And as to Shane?

You remember Shane?

Well...

I messaged him. I told him - after a suitably non-stalkerish period of time - that he ticked my boxes and that I'd like to see him again. I understood his concern about the distance between my hometown and his; but emphasized that I'd managed to maintain a relationship with someone else who lived in a similar locale and therefore that shouldn't be the reason behind any refusal.

The response?

Well - that the locality was only one reason for the refusal for a second date.

The main reason?

My big penis.

Seriously. His text back to me said
"Yes, the distance is a problem. But the bigger problem is your penis".

So despite my hope that he was the one, he probably isn't. I was probably just another one-night-stand.

I suppose, philosophically, I ought to learn from this and treat my own needy one-night-stands with the same respect. I don't believe I don't.

Anyhow, I have to assume that I will perhaps never see Shane again.

Auto-fail fails

They make you laugh, don't they - "Autocorrect Fails"

You know, where someone has typed "cook" and it looks like they're trying to cock their sausage.

That is understandable. However, as with satirical twitter feeds pretending to be the Queen or Transport for London; they take advantage of some of the everyday life around them and "meld"  them to their own requirements.

But what the sites do, which the spoof sites don't, is hold themselves out as "true" autocorrect fails.

Thee lovely Buzzfeed posted the "30 most hilarious aautocorrect struggles ever". This follows on from various other autocorrect fail posts from Buzzfeed and others; and an entire site: damnyouautocorrects.com having been set up to 'catalogue' these.

But, of course, a hell of a lot of these are fake. Most in fact. like this:



 
Who is asking a cat's favouite colour anyway [ignore the spelling changes, I'm English]



Having made the Dong/Dog mistake, would you not check it more than once? And then "fridge auto cucumber"? I can see  "frigin'" not being in the dictionary,  but "auto cucumber"? Maybe it's just me not owning an iPhone. (what does the i stand for again?)





Sorry, "epi pen' translates to 'epic penis' ? Really?

This last is probably one of the worst, most blatant examples:






 "Wawa skittletits" ? Seriously? It had the 'we' bit sorted and was getting there with 'hop' 'hopping'  and 'home' you want me to believe that "Wawa skittlletits" came out of autocorrect? Really?

It's a shame really, because a legitimate "autocorrects that should have been" site would have worked as well - or better. I say better because it would have been obvious that the comedic though had gone in afterwards; whereas with holding itself out as genuine one denies it that comedic value on the basis that they've already been lied to as to how genuine it is.

Who's stealing who?

So, at the weekend my mother turned to me, rather concerned, and asked:

"Have you blocked me from Facebook?"
Me: "No, of course not"
Mother: "Only, I can't see what you've been up to"
Me: "That's because I've not been putting it on Facebook."
Brother: "We thought you'd gone quiet. Your sister-in-law thought your phone had been stolen or something"

At which point I relayed my previous observations.

And then everyone joined in.

Mother: "Well, this is why I don't post anything. I comment that I like a photo of someone's  and blood Scoobydoo will comment back on it and I have no idea who that Scoobydoo is!"
Sister-in-law: "The share button freaks me out. Before I know it, my baby is half way round the world. I'm starting to just email my pictures to the family now"
Brother: "It's always been possible to copy and repaste... it's just that before it took a knowledgable intentioni that you were stealing. These days everyone presumes that it's perfectly ok."

And that last point sums up the most recent problem.

I happened to be in London yesterday (22 May 2013). Fortunately I was nowhere neer Woolwich. However my Twitter feed caught fire. There was a really quite horrific and apparently religiously-extremistly-provoked murder. which sent everyone into a frenzy.

I don't know if I have moderated my Twitter friends more carefully than my Facebook friends; but with both the murder, and previously the death of Margaret Thatcher, the responses have been so much more civil and ethical than the crazy loons who have ranted on my Facebook feed.

Anyhow, to show just how easy it is for people to steal things in the internet day and age, lets have a look at a status related to the horrific murder...

One of my friends shared a status:

Wow. Over 27,000 shares in 8 hours. However one of my other friends shared another status:

Added 12 hours previously and - apparently as claimed by himself - written by Ian Yates. The problem is his original post hasas been shared by just over 12,000 people. Way less than half that the 'lifted' post has been shared.

