James's Journal

unknownj @ 2014-02-03T13:37:00

2014-02-03T13:37:48Z

Tragic..

http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml

This service is no longer live. Which is a shame because I really wanted to see a few year on year comparisons of active users on the site. I think it would be funny..

At some point, this place got weird. I fondly remember a time fourteen years ago when I knew every single UK-based person on this site, if only casually. It helped that there were only 10,000 worldwide users, and UK users were a fairly small proportion, active ones even less so. There was a directory page where you could order all UK users of the site by last update date, and it was reasonably easy to keep up with all of them. Half were my friends on here anyway.

Which, given the age in which we lived, probably means I knew every person in the UK who was into social networking on the web. Hard to imagine saying that now.. Even on LiveJournal alone, there are about 1,000 people who have updated their journals in the last day from the UK, which is an unmanageable number, and that must be well down from the peaks of old.

These days, it looks like most LJ content is some form of slashfic, which may well have been the case for a good decade for all I know, as with all social networks the emphasis is on network rather than social, in that one is generally insulated from anything not immediately relevant to one's own interests.. Feels strange to even be typing something into this box, for about the fourth time in 18 months..

I don't use this thing because it never occurs to me to sit down and write about myself any more. Often I'll be out and I'll see something and still have some vestige of that impulse to write something down about it, but by the time I'm in front of the relevant input device (still can't bring myself to write anything longer than an SMS on a phone) I have absolutely no motivation to do it. How I'm writing this is a mystery really..

Sometimes I wonder if therapy (correctly) taught me to stop treating my own life as a piece of performance art, to pimp out and try to get reviewed, which is a worthwhile transition if you can manage it in the right way. But it sometimes feels like I've always been a boring person who managed, for a brief period, to translate that into the illusion of being interesting. I've probably acquired plenty of friends over the years who imagine me to be in some way fun, and sometimes I can switch that on. But fundamentally, it's not me, never was, probably never will be. It's not that I don't have fun, you understand, it's that I find it completely impossible to translate my own sense of fun, amusement, excitement, engagement, etc., into something that has any sort of contagious or relatable qualities..

There might have been a time when I used to write here about what I was doing at work, for example. It was probably never interesting, but I put the time and effort into at least trying to make it interesting. I'd translate "things that happened" into "stories", and in doing so at least provide some sort of narrative that was more engaging than a bulleted list of disparate events.

But of late (and by that I mean for several years now) it feels like that sort of thing was only ever really a means of trying to attract attention to feed my own ego, not motivated by a desire to share what's going on in my life but by the need for other people to pay attention to it. My sense of self worth is much more sustainable now and I don't need that external validation, so the motivation to dress up the mundane into a story has left me, and all I'm left with is bullet points, a "what I did on my summer holidays" list of things that nobody really cares about (and nor should they).

I'm no longer under any illusions as to whether I have something novel or exciting to contribute, which sounds awfully self-pitying, but in reality it's just a fair self-assessment. Nobody needs to hear about how my day at work went. The interesting parts involve people that "the Internet" doesn't know, the bits that I feel most passionately about relate to a subject area that nobody but me takes an interest in, and there's only so long that the remainder (generally details about my commute, things I thought of during the day, that funny thing that happened) can sustain some sort of "blog"...

Of course there are times when it makes me sad to think that I've documented with reasonable detail the end of my teens and start of my twenties, and have no equivalent record for my later life. I had hoped to keep this thing as an enduring record of my life, when as it turns out it sort of tails off towards the late twenties. If anything these last few years have been the ones that have been the least embarrassing, whilst still containing a healthy set of milestones (getting married, buying a house, selling a house, buying another house, getting a dog).. These are things I ought to have written about, but the habit of not mentally rewriting one's experiences into blog-able narratives is a tough one to get out of..

This isn't going anywhere, there's nowhere for it to go.. Of course one can never say never about these sorts of things, it's entirely possible that the urge to share stories about life will return at some point, perhaps like Christmas it's the sort of thing that finds new life if/when children come along.. But in the meantime, I expect to find that the occasions when I feel like I have something worth musing on, and the occasions where I'm in the right frame of mind to write about it, and the occasions where I'm actually sitting in front of a computer with time to write, will rarely intersect.

unknownj @ 2013-04-28T17:26:00

2013-04-28T16:26:44Z

Smart move here...

We noticed that your account anonybot has less than three entries and hasn't been logged into in over two years. LiveJournal is deleting inactive empty accounts. Pursuant to our housekeeping policy, your LiveJournal account anonybot is scheduled to be deleted in 15 days.

