Welcoming The Coming Of The End

As I may have noted here before, given my health conditions, I have been told by a series of doctors (I have had 16 GPs since 1988 and have met numerous specialists too) that I have a life expectancy of 51-57 years old, which means 4-10 years remaining.  I have become conscious of my departure in the next few years as my health has deteriorated.  I feel like a man probably thirty years older than my actual age.  My digestion is all over the place and it is often difficult for me to swallow.  My limbs are stiff and my eyes have trouble refocusing after I have been reading or in a dark room.  I also feel incredibly lethargic and when returning from work, which is very sedentary have no urge except to slump watching television and to sleep.  I often sleep for a couple of hours and then return later.  Feeling bloated much of the time means I have little appetite.  However, I have not lost weight, indeed my belly looks rounder than ever before, causing real problems with my trousers.

Perhaps I have been reaching this state for a number of years now but the bullying and the almost incessant problems with cars, holidays and accommodation have been a distraction.  Now things are reasonably settled, largely because I have given up on holidays and rent only a room in a shared house; car problems still persist, I am aware of how far I have deteriorated.  Of course, I have no idea when I will fall dead.  Ten years can seem a great deal, it will work out to be about an eleventh of my life.  I have a feeling I will make it to 57.  I have had more than one dream and other premonitions that I will live until late in 2024 and then will die in a car fire in Spain, during daylight.  Quite precise.  I have had quite a few premonitions in my life that have proven to be true.  Often I have ignored them, for example in the case of two of the jobs I was bullied in, much to my personal cost.

How do people react to a recognition of mortality?  I heard an interview last week with blues musician Wilko Johnson who was diagnosed with cancer in 2013 and was given 10 months to live.  His tumour in and around his stomach grew to be 3 Kg (6.6lbs) before it was removed, along with his pancreas, spleen and parts of his stomach and intestines.  He had done a farewell tour and album, but then last year was cured.  He has been left at a loose end now he has recovered.  However, what he had done in response to death was to rush around and do things.  Maybe I am not close enough to it yet to feel that urge.

I have been working on a number of partially completed novels that I have written over the past twenty years and have enjoyed returning to them.  I am a better writer than when I began some of them, but I have liked going back to the characters and finishing off their stories.  However, I realised, now that I am working on a full-length Braucher novel, that I simply do not care.  I do not mind if I finish it or not or whether it gets out into the public domain or remains locked up behind passwords on my laptop's C drive.  Many people facing imminent death have a 'bucket list' of things to achieve before they go.  However, reflecting on this, I could think of absolutely nowhere that I wanted to go or any activity I wanted to do.  I have no desire to see the Grand Canyon or swim with dolphins.  There certainly is no point in me learning anything new.  I know I will gain no new skills before I die and there is no point in all these adverts for language learning that I receive.  Given my digestion problems I have no desire to eat any particular foods.

I have booked to return to the hotel in Sables d'Or in France: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/memories-of-sables-dor.html  that I visited when I was five and apparently before that in my mother's womb.  However, that was simply because have had so many disastrous holidays I could think of nowhere else to go.  If I do not make it, I will not be fussed.  It is almost due South of where I am living at present and it seems that I can reach it without much difficulty.  I do not really need a holiday but am conscious of the censure from colleagues for not going away especially from those who insist on putting themselves into dangerous situations around the globe.  Why do amateurs keep on insisting on climbing Mount Everest?  However, having had only two weeks of successful holidays since 2005, that have not ended prematurely and costing me hundreds of pounds, I am not optimistic that even this simple holiday will work.  Yet, they do not fail sufficiently.  I have not been at risk of my life at all.  I would be more than happy to give up my place in the lifeboat for someone else who wants life, when the catamaran goes down off the Channel Islands.  I have found myself incompetent: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-challenges-of-suicide.html and too cowardly: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/trouble-after-suicide-fails-is-that-you.html  to succeed at suicide, so it has to be something from outside that ends my life and I would be grateful if it got a move on.  I would like a heroic death, but given my luck it is bound to be humiliating, but I trust I will be on my way by then so will no longer care.

That is the one great thing about knowing you have a reasonably limited amount of time left - you no longer need to care.  Once I have gone, I will have no control over what moronic things people might say about my book.  Amazon actually bans the posthumous sale of books if you self-publish, presumably that is limited to ordinary people, not literary greats.  I have already stopped worrying about my career.  It was destroyed by the bullying of two managers who because of personal prejudices decided it was the appropriate thing to wreck my life.  I kept hoping that I could get back to the level that I had in 2009 if not beyond that and now am aware that unless this job goes bad too, this will be my last entry on my CV.  I do not have to worry about my pension as I will not be alive to collect it.  Even if I live ten more years, I will have left well before retirement.

I do care about what will happen to the UK, but these days it is the way I might care about the plastic bag island in the Pacific Ocean, I mourn it, but know I can do absolutely nothing about it.  I am throwing myself right into the current election as this may be my last or at most, the penultimate one I will witness.  However, with so much, a weariness comes over me.  I am just tired of how appallingly so many people are behaving and the energy they put into telling you how essential their nastiness is.  I am tired of how badly so many people drive.  I am tired at how every company tries to rip you off and insists that their various ways of screwing money out of you is customer service in your interest.  It tires me that they feel obliged to lie as if we are morons.

In many ways as the burden of life begins to lift but on the other hand I become ever more tired, perhaps I am becoming like the bulk of the population, walking along oblivious to everyone around me, not interested if I put myself or them in danger as I lap up the 'vital' rubbish coming through the phone.  In my case it is coming through my head rather than my phone, but maybe society has finally made me conform.  Perhaps if this does drag on for four years let alone ten, I will become tired of waiting.  I can certainly tell you now that if I died before I finished this posting, I would be more than happy to be relieved of having to live this tedious existence a moment longer.

No Browser Choice

As you can see from the extended discussion following my posting in April many of us are battling to use the new Blogger interface.  It was introduced in April but then taken down again because so many users had problems with it.  Now it is back and for me it is worse than ever.  I struggle to get into the dashboard of my blog and edit or post without the whole system crashing time after time.  I have gone through three crashes to simply get this post up.

It appears that Blogger, in line with many companies, assumes that all users have the fastest and the best systems on the market.  Yes, I am sure some of them do, but the bulk of us cannot afford to keep updating, especially with such a high level of unemployment and rising living costs, it is even less feasible than five years ago.  I am now in a position where I cannot even connect my computer to the internet.  I am living in a house now with no wireless connection and a single PC connected to the internet.  This PC has a heavy firewall so I cannot download new software.  This means I can only use Internet Explorer as the browser, rather than Google Chrome or any other browser that so many companies feel they should bully us into using by shutting off so many webpages to the browser that so many of us choose or are compelled to use.  The same applies to my work computer.  IE is the browser for the company which employs over 1000 staff as it was from the company that I have just left which employed over 3700.  These are not obscure organisations, so if they still believe in IE, why is it that so many providers now effectively block IE users from accessing their content?

A lot of us adhere to the credo 'if it isn't broken, don't try to fix it'.  We see no point for the constant upgrades of every piece of software on our computers which keep on interrupting things that we actually want to do.  Companies get exasperated that we are not as ecstatically excited by the tiny change in the new version which they are pressing on us.  For many of us there is no noticeable difference and in cases such as the interface for this blog, the new version is far worse than the old one.  Remember Vista and what that promise only to blow up in the face of so many users?  Since moving to the new interface I have had to fight off automated spam being sent to this blog, day after day, something I never had a problem with using the old interface.

Companies need to realise that the bulk of users are not at the cutting edge.  Firefox has not yet ousted IE as the prime way the majority of people access the internet, just as shops have been compelled to continue selling DVDs alongside BluRay versions.  Not only do we lack the money to chase after every new version of everything, we see absolutely no need.  Realise that if something works, we do not feel the compulsion to change it, certainly not every six months.  I know I am not unusual in have a mobile phone which is 6 years old and a car which is 14 years old.  They both work to do the jobs that I bought them for.  When they stop doing that then I will replace them. 

