#obviously we’re all finite like mortality but you don’t think about it because it’s an awful thing to think about

[alarawriting]

Inktober #8: Frail

This was delayed a day because it’s longer than any of the others. Relates to my WIP “No Drama”, aka “Q is an investigative journalist researching whether God is a corrupt politician of his people”. 

So the first thing I need to explain before I tell you about meeting Heph is his name.

Humans call me John Deer (it’s a joke. Their name for a man who has no name is John Doe, but a doe is a female deer. I don’t technically have one of their genders, strictly speaking, and if you go by the body I’m in, it’s not female, so I thought I’d go by John Deer. Turns out the joke’s on me; add a silent e to the name and it’s a company that makes tractors. Go figure.)  However, as I hope would be obvious, that’s not my real name. The Aleph don’t have physical bodies and aren’t made of matter and the pure information we are made of doesn’t translate to syllables you or anything that makes sound can pronounce. If I were to translate my name, it would be impossibly long to convey in words; an Aleph’s name is, essentially, a hash function of our personality, the defining nature of our being. I’m not going to stand here and recite my entire personality to you, or anyone else’s entire personality, either, and don’t expect any other Aleph to do so.

So when we walk among pre-eschatonic species, we generally go by the names of gods in their language, or animals of symbolic value (which on most planets, for many groups on that planet, are indistinguishable from gods), or Virtue Names like “Patience” (that one is definitely not mine). And then, when we speak to one another with our meat mouths because we’re in meat bodies, we use those names, the use-names specific for that planet, that culture, that language. On Earth, in English-speaking languages (as well as a significant number of the other ones), I’m known to other Aleph as Fox, Ferret or Weasel, depending on their current opinion of me. My opponent goes by the Lion, or the Ape. But Heph doesn’t use animal names; for the past several hundred years, when he walked on this planet, he called himself Hephaestus. The Greek God of engineering, smithing and invention – technology, in other words – who also happened to be crippled. I think it would be hard to find a myth better suited to be Heph’s use-name.

You see, Heph was born damaged. (We aren’t “born” like you’re born, messy screaming infants coming out of a parent’s orifices. A seed is woven by an entire team of Aleph who’ve chosen to procreate and gotten permission to do so, and then that seed grows fractally. So we are a little less random than spinning the Wheel of Sperm and Ova like you guys do… but not much less random.) By the time he was grown enough that anyone was able to notice the damage, it was too late to correct him without making major changes to his essence, and most Aleph would have to be dying before they’d consent to that (if then. Personally I’d rather die.) It’s hard to explain what the problem is to a non-Aleph, so I need to draw an analogy. In essence… his bandwidth is too low. He cannot quickly upload anything to the Host, and he doesn’t have the storage capacity for the energy we draw down to do our reality-altering things. Where the rest of us are gods, Heph is barely a guardian spirit.

Back when we were both living in the Host most of the time, I am… ashamed to admit that I overlooked Heph, the way almost all the Aleph do. He can’t join with one of us – well, he can, but it’s shallow because of his low bandwidth. Not to be crude about it but it’s as if one of your males was trying to make love to a woman with the vaginal depth of a tea saucer. It… doesn’t do a lot for most Aleph. He can’t participate in most of the things we do because he can’t store enough energy to do it. So he isolates himself from us, and we let him do it because we’re all kind of at a loss as to how you include a guy who can’t do 90% of what you take for granted.

Heph, however, is very smart. All Aleph are by human standards, but Heph is by our standards. So he found a way around the problem.

When I met him on Earth, I was dying in a gutter. I’d been sentenced to a decade of being locked down to a single mortal body, and since I’d been on Earth when they grabbed me and put me on trial, it was Earth they sent me back to. Specifically, Victorian England. Naked, and with no money. Or antibodies. I ended up in a workhouse, where as you can imagine I did fantastically well since I’ve always been so eager to do pointless busywork and follow orders. The main punishment for disobedience was not being fed, followed by being held in a cell for a day and then given clothes that were supposed to shame you. I had no sense of shame, but I got a lot less food than the body I was in needed, and I was surrounded by people who were not in the best health. When I couldn’t work anymore and I was delirious with fever, they threw me out to be picked up with the rest of the refuse, assuming I’d be dead by morning.

Heph was on Earth too. He tracked me down, using technology he’d created. That’s Heph’s thing. He creates technology to compensate for his weaknesses. We have safeguards against anyone or anything but a recognized member of the Host drawing on power, so his tech can’t do all the shiny things a full-powered Aleph can, but we have plenty of access protocols to reach the database of knowledge. So he was able to find me. No Aleph was supposed to render me aid, but Heph was not afraid of pulling the cripple card to get away with doing anything he’d been forbidden to do that he nonetheless decided was the right thing to do. He may be one of the smartest of us, but most Aleph treat him as if he’s not particularly bright, just because he can’t output his thoughts as fast as the rest of us, or fork himself and multi-process. And he made sure not to give me any aid that only an Aleph would be capable of. He fed me bread mold, a powerful antibiotic – you know it as penicillin – that humans happened to not have discovered yet, and pumped sugar, water and saline solution directly into my veins with a sterile glass tube ending in a needle, which humans would later refer to as an IV once they’d invented it. It was all with materials that could be found on Earth, that humans could have discovered (and in fact did, later on.)

I didn’t know my sentence was for a decade. Nobody had told me there was a time limit. I thought they’d left me on Earth to die. Heph restored meaning to my life. The Host as a whole may have abandoned me, but one specific Aleph still cared, and went well out of his way to take care of me. Heph’s not known for being a fluffy, love and compassion kind of guy; he’s cold, aloof, introverted, with difficulty outputting his emotions in a format most Aleph can read, and his shallow bandwidth means that if an Aleph tried to probe him directly, it would cause him a lot of pain. Which, since we are a compassionate species, meant no one was allowed to probe him without his permission. Which he never gave.

In those days, Heph had been tall and broad-shouldered, still going with the whole blacksmith motif. He was never ripped like a bodybuilder, but his upper body had some substantial muscle to it. He’d affected black curly hair and bronze skin like the Greeks he’d named himself for. And he’d worn thick spectacles and walked with a cane. I’m not sure whether he does it on purpose or whether it’s a subconscious compulsion, but every body Heph creates for himself in matter has damage to mobility and damage to perception, representing what he suffers in his true form. I tend to think Heph identifies so strongly with being disabled, he can’t imagine having a form that isn’t.

Ten years before I’d even learned the sentence was finite. Heph had known, but hadn’t been allowed to tell me – and while obviously he thought he could get away with saving my life and being my companion and showing me how to survive as a human, equally obviously he didn’t want to disobey the Host in the matter of telling me my sentence. Their logic was that it was hardly an aspect of being mortal to know for a fact that if you just survive long enough you’ll get your immortality back. The truth was, of course, the Lion had had the judges in his pocket. We hated each other even then; that’s why I started investigating him. He had them do it to be pointlessly cruel, and they came up with a rationalization to the rest of the Host. Well, in those ten years, Heph became my best friend. Raven and Cat and Monkey, my other close friends, hadn’t come to visit. Even Isis, who treated me like I was her little brother and used to watch out for me when we were millions of years younger, left me there. Heph was the only Aleph willing to risk the displeasure of the Host to be my friend.

So as soon as I came back to Earth, I looked him up, of course.

I’m kind of in the same boat he’s always been in; I have my powers, but the moment I draw down energy to do anything major, or even upload any complex hand-rolled query, my memories upload to the Host. And I’m absolutely sure that the Lion is going to honor the law and not seek to obtain illicit access to privacy-locked memories. Yup. Positive. So the moment I use my powers, my enemy gets to see exactly what I’ve been thinking and planning up to that point. Which means I can’t use my powers for anything short of “my physical body has just been killed and I need to upload or I’ll actually die.” But locating a fellow Aleph is such a common query, we have a wizard for it, which can be triggered without uploading – and while my privacy lock keeps that particular simple query from finding me, Heph’s never felt the need to hide.

But I gotta admit I was kind of shocked when I saw his new body.

He recognized me, of course. “Fox. Come on in.”

Heph was living in a farmhouse that he’d converted to his brand of tech wonderland, probably because he wanted to have enough land between him and his human neighbors that no one called the cops for strange noises or mysterious lights. I stepped over several gadgets of unknown function, following Heph to the kitchen. “You still drink tea?” he asked me.

“Uh, yeah, what have you got?”

“Oolong, chai, green with ginger, peach chamomile, Earl Grey, and hibiscus.”

“Gimme the chai.” The last time we’d met, chai had been something you’d only get if you were actually in India.

I made my way to his kitchen table, which was covered with papers and had what looked like two laptops sitting on it. I happened to know they were laptops the way desktop computers are abacuses, but humans probably wouldn’t have been easily able to tell the difference, unless they knew the Unix operating system well enough to know that Heph was not running a variant of it. Heph pushed the papers out of the way on one of the chairs, giving me a clear spot to sit down, as he remote-activated a teakettle with his mind.

“What brings you back to Earth?” he asked.

“Before we get into that, I need to address the elephant in the room, Heph.”

“No one here goes by Elephant.”

If I hadn’t known Heph as well as I did, I might not have guessed he was telling a joke; he was completely deadpan. “Yeah yeah. What have you done to your use-form?”

Like I said, the last time I’d seen Heph, he’d been built, matching the crippled blacksmith stereotype. Now… he was still tall. That was about the only point of resemblance. He’d gone for a pasty white, skinny form with long blond hair in a ponytail, thick glasses with a tint to them so I couldn’t really see his eyes well, and his body looked like it would blow away in a strong wind. There was a visible brace on his left leg, and he dragged it very slightly when he walked. Heph had always made his use-forms disabled, but there’s disabled and then there’s “looks completely helpless.”

