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.
I am very tired. This is a side-effect of my new routine, which necessitates getting up at some point before (or, more commonly just before) 7am, going out, doing some work for a normal working day, then coming home in time for about 6pm, eating dinner, then doing something relaxing and pleasant in the evening.
This may not sound all that tiring to those of you who have happily been holding down nine-to-fives for the last umpteen years, but it's been something of a culture shock to me.
Actually, that might be a slight exaggeration. But after four years of working from home, often in my pants, there have been a number of adjustments I've had to make. And, you know, aside from the whole "getting up early" thing (which I still loathe thanks to my body's uncanny ability to be extremely tired in the morning regardless of whether I go to bed early, timely…ly or ridiculously late) these adjustment haven't been all that bad — and I think they'll have a positive effect overall.
The biggest change is, of course, the fact that I am no longer working from home and consequently have to 1) put clothes on and 2) travel to work. The former's not really an issue — I joke about working in my pants, but in reality more often than not I did get dressed to do work, because it put me in the right mindset to do useful things.
The latter, however, is a noteworthy change. I have a drive of about 45 minutes or so to my place of work, followed by a 10-15 minute walk from where I park my car to the actual office. This means that I'm getting a bit of very light exercise every day, which is probably a good thing. I can't say it's particularly strenuous exercise, given that I tend to walk quite slowly — a trait I have apparently inherited from my mother without noticing at some point — but it is exercise of sorts, and it's every day.
There's also actually a gym on site at my new workplace, which I will probably join at some point soon, since it's a lot cheaper than the one I'm currently a member of. (Plus I walk past it on the way out of work every day, so that makes it a lot more difficult to ignore… and it has the advantage of meaning that if I stay late to do even a short workout, I'm less likely to run into rush-hour traffic on the way home, which will be very nice indeed.)
The fact I'm working in an office rather than in my own house, which, to put the following in context, is approximately 5 minutes' walk from a Tesco Express, means that I'm less inclined to wander out and purchase various snacks and sugary drinks when I'm feeling hungry, too. Instead, I'm drinking a lot more water, I've cut down a fair bit on the lattes — no more than one or two a day, usually just the one to pep me up a bit in the morning — and I've almost entirely eliminated fizzy pop from consideration when I think about what I'd like to drink. I take my own lunch when either Andie or I remember to prepare it the night before (because let's face it, neither of us feel inclined to do so at that ungodly hour in the morning) but even when I don't, the work canteen is pretty good, with a selection of decent food rather than the usual "chips with everything" situation I typically associate with the word "canteen".
So on the whole, then, things are going well and I hope they will have a positive impact on both my physical and mental wellbeing. It's too early to say right now, but I'll certainly be keeping an eye on things as I continue to settle in.
One of the side-effects of 1) having a job that doesn't involve staring glassy-eyed at the Internet all day and 2) being in the middle of a self-enforced social media blackout (it's going great, by the way) is that your priorities and even interests change.
Oh, don't worry, I'm not about to stop boring you with tales of obscure video games any time soon, but what I have found is that I'm in no hurry to keep up with the latest news in gaming and related spheres such as technology.
This was really driven home to me today when someone asked what I thought of Apple's new announcements.
Eh? I thought. I haven't heard anything about those.
Apparently Apple announced a new iPhone and a smartwatch, whatever the fuck one of those is. And I was surprised to find how little of a shit I gave about either of them. My current phone is a functional workhorse at best, though without Facebook and Twitter demanding my attention every few minutes it stays in my pocket or drawer a lot more than it used to, and is largely being used for a bit of lunchtime Web browsing and playing music in the car. As such, I find it hard to get excited about the latest piece of shiny, pretty and overpriced tech that Apple is coming out with. My honeymoon period with "smartphones" is well and truly over: I'm not interested in playing games on them, I'm rapidly discovering the value of not having social media in your pocket, and for organisation, frankly I'd rather use a paper notebook and calendar. Get off my lawn.
