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.