Maybe this is me getting older.  You may say that a man in his forties is likely to be a 'stick in the mud'.  However, especially when it comes to bloggers, by definition you are going to get someone who puts in the time and the effort with things.  This is in fact the case even with those young bloggers who cover the latest fashions.  They take their time and analyse what the new trends are.  Newness does not inherently equal quality.  If you look at the growing number of 'classic' games let alone the number of remake movies, you see that in a previous time when there was not the constant drizzle of updates, actually things that are still seen as being of high quality remain popular and engaging.  In fact with the movie remakes, we are often simply reminded how much better the original was.

I am tired of being bullied by services which should be serving me, rather than me being their lapdog to be dragged from new application to new application when I simply want to get one with scratching and sniffing around where I am.  Companies do not seem to understand that we will be more loyal to those who do not use bullying tactics and let us make our own choices, especially those of us who are thoughtful adults.  Blogger does not seem to understand the reason why I have a blog here after five years, when I could have easily gone somewhere else, is because I once liked the service I was getting.

Blogging The Blog 13: Still Here After 5 Years

I have worried right throughout 2012 that I would run out of things to post in this blog.  I suppose if it dies from lack of issues to discuss then it dies.  Today, however, it is more about acknowledging the fact that five years on from beginning this blog it is still active.  As I wrote back in 2007 the typical life of a blog is 3 months.  It serves a particular focus and then it expires.  Blogs that last longer have something that keeps sustaining them.  I guess this is one reason why there are more blogs about fashion than anything else.  Fashion keeps changing, new styles come in, old ones are revived again and in between time there is room for lots of discussion not only about what the style looks like and how much it costs but how it looks on the blogger and other contributors to the site.  There is a constant refreshing of topics.

My blog has generally lack that regular refuelling.  In the first couple of years there was a large backlog of things that had been on my mind for many years.  Getting them on to this blog got them out of my system and I found that was good for establishing piece of mind.  In addition, bringing in my back catalogue of fiction, reminiscences and travel journals and photographs provided more material.  However, both of these sources were effectively 'fossil fuels' for the blog.  Similar sources were the various maps that I uncovered or 'borrowed' to put on this blog, though new ones do occasionally appear.  Counter-factual discussions are a finite source, but there are so many remaining that I could simply just do them as postings for the rest of this year and not run out.  Other more 'renewable' sources of discussion have come from the news.  The insane period in terms of the global economy and British politics we have experienced over the past five years and the deepening of social trends bubbling up since the 1990s have been a basis of discussion which is regularly renewing.  It is interesting how many people I have spoken to have felt that British society has seen a marked deterioration, primarily in respect over this period.  The UK in 2012 is certainly a much less pleasant place to live in even than it was in 2002.  That decade has also seen a decline in opportunities and the worsening of the quality of living for ordinary people.

Against this background, my own woes have provided far more postings than I ever would have envisaged back in May 2007.  At that stage we had been compelled to leave the house we had rented due to the landlord divorcing, but I was not yet aware of the fact that the landlord of the place we moved to had already defaulted on the mortgage and his father who acted as agent was set to intimidate us for months.  I was not aware either that I was going to go through two periods of redundancy and encounter two incredibly nasty line managers, though given what I have said in the paragraph above about the deterioration of the economy and British society, maybe I could have foreseen that that would have impacts on me personally.  If our landlord had behaved decently and if someone else rather than me had been selected for the first redundancy or even if I had been able to find work more quickly after that, then a lot of the entries on this blog would be missing. 

Now I once again face both losing my job and my house.  In many ways I am weary of the instability that the past six years have brought and just wish I had had less material for this blog.  On the other hand, without this blog, I know that I would have handled things far less effectively.  This blog has been a great release for me.  It is like a diary but one freed in large part from chronological constraints.  Not only has writing about the bad things that have happened to me provided release, it has also provided support, some of which has been featured in the comments on this blog but has also been 'offline' in emails.  It may be wrong to air one's troubles but the benefits have been great for me and I have no regret in doing so.  Perhaps in some cases it has even helped others to see they are not alone in experiencing these challenges.

I do think that this blog is nearing the end of its natural life.  My own life does not seem to be approaching any degree of stability and given the economic climate may not do so for many years from now.  However, I am finding that I have covered so many topics, that 'new' things I turn to write about seem very much like what I have written before.  Perhaps updates are all that will come to this blog in the future.  Of course, much of what I have discussed here is not what attracts the largest audience to this blog.  Certainly it seems that if I want to gain fame for this blog I should simply write essays on James Bond movies.  This along with counter-factual analysis which can be used in school level essays appear to be the main draws.  Naturally it was never about the audience, it was more about a the anger/despair management that blogging provides and this blog has done that service very well.

Struggling With The New Blogger Interface

When I came to write a new posting today I found that the blog interface had changed and it has proven to be an utter nightmare.  Every five words or so the system backs up what I have written, freezing the screen and leaving my laptop to labour with its fan going at full blast.  The interface cannot keep up with the speed I type at.  Every saving wastes about twenty seconds let alone losing the words that I have typed in after it decided to save.  Even this short posting has taken many minutes to produce and it means a longer piece is going to need much more time than use to be the case with the former interface.  Given the frustration of having to write and stop, write and stop, not knowing at which moment I am going to be interrupted by the system, I do not know if I have the patience to continue with this blog.  It is very, very irritating now and so causes tension whereas in the past it has been an outlet for tension.  Why do companies always feel they have to 'improve' a system when in fact they end up providing you with something so much worse than what was available before?  They have probably now wrecked the good reputation they once had for blogging facilities.  I, for one, am now looking for some other host with a much less stupid interface!

Blogging the Blog 12: Most Interest & Mostly Americans

I was looking around the various functions that this Blogger site provides for us bloggers and came across a tab I had not used before: Stats.  I took a look at it and it revealed interesting data about you, yes, the people who read my blog.  It was a little depressing but the information is not going to get me to change what I post here.  However, it is interesting to look at what I have found out.The first thing I looked at was where the 99,000+ hits on my blog had come from.  Over a third were from the USA and 16,000 were from the UK.  I guess that I should not be surprised that half of those visiting the site were from English-speaking countries and these two in particular given that I write a lot about the UK and often feature US movies.  The third highest source was Germany with 6,000 visitors followed reasonably closely behind by Canada and France, almost equal with each other; Australia in sixth place has provided 3,000 visitors, the Netherlands next with 2,000; Italy and interestingly, the Philippines both with 700+ and finally Sweden with just over 500.  I guess this spread may come from the topics I have covered.


The tools with which people reach my blog are varied though 84% have come from a machine using Windows and only 10% from a Macintosh.  Of new devices just over 900 used an iPhone, 713 used an iPad (one of those might have been myself), 223 an iPod and interestingly, 65 used a Playstation 3.  The search engine people who did not come direct used is unsurprising, with 45% coming through Internet Explorer (recently it was reported the average IQ of users of this search tool was only 80; I assume because it includes numerous school children); 29% used Firefox, 13% used Chrome, 9% used Safari (the default search tool on the iPad) and only 2% used Opera and <1% Iceweasel, the search tools that are supposed to be the ones favoured by the most intellectual web searchers.

The main ways in which people have reached my blog through other links is in terms of the maps of imaginary places, especially Narnia, because my inclusion of six maps of that world is referenced on Wikipedia in the footnotes. Other imaginary maps are also high in those pages on my blog which are visited with large continents and then tube maps in second and third place of this sub-set.  Getting featured on the 'Today in Alternate History' website has channelled more traffic to me and interestingly so has mlwodementia.blogspot, one which I was not familiar with but is proving to be the third highest channel through which direct traffic as opposed to searchers, is coming.  It turned out to be a blog which has been running since 2007 with over 50 postings per year and is focused on making and playing with fantasy lead figures.

