Said problem is that if I have to sit still and do nothing while concentrating on someone else talking for any length of time, I get extremely sleepy, regardless of how tired I actually am. My eyelids start to get heavy, my body gets tired and all I want to do is just curl up and get comfortable for a bit of a nap.
This is a problem because the times when I am supposed to sit still, do nothing and concentrate on someone else talking for any length of time are generally occasions where it would be impolite to fall asleep. Weddings and funerals, for example, but also meetings.
I’ve suffered with this issue for as long as I can remember — certainly for as long as I’ve been an adult. I remember it happening on occasion at university during lectures, but more often than not this could be attributed to a heavy night out the previous evening and a hangover weighing on my mind. (My peers found it terribly amusing when I had to quietly slip out of our weekly piano workshop to go and be a bit sick. Well, I didn’t want to throw up all over the Turner Sims concert hall.) At other times, I could fend it off by occupying my brain somewhat: either taking notes if I was actually interested in the subject of the lecture, or doodling the lecturer getting sucked off by some sort of sinister vacuum cleaner-like contraption if I wasn’t. (This happened once; it wasn’t something I found myself drawing on a regular basis.)
It’s mildly embarrassing, but fortunately I’ve never managed to actually completely fall asleep before. I’ve come perilously close, I must admit, but I always manage to maintain my faculties and remain in the land of the living. I came perilously close on more than one teacher training day while I worked in schools, too, particularly since said training days tend to ignore everything we’re ever taught about engaging people and helping them learn and instead tend to consist of someone waffling on and on and on for hours about something which is, quite possibly, a load of old bollocks.
The peculiar thing is the moment I step out of the situation where I’m supposed to be concentrating on someone else droning on about whatever, I can be back to full alertness in a matter of seconds, with no trace of tiredness. It’s just that while I’m sitting there, expected to take in everything that is being said and actually retaining very little of it at all — usually because it’s not relevant to me and thus immediately filtered out by my brain — my body appears to go into its shutdown sequence. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Or am I? That would be awful, and even more difficult to explain than falling asleep in a meeting already would be. But I guess we’ll cross that bridge if — yes, if — we come to it!
“I’m a perfectionist” may be the lamest, most clichéd answer possible to that equally lame and clichéd job interview question “what is your biggest weakness?” but, well, it really is a weakness.
Why? Because perfectionism often makes you feel responsible for things that aren’t your fault. Perfectionism often makes you feel bad for making mistakes based on information you weren’t given. Perfectionism often ruins an otherwise pleasant day when that one thing that didn’t go quite as well as all the other things weighs on your mind more than the considerably greater number of positive thoughts you could be having.
I came to the conclusion today that I suffer from perfectionism. I hate doing a bad job. I hate feeling like I’ve made a mistake. I hate feeling like I could have done more.
I made a mistake today. It wasn’t a big mistake. It didn’t get me into trouble. It didn’t hurt anyone or spoil anyone else’s day, and thinking about it rationally, from a distance, it wasn’t really a “mistake” at all since, as noted above, I didn’t have all the information available to hand. It does, however, have the potential to make more work for me — thankfully there is plenty of time to complete said work if it is necessary — and it’s probably something I could have avoided. I didn’t, however, and now this has happened. And I feel bad.
I’m assured that I shouldn’t feel bad, that I wasn’t to know, that it might not even be a problem at all — I won’t know that latter part until tomorrow — but it’s too late; the knowledge that I Did Something Wrong has already sunk in and already made me a bit mopey on the way home. Thankfully I managed to distract myself in time, so with any luck I won’t be spending the evening in a depressed haze staring at a wall as often happens on such occasions, but the fact remains: perfectionism stinks.
I’m not sure where this stems from. My most plausible explanation is that it likely hails from my childhood, where I was typically — not to blow my own trumpet here, it’s a statement of fact — one of the top-performing students in the class, both in primary and secondary school. On the few occasions where I failed to live up to the standards I had apparently set for both myself and others to expect of me, I felt really bad. I still have a vivid memory of a two-page spread in my Class 2 (year 3 or 4 in new money, I think) Maths book where the left page — on which I had completed a single sum — was adorned with the teacher comment “Lazy work” in red pen, and the right page — on which I had completed three sums, two of which were incorrect — was forever blemished with the words “Very poor”, also in red pen.
