write.as/jonbeckett

Do you ever feel the online world is becoming overloaded? Thoughts have been rattling around my admittedly tiny little brain for the last few months – that too many social platforms are now thought of as essential in some way or another, and that their content has become either insidious, irrelevant, or toxic.

Facebook seems to have become the place to either complain about anything and everything, or to see how high you can piss compared to your peers. No photo is worth sharing in the Facebook universe unless it’s of your crashed car, your broken body part, or your children skiing in the French Alps.

Twitter has become a political bating arena, where the vocal majority bash everything that comes out of any politician’s mouth at every opportunity. The most outspoken have all the time in the world to write pithy tweets, but no time at all to actually do anything positive, or to affect change.

Instagram remains a bastion of hope in the social cesspool, if only because so many people share little square photos of food they are about to eat, drinks they are about to pour into their mouth, or heavily filtered photos of themself and their friends pulling duck face. At least it’s largely original, harmless, and somewhat candid (well… apart from the fitspo crowd).

Wordpress, Blogger, Medium, and Squarespace continue to host the written word of a diminshing band of brave writers (I’m biased – can you tell?). Wordpress has all but won the published internet, making you wonder why the competition still bother at all. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy foresaw the darker side of blogging though – with Vogon Poetry being used as a weapon. If updated now, I’m sure the guide would list a number of Wordpress poetry blogs as far more damaging than anything the Vogons came up with.

Tumblr continues to be a law unto itself. Despite being by far the worst engineered, most unreliable, and least feature rich social platform on the internet at the time of writing, people persist with it – largely because they don’t want to lose touch with each other. It’s probably worth mentioning that when I say “people” I mean a tiny minority, surrounded by millions of teenagers and robots reblogging each others reblogs in an incestuous orgy of recursive regurgitation.

Snapchat has been taken on by an entire generation of teens and twenty somethings that have no idea how badly designed and built it is. They typically use it over other platforms simply because their parents do not.

WhatsApp has become a living hell, with groups of parents banding together around children’s sports teams to flatten phone batteries while arranging team fixtures, searching for lost kit, and ferrying children here, there and everywhere.

We cannot forget the mighty YouTube, which is single handedly ripping television as we know it to pieces. Instead of arranging saturday mornings around a stead stream of cartoons, children can not only watch any ripped off cartoon they care to search for, but also find out how to apply makeup, how to burn their hair off, and how to break every bone in their body attempting “epic fails”.

Somehow we are all supposed to invest time in a number of these platforms – seeking out content posted by those we know, those we might like to know, and those we had no clue were following us. Creepy. We’re supposed to like, comment, heart, smile, frown, and express amusement, solidarity, horror, and understanding. We’re supposed to share as much as possible, but not share anything about this, or that, and definitely not THAT.

Today began with a late start – leaving the house in time to arrive at the local hair cutting establishment just as they opened for the day. I chose the one filled with friendly ladies this time, rather than the alternative round the corner staffed by a grump guy that complains better than a taxi driver if given the chance.

A voluptuous polish lady cut my hair with an attention to detail I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. She apologised at one point as she obsessed over blending in my short-back-and-sides – or at least I think that’s what she was doing. She did laugh when I explained my choice of haircut:

“If I have it like this, I don’t actually have to do anything when I get out of the shower on a morning”.

Somewhere along the way in our conversation she didn’t ask if I wanted any wax in my hair, so I left looking like a choir boy from the mid 1950s. Thankfully a little further along the street stands a shop that sells all manner of grooming supplies – including pots of wax. Of course it’s not called wax – it’s clay, or sculpting stuff, or magical unicorn spit, or something equally ridiculous – with a price to match. How the hell can a small tin of wax cost more than a meal out?

The work day passed without incident. Actually, I say that, but that would ignore a conversation I had with a colleague about blogging platforms. We ended up looking at Medium together (a web publishing platform), and as I explained it to him, I discovered a relatively new feature – you can now import Wordpress blogs into Medium. Guess who did just that a few minutes later to try it out? Yes – this idiot. I have no clue if it will go anywhere, but I’ll cross-post for a while just to find out how it all works, and if there is an audience out there.

