1569: Life Gets In the Way

I was chatting with my friend Lynette earlier about various things, and the subject turned, as it often does, to anime. Don't worry, this isn't going to turn into a lengthy spiel on how emotional the ending of Angel Beats! was — though I did watch the last episode today, so expect some thoughts on that shortly. No, instead, it's going to be about the frustrating feeling of discovering things that you really like when it feels like it's almost "too late".

I don't mean that I'm too old for anime or related media, of course — I really hope the day never comes when I feel like I've "grown out" of the things I love today — but rather I feel like the opportunity to enjoy and share these things with friends has been, to a large degree, mostly lost.

I mention this because of my aforementioned conversation with Lynette. Aside from this blog — where, as we all know, I'm pissing in the wind — Lynette is one of the few people I have the opportunity to enthuse about anime with on a fairly regular basis. And it's somewhat frustrating to both of us that we're several thousand miles apart and consequently unable to get together regularly for cocktails, popcorn and a few episodes of some favourite anime series, perhaps educating one another on recent discoveries that we want to share. It's something we'd both really like to be able to do — indeed, we have done it before, on the occasions when I've had the opportunity to visit her and her husband Mark (also a close personal friend, and also someone with whom I can enthuse about anime) in Toronto.

This is one unfortunate side-effect of the whole "global village" (hah, bet you haven't heard that term since a '90s issue of PC Format) thing the Internet has brought about. It's never been easier to find like-minded friends who share the same interests and passions as you, but the thing people don't mention about that seemingly great development in socialisation is how frustrating it is to not be able to get together with those friends on at least a semi-regular basis. (Unless you're loaded enough to be able to simply hop on a trans-Atlantic flight at a moment's notice whenever you fancy it, in which case I think I hate you a little bit.) I have friends literally all over the world — America, Canada, the Middle East, Japan, Australia — who I would love to hang out with and do all sorts of mutually enjoyable things with (no, not that sort of thing, pervert) but am unable to do so. I'm fortunate enough to have these friends in the first place, of course, but by gosh, I sometimes wish they were just around the corner so I could drop them a text, invite them over for an anime evening and subsequently have an enjoyable time.

Why not ask your local friends, you might wonder. Because my local friends all have their own passions and interests — and, with us being the age we are (we're not in university any more!) a lot of them are doing distinctly "grown-up" things like grouting their bathrooms (whatever that means) or having children. I certainly don't begrudge them any of those things, but it can be sad and frustrating when it's difficult to get people together for anything more than the most cursory of social occasions. Life gets in the way, in other words.

So, uh, anyone local want to hang out and watch some anime? We have popcorn.

1221: How Do You Make Friends Again...?

One of my earliest and most enduring memories of my time at secondary school is also, coincidentally, the first time I was consciously aware of what I now recognise to be a longstanding case of social anxiety.

It was the first day of secondary school. Everything was big and new and scary — I'd come from a small village school in which the entire school population was roughly the size of a single year group in my secondary school. I'd chosen to go to said secondary school because a lot of my friends were going there, and also my brother had attended there some years previously and had come out of the experience as what is generally accepted to be a Good Person. Also, a lot of the people who had been bullies to me in primary school were going to a different secondary school, so I knew that I wanted to avoid that one like the plague.

But I, as ever, digress.

It was the first day of secondary school. I was sitting in my new seat in my new tutor group, and our tutor, Miss Quirk (yes, really), had tasked us with spending a few minutes getting to know the people around us.

I gazed around me. I was sitting next to a boy named Murray whom I didn't know. In front of me was a girl named Claire, whom I had instantly fallen in love with due to her long shiny blonde hair and the fact she wore short skirts with tights — something which I found (hell, find) inexplicably attractive. (Hey. I was eleven years old and easily pleased — but to be fair, she did remain consistently stunning throughout our entire school career.)

Behind me was my sometime best friend from primary school, Matthew. I say "sometime" because he wasn't always my best friend — he was a somewhat fickle chap rather prone to occasionally deciding he'd rather hang out with the "cool" kids, whose opinion of me tended to flip-flop back and forth on an almost weekly basis. Needless to say, I ditched him fairly soon into my secondary school career as a result of two events: one, him sneezing so hard he snotted over his hands and then ate it — mmm — and two, him deciding that sitting in his chair, miming masturbation and bellowing "I'm a wanker! I'm a wanker!" would be somehow amusing. (To be fair, it was sort of amusing, but perhaps not in the way he intended; needless to say, I didn't really want to be associated with him after that.)