I was mortified at the time; the rest of my school books were so consistently good and I was so regularly praised and rewarded — “go and colour in a square on your rocket” — that doing something badly brought me crashing down to earth and upset me a great deal. I didn’t want anyone to see those pages in my books; they were a stain on my otherwise good record. To my credit, though, I always made sure I was both more industrious and careful in Maths lessons from that point on, even though I absolutely loathed that subject right through until the end of secondary school.
To date, though, every time something doesn’t quite go right, I end up feeling like I did that day I got that book back with those two awful pages. Whether it’s a negative comment on something I’ve written, an offhand remark by someone I know or simply the knowledge that I messed up somewhere — even if no-one else knows — it hits me right in the Black Dog and, more often than not, ruins an otherwise good day.
Thankfully, the very act of writing this post is helping banish such thoughts from my mind, and I fully intend to go and have a thoroughly pleasant evening now. So suck that, perfectionism.
Whenever I see a police car or an ambulance screaming down the road in the opposite direction to the way I’m going, I can’t help but wonder where they’re going, what they’re doing and what the story behind that split-second encounter was. For a brief moment, my own story — usually something rather mundane like going to the shops or to get some petrol — intersects with that of some other people; an exciting, possibly tragic story that I will likely never know the details of.
That doesn’t stop me wondering, though.
Stories are all around us. Everyone you see is living their own story. And while few of them live up to the obnoxious banner currently hanging in Southampton’s WestQuay shopping centre (which promotes a local photography studio and reads “The Most Important Story Ever Told: Yours”), they’re all different and they’re all interesting in their own way. It can be kind of mind-boggling to contemplate quite how many things are going on at any given time, particularly when you contemplate how many things happen to you — however mundane — on any given day.
It’s in acknowledging the fact that stories are going on all around us — and continue without our intervention — that it becomes possible to craft a convincing, compelling fictional world. And it’s true across all forms of media: many comic books these days unfold in shared universes, with foreground events in one series fading into the background in others, but still being acknowledged; crossover TV shows keep their own narratives mostly parallel, but occasionally bend inwards a little to meet for a fleeting episode or two before diverging again; prolific authors spend volume after volume building up a convincing mental picture of how their world works, and the many adventures that the people therein have over time.
And the same is, of course, true of video games. The most well-crafted video games embrace this feeling of stories happening all around us at any time and, more so than any other medium, allow us to explore them at our leisure, pursuing the threads we’re interested in to build up a full picture of what it must really like to be an inhabitant of a virtual world.
This sort of thing is particularly important in sprawling role-playing games, where a poorly crafted world can do great harm to the immersion factor of the game. It’s the reason why the Elder Scrolls games have never really resonated with me: I never got the sense that the people wandering around and occasionally looking in my direction mattered; I never got the sense that they had their own personal stories, even when they formed the basis of a quest or two. There was the odd exception — tucked away in a few nooks and crannies were some interesting diary entries and illicit items that suggested all was perhaps not as it seemed with a character that seemed otherwise respectable — but for the most part, the identikit nature of most of the characters in these games was immensely offputting.
It will doubtless not surprise you to hear that this is one thing I feel Final Fantasy XIV does exceptionally well, much as its predecessor Final Fantasy XI did before it. Although the world is primarily populated by static NPCs who go about their same old business at all times of day or night — that and the players, of course — the game does, on regular occasions, make the effort to make the land of Eorzea feel truly lived-in.
This is most apparent in the relatively recently added “Postmoogle” quests, in which you’re recruited (somewhat reluctantly) by the Deputy Postmoogle to deliver a series of letters to various characters around the realm. Mechanically, these quests are little more than “go here, talk to this person” fetch quests, but if you stop and pay attention to what is being said — and who is involved — they take on a whole new amount of meaning.
This is because they involve characters that you will have seen elsewhere out and about in the world in various contexts.
One quest sees you accompanying the aptly named Hunberct Longhaft and his two adoring Miqo’te companions around the city of Ul’Dah; your only previous contact with these characters will have been during one of the major “FATE” events out in the world, at which point there was little time for conversation, but just enough time to wonder exactly what was going on between Hunberct and the two Miqo’te.
Another sees you engaging in conversation with a group of four gladiators whom you’ve likely only ever encountered as the last “boss” of the dungeon Halatali (Hard). Another still delves into the background of the “aesthetician” — the character you can summon from your inn room to get a new haircut — and his Ishgardian heritage.
It’s not just the Postmoogle quests that do this, however. Many of the sidequests that have been added since the game’s launch acknowledge popular minor characters, such as the ill-fated adventuring party you run into early in the game’s main scenario, whose erstwhile leader is beheaded in battle “off-camera” while you run your first dungeons. The next time you meet the group, the healer of the party — the deceased leader’s fiancee — is carrying his head around in a bag with her, stricken with guilt; the next time you meet them, which is much, much later, at level 50, long after the initial main scenario is over and done with, things have gone very, very wrong indeed.
