I get too attached to it. Correction: got. What with this SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) issue getting heated up, yakking on to my brother about it…
I see many people are involved. Many people blocked out their websites for the 18th day of January. People tweeted about it everywhere. People posted about it on their blogs. People posted about it on forums. People expressed their opinion virtually everywhere – on the internet. I guess I didn’t really want to put much thought into the issue, thinking that a lot of these internet-related laws or acts usually don’t garner much of a problem in the end. Of course, it crushes the right that people have to free speech, but when I look at it in light of other things, I feel like it’s not going to take a massive toll on my life.
I could be wrong, though.
My brother seemed to only have become interested in the issue today. I hardly talk to him since he’s occupied with studying and activities like taekwondo, and I have work myself, but when we do get to chat, it’s usually about the internet or music or something that is indirectly related to the internet. Today he brought up SOPA, as if it was completely new to him. He does use the internet a lot – just as much as I do – but he doesn’t do much other than play games and watch videos occasionally. That said, I’m not surprised he wasn’t as educated on SOPA as I was.
My parents find me to be very terrible when it comes to “general knowledge” and world news and “current affairs”. Truth be told, I hate current affairs and I find news incredibly dull.
It’s always “three thousand people were killed when a ship ran aground on the east coast of Whatchamacallit. About fifty of them are believed to be Australians”. The latter sentence always ticks me off, because for some reason, when a large number of people have died, the fact is always put forward that so-and-so Australians have died. I begin to wonder if it is like that in other countries. Perhaps not. My brother, on the other hand, gratuitously laughs and repeats lines from newsreaders that follow as such: “Good evening a man has died…” where there is no pause for breath between the greeting and the announcement of a tragic incident.
But when it comes to internet-related things, oh, I like to believe I’m on the ball. Which is why I wasn’t at all surprised when my mum said, “What are you guys talking about?” Neither she or my dad had any idea what SOPA was about, though my dad had a faint grasp of the situation. My dad uses the internet to download music, and my mum sends and receives emails. That’s about it. If the internet were to go down for whatever reason, they wouldn’t feel that affected.
I guess in the past few weeks, being busy with work, I haven’t felt so attached to the internet as I have before. I know, I work with the internet with web design and I have to be connected to the internet, but I still don’t feel that need to check my email every two minutes. My consolidation has done me really well; I have cut down on a lot of online projects and I’ve relaxed in terms of blogging and reading blogs. It’s something I enjoy, but after nine hours at work, sometimes I really do just want to read a book, or watch Futurama, or crash on the couch and just see whatever movie is on television. I have hated many things about the internet – the drama, the idiots, the YouTube commentators, the YouTube “community” (as my boss says, “what community? More like a flash mob”), the Tumblr bitches, Tumblr in general, the whiny bloggers, the paedophiles, the sex advertisements, the thieves, the…
Oh, I could go on. But you know, it’s times like these when I really appreciate a good walk out of the office and Vietnamese food with the gang (I’m just referring to workmates here), a walk to the bus stop with Jebediah ringing in my ears, or just curled up in bed on a Saturday morning finishing a really good book.
Whatever happens with SOPA, well, rest assured that it can go right back up the backsides of anyone who makes the internet an unpleasant place.
Maybe we all do. But a lot of us take photos that aren’t ours to use as avatars, rephrase things, quote Wikipedia, have downloaded an album without paying, have shared music with everyone else – maybe we do get a taste of our own medicine, but who’s going to stop us? It’s the freakin’ internet.