When I turn to the topics of interest, however, I begin to be rather disheartened.  My most popular topic has been discussing James Bond villains, my first posting on this in April 2009 has attracted over 3,600 visits, the second posting over 11,000 and the third over 16,000.  This pattern in itself is shaped by the search terms that have brought people to my blog, the term 'Sophie Marceau' is by far and away the most popular term followed by 'Le Chiffre' though only warranting a tenth of the interest that Sophie has done.  He is followed by 'Robert Davi' and 'Toby Stevens' interesting pair of actors who have been Bond villains and the fifth most popular term is 'Tamriel'.  Interesting my two postings on steampunk pirates have received 7,500 hits for the first one and 8,500 hits for the second, partly through people looking for 'steampunk pirates' specifically as a search term and partly people coming across it looking for images of Japanese flags.   In terms of the counter-factual postings the top one with over 1,100 visits is 'What if the Bolshevik Revolution Failed?' followed far behind by 'What if Hitler Had Been Assassinated?' and 'What if Lenin Had Lived 10 Years Longer?'.  I would have expected more coming to the Second World War and other better known 'what ifs?' but I guess there are a lot of sites covering those that draw them off before they reach me as a result.  Whilst I know that some people have read my political postings and my fiction they must be so few in number so as not to turn up in the statistical returns.

I suppose we have perceptions of how people view our blog.  It seems apparent that mine mainly attracts Americans looking for pictures of Sophie Marceau, perhaps reading about James Bond villains and on occasion looking for maps of Narnia or something on steampunk pirates.  I guess I am filling a role that might not be filled by others, though I find it weird that people cannot source the hundreds of images of actors who have appeared in the James Bond movies from other places, there are hundreds of websites with this stuff on.  As I said when I launched this blog, it was primarily for my own peace of mind and I would always rather be right than read.  As time has passed I guess I did hope that people would at least read my views, but I need to be clear than unless I am commenting on James Bond or steampunk pirates then they are not, well, even then they are probably only here for the pictures rather than the text.  It is also frustrating that the bulk of visitors come to look at pages from 2008 and 2009.  I could easily have packed up after having posting something like 300 pages.  I guess this information is useful for people looking to attract visitors to their blog.  'The Guardian' has been running a column about how to create and 'monetise' your blog.  Clearly a good starting place is to whack on images of popular actresses and maps of fantasy places.

Blogging the Blog 11: Online No-one Knows I'm A Dog ... Or A Man

As regular readers of this blog, assuming there are some, will know I have maintained an interest in the art of blogging itself and the forms of behaviour it creates or has imposed upon it.  Thus, you will not be surprised that I read with interest, last month, the exposure of two renowned lesbian bloggers, Paula Brooks of LezGetReal as a 58-year old male construction worker from Ohio called Bill Graber and then Amina Abdullah Araf al Omari of a Gay Girl in Damascus (a blog I had stumbled across) as Tom McMaster, a 40-year old male student from Edinburgh.  I guess people should not be surprised that these two men have provoked the wrath of the lesbian community and many blog readers in general.  It is always painful to feel that you have been duped, and in this case for a number of years.  In addition, people took risks trying to find out what had happened to 'Amina' in the upheaval that has been plaguing Syria.  Note the quotations used here, I have lifted from various articles in 'The Guardian' newspaper.

The extent of the anger was shown by many commentators, e.g.:  Judy Dlugacz head of Olivia, a lesbian travel company: 'This is really an outrage.  We all need to be aware that there are people out there who will abuse the blogosphere.' and 'Look at how much power he wielded controlling this. The fact that he created this illusion and that he enjoyed it so much, that he was perpetrating a hoax and had such a good time with it, that is pretty pathetic.'  Dlugacz almost answers her own questions.  If she has only now woken up to the fact that people are misusing the blogosphere then it has taken her a long time.  Of course, we know companies employ bloggers to promote their companies; universities now employ students to go into discussion groups to promote their university.  As with any media, you have always had to be careful about what you read/saw/heard.  To me it is surprising that people had more trust in blogs than they do in newspaper or television reports.  Is it simply the novelty of the medium which has won that trust.  Dlugacz is right, people love the power of pulling off the hoax, they can become addicted to power they wield.  All of us love to think that people listen to our views and value them, bloggers far more than the average person.  One interesting question is, if, rather than McMaster and Graber producing blogs they had written first-person novels from the perspective of the characters they created.  There would have been complaints, but I also expect that their clear ability to replicate the manners and language of an American or a Syrian lesbian would have been commended as skillful writing.  Men have written as women and even more often women have written as men in novels, this will not stop.  It is naive to think that somehow simply because something is a blog rather than a magazine story it has more truth in it.  This realisation, may be one reason for how angry commentators are.

Michael Triplett runner of the  National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association blog believes all bloggers would lose credibility. I think people are just going to be more suspect of people they don't know or people they don't have familiarity with.  Blogs are already being discredited as people sitting around in their pyjamas talking about news. Now you are talking about guys in pyjamas pretending to be women in their pyjamas it really makes it even more of a credibility concern.' and 'There is almost something pathological about it.  I really don't get the idea of wanting to take on an entirely different person, especially a group that you have no affinity with.'  This is a foolish view.  Bloggers will not lose any more credibility than they currently hold.  Again, I find it incredible that people that sophisticated web savvy people did not read these blogs without a greater level of judgement and now are furious that due to their lack of perception/thought/care (traits I admit I share) were deceived.  

Triplett also seems to move in very narrow circles if he thinks that wanting to take on a different persona is something peculiar.  He clearly does not get out much to bars or clubs of an evening.  I have encountered both men and women pretending to be something that they were not; how many celebrities fabricate their ages, where they were born, their tastes, etc.  There is a lot of pretending to be other people, just look at the quantity of online material produced by transvestites with names, clothing and mannerisms very different from what they truly are.  The internet including blogs is ideal as it allows sustained construction of a persona.  Very few people appear online with their full proper name, partly for security reasons.  The bulk of contributions use a name that is not their real one.  Even when people like celebrities do feature their names (or in fact their stage names) then they are still weaving a persona that can be far removed from the genuine person.  

Personas are always created in any online context and gain a mass of their own very quickly.  I am a 43-year old white British man and yet even here on my blog, that has been contested with people arguing that my views suggest I must be a teenager or not British.  Thus, even when you create a genuine persona online it can quickly acrete extra elements, some which you might foster, others which you might be powerless to halt.  I think if McMaster and Graber had not attracted as much attention and interest as they were then their blogs would have faded away.  Ironically the lesbian community in wanting these types of lesbian bloggers out there sustained the continuation of these fakes.

Melanie Nathan, previously involved in LezGetReal said 'In my opinion, what Graber has done, to be a straight man calling himself a lesbian, is tantamount to impersonating an entire community.'  This is a clear exaggeration and as I note below, this easy assumption that an individual can somehow carry the identity of a whole sub-set of people, or in turn harm an entire sub-set by their behaviour is dangerous; not least it pretends that every grouping, no matter how large, is homogenous.  I am sure lesbians would be the first to emphasise that even within their community/communities, there is wide diversity and that is good.  No-one can ever represent an entire community, we always only represent a tiny element, one person.  Neither of the bloggers claimed to be speaking for a community, and in fact made themselves a sub-set even of that sub-set of people.  What intrigues me is why was so much attention paid to these two bloggers rather than other lesbian blogs?  I cannot believe that there are not women who can write as well or as engagingly.  Again, that realisation, that the fakes were garnering more interest than the real members of these communities, is understandably frustrating.  I believe these faked blogs lay down a challenge to other bloggers to raise their game.