Final Fantasy XIV is far from the only example of this idea of stories being all around us being used effectively in video games, but it’s one of the best in recent memory.
I still can’t help wondering where that ambulance was going, though. I hope the person it was on its way to help is all right.
I bought some new glasses recently, at great expense. (For those of you with 20/20 vision, be happy; glasses are expensive.) I picked them up this morning and I was actually quite excited about it — I’ve felt that my current pair haven’t been quite “right” for a little while, and a recent eye test confirmed that yes, my right eye in particular seems to have changed a bit, and a new pair of glasses probably wouldn’t be a terrible idea. (They probably weren’t a terrible idea anyway, since my current pair are now several years old and, having been attached to my face for the majority of that time, are now also covered in that unpleasant but reassuringly familiar clink that builds up around the nosepiece of glasses that are worn on a daily basis.)
Anyway, I put on the new glasses to try them and they immediately felt a little odd. I was assured that it was largely to do with the fact that my eyes were adjusting to the new lenses, though; after all, if my right eye had changed a bit, it had probably been overcompensating somewhat for the lenses in my current pair. I was then encouraged to keep them on for the whole day in order to try and adjust, and discouraged from returning to my old pair.
Well, I tried. I kept the new pair on for most of the day, but when I reached mid-afternoon and found myself sporting a headache that I can only describe as “excruciating” — it was near migraine-like in its intensity, nausea-inducing tendencies and quantity of colourful flashing lights it was attracting in front of my vision — I came to the conclusion that no amount of “adjustment” was going to fix this; the glasses were simply not quite right.
This is a bit of a bummer, since it means I have to make another appointment with the opticians to attempt to get this sorted. I imagine it will probably result in another eye test, too, which will be a pain to schedule around work, and then, of course, I’ll end up having to wait for some new lenses, assuming they do need replacing. This isn’t the end of the world, since my current glasses are still perfectly acceptable, but I was looking forward to enjoying the improved clarity and magic blue light-reducing lenses of the new ones.
Sadly it seems that is not to be for now; it would seem unwise to try and just cope with a pair of glasses that make me feel slightly cross-eyed at best and make me want to throw up and fall over at worst. With any luck, I’ll be able to get them sorted out this week.
These things happen, of course, but I can’t deny being a little disappointed by all this. I’ve not had a bad experience with opticians in the years since I started wearing glasses, so it’s a shame to run into this issue. Now comes the test of whether Boots’ customer service is up to snuff or not… I guess we’ll find out on Monday!
Given the ubiquity of technology these days, there’s a lot more competition between apps and online services than there ever was in the past. This means that all of them have to stoop to increasingly low levels in order to get people to “engage” with them, leading to a situation we’ve simply not had prior to the last few years.
That situation comes in the form of apps and services begging you to use them. It’s obnoxious, obtrusive and, more to the point, makes me disinclined to make use of that app or service ever again. In fact, in most cases, if an app or service begs me to use it or come back, I will simply uninstall it or unsubscribe from their mailing list.
The most egregious example I can think of recently was an app called TuneIn Radio. I was recommended this as a good means of listening to both streaming Internet radio and podcasts, but was dismayed to discover after firing it up just once that it then insisted on reminding me of its own existence at least once a day via a push notification that was usually recommending something I had absolutely no interest in whatsoever. (“Listen to TalkSport!” Oh, how little you know me.) However good the app is, notifications bug me enough at the best of times, so in the bin it went.
I’m still getting email messages from services I had to sign up for when I was reviewing endless reams of shitty mobile-social apps for Inside Mobile Apps, too. Eventually I simply registered for these services with an email address I don’t use any more, and this mitigated the problem somewhat, but there are still times where there are services that I haven’t touched for a year or more feel the need to email me and remind me that they exist.
Worse, when you unsubscribe from these mailing lists you inevitably end up signed up to, you’re often questioned as to why you’d ever want to stop your inbox being cluttered up with this meaningless crap. I had one email the other day from a service called AppData, a ludicrously expensive analytics service that was attached to the Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps sites I used to write for, which asked whether I had unsubscribed “by mistake”. Seriously. Look.