This is quite an issue as the rather delightful Neal Mann has identified:

Fair use or stealing?Buzzfeed lifts almost 400 words of quotes from @telegraph's interview with heroic Woolwich woman bit.ly/16aeT8K
— Neal Mann (@fieldproducer) May 23, 2013

Now, this is a guy who does his research (as every proper journalist should, despite being 'new media' and therefore seen by the 'old media' as a shammish flybynight, which they are trying to piss on like a catepiller tries to piss on a butterfly):

Worth noting Buzzfeed has added absolutely none of their own reporting to that article & including headline added 129 words of description

— Neal Mann (@fieldproducer) May 23, 2013

And he properly follows it up:

Good to see @buzzfeedben get involved & cut down the amount of quotes Buzzfeed used from the @telegraph Woolwich hero article.
— Neal Mann (@fieldproducer) May 23, 2013

It again goes to show
1) what a risk social media can be about control of your IP
2) how laws have failed to keep up with these new developments
3) how devastatingly quickly these things go viral - as the bike tweet lady
4) how effective - and yet ineffective - the individual can be.

Final Facebookery?

So, I’m standing on a precipice. Or a pinnacle, I’m not sure.

A Facebook precipice to be precise.

Yes, I have been very vocal in my opposition to Facebook, and curiously no-one has asked the question – why do you still use it?

My previous rants have been terribly minor rants – mostly about excess advertising, poor communication and spam.

This one, however, is much more serious. So serious, in fact, that I have been in communication with the Office of the Data ProtectionCommissioner in Ireland – where Facebook Europe is based.

Have you noticed the ‘share’ button? I noticed it a month or so ago – I mentioned it on here. What I didn’t realise is actually how scary a tiny little button that is. And here’s why…

I have around 15,000 photos on Facebook. All of these photos have been given the privacy setting “Friends only”. Fine, I thought. Then the ‘share’ button came out. I only found out about the ‘share’ button when my brother shared a photo of mine. No problem, I thought, my privacy settings are such that only mutual friends will be able to see it.

Not so.

Despite me specifying in the privacy settings that the photo could only be seen by friends of mine; Facebook has wantonly overridden this to allow anyone to see this – I found this out not because Facebook has communicated a change in policy to me; but when an unknown friend of my brother’s started commenting on my photo.

Now, this is massively concerning. This is in direct contravention of the licence I gave to Facebook when I uploaded my images – that they would only be visible to my friends. This is even more concerning because I cannot turn off the ‘share’ function. Essentially, it is possible that every single one of my over 15,000 photographs and countless status updates could be shared with the world at large by friends who have much lower privacy settings sharing my content.

The communication I have had with the ODPC has been reasonably fruitless. They haven’t actually treated the complaint with any degree of gravitas, merely flippantly dismissing it. The ODPC response? “You give consent to such processing as Facebook deems necessary by using the site and uploading the photographs.” The ODPC also claims that “Facebook provides clear information about how information is made available”.

Sorry?

No it doesn’t.

Firstly, any such ‘consent’ is lost in a highly confusing and contradictory privacy policy. It must be contradictory if privacy settings for ‘only friends’ include ‘friends of friends or whatever your friends’ privacy settings are’. Secondly Facebook is very poor about communicating the roll-out of new privacy policies. Finally, this has been applied retrospectively, so despite the new policy coming into force in December 2012, it applies all the way back to my first post in July 2007. Are they really asking that every time they change their policy (without telling me) that I trawl back through my history and change the settings of anything I am unhappy with?

That makes Facebook unusable.

According to ODPC, the only way to withdraw consent to such processing, is to withdraw from Facebook as a whole.

And as such I have taken a hiatus away from Facebook for a while. And it appears I’m not the only one – Facebook has lost 2m of its UKusers in the last 6 months. That’s over 6% of its 32m UK users.

So, why should I still use Facebook?

Well, it lets me share photos with my friends. After a weekend away I can upload a full album of my artistic genius (or drunken antics) and draw attention to specific friends by tagging them in it. Videos are starting to take off in the way too. Obviously the risk now is that I am sharing the photos with more than friends; but the alternatives here are poor – Instagram and Tumblr are more about individual photos than albums, Flickr is slightly better, but then it’s about encouraging people to go to your Flickr site which people check far less frequently – often when only uploading their own photos.