“This is the new look for the 21st century technologist,” Heph said.

“It looks like the consumption chic that was going around in Byron’s day. Do you eat? At all?”

“Sure. Chips, pizza, burgers. All of the fatty, unhealthy stuff that modern technology gurus poison themselves with when they’re crunching on a project, which is all the time.”

“Great, so you’re not just incredibly skinny, you also probably have a dozen vitamin deficiencies. Heph. You gotta keep that body running! With your upload time—”

“Thanks, I’m aware of my upload time. And I’m pretty sure you didn’t drop in on me just to tell me I’m too thin.”

“I’m worried about you. You look like one high fever could do you in.”

“They’ve invented a lot more antibiotics than they had around when you got sick. Listen, Fox, I get that you’re worried, but I’m not trapped like you were. If something goes wrong with this body because it’s too fragile to survive, which is highly unlikely anyway, I’ll have enough time to upload. I’ve got plenty of equipment to scan it for health.” He got to his feet with some difficulty and limped over toward the singing teakettle.

“What was wrong with the old one?”

“Firstly, too many photographs got taken of it. I had to fake my death so I didn’t have uncomfortable questions about why I looked exactly like my great-grandfather.”

“Maybe you should have thought of that before posing for photographs right after they were invented.”

“It’s not the Victoriana I was concerned with, it was more the World War II era stuff. And secondly, it’s the aesthetic. Today people don’t think of blacksmiths when they think of technology. They think of autistic white men with bad vision.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Did you actually give yourself autism or is that just a metaphor?”

“Look the definitions up, I am actually the closest thing to autistic the Aleph have ever produced.” He came over to the table with my tea. I didn’t try to help him or intercept him. Quite aside from the fact that he’d find it insulting, he had so much junk on the floor that his knowledge of what to step over and when made him more mobile than I’d be. “But stop trying to sidetrack me. What are you doing on Earth?”

If another Aleph had asked that question, there might have been all kinds of subtext in there. Are you in exile again? Have you gone native after spending ten years as a mortal here? Don’t you have anything better to do? From Heph, it more or less meant exactly what he’d asked. “Can’t tell you unless you’ve run a backup,” I said, taking a sip of the tea.

Heph rolled his eyes. “You’re so dramatic,” he said. “Look at this.” He got up again and dodged some more junk on the floor, making his way toward what the people who’d built this place probably thought of as a family room or maybe sitting room. I followed, feeling like a drunk guy in a china shop. My personal aesthetic has never been tiny, delicate motions, so getting anywhere across Heph’s floor without breaking his stuff was like a minefield, except with fewer actual explosions, I hoped.

It was a metal box. “Very impressive,” I said. “I especially like the craft in the solder lines.”

“Don’t be an ass. Here.” He unlatched a latch I hadn’t recognized and lifted the lid. Inside was a crystalline array of the kind the Aleph used to use before we shifted to encoding our data in neutron stars. “Local backup device.”

I tried not to look impressed. Of course Heph had a local backup device. I was kicking myself for not assuming he’d have created such a thing. “Does it work?”

“I changed my use-form. How do you think I did that without it being a major pain in the rear?”

That was a good point. Heph’s bandwidth was low enough that it would take him a couple of days to upload to the Host. Changing bodies would have involved creating a new form, uploading out of it, and then downloading into the new one… which was a problem if it took you two days to upload or download, because your physical body might very well die on you or suffer brain damage while you were imperfectly socketed in it. I felt a lot better about Heph’s frailty now. “How long does it take to transfer to that?”

“I’m running delta backups every time I sleep, so if the body were to die unexpectedly, I’d only need to transfer at most a day’s worth of memories and experiences. Probably 20 minutes at a maximum. Also, if it wasn’t obvious to you, I’m not doing regular backups to the Host and I can tag data to keep it out of the upload when I do, and there’s no way any other Aleph is getting into my local backup server. It’s not even connected to the Host except when I run uploads from it.”

Okay. His memories weren’t accessible to the Lion either. That meant it was safe to tell him the details of what I was up to. I made my way back to the table with my teacup. “So, this is going to be a long story…”

#inktober 2019 #no drama

[lhs3020b]

Some notes on recent polling developments (long, fairly depressing)...

The YouGov MRP figures came out last night. This is notable because in 2017, the multilevel-regression approach was the sole one that spotted the possibility of a hung parliament. We all ridiculed it at the time - I'll confess that I side-eyed it too. And then - well, we all know what happened to Theresa May, don't we? So, the MRP thing deserves to be taken seriously. And unfortunately, this year, it's looking grim for us. Briefly, the MRP is forecasting a Tory majority. They're also predicting that all opposition parties (bar the SNP, who only stand in Scotland) will lose seats. Labour in particular look in the danger-zone for a collapse, and contrary to their bullish predictions, the Liberal Democrats are also forecast to lose seats. (Note that this is with respect to their current strength - technically, the MRP result gives them a gain of 2 seats on where they were on the 9th of June. They currently have 19, due to defections from various other parties.)

I'll admit that I don't want to believe the MRP results, but this has never been a data-denialist blog, and I don't intend to start on that road today.

One caveat is that the reporting on the MRP results has ben remarkably-bad. The actual YouGov page is here: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/yougov-mrp-conservatives-359-labour-211-snp-43-ld- Buried a long way down the page, they say this: "Taking into account the margins of error, our model puts the number of Conservative seats at between 328 and 385, meaning that while we can be confident that the Conservatives would currently get a majority, it could range from a modest one to a landslide." As far as I can tell, the "majority of 68" figure is derived by treating 317 as a working majority and assuming that the Tory vote lands right at the upper end of their confidence-interval. This is poor statistical practice for a variety of reasons. It's also a bit questionable in terms of parliamentary arithmetic - the "working majority" thing depends on how many Sinn Fein MPs Northern Ireland elects (they don't take their seats, so count toward neither Government nor Opposition tallies). And we won't necessarily know how many that is until, well, December the 13th.

(Also, a further health-warning is that apparently the model isn't able to fully-represent some local phenomena, such as independent candidates, and the effect of the Brexit Party's partial stand-down is also apparently somewhat-unclear. The last caveat is that the analysis assumes data that has already been collected - that is, if public opinion changes between now and polling day, then obviously existing projections could become obsolete. This will still be a possible source of error even if the MRP sample is statistically-unbiased and the underlying theory/analysis is all sound.)

However, even the best-case scenario for us gives the Tories 328 seats, which is both a working and a (very small) absolute majority.

Obviously, this is not a good situation for us.

While not quite a landslide, nonetheless an inflated Tory majority will be devastating for this country. The stuff they'll do will be awful. Brexit will happen. There'll be a bus crash late next year, when the transition period ends. (No, they will have no plan for this - they won't feel they need one, as they'll be secure in power until 2024.) There'll be a Windrush for resident EU citizens. They'll trash the economy. They'll probably crash the NHS - the only question there is whether they do it through accidental negligence or through deliberate malice (say, an ideologically-driven trade "deal" that gives President Trump everything he wants on a silver platter). Nothing will be done about the country’s escalating housing crisis. They'll double down on all the maddest of the madcap "law-n-order" stuff - expect an explosion in jailable offences, accompanied by lengthy minimum-sentence tariffs and further restrictions on legal aid. They'll also resuscitate their plans to manipulate the parliamentary boundaries, and change electoral laws in their favour. The media? Expect no surprises from them. The newspapers are largely already Conservative Pravdas. The BBC - nervous about its precious Royal Charter - seems to be in the process of declaring itself for the Tories too.

Bluntly, if the Tories get re-elected this year, they'll gerrymander things so you have little chance of getting rid of them in 2024.

Perhaps this is the key thing to understand about Boris Johnson: really, he's less Britain's Trump, and more Britain's Victor Orban. He'll leave just enough vestigial democracy intact to make what he's doing plausibly-deniable, but he'll busily rearrange the furniture to favour himself and his friends. If he gets re-elected this December, you can expect to be seeing his face into the 2030s. The only reason I put the cut-off as early as that is that I expect the coming climate-crisis will wreak havoc with the Tories' internal coalition. (Oh you've built all your luxury millionaire mansions by the seaside? How nice for you, especially now that the sea is literally in your parlour. Umm, whoops.)

What can be done? Well, the first thing is to reiterate some discussions I've seen on Twitter recently. The TL;DR of them is that hope doesn't have to be something you feel - it can be something you do. (And that's just as well, because I'll admit that 2019 has destroyed what traces of social optimism I was clinging to. I'm dreading the bad end that's coming to us next month, but I also fully-expect it.)

So, my advice remains as it has been: on December the 12th, turn up, and vote for whoever you judge most likely to beat the Tory.

Remember, the MRP approach is fallible. "Mortal, finite, temporary" is absolutely in play here; no model is any better than the data that went into it. Or, indeed, the date when it was calculated. And at the end of the day, the only poll that genuinely-matters is the one on December the 12th, and that hasn't actually happened yet. (Though admittedly, given the storm-surge of pre-emptive grief that's flooding Twitter today, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.)

As for the horrible mess that are our opposition parties, I'll repeat what I said in 2017: it's OK to vote for a least-worst option. You're not perjuring yourself or committing any moral sin, rather you're trying to be a grown-up. Part of the package of being an adult is making the best of bad situations.