The sheer arrogance of this is absolutely astonishing. “Oh, no, whoops, I unsubscribed from your marketing spam by mistake. I actually do want you to try and sell me things! Sign me back up, quick!” Or, indeed, “oh no, the pointless marketing spam I forwarded on to my friend [who does this?] annoyed them so much that they tried to unsubscribe themselves and instead unsubscribed me! Sign me back up, quick!”
I kind of understand why this happens. As I said at the beginning, the sheer amount of competition between mobile app and online service providers these days is ridiculous, so they have to resort to ever more drastic measures to retain their users, and hopefully convert them into paying customers — or at least people who will click on ads.
I can’t say I feel much sympathy, though. Surely having to resort to this is not a signal that you should market harder. Surely having to resort to this is, instead, a sign that there is far too much pointless, useless crap on the market, and maybe you should try a bit harder to come up with an idea that is actually innovative and helpful to people rather than a rehash of other things people already use? Harsh as it may sound, these days I find myself smiling a little with every email I receive that informs me a pointless, stupid mobile-social service that I reviewed a year or more ago is closing down. I’m glad; there’s too much noise in our lives anyway even with just the well-established services like Twitter and Facebook, so stop adding to it.
All right, WordPress, you win. After bugging me constantly with urges to try the “improved posting experience” while I was just trying to write my blog, let’s give this “improved posting experience” a go and see if it’s actually any better than the “posting experience” most WordPress users are accustomed to. Here we go, then.
So first up, it’s pretty blue. This puts it in line with the main WordPress.com site, where those using WordPress.com to manage their blog and/or be part of the WordPress community of bloggers can tweak their blog settings, fiddle with multiple sites and subscribe to other people’s blogs. In that sense, it’s consistent; however, where it’s inconsistent is with the rest of the WordPress dashboard, which is still the black and grey it’s ever been.
Let’s take a look at functionality.
There’s drag and drop for images… sort of. You can drag an image file onto the post editor, but this doesn’t automatically insert it into the post at the point where you drop it, disappointingly; rather, it simply brings up the regular media browser (which now doesn’t match the new editor) and uploads the image, at which point you can insert it into the post where you left the cursor. (This didn’t work first time I tried; I had to close the media browser, reposition the cursor, then open it again and then insert.) It also inexplicably forgets the default setting for image size that you might have been using in the “classic mode” (ugh) “posting experience”.
As for other functionality, there’s the same toolbar as the regular WordPress “posting experience” (no, I’m not going to stop the sarcastic quotation marks around that phrase anytime soon) but, like the media browser, it forgets your default settings, in this case whether you have the “kitchen sink” second row of buttons (allowing access to styles, underline, justification, text colour, special characters, indents, undo and redo — all pretty useful stuff) open or not.
Over on the right of the editor, there’s a bunch of pop-open menus for the post’s status (draft, scheduled, published), tags and categories, a featured image, whether the post will be shared on social media (and whether there will be a custom message), an attached location, a front-page excerpt, and the mysterious “advanced settings”, which include… drum roll…
…a custom slug, the author of the post, the format of the post, its visibility, whether or not it’s a sticky, and whether it allows likes, shares, comments and pingbacks. Hmm. Not all that advanced, really.
I can’t really tell what’s better about this “improved posting experience” to be honest, and in a number of ways it’s actually inferior. It certainly looks quite nice — the pop-open menus on the right keep things very neat and clean, for example — but it has this improved look at the expense of ease of access to information and settings.
The standard WordPress editor may be more cluttered and rather more clinical-looking than the soft blues of the “improved posting experience”, but it’s also considerably superior. Information and settings can be popped open and closed at will — it’s all open rather than closed by default — and the screen gives you much more information, most notably on the status bar at the bottom of the editor, where you have a word count and a “last edited” date — both of which are completely absent from the “improved posting experience”. There’s also easy access to all other aspects of your site via the left-hand side menu.
Also worthy of note: when I started writing this post, there was a button to switch back to “classic mode” which promptly disappeared when I saved a draft. Getting back to the standard editor required logging back into this site’s dashboard, going to the post list and then choosing to edit my draft. Somewhat cumbersome.
I can see the intent behind the “improved posting experience” — it’s to strip out all the stuff that might prove daunting to those less familiar with technology and software such as WordPress. It’s an attempt to make it into a simple and clean blog editor along the lines of Tumblr. Trouble is, that’s never what WordPress has been about; WordPress has always been the blog solution to go to when you want customisability and a lot of control over what you’re posting, when and how — and without having to mess around with HTML and CSS for styling.
Perhaps the “improved posting experience” will encourage more new users to give blogging a serious go. And that’s ultimately a good thing. For people like me, though, who have been using WordPress for years now, it’s very much a step backwards rather than forwards.