It seems that McMaster's motives were about vanity, seeing if he could pull off the deception.  Both Graber and McMaster had a misguided view that through blogging a particular character in a particular setting (a lebsian mother with three children in the USA, a lesbian woman in Damascus - McMaster's wife is a specialist in the economy of Syria) then they could voice issues that they felt were being neglected.  Ironically they did achieve this.  Their blogs were well written and engaging.  For 3-4 years many lesbians who you might imagine could spot a fake, as well as non-lesbians like myself, believed they were genuine.  This suggests that neither wrote anything that contradicted what even lesbians would expect lesbians to write online.

Louise Carolin, deputy editor of a lesbian magazine 'Diva' likened the blogs to faked cancer blogs. 'They remind me of the cancer blogs that have been revealed as hoaxes, some of which have been a deliberate financial fraud, and others just an emotional one. Many lesbian women feel very isolated – especially if they're from a minority ethnic or religious background where it's difficult for them to come out – and the internet is somewhere they go for support and a sense of community.'  She notes that the Gay Girl in Damascus 'blog tapped into a lot of very real experiences for people in Syria and the Middle East, and also people here [the USA] who identified with it. I think it's absolutely indefensible.'  She added that 'MacMaster and Graber are unusual in that they chose to operate with such a huge sense of entitlement at such a high level, not just for a brief kick but apparently under the delusion that they were doing something good for lesbians. And they weren't just infiltrating a website or forum run by lesbian or bi women, but actually running the operations themselves.'  What 'operations' were they running?  Surely it was better that they were blogging rather than penetrating discussion groups which all of us know has long been going on.  People can easily click away from a blog.  There was no financial fraud and at the stage when McMaster realised he was having real world impact he came clean.  To assume that the two men were led by some male dominance ethic that they had to get out and control every space seems highly exaggerated.  The motives are common: there is an intellectual buzz in creating a character which people believe is real; it is rewarding to know people are listening to you.

Susie Orbach a psychotherapist has said that in being lebsians online the men were engaging in a 'double inversion – exploiting the 'illegitimacy' of the person they were impersonating to give themselves legitimacy'.  This is an interesting element.  A lot of white men do not realise that they are the dominant socio-economic group in the world.  With the disappearance of class politics they have even been stripped of that 'tribe'.  When equal opportunities policies in UK companies emphasise the protected characteristics of gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality and only recently race, white young and middle aged men can come out feeling that they lie outside all of the Venn diagram circles.  In addition, they seem by automatic default to be the wrongdoers in any scenario.  In the current economic climate men can feel discarded and at the back of the queue.  In the old days in the UK at least, they would have at least been able to link with others of their social class and complain about the greedy bosses or the lazy workers as appropriate, but with the 'me first' ethos, even that consolation has gone.  

All of us like to feel special, to have people pay attention to us, so I am not at all surprised that in a context in which you can pretend to be what you like that men adopt this 'double inversion' basically so that they feel they are being listened to.  The vast majority of men are not oppressors or sustainers of a patriarchical society but like all people they hate being ignored and having learnt or been taught which groups are focused upon right across companies, they see that to put themselves in that category, even only briefly can relieve their sense of uselessness or being ignored.  Ironically the decline of feminism and the sexualisation of society is not helping this as whilst women are being pushed into submissive roles and dress once more, men are being assumed to be the strong earners which of course conflicts with the current socio-economic pattern, making them feel even more redundant and keen to doubly invert that position, even in just one context, to find some relief for that sense of being discarded.

This fear by white men has been identified by the Pakistani female writer Iman Qureshi, though she sees it as stemming from egotism rather than a lack of ego.  She said 'I think the rise of identity politics – a concerted effort to give marginalised people a voice – has made some white heterosexual men a little paranoid or insecure, so they invent an oppression and position themselves as victims. I would assume MacMaster felt ostracised from his 'own people', as it were, and as a result took on a persona in which he felt he could be heard without criticism. This seems to me to be a hero complex that's really a very smug delusion – 'Look at me, look at how I'm standing up for oppressed people.''.  I do not agree that it is a hero complex, because neither blogger was really standing up for the people, they were seeking to situate themselves actually in that group.  Carolin feels that they were misguided allies of lesbians, but I think she misunderstands the need the men had.  Whilst their blogs did raise issues relevant to lesbians and in fact women in general, the driver was more that for once it gave them a context in which people would take time to read their words ironically without prejudice.  If they had done like me and created a blog with their true identities, you can guarantee they would have long ago been censured or more likely never attracted readers.

The irony is, that each white man seems to have to carry the burden of blame not only for the behaviour of every other white man in the world, but all of those throughout history, going at least back to 18th century slavery if not further.  This is one reason why people in this category are liable to seek a different identity as they know that whenever they challenge anything they can be simply thrown back by the charge of 'men are rapists', 'white men ran the slave trade' and so on.  This behaviour remains acceptable though it is no longer acceptable, for example, to blame all Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Mongolians, Spanish, etc., whether men or women, for the atrocities committed by their ancestors.  As a white man operating in the public arena, you can certainly feel you are carrying a kind of 'original sin' around with you, that you are complicit in every cruel action carried out these days, simply because of what you are.  No protestations or even demonstration of your sense of equality can scrub that stain off you.  It is important to recognise that we are all individuals and we are not even responsible for the behaviour of our parents let alone people of the same ethnic group/gender that we have never met. 

I do not charge every English woman with the horrors inflicted by Mary I or the warfare of Empress Matilda or all the colonial atrocities committed across the British empire during the reign of Queen Victoria.  Thus, why should I be charged with the offences carried out by British slavers or colonialists when no-one in my family was ever any of those things and why should I feel guilt because an American man decides to beat or rape a woman simply because he is of the same ethnic group as me and of the same gender?  I condemn all of these things and can understand how many men feel that the blame apportioned on them inhibits them speaking on any issue in a public forum. Yes, we need to be held responsible for our own behaviour but the crimes of others should not be used as a tool, as it is by default in Western blogosphere space, to effectively shut down white male contributions.

Where this tendency comes from can be seen from the comments of another female writer, Beatrix Campbell.  She has seen the blogs as typical of the desire by men to dominate all forms of media and get into spaces where they would not normally appear/be permitted and thus by such actions, in fact to continue to marginalise already marginalised groups in these contexts which would normally allow them status.  To Campbell, McMaster 'clearly doesn't have a clue about what the politics of identity has tried to reveal, which is, first, that we are not all white men, and second, that white men are always treated as the supreme identity. Here he is, doing the same thing – claiming the virtue of representing a repressed condition, in a repressed part of the world, deciding that he is the person who will give that voice. That is the supreme irony. Here we have a boundaryless white American boy absolutely habituated to a kind of supremacy, and reiterating that supremacy through his blog. It speaks to an omnipotence that doesn't understand its own limits.'  This entirely misses the point.  The motivations do not stem from any sense of 'supremacy' or 'omnipotence' in fact the complete reverse.  Here were men feeling left out for not having any of the stated protected characteristics who knew, that, as a consequence their writing would attract no attention, or at best, that of people, who as intelligent men they would not really want to engage with, found strategies that allowed them to be heard.  Clearly this massaged their egos.  In addition, there was probably a sexual frisson, as both men are straight and McMaster is married, they no doubt like the company of women and to engage intimately with them (and ironically flirted online with each other), so there could have been a thrill to brighten a dull day.

The false representation of yourself in the online context has long been noted. Tim Jordan noted in 1999 '"cyberspace will be liberatory because gender, race, age, looks or even 'dogness' are potentially absent or alternatively fabricated or exaggerated with unchecked creative license for a multitude of purposes both legal and illegal'; summarising views expressed by pioneer John Gilmore as early as 1996.  Furthermore, David Trend wrote in 2001 of the ability to 'computer crossdress' as well as the 'freedom to 'pass' as a privileged group'.  Whilst lesbians may not feel they are a privileged group, we all need to recognise that for many equal opportunities initiatives, whilst very necessary have a by-product of actually making marginalised groups, if not privileged, then at least more 'legitimate' than the white male persona.

