My writing has always been contentious and I don’t think it has ever once brought gleeful looks and words of adoration from others. From using the names of people I knew when writing in high-school, through to crossed-wires with a previous partner, through to my latest debacle whereby people from my place of work “found” this tome of scattered thoughts and unfettered boredom. I have elucidated before how I don’t write for others, thankfully the visitor statistics (or lack thereof) back up this statement but more than my solo writing, it allows me to ramble near incoherently for paragraphs about nothing in particular other than coagulated thoughts from throughout my day. Even the titles are taken from songs I’m currently listening to. What I’m getting at though, is that fundamentally, this is all about me. Oh of course, ostensibly this is about anime, or programming, or a different country, but really, this blog is just a big ego jerk for me. My own little space where the black and white text forms the furniture. Grotesque and deformed furniture with no overarching colour scheme but furniture none the less.

I have flashes where I believe that I’m somehow ill-suited for living, that the desire to close myself off from others is a tell-tale sign of acute introversion and I should just submit to it and be done with things. That is not how I operate. As one of my friends said, I am “uncompromising”, which my sister put in a slightly more flowery way: “you don’t do things by halves do you?”. It’s not stubbornness, but and unrelenting desire for grander; that idea that something greater and more elegant can be obtained is what drives me. This is where I’m supposed to say that I lack empathy with my fellow man and it’s a character flaw I endeavour to fix. I don’t. I am critical of things because without knowing what is “wrong” or “broken” (relative terms without elaboration) then I can’t fix them; and if I accept the sub-standard, then I have lost to myself.

So what does this have to do with my writing wounding those around me? In a tangential way, very little, but it circles around (and meanders a bit along the way) to the idea that people are flawed. That in reading something it becomes about them, the idea that perspective defines the world rather than the other way around. What I’m saying is that anything here is all about me. My angst, my anger, my flower language coating a distinct lack of substance; I don’t write to hurt people, just as I don’t write to make people happy. This is neither the place or the context to do that because this is my space, not yours. The fact that this is “on the wire” does not make it public domain, it doesn’t make it fit for human consumption, I could well have scrawled this on scattered napkins around my home, or into a word processor, and there is no good reason why I shouldn’t have if I worried who would read this. But I don’t. One makes choices in what they do, what they read and how they react and by those metrics the measure of a person can be had.

Others though would weigh you up according to what you say or how you look, and perhaps that is really what I’m rallying against. That the disconnect I think I feel is simply the idea of half-truths and white-lies is like putting on a mask, an illusory barrier between oneself and the world at large. Perhaps not being able to erect such a façade is my most glaring of deficiencies, and the thin veneer I have managed comes tumbling down while I sit at a keyboard. I always wonder about retrospect and whether in many years time I will look back at these, as I have looked back on my imported DeadJournal entries and see myself as a better person, someone who has “grown up”. That idea of growing up keeps changing with me; that being an adult simply means you have the flotsam and jetsam of life swirling around you, and at a critical mass you are suddenly born anew as an adult.

Such vitriol flowing forth seems like the purview of a troubled mind, dots on a line towards a macabre end-game; an orgy of media fuelled revenge for “ills borne upon me”. How trite. As with life, none of this has any meaning to anyone but myself. This isn’t for you.

The company as a whole was stagnating with the type of work we were getting and the digital side was working off word-of-mouth which in one respect was beneficial to us, however it locked us into developing a very specific subset of sites which, despite my efforts to the contrary, were stunningly uncreative. This is an aside though as the business as a whole needed to move somewhere where profit (the great motivator) could be made and it was at a specific meeting that the first portents of my current predicament were uttered.

“We need you think like marketeers.”

The usual managerial doublespeak had already been uttered, and then came that bombshell. Stealthy as a cat in the night it held no weight in context and seemed to be forgotten as swiftly as it had been said.

I would be overstating my resentment to say that I wanted to walk out then and there, in retrospect it would have made a point but only the most melodramatic of persons would do that. Lamentably it was as bad as it sounds and the company that I worked for changed its remit from a simple design agency to some kind of amorphous hybrid commonly termed a “Branding and marketing agency”. I could feel the bile in me rumble at the thought of “marketing”, a bastard term for my most despised of job titles; images of slimy yes-men and protracted babble filled my head at the very utterance of the word.

