Clearing the cobwebs and blowing away the dust
Adam
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Posts by Adam
Love and Violence
Aug 8th
Today, while walking to work, I observed two extremes of the human condition occurring within two minutes of each other.
I saw two girls, probably late teens, early twenties, oblivious to the rest of the world, staring deeply into each other’s eyes. As I walked past, they kissed. It was a brief, tender moment and yet, somehow, incredibly intense.
I walked on across the square. I noticed a young girl, about nine-years-old, with her mother. The girl was crying. As I watched, the mother slapped her across the face! Another brief, passionate moment, but instead of love and tenderness, anger and violence. I know, I should have said something. I should have said that you shouldn’t treat anyone like that, least of all a child. But to my shame I didn’t. And then they were gone, disappeared into the crowd.
“X Factor Joe: I’m Gay” Shock Horror!
Aug 1st
It seems The Sun goes out of its way to create headlines that are totally and completely irrelevant to me. I have no idea who Joe is and even if I did why should I care if he’s gay or not.
Then I noticed that it had something to do with The X Factor and I wondered if Joe, whoever he is, was using the vernacular of today’s youth and was admitting to being a bit crap. But no, reading on, it turns out that Joe is revealing to the world that he is, in fact, a homosexual (gasp)!
To quote my twelve-year-old daughter (who actually does know who he is) “And?”
There is no ‘and’. That’s it. End of story, although they do manage to spread the ‘story’ out over two more pages inside.
Come on, this is 2010 not 1960. Does anyone (save for a few small minded bigots) really care if some minor celebrity/talent show winner is gay or not. This isn’t news and it certainly doesn’t warrant a headline with two-inch tall letters
“Pope: I’m Jewish” Now that might require such treatment. That would be a revelation with far reaching consequences worldwide. (thinking about it, the pope does have a fondness for skull caps, and have you actually ever seen him eating pork? Hmm we might be on to something here).
And was someone having a bit of a joke with that promotion at the top?
What will we leave behind?
Jul 30th
Today Pocket-Lint revealed that Amazon expect ebook sales to outnumber sales of physical books in the near future
“I think we [Amazon] will sell more Kindle books than paperback books in the next year [2011]“, Steve Kessel, the man tasked with making the Kindle the number one ebook reader in the world, told Pocket-lint in an exclusive one-to-one briefing.
“Sometime after that we will start selling more Kindle books than hard covers and paperbacks combined”.
Is this necessarily a good thing though? Yes, it’s pretty cool and convenient to be able to carry around the contents of a library in a small lightweight gizmo and yes it’s great that you can get a book you want to read delivered to you almost instantly. But what of the future?
For a while now I’ve had an uneasy feeling about the headlong rush to digitize everything; music, photos and now books. How much of our culture will we leave behind for our children, their children and their grandchildren?
Take photography for example. Virtually all family photographs taken now are digital. More pictures are being taken than ever before, yet all these memories run the risk of being lost within a generation. I’m guessing that the majority of photos never leave the hard drive – and how long does a computer last? Five Years? Even if we carefully back-up our photos (and we all do that – right?) what are the chances that the media we use today will even be readable in the future. Have you tried reading the data off a 5¼ inch disk recently? It was only twenty-five years ago that 5¼ inch disks were the standard storage media.
And now books. If ebook sales start to outstrip physical book sales, it would hardly be surprising if publishers stop producing real books. Why should they bother when the production and distribution costs are so much lower and the profits so much higher? If that does happen then great swathes of literature could be lost for future generations.
How will the people of the future see us? Will they marvel in awe at what we have achieved or will they scratch there heads and wonder why everything suddenly just sort of stopped?
750 words everyday to improve your writing
Jul 27th
So anyway, I was thinking about Headswill today when I remembered a site I used a while back, 750words.com.
The idea behind 750words.com is based on the concept of ‘Morning Pages’. Morning pages are three pages (or 750 words) of stream-of-consciousness writing done every day. Editing is frowned-upon while private thoughts and tangents are positively encouraged. The goal is to declutter your mind and to dip into your subconcious. As the site’s creator says: “You can’t just fart out 3 pages without running into your subconscious a little bit.”