I can understand the anger from lesbians, other women and other online readers to feel that they were successfully duped by not just one but two bloggers over quite a period of time.  I was one of those who was duped. However, to present the incident as some sinister conspiracy by men to control yet another media outlet so that they can sustain, even extend white male hegemony, misses so much.  What we have seen is very well constructed fictions that are worthy of a leading novelist.  They were probably done to pep up bruised egos feeling discarded by Western societies' focus on protected characteristics.  However, the criticisms that these two blogs have broken some unwritten code about online behaviour, especially the creation of personas, is incredibly naive and betrays an ignorance of how the online world, whether the blogosphere or elsewhere has operated right from its birth.  Peter Steiner's cartoon 'On The Internet No-one Knows I'm A Dog' appeared in 1993, yet, that simple observation seems to have been forgotten by people who through their professions, should know that principle even more than the average person.  What seems most incredible is not the original deceptions, but the response that has revealed that so many commentators who should know better, in their love affair with the blogosphere have forgotten lessons taught to primary school children about internet usage.

P.P. The criticisms continue to roll in even as I have been writing this posting, now McMaster and people who have supported him are condemned on the basis that one commentator noted: 'western audiences will only embrace Arab gay movements if those movements attempt to mimic western gay movements'.  This seems to go beyond the lesbian condemnation of the blogs and yet, again seems naive.  Of course, people flock to what is interpreted in a way they find easy to consume.  Few Westerners read Arabic (very few read Chinese or Hindi or know any language bar their own), so they are going to be attracted to something that is in a format they can consume. 

What is intriguing on this basis is that they were drawn to a lesbian supposedly in Syria, a country that means very little to most people in the West, it does not even have oil!  I accept that gays in Arabic countries might not want the support or even the interest of Westerners, but that goes against the sense of shared community that ironically blogs and other internet communication fosters.  To some degree, I feel that this incident highlights that ultimately whilst people may be interested in a blog because they feel an empathy (however much that empathy is stimulated by a fiction), a curiosity or a frisson, but that people stay with a blog due to good and stimulating writing.

Blogging the Blog 10: The Demand For Brevity

Given what I have written recently about running out of steam in terms of blogging, I was interested to read on the BBC website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8497427.stm that interest in blogging among teenagers, aged 12-17, has halved from 2006 with only 14% involved in keeping blogs, though among people aged 30+ it rose from 7% in 2007 to 11% now.  To some degree this is no surprise, young people like to 'own' the technology they use and are resentful when others such as their schools, colleges or other public bodies let alone people like politicians beginning trying to use the facilities to try to get their message across.  Once adults are involved it stops being 'cool'.  This may be why young people have not engaged with Twitter which with its brief often text message style communication would appear to be suited to them.  However, who is the most renowned Twitter user in the UK?  Though many pop stars and DJs use it, the figurehead here is Stephen Fry, a gay actor, presenter, writer and raconteur aged 52.  In fact if you search for Stephen Fry on Google, the most popular suffix to his name is 'Twitter'.

There is another reason which, I feel discourages young people from both blogging and Twitter and that is because it needs commitment.  It is far easier, for example, to post an odd mood statement once in a while or upload some photos or link to a YouTube clip from a Facebook page once in a while.  Online friends may be concerned if you do not add anything for a while, but the core of the page with your picture, interests, etc. remains whatever you do.  Conversely, campaigns, for example about the 'A' level biology exams, are now based on Facebook or MySpace groups rather than someone blogging their grievance.  These things come and go rather than continuing for months.  So what is enduring at present are things you do not have to keep doing but can engage and disengage from at will.

For a blog, if you do not see a posting in the past month, you tend to assume the site is dead and you look somewhere else.  Of course, even aged blogs can be useful and I often find postings about things from a few years back there, but in terms of speaking about the individual behind the blog and what interests them, then a stagnant blog is not useful.  Blogging is like keeping an old fashioned diary and while some people do that many people who start one have given up by March, so lasting about as long as the average blog.  Perhaps one reason why I am still blogging is because I have kept a diary every day for the past 32 years anyway, some of it has formed the basis of postings here.  Blog implies chronology.  The word comes from 'web log' and a log is something like captains of ships keep noting day by day activity.  If nothing is reported it is at least moribund if not dead.

One explanation in the BBC article about the reason for the decline of blogging among the young is the ability to give 'status updates' much more easily, and this is what they term 'micro blogging', though, really that is a misnomer, because no log is kept, it is replaced by a difference status indicator.  Another explanation is that blogging is seen as too involved as you have to string some paragraphs together and that is seen as too burdensome.  This, I feel ties into a development which I have began to experience, especially at work.

In my company, some senior staff see even a single panel of an email screen of text as 'too much' and I get complaints about 'lengthy' emails.  The trouble is often issues are more complex than a couple of paragraphs.  Especially as I have experienced using individual words from emails back against me, taking them out of context, I now take a great deal of care with what I write.  I was told I needed more modal verbs, like 'could', 'would', 'should' and to make phrasing more ambivalent rather than certain.  Yet the demand for short email messages cuts against this.  Email is a terse form of communication and now we are being pressed to make it epigrammatic.  Haiku is a difficult skill that most of us cannot pull off.  The hazard of summarising things for Powerpoint slides, which only really comfortably hold four points, has long been identified for contributing to the explosion of the space shuttle 'Columbia' in 2003 as it meant that in presentations minor, but vital technical issues could not be commuicated to the necessary audiences.

The assumption that all ideas can be contained within a particular length of communication is a dangerous one, as is the assumption that 'long' automatically means 'bad' or 'inefficient', especially as no other information about what was wrong or superfluous in the email is given; the length itself is now an offence no matter what content it touches on.  I have pointed out that mine only have multiple paragraphs when dealing with complex issues; many conversely are only a single sentence or even just a clause.  People seem, also to forget, that emails are a record and ironically those people who whine about long emails seem the ones most likely to send you reminder emails about what they sent you last week even when you have it.  I know as a society we have a shorter attention span than people of the past (fancy attending a 2-hour speech by a politician as in Gladstone's day anyone?) but there need to be limits as to how far we try to force communication into being as brief as possible.  While none of us want turgid lengthy text, we also need to see that a thorough exposition of an issue, especially ones seeking a decision in business, is vital and not to discourage them simply because it is not the fashion.

Blogging The Blog 9: Running Out Of Steam?

This is my 600th blog posting which may seem an odd number to commemorate but when I look down the list of postings for editing they are listed in groups of 300 so I am now at the top of my second page.  This blog has now been running for two years and nine months compared to the three months which is supposed to be the average.  However, as the few postings last month show, perhaps I am running out of things to say.  I think in part it is now that I am in a job and so do not have the time between writing applications to comment on the world, nor the time to read the newspaper or websites to pick up stories to explore.  I think a large part of the problem is that when I started the blog I had a lot of ideas, complaints and observations, fiction too, that I had been carrying around for many years looking for an outlet.  Over the past couple of years I have probably covered the bulk of those things and with me not going on holiday or travelling anywhere new and now having a very shrunken social circle compared to ten years ago, I am just not getting new input to stimulate comments. 

I identified three types of blog: the journal blog, the scrapbook blog and the anger management blog.  In terms of the journal blog, I have too few new experiences to warrant postings of that kind. I do get some, but they tend to be a reflection on what I read in the newspapers and what I see on the road.  Having to travel for my work and being holed up in a hotel room for much of the week, these are narrow horizons so reduce the stimulus that would provoke blog postings.  In terms of travel I have not left the UK for almost two years now and that time it was only for two days.  I have not been on holiday even in the UK for almost two years and on that occasion I was so ill I could not appreciate it.  I have no holidays planned and not even any work travel outside my daily and wekely commutes. Consequently, experiences outside my home and work towns are limited and even in them I move in very small circles from home to the shops and back and from the hotel to work and back.  There is some artificial input from recounting my journeys of decades passed, but by definition they are finite and I am going to soon run out.  Also it simply emphasises how little I am doing with my life these days.