Unfortunately I was to find out that this kind of job comes naturally for some people and even more worrying, a necessary evil for a business. The blue-sky ideal of a company bereft of marketing and still successful by virtue of its name and track-record is the stuff of myth and fable. It seems as of late I have heard and even find myself saying things which I would have thought would have raised alarm bells in me by now, it’s this ambiguous grey area that sits between scruples and livelihood where things people say or do make you wonder whether you should speak out against it or quietly take it as part of surviving in your current job.

Case in point: for the past few days a colleague of mine has been phoning companies to inquire as to whether they sell their customer data for marketing purposes; the end point of this investigation being the ability to provide this avenue of information to our clients (whether future or existing). This kind of action speaks to me on a primal level as something that I don’t want happening around me, a disgusting practice of selling a persons’ identifying information like a commodity; but what does one do in this situation? I can’t mount my tall pony and start preaching the evils of her ways simply because it irks me, the practice may be unsavoury but ultimately one has to have faith in the systems surrounding it (Data Protection et. al.) to control it. Standing on my soap box would only alienate me from her as a person and ultimately do nothing for the business or the client who evidently see some worth in pursuing it.

It’s these sort of dilemmas that make me question whether where I am currently working is right for me whether, even if the majority of people are fantastic, where the business is heading is somewhere I don’t want to be. It’s hard to think long-term when current work is so uninspiring and that the promise of future, interesting work becomes more and more distant. I want to somehow link this all in with being an adult, how simplicity of life is eroded by age, but fundamentally it’s nothing to do with age, only the perception of the world and how one chooses to interact with it. I only hope that I have the hindsight to notice if my scruples wane in favour of greed or survival or that I have the strength of character to never let them fade.

That question is above and beyond what I asked myself a scant few years ago, of what I was going to become, and it has dawned on me that it is not some ephemeral, distant question but what should be driving me right now. I am unhappy with where I am right now, unfortunately the answer to this question lies in the details rather than a neat summary. More than anything I seem to have begun (or perhaps continued) to define myself through what I own, the very definition of materialism. My spending is tolerable to my income, but more and more I seem to be buying things to delineate myself from the rest of my life.

My job is entirely unspectacular, more than that though is that it no longer challenges me. Even my recent foray into managerial (blech) roles has proven unstimulating at best and each day I can feel myself dying inside as some phantom ideal of how a job should be moves further away.

This is not to say I am entirely sedentary, languishing and not moving. The fact I have identified the problem (if not the cause) has been enough for me to try new things; the most recent one being the belief that somehow moving into a new apartment would be a wise thing to do. While it has kept things interesting there are so many facets to that decision it’s boggling to even attempt to describe them.

On the one hand there are the negatives which, to cut a long story short, outweigh the positives. I realise that moving would provide a momentary release from the monotony but overall it would isolate me further from my friends and position me closer to my current place of work, not a switch I encourage. Then there is the monetary aspect, while my parents have stated they will help me, it gnaws at me more that I cannot afford it myself, that it will not be my place but somehow co-opted by accepting their money, no matter how philanthropic it is. The positives however all boil down to material aspects: double glazing, stronger shower, closer to work, more space, nicer décor etc. etc. What worries me more about not following through with my apartment hunting however is the idea that I’m getting cold feet and simply conjuring up reasons, no matter how sound, to try and worm my way out of it. The idea that I can’t follow through on things terrifies me more than anything, and while a part of me knows that in the long run drastic alterations to my life may hurt me financially and emotionally, another part of me wants to go through with it just to prove that I have the chutzpah to see this through to the end.

At the core, all of this is in aid of trying to find a synergy between real life and happiness. Not disappearing into a fantasy world of frictionless interactions and not mired in the entanglements of the day to day monotony. Until I find something that makes me truly happy, it seems futile to try drastically change things, like changing the equipment halfway through an experiment. Often though, the debilitating idea that I may spend my life finding numerous things that don’t make me happy terrifies me more than anything. More than the thought that if the world came to an end, web developers would be low down on the list of occupations fit for a post-apocalyptic environment.

