Personal Blogs

That killed and maimed millions? The start?? Celebrate our britishness?

Presumably that's where the £60m figure came from, £1 each. Probably it won't be done that fairly, "we must attract the best generals...". Actually if we'd managed to foist our generals onto the Germans the whole thing might have been over by christmas.

Even when they're dead the poor soldiers are being used as props for wealthy greed-mongers who think that they're plebs. It's like they died twice. This says it better than I ever could.

The self-centred vileness of politicians should never be underestimated.

That the children of people who claim benefits are turned over to the BBC

Three hundred years. Same shitheads.

I don't really want to spend my life online, it's just necessary that I do.

Normally the people who interact with me are people like me—sane, rational, ... actually the main thing about them is that they are nice. They aren't out to hurt anybody, they want others to be happy they want to communicate with me in a share the life sense.

Nearly all of them that is.

Every so often you encounter someone who isn't like that. Someone who, for some reason feels that they have the right to transduce, degrade and despoil another person. And it is always another, singular person, an individual. It's never an attack on a group, it's focused on some poor bastard.

It's always targeted at a person and done in such a way that they can plausibly deny that they are targeting you.

I see craft in this.

Why do people do this? I have no idea. I'm not even going to suggest that such people are either mad or bad. But they cause massive harm. Whatever their personal devils are this can't be right.

Even if they mean well they are maiming people.

For the victims, and let's be clear there are victims, it's the sense of impotency that hurts the most. Nobody listens, and if they do take notice you are the one most likely to get whatever punishment is on offer.

You are blamed because someone has fastened onto you in an odd way. Because it's easier that way for them. Otherwise they'd need to make a judgement against someone who is clearly scary-bastard-mental. Best that you cope with that, I have a life of my own.

So there's nothing we can do?

Some time soon, after my exams, I'm going to have time to write some javascript. I'm going to write a wee bookmarklet that will block your favourite twat[s] from what you read here. Others will still be able to read what twat[s] say. But you can pretend that he [it's mostly he] isn't there.

Perhaps not a solution but a something?

I've just watched a doumentary about why I should be getting angry because, I, having done the right thing, am being ripped-of by pretend-poor bearded-foriegners who've schemed.

I'm supposed to be angry that everybody who isn't the same as me is sponging off me. I don't see that.

I see a of of people making money out of other peoples' children dying

I see a lot of people saying that what they believe is so special that I can't question it

I see a lot of people who believe they are so special that nobody can question them

I see a lot of people suffering

I see what we've always had, terrified humans and an expoiting class.

We can't do much about the shit heads, but let's be nice to each other.

[forgot to mention. We will win. That isn't aspirational, that's a truth. Good people like us will prevail. We will inherit this earth.]

Once upon a time I almost had it.

I want a polished wooden floor, a matress, a mass of books piled round the walls and nothing else at all. I want order and mess. I want purity and chaos.

When I was younger than I am now I lived in a shared house where things were a bit basic. I had a huge [5000+] collection of science fiction books and little else.

There was a wardrobe where I stored nothing, mostly it was just me and the books. But there were carpets and curtains between me and the sky, there were things that got in the way. It wasn't what I wanted.

Now I exist in a space where all is mess; unit texts scattered everywhere, PT3 forms, maths books, computer books, laptops, devices, the detrius/kibble of an OU life...

I want to sit on an endless floor with a single, white, sheet of A4 between my legs, with the sharpest of sharp-black pens and just think.

Tonight I realized that without the feeling of mess I wouldn't be doing this.

I was sitting in my annexe [it's the Munich exchange ceilidh] listening to 'the dancing', doing topology, when a teacher came into my office. I was a wee bit surprised to see her, she hadn't struck me as the ceilidh type and she was a maths teacher.

[I should explain that my office isn't really my office, it's just the place I sit when I'm in the annexe. It's someone else's office really.]

She had left her memory stick in the main school and was going away for the weekend. Strange how often we forget our memory sticks. So we toddled over to the main school.

"You could store stuff on drop-box."

"The school system doesn't let you." Odd, I don't much do it but it works for me. Then I do have admin rights—geekiness must have its privileges I suppose.

I'd heard sirens in the distance as we walked, you don't listen though, do you? We retrieved the memory stick and exited the school to see the sight of five fire engines lined up in the playground and firemen milling around everywhere.

"See, I've arranged some firemen for you Jo."

"We've had a report of smoke coming from the building", one of them said.

Not again I thought. When it gets cold the boilers come on at night and what seems to be a plume of smoke rises from the school. We get a couple of reports every year. This was the first time that I'd been on hand to see the response, a pretty impressive one I'll admit. [If the building is open they come in and tell you.]

Then I started to have second thoughts—it wasn't that cold, the pumps might come on but the boilers shouldn't, and I didn't see steam where it should be. A worry developed. Could it...?

