Quote of the 'Week'

"Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all."
Voltaire
Discovering that someone has commented on one of my blogs is such a joyous feeling. Hint, bloody hint!

Saturday 27 March 2010

Talk to the Handbook, because the Facebook ain't listening. The Handbook of Common Sense, that is!

If a drunk driver slams his car into a tree and is killed, would the authorities criticise the car manufacturer for not making the vehicle safer for drunk drivers?
No, of course they wouldn't. It's not the fault of the car; it's the fault of the driver. And yet it seems this type of hunting for easy solutions is all too common in today's society.

Now, I mention this because I was just reading a report about Facebook, slamming it for not keeping people, particularly young people, safe from dangerous strangers online.
When something terrible happens to a person, they, and their friends and relatives, are bound to harbour resentment towards the cause of the terrible happening. This is perfectly understandable - there always needs to be people who are on the side of the victim, it's only right - but sometimes it should stop with the close associates. Sometimes, whatever caused the terrible incident only did so through a lack of judgement on the victim's part. In these cases, less pressure should be put onto the cause. Especially if the pressure can negatively impact other people, people who are smart enough to cope anyway.

Facebook is merely a tool, a means by which people can communicate with other people at the click of a button. It is not an online community; the online community exists through Facebook. The site didn't come into being with already existing communities, because it needs people to do that. People make communities.
So it seems a little unfair to me that people read about other people being lured to their deaths through meeting people on Facebook, and go all Mary Whitehouse on the poor site (look her up if you didn't get that last bit).
Those who fall foul of Facebook only do so through a lack of necessary caution. One should exhibit apprehension when accepting friend requests from strangers. Make sure they are who they say they are, and that you don't put yourself in potential danger through associating with them.

Of course, the younger people may not have this developed awareness, but to blame Facebook for that is also ludicrous. If a child wanders onto a dual carriageway and is hit by a car, it is not the fault of the road for being too busy; either the child was not sufficiently tutored in the ways of road safety, or there was a lack of necessary signs or constraints in that area. Facebook is, in my humble opinion, excellent at warning you about potential threats to your online safety whenever possible. So these youngsters, innocently oblivious to the dangers of online strangers, are only being put in danger by those responsible for them. Those responsible should warn their children, imbue them with a deep-rooted sense of online awareness, and keep an eye on them when Facebooking.

Unfortunately, the world doesn't work like that. The rational people, those who understand the workings of Facebook, see the human errors of others and accept them as human errors, are often the ones who keep to themselves. To be rational is to step back and put everything into perspective, but you can't step back if you're smack in the middle of it all. The parents and close friends of the victims are bound to have this blinkered, blood-tinted opinion of Facebook, because it's either that or accept that poor little Timmy was being an idiot. These people, people with significantly more emotional damage than peripheral vision, are the ones who appear on the news and in the papers, ranting and raving about how 'the evil of social networking destroyed/took the life of my poor little under-experienced, unsupervised child!'

The media is far from rational itself. It all boils down to money. The news companies get money from ratings and purchases, and the ratings and purchases positively correlate with the amount of bad news there is. After all, good news happens all the time. Has your area been hit by an earthquake? No? Then bugger off with your good news, because neither have most places. Bad news is, from a global perspective, more interesting than no news at all, and good news is rarely any more interesting than anything you could discover by going for a walk.

The news loves sob stories. One of the only things it loves more than sob stories is the resultant support the sobbers receive. This invariably provides the news with even more money; they get to prolong the news story and they receive thousands of calls from easily-swayed people with a lot of time on their hands and higher blood pressure than IQ.
Meanwhile, the rational majority sit back with a justifiable apathy. But nobody with any power wants to hear from them. No matter how solid and sane their views are, they're just not very interesting.

Our growing ability to adapt to our consequently shrinking boredom threshold will inevitably be our downfall as a species.

