politics in recent years even briefly so, then you will know this claim is patently untrue. This isn't a political post though, much as there is to say on the matter I would mostly be echoing what you've already heard a thousand times over.

What interests me about the idea of meritocracy is its application beyond government to everyone else and the jobs that they do. Judgement of politicians to one side, they are not the only people we see in jobs and feel they're in the wrong profession. The truth is that capitalism doesn't reward ability it rewards durability - or permanence. The people who remain in their jobs are those that can withstand the pressure of their job, even if they're crap at it.

The Dark Side of ASMR

By now most people probably know what ASMR is, it stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response and describes an involuntary sensory response triggered by an external stimulus such as sight, sound, or touch. The sensation is best described as a tingle that emanates from a trigger point and passes through the body in a wave of nervous stimulation.

I watch a lot of ASMR videos on YouTube, some of them with active focus where the video is the only thing I fixate on, and others more passively as a background whilst I work. They provide a sense of comfort and relaxation that helps relieve anxiety. As far as tingles are concerned, the first time I ever felt ASMR was when I was a kid and didn't know what it was. Every time I would get my head shaved I would feel a shiver wash over me when the electric razor passed by my ear. This trigger is the only one that I've never become immune to, no matter how often I hear it.

Go Again?

You can tell how old someone is mentally when you ask them to make a decision based on an impulse and measure the hesitation that follows. When I was 18 years old I thought nothing of applying to University in London whilst living here in Northern Ireland. The distance wasn't a factor in the decision making process at all. In fact the choice of University was at first random, there were 6 places to fill on the University application form known as a UCAS form, I had filled 4 places with the Universities I thought I would choose from, and filled the final two places with Universities that looked interesting but were ultimately chosen at random.

It wasn't until after I was invited to an open day, and received an offer that I actually considered the possibility of living in London with any serious weight. If you asked me to do the same thing now as a 35 year old - approaching 36 in a few weeks, the hesitation is incalculable. It's not just a hypothetical idea either for me now, it's a realistic possibility. Here in the UK there are a growing number of Degree Apprenticeship programmes, these have no age limit and work on the basis of applying for a job to an employer, if accepted you work at a discount whilst also studying for a degree alongside your job, at the end of the first 3 or 4 years you are then awarded a Degree. Essentially this is the equivalent of an employer sponsoring your degree.

Halcyon Lights

The world that turns knows not our remiss
Nor the warm embrace of a lover's kiss
It turns forever with each passing day
Now void of the words you used to say

Your loss was felt by those who remain
A loss marked by most intimate of pain
In the echo of the night your music plays
With a sombre yearning for bygone days

As we remember your heart beneath halcyon lights
Striving to reach all those promised heights
Yet darkness swells as we watch this world burn
In sorrow we beseech why would you return?

Romeo and Julian

As a gay man I am blessed and cursed by the fact that beyond higher education, society doesn't really know what to do with me. What I mean by this is that in contrast to a straight person, their life has a set path that society expects them to follow; they're born, attend education, graduate, date, marry, have kids, and raise those kids to do the same. Every major life goal or milestone that society expects of straight people centres around this path, from renting and eventually buying a home big enough to house those kids, getting a job where you earn enough to support them, even marriage as a concept was tightly linked to having children.

As a gay man though, the expectation to get married isn't placed on us, even in the rare instances where it is, there's no time frame that we're pressured into. If you're straight you're expected to be married and have your first kid by 30, if you wait longer then you're going to end up in the position where you'll already be feeling the effects of ageing and find it difficult to keep up with those children. For gay men as neither can get pregnant this time pressure isn't present because the assumption is that you will adopt if you do have kids. That is if there is any expectation to get married and have kids at all, many cultures and communities actively push against the idea of gay parents - which is ridiculous, the idea that gay parents will make kids gay is just asinine, having straight parents didn't make me straight.

Normalcy

People's attitudes to intelligence can tell you a lot about their insecurities. When I was a kid I learned quite early in my life that people only valued your intelligence as long as they didn't perceive it as a threat, and as long as it didn't make them feel inadequate. I was top of my class for a time, but that position made me a target for bullies to the point where I intentionally dumbed myself down in school. I didn't see the merit in pushing to be first when all that got me was hostility from those around me. This held true throughout my Primary and Secondary Education, I did what I needed to pass each class with a comfortable margin and made little effort to apply myself further.