Secondly it seems to be the default for organising events. Whereas once events were organised by mobile or email, these days they are most frequently organised by Facebook. This is because all the contacts are in one place – there is no scurrying friends for email addresses of other people. Friends can add other people too, in case you can’t get or don’t know their contact details. And then the conversation can start – what the fancy dress theme will be, what the route of the pub-crawl should be. It saves emails pinging about; or people getting left off the list when someone accidentally hits ‘reply’ rather than ‘reply all’.

And that emphasises the third bonus – I can easily see what friends are up to by checking their timeline. I don’t need to email them seeing how they are; I can do so surreptitiously without them even knowing. It’s great for stalking keeping in contact with people like that. If I don’t know someone’s mobile number, I can message them on Facebook and, assuming they are a regular user, they will see it. Aside from regularly texting or emailing people to find out how they are (including old school friends who I really don’t care about) there is no other way of finding out how they are and what they are up to. Well, except Twitter, although my local friends are very very slow on the take-up of Twitter.

And that, primarily, is the problem identified with Flickr – getting people to be regular users of other technologies. It will happen. There are still a lot of my friends who have ‘dormant’ Facebook accounts – they post very little and, so far as I am aware, log on very little, so it clearly hasn’t ingrained it so indelibly in the national psyche as to be essential. And challengers are starting to take off – various messaging services allow you to send messages free in the way Facebook chat or messenger can; and to groups. My family use Google calendars to organise events and then email to communicate conversations relating to it; and yes, there are photo sharing sites. But it isn’t all in one place.

All of this leaves me with three choices:

Firstly, carry on using Facebook as I always did and just take the risk that people will share things – perhaps exercising a degree of caution over what I post and hoping that no-one will go through each of those 15,000 to find the one of my peeing against a fence at a festival.

Secondly, scour my profile. Remove everything or anything that could be a risk, and use the site as though it is a fully public site in future. This will be very energy intensive (and subjective as to my mood on each occasion) procedure.

Finally, either remove or deactivate my account, thus removing all security and privacy issues, though at the cost of the functionality.

I haven’t been posting content on Facebook since the beginning of May, although I have accepted around 5 friend requests because I was stood next to the people as they added me on their mobiles, so it would have seemed rude not to. I’m currently in what I would term an ‘unhappy medium’ – I bear all of the risks of the privacy settings with none of the functionality. I need to make a decision on where I am comfortable. Unfortunately I fear it may be the second, most time-consuming option of stripping back to basics, with minimal interaction save as is necessary. In light of my various other concerns, perhaps it is time to search out that alternative. Afterall, when one of the most recent Facebook conferences occurred, there were a lot of people asking Who uses Facebook these days anyways?

The force is with Facebook

So I’ve already (over?) analysed corposting on Facebook, and as part of these various analyses I identified a number of non-personal statuses, and will now embark upon my rant about “causes”.

The cause posts are many, and surprisingly deceptive. They can be personal, charitable, feel-good, or just plain obscure. They always involve a photo. This is because this used to be the only way to share stuff on Facebook, and seems to have been retained either because people still aren’t aware that statuses can be shared, or because they take up more room, or because they are visually more appealing and intriguing than a ream of text. Though they usually include that too.

Most of them are about trying to achieve something, some sort of recognition, though some of them seem much more obscure, and some you do have to wonder why they exist – they clearly seem desperate for likes, comments and shares, but why? To spam you? But that can be stopped by unliking the post or the account.

The personal ones you can see why people do it – they want something done. There are two examples of this:

Firstly, the woman who was “so enraged” about someone’s bad driving that she took a photo of the car and had her own rant about what had occurred. It “went viral” (it was a slow day for local news, and they wanted to get on the whole “social media is cool and a new force for crime-fighting and stuff that we don’t understand” bandwagon).

Did it achieve anything?

Well, not really. The post did not help identify the driver – the numberplate did. And there hasn’t been a vigilante group going round to right a wrong – she reported it to the police (entirely separately to the Facebook post) who are (again, entirely separately) investigating. This could all have been done without the Facebook post. Indeed, the local “news” weblink says that the driver was “shamed”, despite not identifying the driver, despite obscuring the numberplate, despite not actually asking the driver if he was shamed.