My mum recently got a new phone which is exactly the same as mine – a Samsung Galaxy Ace. Well, mine is on the Froyo build and hers is on Gingerbread, which is a newer Android version. I actually noticed the difference in the user interface as soon as I checked out her phone, but I didn’t really give it much thought. Well, duh, the OS versions are different…
Anyway, that aside, teaching my mum to use a smartphone after having one with a keypad began horridly and only went downhill from there. She keeps getting stuck. I honestly don’t blame her; she sure knows how to use a touchscreen device (she uses a register at work) but I think that she just struggles getting used to one in which you can scroll and zoom and not just tap imaginary flat buttons. Many times I’ve had to teach my parents how to use some new piece of technology (or even less new, like my dad having trouble with most computers that aren’t his) and I feel a bit sorry for them, but I can’t help but become irritated. Of course, born in this new generation, and having a brother four years younger than me but also tech-savvy – having an immediate interaction with new technology is not really surprising.
It isn’t just parents or any “older” person who struggles, though – for I’ve been through the same states of confusion and worry when I’ve had to deal with a new piece of technology. I think my mum must think, “This phone is smarter than me, I wonder what it’ll do next.” Of course she doesn’t think it’ll make the perfect cup of tea, and for heaven’s sake, if she had an iPhone, she’d be asking Siri to make her coffee all the time – but she still remains in that state most of us are in when we encounter a new device, or even an operating system or, heck, a vehicle. On that note of Siri, by the way, our Samsungs also have the ability to understand our voices and print out in text exactly what we are saying.
For my mum, not so much. A garbled line of “the boy and then merry pool” was the phone’s translation to “Brandon is very rude”. I repeated this statement, with an equal amount of jest, to the phone, and it printed exactly, “Brandon is very rude”. It could be due to the fact that my mum has a slight accent, but let me tell you, she was amused by the phone’s interpretation of her words, and I proceeded to amuse her by beatboxing into the microphone, only to have it print “boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs”.
As I was saying, any new device. My boss is used to using a Mac, so of course when he encountered my highly-customised laptop with touchpad turned off, left handed mouse, RocketDock and just insanity everywhere, he got madly confused. Quite similarly, I was too, when I used his iMac and tried to scroll and it kept scrolling the wrong way. But, neither my boss or myself are “old”, and even the elderly will learn if they are keen enough. Somewhere down the line my mum will learn how to use her phone.
Today though, I simply cannot explain how she recharged her phone credit a month ago and claimed that it worked, when today she found that she didn’t have enough phone credit to call or message anyone. I found that she had in fact not charged her phone credit at all, at which point I requested her credit voucher (I used to get so annoyed that she kept those things, but now I’m thinking, thank goodness she did it just this one time) and tried it myself. She must not have done it correctly the first time because this time it actually recharged.
I have to say, she doesn’t seem all that happy with Optus‘ customer service because she was hung up on twice while on the phone. I don’t know – both times, she was in the middle of talking. Her question had been answered, vaguely, and she was just repeating to check… and it was as if the person on the other end was sick of her babbling on or something?
Well, either way, I’m still going to Optus because I like their packages and they can actually give me internet data.
Big fat announcement: James finally blogged! I urged him to blog at least once a week during our vacation, so now you can see his side of things and admire his humour just as much as I do.
Earlier this evening I was talking to Lilian about cleaning out my websites. I have decided that I need to consolidate. It is much nicer having just a few websites than having so many scattered everywhere. That said, I will most likely be moving my writing portfolio and A Letter To A Domain project here. I also mentioned to Lilian that I would get rid of any superfluous visitor content, to which she responded, “I bet as soon as you get rid of them, people will want it back!”
I realised this was partially true of my old free layouts, which I thought were horrid, so I took them down, replacing them with new ones. People asked me for the old ones because they liked them. Ah, oops.
This got us discussing Murphy’s Law:
“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.
Of course, this is relatively similar to Sod’s Law and Finagle’s Law:
“Anything that can go wrong, will”.
“Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment”.
Sod’s Law is more commonly related to fate – such as Beethoven being a deaf composer, or athlete Lou Gehrig developing the neurological disorder known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Finagle’s Law was made popular in science fiction, such as Star Trek, and can often be seen expressed as “Inanimate objects are out to get us”. Now that would be the worst of it, wouldn’t it?