This drew the ire of teachers who accused me of not taking my education seriously, I pushed back out of spite and sat at the top of my class in a handful of subjects again mainly to shut up the teachers not because I had a vested interest in doing well. I was already being bullied for other reasons at that point, so it didn't make much difference to me.

The Psychology of Food

I think I need to fundamentally reassess my relationship with food. When I was a child my family regularly went through financial fluctuations in our budget, there were times when we had extra money which was when we occasionally had takeout; there were also times when our budget was comfortable those were the times when we ate regularly and also had between meal snacks, and between-between meal snacks. Then there were times when money was tight so we'd only really eat at our regularly dinner time in the evening, and a light breakfast which was usually just cereal or toast.

There was an element of guilt associated with uneaten food, the times when money was tight this element of guilt was at its highest and conversely when money was expendable the guilt for not eating everything I was given was less, but not completely absent. That mentality prevailed for my childhood and teenage years. The problem with all of this was that I had never been able to regulate my metabolism no matter how much or how little I ate because my circadian rhythm - the time when I wake and sleep - was never in sync with my family. I have posited that this is related to my Nystagmus, the ramification being that I've never been able to sleep willingly or at a regular time because I only ever sleep out of exhaustion.

Write for yourself, first and foremost

If you're of a creative mindset, whatever the form of expression you use as an outlet for your creativity there is inevitably the question of who you create for - do you create for yourself, or for others, or do you try and find a balance between both of these influences?

When you create for yourself, ultimately the act of creation is a form of self expression, and introspection. Everything you create ultimately comes from somewhere inside of you, what you choose to express reflects an internal state. This becomes the most difficult to face when you create characters you want to hate, even if you draw from external influences for inspiration, the character you create is an extension of you. In order to convey what a character thinks and feels, and how they act, you have to embody the mentality of the character which forces you to face the reality that what the character does is an impression of what you yourself would do in their situation.

Classism

I witnessed an exchange lately where someone uttered the words "You're just a hairdresser, what do you know!?" the nature of the argument was somebody else's business so I won't go into details, that's not my story to tell; however what I can say is that the hairdresser in question has a degree in Art History and she very much has the authority correct this person.

This whole exchange however made me think about just how much other people make assumptions about someone's education and background based on the work that they do. I have a degree in Computer Science with Games Technology but I've never actually used it since I graduated from University as I never went into that field to work. I have done other jobs where elements of my education have been useful, and although I would choose a different degree if I were doing things over, I don't regret the choice I made.

Now What?

In a few of my recent posts I mentioned the health problems I am currently going through, as a small update I had a follow-up appointment with my Doctor today to discuss my test results and my suspicions have been confirmed, I do in fact have an allergy to rapeseed oil. It's been about 12 hours now since I had this confirmed and I've been mulling over the ramifications and it still hasn't fully sank in.

I'm no stranger to allergies as a concept, I've struggled with hayfever for as long as I can remember, it's just part of my life and something I learned to work around. I'm also allergic to ginger which I found out when I had sushi for the first time and went into Anaphylactic Shock later that day. This is different though, this is a little more insidious.

Digital Privilege

I talked about Parasocial Relationships in a previous post and how the evolution of technology evolved so quickly to enable us to see and hear people that aren't in the same room that it was unrealistic to expect our physiological evolution to catch up to that reality in such a short space of time.

I've been thinking about how technology enables us to revisit past moments in our lives with absolute clarity and realised that we live in a time of "Digital Privilege" that arguably previous generations never experienced. Yes cameras have been around for some time, and yes home movies were relatively common for a few decades but all of those things came with a price tag that not everyone could afford.

Why does the Queer Community care about Palestine?

This was a question asked on Reddit recently which has since been deleted, that asked why Queer people cared about Palestine when it seemingly didn't affect us, with the usual argument that the political ideology of Palestinian leadership doesn't align with the rights of Queer people. This post is a response to that question.