Anyway. Our seating arrangements were the way they were in order to encourage us to interact and get to know each other. We'd been deliberately seated next to people we didn't know to encourage us to break out of our primary school "cliques" and widen our friendship circles — a theoretically sound idea that even at that tender age, I could see the benefits of.

Unfortunately, I couldn't act on it. Given the prospect of being thrown into enforced interaction with someone I didn't know from Adam, I froze up. I had no idea how to begin a conversation, how to get to know this person. Frantically, I turned around to gaze at Matthew (a pre-"I'm a wanker! I'm a wanker!" Matthew, I might add) and looked at him pleadingly.

"I can't remember how to make friends!" I said quietly to him. He just laughed and motioned for me to turn around and talk to Murray. He obviously hadn't taken my statement seriously, and that was frustrating, but I had little option but to try. It was a terrifying experience, though, and obviously I didn't set a particularly good first impression on Murray, because he became a complete bellend who bullied me on a regular basis. (I got my own back by punching him in the face just as the principal was walking around the corner and, although I was punished for lashing out like that, the unspoken consensus between my parents and the teachers involved was that he probably deserved it — and to be fair, he didn't bother me again after that.)

That first day and that pitiful statement — "I can't remember how to make friends!" — stuck with me, though. Because I can't remember how to make friends. It just sort of happens. I have made friends with people over the years, of course — the friends I made after I abandoned Matthew following the "I'm a wanker!" incident (such as Edward James Padgett, who has been mentioned in this post since it was first written, he just didn't see it); my university flatmates; my fellow students on my music course (though not on my English course — I didn't really get to know anyone on that side of things); and people I've worked with — but if I'm thrown into a new situation with unfamiliar people, or simply decide that I want to get to know new people who perhaps share my interests… I still have no idea how to do this.

This is, as I'm sure you can appreciate, frustrating, particularly as at the age of 32 I finally feel that I have found a number of geeky "niches" that I fit nicely into, and would like to share these experiences with like-minded people. I greatly enjoyed spending time with Mark and Lynette while we were over in Canada because they are both My Kind of People who enjoy the things I do — but I also found myself somewhat envious of them for having a group of friends they play Dungeons & Dragons with, watch anime with while drinking cocktails and all manner of other things that are in keeping with their interests.

This isn't to say I don't have friends, obviously. The friends I see most frequently are my regular(ish) board gaming group, and I wouldn't exchange them for anything, since I really, really appreciate the time I spend with them indulging in our mutual hobby. However, we do have our own incompatibilities — two of our number are really into football, for example, while the rest of us either have no strong feelings or actively hate it. (I fall into the latter category.) Similarly, I very much like Japanese video games, while several of the others cling to common misconceptions about them and thus either refuse to play them or have little interest in exploring them and having their misconceptions disproven — though at least they are patient and willing to listen to me talk about them. Conversely, a couple of our number are big into Skyrim, a game which I found almost unbearably tedious after a while. To continue the pattern, I'm a big fan of anime and would really like it if I could have a semi-regular viewing session with a small group of people, but no-one from that particular group is biting for various reasons — some don't like or don't see the point of sitting and watching something together as a group; some aren't interested in anime.

You get the picture, anyway. I obviously don't begrudge my friends these incompatibilities we have — everyone is different, after all, and thus has their own tastes — but I find myself wishing on a regular basis that it was a bit easier to find additional friends (note: not "new" friends, because to me that implies a degree of "replacement", which I don't want) who have common interests.

Actually, let me qualify that somewhat: I find myself wishing that it was a bit easier to find additional local friends who have common interests. It's obviously no problem whatsoever to find new friends on the Internet who have similar tastes to me, and I'm very grateful for the fact that I do have so many people on the Internet that I can rant and rave about how awesome Ar Tonelico is or how much Kana Little Sister made me cry or whatever. But as much as I appreciate these friends in far-flung corners of the world, it's not quite the same as having someone you can just pop over and see at short notice, hang out and do some things that you both enjoy.