Will

Friday 19 March 2010

As is but one of the captivating series of outlandish adventures that constitute my life

I just got a high-ish score on a game called Drop3. It's essentially tetris, but with a physics engine and different shapes. If a circular piece drops onto a triangular piece, for example, it will roll down its slope until it finds somewhere solid to stop. you have to get three or more colours to touch for them to disappear, and it's all really rather brilliant.
I got the rather splendid score of 169,800, which is the best score this week, the second best this month and the nineteenth best score of all time. Which is rather pleasing when you consider how many people play these games.

But what have I earned from this?
What have I been working towards? Why am I so pleased to have my name on the leaderboard? What have I actually acheived? I haven't really acheived anything, but I'm dizzy with adrenaline and euphoria. What's that all about?
I suppose games are tricking the body. The excitement of a simulated challenge is sending signals to the brain, which must interpret it all as genuine, because games of this sort have not been around long enough for our bodies to evolve to instinctively recognise them as games.
My brain probably thinks I'm tackling a mammoth or something. It thinks 'Bloody hell! If I don't do something, we're fucked!' and desperately tries to save its human host by increasing adrenaline levels and so on and so forth. Hence the dizzying glee that comes from getting a high score. To the brain, that's like not only avoiding the mammoth, but killing two of them, providing enough food for the whole tribe and earning respect from the elders... or something like that. I don't know.

Have I earned anything? Well, apart from the mild respect of anyone who glances at the leaderboard (which isn't anyone who gives a crap anyway), not really, no. But I think it helps to play these games. I think it helps to keep the brain exercised and on its toes, a brain that hasn't completely evolved out of the Stone Age.

But I'm still really rather pleased with the high score. Get in!

Will

Wednesday 17 March 2010

New Background

Yes, I've managed to crack the system and alter my background. It took long enough for me to figure out! It's not an option that's readily-available at the click of a button. There's a lot of copying-and-pasting image files into HTML scripts that goes on, and it's incredibly boring.
In fact, the only reason I've posted this is so that I have an online version of the image that I am about to paste into the HTML to become the background. By the time you read this, it will have all been sorted.

Ominously optimistic last words, methinks.

Will

UPDATE: This background, tiled repeatedly as the background of my blog, looks somewhat... hideous. So I decided not to use it. I'll find another background at some point. But not this one! Blech.

Wednesday 10 March 2010

The Revenge of the Silly Titles

 'Sup?
While I was just reading some blogs, it occurred to me that I haven't updated mine recently. I think this is due, in part, to the fact that I have been on Blogger a lot lately, but only in a blog-reading capacity. Any absence of Blogger.com in my memory banks is an indication of a lack of blogging activity, but that means of identifying negligence doesn't work if you've been on the site doing things other than contributing. Silly brain.

Anyway, I'm back, and ready to rock! Well, type, at any rate. Type some awesomeness! Yeah!

Right. I have done another vlog recently; you might want to have a gander at that at some point.
Also, my black book of comic strips is nearing completion. By this, I mean that the unpublishable scrawlings in the back of the book are about to collide with the comic strips in the front of the book.
I may redraw the final collection of comic strips for the sake of neatness and continuity, but they will remain fundamentally the same as they are now, just more presentable for a published book. John Mahon and I have been pondering over possible names for the book, as the comics do not yet have a collective name. We were thinking about going down the Monty Python route of giving it a completely random and unrelated name, just for the sake of it.
I did a doodle a while back of a man with a completely deadpan expression, and a pipe. I then proceeded to draw his legs, at which point I decided to be silly and had him dancing wildly. The image of a man, seemingly stationary and calm from the waist up but dancing furiously from the waist down, tickled me immensely, so I gave the doodle its own title. That title might become the title of this book: 'The Nonchalant Prancings of Horatio McNargle'.
The only thing is, I wonder if it's a bit... too random. A bit too left-field for a first-time publication. I may just play it safe and call it something more relevant. It'll still be humorous. Just relevant at the same time. It can be two things! Why can't it be two things?

And on that slightly whining and exasperated note, I'll stop typing, post this, and get on with whatever it is that I do.

Au revoir for jetzt.
I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!