And when you look at the prose to the photo, you have to wonder exactly how shamed the driver was. There was a bit of tail-gating; a bit of swearing; a few hand gestures. It’s not right, but it’s hardly at the worst end of the wrongs. Indeed, the tailgating aside, there is probably actually no law broken – and we only have her word to say that he was tailgating, which can be quite a subjective assessment. Who’s to say that he wasn’t entirely in the right to make some gestures – perhaps she pulled out in front of him, straddled two lanes preventing him from passing. She seems like someone a bit too desperate for attention for this to be an entirely cut-and-dried story.

Secondly, there is the dead man and the virgin. Well, the Virgin Media. A chap uploaded a photo of the bill that his deceased father-in-law had received from Virgin. Obviously they ‘tagged’ Virgin in the post, meaning that Virgin’s notifications will have been going wild. They also mentioned and tagged Sky, Virgin’s competitor, in the post extolling the benefits of Sky – presumably trying not only to get Virgin to right the wrong, but get a freebie from sky. But the basics of it were that they had informed Virgin of the death, but that Virgin had still sent a bill.

There could be many reasons behind this. Knowing how these big corporations work, this could simply have been a case of a note being put on the wrong account or the wrong screen; it could have been taking a little time to process; it could actually have been a perfectly legitimate ‘account closing’ bill – afterall, they are still perfectly entitled to be paid up until the date of death: it would still be a debt owed by the estate; these things don’t just get written off (except for the goodwill of the company). So we really don’t know what has happened here. Has the chap even questioned this with Virgin? From the blurb in the posting, no. He merely informed Virgin of the death. A single contact. But this “went viral”. [If you read the news story, Virgin have apologised and promised to “bring the account to a close more sensitively” – a strong suggestion that in fact the charges were perfectly legitimate, but that the poster thought they would just waive them. The poster has not removed the post or updated it to reflect the apology.]

Now, that – of itself – is a curious thing. What is “going viral”? I regularly log on and see that half a dozen or so people like my status. On Twitter some of my comments get retweeted a dozen or so times. Are they viral? At what point is a critical mass achieved that seems to perpetuate the post, and what is the value to be achieved to have hit internet stardom? The Virgin post hit around 25,000 shares in 24 hours. Well done. But it’s not Gangnam Style, is it?

And it shows as much about the phenomenon as the cause. When you read the comments to the post, they are not about the validity of the post. They are all “Oh my gosh John [or whatever], you got 15,000 likes in a few hours!” “Oh my gosh John, you’re like an internet star!”. Even John joined in with these, entirely losing focus on exactly what he was trying to achieve – rather than getting a bill written off, he was wanting to hit his next target of 30,000.

I didn’t share.

I don’t share these things. I don’t care about these things really.

But, as with everything (see the films post) these are getting more and more extreme.

There are a lot of vigilante posts, often about people who have been abusing dogs or forcing them to fight. It will usually be a photo of “the perpetrators” (though how correct these are is open to question) or “the victim” together with some comment along the lines of “We need to find these people, they were spotted down such-and-such a lane in so-and-so town with seventy West Highland terriers, and were whipping those poor dogs with fishing wire.” Or some other such nonsense. One of the more recent ones I saw contained a lot of expletives and threats to kill. Now that’s just illegal.

Whether or not the dog has been injured or a simple stock photo used is open to question; as is how old the ‘cause’ – almost weekly I have one friend or another share a picture claiming that this week – like every week before – is Mental Health Awareness week so that no-one actually knows which week is Mental Health Awareness week. Perhaps the photo was one taken by an aggrieved neighbour who had not see dog fighting but was just getting a bit fed up with the neighbour parking in front of their drive. To ‘get their own back’ they turned to social media to have a rant, bad-mouth the person a bit, and before they know it, it is out of hand. Because of the ‘share’ nature, it may lose the identity of the original poster, and still be floating round years later; but more often than not it won’t lose that identity. Unless the poster is absolutely certain as to what has happened; they shouldn’t be posting as to do so would expose them to a claim of libel or malicious falsehood; and indeed those of the sharers. This is why we have the police rather than relying on self-determination and execution.