Which would of course be entirely valid logic if not for the hundreds of posts to communities and thousands of comments attributable to the account.

If I was running the "empty account" ruleset, I might be a little more broad in the sorts of activities I would consider before declaring an account "empty"..

Serious Question

2013-01-03T01:12:59Z

On the grounds that this site was offline for like a week just now (YMMV), just wondering - those of you who still use this thing, why?!!

I mean seriously, the site is a f'king joke these days, unreliable, full of spam, and run by people who give even less of a shit about you than Facebook (and that's saying a lot).

So seriously. What the f'k are you thinking?

unknownj @ 2012-09-08T22:11:00

2012-09-08T21:11:57Z

So, LiveJournal....

What's that about?

unknownj @ 2012-04-14T08:42:00

2012-04-14T07:42:16Z

However, in entirely other news, I have returned from South Africa with bloody hundreds of pictures.. Possibly thousands, actually..

I've been working through them, and on the basis that Facebook's timeline, location and people tagging functionality seems to fit a lot of the pictures, that's where they'll end up. Creepy data policies aside, the thing is that I had an amazing time, and it's an experience that I really want to share with people, and of course Facebook is more or less the best place for that sort of communal interaction.

But put simply, it was probably the best holiday I've ever been on, though it's difficult to form a fair comparison vs my honeymoon. In either case, South Africa occupies #1 and #2 on the list, and that's what matters. It's a beautiful country, with all kinds of awesome things to do, and a political background that I find really engaging and interesting. I think I'd take the politics of a post-apartheid South Africa over a proto-fascist UK any day.. It's not about where you are, it's about where your trajectory is taking you...

Much much more to follow, here or on Facebook..

unknownj @ 2012-04-14T08:36:00

2012-04-14T07:36:13Z

Having just taken my best shot at Dale, it would be dishonest not to leave myself open to the same..

I think everyone is curious about what others think of them. It's a natural curiosity and one that we rarely get to indulge in. So, let's indulge. Comment on this post with the three words that you think best describe me. They don't have to be complimentary. They don't have to be anything but honest. Post this in your journal and find out what three words others would use to describe you.

Three Nye Bevan Quotes

2012-03-21T18:31:35Z

"How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century."

"Whenever you scratch a Tory you find a Fascist."

"No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party... So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin."

Timeless.

unknownj @ 2012-03-21T15:26:00

2012-03-21T15:26:11Z

Lovely day today, feels very much like Spring has properly arrived. Though that being said, it might have happened days ago, and I just haven't noticed because I've been stuck in the office all day..

Did give rise to a slightly morbid thought though.. Much like one has a limited number of birthdays, one also has a limited number of instances of realising "ah, summer is coming again". Pretty much the same number of each.

So much in the way that a birthday reminds you that you're a year nearer to death, so too can a nice day outside. If you're predisposed to thinking odd things.

At least each year has effectively two significant seasonal transitions, so I guess you have two instances of "ah, new type of prevailing weather coming up" for every birthday.. Still, it's odd to think that the number of times you realise "summer is coming" is actually very easily countable.

Cheery thought!

unknownj @ 2012-03-16T12:52:00

2012-03-16T12:52:18Z

I keep meaning to write something here.

This isn't it, but when "it" comes along, this is where you'll find it.

Liberals are the problem

2012-02-28T21:13:59Z

I've had it pointed out to me more than once that my politics are a bit.. "extreme"..? I dunno, I don't care for that word - I'm always open to debate on it, and can back up any ideologies I might support with logical, considered arguments. With those attributes in mind, I don't find "extreme" to be a helpful word since it also describes people with the exact opposite attributes. If anything, I would go for the word "radical", since it has a slightly more appealing history in politics.

Either way, the criticism is that I appear to adopt positions that sit well outside of the "moderate" set of ideologies. However, it hasn't always been that way. I drifted towards being a moderate in the period between leaving university and my later radicalisation by the election of a Tory government (sic). The following graphic shows my positions at different times using the Political Compass as a handy way of recording such things:

What's clear is that I started off towards the anarchist corner, drifted towards being centrist, and then swung right back to the anarchist corner again. Fortunately (for me), the amount of time I spend dwelling on political ideas means I can pinpoint exactly where that drift happened, and the point at which I realised that I had been absolutely wrong. Liberals, moderates, whatever you fancy calling them - I'm sure their hearts are in the right place, but if they think their approach will ever lead to left wing progress, they're wrong.