It absolutely does suck - believe me, this is one of the most soul-destroying election campaigns I've ever seen. Every single party has clown-show'd itself. All of them have done things that are ridiculous, inept or otherwise ghastly. (Well, maybe not the Greens - I haven't heard of any specific scandals surrounding them - but their cardinal sin is that they have no plausible prospect of winning the election.) But even then, the barrel we're going to have to stare down is going and voting for them anyway.

(As a related case-in-point, one factor that seems to have helped the Tories win their unexpected 2015 majority was that a contingent of left-wing voters simply stayed at home on the day. While it's hard to find concrete statistics on, nonetheless anecdotally, this absolutely was a thing. A lot of people were demotivated by Labour's confused and incoherent campaign, left cold by all the bothering about fiscal rules, and alienated by things like the mug with "controls on immigration" on it. All of those are 100% valid criticisms. Except, except, except ... it helped an even worse party back into office. The theory of "if the choices are bad, sit it out" has been tested to destruction. It turns out that looking the other way is also a choice, and not necessarily the best one.)

I would add that there are also real questions to be asked about the utter vacuum of political strategy of people nominally on the anti-Tory side - it seems the Opposition spent the summer fixated on the minutiae of House procedures, while never stopping to ask why they were on this battlefield to begin with. Meanwhile the Tories largely-ignored Commons process, and instead sent a political appeal straight to Leave voters. It lost them a lot of individual legislative battles (and I'm not minimising their defeats - they were important!), but it put them in a good strategic place to win an election. And in the long run, it turns out that was what mattered.

It's hard not to feel bitter while thinking about the events of spring and summer. Perhaps if Jo Swinson had been less blinkered about Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps if Labour could have had the minimum sense to call a Vote of No Confidence when BoJo was vulnerable, perhaps if the collective Opposition had been able to recognise the huge wave of unharnessed political energy washing through the country during the petition back in March, perhaps if Change UK had managed to be something other than an unfunny joke, maybe if Corbyn had taken the anti-semitism problem seriously in 2018 and had actually done something instead of sitting on his hands and letting it metastasize to the point where it derailed his election campaign ... but, no. That's for some other, better timeline, not the one we live in. We seem to live in the world that resolutely and firmly chooses the wrong fork in every road. I don't know whether our timeline quite qualifies as the Bad Place, but it's certainly a place full of bad choices.

In a weird sort of way, though, this brings us back to the key theme. Whatever you might think of what's happening in this election - and goodness knows I'm as appalled as anyone else - nonetheless, your vote matters. Use it. As we're seeing, this is the ultimate limitation on their power, and the one chance we have of stopping them.

So once more, let me reiterate: turn up. Vote against the Tory. Do it as a hopeful action, even if you don't feel hopeful. If nothing else, do it so that when the bad things happen, at least you can say you tried to stop it. I wish I had something less bleak to offer here, but this is where we are.

#UK internal politics #diary of a disaster #needed to get that wail of despair out of my system really #still feeling quite despairing though

[raisingsupergirl]

Wasting Time

We all use our time differently. We assign certain values to everything in the known universe, and we allocate our attention accordingly. Work, war, school, sleep, play, research, romance, housework—life's pursuits all mean something different to each of us based on our personalities and circumstances. And, obviously, as we get older, those circumstances change. As young and middle-aged adults, we start becoming more practical (i.e. boring), and we tend to see anything that's not obviously productive as a waste of time. This shift comes primarily from increased responsibility, but oftentimes our sense of urgency is tied to awareness of our mortality. As kids, we feel invincible. We'll live forever. But it doesn't take long to lose a loved one or two, and then we start realizing that our days are numbered, so we'd better use them wisely. And then, in a fantastic twist of irony, as our final years wind down and death becomes an imminent reality, we become kids again, and we realize that wasting time is exactly the thing we should have been doing all along. Are you lost yet? Completely confused and angry that I would even suggest such a thing? Good. Because it gets better.

Last night, I downloaded Starcraft, a computer game from the 90s. Back in the day, I spent hundreds of hours mashing buttons and flinging commands at little soldiers, combatting evil aliens as if the galaxy were actually on the brink of destruction. Not for a second did I care that I was simply running through a pre-programmed simulation, just a bunch of ones and zeroes strung together to form some semblance of reality. No, for me, this futile act was pure enjoyment and mind-expanding revelation. I learned creativity, improvisation, leadership skills, and critical thinking, amongst other things. It didn't matter that the end result of the game was a pre-determined command execution that had no bearing on the real world. I grew as a person on the inside while looking like a mindless automaton on the outside.

I've spoken before about the value that video games brought to my childhood, so I'll not go into that again, but my point is this: as I got older, I just couldn't stomach the idea of "wasting'" hours crawling through some digital dungeon just to level up some ultimately meaningless character and storyline. And, to be honest, I still feel that way. I wish I didn't, but I've got books to write. I have a company to run. I have patients to treat. And I have a family to provide for and protect. In short, my time is too valuable to waste.

And for now, maybe that's okay. Maybe I have a few years or decades to give back to the greater good. Maybe I can sacrifice some of my time to ensure my girls' future. But already I'm starting to feel the weight of mortality, and the idea of wasting time is sounding better and better.

Are you starting to track with me yet? Are you starting to see how "wasting time" isn't contradictory to making the most out of a finite life? Good. I knew you would get there. I knew you'd remember all those self-help mantras about work-life balance and appreciating the little things. But there's a reason why I keep using the term "wasting time" instead of sugarcoating it with "mindfulness" or ""recharging." You see, as humans, we require raw materials to survive. Resources: food, water, oxygen, and yes, time. We need time to sleep so our bodies can recover. We need time to gather those other resources. And we need time to consider how we should order everything else. In short, we're constantly consuming time, without exception. And so, if we're constantly utilizing our time to do something productive, that time becomes like carrots and purified water. It becomes "health" time. And man cannot live on carrots alone.

Okay, sorry. You're lost again. But what I mean is this: in the same way that rewarding ourselves with a donut or a beer makes it easier to get through a hard exercise routine or a long day of work, rewarding ourselves with "junk time" makes life's relentless productivity more bearable, and dare I say a little enjoyable.

For example, right now, I'm literally sitting poolside at the waterpark, probably for the last time this year. My laptop is about to either melt from the sun or short-circuit from a random tidal wave. I'm drenched in sweat, and my family is splashing away in the shallow end. And I'm having a blast. Why? Because when I get done with this little post, I'm going to tuck my computer away someplace safe, and then I'm going to go waste some time in the water with my family. And tonight I'm going to waste more time by saving the simulated galaxy on a game developed almost twenty years ago. And during all that wasted time, I'm going to reminisce over all my good childhood memories, and I'm going to make more memories with my own children. I'm going to consider reality in new ways. I'm going to laugh. My heart is going to race. And at the end of it all, I'll have absolutely nothing productive to show for it. And that's okay. Why? Because productivity fades away. It all does. Famous authors will be remembered for a few decades. Maybe they'll even change the course of history for a while. In the same way, physical therapists improve the health and happiness of the human race. But ultimately, we'll all pass away, and the only thing remaining will be a glimmer of the collective time wasted by humanity. And it'll be beautiful.

So find someone and talk with about the weather. Share a laugh and a cry. Don't worry about being productive. We can't help but work too much. That's a part of our nature and culture. Instead, strive to be wasteful. And may the joyful sound that it brings echo to the edges of eternity and back. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some swimming to do.

#wasting time #free time #recreation #water park #poolside #perspective #relax #family #momblr #dadblr #mumblr #starcraft #video games #farmington water park

[missmentelle]

Hey!So I have a problem, it's tied to my perfectionism and all-or-nothing bs probably.It's weird saying it, but it's like I can't love anything because they all going to end.I know that's the natural order and so, but everywhere I look, I see death.And if there's something I like I immediately think"Well, it won't last forever, so why invest emotionally."I tend to either obsess over things or not give a fuck, but I can't bear the thought of losing something I love again.Can this ever be stopped?

This can be stopped, but it’s one of those things where you have to dig in both heels and fight it. What you’re experiencing right now is what some people might refer to as an “existential crisis”. Basically, given enough time to think about the nature of human existence ( and depending on your religious beliefs), people eventually come to the realization that we’re just sentient and temporary chunks of carbon living on a spinning rock in an indifferent universe. Some people - many people - find this understandably terrifying. There might not be any divine purpose to our lives - we might just exist as a random accident of chemistry and biology, at the whims of forces beyond our control. As you said, life is temporary, and the things we do might not “matter” on some grand, universal scale.That’s a really, really scary thing to grapple with, and it’s something that a lot of people have to confront sooner or later. It’s certainly something that’s started me on more than one downward spiral throughout my life. But the good news is, there’s a way out of this. 

Overcoming an existential crisis requires that you challenge your perspective on the nature of existence, and redevelop your philosophical outlook on life. Obviously, that’s a lot easier said than done. But it is possible. It’s true that our lives are finite, and we don’t know if there’s anything that comes afterwards. We can’t do anything about that. But we can choose to find meaning and joy in our relationships while they exist. The fact that something is temporary does not mean that it isn’t worthwhile. Concerts do not last forever, but we still enjoy going to them. The taste of our favourite food doesn’t linger for long, but we’re still happy that we ate it. Vacations don’t last forever, but they still enrich our lives. And our relationships with other people are the same. Instead of seeing other people as something to be avoided because they are temporary, we have to choose to rejoice that we got the opportunity to know them at all. The odds of two people existing in the same time and place and coming into contact and having something to say to each other is incredibly small, and when it happens, we have to choose to delight in the unlikely miracle of this person’s existence, rather than choosing to start grieving them years before they’ve already died. We have to decide that the laughter and comfort and happiness that people bring to us are worth the potential pain of losing them later on. Having no ultimate purpose to our short little lives can be terrifying, or we can choose to be invigorated by the idea that we get to decide on the purpose and meaning of our own lives, and that there are no wrong answers. Maybe the meaning of human life is just to reach out and touch as many other human lives as we can, in the most positive ways that we know how. That’s what I’d like to believe, anyway. 