That said, the phenomenon itself can only be short-lived. Not everyone’s bill will go viral. The first is a novelty, after that it’s just boring. Yes it may be the most current form of ‘chain letters’ but they disappear for a long time before a short flurry of activity and they are gone again.

The latest development of these, perhaps the most extreme of combinations, was one I saw recently – it was the picture of a child. If you just read the initial blurb, it explains the name of the child, the age and what he enjoys studying at school. It’s only when you click ‘read more’ that you end up with a full-blown essay. I didn’t read it. I couldn’t be bothered - it was SO long. It was clear that it was a 'cause' so I fleetingly glanced to try to identify what type of cause. And this was the curious thing. The post must have had well over a thousand words of copy to it; yet it didn’t seem to make a point except for “share this if you are against child cruelty”. It didn’t point you to a charity, or give you any hints or tips on how to spot child cruelty; it just circulated a very long, meandering, somewhat prosaic tale of an anonymous child who suffered some very terrible things.

But then again, people will buy these “Misery-Lit” novels (also call It-Lit or Pelzer Phenomenon novels after Dan Pelzer’s AChild Called It). However it gets worse. I have often been told to “Share this if you are against such-and-such” or prompted or induced to share with comments such as “it only takes one second to click share, 99% of people won’t share it – will you show compassion?” this particular one stated “share this if you are against child cruelty. If you don’t share this you clearly endorse child cruelty and probably beat your own child”.

Now aside from that being false, and a threat, this is positively chilling. Yes, the only person realistically who will know that I didn’t share it is myself (unless my friends are keeping such scary stalkingish attention to my shares); but to be forced with threats by an unknown person to share something which if I don’t, it will be assumed that I am a fully paid-up child abuser is absolutely unacceptable. I’m sure the people who write them don’t realise quite how unacceptable their lobbying tactics are – particularly when I get little or no warning as to the harrowing story I am about to read when I open the ‘read more’, though this is something which Facebook itself is struggling with as recently showed with the beheading videos.

 

Whoever writes these posts clearly does not do so professionally. They are rambling, self-indulgent and ultimately pointless and ungrammatically syntaxed blurb. Yes, I realise the irony in writing that in a rambling, self-indulgent and poorly grammartised blog where I have a tendency to make up my own words. The poor grammar is probably as bad as the fact that people are ‘causing’ in my own living room without me inviting them in. Or perhaps I do consent simply by opening my web-browser.

One of my friends on Twitter the other night was bemoaning himself the newsfeed on Facebook. His moan was the fact that he had “liked” a number of bands so that people seeing his ‘about’ tab would be able to get a good grip of his type of music. He was complaining that his newsfeed was more and more spammed by these bands that he may like but did not necessarily want to hear from. He wanted a way to be able to filter these out, so there was a separate ‘likefeed’. I would like a separate ‘spamfeed’ to shove these posts that, albeit posted or shared by friends, clearly has no relevance to their life whatsoever let alone mine. They seem to be able to “other-box” messages that are clearly meant for me, even though they are sent from people outside my friendlist; something which I only found out the other day when I stumbled upon a couple of messages in there that had been waiting a month or so. Once again, good communication Facebook!

I’m sure the fad will die a slow death and be replaced by another, hopefully much more funny fad. Perhaps it is time to bring back planking, quickly followed by news reports about how absurd or even dangerous planking is.

Perfect, but for...

What's that, three posts this month about my personal life? Not a single rant yet about social media? Don't worry, it's coming.

At the end of the last post you might have seen the slightly curious editorial comment "[this post was written on 28 April]" and thought it either a curiousity, or thought nothing of it.

The reason behind that was that things changed a little over the weekend, prior to actually finalising the post.

The reason was Shane.

I went down to London for the weekend to see a play on the Friday night - Beautiful Thing. It's a play about two gay lads coming out to each other. It's kinda one of those "You can't call yourself gay until you've seen the film" types of thing. Well, the film was good - one of those classic, British, council estate films that only the British could make or love and that get cultural cache somehow, like Rita, Sue and Bob Too for example. But it started out as a play, and returned as a play for the 20th anniversary. Gosh that makes me feel old - I'd have only been a couple of years younger than the characters! And probably feeling the same feelings.