It was the watch that particularly bewildered me, though. Before I left the games press, tech writers were just starting to get excited about "wearables", and I couldn't fathom why. I still can't. It just sounds like an unnecessary step in the process of consuming digital content, and a way for the ever-present menace of notifications to be even more intrusive to your daily life than a constantly beeping phone already is. A little computer on your wrist is something straight out of sci-fi and a few years ago I'd have been all over it, but on reflection, now? That's not what I want. Not at all.
I'm not writing about this to be one of those smug "well, I don't care about those things you're excited about" people — though I'm well aware it may well come across that way. Rather, I'm more surprised at myself; I always had myself pegged as a lifelong gadget junkie, and the trail of defunct-but-useful-at-the-time technology (Hi, Palm!) my life has left in its wake would seem to back that up.
But I guess at some stage there's a saturation point. You see something, and see no way for it to possibly fit into your life; no reason to own one. I already felt this way about tablets — I barely use our iPad even today — and I certainly feel it about Apple's new watch. Smartphones still have something of a place in my life — if nothing else, it's useful and convenient to have things like maps and a means of people contacting you (or indeed contacting others) in your pocket — but their role is much diminished from what it was, and I'm in no hurry to upgrade to the latest and greatest.
It's another case of, as we discussed the other day, solutions to problems you don't have. All this technology is great, but it convinces us that our lives would be an absolute chaotic mess without it — when, in fact, it's entirely possible that the opposite could be true. After all, the human race survived pretty well before we discovered the ability to photograph your dinner and post it on the Internet, didn't we? While I'm not ready to completely let go of my smartphone — not yet? — I'm certainly nowhere near as reliant on technology as I once was, and I'm certainly not obsessively checking news feeds to find out the latest and greatest news about it.
And you know what? It's pretty nice and peaceful. I could get used to this.
When I was growing up, I wasn't massively into popular music — my peers found it hilarious that I bought my first ever album, Oasis' Definitely Maybe, literally a single day before (What's the Story?) Morning Glory came out — though I did, on occasion, purchase an album containing a song I particularly liked. (Sometimes I inexplicably also purchased albums containing songs I didn't like, though this sometimes led to surprising discoveries.) I would listen to music while I was doing things like homework or reading, and later, when I could drive, I'd record albums onto tape so I could listen to them in the car.
At the time, I didn't feel like a lot of the music I was listening to was particularly "iconic" or defining of the era. I certainly didn't feel like I was living in a particularly noteworthy era of music in the same way that those who grew up listening to, say, The Beatles or The Rolling Stones would have been able to. While my tastes were initially defined by what everyone else liked, I gradually started the pattern that I continue to this day of exploring a wide variety of different creative works, and sod what anyone else thinks. Consequently, my CD shelf contained everything from The Spice Girls to Bernard Butler and all manner of things in between. I enjoyed it, indulged in it and, like most people these days, gradually migrated my music library from a collection of CDs to a vast iTunes folder, 95% of which I never listen to.
Just recently, I've been starting to feel nostalgic for some of this old music. This can be attributed at least in part to the fact that both Andie and I have taken to listening to a lot of Jack FM, which tends to play a lot of the songs we grew up with, plus some earlier stuff from the '70s and '80s, too. While Jack FM has its annoyances — most notably its repetitive adverts and truly dreadful attempts at humour — it's led me to rediscover a lot of the songs of my youth, songs that, in some cases, I haven't listened to for literally years now.
I've long since parted with a lot of the original CDs — Music Magpie took a whole load off my hands a couple of house moves ago — but thanks to services like Google Play Music, I'm able to call up old favourite albums with the click of a mouse and enjoy them on my phone, in the car, on my computer. It's pretty great.
And I've been discovering that many of these tracks were a lot more "defining" than I thought. Or perhaps it's just that I have good memories associated with them. Either way, spinning up a copy of something like Prodigy's Fat of the Land or Mansun's Attack of the Grey Lantern is like slipping on a comfortable pair of earmuffs and losing myself in times past. If I listen on headphones, it's exactly like that, in fact.
I've never really been one for just sitting and listening to music as my sole activity — I prefer it to be an accompaniment to something like driving or working — but it's been kind of pleasant to rediscover a lot of these old favourites recently. I anticipate that my drive to work each morning will be accompanied by a lot more singalongs in the near future.