So, uh, anyone want to hang out, play some games and watch some anime?

1100: The One where Pete Watches 'Friends' for the First Time in Quite a While

I went through a phase a few years back of watching just two or three different TV series over and over again on a cycle. They were my passive-consumption "comfort food", if you will — things I turned to when I didn't really want to do anything, but didn't really want to fall into that pit of depressed ennui that normally ends up with staring at the wall for hours at a time. Those shows included Spaced and Black Books, which are two series I still own the DVDs for and will never get rid of, and Friends, which I have never owned a complete collection of but have had scattered home-recorded VHS tapes and a few purchased DVDs and videos over the years — also, for many years, it was on a constant cycle of repeats on E4 alongside Scrubs.

Friends is something that I've watched so many times now that I can pretty much recite it word for word along with any episode that's on. It kind of fell out of favour with the public in its latter stages as many people saw it as outstaying its welcome, but I enjoyed it consistently all the way through. As I say, it was comfort food; you knew what to expect with every episode. It was never anything adventurous, but the characters were both relatable and attractive, the situations they got into often personally relevant, and the quips and jokes memorable and, yes, genuinely amusing.

I started re-watching Friends again the other day having come into possession of a complete collection, only this time around I'm watching the "extended cuts" that came out a few years back. These aren't Lucasesque "special edition" versions, they're simply about 5 minutes longer per episode, with numerous scenes restored to their full length and, in many cases, adding a whole bunch of additional context and depth to the characters and setting that simply wasn't there before due to the constraints of the TV scheduling.

I'm really enjoying them so far. This extra footage means that watching the show again after a few years' break strikes a wonderful balance between the comfortably familiar and the brand-new — and, given how well I know the original versions, I can immediately recognise when something is new. In many cases, scenes that had rather awkward and obvious edits on TV now make much more sense, and in some cases there are scenes that I simply don't think were even there at all in the first place — Joey's first meeting with his colourful agent Estelle, for example.

More than the pleasure of getting some "new" Friends to watch, though, I'm overwhelmed with the feeling of comfortable nostalgia that watching this show always infuses in me. I've spent so much time with these characters inside my TV over the years that I feel like they're my friends, too — a fact helped by the fact that I still, to this day, tend to group people in my mind according to which one of the main cast they most remind me of. (Shh. Don't tell anyone.)

One thing I'd forgotten about is that the show appeared to coin the term "friend zone" back in its first season, where Joey uses it to describe Ross having waited too long to make his move on Rachel. I shan't get into any of that endless discussion over people who use the term "friend zone" today because it's inordinately tedious and frustrating, but I wonder how many people remember where it actually came from and its original context. A few years back, I would have deemed it unthinkable for someone to not have knowledge of Friends, but a lot of years have passed since then.

And yet, I struggle to think of a recent TV show I've been quite as attached to as Friends. I've enjoyed various American comedies that have come since — How I Met Your Mother was originally sold to me as something of a successor to Friends in many ways, and I have major soft spots for Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock — but for me, nothing will ever be quite the same as the time I spent with Monica, Phoebe, Rachel, Ross, Chandler and Joey. However well (or otherwise) you think it may well have aged, there's little denying that for many people of a similar age to me, Friends was and is a touchstone of popular culture that will always carry at least some degree of personal resonance.

#oneaday Day 984: Stagging

I'm away for the weekend. Specifically, I'm in the middle of nowhere in Worcestershire for my friend Tim's stag weekend (or "bachelor party" as you Americans prefer to call it). We're having a weekend of drinking, board games and shooting each other (but mostly Tim) with Airsoft guns. Sounds like fun.

Of my friends who have got married whose stag dos I've been to, none of them have done the stereotypical "get hammered in Amsterdam, hire hookers then leave Stag Boy in an embarrassing position to be discovered by the police/his parents after several hours of considerable discomfort". And I'm actually quite grateful for that. Although everyone jokes about that being the way that stag dos are "supposed" to go it never struck me as particularly fun — especially not for the Stag, who will probably be left rethinking his friendships in the hours between being chained to the lamppost and having to explain to the nice police officer why he is naked and covered in margarine.