So, we did the theatre on Friday night, and had our 'big blow-out night out' on Saturday night. This is how our life has changed. Once upon a time we would go to Popstarz on a Friday night, have a full night out, visit somewhere interesting on Saturday, then go out again Saturday night. These days we have a restrained night on either theatre on the Friday or the cinema on the Saturday, and probably spend most of the daytimes relaxing. It is the challenge of age, but also the additional pressures of work. Both my friend and I are in jobs that have considerably more pressures both in time and stress. But it takes it toll on non-work life. But then I have bemoaned this previously on many occasions.

Anyhow, to Saturday night.

So, we went to the Two Brewers in Clapham. It's a good, fun venue which doesn't have any pretenses about itself. And it had Shane...

Now, if someone were to ask me how to describe my ideal man, I would say:

• Cute, handsome or otherwise attractive.
• Sensibly aged. Preferably graduated university, though not much older than me. It's quite a large age range.
• Intelligent. Preferably graduated, though common sense is essential.
• Shorter than me
• Accent - Scotch, Irish or Welsh preferably, but others considered
• Hairy chest
• Non-smoker
• Bottom. Not to put too crude a point on it, but in gay men's terms I am totally top.

That's not in any particular order. Now, when in the Two Brewers I glanced upon this chap who was gorgeous. We'll put gorgeous in with 'cute, handsome or otherwise attractive'. And he kept looking at me. My friend asked me the reason for my distractedness and I explained how I had seen the only attractive person in the room.Anyhow, that only attractive person in the room came over to talk to me and explained how he thought that I was the only attractive person in the room.

So, let's put this into context. Shane is:

• gorgeous
• 31
• A primary school teacher, funny and intelligent
• 5'10" max. Shorter than me but not so short I have to stoop (I'm 6'4")
• Irish
• Has a lovely hairy chest
• Doesn't smoke
• Yes. Fits this category entirely.

The only problem?

He lives in London and I don't.

When is a date not a date...

Well, when it's me who's on the date.

So, in the last post I said I'd kinda gotten my eye on someone. Well I do. And he's cute and lovely and stuff.

And we've been on...

Well...

I'm not sure what.

We've seen each other out quite a lot. That's half the bind of tiny-town-scene. But then we got chatting online, and - eventually - we got to the stage where he suggested we should meet up.

Meet up.

Is that a date?

Well, I forgot to ask. I was so giddy at the suggestion, I didn't think of the technicalities. I know: and me a solicitor.

So anyhow, we arranged a day and time to meet up and did so. And it was lovely and stuff. We chatted for ages and drank a lot of tea.

It was lovely.

But was it a date?

I don't know. It seemed to, and we agreed we had to do it again.

Which we did.

Eventually.

It took a good few weeks because I kept going to London and he kept going home, but we got there and we met up for ... tea, again. Two dates, zero alcohol. This has to be a record for me, particularly as we are both drinking when we see each other out. But, after uncertainty of which day would be most suitable, once that was confirmed I forgot to sure up weather it was a date or not.

You'd have thought I'd have learned from the first time. But this is me. And I didn't.

So we met up a second time and drank tea and it was lovely and stuff. And I still have no idea if it was a date or not.

I asked my friend and he asked a couple of questions:

Was it expressly "not a date. Just friends"? No, it wasn't.
Was it just the two of us? Yes.
Were there long prolonged periods of eye contact where we almost expected to kiss? Um, yeah.
Did it feel like a date? Well, yes, it did, kinda.

So he suggests it was a date. Well, it was two dates.

And we have kinda suggested a commitment to a third. Obviously we haven't cemented a date yet, let alone whether it is actually a 'date' or not. So we'll see how it goes.

[this post was written on 28 April]
 

Epic ... fail

A week or so ago I went to the cinema. I don’t go often, and when I do it is usually to see arty-farty stuff like the National TheatreLive performances (which are superb).

But this time I went to watch the latest, big ticket film. It was the wrong time of year to go really. The trailers that were showing were those for the summer blockbusters – Oblivion (Tom Cruise) and Olympus Has Fallen (Gerald Butler and Morgan Freeman). This year must be ‘O’ year, clearly.