I had a sense that the building wasn't burning, after all I'd just been in there, it would have told me, wouldn't it? But still...

While logic was beginning to cut into my mystical another fireman appeared and said that someone was burning waste in a garden behind the school.

Panic over, back to topology and Scottish country dancing for me then.

I see a multitude of lamposts, I know a rope shop where we can buy the needful, is it time for us to go hunting capitalists? This is something that I would never say. For people who say stupid drunken stuff on twitter, stuff that they don't really mean seriously, stuff that only vindictive despots would find alarming get put in prison, because the Daily Mail gets upset.

Other people, people who send other peoples' children to their deaths in unjust wars, have shares in arms companies, those who would butcher the world if it suited their agenda and might even if it didn't. They make a heapload of money on the 'cocktail circuit'.

It is now far more terrible to say something about something or someone than it is to end another's life. Words sting so don't they, especially if they come from someone considerably less entitled than you.

I guess that that's me finished everywhere.

Goodbye.

[I kept this private, then I decided that I was being a coward. When did I start being one of those?]

My mum and dad gave me a bag of chantrelles and a grand cru St. Emilion. Dad also lent me his Steve Jobs biography, so that I can talk with him about it. Perhaps as a shunt.

What am I for? I always ask this of myself on my birthday. I have a nagging sense my of uselessness. My failure to achieve what I should. I piddle around at nonsense, every time I seem to be making a difference it gets taken from me.

Nobody ever troubled to tell me the rules. Still, I fear that I'm not doing enough. I've been given this most marvelous thing—life, and I'm pissing it up against the wall.

I resolve to change but I can't help but notice that all those who do manage to change seem to have the life sucked out of them. What made them special, what made me love them, what made them fun. Was gone.

However dead I might be tomorrow, I need to be alive today.

I asked.

"Present a bit of a difficulty. They're insoked." [Another internal word, meaning that they're interested in the world and don't make judgements about it based upon a recieved understanding. That's the best that I can do </shrug>.]

"They seem like us, first-rate, third-rate minds."

"So why don't we understand them?"

"They seem to have no understanding of maths."

I laughed, "you mean that we can't communicate our understanding."

"No, it appears that they have no conception of the natural numbers."

"Eh? What do you mean?"

"They seem to be fractal. Dimensions, they always see things rationally."

"So why aren't we?"

"We are a bit...", he [me] waved a hand to indicate the four of us.

"But..."

"See. That's the difficulty."

"It's not that they can't conceive a zero, it's that they can't conceive a one."

"Hell?" said another me, "doubt it. Rather too interesting for it to be a punishment to us."

"Besides we weren't that awful", another me said.

I wasn't so sure; to be locked up forever with another three of me? A lot of people might consider that cruel and unusual.

There were four of me including me. Two had been here for, "a while". They weren't specific. Another had just arrived.

We were perched ... on something, our legs dangling into nothingness. We hadn't been introduced to the others, that was the tradition, apparently, we had to get to know ourselves first.

"Why don't I...?" I started to ask.

"Have a fishing rod? I see you as having one. I don't have a fishing rod..."

"But..."

"Yes. The way we perceive reality doesn't match up with how, what appears to be another me perceives it."

I looked at a number scrolling somewhere off at who-knows-what distance, there was a slight feel of something brushing my left arm but mostly I was just seeing it.

"Are we supposed to figure this out?" I asked.

"Who knows but it isn't as if we aren't going to try", another I answered.

I smelled something rushing past me. Smelled?

"It takes a while for your senses to adjust to it. You might taste a touch, or something, for a while." A me was standing behind me. "See that?" he pointed at...

"That looks like a  ... number." I seemed to see a dark decimal scrolling out of a nowhere off into a nowhere.

"We see it that way, most of the others don't."

"Others?"

"Yes, quite a lot. Mostly clone-sets like us, but not always and..." He trailed off with a look, a look which if it meant the same as if I had made it, I didn't like.

"What?"

"The personal metric bit", he perked up, "it seems to be related to our feet, or whatever. We can do what we like with the rest of our bodies and it seems like we're in R three but as soon as we move our feet..."

"Where are we?"

"The jury is a bit out on that one I'm afraid. Oh, and we all have mobile phones."

"What? Why does that matter?" Something else rushed by me, I tasted it. "That's..."

"Your brain will start to cope with it soon. It's like when you wear upside down glasses. Pretty soon you'll see again with your eyes."

Sadly I knew what that meant. If you wear glasses that make the world look upside down, your brain will eventually turn it the right way up again.

"But..."

"Yes, none of us are sure how many dimensions exist here." And what it is that our brains are making sense of was the sub-text.

"What do the others see?"

"Difficult to say, none of them are human apart from us and this makes concepts difficult to communicate. We don't know if we are talking about the same thing."

"Don't!" I'd raised a foot to kick him. "Put it back carefully and I'll introduce you to the gang.

I'm an insufferable pratt, and he was clearly me.