Liberals are basically good for signing petitions, and not a lot else.

What I've noticed in a lot of liberals, and what I felt myself for a time, is that somehow perhaps the machinery of capitalism and neoliberalism can be use to deliver progressive, humanitarian outcomes.

Nick Clegg recently said

"competition is the means to a better NHS, not the ends"

And I think for me, that says it all. He imagines that the forces that routinely create societal inequality can be harnessed for good. It's a sad delusion, which I held for a few years, and which he has seemingly made a career out of holding. What will of course happen is that competition will do what competition does - serve markets, serve itself, and do nothing to help people.

I mean, look at the railways. There's meant to be some form of competition there, right? So, say I want to travel from Guildford to London.. Competition means that I can choose between taking the direct route with Southwest Trains (33 minutes), or else with First Great Western (88 minutes - more than twice as long) or else with FGW and Southern (97 minutes - almost three times as long). Is that competition in any practical sense?

"Ah!" say the neoliberals, "that's not how it's meant to work!" Rather, they would argue that the competition element comes when companies bid for the franchises to run the railway lines, at which point they can compete on price and on the services they propose to offer. So we get the best companies, right? Wrong - what we get are the companies who have the best short term policies, with no regard to the long term. What incentive is there to invest in the infrastructure of the line if in ten years, before the investment has paid for itself, the franchise is then awarded to another company? So that doesn't really work either. This is why we're currently overwhelmed with mediocrity in our rail network.

And this is why liberalism needs to be combated at every possible opportunity. It's a mechanism by which good intentions think they can tame a bad system, and in doing so only lend legitimacy to that system, without improving it one iota.

If you think you can tame the system, the system will instead tame you. The Liberal Democrats are an obvious example of this, but there are plenty of others. Do not aspire to tame the system, aspire to smash it. It'll try to smash you back, but better that than be turned into a liberal...

unknownj @ 2012-02-26T09:48:00

2012-02-26T09:48:53Z

One of the things I noticed on HYS was the number of people who rather like Mandela now, but consider him a "terrorist made good", as though he underwent some sort of transformation which cured his previously wrong line of thinking.

So here's a couple of quotes from his trial in 1964 which for me make it impossible to consider him a terrorist:

I must deal immediately and at some length with the question of violence. Some of the things so far told to the Court are true and some are untrue. I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people by the Whites.

And this:

I have already mentioned that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto. I, and the others who started the organization, did so for two reasons. Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalize and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war.

Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the Government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

That about covers it for me..

unknownj @ 2012-02-25T23:12:00

2012-02-25T23:12:26Z

BBC's "Have Your Say", arguably the most obnoxious troll pit outside of the Guardian's "Comment is Free", has managed to surprise me.

I'm now left trying to understand the motivations of the people who would condemn Nelson Mandela (now, not even during apartheid) as a terrorist. Obviously a bunch of them are probably resentful racists, grasping at whatever opportunity they can find to discredit a man whose politics are diametrically opposed to their own. But outside of that, there's another group that I hadn't really considered before..

Loathe though I am to refer to the "political compass", the upward axis refers to the extent to which a person exhibits authoritarian traits, and it's that tendency that I think is responsible here.

The only context in which I can imagine a person genuinely believing Mandela to be a terrorist is if they're so blinded by a respect for arbitrary authority that they can't conceive of violence as an appropriate response to state oppression.

An authoritarian would look at civil unrest in Soweto, see the police beating poor black kids on the streets, and would instinctively feel like they had probably done something to deseve it. Without necessarily feeling that the power structures in the country were fair, they would nevertheless probably believe that the government is trying to do its best with a bad situation, and that the police are ultimately there to protect law and order, and were probably provoked into anything they did.

Under these delusions that authority (which is almost always derived from power rather than any qualification) is always right, I can possibly see how such a person might arrive at the conclusion that attacking the state is always bad. Why did the ANC not try harder to negotiate? How can a "good" person ever advocate violence in support of their cause? All of these questions typically come from those who sit on the right wing of politics, towards the authoritarian end of the spectrum. A lack of relative perspective combined with an absolute view that might is right naturally leads to the belief that all "freedom fighters" are "terrorists".

What surprised me though was the very idea that the belief that Mandela was a terrorist could persist even after the end of apartheid, even as worldwide public opinion snapped back to the "correct" view (which was that the government of South Africa at times bordered on genocidal, and that any and all means to resist and overthrow that government were justified).