My godfather died the summer before my final year of university. It was an incredibly painful experience for me. I don’t have an extended family, due to complicated personal circumstances, and outside of my parents and siblings, my godfather was the only family I had. In the weeks after he died, I felt almost exactly what you’re describing - I began to feel that my relationship with my godfather had all been for nothing, and I didn’t want to spend time with my loved ones anymore because I felt like I needed to create distance to protect myself from their future loss. But as my godfather’s death stopped being so raw, I realized that the memories I had with him were still meaningful, and that my time with him had been worth it, even if it hadn’t lasted forever. My life is better because he was in it, even for a short while. I can still remember the time he tried to teach me to drive his sports car (a mistake on his part), or the way he managed to slip money into my pockets when I wasn’t looking, or the time he proudly drove me around his home city to point out all the buildings he’d worked on. I can also still remember the last days of his life, as the cancer drove him out of his mind with pain. One doesn’t erase the other. My relationship with my godfather was complicated and imperfect, just like any human relationship, with good memories and bad memories. One of those bad memories happens to be his death. But I will carry the good memories with me for the rest of my life, and I choose to believe every day that they are worth it. 

I won’t lie to you - anxieties about the nature of life don’t totally go away. Being aware of our own mortality is part of being human. But this despair doesn’t have to be on the center stage of your mind - it is possible for it to be background noise, something that you can easily drown out whenever you need to. It is possible to acknowledge that relationships are temporary, and still feel happy and fulfilled, knowing that you are choosing to spend your days getting as much joy and human connection from this world as you can. It’s hard to choose to see the world that way. But you can choose to. I hope this helps. 

[ezatluba]

The wisdom of cats

Philosopher John Gray explains why we’re doing it wrong and we should live more like cats. (Dogs, not so much.)

By Sean Illing

Mar 6, 2021

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Humans might be the smartest animal on this planet, but are we the wisest?

Wisdom, after all, isn’t really about knowledge. Humans are the only creature on earth capable of building a rocket ship or developing a vaccine. That makes us intelligent, not wise.

To say that someone is wise is to say they understand something about how to live. For instance, I know I’m being an asshole when I wake up grumpy and act impatiently with my wife and son. But often I still behave like a grumpy asshole. My problem isn’t a lack of knowledge so much as a lack of wisdom. I simply can’t take my own advice.

A new book by the esteemed British philosopher John Gray, called Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life, offers a somewhat provocative suggestion: If we’re looking for models of wisdom, we should look at cats. According to Gray, humans think too much. Indeed, we invented philosophy in order to divert ourselves from the anxieties created by our overactive minds.

Cats, on other hand, have nothing to learn from philosophy because they have no need for diversion. They’re among the wisest animals because they’re spontaneous and playful and content with whatever life presents them. And they’re too immersed in the present to worry about what might happen in the future. Cats aren’t exactly unique in this regard (a fact Gray happily admits), but they do seem to stand out.

I should say that Gray’s book is obviously not an empirical study, and it’s not presented that way. It’s self-consciously light, and Gray definitely projects some of his own beliefs onto cats. But the tongue-in-cheek tone makes the book all the more accessible.

If we accept the conceit of Gray’s book and just look at how cats live, then maybe we can learn a thing or two. In that spirit, I reached out to Gray to talk about why our feline friends are so much wiser than we are, and why all animals, especially cats, may not be able to teach us how to think, but they can absolutely teach us how to live.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

If cats could talk, what do you think they would tell us?

John Gray

I guess the first question is: If they could talk, would they find us sufficiently interesting to talk with? I try to imagine in the book whether cats would philosophize at all if they had the intellectual capacity to do it. And if they did, I’m certain it would be for very different reasons than humans philosophize.

Sean Illing

Why do humans philosophize?

John Gray

I think it’s a search for quietude, for a state of calm. And if that’s the case, then you have to ask why humans have such a need for calm. Humans are rather anxious and restless by nature. That’s what makes us so different from cats, to get back to your original question. Unless cats are hungry or mating or directly threatened, they default to a condition of rest or contentment or tranquility — basically the opposite of humans.

So if cats could philosophize, my guess is they’d do it for their own amusement, not because of some deep need for peace. Philosophy is such a human thing because it comes from this anxious search for answers, for freedom from anxiety, and really freedom from our own nature. But of course that’s not achievable. If you yearn for tranquility, you’ll spend your life in turmoil because that’s not what life is like.

The ease with which cats live is such a lovely alternative to humans in that sense. There’s a natural rhythm or flexibility to their day-to-day life that’s rarely achieved by humans. We’re obviously very different from cats, but I do think we can learn something about how to live from them.

Sean Illing

I live with a cat and a dog, and the biggest difference I notice is how manic the dog seems in comparison to the cat. The cat is cool to the point of indifference, whereas the dog always seems to need some kind of external stimulation. It’s so clear that dogs have become, well, more human and the cats have remained cats.

John Gray

Exactly. Cats have remained non-human. They’re like aliens, in a sense. They have a mind and they can get to know us, but they remain alien to us. Of the four cats I had, one of them in particular was extraordinarily subtle in her responses to me and my wife. She reacted differently to each of us. But the cat never looks for validation from us, the way, say, dogs do. Cats are living their own lives and that’s why they seem so indifferent to us.

Sean Illing

Do you think cats are capable of loving humans in the ways dogs seem to be?

John Gray

I think they can come to love humans, but unlike us, they can love humans without needing them. They come to love us in the sense of enjoying our company. They may even delight in it and sometimes they’ll initiate games and play and some kind of communication with us, but at bottom, they don’t really need us and we know it. They can love us without needing us. That’s an almost impossible contradiction for humans, I think.

Sean Illing

I want to go back to what I consider the genius of cats, which is their imperviousness to boredom. Wherever they are, whatever they’re doing, every moment is complete and perfect — or at least it seems that way. Why can’t humans live like that? Why can’t we see the folly in our anxiousness?

John Gray

That’s the big question, isn’t it? When humans aren’t in immediate pain or experiencing immediate pleasure, we’re bored. If not immediately, then soon. And all of our pleasures — sex, drinking, good food, whatever — all become boring after a while. Why is that? When cats are not immediately under some direct threat, they revert to being content. The sensation of life itself is enough for them.

One of the thinkers I discuss in the book is the French philosopher Pascal. He says a great deal of human activity is basically diversionary. He says if you put human beings in a situation where they have nothing to do, they’ll be intensely unhappy. They’ll do things like gamble or start wars or really anything to escape the condition of inactivity. This is just a fundamental fact about humans.

I know a few really rich people, people who don’t have to sweat to keep their money. And they all know this about themselves. They know boredom is a threat. One of them told me recently that the only way he can feel excitement is gambling, because then he knows he can lose everything and that excitement wakes him up from the lethargy of life. But this is a problem for basically everyone who isn’t in desperate poverty or in desperate need.

Sean Illing

And where do you think this pathology comes from? Are we too self-aware to be happy?

John Gray

I think it comes from the shock of self-consciousness and the revelation of mortality. If you don’t have an image of your self, as I’m fairly sure cats don’t, then you won’t think of yourself as a mortal, finite being. You may, at some point, sense something like death, but it’s not a problem for you. When death happens for cats, they seem quite ready for it. They certainly don’t waste their lives worrying about death.

Sean Illing

Other animals fear death, but worry is a very different thing. You fear what’s right in front of you. But worry is an act of imagination, something you can only do if you’re anxious about the future.

John Gray

Yeah, and I think there’s something uniquely human about anxiety over death and constantly thinking of ourselves as mortal. This is where our incessant need for storytelling comes from. If you sit around considering your own mortality, you’ll be driven to invent stories about an afterlife so that the stories you fashion for yourself can carry on after death. This is what religions have done. And it’s what so-called transhumanists do today. They imagine all these technological solutions to death and they hope that our minds will persist after our bodies fade away.

Cats have no need for these games. They don’t have this problem because they don’t have the concept of death. They die, of course, but they don’t fret over the idea of death. This need to divert ourselves is deeply human. So at the end of the book, when I give my 10 feline tips for living, I just say that if you can’t live as freely as cats, and most of us can’t, then by all means return to the human world of diversion without regret and stay in it. Take up politics. Fall in love. Gamble. Do all the things humans do and don’t regret it.

And you know, maybe that’s what a cat would say if it could philosophize. It would say, “Don’t struggle to be wise because it doesn’t lead anywhere.” Just take life as it comes and enjoy the sensations of life as cats too. And if that’s too austere for you, then you can always immerse yourself in the human world of illusion and distraction.

Sean Illing

In defense of humans, I’ll concede that we’re awkward and anxious and self-pitying and all those things, but we also have the capacity for transcendent love and art and spirituality, and none of those things are available to cats. So maybe the benefits of thinking outweigh the costs?