The lack of source material also applies to me doing a scrapbook blog, I have scoured the internet for items of interest to me to include and until I begin a new interest have exhausted the supply. With my addicition to online gaming and when tired of that, basic computer gaming, I am not even writing fiction to potentially fill these pages.  Detective novels set in Weimar Germany seem to be an established sub-genre these days so the wind has been taken from my sails in that regard as I see these books selling on Amazon and know my stories will never get to that situation.  I no longer have the time to write things and knowing how many amateurs are out there writing (between 42-49,000 novels are entered at a time for amateur writing competitions that are run in the UK) it seems pointless to add my stuff to the pile anyway.

I have come to realise that there is another type of blog: the review blog and there seems to be hundreds of these reviewing things  especially like fashion and interior design. The trouble with me is that I consume things far too late to have a review blog.  I read books I buy from charity shops; I only watch movies on DVDs; I have not bought new clothes for years; my household items are  second hand or remaindered.  My reviews of movies or pop music or computer games tend to come long after the things I am looking at have gone out of fashion.

I anticipate, that all I will have left is the fourth type of blog: the anger management blog.  I noticed that not blogging much last month did leave me far more tense and crotchety than usual.  However, whilst the blog is clearly an outlet for my anger it also seems to foster it and it seems that I am even running out of things to be angry about.  I guess there will be the election and especially if the Conservatives win, I will be complaining about the even more divided and poor country that will be being constructed, but that will be about it.  Being angry in my blog is good for me, and may offer consolation for people feeling angry about the same things, but perhaps is insufficient a resource to sustain my blog for long.

Once I had envisaged this blog going on for many years, but now it seems to be starved of source material just as my life is empty of experiences and will be as long as I am clinging to short-term contracts and cannot afford to do anything except save for the next period of unemployment.  I envisage that existing going on indefinitely from now on, especially given that my sector of industry looks on the verge of a severe collapse.  While I may have reached the 600 posting mark, I have little expectation that I will reach 700.  Maybe that is right.  Perhaps this blog is dwindling because I have said everything that I need to get out of me and from now on would simply end up repeating myself as I encounter the same irritations again and again.

Blogging the Blog 8: Characters Come To Life

I advise anyone who is running a blog to do a search for your blog's name once in a while. Often I find references to this blog on other sites that I was oblivious to. Recently I was using someone else's computer and not wanting to connect my Rooksmoor identity to my real identity, rather than simply type in the URL which would then be left in their 'History', knowing that they use a different search engine to me so were unlikely to stumble over my searches, I simply searched it and then linked through. It was interesting to see who had referred to me. There were the references to my posting on 'It Happened Here' which I have mentioned. I was particularly pleased to see a reference from a Liverpool community discussion board to the section of my article on the Great Unrest of 1910-11 and I joined in providing a book reference and filling out some facts for one commentator who seemed to have mixed up some pre- and post-First World War events.

Of course it is not simply humans who reference your blog. There seem to be a whole slew of engines that go around listing links to topics that they think might be of interest. MattFind.com references this blog for my comments on Catherine of Aragon back in October 2007 and on counter-factuals in June 2008. Another such engine, Technocrati, has picked out a more recent posting, from last month, on restraining Wilhelm I whereas the Yahoo! Glue system seems interested in my posting this January about the assassination of King Edward VII. What is interesting is that my counter-factual speculations are listed alongside true historical content.

There is another set of engines, it seems, particular to Germany, though I imagine they have appeared elsewhere too, that goes in search of specific named individuals. The first one I came across was produced by PeopleMe.org about Ingrid Langen. It describes itself as 'a people directory made by users'. Though I have not had any particular interest in the topic, I have been made aware now that I am looking for a job, that it is important to be able to be found on the internet. This can work for you in two ways, graduates are warned about having nude or drunken pictures of themselves spread across their FaceBook and MySpace pages which will embarrass them when potential employers search from them online. Conversely applicants complain that companies that have none of their current employees on a site such as Linkedin, have no credibility and are clearly not worthwhile attempting to work for (though given the economic climate they may have to be less choosy). You are supposed to produce a blog. However, my given the atmosphere of closed minds and bullying I have revealed about my company it could be really detrimental to my career hence me speaking my mind but keeping my identity out of it.

Anyway, clearly PeopleMe (it is actually peopleme but that is difficult to make out in text like this) has Ingrid Langen as a member or perhaps wants her as a member and so asks any passing surfers if she has a blog, MySpace/Bebo/FaceBook/Xing, etc. spaces and if you have any photos of this woman. So how does that link to my blog? Well, it lists all references to Ingrid Langen and importantly references to parts of her name. This means it picks up a ragtag of stuff: the blog of Ingrid Glomp; a man called Gregor from London who writes in German on MySpace and has 'langen', the word for 'long' in one sentence and talks about an Ingrid in the next sentence; the Facebook site of Sigurd Langen, and then the (presumably) relevant LinkedIn spaces of an Ingrid Langen and a Dutch woman called Ingrid Langen de Kanter. You may ask why my blog appears in this very odd list and this is simply because I referred back June 2007 to Eugen Langen the man who constructed the Wuppertal monorail system, the Schwebebahn at the end of the 19th century. I do wonder if more internet systems are actually reading my blog than human beings are!

Looking through the search results for this blog, however, it became even more fascinating and suggested that the desire by society and in particular business to have everyone present on the internet and their details made available (presumably to sell to marketing companies) is leading them down uncertain paths. I found three names that were associated with my blog picked up by the People123 website, another German one. Again it is seeking details, telephone numbers, email addresses and photos of these people across social websites and other locations on the internet. The three people it picked up from this blog are: Werner Meinders, Patrizia Emmerich and Claude Goethals (to be accurate that should be Andre-Leon-Claude Goethals). Now, aside from many other real men in France, this Claude Goethals was a character, a French journalist, in my Beckmann story, 'The Ruthene'; Werner Meinders was another character, this time a 44-year old civil servant for the Bavarian Landesfinanzamt, in my story 'Reliable Witnesses' and finally, Patrizia Emmerich, a young woman living with her mother and grandmother in a block of flats in 'The Dead Landlord'. I try to avoid affectations in my writing because they can really hamstring a decent story. I did allow myself a small one with 'The Dead Landlord' and all the surnames of the characters are of movie directors or actors, many from Hollywood of the past 50 years.

The reason why these characters have been picked out from all the ones that appear in my story is because there are real individuals who have a place on the internet with these names or similar ones. However, what fascinates me, is that my fiction is adding elements to the accretion of data around identities on the internet. Does this mean that I might mislead people, if they do a quick search and find me having written a fictional character who is a civil servant or lives with her mother and they lazily associate it with the real person they are encountering. I trust that would not be the case. It does rather put a great deal of burden on online authors. I always try to get names for my characters appropriate not just to the country but also the time period. Names go through fashions very quickly and it is very jarring to read a novel in which historical characters have modern sounding names. Before the age of internet search engines, I used to read through the indexes of history books about the country I was writing the story about at the time and simply copied down the names of the people listed there. Thus, hopefully the names in the Beckmann series are appropriate for Germany of 1923 rather than Germany of 1973 or 2009. You have to be subtle as when you feature characters who are middle aged or elderly, you need to be looking for natural names of people when they were born 40-80 years, earlier, so for the Beckmann stories, names not only of the 1920s but also the 1840s-80s were needed.