Just a bit of an eye opener really.. To believe that the ANC were the principle instigators of terror in apartheid-era South Africa betrays a very serious ignorance of the power dynamic at the time, or else a very twisted view about when direct action becomes necessary. Either way, the world is a slightly sadder place now that I know such people still exist...

unknownj @ 2012-02-25T17:10:00

2012-02-25T17:10:24Z

That is all.

unknownj @ 2012-02-25T12:59:00

2012-02-25T12:59:32Z

Dear TMA,

I'm curious, do you ever stop and think about the wider implications of your political position?

This might be the point where you claim that your stated political beliefs are just an attempt to troll me for fun, but it's a bit tricky since they so closely resemble the beliefs you grew up with, and the beliefs you genuinely claimed to hold throughout your teens. If you expect to be taken seriously when claiming you're just trolling, you might want to work harder at establishing your actual position.

In any case, I got to thinking - what would things be like if you and I had been born, say, thirty years earlier? I'd wager good money that I'd be helping to organise pickets of companies that supported apartheid in South Africa. Meanwhile, you would be obnoxiously tweeting (or contemporary equivalent) about how I and my ilk are unwashed hippies, probably throwing in a "Mandela should be hanged as a communist terrorist" for trolling good measure.

A couple of decades earlier, and I wonder what you'd be saying about the civil rights movement as part of your right wing rambling.. Or a couple of decades more, and perhaps you'd be agreeing with the Daily Mail about how agreeable the "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine" of fascism is.

Now obviously I know there's a part of you that's just after a reaction, but there's another part that's sitting there kind of agreeing with everything you say if not exactly how you say it. Just want you to think about what company that puts you in - throughout history, pretty much, it puts you on the side of the "bad guys".

Consider me trolled,

James

So, 30, eh?

2012-02-15T22:05:10Z

That is to say, in early December, I finally turned the age that I spent most of my teens wishing I was. That was always the plan - be thirty, have a job, have a house, have a wife, possibly have kids. My entire expectation of my future lifestyle was based on my home life as a child, and in a sense it was perhaps more of an ambition than an expectation - I decided from a very early age that if I could do as well as my dad, then I'd be doing well.

And I'm there, more or less. I mean, the turning thirty part is roughly inevitable if you can just avoid death for long enough, but the other stuff is about right. The only significant missing details are that I don't yet have children (which isn't a problem) and that I leave the house two hours earlier every day than he did (see, in my expectations, I figured I might actually see other members of my family before leaving for work, which is a stretching target when you get out of the door at 5:30am each day).

But anyway, about the actual day itself.. It was basically a day of deception, in which I believed the plan to be that my mother in law would pop over and drop something off, and then Naomi and I would go to Bird World (in spite of the fact that it has limited opening at that time of year), to the extent that I was busy memorising the route when my mother and siblings showed up at the door. I hadn't been expecting to see them until the weekend, so it was an awesome surprise (arranged by Naomi behind my back).. Then my mother in law turned up, and the six of us went for a delicious lunch in Worplesdon. It was around this time that I twigged that we wouldn't in fact be going to Bird World at all - not a crushing blow, simply a lingering confusion in my head for the rest of the day as I retained this feeling that I wasn't where I had expected I would be.

See, that feeling is a weird one. The sense that "I was meant to be doing something else". It's very specifically not a feeling I have about my own life, and the absence of such a nagging doubt is actually a wonderful feeling in itself. I had to go back through my journal a bit to check that I hadn't just forgotten about something I was meant to be doing, and whilst I did find a reference to an ambition to visit every continent on the planet by the time I hit thirty, otherwise everything's fairly consistent with this being where I aimed to be.

On the subject of travel, in my condescending way I'm rather glad that I didn't naff off around the world after uni. Firstly, I don't think I would have liked it - I'm not sure that I was really ready to fully appreciate the significance of what I would have seen, and wouldn't like to gamble on developing that appreciation along the way. But more than that, it would only serve to delay the other plans - the get a job, get a house, grow up, settle down, that type of plan. The amount of work I would need to do in advance in order to afford to visit every continent in the space of the nine years post university would mean constant in/out of work, no stability, a perpetual repetition of a pattern. Whereas if I now aspire to do those things before I'm 40 (or older), I'm in a much better position not only to finance them, but to share them with someone special.