So what is 750words.com? At its simplest it’s just a place where you can write 750 words every day without the distraction of formatting controls, toolbars and the like. It goes a bit further than that though. There are stats so you can see how long you take to write your three pages. There are badges that are awarded for such things as writing a certain number of days in a row. There’s text analysis to tell you your emotional state while you were writing and a complicated scoring system which allows you to see how you compare to all the other users of the site.
The important thing about 750word.com is that your writing is private, unless you decide you want to share it with other users. This means that whatever you write doesn’t have to be pretty or even make any sense – play 750 word word association if you want. Just write it down and see what happens.
Of course, you could write your 750 word in a text editor, word processor or longhand in a notepad but 750Words.com adds fun and motivation so you’re more likely to get into the daily habit.
Art on A Monday? Are You Serious?
Jul 26th
So Daughter and me went to take a look at the Diane Arbus exhibition at The Nottingham Contemporary today. Sadly I forgot to check the opening times and when we arrived we discovered that it’s not open on Mondays. What kind of a place closes on Mondays? Don’t people do contemporary art on a Monday or something? Apparently not.
All was not lost, however. Instead we wandered around exploring some of the lesser travelled areas of Nottingham, taking photos and just chatting. I really treasure the time we spend together. She;s so inquisitive, intelligent and eager to learn. We share the same sense of humour and many of the same interests. I’m proud that she treats me as a friend first and parent second. I dread the day that she discovers boys and doesn’t need her old man as much. She’s coming-up for thirteen now, so that day draws ever closer. All I can do is make the most of it now.
Hmm, harder than I thought
Jul 25th
Why am I finding it so hard to get started on here?
Write for writing’s sake I said. Since then, Ничего, Nada, Niente, Τίποτα, Niets.
The daft thing is, there’s been plenty to write about. I’ve been ill over the last few days and my Google Reader account, e-mail inbox and Twiiter feed have never had so few unread items in them.
Take, for example, David Mitchell’s article in today’s Observer: If Britain decides to ban the burqa I might just start wearing one. Funny, well argued (but then I do agree with what he’s saying so I would say that) and as an added plus it taught me a new word/concept – toleration.
Then there’s SwiftKey and Edwin, two totally awesome Android apps that I’ve installed recently. Big changes at Facebook, a cool cow video over at Youtube, the Queen got a Flickr account and other stuff and nonsense.
Did I blog about any of this stuff? No I didn’t. Why? I guess it’s because I’m not really in the blogging habit. I think “Oh that’s cool”, but I don’t go the extra step and follow it with “I must blog about that”. Possibly it’s because I have difficulty with procrastination – actually that’s not true, I have no problems at all with procrastination, I’m incredibly good at it. Maybe the reason is that this blog doesn’t have a defined role. So let me define a role:
Headswill.com is my personal blog. I shall blog about stuff that interests me, stuff that catches my eye, stuff that I think other people might be interested in and so on and so forth.
More than that, Headswill.com shall be the place that I satisfy a nagging desire, that I’ve always had, to write. It will be where I learn, practice and experiment – not just with writing but with blogging in general.
I hereby pledge that I will write at least one 100 word blog post each and every day unless I am physically unable to.
There, that ought to do it.
Starting again
Jul 13th
How many reincarnations will this blinkin’ blog have? I suppose that’s what happens when you come-up with an idea for a domain name and don’t think much beyond that.
So, here’s the plan: Just do it and don’t think too much about it. Let it flow. Write for writing’s sake. Have I got an opinion about something I read in the paper or online? Write it down. Have I discovered a great new app for my phone or a cool piece of software? Do a review. Has something amusing happened? Jot it down in a whimsical manner. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Headswill.com will be the place I come to clear my head – swill it out if you will.
During my working day I often think about stuff, but then I don’t actually do anything with it. All that thinking goes to waste. As from now I vow I will not let all that thinking go on in vain. It will be recorded for posterior’s sake!!
The important thing here is to keep the flow going, to get into the habit of writing. So that’s the plan. Quite a simple plan really and not actually that cunning.
We shall see