My own stag do was relatively stereotypical — paintballing in the daytime followed by drinks in the evening — but I chose to invite my female friends also, and nothing embarrassing happened. Not that I remember, anyway. I remember it being a rather fun night — there are certainly a bunch of photos suggesting it was lurking around somewhere — but I didn't leave it thinking "wow, my friends are a bunch of bellends." Which, again, I'm quite grateful for.

A stag do should be an opportunity for the groom-to-be to have some time with his closest friends — regardless of gender if he so desires — and have a memorable "send off" before married life. That looks like exactly what this weekend is going to be, so I'm going to take the time to relax and enjoy it hopefully as much as Tim will.

Bed now. The drinks have been flowing freely and we've been playing Cards Against Humanity for the past few hours. Hilarity, as usual, ensued, but I'm more than ready for sleep now!

#oneaday Day 954: I Love Cock

"Cock" is possibly my favourite word in the entire English language. I don't care if you're using it to refer to a rooster or an erect penis (I always felt that "cock" implied "erect", as does "dong", "schlong", "wang" and numerous others; meanwhile "winky", "dick", "willy" and "tallywhacker" imply flaccidity, but I digress) — it's just a fantastically satisfying word to say.

You have to say it right for it to be satisfying though. Try it with me.

Take a deep breath, in through your nose. Now open your mouth a little as if you're going to cough up a big ol' flob and pronounce a nice, crisp, hard "C" sound. Immediately follow with a round, fruity "O", where your mouth makes the perfect shape of the letter it's pronouncing, leave a short gap, then follow up with the "CK". Ideally, you should throw back your head slightly while doing the "CO–" bit and give a pervy smile while doing the "–CK" bit. Advanced "COCK"-ers should feel free to add a crescendoing "mm" or "nn" sound beforehand for added amusement. "mmCOCK!" "nnCOCK!"

Lest you feel I've lost it here, let me explain my love for this gloriously expressive one-syllable word. It came about back in secondary school. Some friends and I were hanging out, and I, for some reason, happened to pronounce the word "cock" in the manner described above, and everyone fell about laughing. According to my friend Craig, it was hilarious because it, I quote, "sounded like a porn star saying it." (It sounds even more like a porn star saying it if you also say the word "SUCK" in the same manner as the word "COCK" described above.)

Anyhow, the word "COCK" became our go-to insult or space-filler when there was a lull in the conversation. This use of the word, completely devoid of its usual context, came to a head one summer when my parents had gone on holiday and I was left alone in the house for the first time. My friend Woody and I had recently discovered Final Fantasy VII and, having both finished it possibly several times by this point, were doing a communal playthrough together, fuelled by tequila which we had decided we would attempt to drink despite the fact that both of us felt that it tasted like what a glass of water would taste like if you dropped about fifteen cigarette butts in it. As night fell, we decided that The Thing To Do would be to switch over and play Resident Evil 2 very loud while absolutely munted off our tits. (We also left a metronome ticking outside the room our friend Ed, who had flaked out early, was sleeping in.)

For whatever reason, during our Resident Evil 2 session — and remember we were absolutely twatted by this point — we then decided that The Thing To Do would be to turn to each other and repeatedly say the word "COCK" in the manner described above to each other while attempting to continue normal play. Normal play was already somewhat difficult due to the amount of alcohol we had imbibed coupled with Resident Evil 2's cumbersome controls, so it largely degenerated into just the shouting of the aforementioned syllable over and over and over again.

I don't know for how many hours we kept this up, but it was certainly a long time. Probably at least one hour and possibly more. I'm pretty sure that we somehow got most of the way through the game while repeatedly bellowing "COCK" at one another, because I have a vivid memory of collapsing in a drunken, exhausted heap after failing to kill the final boss and waking up the next morning in an awkward position with the PlayStation still running.

So there you go. That's how much I love cock. I'll go all night with it.

(Aside: WordPress recommended "wine tasting descriptors" as a tag for this post. I'm not sure I need to make any further comment than that.)

#oneaday Day 899: I'll Be There For You

I have social anxiety. I may have mentioned this before once or twice.