John Gray

That’s true, and I do think that all the troubles of being human are worth the price. But I’d also say that we should look around the world of nature and study how other creatures live and maybe incorporate the lessons into our own lives. There are, after all, lots of ways to live, lots of ways to be human. Cats, like other animals, are wise in all kinds of ways, and it’s worth reflecting on that and it’s worth pushing back on the Western idea that the good life is really the intellectual life. That’s such an impoverished view of the good life, and I find it easier to see that through the eyes of a cat.

Sean Illing

If you had to distill the best of feline philosophy in a single commandment, what would it be?

John Gray

Live for the sensation of life, not for the story you tell about your life. But never take anything, including that commandment, too seriously. That’s the great lesson from our feline friends. No animal is more spontaneously playful than cats. Which is why, if they could philosophize, it would be for fun.

[newproletarians]

getting tired of writing

writing in this thing feels like a bit of a waste of energy. I want to be putting my energy and very limited time resources into things that I care about. I want to organizedly divvy up my time into worthwhile endeavors. Not that this isn't one, but like, this is clearly just Fucking Around. I am probably not going to look back on my blog and think "man, that blog was so important." unless I want it to be, i guess. I guess I could make this blog into something meaningful by continuing to work through things here. that is one possibility that I haven't considered much, but I'm pretty sure it's not a thing. I want to put my time towards things I really care about.

but this is good. what I'm feeling is a deep urge to be fucking doing things rather than pondering a time far off in the future where I begin doing things.

I don't want this blog to be one of the things I remember on my death bed. To the extent to which I have control over the infinite chaos of reality, I want to make it bend to my will. Not that this needs to be mentioned, but also, it's not all about the death bed, obviously. the death bed helps us get to that headspace of... perspective. it reminds us that we're mortal and that our time, infinite as it seems, is actually quite finite.

I don't want to overshare. I want to listen really well. I want to keep my thoughts organized and sparse. I don't want this overrunning fountain of words pouring out of my head all the time—just personal preference. I don't need it. I don't need these writings. What I want to do is put this energy toward things I really care about. That's when this writing becomes useful. I want to live a simpler life. life can and should be simple. it's not my zone of comfort because it's scary to look at things for what they really are. wow, it really is not fun to look at things for how they really are. I gotta do it, though.

I am scared of life. I'm scared of the things I need to do. I'm scared to live. I'm scared to be myself. I'm scared to disappoint my hometown. I'm scared to disappoint my family.

I feel like I'm out swimming in life and my feet can't touch the ground anymore when I go to feel.

it's okay to be scared. you just have to be scared and also do. you have to sacrifice your desire for constant comfort for the things you want. you can either have the things you want or make sacrifices. you gotta sacrifice for the things you want or the things become the sacrifice.

what are you giving up by waking up early? a happy feeling when i'm getting out of bed in the morning, sometimes. my feeling of general coziness.

what are you gaining? a routine—something that will absolutely frame my life. also, self-esteem. also, physical and mental health.

seems pretty simple.

what are you giving up by eating healthy? that feeling of ultimate sensory satisfaction when I crave something and sate myself. being able to not cloud my mind with thoughts of what i should be doing; being simple and happy like I was a child (during these moments).

what are you gaining? confidence in my physical appearance, self-esteem (again), physical and mental health, a foundation for a happy life.

again, pretty damn simple.

I feel like I am getting a ton of clarity right now.

what are you giving up by being focused? a ton. I am giving up a cornerstone of my sense of self. my comfortable sense of distraction. the luxury of not confronting my life.

what are you gaining? self-esteem and my dreams coming true.

well look, man, you do the math. you truthfully have the ultimate power to choose. you can live your life either way, or some way in the middle. here are some other things i want to think about.

I am going to be in my forties at some point. for sure. so i may as well enjoy it when it comes. i want to have a lot of cool friends doing interesting things. i want to go out a lot. i want to have a cool house. i want to have ample money saved up. i want to be in great shape, like really healthy. i want to have awesome, loving relationships. i want to have a ton of inner clarity and make the people around me extremely happy. i want to have a lot of passion in my life, and to be at a point of high fulfillment in whatever field of work i'm in.

(do I want to raise children? I don't know. hopefully I'll know by then. although I don't think you ever really do. I'd need to have a lot more dang energy than I have rn.)

I don't think I have much clarity right now because I think i'm pretty lower-case-d depressed. I think that'll change soon and make it more clear what I want to do, or at least I hope that's the case, but as it stands I have no idea what I want to do nor do I really remember what it is like to really want to do things at all. Have I ever? Anyway. There are some things I know.

Moving on, i am going to be in my thirties at some point. how do I want that to be? well, i don't know exactly. i want to be hitting my stride though. I want to be doing it fuckin' hard. I want to be excelling and making a name for myself somehow. I want to have a ton of friends, be partying a ton, and be simultaneously very successful and not full of myself. I don't have an exact plan. I do know that I want to be killing it doing whatever I'm doing, I want to be very cool and kind as a person, and I want to be extremely focused. It's pretty vague, for sure. Maybe I've already bought a home. Maybe not.

I'm gonna be 28 some day. I may as well be enjoying myself when I'm that age. I want to atone with everything in my life. I want to get good at small talk. I want to be smooth. I want to be cool. I want to have a ton of control over my life. I also want to be as fun and carefree as possible. I want to leave things as open as I can while having myself be a self-contained unit. I want to be able to attack things as they come at me. I want to be a master of life. I want to be honest and good at communicating. I want to have a career in motion.

I'm gonna be 25 someday. It's just a number, but if I'm gonna be that age, I want to be excited to be it. I want to be happy and free. I want to be in control of my life and dedicated to the things I'm dedicated to. I want to work really fucking hard toward my goals. I want to spend less time online and be way more intentional with everything I do. I want to do more, generally.

I'm gonna be 24 someday. I may as well enjoy it. I want my life to be designed for my pleasure. I want to be in shape, healthy, and happy. I want to make the people around me happy. I want to play music. I want to have a lot of experiences. I want to live the hell out of life. I want to find my people. I want to work really fucking hard toward my goals. I want to be exceedingly focused and hard working.

I am currently 23. It's been a weird year, to be sure. The first part of me being this age was a lot of optimism, then a very deep, long winter of pessimism, which I am coming out of now. I want to be motivated, strong, focused, and self-actualized. I want to work hard. I want to figure out what to work hard on. I want to start really going for it. I want to start actually living my life again! I want to just live as much as possible.

[antthonystark]

yeah i think people don't really realize when it comes to alec that choosing to be immortal is like a REALLY REALLY big decision it's not just whatever

i mean, i’m sure people interpret things differently so i don’t want to say that they haven’t thought about it enough or whatever, but idk man the massive and enormous difference between mortality and immortality is so significant that, as i’ve said before, really makes it hard for me to even really fathom this issue on a character level - like there are very significant burdens to immortality as, like, every single piece of fiction with immortal characters can attest to lol

like again because immortality doesn’t exist in our world it can be difficult to really think about which is why i dont like to bc i get too caught up in it lol. i think a lot of people think of immortality as just an extended distance between point A (birth) and point B (death) but immortality isn’t just a longer lifespan, it’s point A without any point B and therefore no possible linear progression from the start to the anticipated destination so it really Changes the entire game of, like, living and aging lol it becomes agelessness, in a sense. we’re obviously all mortal so we don’t always realize, i think, how very very very very much our lives are framed by their own finite-ness and the implicit understanding that we are in, essentially, a linear progression to the point B that represents death BUT that’s entirely irrelevant to immortality as it relates to alec that was just a huge tangent lol 

to preface: none of this is me saying that malec should have a tragic mortal/immortal ending, or that i don’t think alec could or should choose to be immortal at some point down the line (he could! he should!), but just factors that i think should be considered when the immortality problem is solved in the show so please just please be calm

but back to alec, i think the loss of loved ones who aren’t magnus isn’t something people think about in its complete implication - like i see a lot of people treat alec’s love for his family as an obligation he deserves to be freed from. and don’t get me wrong, one of my favourite juxtapositions Ever in life and fiction is the contrast between alec’s love-from-duty for his family and alec’s love-equals-freedom for magnus so there is a significant and not-incidental sense of obligation there compared to with magnus that is one of my favourite things about the malec relationship, but i don’t think that undercuts the immense love that alec feels for people like izzy and jace and max, for one thing, and the utter devastation that having to experience their deaths would bring. 

but that’s pretty intuitive, but i don’t think people always take into consideration the fact that the lightwood line isn’t going to end there. i presume (hope) that clary and jace would have kids, and maybe izzy and simon if simon gets de-vamped as in the books. so having to watch those children grow up and loving them as family, they have children, then they die, and watch their children, and their children’s children, your entire lineage, everything that ever connected you to someone else, everyone who was even ever alive when you were young, every memory and keepsake you had of these people you loved with all your being, just fade into oblivion…………as im sure magnus can attest to, that would be frickin harrowing. so it’s not just “yeah izzy and jace will die and it’ll suck but he’ll get over the grief after like a hundred years or something and plus he gets to be with magnus forever” like the burden of immortality isn’t one to be taken lightly tbh like im sure there will be a million happy wonderful things to look forward to with immortal husbands magnus and alec but there are two sides to every coin that i’m sure would need to be taken into consideration by alec as well as by the writers who would need to bring this organically into his character arc - like the benefits should clearly outweigh the costs in the way that it should be depicted on the show imo

also, im sure this isn’t one that alec would be like, focused on over the idea of all his other loved ones dying before his eyes, or the thought of having to lose or be lost by magnus aka the eventual love of his life, which i think would be the two main (and warring) impulses behind the choice of being immortal (assuming that that’s even a ready choice, but really this whole thing is stipulated on that assumption) - but i would be interested to know what the implications might be on his career and work as a shadowhunter, being like the only immortal shadowhunter ever, or at least one of few. i feel like it would be affected in some way, but i dont really have any thoughts that merit discussing, just a random point that might be interesting to think about lol

so yeah. immortality is like. Significant lol. so, you know what i mean, i really really really really dont want it to be just “oh magnus i want to be with you forever let me sip this immortality potion!” after, like, a two-episode arc. like i know and have faith in the show that they would never do it that stupidly and callously, but i’m talking like a season-long arc at the very least lol like i need this shit to be handled with a Lot of care and attention to character of alec before it happens, if it happens at all in the actual canon, is all i’m saying and all i ever usually say lol like i have 100% faith that the malec relationship will easily become something that can justify something this huge, because it is already a beautiful relationship even as it is in its fairly early stages, but i need it to be done so properly you know what i mean because the implications on both the character and the relationship would be So Damn Huge that it shouldn’t be taken lightly but i mean who knows SH could be cancelled after like season 4 and then where will we be lol so this entire discussion could just be for nothing

#my thoughts #immortality discourse #it's just such a meaty topic i wonder why it gets so simplified #i love the idea of immortal husbands like yes please but #it's so fun to think about everything that it entails and implies no #that just me #malec #alec lightwood #anonymous #letterbox #text post

[alien-memes]

In ancient times, the Earth had visitors.