Often, I find myself expecting the worst. Seb always told me to expect the worst, but hope for the best. In all situations I worry about, I find myself excessively expecting the absolute worst to happen, even if it is something ludicrous and, though possible, is very, very, very unlikely.
Being very curious about these laws, I looked into more of them, including Sturgeon’s Law, which will probably relate to everyone who thinks that knowledge is pointless.
“ninety percent of everything is crud” or “ninety percent of everything is crap”
My high school friend Karen used to say – the more you learn, the more you know; the more you know, the more you remember; the more you remember, the more you forget; the more you forget, the less you remember; the less you remember, the less you know; so why learn? I suppose Sturgeon’s Law summed that up nicely. And this too reminds me of a boy I used to know who thought that high school and the HSC (in my state) was the most important thing. It isn’t. Everyone who has graduated high school will probably agree with me that a lot of it was useless. Oh, thank you Sturgeon.
Now, this one is for the ones who are angsty about grammar and spelling. Ever felt like slitting a throat or killing a kitten every time someone misuses “you’re ugly” and writes “your ugly”1 instead? Or perhaps you’re like me, and feel compelled to correct every apostrophe catastrophe you see on someone’s forum post?
Muphry’s law – “if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written”. (The name is a deliberate misspelling of Murphy’s law.)
Skitt’s law – A corollary of Muphry’s law, variously expressed as, “Any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself,” or, “The likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster.” (Thus often referring to the internet.)
I find it rather ironic that people like to correct spelling and grammar and boast about it, when I see that they make their own spelling and grammar mistakes…
One that I probably have to be a little sad about, being a fan of Doctor Who and Back to the Future, is the following law. I mean, I never really wished I could change the past anyway, but sometimes rewinding just a bit into the past, just ten minutes, to buy myself a bit of time or to fix just one mistake that ends up rolling down the hill into a chain of unfortunate events later on (Sod’s Law, dude!)… is all I really wished for.
Niven’s laws: “If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.”
I also find myself thinking too much at certain times. I have to tell myself to relax, take a break from whatever it is, and come back to it later… because by then it’ll be clearer. I used to question the silliest things, like why I have a reflex, or how I learn to read a word in a foreign language so easily. Not only is the answer painfully obvious, but sometimes it’s just not. There are, of course, things more mundane, like walking and brushing teeth and showering, which don’t need to be thought about. Don’t think. Just do:
Humphrey’s law – conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance.
And to end, a few other favourites, of which I think the first two would benefit to people dealing with a relationship breakup:
Stein’s law – If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. If a trend cannot go on forever, there is no need for action to make it stop, much less to make it stop immediately; it will stop of its own accord.
Sayre’s law – “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.”
Herblock’s law – “If it’s good, they’ll stop making it.”
Hutber’s law – “Improvement means deterioration.”
So, got any favourite laws? Found some in this post that you could live by? Found some you already swear by but could never find a name for?
Put simply, a lucid dream is a dream in which you are aware that you’re dreaming. There are two types of lucid dreaming.
DILD – dream-initiated lucid dream: a normal dream in which the dreamer eventually concludes it is a dream. WILD – wake-initiated lucid dream: dreamer goes from a normal waking state directly into a dream state, with no apparent lapse in consciousness.
I’m very sure that most people have had a DILD at least once in their lives. Many years ago I had a dream that I was exploring some caves and found a huge jewel. After I started running home with the huge jewel, I realised I was having a dream and tried very hard to control what I was doing in the dream. I had to hide this jewel where no one would find it. I put it in my desk drawer, at which point I woke up and looked in my desk drawer… only to realise the jewel was not there and had only existed in my subconscious. Many other times I have been in control of my dream after realising it was a dream, but unfortunately woke before the dream properly ended.
I know James looked into WILD before, and it got me curious as well. There are apparently techniques to making yourself have a lucid dream, which you can easily find on the internet. I tried it a few times but failed, while James told me a couple of stories about his experiences which I could be jealous about. However, a few days ago, most likely due to the effects of my medication, I was still very tired after I had woken up and I just lay down on the couch for a bit.