What that means is that sometimes I get tongue-tied and don't know what to say. Sometimes I let conversations run inside my head but worry about what the possible outcome of them will be, and end up saying nothing. Sometimes I quite literally have nothing to say whatsoever. And sometimes I do say something and don't get the reaction I expected and consequently feel weird.

As you might expect, this makes the prospect of "making friends" a fairly terrifying one. Obviously I have made friends over the years, otherwise I wouldn't have any right now, but I can never quite remember how it happened. In some cases, it was a simple matter of being thrown together in some context — living together, studying together, working together — but in others, it's not quite so clear.

While I am more than happy with the friends I do have, I do sometimes wish I could have more. That may sound greedy, but the fact is that I don't get to actually see the friends I have all that often. The vast majority of them live in the States (thank you, Internet) and the others live just far enough away for it to be A Big Effort to go and see them. And, you know, sometimes I just want people to play board games with. I bought a copy of Legend of Drizzt, one of the cooperative Dungeons & Dragons adventure games, this week and I'm hoping I get the chance to play it more than once or twice. If I had more friends (who liked board gaming) then I'd be able to play it more often — at the moment, however, it's determined largely by mutual availability and whether at least one of us can be bothered to drive about 50 miles. I'm more than happy to for the prospect of board game fun, but it's the former bit that can be tricky sometimes. Hopefully if and when Andie and I manage to move a bit closer to Southampton it'll be a bit easier to be more spontaneous — as it stands, however, it's a relatively rare treat to see people.

This is all rather self-pitying I know, but I direct you back to the first line of this post. Social anxiety makes the act of making new friends — even the prospect of just talking to strangers — a terrifying and difficult prospect. Even in an environment that should be "friendly" — I know there's a local board game shop in Bristol that does games evenings, for example, but I don't even feel especially confident about that. My mind gets caught in a cycle of "what ifs" and I just end up deciding not to go.

Perhaps one day I'll get over this social anxiety and be more confident about making new friends and considering that people might actually want to spend time with me if they don't have to. That day is not today, however, which means that I'm all the more grateful for the friends I do have and the time I do get to spend with them.

Anyone fancy a game of Legend of Drizzt?

#oneaday Day 877: Far Away

It's not been a great week to be in my mind. You can't control how or when or for what reason depression will hit you, but it's been getting me down somewhat recently for a variety of reasons. The events I outlined yesterday are one contributing factor, but as I said there, they aren't directly affecting me and thus I have to think that the exaggerated feelings of disappointment and upset I have been feeling may be caused by, rather than be the cause of, depression. Or perhaps there's a whole mess of contributing factors.

I don't know. And thinking about it inevitably doesn't help.

One thing that is getting me down a bit at the moment is how far away I am feeling from all my friends. I live in the middle of nowhere a long way away from pretty much everyone I know, and thousands of miles away from the people I talk to literally every day — friends, coworkers, confidantes. I have Andie in my life, a fact which I am incredibly thankful for every day, but that unfortunately doesn't stop the occasional feelings of loneliness and disconnection.

It's partly my fault in some cases, of course. When you have disparate, unconnected friendship groups scattered around the globe, it's difficult to keep up with all of them. (Hell, it's difficult to keep up with disparate, unconnected friendship groups in the same city sometimes.) Some necessarily fall by the wayside as a sort of natural atrophy. In many cases, this gradual contraction of your worldwide friendship network is a sign that one or all of you have evolved and changed from the people you were when you first knew each other, and you're just going in directions too different to stay together. In others, yes, it can simply be laziness, but mental states play a role in all this, too, particularly if you struggle with social anxiety as I do — sometimes even the prospect of hanging out with a longtime friend can be terrifying if you haven't seen them for ages. What if you have nothing to talk about?

Mostly, though, my daily life, my work and my hobbies have led me to the position I am in now, where the vast majority (though not all) of the people that I would consider my closest friends live many thousands of miles away across the Atlantic Ocean, and in some cases even further afield than that. It's great that I can talk to these people every day thanks to various forms of social media and other online happy funtimes, but sometimes all you want to do is get some people together in the same room, play some couch co-op (or couch competition games like the rather wonderful Hidden in Plain Sight), play some board games, eat some pizza/curry/Chinese/other takeaway goodness and simply, you know chill out together. It happens all too rarely these days.