I’ve never really felt like all those pieces of conventional wisdom regarding certain foods and drinks actually have the intended effect on me — at least not until the last few years or so. I’m not sure if they’re actually having more of an effect on me as I get older, or if I’m simply more conscious of the effect they’re having on me. Either way, I’m starting to notice that some of the things regarding food and drink I’ve long had a certain degree of doubt over are perhaps a little more true than I thought.
Take coffee, for example. Now, my past resilience to caffeine — I’ve long been able to drink a cup of joe in the evening and not have it affect my sleep patterns, though this is perhaps due to the fact that my sleep patterns are already somewhat questionable — can perhaps be attributed to the sheer amount of the stuff I’ve put into my body on a regular basis ever since I was quite young. Coffee is seen by some as a “grown-up drink” — perhaps because of its bitterness, and the fact that, without milk, it’s an acquired taste — but I’ve been drinking it in various forms for as long as I can remember. Okay, for the first few years of my life it was milky Nescafé, but as soon as the world discovered fancy, expensive coffees I was right there with everyone — though I must confess I don’t go as far as some people, largely because I have no idea what a “wet latte” is.
Anyway. The fact is, I’ve always drunk a lot of coffee — and buying a nice coffee machine a while back certainly didn’t help me cut back, not that I particularly wanted to. As such, my body has apparently grown somewhat accustomed to caffeine, and thus a simple coffee never felt like it had a huge amount of effect on me. Sure, if I drank too many coffees and Red Bulls in a day, I’d get the shakes and feel a bit sick — as bad a feeling as any hangover, that, let me tell you — but for the most part, I never felt like caffeine made me any more “alert” or gave me a buzz as legend had it that it was supposed to.
Recently, however, I’ve cut back on coffee somewhat, largely due to the fact that it costs money to go and get a decent coffee at work (I could take instant, but, frankly, I’m a snob about coffee now and find that most instant — with the possible exception of Nescafé Azera, which is actually pretty good — tastes like crap) and thus I drink far less on any given day. And, as a result, I feel like caffeine is having more of an effect on me. I know a morning coffee certainly feels like it helps — and if I need to pep up a bit in the afternoon, another cup feels like it helps too. It’s possibly psychosomatic, of course — which is what I’ve long suspected when it comes to caffeine — but, well, it’s working for me.
An area where I have less doubt is in the matter of baked beans. Now, those of you with fond memories of the schoolyard will doubtless remember the short piece of juvenile poetry that taught everyone that while beans were indeed good for one’s heart, they had a habit of also afflicting one with a certain degree of flatulence.
I’ve never really actually considered this to be true, despite the popular perception of eating beans being akin to allowing a Northern mining town free rein to hold brass band rehearsals somewhere within the cavernous expanse of your rectum. However, once again, just recently I have discovered that there may, in fact, be a degree more truth in this piece of popular wisdom than I had initially anticipated.
I had a jacket potato for lunch the other day, you see. My workplace canteen boasts some of the largest baked potatoes I’ve ever seen, and they’re cooked nicely so that there’s a bit of crispiness to the skin while they remain fluffy and not dried out within. There are few fillings available for said baked potatoes, but one of them is the old staple baked beans, optionally with the addition of cheese. I indulged in this classic combination, then went back to work in the afternoon. Upon reaching the end of the day, I found myself feeling a little bloated, but thought little of it and walked the 15-minute walk back to my car.
Upon reaching my car and sitting down inside, it happened: an attack of flatulence that bore an uncanny resemblance to distant — but rapidly approaching — rolling thunder. Starting subtly but quickly building in a crescendo of gaseous overtones, the entire affair lasted a good ten seconds or so, after which the feeling of being somewhat bloated had magically passed. It took another ten minutes for me to stop laughing enough to be able to drive off safely.
Naturally, upon discovering that the canteen’s particular brand of baked beans had such a dramatic impact on me, I had to try again. And so it was that today I indulged in another gigantic jacket potato with beans and cheese — and a jelly for afters, because who can resist a jelly? — and so it was that once again, upon returning to my vehicle after a long day staring at my computer screen, I erupted in a cacophony of full-bodied guffs that I can hardly deny were extremely satisfying to release. I was even a bit sorry that no-one was around to hear them.
So yeah. Beans, beans, good for your heart; beans, beans really do… you know.
I don’t miss many things about going to school, either as a pupil or as a teacher, but one thing I do sort of miss about the former aspect is having a packed lunch.