In future I probably need to be more careful when I select names for stories that I am going to post online. Given how much fiction is made available this way whether on blogs, websites or as e-books, I imagine I am not the only one who has encountered this issue. Next time I write someone as a murderer, especially if they are a German character, I will make sure that I check the internet first so as to avoid tarring someone with such an accusation, at least in the eyes of these numerous searching engines. In reality there are some people who end up with names that become famous. In my career I have worked with an Alan Parker, a Diana Ross and a Michael Foot and many of us have probably known a Michael Jackson, none of whom are the celebrities who share their names which must make it a nightmare when trying to find that ordinary person's MySpace page. I suppose I worry a little that I will become like Emma Thompson's character in the movie, 'Stranger than Fiction' (2006) which did not get much attention but is well worth watching for the central idea. In it Thompson's character, Karen Eifel, finds out that the novel she is writing is shaping the life of a real man, Harold Crick and as the man is to die in the novel this puts her in a moral dilemma. So I hope that the reputation of no-one sharing a name of one of my characters ends up being tarred with what their fictional counterpart does. In our world where everything has to be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed and numbered by internet tools if not by humans, then I can only hope that authors will not be held responsible for happening to select a particular name for a particular character who behaves in a particular way. Folks, it's fiction, no matter what your search tool might think.

P.P. - 11/02/2009: I was interested to find that my views on the dangers faced cycling on British roads was picked up, ironically by 'The Guardian' news blog last July: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2008/jul/09/dangerouscycling
My research on the Great Unrest has formed the basis of the best response to an Answers@Yahoo.com question on this period, with a decent quote from my writing. I find some of the responses to these questions, even the ones picked as the best by the asker, often to be weird or inaccurate, but I can hardly complain in this case!
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090112100700AAftLEj

Blogging the Blog 7: Leaving Traces

By chance working on someone else's computer today and not wanting to put in the URL into their system, I search for this blog through Google. Of course they could see what I have been searching for but only if they went out of the way, more lengthy than looking in the URL bar at the top. I was intrigued to see that this blog has been picked up by sites that monitor blogs. 'Clasped in an Iron Hand' seemed to have attracted most attention of these electronic viewers, but other postings such as the one about Chinese bloggers had been scooped into 'Sphereit' which seems to be a system that links blogs to the news stories they feature. I did wonder how the newspapers now pick up on bloggers' views of events. I guess they have their regulars but this no doubt draws their attention to others. Apparently my blog has an Authority rating of 1. I do not know how high the ratings go but I saw one which is rated 14.

Someone else had copied my posting What If? Art 3 into their blog about manipulating images and my Atals of Imaginary Worlds 7 not surprisingly is included in a list of blogs referring to the artist Kim Coles who I referred to in that posting. Another picked me up because I referred to both Aretha Franklin and 'Nessun Dorma' and apparently Aretha sung that song recently.

I have found other Rooksmoor references. There is apparently a Rostra & Rooksmoor gallery in Bath, a shame I missed it when I was in the city in March. Rooksmoor Autumn Tango is also the name of a particular labrador. Of course Rooksmoor itself is in Gloucestershire on the southern side of Stroud, so not that far from Bath, presumably where some of my long-lost relatives came from.

So, it is interesting what I said about blogs getting your ideas out there, though it seems often the only ones paying attention to them is search engines rather than people. It does raise the possibility that someone will stumble over my ideas. Clearly, though references to news items and to particular artists whether painters or singers, is likely to raise your profile a little.

Blogging the Blog 6: Self-Serving?

On Friday in an idle moment I followed up a few of the links on the 'Blogs of Note' from Blogger and came to 'When Tara Met Blog': http://www.tarametblog.com/ Now her blog could not be further away from mine, (though I do note her noting encounters with minor celebrities too), hers is all pink, almost anti-Goth (as in like anti-matter, not opposed to Goth) in its nature. Hers has been running for over three years, so she is well passed the usual life expectancy of a blog. She likes free giveaway items and twee things and has blogged about dating in New York and is now engaged in Los Angeles.

So, what was there to interest me on this blog? It is the posting of 8th May 2008, 'Are blogs self-serving?'. Apparently Tara had been challenged by a friend that her blog was simply there to serve herself. Tara defended her blog and like me she has found solace from blogging through the hard times. In this role it is no different to keeping a diary. Of course diaries may be seen as self-serving too, but the result of them is that the diarist/blogger is in a much better mental state to get on with their lives, so actually to be less of a burden to others. As she notes, you get feedback from people with an interest in similar things and often if you have a problem, are very supportive. If people are not interested then they do not have to read it. It is an excellent way to get out anger without harming anyone else. So, it is rather like a diary that you keep but you share with a therapy or help group.

I suppose we are in a generation in which everyone feels they have to be some sort of celebrity and it is interesting that celebrities are often keen bloggers, but maybe for the reverse effect, to show that they are real people under all the hype. So maybe blogging is our five minutes in the spotlight. However, given how much stuff is out there on the internet and how many blogs alone there are, it is hardly as if we are jabbing ourselves into everyone's lives. About 200 people have viewed my profile on this blog since it started a year ago, so I am hardly intruding into too many people's lives given how many people are active on the internet at any one time.

You could say that blogs are not so much about celebrity as about immortality. You can guarantee that even if you die tomorrow, your ideas will be recorded somewhere for people to stumble across for years to come. This is what motivated me to get my novels out there as I knew otherwise no-one would ever see them again and even if one person enjoys reading them or has thoughts stimulated by them, then that will be a gain for the world.

Of course the blogs that are run by families are very much like this, repositories for the life of a person/people. I have not seen anything about bloggers who have died, but I imagine there is something nice about having a blog to go and see Grandpa's/Grandma's thoughts especially in an age when we do not write letters to each other and photographs often are not even downloaded from the digital camera. We are in an incredibly ephemeral age which could easily be eliminated with an EMP blast in your neighbourhood. Of course, as with letters the condemnation of the departed may hang over you, but turning away from blogs is not a way to deal with that, it is just we have to learn new habits for the new facilities. Whilst pictures feature a great deal in blogs, at their base are words and I feel they are important for helping sustaining a literate culture.

I think ultimately blogs are not self-serving. They do certainly benefit the blogger, but in return for a lot of work being put in. I think they are vital as they expose millions of fragments of culture across the world. When searching for ideas and facts and opinions I come across so much on blogs which intrigues, entertains or infuriates me and that in turn stimulates my own thoughts. Society is about interchange of ideas and discussion. I know that in many parts of the globe such things are dismissed as unnecessary and I am not even thinking about the dictatorial states, but I think it is an element of what makes us human. So, blog on, you may be benefiting yourself, but you are also adding many pieces to the mosaic of humans on this planet.

P.P. Talking about my blog with a friend of mine who works in the media, he asked me how many subscribers I had to it and I said none. Consequently he dismissed it as a waste of time as clearly nothing that I said impacted on the 'media-sphere'. No wonder bloggers get a reputation for being self-serving if that is seen as the measure of the 'success' of a blog. Of course, that is not the criteria I use to judge mine.

The Time, The Place 2 - the Difficulty of Scheduled Postings

I usually welcome the new facilities that Blogger adds, but now I have encountered a difficulty with the ability to schedule postings. The time shown on my blog when I am writing postings seems to be 8 hours behind the time in the UK, so West coast of the USA. Before I publish a posting I generally go into Post Options and amend the time to UK time. I did that today with the posting about pushing Gordon Brown out, and then rather than the posting appearing immediately on the blog as usually happens it said it was 'scheduled'. At first I did not understand why it did this, then I realised it was because the time I labelled it with was 8 hours into the blog's future. To get it published I have had to amend the timing, though that was not a sound step with that particular posting as it mentioned information I could not have had yesterday, so I have had to bring it forward again now.