I've decided to go through with a week-long social media blackout. (By "social media" I mean "Twitter and Facebook", just to clarify; I'm not breaking my own rules by posting here.)
I was originally intending to start it off on Monday, but then yet more nonsense in the whole Zoe Quinn thing kicked off this morning and I just didn't want anything to do with it whatsoever — either the inevitable abuse she would receive for the things she was posting, or the unbearable smugness of her supporters.
So I started it today, cold turkey. And I'm serious about it. I deleted the Facebook and Twitter apps from my phone. I logged out of the sites on all my browsers. I removed the bookmarks from Chrome, the browser I use most frequently. And I haven't looked at either all day.
While I won't pretend I haven't felt a few urges to pop my head in and have a look, I haven't acted on these urges at all. I haven't felt the need to. I know that, going by what I saw this morning, something would just irritate and annoy me. And I don't need that.
I'm not going to cut myself off completely, though. For the week, my online socialisation will be through email, instant messaging (Google Hangouts), comments on this site and the Squadron of Shame forums. All of these are environments where I have much greater control over my socialisation, and which are populated by far smaller groups of people. And they are all people with whom I know I get on and can enjoy conversation with.
One may argue that there's a danger of creating an echo chamber when you simply surround yourself with people that you're 100% comfortable with, but in reality it's actually rather desirable to have a friendship group that understands you. It's an admirable goal to attempt to understand and ingratiate yourself with groups that you don't know a lot about, or whom you probably wouldn't hang out with in "real life", but eventually it just all starts to feel a bit high school, what with all the cliques, cool kids and groups that end up being the butt of everyone's jokes — often without justification.
Ponder how your friendships work in real life. Chances are that over your lifespan, you've met a significant number of people. Some of these became friends because you had things in common or enjoyed spending time together. As time passes, the number of true friends you likely have has probably dwindled as everyone's lives start to move in different directions. That's a bit sad when it means you lose touch with people with whom you used to spend a lot of time, but it's also part of the natural "filtering process" our real-life social lives go through over time.
With social media, this filtering doesn't happen automatically, so unless you take the time to actually go through and prune your friend and follower lists every so often, over time the noise just builds and builds and builds, often with disparate groups ending up butting heads with one another in your timeline or news feed. If you stand on the periphery of a few groups that, for whatever reason, end up at each other's throats, it can put you in a very awkward and undesirable situation, as we've seen with the whole "Gamergate" thing over the last week or so. To use my own personal situation, I identify with the games journalists who are undoubtedly frustrated at the constant accusations of "corruption" being levelled at them, but at the same time I also identify with the gamers who are sick of journalists talking down to them as if they're some sort of superior moral arbiters. Both sides say and do some regrettable things, and even if you're not directly involved — as I've taken care not to be — it can be anxiety-inducing to see what's going on.
That's not what the original promise of social media was. I recall signing up for Facebook for the first time and being amazed by the prospect of being able to easily stay in touch with people. Twitter, meanwhile helped me make a ton of new friends and discover people with common interests all over the world. Since I first signed up for both of them, though, their place in society has changed; Facebook has become little more than a link repository for endless "You Won't Believe What Happened Next!" clickbait bullshit, while Twitter has become a place where they who shout the loudest get to be "right", and whoever is right gets to declare anyone who disagrees with them as some sort of awful deviant.
As such, then, we come to my blackout. I feel positive that it will have a good effect on my mental health. And when it comes to next weekend, I'll make some more permanent decisions about my online existence.
I may have already made up my mind. But we'll see.
I had one of those curious epiphanies on the way home. You know the ones. Or perhaps you don't.
Anyway, I digress.
My epiphany was that I felt like a new person today. I felt like I was in the middle of a new beginning, like I was getting a chance to pretty much "start over" and try again.
Of course, this isn't strictly true, what with me being 33 and thus on that ever-downward slope towards middle age, old age and eventual death rather than a fresh-faced (I'm not sure I was ever fresh-faced) youth in my early twenties looking forward to the future. But I'm glad I did get this new chance to start again, and I don't intend to squander it.