This evening hasn’t really happened – and by “hasn’t really happened”, I mean I walked five miles between schools and football pitches while fetching and delivering children, and cooked and ate inbetween journeys here, there, and everywhere. It’s all good though – no children were lost, no football kit was lost, and no parents decided that sitting in the pub with a beer might be a much better idea than trudging all over town.

I never do seem to make it out for a beer. I’m tempted to think that only happens in movies and TV shows. I did pass a couple of friends this evening on my travels, and wondered if their evening was as crazy as mine. Of course if I ever kept in touch with anybody, I would know.

Late this evening – once the children were in bed – we sat down and watched the first two episodes of the new Star Trek series on Netflix. I’m trying hard to like it, but it’s taking forever and a day to get going. The first two episodes are a prologue of sorts – the third episode (which isn’t out yet) is apparently what you might think of as a “pilot” episode. I’ll try and stick with it.

There isn’t really anything else to report this evening. I only just got the chance to sit quietly and write this – at 11:30pm. Yes, I know – I could have written it instead of watching Star Trek, but there was half a bottle of wine to be drunk, and pretend socialising to be done. If not for watching junk television together late on an evening, I might not see my other half for days one end. She usually consumes a steady diet of CSI, NCIS, Bones, and whatever other detective series is showing to de-stress late at night. I wander in, and am usually horrified by some pathologist or other scooping goo out of a skull.

Anyway. Time to wrap this up. The clock is ticking. It will soon be tomorrow.

It’s been a few weeks since starting out on the Bullet Journal adventure, so I thought it might be worth recording a few thoughts.

When I started, I looked around at some of the inspirational pages posted to Pinterest, Instagram, and various creative blogs around the internet. This resulted in a couple of days filling pages with doodles, diagrams, bargraphs, charts, and who knows what else – all decorated wonderfully, but of no practical purpose whatsoever. I ended up with the journal of a 16 year old girl, rather than the journal of a professional software and web developer – which is fine, and proved I could do all that crap if I really wanted to, but actually… no.

By the second week I had scaled everything back to pages of notes about whatever I happened to be working on, a minimalist weekly grid, and plans for a more minimal month page for the next month. By and large that’s how I’ve gone on.

I wondered for a while about dealing with longer-range calendar dates, before realising that’s what the month sections at the front of the journal are for – and that as each month comes up, the long range dates should be migrated in.

I’ve started to realise that it might be better to deal with days of the week in the same way – not writing the entire week out to cover a page, but just writing in each day as it occurs, migrating tasks into it both from the general task list for the week, and the month.

I think so far my biggest take-away from the bullet journal process is that it encourages repetition in terms of the migration of tasks from the year, to months, and to days of the week – and repetition helps form habits. I also find that looking through the things not done causes a level of accountability.

I will admit that last weekend I looked back at the Filofax again, but given the epiphany about migrating year and month events in, rather than writing them into future pages of a calendar has the same advantages in terms of reviewing what’s coming up at multiple points, rather than turning a page and discovering what you might have written in months before.

I’m still forgetting to back-populate the index pages with page numbers. I guess the utility of various gadgets like the index will come over time – when I need to look something obscure up, for example.

Anyway. There you go. I’m still going with the bullet journal. I can’t share a photo of mine, because it’s filled with real-world project names from work, and places my kids will be throughout the week. Given the bun-fight that happened on Facebook earlier today about safeguarding, and over-sharing by some parents (I set out a picnic blanket to relax while Rome burned around me), I don’t think I’ll be sharing anything like that. The stock photos that usually accompany my posts are there for a reason.

The clock is ticking inexorably towards the end of Sunday evening, and my mind is trying to avoid thinking about work tomorrow. Something didn’t work as well as we might have liked on Friday, and it’s been at the back of my mind all weekend.

I stayed at home today while my other half camped out on the touchline of a rugby field an hour from home watching the younger girls train with the rest of their squad. While they completed endless drills I filled, emptied, and re-filled the washing machine again and again. It’s rapidly turning into “the thing I do” at the weekend, which is fine, until I realise that some people are out with friends, drinking, eating, laughing, and having a great time.