Ah well. Not a lot I can do about it right now at 1am in the dark in Chippenham, is there? Someday I'll buy you all a drink. Just probably not all at the same time.

#oneaday Day 809: PAX Pact

Disclaimer: I'm aware that I wrote almost exactly the same post as you're about to read at this time last year, and for that I make absolutely no apologies.

It's PAX East time! Yay! I'm not there! Boooo.

I've not been to many conventions or big shows like that over the years, so I have very fond memories of those I have been able to attend. My decision to attend PAX East in 2010 was very much a spur of the moment thing — I'd decided I wanted to leave my primary school teaching job because I'd given it a chance and determined it wasn't for me, I was trying as hard as I could to pursue a career in the Writing Words About Games industry, and I was feeling a bit miserable and lonely. So, with a little financial help, I flew across the pond to Boston and went to my first big show in America.

It was an exciting time for a number of reasons. I'd just started working for Kombo.com which, while it didn't pay particularly well, provided me with a position where I could legitimately say I was a professional member of the games press. I knew that a large number of my buddies from communities such as Bitmob and The Squadron of Shame would be in attendance, so I'd have the opportunity to meet some people face to face. And I always love the opportunity to visit the States. I'd never been to Boston before, and while I was under no illusions that I'd be seeing much of the city while I was there, I was looking forward to being Somewhere New.

It was also terrifying. As a sufferer of social anixety at the best of times, the prospect of meeting people I'd only ever talked to on the Internet in the past was a scary one. What if we didn't get on? What if it was a massive disaster and it destroyed the carefully-cultivated relationships we'd built up with one another? What if I had nothing to say? What if I got lost and it was actually because they wanted to lose me? All these thoughts whirled around my head as I was on the plane, but I was very happy to discover that PAX was, in fact, a happy, inclusive and wonderful place for geeks of all descriptions to call home — whether they were someone who just liked video games or was also into collectible card games, role-playing games, board games, cosplay, the history of technology… anything like that.

That word — "home" — is an important one. Because it felt good to be there. It felt like a world which I wanted to belong to, surrounded by people that I wanted to be with. It was a world that accepted and embraced each other's differences and brought people from many different walks of life together in the name of common interests. Perhaps most importantly, it made friendships real. It's all very well chatting to people online on a regular basis, but once you've spent time with those people in person — seen them, heard them, hugged them, tickled their beards in a homoerotic manner where applicable — your friendship is on a different level. I haven't seen some of those people I met at PAX East 2010 in person since that weekend two years ago, but in many ways I feel closer, more connected to them than many of my — for want of a better word — "real" friends. Perhaps it's because they're also "Internet friends" that I speak to most days via Twitter, Facebook and G+.

Whatever the reason, knowing that lots of people I know are at PAX East right now and undoubtedly having a great time (and/or queueing for hours) makes me a bit sad — not that they're there, obviously, but that I'm not there with them.

I propose a pact, then, faraway friends: PAX East 2013. Be there. You have a year to prepare. Get cracking.

#oneaday Day 738: Diversifying

In a recent blog post, one Ben Goldacre described Spotify's auto-sharing behaviour as "creepy" and called for greater transparency in opt-out procedures. While I don't disagree that users should have the option of whether or not to share what it is that they're doing, I do disagree with the good Doctor's assertion that showing off your tastes to others is somehow "creepy" or "wrong".

The reason I don't find it either of those things is because of discovery. Spotify is built in such a manner that it's easy to check out an artist or album you're unfamiliar with in a risk-free environment. You don't drop any money on the album directly, so if you wind up hating it, you haven't lost out. And if you end up loving it, you can whack it in a playlist or star it for future reference.