There was always an air of mystery about a packed lunch that someone else had prepared, particularly in primary school, where it tended to be safely stored in a vibrant, colourful plastic lunchbox well away from one’s desk, with its contents not to be revealed until, well, lunchtime. And then it was always a tense moment as sandwiches were unwrapped and fillings surveyed. Would it be cheese and brown sauce? (My “compromise cheese and pickle”; I don’t like Branston Pickle) Would it be ham? Would it be Bovril? Or would it be something surprising and exotic like… err, egg and salad cream?
Then there was the remaining content to go through. What would accompany the sandwich? Would it be a packet of crisps that I liked, or something “boring” like ready salted? (I remember vividly getting into a rage and crushing a packet of ready salted crisps when I was about 8 years old; I was quite an angry child, for reasons that were at least semi-justifiable — though the crisps didn’t really deserve to receive the brunt of my ire.) Would there be a chocolate biscuit like a Penguin, or something else? Would there be some form of fruit? What would the drink be? (I doubt many of the lunchboxes of my youth would have passed the stringent inspections that some schools apparently now insist upon, incidentally.)
It was all oddly exciting in the most boring way possible, and I’ve been gratified to rediscover this dubious joy now that I’m going out to work every day — although sadly without a gaudy plastic lunchbox containing a Thermos full of squash. On days where I remember to pack a lunch, obviously I know what I’ve put in there, but there’s still that joy of being able to finally devour the things that have been waiting in your drawer all morning; on days where Andie is good enough to prepare a lunch for me (and herself as well, I might add) there’s that element of mystery back again… what might be in the sandwiches today? Which one of the biscuit bars is in there? What kind of drink might be waiting for me?
You have to take pleasure in the small things in life because the big, exciting things don’t come around that often. (At least, I don’t think they do.) And a fine way to start appreciating those small things is with something as simple as a lunchbox. If you’re the sort of person who habitually wanders out to Tesco of a lunchtime to purchase a cardboardy prepacked sandwich, make yourself a packed lunch one day, and you, too, can discover this dubious joy which I’ve been rediscovering recently.
Or perhaps I’m just a weirdo. That, let’s face it, is a very distinct possibility.
Posts that essentially boil down to “I’m Leaving [insert site name here] And Here’s Why You Should Care” are the very worst kind of egocentric narcissism, as most of you probably know. This is because they usually amount to someone attempting to attract attention to themselves flouncing off in a huff after they feel they’ve been slighted, only to return a week/month/year later to repeat the cycle anew. If you’ve had the patience and willpower to follow Fez developer Phil Fish over the last couple of years, you’ll have witnessed this action firsthand.
And yet here I am making a largely similar post, and not for the first time. I shall try and keep the egocentric narcissism to a minimum, however — though I’m making no promises.
This post is about two things: 1) why I don’t intend for Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to be part of my daily routine any more, and 2) how you can reach me if you’d still like to talk to me online — because despite the things I’m going to say under heading 1, I can’t deny that I’ve made a lot of good friends across all three networks over the years, and it would be a shame to abandon that completely.
To begin at the beginning, then. There are a lot of words ahead, but I would appreciate you sticking around to read them — particularly the last section about keeping in touch.
Don’t worry, there will be pictures. They’ll be irrelevant pictures, but there’ll be pictures.
Why I don’t intend for Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to be part of my daily routine
Those of you who have been following this blog recently will know that I decided to subject myself to a voluntary social media blackout this week. Specifically, I logged myself out from Twitter, Facebook and Google+, deleted the relevant apps from my phone, ensured that anything that might bug me with notifications from them was well and truly switched off and finally settled down to a week of peace.
It’s now a week since I started that blackout, and the time at which I decided I was going to review whether or not I needed social media in my life any more. And the conclusion I’ve reached is that I don’t think I do. I opened Twitter earlier today to see how I felt, and felt no urge to scroll down to see if I’d missed anything — I closed it straight away without even scrolling off the first page of tweets. I didn’t even feel the urge to open Facebook or Google+ at all. I have broken the “habit”, it seems, and I don’t feel like I “need” to develop it again.
Because it is a habit. It’s compulsive behaviour — at least it was for me. You may do it yourself without realising it; you reach a quiet moment in the day, and out comes the phone or up comes the web browser, and you do your “rounds” of your social networking sites of choice. You scroll through the reams and reams of content the millions of members of these sites worldwide have made, rarely taking anything in, rarely stopping to appreciate, say, the composition of a photograph on Instagram, or the witty headline that someone came up with for a news story on Facebook. It’s page after page of noise, little of it meaningful, all of it vying for your attention with equal fervour. And yet still around and around and around you go.