Inbetween chores today I filled my Kindle up with books – or at least I tried to. It turns out Kindles no longer play well with sideloaded books (when you attach the Kindle to the computer via a USB cable, and upload books into it via Calibre). Some of the books appeared, others remained conspicuously absent. I ended up deleting everything and just importing the book I want to read next. I’m trying to arm-twist myself into reading more instead of spending hours surfing the web, or watching TV. The next books will be “IT”, followed by “Neverwhere”, and then maybe “John dies at the end”, which I spotted earlier today.

I still haven’t read “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”, despite the paperback kicking around the junk room for the last couple of years.

I tried an audio book out while in Germany. The Jerry Pournelle book “The Mote in God’s Eye”. I thought it might be a good chance to listen to a story while holed up in a hotel, but found it incredibly difficult to concentrate. I think when I read from a page, my mind builds the scene far more solidly than just hearing the words (if that makes any sense).

Maybe my mission until the end of the year should be to read as many of the books on my “to read” list as possible, and actually update Goodreads with progress.

I rescued my old netbook computer from almost certain doom earlier in the week – it had been sitting on the corner of a counter in the kitchen along with a few other bits and pieces to be sent off for recycling or charitable donation. We finally made it to a charity store today with several bags of clothes and brick-a-brack, but no netbook. It’s back in my bag, re-installed with Windows 7, and a copy of Scrivener. If you’ve never heard of Scrivener, it’s a writing app – kind of like the digital version of a typewriter, moleskine notebook, and binder full of notes all wrapped up in one piece of software. Apparently writers swear by it.

Here’s the thing – whenever I launch Scrivener I feel like a fraud. I feel like a weekend cyclist pulling on sponsor laden lycra for a training ride. I’m not a writer – I’m not paid to write – it’s just something I like to do. I’ll never be famous for my words, and my words will never be sought out (well… other than by one or two friends, and one or two stalkerish maniacs that have quietly tracked my every move for years – yes, I know you’re out there if you’re reading this. If there was a way of waving and embarrassing you in front of everybody I would).

I suppose in some ways having a copy of Scrivener installed on the computer is no different than a hobbyist photographer dangling a top of the range Canon or Nikon camera from their shoulder. It will almost always be left in fully-automatic mode, just as four wheel drive trucks very rarely get their wheels dirty while being driven by trophy wives on the school run.

Reverting to the old netbook to write anything of consequence consigns the Chromebook to a temporary limbo. It’s great for consuming the web, passable for writing (if you like Google Docs), and lasts all day on a charge. I suppose there is another option too – the Amazon Fire tablet I bought myself for Christmas a couple of years ago. While it spends most of it’s life tucked in my work bag to watch movies and TV shows while away with work, it can also pass as a pretty good word processor when allied with the Evernote app, and a cheap bluetooth keyboard. I’ve used it on trains and in coffee shops several times.

Just to maintain the fence sitting contrary position most people expect of me, it’s probably worth noting that I write nearly every blog post in a text editor – a programmers editor on the PC. Each post gets written in plain text, and copied into Wordpress and Tumblr. I save every post prefixed with the date in a folder structure, and check it into version control – just as I would with programming. I know it’s insane. Think about it though – I get a free backup with version control, and the ability to clone every post I’ve ever written to a new computer at the drop of a hat. What’s more, because my backup posts are written in plain text files, they will never be incompatible with anything.

I give this rubbish far too much thought, don’t I. Rather than write about my day – standing on the touchline of my middle-daughter’s football match, and then making a trip to the rubbish tip – instead I write a load of introspective drivel about old netbooks, chromebooks, software, insane writing workflows, and idiotic nerdiness.

It’s Saturday night. Surely I should be out getting drunk with friends? Instead I’m sitting in the dark of the junk room, listening to some wallpaper music on Spotify, typing this. Being honest, I would rather be here than out wasting money I don’t have, but that’s just me.

p.s. I threw away the 9 year old Macbook today.

I suppose technically it’s already Saturday morning, but I’m writing this before falling into bed on Friday night, so I’m classing it as Friday still.

I took Miss 17 to see “IT” at the cinema this evening – the movie version of Stephen King’s famous book. I’ve never read the book, and I never saw the TV mini series back in the day, so the story was entirely new for both of us.