I was watching television – The Morning Show, to be specific – but I was really tired and my eyes kept on shutting so I decided to just try and sleep for a little while. I was actually having trouble doing so, and I had my eyes shut for a few minutes and could still hear the television. Then I started having a dream.
I can’t remember exactly what happened but I had been holding some toast, and I was in a shop talking to some salespeople. I couldn’t control it, but I was completely aware of what was happening. At the same time, I could hear the television. I could recall everything that was discussed on the show while I had my eyes shut – they were discussing Australia’s best psychic, and the movie When Harry Met Sally.
Earlier today I was reading a book, and began to yawn. I felt a bit tired and thought I could power nap for a few minutes. I’m pretty good at power napping. I’ve done it on the train for several minutes, without the need for an alarm to wake me up; I’ve done it when I arrive home after a long day; I’ve done it at work for several minutes in front of the computer. So I thought I’d power nap while sitting in my reading/studying chair.
Except I couldn’t actually sleep. And right then and there I found myself having a WILD. I just remember walking in a field and everything happening rather slowly, but I could still think in my conscious about how I was holding my book at the page I was up to. I could still hear children outside (neighbours) squealing, and the sound of my fan and the wind coming through my window. But I felt like I was sleeping.
When I decided to open my eyes I felt rather refreshed. It’s so weird. I’m starting to blame everything weird on my antidepressants now. In case you weren’t aware, five days ago I was put on antidepressants and I’ve been experiencing side effects. Now it doesn’t make me sleep so easily, but I think it is interrupting my sleep because I still keep waking up in the middle of the night. I’ve also lost weight and I can’t stop shaking my leg, but other than that, the worst of it seems to be over and I think I’m getting used to it. My doctor said it would take up to a week to get used to it, after all.
If someone were to ask me, “Do you have a vivid imagination?” the answer would be yes. Yes I do. If I try hard enough; if something means a lot to me – I can imagine it. Which is why, two days ago, I shut my eyes, I turned my music up loud, and I pictured myself at the Jebediah show. I was in the crowd. People were jumping up and down and their arms were up in the air. Kevin Mitchell was singing into the microphone and Vanessa was chilling on her bass guitar. The coloured lights went on and off. A glance to the side – people were relaxing at the bar having a chat over drinks. Mostly beers. Security guards were at the front towards the stage watching the crowd, looking bored. For a split second I wondered whether any of them liked Jebediah’s music.
I saw the coloured lights over and over. I moved with the crowd as they played the beginning of Battlesong. It was this amazing warmth that filled my soul – the music was pure, it was incredible. It was loud, but it was beautiful.
“Georgie?”
My vision went white.
Far and away, orbiting each other… I hope you come around…
“Georgie? Is your phone off?”
I pulled my eyes open and shifted my eyes left to right. I was sitting in the car.
I wasn’t there. But I was. In my mind and in my heart, I was. In fact, it’s coming to my head so vividly I actually think it has psychologically affected me. I think I’ve actually brainwashed myself into believing I actually went, by imagining what happened and imagining that I really did see them live. I swear I was actually there. Except when I think too hard, I realise I wasn’t.
I love my imagination.
Earlier today, I was reading Jebediah’s newsletter, since I’m subscribed to them by email. They’re playing at a racecar event next Friday. I want to go. I wouldn’t mind spending the money, and I want to see them even though I don’t have much interest in cars. Boys in high school would talk about cars all the time. I wasn’t interested in the least, but I love learning new things, I like hearing about things I don’t know, so maybe if I at least take a car-savvy friend with me, it won’t be too bad.
Though no one said it was bad going alone. Except when I think about seeing Jebediah at all, I wonder if it’ll be as amazing as it was… was, in my head. They say nothing can ever be as good as your imagination. I don’t know what to expect. I don’t even know if I should go, but… well, I really want to.
So I thought I’d power nap while sitting in my reading/studying chair. 