Justice cannot be something that is afforded only to the people you think are "worthy" such a stance breeds complacency and empowers fascism and oppression of people by their own governments. If justice is only served to people deemed "worthy" then the definition of worthy is modified until it eventually amounts to null and is served to none.

The Nostalgia Blackhole

I've been thinking a lot about the last few years as my life is shrouded in uncertainty once again and I've come to the realisation that my memory has a black hole of 5 years that it's impossible to reflect on without getting sucked in and consumed by darkness.

2017 saw the start of my journey into darkness; when my treatment for Sarcoidosis came to an end I was advised recovery would take around 2 years before I would get back on my feet. Those two years came to an end at Christmas in 2019, with the start of 2020 my renewed optimism was immediately shot down along with everyone else's. Arguably the period of depression that followed didn't come to an end until around 2022, whilst for some it simply passed its peak.

Those 5 years from 2017 to 2022 represent a minefield of memories that it is difficult to navigate in an attempt to isolate the moments of happiness. Nostalgia as Baz Luhrmann once said "is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it's worth" - this is what we try to do with our past when we look back and try to use it as a model for how we shape our future, but what happens when the past isn't something you want to return to? - when it was objectively bad with no conceivable way to spin it into something positive, what happens when a cloud doesn't have a silver lining?

In reflecting on the past 7 years of my life since my problems with Sarcoidosis began I've realised that only the last 2 years of that period could have been salvageable, unfortunately that was also a time when my mother was diagnosed with Breast Cancer, she had surgery and radiotherapy to remove the tumour and is now in the middle of a 5 year course of hormone therapy and in a much better place physically and mentally as she continues to make progress with her recovery.

I know the last few years haven't been easy for anyone really, the world is a complex place, one where it seems impossible to escape limitless sources of negativity. At the same time, there seems to be no counter, no endless source of positivity, and a jaded cynicism that immediately leads us to question anything that presents itself as such - the concept of anything being endless seems to be something we reject but if that truly is the case, why are we seduced by the idea of endless negativity? If nothing lasts forever, why does it feel like that is the exception?

Here we are again

In 2017 after struggling with my personal health for a while I decided to see a doctor to try and find out what was going on. Over the course of 6 months I had countless diagnostics, scans, and was poked and prodded, culminating in a fibre-optic bronchoscopy and 8 biopsies that lead to my diagnosis with a condition called Sarcoidosis. I documented this whole process on another blog during that time.

I recently decided to restore all of my old posts from almost every blog I've ever ran. They have been uploaded here, so my apologies if you happen to subscribe to this blog via feed and were probably wondering where the thousand odd posts that were recently uploaded came from. In amongst these posts are those that documented the journey I went through with Sarcoidosis

Unset

As you grow older it becomes quite difficult not to get set in your ways. We hold onto ideas that no longer serve us, we hold onto beliefs that are not longer true, and we practice behaviours that don't give us the results we think they do. Self-reflection and introspection are important in life but they form a much more integral part of our psyche when we are younger, when our beliefs are still forming, when we haven't made our minds up yet as to how we view the world, when we still hold some degree of hope for change and optimism that even if it doesn't come straight away, some day it will come.

You can call it cynicism, or even pessimism, or simply call yourself jaded, whatever term you use to describe the mentality, ultimately the hallmark is the belief that nothing will change. This is what we fight against as we grow older, and our degree of mental resilience can often determine the outcome, with lower resilience creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where we spiral down into doom and gloom. A high degree of resilience allows us to endure with a positive outlook even when there is little reason or even none at all that we can draw upon to justify that outlook.

The Millennial Bug

We're taught in life that the thing that sets humanity apart from animals, amongst many others, is that our evolution is sequential and cumulative.  That each generation that comes after the one before it, stands on the foundations that it built for them and is therefore able to climb higher as we develop as a species.

I and my generation no longer believe this to be true.  We don't even know if the generations that came before us really believed this or if they just never questioned it.  Whichever is the case is inconsequential now.  The truth is self evident, that our generation and the ones that are already coming after ours are being forced to build a new world from the ground up - whilst the generations that came before us continually try to tear that asunder, not content with the mess and misery that have already created, they are determined to screw up any chance at a legacy.