They are benign, filled with enough curiosity to motivate them to travel halfway across the galaxy to visit the first new lifeforms they had discovered in over 10,000 years. In their excitement, they forget to calculate variables; important variables that are a matter of life and death. Sometimes in the pursuit of science, one’s own mortality is not first on the priority list, you see. But these creatures are clever, and live by their spontaneity, and have developed multiple travel available failsafes.

Their spacecrafts are moveable laboratories, filled with more technological advancement than the human mind could ever hope to fathom. And on their way to Earth, a planet that to them is simply X-79 (a fantastic coordinate), they point their computers toward it, analyzing it for things like atmospheric chemicals, soil density, and water presence. 

While their machines do the work, the explorers on board (three in total) pour over the initial data: a simple picture of a scruffy bipedal creature in a field. There’s hope that there’s more than one. Many times they had gone on these long missions, only to find that the last of the species had died out before they got there. An average travel time of twenty years could do that sometimes.

A plus is if they’re sentient. It’s not important, though. These creatures are simply fascinated by the idea of /life/. Even after the hundredth time, it feels like the first - over a billion years ago - when they encountered their first otherworldly being. And even though they were now part of a thriving trade network with millions of other star systems, it was starting to feel incredibly lonely, thinking that the Universe had met its finite state and there was nothing else of interest. But the Universe was full of wonders, one of which was its ability to hide wonderful things deep inside its belly.

They go over the new data daily, gleefully filing away tidbits of information for trivial purposes. When the days comes, when they finally break atmosphere, they know enough about the planet to know that they don’t need space suits, for once. Their scaly skin dries up on most planets, but this sun seems especially kind toward reptiles. 

As they bask in the novelty of sunning on a foreign planet, their skin turn a litany of colors, starting with red and ending with ones not on the visible spectrum. Their tails wags, and their large eyes dart around the plant life swaying between their toes and above their heads. Of course, they knew about all this before they landed, but there’s something incredibly enchanting about experiencing something in the flesh.

Eventually, a drone reminds them of their task at hand, it’s quiet beeping reminding them that there’s much more for this planet to offer. The drone continues on its task; primitive in its own way, not really capable of speech nor intelligent thought, but two thirds of the party can still register cool annoyance from it.

“Always business with this one,” snickers the youngest member, Yon, one who isn’t used to the non-sentient drones and had a soft spot for this one in particular. The drone makes sweeping motions with its stunted arms, cataloging all the creatures captured in its red stare. It’s technically only looking for one in particular, but it’s still good information to have.

“Well, I guess that’s why he’s the best the Council could grant us,” says the most experienced explorer, Drita. It's true, the little drone is the best ever made, mainly because of its simplicity.

They walk for a stretch of time, the sun moving slowly through the sky. It’s off for them to see only one star, and if it wasn’t for their careful research, they would be tempted to risk retinal damage to search for another. It’s nearly gone by the time they stumble on an outcropping, in which the excited beeping of their drone goes erratic, flashing a blinding blue light in rapid succession that frightens their new discovery.

As the creatures huddle together, sharp objects poised in their hands, the lead scientist, Vilk, makes her way to the drone to dismiss it. A readout prints from the thin line that mimics a mouth. She takes it, but doesn’t read it, too busy making placating gestures with her hands. The drone makes a clicking noise, it’s eyes returning to it’s standby green before heeling next to the youngest. 

“Sorry about that, we didn’t mean to startle you.” The creatures don’t seem placated, but instead one of them tries to swipe at her. It’s only her forcefield that protects her from taking damage. She recoils regardless, and regroups a few steps back with the others. 

Drita is non-plussed. She takes the readings from Vilk’s lax hand, scanning them lightly. The basics she knows. The graph that shows the possible growth patterns, the pie chart that details their diet, and the oddest little chart she had ever seen at the very bottom. Yon leans over her shoulder, brow furrowing as he reads them over, only able to get the gist of what it says.

Drita wants to ask Vilk what this means, but the creatures have started screaming and Vilk seems shaken for some reason. This is neither of them’s first time, and attacking creatures was not exactly something novel. Perhaps such a long time away from new discoveries has softened Vilk. She gestures for them to retreat, if only to not stress the creatures even more. 

“Primitive,” Yon comments on their way back to their ship. “But their use of tools has to denote some sort of intelligence, right?”

Vilk manages to shake off her stupor enough to nod her head. “Yes, and they’re obviously social. I saw some young ones with them. Possibly even some sort of writing on the walls.”

She reaches for the paper, which confirms most of what she already figured out, but her eyes light up upon reaching the bottom. “Do you know what this is?”

“Not really,” says Drita. “Must be a recent update. Wasn’t around the last time I went on a mission.”

Yon shrugs. “Hey, this is my first time on a real outing.”

“This is meant to project their potential. It’s based on everything; evolutionary patterns, environmental factors, current progress, everything! See these bars?” She points to the six individual bars lining the bottom of the chart. “These represent progress in a hundred year intervals. According to this, there’s some pretty considerable growth expected each century.”

Drita took the scan back, taking a closer look at the extending bars, noting the significant jumps in scale between each one. “This seems like a pretty young species too. Looks like we’re witnessing the birth of an intelligent life form, my friends.”

“That’s never been heard of!” Yon took the paper excitedly, gleefully reading the data. “This is amazing! Just think of what this will mean for everyone back home.”

#aliens #alien #first contact #anyway i can never manage to end my writing properly #am post

[the-desolated-quill]

The Wolverine - X blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. if you haven’t seen this movie yet, you may want to before reading this review)

I had absolutely zero interest in watching this movie. Why would I after X-Men Origins: Wolverine? It was boring, poorly thought out, badly constructed and it completely butchered the greatest comic book character of all time. (I’m talking about Deadpool obviously. What, did you think I was talking about Wolverine? LOL. In your dreams). Plus I just don’t give a fuck about Wolverine. Did that come across? Hell, at this point, I wouldn’t even pass water over Wolverine. But then my boyfriend at the time convinced me to give this movie, The Wolverine, a shot. Saying it was a massive improvement over the previous film that corrected all the wrongs. So I snuggled up next to him on the couch and watched it, anticipating the ride of my life.

That’s not what I got.

The Wolverine isn’t an improvement over the previous film. It’s not even as bad as the previous film. I’d go as far to say that it’s worse than the previous film (and in case you’re wondering, my boyfriend and I aren’t together any more).

Dear God, where do I even start with this mess? I mean say what you like about X-Men Origins: Wolverine, at least it was attempting to tell a story. The Wolverine is just… I don’t even know how to explain it. Nothing happens most of the time and the few things that do happen don’t make any fucking sense. It’s actually surprisingly hard to follow most of the time.

I suppose I should say the initial premise is solid. Once you overlook the stupidity of Wolverine using himself as a human shield to protect some Japanese soldier from a nuke (yeah, um… what about radiation poisoning? or can Wolverine absorb it all like a human sponge?), the idea of Wolverine losing his healing powers is actually a really good one. It could provide some much needed tension in fight scenes knowing that he can be wounded or even killed, and it could inject a touch of vulnerability into the character that would be interesting to explore. The problem is they never do anything with it. It doesn’t even really change Wolverine that much. He may get wounded, but he’s still fighting the exact same way, throwing caution to the wind as usual. He’s still shrugging off bullet and knife wounds, and there’s even one ridiculously stupid bit where he fights some thug on top of a bullet train, which should have turned both of them into pulp. It’s as if the filmmakers forgot the premise of their own movie halfway through. For fuck’s sake, if you’re going to depower Wolverine, actually commit to it! Don’t chicken out the minute it becomes inconvenient for you.

There are traces of the cure storyline from X-Men: The Last Stand in this. Wolverine wondering whether to give up his healing powers in order to live a normal, finite life like everyone else. But at this point it seems any interesting social commentary the X-Men films once offered has pretty much abandoned ship. There’s no real effort to actually explore the character (again) and the logic behind the premise is just baffling. Curing a mutant’s powers is one thing, but now you can swap them with other people? How the hell does that work? How does that spider thing attached to Wolverine’s heart somehow suppress his powers? How can sticking drills into his claws absorb his powers? I’m really confused!