Beneath all the flowery vocabulary, this is primarily a cathartic experiment, one where I readily admit I fucked up some things, but can now conclude wholly that I was not in the wrong, but slipped into it without me knowing. I have no grand overview of life, this isn’t something that has a moral or a neat outcome that can be surmised: “and he lived happily ever after”, it’s messy and blurred but not overly complex.

Let’s call my previous partner K (as in Kafka, Josef K.); I met her in the most inauspicious of circumstances, a Japanese themed karaoke night. Six-month story short, we forgot each other’s name, discovered them, went out, burgeoning relationship stuff. The beginnings are not important, the middle is where the meat is, and the end is simply that. The time of our meeting was shortly before I entered my last year of university and before she entered her second, this was a turbulent time as I’m in no doubt others in the same position can attest to. It’s a time when one is forced to really define how the next years of their life are going to pan out, I knuckled down to actually work for my final year, then spent time job-hunting and so forth in the aftermath of institutionalised education. The point to all this is that when you have a good relationship with someone at this point, the definition of life becomes augmented and one shapes things around their partner, in this case K.

It wasn’t something I was aware I was doing, it was as natural as it comes. The real problem comes in the dichotomy of this situation: on the one hand my life was changing drastically beyond recognition, and on the other I was still clinging to the university student ways by simple virtue of being attached to K. Whether this bred insecurity as to my abilities or simply detained me in a rosy reverie I’m not sure, but the outcome was that life was built around the other which made separation difficult. Not just the ultimate separation, but separation of leisure time, separation of self, “compartmentalising” would be the parlance. This did two things: it made me unappreciative of what I had and also blinded me to the crumbling state of the relationship, I was entirely too close to notice how fundamentally wrong things had become.

That is not to say that I didn’t notice problems, but more and more things were being left unsaid and as much as I tried to (re)connect with K, it was to no avail. At this point, K was more or less cheating on me in plain view. This is not to say she was going out every night and then coming back smelling like other men, but the communication she once had was now directed towards people on the internet. Eventually only one person. Hindsight is indeed 20-20 and from a vantage point, things become all too clear. That is not to say I was entirely blameless, while my attempts to communicate came to naught, I perhaps pushed K away through flippancy and treating her as a child though at the time, I believed (and still do) she was acting like one. Naively believing that one could change, I believed I could rekindle past glories by getting K to somehow grow up. This is the part where I’m supposed to say “but it was me who needed to grow up”, but no, it was her. Running away from a problem and emotionally investing yourself in someone other than your partner is still cheating; ignorance on my part does not absolve guilt.

This should have all come to a head when K mentioned she was intending on moving out sometime in the next year. A distant punctuation mark to a sordid, strangled-path of a relationship. If you asked me now I couldn’t say what I thought at the time, whether I quantified it as a good thing, whether I knew we would be breaking up, whether I thought this was a temporary separation for her to get her head straight I’m not sure, but once again, in hindsight, I should have been more angry. Passive-aggressive is never healthy but any passion at all may have changed things; instead just a blithe disinterest in things, I futilely continued my daily life, braindead to the situation.

The day K moved out was gradated, I remember an increase of space in the house and a decrease in noise but only the dim realisation that this was it. Dark times are all I wish to say about this period. But then I did the most stupid thing I have perhaps ever done, I talked to her. To call this a dumb fucking idea would be an understatement of magnificent proportions because it tied me down to what I’d lost. A pitiful war with myself to make sure I appeared stronger than what K had known. There is a reason that ex-partners shouldn’t talk to each other, perhaps because of vitriol or restraining orders, but mainly because it draws a very final and significant line beneath everything. Anything after that line is clean, black and white, rather than a grey smudge stretched across a year and a half; worthless beliefs that you’re over them because you’ve talked it out. Squared everything away and put right to the world. Anger and fury are necessary because making the other person hate you, no matter the side of the relationship you’re on, is healthier all round.

