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.