Some people deal with this noise better than others. Some people can discipline themselves to set aside a little bit of time to check their networks, then put them aside for hours or even days at a time. That can be a valid strategy, but with the speed at which modern social networks move, if you’re not there when something happens, your contribution to the “discussion” — and I use that term loosely — is likely worthless, since conversation will have moved on by then.
This matter of “discussion” is worthy of consideration, so let’s ponder that a minute.
The approach most people tend to take to discussion online.
One of the things that drove me to start my week-long blackout a couple of days earlier than I intended was the whole #GamerGate thing on Twitter. For those who don’t follow the video games field — or those who simply aren’t on Twitter — in simple terms, this was an argument between video game journalists (particularly those who err on the “feminist” side of the sociopolitical spectrum) and those who self-identify as “gamers”, i.e. people who play, enjoy and are passionate about video games and would rather not be told they’re awful people whenever possible.
I don’t really want to get into the details of the events surrounding #GamerGate as that would be long, tedious and, more to the point, has already been summed up in a great amount of detail elsewhere on the Internet. (As always, note that there are two sides to every story — something that both sides on this particular argument have been guilty of forgetting.)
Suffice to say, however, that #GamerGate brought out the very worst in a lot of people. It brought out some of the most unpleasant trolls the Internet had to offer, who, predictably, went after a number of people who — let’s be honest here — often court controversy to make a point. On the other side, those loud-voiced members of the press and their numerous sycophants continued down a path that I’ve been unhappy to see them proceeding down for the last year or two: belittling, ridiculing, publicly shaming and even outright insulting the very people they are supposed to be writing for.
Whatever fair points both sides had — and make no mistake, both sides had fair points — were lost amid the noise, and discussion never got anywhere. It was frustrating to watch; I tended not to participate as much as possible as I learned a while back that any attempts to call for moderation in such matters tended to result in accusations of “tone policing” — which, ironically, is itself a form of deflection attention away from a point being made — rather than genuine attempts to calm down and discuss things like rational adults. And thus nothing was ever resolved.
As I said above, different people deal with different things in different ways. My frustration with these endlessly circular arguments — in which no-one was really listening to anyone else and in which any fair points were inevitably lost in all the blind anger and insults being thrown in both directions — manifested itself as anxiety, stress and depression. I was genuinely afraid to contribute to these discussions for fear of attracting the wrath of one, the other or both of the angry mobs involved. And it was having an effect on my mental health.
If you can take yourself out of a situation that is causing you problems with your mental health and not cause yourself further problems, you should do. So that’s exactly what I did. I extracted myself from the whirling miasma of rage, quietly slipped away for a while to reflect, contemplate and heal — and now, here I am, a week later, with no desire to jump back into the fray.
This isn’t to say that Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are nothing but whirling miasmata of rage and other negative emotions, but frankly, the other stuff there has seemed of little value to me for some time, too. There’s only so many “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!” videos you can take seeing before you just don’t care What Happened Next; only so many “adorbs” pictures of cute things you can see before you never want to see another squirrel again; only so many baby photos you can scroll past before your only reaction to a friend enjoying a new addition to the family is… well, nothing.
It’s all noise to me, in other words; an overwhelming swathe of constant content; a never-ending stream of consciousness in which meaningful life events are ascribed equal importance to a video of a cat drinking water from a squirt bottle. I don’t need that. I’ve always been one for social anxiety, but right now I’d rather hear important things from the lips of the people involved rather than read it on Facebook or Twitter; I’d rather actually hang out with friends than hope I get more than a couple of “Likes” on the picture of the bag of chips I’m about to eat, or a couple of comments on a post I made about how much I’m enjoying Tales of Xillia 2.
I’m not saying there’s no place for these sites in society at all — clearly a lot of people get great joy, excitement and enjoyment out of them. But for me, their value has dwindled significantly over the last year or two, so it’s starting to make sense to cut them out of my daily routine and instead seek other means of staying in touch with the people I actually care about.
Which brings us neatly on to the second part of this post.
Well done for reading this far. Have a cake.
How to stay in touch with me
I’m not retiring from the Internet altogether. Rather, I’m being more selective with how I communicate and with whom. Consequently, I’m focusing on ways of communicating that allow me to take more control over my online presence, and which are more inherently personal than just shouting into the void of social media.