Combine this ease of trying things outside of your usual comfort zone with social features and you get a powerful tool to expand your own tastes. Because music is an ever-present part of society these days — silence, it seems, is frowned upon by most people, particularly those of more tender years — conversations about what artists are awesome are less common than they once were in the age of buying CDs (and, heaven forbid, cassettes). Music is just there for many people — a disposable thing that people may well have a strong connection to but perhaps don't always think to actually discuss,

What Spotify's sharing feature does is allow you to see what friends have been listening to and, if it takes your fancy, jump right in there and have a listen yourself. I've discovered more than a few new favourites this way, and I'm certain other people will have been curious about some of my tastes too. I don't have any objection to people seeing what I've been listening to and I'm certainly not ashamed of it. The same is true for Netflix, newly launched in the UK and nicely integrated with Facebook to allow you to share what you're watching. On the whole, I'm much more inclined to pay attention to new releases if my friends are enjoying them rather than if they're simply "critically acclaimed". See: The Squadron of Shame

Goldacre suggests that people will make judgements based on what you have been listening to, and your playlists which, if you weren't already aware, are made public by default. And perhaps people will — but the attitude I have always taken with personal taste is that it is just that: personal. If you're the sort of person who ridicules someone else just because of what music they listen to, how they dress, or their appearance… I probably don't really want to know you. Everyone is free to make their own choices with regard to what entertains them (unless, you know, if you're into something fucked up and illegal) and so people should not feel ashamed or embarrassed to share what it is that they have been enjoying.

In fairness, it's entirely possible that there is the scope for cyber-bullying among schoolkids based on what they might have been listening to with Spotify, or the content of their playlists. But there's the scope for cyber-bullying based on their photos, their status updates, all the other stuff that's on Facebook, too. This isn't excusing it. However, it does mean that Spotify itself isn't some sort of creepy bully-magnet. As with all forms of social media and teens interacting with others on the Web, it's important for parents to be involved and aware of what their offspring are up to. If it looks like causing a problem, they should be familiar with the options that are there to protect people — and Spotify has those options if, for whatever reason, sharing things does become a problem. But someone's listening habits are public by default — and why shouldn't they be? There's nothing to be ashamed of there.

Perhaps I have a naïve view of social media and sharing information on the Web. But I just don't see how sharing your entertainment consumption is particularly harmful. Sharing deeply personal information, yes. But the fact that you listened to the Lazy Town soundtrack today? For me, that's the start of an interesting conversation, not something creepy.

#oneaday Day 137: Say My Name, Bitch

I have something of a — what — phobia? I'm not sure it's that serious, but I have something of a thing about saying people's names, for some inexplicable reason. It might be something to do with the fact that I never really liked my own name or the way my voice pronounced it when I was a kid (hence my habitual shortening of it to "Pete" everywhere in the world these days) or it might just be one of my many strange and inexplicable neuroses.

I can't even pin down why I sometimes find it difficult to say the name of the person who is standing right in front of me and who, in most cases, I know quite well. Perhaps I worry I'll mispronounce it (granted, it's kind of hard to mispronounce most of the names of people I know, though I have no idea how to say the surnames "Ohle" or "Honea" to this day and worry if I ever meet the people in question face to face I'll pick the wrong possibility and make a big tit of myself) or perhaps I just think that someone's name is somehow a window on their soul, a piece of their person that is, well, personal.

I don't mind people calling me by name, though, that's the weird thing. And I'm aware it's silly to feel odd about saying other people's names — particularly if you're calling out for someone. "Hey! You!" really doesn't cut it in a room full of people — although to be honest, I've never really been one for calling out anyway, as I generally much prefer to just go over to the person in question and speak to them, as yelling just draws attention to 1) you and 2) the person you're yelling at, who may not be grateful for the attention.

Of course, it's easy to go the other way and start calling people by their name far too much. Then it gets a bit weird, people start raising their eyebrows and wondering why you're "acting suspiciously". Saying someone's name too much is often seen as a sign of guilt, like you're trying to avoid accidentally referring to the person as someone else, like an ex, or a hilariously deformed person you saw on TV that you can't get out of your head while you look at your friend, however awful a person that makes you.

Maybe it, like so many socialisation things, is something you just need to practice a bit. It is, after all, one of the things about "growing up" — the moment when you stop calling adults "Steven's mum" or "Mrs. Stevenson" and start calling them "Geoff". (Steven's mum's parents didn't like her much.) Perhaps there's still some sort of residual hang-up in my mind about that, like so many things.

Ah well. One more to add to the list.