The trigger for feeling this way is, of course, the fact that I really have made a new beginning by starting a new job and hopefully a new career. In just two weeks on the job, I feel like I've made some new friends, learned some new skills and made a good first impression.
And it's put a lot of things in perspective, too. Most prominently, my feelings surrounding the echo chamber of social media.
My typical working day now looks very different to how it did when I was working from home. I no longer have Twitter perpetually open on screen or on my phone; I don't check Facebook at all; Google+ has fallen totally by the wayside, particularly since the Squadron of Shame jumped ship to its own forum a while back; and I spend most of my time either actually doing work, interacting with people through internal emails or speaking with them face-to-face.
And it's blissful. Blissful, I tell you. You might call it wilfully shutting out issues that need to be addressed; I call it a haven of calm, and I can already feel my mental health improving because of it.
Being constantly bombarded with the noise of social media at all hours of the day — as I voluntarily subjected myself to when I was working from home — is actively stressful, anxiety-inducing and even depressing. It shouldn't be — it should be a positive thing — but it is.
Part of this is down to who you follow, of course — like real life, putting the people you interact with regularly through a rigorous filtering process until you're left with the people you genuinely like is important — but with the nature of modern social media, sometimes you get things thrust in your face without you going looking for them. The clearest example is Twitter's Retweets, which can expose you to people and opinions so far divergent from your own as to create genuine anxiety (and also people who go on to become firm friends, it must also be said), but it also happens whenever Facebook makes one of its inexplicable decisions to show you a post from someone you don't know that one of your friends commented "lol" on forty-seven comments back from where the argument is now raging.
This is why I'm enjoying the peace and quiet of not being permanently plugged in to social media, and why I feel like a new person. I can switch off, focus on the people around me and the work I'm supposed to be doing, and I can enjoy it. It's pleasant. Very pleasant indeed. And it makes me wonder why the hell I've been voluntarily putting myself through all this for the last few years.
And this doesn't mean that I've lost interest in the things I previously immersed myself in. On the contrary, it means I can just enjoy them for what they are. I can enjoy games purely on the virtue of them being great games; I don't have to give a shit about whether The Internet thinks something I enjoy is terrible and wrong, or whether I find the latest indie darling to actually be rather tedious.
In short, I feel like my rebirth has been a wonderful thing all round, really. I'm still in the honeymoon period, of course, and I'm sure my new life will bring with it a torrent of new things to be anxious about, but for now I'm enjoying it very much indeed; long may it continue.
One of our local radio stations is called Jack FM. Jack FM has two "unique selling points" as a radio station: firstly, the fact that they "play what they want" — in practice meaning that they have a playlist just as repetitive as the fetid crap played on more pop-centric radio stations every day, only it consists of actually good songs from the '70s, '80s and '90s — and secondly, the fact that, outside of a couple of special shows, there don't appear to be any DJs — just regular, prerecorded voiceovers from actor Paul Darrow of Blake's 7 fame.
This is Paul Darrow, if you're unfamiliar:
(No, he is not the same person as the narrator from The Stanley Parable, if you were wondering. That is Kevan Brighting.)
This latter aspect marks one of Jack FM's strangest characteristics — the fact that it appears to be trying as hard as possible to be deliberately shit, at least between the songs which, as previously mentioned, tend to err on the side of "actually pretty good".
The reason I say this is that Darrow, bless him, is forced to read some of the absolute worst "comedy" material that has ever been broadcast via any medium — seemingly every few minutes.
The trouble isn't necessarily with the jokes themselves — some of them, particularly those which poke fun at notoriously shit town Basingstoke, will elicit a genuine chuckle — but rather the fact that they tend to go too far. Not from a taste perspective, but from a "you should have stopped talking a sentence ago" perspective.
Mostly this happens in a futile attempt to make something mundane appear more funny than it is, or indeed at all. I'll give you an example.
"Jack FM news with [company name I can't remember — great advertising, guys!] bus services. Forget about parking and travel costs, travel by bus! The wheels on the bus go round and round!"