So I was not at fault for the relationship ending, of course partially for it disintegrating but I live without regret of anything I did or any of the time I spent with K; just because it ended does not mean the journey was worthless. What I do regret is the year and half I have spent dazed and confused, stumbling blindly about trying to find myself in every place apart from the most obvious. When a relationship you’ve built a life on, shaky foundations or not, comes to an end, the hardest part is finding out who one is without the other. I’m ashamed to admit it took an engagement message to spur this but I realise now that the desire to change is more beneficial than the change itself.

And apparently that’s someone who constructs rambling monologues on uninteresting subjects from the sublime darkness of early morning. Next time: ANGST-O-TRON, saviour of poor poetry.

Being inebriated allows for a frank honesty that I couldn’t hope to muster while sober. For instance, I can say now that clubs are in now way conducive to me meeting people. I believe I’ve said before that I rely on my limited verbal prowess to seduce you mortals, so when there is a bass-line that rattles your laces and more flesh than clothing, I’m out of my element. Saturday had (what I can only assume) were two very attractive girls gyrating in front of me and this elicited nothing but confusion from me (“They’re probably lost..”). Females are not a foreign concept to me, contrary to popular geek lore, I am not a fish out of water while speaking to the opposite sex; I may be an introvert but I like to believe I’m not a total social outcast.

Of course the dichotomy (why is it I can use that word while my reptilian brain is active?) is that the more I drink, the more social and the more confident I become, but the less garrulous I am. My white-hot, full-bore wit is lost when I can’t answer simple questions without immediately flummoxing for larger words or perhaps something more witty.

I cannot dance. I can mosh, although this is no great feat as a retarded jellyfish that has come in contact with an electrical socket can mosh. The idea of losing myself is foreign to me, and becomes more and more foreign with each day that I forgot who I am. I lament for my past passion, my anger, my fury at the world at large, at people, at commercialism and society as a whole. Instead I find it replaced with apathy and the counting of days. Nothing is new anymore, the familiar lull of routine and fluffy comfort of knowing what is coming next. I yearn for the days when I woke up and had nothing to do, when the highlight of my evening was putting a camera down my boxer shorts and equating squirrels to cheese.

I wonder whether the draw of regular money and the deeply-defined nesting instinct has stripped me from what I should be doing. I fear that I may continue to drink only to remember the feeling of what it was like to have a spark, then to remember that memory, and then nothing. Sometimes I think it might be a fortuitous turn of events to wake up and lose all memory of what you are. To be left with fragments of writing, bits of a life to piece together as the clean slate of you lives again. What would I think if I woke up and this was what I saw first? A rambling diatribe of unfulfilled dreams and directionless fury, a short journey to see what I’ve filled my empty life with: a steadily overflowing collection of other people’s creative visions.

Perhaps this was supposed to be a post on sexual tension, frustration and release, dark feelings of ineptitude or just the cursed words of a legally-insane madman. Perhaps this is the only way to gain a perspective on what the daylight me perceives as normality. Or perhaps I’m taking things far too seriously and this is just a brain dump of a fevered mind. Either way, I started this post with the promise I wouldn’t delete it or rewrite it and I’ll stick by that promise.

But not any more.

It started with House, a sarcastic comment here, a blistering one-liner there and I was hooked. Realistically it started with Scrubs way back when, but Scrubs has long since hung up what medical credibility it had and focused on it’s superlative off-the-wall humour. Recently however, it’s been Grey’s Anatomy. I still keep up with House but with the recent storyline has eroded my interest very swiftly. I’ll admit I was shallow and that the Golden Globe award for Grey’s was what made me originally pick up the series but I’m glad I did. In an ambivalent kind of way.