Holy shit it scared me. Thinking back, I can’t remember seeing a thriller or horror movie at the cinema before – I usually only make it to the big screen for fantasy or science fiction movies. Miss 17 thought it tremendously amusing that I almost left my seat at one point (Pennywise appearance in the bathroom scene, if you are wondering) – I decided not to recall her attempts to crawl into the back of her seat during more than one scene.

Let’s avoid doing a capsule review, and just say the movie was great, and has given me a fresh appreciation of how much a good cinema adds to the experience of seeing a good movie. Let’s not talk about the assholes you have to share the cinema with though.

Oh. My. God. Why do some people bother paying to see a movie? Why would you pay, and then turn up ten minutes into the movie? Why would you get up to go to the toilet twenty minutes in? Do you have the bladder of a small baby? Several people missed pivotal sections of the movie, and would have no idea what the hell was going on later. Like I said – why spend the money if you’re going to wreck the movie for yourself? Why not just wait for the DVD?

Getting back to the movie, I think a part of my affinity for it was based on the era it is set (which differs from the book, apparently). The kids the story centres around are about 13 or 14 years old in 1988. I was 13 or 14 in 1988. They could have been me.

I have found myself thinking about “the point of things” recently. I’m not sure what brought it on.

My father in law died a couple of years ago. Throughout his life he collected things – books, jazz and folk music, stamps, even silly things like scout memorabilia. When he died the family shared out some of the things he collected, but sold the majority of it. I get it – during his life he enjoyed the things he collected – he listened to each album that arrived through the post, and filed stamps from all over the world carefully away in orderly volumes. I can’t help feeling that it all came to nothing though.

I’m not sure, but I think the pattern of thought that questions the reason for collecting things – be that knowledge, or experiences, or material things – borders on nihilism. If life is meaningless, what is the point of trying? What is the point of carrying on?

A few days ago I made an offhand remark about blogging to a fellow blogger – that I sometimes wonder about the value of any of these words we publish. Who will really bother to look back over any of it and find any worth? Of course, this particular friend immediately rallied, and started re-building the wall around me that most of us have – the wall that allows us to just carry on without surrendering to futility.

It occurred to me today that the close friendships I have forged while sharing words with the internet have become my reason for continuing with this idiocy. They are the reason I keep landing each foot in front of the other, typing in the dead of night, and hitting the publish button. It sort of makes sense, looking around me. I’m not a material person – I never have been. I’m sitting in the junk room at home writing this, surrounded by detritus dumped by the rest of the household. I’m using an eight year old Windows PC, and have a middle-of-the-road Android phone in my pocket. I don’t drive a car – I cycle everywhere. The only jewellery I own are two rings – my wedding ring, and an engagement ring bought from a gift shop for a few pence.

While watching the latest episode of the rather wonderful “Halt and Catch Fire” late last night, one of the characters stopped another mid-conversation while they worried about the future, and explained that we are here – we are in the future right now. We should enjoy the now a little more, and question what might happen next a little less. I think he may have been on to something.

A friend challenged my apparent lack of faith earlier this evening, causing me to really think about my opposition to “faith”. It’s worth pointing out that I have no problem with people believing whatever they want to believe – as long as they respect my freedom not to share their belief.

In the process of thinking through the various facets of my opposition to organised religion, faiths, ideologies, and so on, I ended up writing a number of observations down. I thought it might be interesting to share them here.

Here goes (gulp)…

The vast majority of people choose to believe in what we commonly term the “Judeo Christian God”, and the stories written in a collection of books hundreds of years after the events of the stories they tell.

Billions of perfectly well educated people around the world choose to believe in completely different gods, and have just as much faith in the veracity of their gods and the stories surrounding them as Christians do in theirs.

Throughout recorded history entire civilisations have come and gone that believed unflinchingly in all manner of faiths, religions, or origin stories that are now regarded as either curiosities, misguided, dangerous, incorrect, or even laughable.

Many of the most violent conflicts in recorded history have been caused by factions either promoting, or defending differing faiths.