It’s actually very hard to talk about this movie because I confess I don’t fully understand what’s going on half the time. Basically the Japanese soldier Wolverine saved at the beginning is dying and wants Wolverine’s powers so he can live forever. He has a giant robot samurai suit (don’t ask) that can drill holes into Wolverine’s claws and absorb his powers… somehow, but he doesn’t do that. Instead he concocts an elaborate plan to make his granddaughter the heir to his business empire, thus pissing off her dad and fiancé, leading them to contacting the Japanese mafia and trying to have her killed, which Wolverine prevents whilst having his powers suppressed by another mutant called Viper, and once all that is over and Wolverine has fallen in love with her (because obviously that would happen), the soldier kidnaps his granddaughter and uses her as bait, luring Wolverine to his giant tower of evil and THEN uses the giant robot samurai suit (don’t ask) to drill holes in Wolverine’s claws and absorb his powers.

Now… I think that was the plan, but I’m not sure. I tend to fall asleep about halfway through so I can’t be certain. Needless to say, the plot is convoluted and extremely boring. For starters if you have the time to send that Viper woman to french kiss Wolverine while he’s sleeping, then why don’t that soldier guy just use the robot samurai suit? Why even suppress Wolverine’s powers in the first place? I don’t think he’ll be much use to you dead. But the main issue once again is that I just don’t give a fuck about anything that’s going on. None of the characters are properly developed and I’m just simply not invested. The supposed friendship between the Wolverine and the soldier is never fully explored, which is a shame because the soldier had the potential to be a fascinating antagonist. A man so terrified of his own mortality, he’s prepared to sacrifice his cultural beliefs, his family and his morals just to survive. Plus this is ostensibly a villain of Wolverine’s making. But the film never even touches upon it.

One thing The Wolverine does improve upon over its predecessor is the fight scenes. In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the fight scenes were so poorly edited and filmed that it was hard to make sense of what’s going on. Here that’s not the case. So at least I can see what’s going on, what little of it there is. Because as overly complicated this plot is, it’s surprising how very little actually happens in this film. Vast stretches of runtime devoted to absolutely nothing. The first 10 minutes of the film for instance are devoted to Wolverine trying to figure out who killed a bear. A fucking bear! And then there’s the incredibly forced romance with the granddaughter. Despite the fact that we never learn anything significant about her and the two share absolutely zero chemistry, we’re expected to be invested in them falling in love and fucking like rabbits because… he has a penis and she has a vagina I guess. I don’t fucking know! It’s all stupid. Not to mention it stands contrary to the whole woe is me crap with Jean Grey.

Oh yeah! Jean Grey is back in this movie! Albeit in dream sequences. Basically Wolverine has left the X-Men because he’s feeling all angsty about killing Jean (yawn) and now she shows up every five minutes encouraging him to die so they can be together forever and ever amen. I assume these scenes are here to get us to feel sorry for Wolverine and to get all wistful over his relationship with Jean. Except I don’t feel that because both Wolverine and Jean Grey are incredibly dull and poorly written characters and their ‘relationship’ mostly consisted of him sexually assaulting her. So no, I wasn’t moved. In fact the opposite, I was very, very unmoved. The only time I moved was when I got up to get a sick bag because I couldn’t believe this stupid romance was being forced onto me again and I was feeling rather queasy.

Plus the return of Jean Grey once again caused me to ask some very awkward questions about the X-Men continuity. So this film takes place after X-Men: The Last Stand, right? So how come Magneto has his powers back? Didn’t he lose them at the end of X-Men 3? And how come Xavier is back from the dead? Plus there’s all the discrepancies with the X-Men prequels (I’m assuming X-Men Origins: Wolverine is no longer canon, otherwise what the fuck is Wolverine doing in Nagasaki and where was Sabretooth). Also at the end of this film, Wolverine gets his bone claws back, but in X-Men: Days Of Future Past and the trailers for Logan, he has metal claws.

WOULD IT KILL SOMEONE TO HIRE A FUCKING CONTINUITY EDITOR?!?!

I just feel sorry for Hugh Jackman at this point. He’s a great actor and you can tell he’s really trying his best, but there’s simply nothing anybody can do with this material. No wonder he wants out. If I was stuck playing the same shit character for 16 years of my life, I’d want out too.

#the wolverine #x-men #marvel #20th century fox #review #spoilers

[swonkimn]

Feelings

Let’s just get it out. 

I’m feeling more and more dissatisfied with my life, which feels like a regular emotion for me. Isn’t it so familiar, typing in this online blog with its familiar navy background about dissatisfaction and unhappiness with myself. Wow. But I am feeling unhappy, and it feels progressive. I don’t think that I have a shopping problem, i think that I have an unhealthy fixation on the past and how seemingly “perfect” it was. I was at a thinner weight, with less responsibilities, more prospects, and surrounded by people who were mine--my blood family. But these days I feel bogged down, heavier, from my literal weight gain, my marriage that comes with obligations, a career that I worked to obtain for more than 6 years...and now semi-dread. I feel so heavy, and it makes me want to reach back to some familiarity and control...which manifests with a fixation on my weight. I feel like if I’m able to control my weight and go back to a lighter (literally) state of being, then I’ll also find the energy, gumption, and desire to revert back to the person I used to be. Who was happier, simpler, more positive.

The sad thing is that when I was dating Charlston, things didn’t feel happier--they felt more significant. (I felt important doing important things and striving after lofty goals and integritous pathways.) And I guess that’s true even now; my life isn’t happier, it’s more significant. I’m weighed down with caring for terminal patients, people whose lives are literally straddling the line between life and death; I’m weighted down with terminal MILs and with husbands who carry baggage that I can’t even begin to attempt to heal or touch or even mention. I’m paying for my mom’s new car and giving thousands of dollars to them to settle their debt because they can’t on their own. I’m filled to the brim busy taking care of other people’s lives. And now Charlston wants to start a family which will just be another life to add to that list--a life that will outlast even mine in length. Motherhood is significant, it’s “worth its while” as they say. (But really, stopping now to think is all of this truly the right way to think? Does this mean that my life gained “direction” and “value” and “worth” and “significance”? A life spent doing sacrificial and selfless deeds--is that more significant than a life squandered and selfish and gluttonous? Isn’t life just life? Starting this thought with the juxtaposition between happiness and significance made sense, but the deeper I probe, the more I just feel like I was becoming some kind of twisted self-importance. An arbitrary value system that I put on myself to figure out what I’m working towards).

So it’s just a whole bundle of repressed emotions that I don’t even know how to work out. It’s not that I regret my life, but I’m overwhelmed at how much my life has changed since my girlhood. It’s not that I wish for a luxurious life, like what Charlston says to me. I’m just internally reeling at the responsibility and significance of my life. I am filling my life with jobs and responsibilities that are significant but I’m none the more important to the people in my life. I am a grunt whose life has been filled with important tasks, but they can only exist as far as  insomuch I refuse to exert the opposing force that I, too, am deserving of rest, service, time, and attention. Because it’s almost like people and things and jobs and responsibilities have become more prominent, but I myself am becoming edged out of my own life. When I’m alone at home, I don’t have a clue on how I want to spend the available hours anymore. It’s a much easier question to answer if I ask myself about the chores that need to be done. Being completely alone this weekend, I don’t know how to answer the question of how exactly I want to spend this day. Do I want to read? Disappear into a busy city? Lounge by the pool? Be with people? No I don’t want to be with people because they only expect from you and get disappointed if you don’t do something or say something that benefits them. And even if they don’t, they eventually will--because people by nature keep count. Maybe this is even me keeping count. 

I think it’s important how I feel like I don’t matter in my own life. Even taking a break isn’t much of a break because there is the underlying messages that exist: there are so many things that just keep moving even when I want to take a break. I wish that a break could just mean that--that all things and involved parties and sicknesses and relationships could halt alongside me. But obviously life doesn’t work that way; when I am not present during a responsibility, someone else has to step in. My life is a shift, just like in retail or service work or hospitality. When I call out of work, there is another nurse/group of nurses who feel that absence. When I want to “call out” of my life and its obligations, the responsibility lands heavily on someone who has to put the additional work on their shoulders. 

I know that these things must sound like obvious truths, but maybe what it is is that I’ve always had a very self-centered attitude. It’s been me thinking about me, but also not expecting others to think about me either. It’s not like my parents really were present during my adolescence or developing years. Or did they, and I am actually more selfish that I perceive myself right now? Did I take from others and also then deceive myself to be a self-sufficient person..? 

I guess simply put, I used to give myself each day for my own enjoyment. My presence or absence never really mattered, except perhaps to my sister and parents. Even my friends realized that I go off on my own and find difficulty in staying connected with others when the interactions are not in person. But now I struggle with the reality that my life is maturing into ongoing connection--the people who are sick in the hospital continue to be sick even when I have a two day break, and they are often still there when I come back. I don’t know why I struggle so much with this concept, the idea of presence and absence being part of the same fabric. That absence from something means that I am present in something else, and vice versa. I think it bothers me because I then have to take into consideration what my absence will mean to these people/responsibilities that have grown to include me. The natural consequence, I think, for the avoidant person that I type myself to be, would be disengage from as many things as possible in order to not have any causal effect on anything. But...is that even possible? Such a life of no consequence? And is that really what I want? 