The storytelling is superb, sublime characters, it did everything to deserve the award. But it took me until the end of the second season to realise just why I could watch so much of it at once: it’s easy drama. While it’s unfair to draw parallels with House, it illustrates the point. Wherein House, anyone could die, patient or doctor, there isn’t that same uncertainty or tautness in Grey’s. It may focus on the characters more than the patients but the same idealism runs throughout all the threads: it will always turn out alright. At all points, each character has an intricate mesh of emotional support so that when they break down someone will be there for them. Someone will go to the supply cupboard and cradle them, someone will always come to the bar when they need it, and their friends will always eventually help them out. It’s this warm and fuzzy cocoon of best intentions and good vibrations like an ongoing anti-suicide advert; that it doesn’t matter how far down the toilet your life goes, no matter how many times you brutalise your emotions, someone is there to pick you up.

With that thought, I began to wonder why I’d burned away my weekend watching it. I wondered why I’d cried at the sad parts and laughed at the funnies, surely I should feel something about being so intricately manipulated emotionally? I realised that I watched it for the patients. These flashbulbs of human lives, dense cores of stories; a sobering thought that, supposedly, the time you’re most alive is when you’re close to death. Every siren is a change in someone’s life and that it’s a good thing?

Grey’s Anatomy does a lot of things very well, at moments it can echo a common ache of transition from adolescence to adulthood, while other moments it can patronise you with a lesson in morals. As ambivalent as I am about it, my worries err on the side of implications and allusions rather than explicit statements. It’s flawlessly written and impeccably acted and that’s enough for me, the thinking and the inferences can come afterwards.

I am not a fan of the BBC’s technology news section at the best of times, I see it as some sort of plague pit where once worthwhile technology stories go to die. The editorial team manage to squeeze all semblance of worth out of a story and just cram it onto the site as sensationalist, mainstream excrement. This story is different in only that it was a non-story to begin with.

To summarise what this “exploit” needs to work:

• A PC with Windows Vista
• The speech recognition feature needs to be turned on
• The speech recognition feature needs to be trained
• The speakers have to be on and clear enough to transmit a believable voice command
• The microphone has to be placed near to the speakers to pick up the voice command
• The user needs to go to a “malicious” website or get a malicious e-mail that sends this voice command to delete files
• The user needs to do nothing while the command is being issued

Not exactly a short list, no where near as fun-for-all-the-family as Blaster or it’s remote-execution kindred. The fact is, this isn’t an exploit, it doesn’t hand over control of the computer to malicious third parties, recruiting it into a worldwide zombie network; this is barely a college frat joke. I can only imagine that you would need to have files selected to be able to delete them although not being an early adopter of Vista, I can’t prove that. This is akin to walking past your roomate’s door, shouting “SHUTDOWN!” at the top of your lungs, hoping the computer recognises your voice to undertake the command then running away giggling like a 12 year old.

I took speech recognition as part of my comp sci degree and it’s not a simple problem. For one, a system needs to be trained to a person’s voice so that it can understand tonal differences and so forth. This training can be useless if someone drinks a cup of tea after training which can subtly alter the voice. I’m sure the Vista recognition is advanced, but if you have a broad accent, the chances of the system recognising someone else’s voice, perhaps of a different locale or gender is fairly slim.

Exploitation level, this is hardly going to have system admins scurrying to plug a hole lest their drooling users fall prey to a carefully dictated pod-cast. The BBC have dramatised a retarded series of events to try and cash in on the “olol, Vista is insecure only days after release” furore that is bound to happen after any Microsoft release. This sort of story is only markedly more interesting than their constant Second Life articles or their painfully irrelevant editorial columns by their resident digital hippy. This sort of story ranks up with when people thought their computers were haunted when the Windows XP speech recognition picked up computer sounds and converted them to words, or when people thought their iPod’s “Shuffle” play mode was favouring certain artists. Everyday is a slow news day for BBC News Technology section.

Ironically their technology page has an opinion piece wondering whether there was too much Vista launch news coverage; with eight separate mentions of Vista on that landing page alone, I can only say yes.

I have blissfully forgotten a lot of the minutiae of some conversations (especially the twenty minute chat I had with her about why I had two shelves of anime) but general topics such as: porn, gay-sex, Grid Wars, age (always guess lower than what your brain tells you), university degree (some people take offence when your first guess at their degree is Business Studies) and many other topics that are lost to time. Suffice to say fragments of retrospectively embarrassing moments keep trickling back to me which just keep reaffirming how much of an ass I made of myself.