One is apocalyptic, the other post-apocalyptic. Both involve a lot of running around, shooting things and – for the ladies – reasonably attractive and muscled men. It’s the standard formula: the world is facing some sort of apocalyptic event, and iconic building gets destroyed, the world survives.

They say there are just seven Hollywood storylines:

Rags to Riches

Quest (including logical quests, thereby mysteries)

Voyage and Return

Comedy

Tragedy

Rebirth (essentially one form of good-overcoming-evil, the chap who learns the error of his ways)

Overcoming the Monster (including all good-overcoming-evils)

I question all of these. Most particularly I fail to see the difference between Quest and Voyage and Return, other than the ‘return’ aspect. It also doesn’t really suit romances (though these are often ‘rom-coms’, and thereby falling into ‘Comedy’, albeit that the comedy element is often rather tenuous). One day I may make my own list...

Anyhow, these apocalyptic endeavours fall into the last category – Overcoming the Monster. The monster being whatever doom is threatening the world on this particular occasion.

The doom is varied. It could be natural (The Day After Tomorrow; TheCore) Extraterrestrial (Independence Day, Star Wars and Superman probably also fit in this category even though the hero is also alien) human (almost every James Bond) inhuman (Jaws, Jurassic Park) or intergalactic (Deep Impact, Armageddon). Admittedly, they started out not being very apocalyptic – Jaws only terrified a single town, for example. However as each summer has approached, the stakes have been raised, the terror has had to become greater, the target greater: the idea that “it was just a small town in America, nowhere near us” becoming less and less easily dismissed.

One of the risks with this it that as the threat becomes bigger and target wider, so it becomes more extraordinary, less believable, more farcical. The stakes get raised so high that the chips topple – a film tries too hard and becomes too epic for its own good.

But in addition to them each trying to outdo each other, so they also nullify us. We expect more bodies, more chases, more fights, more noise. Yes, one compromise is story; but the other is shock. Nothing shocks us any more. When Deep Impact was released, rather than raving about the storyline (though it may have suffered there from being released at the same time as Armageddon which had an identical storyline – there’s only so much you can say about a meteor) everyone was talking about the noise. It was the loudest film to have been released at the cinema up until that time.

There’s not much else you can say about them really. We know the story – there will be some sort of devastating threat; there will be an unusual or unexpected hero; there will be a death of at least one of the main characters (a low helps make the high higher, the overcoming all the more remarkable); a romance (for the ladies); a lot of special effects; and a happy ending. Oh, and probably a soundtrack featuring Aerosmith.

The most recent addition has been the destruction of an icon – the Statue of Liberty, the White House, the Empire State Building etc. They become more and more absurd. If you had said “the White House is destroyed in a massive fireball after suffering a direct hit from an alien spaceship” then an ordinary producer would have thrown it out; but since Independence Day, the producer would say “it’s been done before. Maybe a fleet of spaceships. Or the entirety of America. Or maybe it’s actually a super-volcano”.

It’s exhausting. In fact, it’s not any more. It’s boring. Just as overuse of antibiotics has made bugs resistant to them, so we have become ennumbed by excess. Whilst they try to think of newer, more epic, more novel ways, so in turn they seem less inventive, less distinctive, more farcical.

Perhaps it’s time for a change. Or at least a rest.

A brief life... update

So, I presume you're all consumed with curiosity about what's going on with me?

After all, it has been February since I made a few feeble excuses about my personal achievements. Well, you'll be pleased to know completed the lounge and only a week outside of the original aim-date, which can probably be laid at the feet of March. Well, and a little underestimating.

So, at the end of February the room had been painted. That's not bad at all to say I was still wiring in the lighting and electrics in January, then it needed plastering, then 'tidying up' the plasterwork, then painting with 3 coats of paint.

Well, I figured the floor needed sanding, two coats of stain and three coats of varnish. One night for each of those - 6 nights in total, surely?

I forgot about filling the gaps and knocking nail heads in. That took two nights, if only because I ran out of filler.