Note that I’m not closing down my Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts — they’ll be used to broadcast these blog posts — but I won’t be actively checking any of them, so please don’t @mention or comment via any of those means if you want a reply from me.
Here are the main ways through which you’ll be able to contact me in future:
This site. I post one blog entry here every single day, and have done for the last 1,699 days. Leaving a comment on my most recent post is a good means of getting a message to me. I’ll try and be better about replying than I have been in the past!
Email. Close friends probably already have my email address. I don’t mind sharing it, but I’m not putting it out in the open on this site. If you’d like to chat via email, you can start a private conversation via the contact form on my About Pete page and, assuming you’re not some sort of crazy stalker, I’ll probably get back to you.
Google Hangouts. For real-time chat, I use Google Hangouts almost exclusively. I don’t do voice and I don’t do video, but text chat is something I’m happy to engage in with you, assuming I know who you are before you just pop up saying “hi” and nothing else. If you don’t already know my Google Hangouts info, drop me a message via the aforementioned contact form.
The Squadron of Shame forum. Most of my “public” conversations — “broadcast-type” messages, I like to think of them as — will now be found over on the Squadron of Shame forum. Although the Squad was originally set up as a small but well-formed group back in the 1up.com days, the modern Squad is very open to new members, with the only requirements for membership being that 1) you’re interested in games, particularly those a little off the beaten track and 2) you’re respectful to other people’s tastes in games, even if they don’t coincide with your own. Come and sign up and say hello, since that forum is where I’ll be spending most of my online “social” time these days.
Final Fantasy XIV. If you happen to play Final Fantasy XIV and find yourself on the Ultros server, look up Amarysse Jerhynsson and say hello.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post; I appreciate it. To those of you that I’ve only interacted with on social media in the past: I’m sorry to leave you behind just as, in some cases, we’re starting to get to know one another (I’d like to give particular, specific shoutouts to @FinalMacstorm and @SonyofLastation here, both of whom I’ve very much enjoyed talking to recently) — but I hope you’ll consider staying in touch via one of the means above, and I hope you understand my reasons for wanting to eliminate stressful, anxiety-inducing and unnecessary noise from my personal life. To those of you who are already firm friends beyond the boundaries of social media — well, the same, really; I hope you’ll respect my decision here, and that you’ll stay in touch via other means.
Onwards to a brighter future, then: one largely free of pop-up notifications, pointless arguments and unnecessary stress. I’m looking forward to it very much indeed.
I’ve always appreciated the weekend to a certain degree, but frankly when you’re working from home as I was for the last four years, spending a couple of extra days in the place where you’ve been spending time anyway wasn’t much of a “reward” for a job well done. (A couple of days off, however, was.)
After just two weeks at my new job, I’m already observing a new appreciation of the weekend. It was thoroughly pleasant to know that, as time ticked on throughout this afternoon, I was getting closer and closer to being able to go home and stay there for a bit. (Yes, we have a thoroughly quiet and boring weekend planned, with the only thing we really have to leave the house for being my eye test tomorrow.)
I’ve been in a position to appreciate the weekend before, back when I was a teacher, but it wasn’t quite the same. When working as a teacher, you see, the weekends tend to end up filled with the work you weren’t able to complete during the week. Things like marking, levelling, paperwork — and by the time you’re done with all that there’s not all that much time left for enjoying yourself.
Then there was retail, where weekends would frequently be stolen from you — although, I have to say, having a midweek day off in lieu of some weekend work was always rather pleasant.
Now, though, I have a proper weekend. I get home from work on a Friday evening and I don’t have to even think about it until Monday morning. That’s a good feeling. That’s a nice feeling. That means I can enjoy my weekend without guilt about things I “should” be doing, or worrying about whether I’ll have a job when the next week starts. (The latter worry is a common affliction of those in the online press sector, because, well, as I’ve already demonstrated, jobs sometimes just disappear at a moment’s notice.)
So yes. I plan to enjoy my weekend to the fullest. Not like some ‘avin it large “living for the weekend” twat, of course — I actually can’t remember the last time I just “went out” to drink and… do whatever it is you’re supposed to do on a night out — but rather someone who has worked hard all week and is now perfectly entitled to a bit of a break.
I anticipate this weekend will be filled with a combination of Tales of Xillia 2, Final Fantasy XIV, Velocity 2X and possibly a first look at Danganronpa 2 if I finish Xillia 2, which is starting to look increasingly likely. We’ll see. I’m sure I’ll have lots to talk about when I eventually crack that one open.
For now, then, have a pleasant Friday night, and an enjoyable weekend. I certainly will.