To be a millennial is a statement the definition of which has been debated far and wide, but the definition I accept is any person who turned 18 on or after the turn of the Millennium.  For sake of clarity that's anyone born between 1982 and 2000.  Why do I cut it off at 2000?  Well because society has already decided to define another generation - one which they can't seem to agree a name for, but the one I see most often is "Generation Z" which includes everyone born after the year 2000.  I like to think of the "Z" as foreshadowing, that perhaps Z being the last letter might be an indication that they are the finality of segregation and that they will be the last to be grouped into a "generation" and that a new world will emerge, a post-generational world.  Others are a lot more cataclysmic when it comes to the symbolism of that moniker however.

18 years ago at the turn of the Millennium there was a phenomenon called the Millennium Bug that was a quirk in the way computers and their software had been programmed.  In a nutshell it was to do with the way they handled dates, that they had been coded to interpret dates as 2 digits as nobody had the foresight to contemplate the need for something larger.  The bug of course was averted in the end after billions of dollars and millions of man hours were devoted to upgrading computer systems.  I like to think of this as a metaphor for society in its current state.  There is something wrong with the world, and we need to fix it.  The only way we can do that is to acknowledge that this is not the way things are meant to be, and that we must change if we are to survive as a society.  I call this the Millennial Bug not because of who or what created it, but simply because it is the Millennial generation and the generations that come after us that are going to have to fix it.  You can't solve a problem using the same thinking that created it, we must evolve.  We must look to the future not the past, we must embrace the new not the old.  We must embrace the ideas of those who will inherit this world from us, they are the ones who will have to live in it when we are gone.

Nystagmus

I have mentioned before that I have a number of health conditions, there are two conditions most prominent, the first would be my Sarcoidosis which I have documented on my other blog since I was diagnosed in 2017 for the sake of posterity as I believe there aren't many sources online where you can read about other peoples' experiences with the condition.  The second condition is my Nystagmus which I have had since birth.  This post will attempt to explain as best I can what that condition is and how it affects me.

Nystagmus is an involuntary movement of the eye which causes the eye to lose the ability to accurately focus on objects.  This can result in short-sightedness or low vision.  For me personally the movement of my eyes is similar to that of rolling a coin back and forth with your forefinger while balancing it on your thumb.  In other words they 'wobble'.  The eyes themselves have perfect vision apparently, but due to the fact they are always moving they cannot focus properly resulting in the short-sightedness.

Nystagmus affects around 1 in 1,000 individuals according to my Ophthalmologist or 1 in 5,000 to 10,000 according to the Wiki Article, I'd rather believe the former over the latter in terms of reliability though.  You can't know for sure how many people have it however because you can't guarantee that everyone who does has been diagnosed, some people may have it but are completely unaware depending on how noticeable the movement is.  This movement is constant, it never stops and if you were to develop it later in life it would result in a condition known as Oscillopsia - this is where you see moving images similar to watching a camera shake when filming.  For me personally and for most people who have the condition from birth, the brain develops a method of processing what the eyes see by reducing the "frame rate" of the eyes.  Human vision isn't processed in frames of course but this is the simplest way to explain the concept.  If you think of normal vision being 60 frames per second, then the processing that someone with Nystagmus has involves reducing those 60 frames into pairs of frames, comparing each, and stabilizing the image, resulting in a stable video feed that has a lower frame rate but doesn't shake.  What this means in practice for me and others with Nystagmus is that we don't see things as moving or shaking, but our ability to perceive motion is impaired.  If things move beyond a certain speed then we won't see them at all, likewise if we move beyond a certain speed ourselves then we don't see things that can be right in front of us.  One of the most frustrating things about the condition is the idea that there's nothing actually wrong with the eyes themselves when all of the difficulties the condition brings are associated with your vision.

As our eyes work constantly and so do our brains to compensate for the added motion, there is a lot of strain involved.  Headaches are to be expected, they are a normal part of life for someone with the condition, and if you spend a lot of time reading then migraines will inevitably ensue if you can't take a break or if you can't use aids such as magnifiers or large print or lower resolution displays to be able to read with more comfort.  Beyond the physical strain there are also emotional and psychological elements involved in terms of the effects the condition causes in the individual - i.e. lack of confidence in social situations, lack of understanding from others, and in some cases ridicule on account of the fact that you are different.