Sanding took a lot more than one night. First the belts snapped, so I went to the local shop open late to get some new ones. He clearly wanted to sell me a new sander and kept up a "you've a non-standard (though clearly off-the-shelf) sander there" attitude which I wasn't standing for, so I got the 'closest-fit' belts which worked a dream. Well, one of those dreams where you wake up overheating. Because that's what happened witth the sander - the plastic runner melted, meaning the belt just rode off. By which time the shops were closed.

So the next day at work I popped down to the local DIY warehouse who would sell me a new sander considerably cheaper (and considerably less smuggly) than the local store, bought the sander, but then had to be careful. Operating a strict 15 mins use v 15 mins cooldown I managed not to burn out the sander (and get my bathroom cleaned as an aside) over the next three nights. It's honestly surprised me how big the room was and how slow going it was.

So that set me back a week. Staining and varnishing was no issue - one night each coat of each. But of the four weekends of March, I was in London for three.

Now, that of itself was somewhat unexpected.

I was due a trip down to London to see my friends, so arranged it to coincide with one of their birthdays. Lovely weekend. But on going down that weekend, I found out about the other two weekends - that of the pub crawl; and that of the special club night. Both which were fantastic weekends. But unexpected.

Now, a weekend in London is all lovely, but each weekend knocks out easily as many hours as are available during the week. It knocks out a full Saturday (if I start work at 10 and finish at 6, that's 8 hours) and the same on Sunday. During the week, if I work four evenings from 7 to 11 (Monday to Thursday, because no-one works a Friday night) that's the same 16 hours. But there are more breaks during the week for food and stuff; and a weekend away also knocks out the Thursday evening as I have to pack and tidy the house. So those three weekends cost a lot.

Then I had two weekends planned as "architrave, skirting and contingency". Clearly 'contingency' was already used up with the floor hoo-har, however with the architrave taking a day, that was a happy day. The next day not so - the major piece of skirting was horrible to fit because of windows and shelves and gaps and hell. It looks lovely now it has been stained, but it took a lot of work to get there. The rest of the skirting went ok, then that all needed staining, the PVC surrounds tidying, and any touching up done. So to get don by the end of the first week of April was very good.

I'm just waiting on my sofa now.

I ordered it as soon as I knew the skirting would get done - so end of March. It was supposed to be on 1-3 weeks, but they rang me to say they had received it damaged so it would be another 8 weeks whilst the manufacturers made a new one.

Yes, I'm pissed about this. I did specifically order it at the time I did because it was on a reasonable short lead time. I didn't want them to say they could deliver the next day and the room not be ready, so I got the room almost ready. But now it means I have the lounge all ready, but no sofa to sit on. My only consolation is that they checked it and didn't deliver it damaged.

However the piano is back in there and I can play it, so that has occurred on a couple of occasions.

So, that brings Spring. The most demanding season of the year (along with Summer, Autumn and Winter). Spring is the season I NEED to get my plants growing. Last year I abandoned hope on this because of my time away. That means I have more to do this year against those weeds I didn't get around to tackling last year.

The reason spring is the most demanding is that seeds, plants, tuber and bulbs all need to be set by certain times; which means the ground needs to be prepared and ready. Last year was odd because I was away. This year was odd because up until a couple of weeks ago there was still snow on the ground - it was solid frozen. And now seems to have thawed really quickly, applying pressure to get stuff started off and weeded out.

Anyhow, I have most of my plants started off, I just need to sort the potato patch (massive job) and the I can "relax" by just weeding the borders that need it as and when. Yeah, that's relaxing.


Work is the same. Well, it's busier than normal really but for me it is the same in as much as the businessness doesn't affect my homelife, save as to knacker me more. I just end up a little more frustrated that colleagues who should know better don't (or feign that they don't)

Exercise-wise I have started jogging to and from work on Tuesdays and Thursdays (unless I can find any excuse not to). That is the most exercise I have done since ceasing swimming at Christmas. I always do - the worst thing in life is to go to a swimming pool in January where all the 'resolutionaries' go swimming for a few weeks to "start a healthy life-style" or at the very least "lose the Christmas pounds". It's hell.

Romantically? One of my friends accuses me of being on a streak. He figures every time he sees me out I end up with someone.

I am currently considerably distracted by someone.

He's cute. Very very cute. He's in his final year of studies though, and keeps talking about moving away. And I - as an older chap - have to try to convince him to stay.

So we'll see how things pan out.