Every time I hear this I find myself wondering who signed off on that last sentence. It serves no purpose. It's not funny because it doesn't make a joke. It's little more than a reference to a well-known children's song that's been shoehorned in for no apparent reason other than to say… something. Darrow's voice stands by itself — a distinct, rich, fruity voice that is like caramel melting in your ears — and thus there's really no need to add anything more than the simple marketing copy prior to that stupid last sentence. But no.
Here's another.
"Jack FM travel with Happy Hot Tubs. New hot tubs now in stock. Stock! As in gravy!"
This one suffers a similar problem, albeit to an even greater degree. The "gravy" comment really does have nothing to do with the words that came immediately before it, leaving it dangling there like a stubborn… well, I'll leave that to your imagination.
Not all of Darrow's contributions to Jack FM's distinctive sound are that awful — as noted previously, some of them are genuinely amusing, particularly when he decides to turn on the sarcasm, as he frequently does. ("Our buses have wi-fi. And seats. And poles. And buttons that ding!") I can't help but think that he might be taking the piss a bit, having been given some utterly lifeless marketing copy from one of the numerous sponsors of the station and choosing to spice it up a bit with a bit of thinly-masked disdain. His contempt for Basingstoke also seems remarkably genuine — and anyone who has ever visited Basingstoke will happily back him up on that.
But I can't shake the feeling that Jack FM's jingles could be something genuinely special if they actually employed someone who knew how to write proper jokes. As it stands, Darrow's delicious voice makes for a distinctive identity of the station — but his talents are somewhat wasted on material that regularly falls flat on its face.
Back to work tomorrow, and after a rather gentle start last week I'm actually hoping I'll be able to get stuck in and make myself useful a bit more this week. I have a full-day company induction on Tuesday, I believe, but all being well the remainder of the week will see me actually doing my job, which will be nice.
Yes, that's right, I said "nice". I know in modern life it's fashionable to be cynical about your job and to merely tolerate it rather than enjoy it, but for the moment I'm actually relishing the prospect of having something to do each day — and that something being part of something bigger.
I've had this to a lesser extent when working on websites, of course, but when working remotely from a different timezone to the rest of your colleagues, it's easy to feel somewhat justifiably isolated at times. The advantage of what is effectively working "solo" alongside a bunch of other people who are also working "solo" on the same thing is that you can turn things around pretty quickly — more often than not, I'd have an idea for a feature on a website and be able to research, write and publish it within a space of a day. (Obviously things that require longer to research — by playing a whole game through for a review or walkthrough, for example — take a bit longer, but these can be worked on alongside other things.)
The downside of this I've already mentioned: you feel like you're kind of going it alone, even when the people you work with make an effort to get together online in some form or another and swap ideas.
Conversely, having switched work environments from working solo at home to part of a team in a big office, I've noticed two things related to the shift: firstly, things take a whole lot longer than if I was doing everything myself as in the past, and secondly, you're a lot more reliant on other people.
These things are a mixed blessing at best; it can be frustrating to be waiting on an important piece of information from a specific person and they simply don't get back to you for weeks at a time. On the other hand, it means that things are — theoretically, anyway — a whole lot less stressful, since the workload of getting something done is spread between several people, each of whom can concentrate on their own specialisms rather than having to dip their toes into unfamiliar waters on occasion. It also kind of means you can work on a lot more things at the same time — do your bit, pass it on to the relevant person or people, then get started on something else, only returning to the original thing if you have to go back and fix something.
None of this is news to any of you who have been happily chugging along in office jobs for years now, I'm sure, but this is still quite a new experience to me. Those who have known me a while will remember that my past lives have included being a teacher, a salesman, a software trainer and a video games journalist — all jobs that tend to involve you dealing with things by yourself, whether or not you're part of an overall "team". It's actually kind of nice to know that now, for the first time, I can share out some of the responsibilities a bit more as well as helping other people out when I can. I foresee it being a much more pleasant way to work — let's just hope I keep feeling that way after the initial "honeymoon period" is over!
Anyway. In line with my new responsibilities as a cog in the corporate machine, it is time for me to disappear in a bedwards direction. I hope you have a pleasant week.