It’s worth stating again – the above observations are entirely my own. If I thought about it some more, I could probably keep going for several pages, but that would be very tedious, and probably not worth reading at all. Anyway – my aim is not to dissuade you from believing whatever you choose to, or to question your faith, or intelligence – I’m just making a few observations that correlate with my choice not to believe.

After an extended game of e-mail ping-pong between three people, one of whom’s only function seemed to be the person that talks to the ship’s computer and relay messages, I am no longer returning to Germany the week after next. Everything has skidded a couple of weeks. That game of ping-pong resulted in another game of ping pong with a different client. I’ll be getting good at ping-pong at this rate. They have been hassling for me to visit for a few weeks, but guess what – as soon as you give them some dates in the near future, they can’t make them. So I’ll be visiting in about twenty five thousand years time.

It turns out lots of things seem to “go on” in Frankfurt. I scouted out the hotel rooms over the next few weeks while panicking wildly, and discovered that while some weeks are remarkably reasonable, other weeks are either not available at all, or cost about the same as a Vogon Constructor Fleet (read: a lot of money, but not much use because the earth gets destroyed to make way for an interstellar bypass anyway).

While trudging back and forth from Germany in recent months, it has struck me that the whole “thing” about German people having no sense of humor is completely wrong. They have a fine sense of humor. They’re just not as good at dicking about as some other countries seem to be. The English have a fine history of dicking about, as do the Americans. You might argue that the French and Spanish don’t so much dick about, as do nothing instead. While we’re all dicking or sitting about, the Germans are getting on with their life – and strangely none of them wear lederhosen, and very few of them drink beer. I haven’t seen a single knee slapping dance or accordion so far – it’s quite disappointing to learn so many of your preconceptions were actually prejudices.

Maybe my view of Germany so far is skewed by visiting Frankfurt, which has a 50/50 population of German and Turkish people – oh, and a few Chinese people running restaurants which purport to serve traditional German food, but serve you chinese dishes instead. No, I have not forgotten yet. I’ll turn the menu over next time.

Anyway. I should be getting on with very important things instead of writing this codswallop. No doubt I’ll find something to complain about soon, and type furiously for several whole minutes before posting it. Or scribble notes in the bullet journal I’m still trying to convince myself is a good idea, even though I’ve already stopped decorating pages with twee flags and doodles. Maybe that’s it – maybe I should calm myself down of a lunchtime by filling the bullet journal with pointless lists that I won’t update, but make them pretty enough to take photos of, which I can then post to Instagram in the hope of luring unsuspecting hipsters into my web of mundanity.

Tonight you find me sitting in the dark of the junk room, listening to the “Favourite Coffeehouse” playlist on Spotify, with an incense stick burning on the corner of the desk. I guess you could call it “decompression”.

Most of the day was spent either on the phone, or struggling to figure out how to make something fairly significant work. As often happens, light filled the tunnel minutes before leaving the office, which means I’ll at least sleep tonight instead of turning problems over and over in my head.

In vaguely related news, I’m returning to Germany again – perhaps the week after next. I’ll know more tomorrow, but have already reserved a hotel room. I really should do something about learning a few more words, because this won’t be the last trip. In a curious turn of fate, the better you are at what you do, the more the client wants you to spend time with them.

This evening involved sitting for an hour in the hall of a local school among several hundred other parents, listening to plans for the year ahead. Perhaps the most interesting moment came right at the end when the deputy head spoke to all present about the problems caused by social media, and the need to stop children using screens at least an hour before they go to bed. Our decision to do this a couple of years ago has been vindicated – we thought the research into backlit screens and sleep was well known – apparently not.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have several hundred episodes of Seinfeld to start wading my way though. A promise to a close friend. Apparently I’m going to discover myself, or at least a very good facsimile of various facets of myself. The last time that happened was during the more mundane moments of Mr Robot – minus the drug addictions and multiple personality disorders of course.

Oh – one more thing – I realised earlier that I haven’t logged into IMVU for a couple of weeks. I’m not sure why. Perhaps re-joining Tumblr is somehow related to my apathetic rejection of IMVU? Standing in a virtual room full of strangers hiding behind invented facades, having dispassionate conversations about nothing much doesn’t really compare to blogging platforms where people are all too real – painting their thoughts, problems, hopes and dreams large.