Nystagmus is not contagious, and as far as most research goes it's not considered to be genetic either.  Having said that, there is no known cause of congenital Nystagmus - since birth.  Since there's no known cause, you can't really rule everything out as a cause, all you can do is examine evidence and draw conclusions.  To that end there's no evidence that it is contagious, no-one has ever caught the condition.  There is an understanding that it is neurological in nature and that it relates to the communication between the brain and the eyes.  You can develop Nystagmus later in life as a result of blunt-force trauma, such as a car crash, or as a result of excessive alcohol or narcotic use, in both of these cases the condition is temporary however and will eventually correct itself.  I also know an individual who had a Brain tumour removed and developed Nystagmus as a complicated after the surgery, this too also corrected itself after many months.  I am over thirty years old and I still have the condition.  For me and anyone else who was born with the condition there is no known cause, no known cure, and there is no expectation that it will resolve itself spontaneously.

There are mobility issues which cause difficulty when travelling, for example, not being able to read timetables for buses, or not being able to see the numbers on buses to call them when they approach [buses only stop if you hail them here or if someone wants to get off, otherwise you have to hail them], knowing when to get off a bus can be difficult too as seeing anything outside in detail whilst moving is difficult for someone with Nystagmus.  There are difficulties in Airports reading flight information displays, boarding gate numbers etc, especially in silent terminals where this information isn't read out aloud, and the same applies for train station displays too - the only experiences I have had that were exceptions were the Tube [Underground in London], and the Paris Metro, both of which the train stops at every station and the maps are huge, services are also high frequency and you don't need to worry about time tables.  The things I find it hardest to cope with though are the social situations it provokes and the lack of understanding from others.

Everyone in my circle of friends knows about my condition and they have asked me everything they needed to know and they are the best form of support I have.  The situations I refer to mainly involve strangers.  That moment of awkwardness when they notice it, stop for a moment and stare, then realise and pretend like nothing happened or worse start asking questions.  It's like this, if I am never going to see you again just don't ask questions just do your job.  I tend to avoid eye contact with people because of this which tends to make social situations worse, makes me and everyone else feel awkward and has led to situations where other people have attacked me for being rude.

To put things into perspective for you, to show I am not overreacting, if you had a red birth mark under your eye that was so obvious it looked like one of Ronald McDonald's red cheeks, and people stared at it and put you in the same situation, highlighting something you were self conscious about, something you couldn't change and something you likely answered the same questions about a million times before, do you think you could retain the ability to smile and go through the same routine?  Would you not find it rude people asking about your physical appearance, complete strangers like they have a right to know?

Finally owing to the cruelty of children, I'm sure you can imagine school wasn't exactly the most accepting and supportive environment.  The teachers weren't that much better most didn't know of or understand my condition, they had no idea of what adjustments could be made, and at times it just felt like I was a frustration or an inconvenience.  I have said before there are a few teachers who I regard very highly and I am pleased to say I never had those difficulties with them but this just highlights how much of our environment is influenced by the actions and attitudes of other people.  Other people make life difficult and complicated for us, not just me or people with Nystagmus just people in general, life gets complicated when you have to factor anyone else into it.

I would also add in conclusion that everyone's experiences in life are different and when it comes to things like difficulties and disabilities, some people can adapt much more than others, there's no universal measure of how much something like this will impact your life.  There are a lot of things I can't personally do because of my condition, I'll never be allowed to drive for example, it's illegal for me due to the level of sight I have, but this doesn't mean that everyone with Nystagmus can't drive, there are some people who can. and there are others who can't.  Each person's circumstances are different and the only real way you can get to know how it impacts them is to ask, and listen to what they have to say.  Always remember that because you can do something does not mean others can, even if they are in the same situation as you, what each person is capable of will vary.  With the psychological impact in particular there is often an attitude especially one held by those who are well adjusted, that those who are not just aren't trying hard enough, this idea is ridiculous however and it is the same toxicity that leads people to be unwilling to discuss things like depression in general not just as a consequence of physical illnesses.