Which brings me to Naomi. It's worth mentioning, for the record and because I seldom do online, that I made one hell of a great choice there. Beautiful, smart, passionate, and hilariously funny in both intentional and unintentional ways, when I look back over my twenties she was easily the best thing to come out of them. Or indeed my teens, if we want to scrape the barrel. When I look back over my "love life", it's quite clear that from the very start Naomi held the title of "Girl most likely to be the object of a desire to settle down with", among various other desires which won't get an airing here. She was always and immediately what I was looking for, and I couldn't be happier to be with her.

I think that every now and then, she suggests (whether in jest or otherwise) that on some levels I see her as a means to an end, the modus by which my teenage ambition to be thirty and settled down is achieved. I can see her point, it doesn't look good for me in that respect, but she has it basically backwards. It's being with her that ensures that my ambition remains unchanged from that time. She is the reason why I'm able to consider settling down with her and building a life together as being worthy of its description as an "ambition" rather than simply an expectation. Her role is not simply to complete an arbitrary set of requirements, it's to bring to life the very reason for having aspired to that as a future in the first place.

So all in all, I'm very happy to be thirty. Mission accomplished. I own a house, one I quite like in spite of it not being the size I'd perhaps like, and in spite of my abject failure to do enough with it as yet. I have a job that I love, that as of a few months ago actually stretches me, forces me to think more and develops skills that I'd let deteriorate. I have a wonderful wife, whose own ambitions are a little less simple than mine and whose drive to achieve them drags me along with it. Basically, I have a life that I know that I would have been proud of at any point in my teens or twenties, and the peace of mind therein is a great feeling to have.

Goals for the next ten years:

Visit those continents I have not yet visited (Asia, Oceania, South America, Antarctica)
Voyage into Space
Start a family whilst maintaining a work schedule that allows me to see them in the morning
Make a contribution to the world of which I can be proud, and which will outlast me

Any one of those will do. Clean sweep would be ace.

unknownj @ 2012-02-10T23:28:00

2012-02-10T23:28:45Z

Stuff like this feels like it's becoming my life's work, and principle contribution to "society" or something...

Time to use LJ for all it's good for these days...

2011-11-28T14:44:58Z

Evoke Africa - Jewellery

10% off until 1st December, with free delivery on orders over £30...

Writer's Block: Remembering Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T14:28:45Z

1. FFS, one cannot "think different", to think is a verb, ergo it requires an adverb.

2. What a tedious f'king question.

That is all.

unknownj @ 2011-08-23T10:16:00

2011-08-23T09:16:00Z

LJ Like - surely the death of LiveJournal as a credible platform..?

I mean this purely from a technical point of view - it looks very much like they've decided that they can't be bothered with the idea of post metadata any more, and instead they're going to drive options through leaving tags littered through each individual entry.

To me, that just seems completely flawed as a strategy, and leaves you with all sorts of stupid features knocking around just littering what's supposed to be content.

So rather than actually building an extensible set of metadata and post options, and asking clients to query against it periodically to update the set of options they make available to users, instead they expect you to remember various code snippets which switch things on and off.. Meanwhile, presumably they just build addon after addon to parse entries for the various options you might have dropped into the code?

Surely it makes more sense to actually build support for social recommendations into the site itself, and have entry-level options to enable / disable those features (which could equally apply to comments). Instead, they're heading down a route that it's hard to get out of - building custom functionality in the most work-around way possible, which only clutters the site usability and codebase.

If the recent downtime wasn't sufficient to make it obvious that LJ is no longer the place to be, the cowboy coding would have done the trick...

unknownj @ 2011-06-18T14:14:00

2011-06-18T13:14:54Z

( Why selling the vulnerable into low-wage exploitation isn't cool... )

unknownj @ 2011-05-27T09:42:00

2011-05-27T08:42:06Z

( Why Monopoly is too realistic for kids... )

unknownj @ 2011-04-26T11:00:00

2011-04-26T10:00:49Z

( The Quarry: The Sequel )

Or: How to follow up an actual adventure with reading a series of reports and studies in an office...

unknownj @ 2011-04-21T11:52:00

2011-04-21T10:53:09Z

( Quick DITL - My Route to the Office (or: London is nice when you don't have to use the tube) )

unknownj @ 2011-04-19T15:59:00

2011-04-19T14:59:28Z

( The Evolution of a Meme )

PS: I'm actually really enjoying having left LJ.. It's great out here, y'all should do likewise...

unknownj @ 2011-04-19T07:00:00

2011-04-19T06:00:42Z

( Why I wouldn't want to see the Royal Wedding disrupted )