I just feel like Charlston places a lot of his expectations on me which are unhealthy consequences of him dealing with his mother. Rather than seeing the situation for what it is, I feel like the entire family is romanticizing something that is actually unhealthy. Prolonging death is unhealthy to me. It’s not understandable to me. Death is death. It’s not noble when teachers sacrifice their lives and wages for their students within a broken down system; it’s not admirable when nurses all have to take stimulants and antidepressants to shoulder the burden of caring for so many patients; and it’s not right to praise a man who refuses to let his wife pass away. But Charlston and my siblings in law all do, and my FIL doesn’t know what he can and cannot control. Nobody is having that talk with him. It’s nobody’s place; it’s God’s place to tell us how life is meant to be lived, but as long as we’re including God in this picture...I feel like I’m not exactly listening to Him either. Either life is celebrated so that each and every doldrum moment is special and radiant and to be savored, or else nothing matters and nothing is of consequence. I may be thinking in extremes here, but I can’t stop landing at this conclusion each and every time my mind travels down this road. 

I don’t know if this is a cynical part of me, but I’m starting to devalue life. Rather than life being something to fight for, death is more something that’s inevitable and looming and ever advancing. Rather than waking up each day as something to fight for, death is something that I grow to not wanting to fight anymore. Not that I am suicidal in any way--there’s no point unnecessarily killing a life when it’s healthy--but when a life has started to go down hill, I just don’t see the point in resisting it. For what and for whom? Does it glorify God when we resist death when God Himself created us as mortal beings? Why push back something that is part of our identity? When trees die and animals die and structures break and rivers dry up? It’s finite, this world and us. Life can’t just be trying extending our days can it? 

Oh God, so what is life then? And can it be that I’m just having an existential crisis dressed up? Really? I’ve heard my dad say so many times that he’s just waiting to die, and sometimes I feel that way too now. Again, not in a way where I’m eagerly looking forward to death, but more like a mental posturing like death is the only exit and those who are trying to escape it for even one more day are just being delusional. So then health doesn’t matter, relationships feel like obligations and just people being disappointed in you when you don’t give them what they want; each day doesn’t matter, this body that we are encased in doesn’t even matter. Pleasure doesn’t exist because it’s often at the expense of other people’s time, energy, and suffering. To have something means that others are denied. What is this black hole of thinking that I just can’t seem disappearing into these days?

[socialattractionuk]

Why Seneca Can Help You Select Your Perfect Dating Mentors (Podcast Transcript)

You can find the original article at http://www.socialattraction.co.uk Connect with us Google+

Okay, welcome back to today’s episode where we’re going to be looking at a philosopher called Seneca who was around from 4 BC and died in 65 AD. So this is pretty well just after Julius Caesar. I’ve wanted to read this book for ages because he’s a Stoic philosopher and I just find that time in history to be hugely interesting.

And actually, the book of his that I’ve just read is quite, is more of an essay. It’s called “On the Shortness of Life.” And the reason why I ended up reading this book is that I was thinking about language and the structure of it and what we really get from communicating with people. And there are a few things that came up. I mean, first of all is to show off our intelligence and to highlight attributes about ourselves. I mean, that’s typically why most of us speak.

And the second reason is to show loyalty which is either, you know, loyalty from someone else or loyalty to someone else. I mean, I think that there’s obviously functional conversation where you’re asking directions and stuff like that, but if we just accept the premise at the moment that, you know, when we communicate, we are either  showing loyalty or we’re showing off our genetics.

When we come at it from that approach, it makes you look at your communications differently.

So, for example, putting it into perspective, if you’re going to go and meet a friend for a coffee, typically using this parameter, what you’re really doing is having an opportunity to show off your intelligence to each other but also to show your loyalty to each other.

And I find this quite interesting because, say, for example, you are more self-confident and more self-assured and didn’t seek validation from people, what benefit would you get from having your friend’s loyalty? And that, that’s quite a deep question, actually, so I’ll say that again. If you were completely self-assured and you didn’t need to seek validation, why would you go and meet your friend for a coffee? Because all you’re really doing in getting out with that is highlighting your intelligence to each other and also getting loyalty from each other.

And that really hit home with me. It’s interesting, it’s like okay, well, in which case, then, how much of my time am I wasting because how many times am I going to meet people or communicating with people in a non-effective way? And that’s what kind of led me to read Seneca which, as I say, I’ve, I’ve wanted to read for ages but something popped up in my Facebook feed about this book “On the Shortness of Life” and it, I thought okay, well this is … probably should be reading this. And there are a few things. Obviously, it’s a very small book but there are some really great quotes that we can, we can look at.

I mean, he talks about how we can form a partnership with philosophers from the past so what he’s basically saying is you’ve got the present moment which most of us miss. You’ve got the future which doesn’t exist. But then you’ve got the past, and in the past it’s finite, so it’s happened.

So when we give our time to studying the past, we’re really taking on the wisdom from previous history in the present moment. And his view is that that is how we elongate our lives, which is quite an interesting concept ’cause it’s like, well, it’s not necessarily that your lives going to be longer.

It’s more that if you spend time looking at people from the past and studying them, that you’re going to have more knowledge and live the present moment better.

And this kind of just again hits home a little bit further when it goes to, you know, meeting women. I mean, how many of us waste so much time messaging girls, of going on dates that we don’t really care about? I mean, time is a resource and if we were looking at it the same way we assign, you know, money and budgets, then we would certainly act differently with it.

So I think the first lesson on, on this is if you’re just meeting up with people just to get a bit of loyalty, then obviously you can work on your self-esteem so that you’re more confident in yourself.

But secondly, with women, I mean, why go on a date with women who you’re not specifically attracted to? What? Just to get a little ego kick and make yourself feel better?

I mean there are certainly better things you could do with your time such as reading philosophers like Seneca to understand why you are doing things and what your motives are, you know. And the time spent reading rather than going on a date that’s going to put you in much better stead for the rest of your life as, as opposed to just continually living out trying to get validation which, again, you know, you’re going to be seeking for the rest of your life if you go about it that way.

Now it’s, it’s also funny, I mean, he goes on further. There’s a really, really nice quote which I think I’m going to read out, it’s, it’s just interesting. He-he’s talking about like Aristotle and, and other philosophers like Pythagoras and he said, you know, “None of these will be too busy to see you. None of these will not send his visitor away happier and more devoted to himself. None of these will allow anyone to depart empty-handed. They are at home for all mortals by night and by day.”

And that is such an interesting quote because it’s like how many of us are on social media all the time, looking at our phones, waiting for women to text us, looking at texting our mates.

And we’re just waiting all the time for people to get back to us. Or we post something online and we’re waiting to see how many likes it’s got. What Seneca’s getting at here, I mean, obviously this is 2000 years ago, but putting it to modern-day is like, you know, don’t wait for anyone else. You know, spend your time, your time doing something more effective and he’s saying that if you look at people from the past, that they’re there permanently. They’re not going to change. They’re there, you know, to educate you and, and to be there all the time.

So a different parameter or a different perspective would be, don’t just look at your time, you know, like you’re waiting for people. Actually, claim it and let people be there, you know, that are always going be available to you. There’s one final thing actually which was great and this was a real thinking moment for me. I’m heavily into reading and, and self-development anyway, and I can’t believe that this is the first time

I’ve ever read Seneca because some of his one-liners are unbelievable. But this is a very interesting one a-and I think it’s worth giving it some thought and I’m just going to read out another quote because this is so powerful.

He says, “We are not in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us, that they were given to us by chance. But we can choose whose children we would like to be.” And it’s the end sentence there that’s the powerful bit. “But we can choose whose children we would like to be.”

That is such an insight into life because think about this. There is all of this literature from the last few thousand years that are available to us to read and to develop and to learn. You can choose anything. Economics, philosophy, psychology. It is all there and you can learn it from those books and the reason why this is so powerful for me is because after I had my car accident and I set up Social Attraction I pretty well had no one in my life that was supportive. And, you know, not only that but people used to say it was never going to work, it’s a waste of time and, you know, perhaps at that time in my life, I wasn’t obviously as developed as what I am now. But there was no one to support me.

So what I did, I sought solace in books, and I would read books from the most successful people that have ever lived. And they gave me confidence to actually carry on and develop my life and the reason why Seneca’s quote, I guess, hits home there again is like, you know, if you want to achieve something in life, you don’t have to go out there and ask a thousand people their opinion.

Find the person in history that has already achieved what you want that … Trust me, there is enough literature there and read what they’re saying. Then find someone else and read what they’re saying.

And what will happen is not only do you gain their wisdom, but there is something fundamentally powerful about reading on a daily basis people that are telling you that you can achieve something because where else are you going to get your confidence from?

You can obviously visualise it, you can meditate on it, do all these things, but having people there that you can pick up whenever you want in the mornings, in the evening, any time, and read their powerful words is life-changing. And for me it was sensationally important. I read so much and I sought solace in books and, you know, I-I developed my life so much from the knowledge I got but also just the confidence gained from completely reading positive stuff on a daily basis. I mean, it was, you know, it was life-changing for me.

Just to go back to Seneca. I think that that is an important lesson on our time and h-he talks about how you should look at time like a resource like money, apart from the time are finite whereas money isn’t. So actually the one thing that we should really look at is how we spend our time. And when we link that into what we’re saying about communication and what we’re looking at get-getting we can begin to paint a picture about how, if we change our fundamental views on our time, we can start being more productive.

So rather than going and meeting a friend for a coffee, we can read about something to do with a philosopher or read about weight training, you know, go to the gym more. But can you can assign your time differently with the knowledge that I’ve described in this podcast. So I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and I will catch you tomorrow.

  Listen to The Gary Gunn Show Podcast #11 – Why Seneca Can Help You Select Your Perfect Dating Mentors



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