My reason for drinking so much at such an inopportune time was a combination of short-sightedness and that my day at work had gone particularly well. Once I started watching 24, the sultry sound of Jack killing people urged me to drink more, then Mr Izzard compelled me to drink more by which time I was pleasantly squiffy. Lack of food and general merriment sealed the deal, at which point I figured I may as well get well lubricated as I’d already come so far. It also didn’t help that there were only two people drinking including me so I probably came off as more of a piss-head than I usually am.

I can only look back on the night with fondness, as even though today was very blurry and mighty loud it at least made me feel like I’m not a completely introverted recluse.

But then I get the crazy idea that maybe the minutiae of my life aren’t worth scrutinising. A typical day (and there are more and more of them recently) consists of the following sequence: get up, walk to work while listening to music, spend an hour checking over almost work-related sites (digg, slashdot, various forums), spend the rest of the morning working on whatever is top priority, lunch, spend two hours fighting back sleep then the rest of the afternoon working, home, tea, anime/gaming/whatever, sleep. As an itemised list that mechanically makes up 5/7 of my week; mentally it’s a case of “where to start?”.

My walk to work is defined by what my music player has as it’s album of the day, it sets the tempo for the rest of the day and woe betide me to meddle with my music players hotline to chance. My morning is spent coming up with random thoughts: webcomics with Flickr like hotspots for interesting words or how webcomics could become more searchable and accessible with plain-text scripts or how the next person to reveal themselves as an Apple zealot will have me buying the iPhone just so I can beat them with it. My lunchtime is spent on the lookout for the attractive young woman who I seem to meet on a frequent basis so I can have my daily dose of “Should I say something, what have I got to lose apart from my dignity?”. The afternoon usually brings feelings of resentment towards my job and chosen way of life, untamed disdain at how mediocre I am and how spectacular I wish to be. Evenings bring sweet release from structure but in such criminally short spaces of time. Rinse, repeat.

Then there are days like today where I’m so clouded with head-slime I forgo work to try and recover. Sick days are terrible if you’re actually sick because you’re on borrowed time, time you otherwise wouldn’t have and you’re so crippled by disease (this morning I believed I had the SARS) that you can’t do any of what you would like to. I settled for playing more Just Cause, cleaning the kitchen and writing quoteTangent which now adorns the bottom right corner of the rapidly expanding sidebar. Expect a more diligent description of my handwork (click the author) at a later date.

So once again I’m inconclusive as to what this blog is supposed to do. I don’t write for anyone but myself and yet I still make things public for others to read, otherwise I would just write on a piece of paper or a local word processor file. Maybe this is just a cry for help, a vacuous self-flagellating diatribe spawned from thesaurus-fuelled evenings; however I look at it, this is my life and I’m being myself, so no one can tell me I’m doing it wrong.

I’m getting off on a tangent here, my main point is that I can’t seem to generate conversation where none exists already. I can carry, nurture and develop a conversation, but the opening lines, the ice breakers elude me. My favourite trick in these situations is to do my deer-in-headlights impersonation, practised and refined. The problem with generating conversation when I don’t really know a person is the fact that I wouldn’t want them doing it to me if I didn’t know them.

I met the girl again I spoke about before, not as fleetingly this time; I had many minutes to construct whole sentences and scenarios, even my friend tried desperately to lengthen my opportunities (as any good wingman would) but it was all for naught. The best opener I could envisage was: “I saw you at Tesco the other day”, where it went from there I had no idea. I could blame it on the aspect of surprise but really I’m just being a social retard.

It is something I have to work on; I know my limits and I know my strengths but “not being able to start a conversation” ranks pretty highly on my list of weaknesses. Up until my formative university days I counted small-talk as the bane of my life, a ridiculous pretence to more interesting endeavours. But effort and experience has shown that not agreeing with social lubrication does not necessarily mean you can ignore it. Perhaps my difficulty with starting conversations stems from my lack of observation of when people have done it to me, or perhaps my foolish pride still prevents me from taking a chance where the outcome could be embarrassing. Such pride I need to shed.