I hope that we are going to be able to disable the seheduling if we choose otherwise it is going to be like communicating with someone on Mars (or maybe even farther away, I cannot find the timings except for communicating with the Moon which has a delay of almost 3 seconds) with an 8-hour delay on what I write and then it appearing on the blog. All rather strange. The alternative is that we can set our blog clocks to our local time (useful if you are blogging as you travel around the world). Strangely the autosave notification works on UK time even if the posting clock is on Californian time.

P.P. I have found a way around it. When you first post you put on a time which has already passed in California. Then when the posting is on the blog, you go back and amend it to UK time and it stays still posted but still showing the correct time even though it is actually in the future for the blog clock.

Blogging the Blog 5: My 200th Posting

Well, eleven months have passed since I started blogging and here I am having reached my 200th posting. In the early days I did not think I would make it past the typical 3 months duration of a blog and I still find each month starting with me fearing that I will have nothing to say. I suppose the reason why I am still hear is because this blog has straddled so many different facets of blogging. It is a scrapbook for the things that interest me primarily counter-factual history discussion, maps of imaginary places and occasionally my own fiction. It is also a journal blog in that it charts my highs and lows, though despite feeling pretty suicidal in the first three months of this year, 2008 is turning out to be a lot less unpleasant than 2007 did though I can see repossession of my house coming in the future so more of me whining about the British housing market may be on the cards for 2009. This blog is also an anger management blog and I think that is what gives it vibrancy. The scrapbook items take time to assemble and write, but the anger management aspects come right out very quick and there is a lot to be angry about, not just with what China is up to and how the rest of the world is simply letting it get on with it, but the erosion of civil liberties in the UK and of course always the pig-headedness of so many British people whenever I encounter them in the car or broadcasting.

The title of my blog came from my wish to get things out of my mind and cast them away, in the way Ancient Romans did with curses (though when I went to Bath I found they used pewter as much as lead, but given that their pipes were made of lead I imagine there was a lot of it around to use in the same way, so I have stuck with lead) and I must say it has been incredibly successful in that. There have been loads of things that have irritated or interested me that I have been carrying around in my head for decades now and telling people about them whenever I can (often to the annoyance of friends, particularly women who seem far less tolerant to hearing the same point raised more than once than men are). This blog has proven to be the perfect vessel for putting them in as I can die a happy man knowing that all those things I wanted to get across to people are at least out there in the public domain and people can read them or ignore them as they choose, but at least they have been said.

So, this blog is a kind of download of me and all the clutter in my head. I really have no interest if anyone else is interested in what I say, though I know there are people out there who share my interests. Even if I stopped blogging tomorrow, I would have gained a great deal from this, it has really helped me to get my frustrations out in a non-shouting, non-violent way probably all to the better for myself and the people who live around me. Blogging allows that iota of revenge on the morons you encounter on the daily basis, it is like sounding your car horn when you are cut up by some idiotic driver, but it is a hooting that goes on and on and people can come along and listen to and agree or disagree. No matter what they feel about it the sound goes on and that is incredibly satisfying to the blogger and so, in turn, actually very therapeutic. I have no desire to stop blogging, in fact there are a couple of things I want to get on now. Will I have enough to last another 200 postings, well, we will have to see...

Blogging the Blog 4: The Case of Hu Jia

Previously in my thread 'Blogging the Blog', I mentioned how I had heard about Chinese people using blogs as a way to get the truth about what was going on in China out to other people both within and outside China. A particular example, Hu Jia, came to my attention this week and shows the risks that Chinese bloggers can face in producing blogs. Hu Jia used blogs including one he posted on daily, webcasting and online videos to focus on human rights abuses in China. He was arrested on 27th December 2007 and his wife, Zeng Jinyan and their 2-month old daughter have been placed under house arrest. Last year Jia and Jinyan were under house arrest for over 7 months. Chinese officials can deny him access to a lawyer and he can be held for up to 7 months before a trial is called (Mr. Brown, do we really want to start resembling China? Stop your plans to extend the period of detention without charge!). In theory Hu was not breaking laws by sending out information about China but clearly it is embarrassing to the government. The Foreign Ministry of China has told foreigners that they should keep out of China's human rights affairs and look to their own countries' behaviour instead. Such attitudes go back to what I have posted earlier about defending liberal humanism in an age of fundamentalism (which effectively the Maoist-Marxism pursued in China is a form of). There are certain baseline principles such as freedom of speech and civil liberties that everyone has the right to protest about no matter where they are challenged, whether in your own street or right across the world. Hu Jia is a hero of such liberal humanism.

In 1936 when Berlin was to host the Olympics, the German authorities released a number of political prisoners in the hope that it would calm criticism from journalists coming to the games. In contrast in 2008 when the Olympics are going to Beijing, the Chinese authorities seem set on showing up what kind of regime they run, to the full. Other dissidents such as Yang Chunlin and Liu Jie have also suffered in the current repression. I imagine my blog is now one of those China will block access too, but I am grateful that is the most they can do for me. Us residents of the blogging community should send our support to a fellow blogger punished for doing what we love and something that he has put to use for such a good cause.

Blogging the Blog 3: Chinese blogs and Freedom of Media

Sometimes you wish you had the ability to read certain languages and if I could I would be able to reinforce this post. However, I lack the ability to read Chinese script so will have to rely on the evidence of a woman called Prof. Susan Shirk who is Director of the University of California systemwide Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation, quite a mouthful, but she seems to know her stuff. She comments quite a great deal on current developments in China and it seems that she knows Chinese very well. Anyway, recently I came across some stuff she was outlining on changes in the media in China and how blogging is playing a role in that.

As you know, China is currently under a kind of dictatorship which is Communist in name but is thoroughly engaging with capitalist economics. Since the 1980s there has been a huge economic boom with millions of people moving to the cities and being able to travel far more freely, buy consumer goods and so on. It has been noticeable in the UK where many universities now seem to each recruit hundreds of students from mainland China whereas in the past they would have come from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Despite the move to economic freedoms (itself causing major environmental and also social problems as China's welfare state seems to have disappeared) political freedom has been far more restricted. Most obvious was the suppression of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tianamen Square in 1989 which were broken up by troops and tanks. This ended speculation (at least for a while) that China would follow the path of the USSR at the time, i.e. economic hardship leading to economic liberalisation and openness and then in turn to freer press and TV and to democracy (of course since then Russia has started going back to a more authoritarian system under Vladimir Putin.

As an aside, I was talking to a Chinese man who said that China currently has democracy at least to the level of democracy that there is in the USA and the UK. His view of Anglo-Saxon democracy is that it is dominated by multi-national companies and established families, along the lines of the Bushs, Kennedys, etc. in the USA and noble families in the UK. The people superficially have the ability to choose their government, but in fact it is these powerful families and their companies which run everything. Thus, he sees China with all its nepotism and Communist party leaders running large companies, as already having attained the level of democracy that the USA and UK have. Given that half of the British parliament (the House of Lords) is unelected, I would accept he has some points here, though I would not agree with his overall conclusion; neither Tony Blair or George Bush will be in power when they are 92. More importantly, though, it says something about the level of expectations of people in China, given that this man was in his 20s, spoke fluent English and had had the money to come to the UK for education.

A free media is vital for democracy. In China steps in that direction have almost come about by accident. Up until the early 1980s all publications, television, etc. belonged to the government and simply reported what the government wanted to say. The upper elite had access to information about the wider world, but they kept this to themselves. Journalists were civil servants and not only reported news to the public, but also reported on the feelings of the public to the elite. The cost of running such a system became impossible to sustain and so since then there has been a mushrooming of independent newspapers and magazines, particularly appealing to the urban middle class which has done well out of the economic changes. In fact most of them have a government newspaper at their core as these were the only people able to finance and get passed the bureaucracy to set them up. However, the news they report is much more extensive than in the old days. In addition, freer media from Hong Kong such as Phoenix television brings in a different view on things. Of course a free media may help democracy grow but it does not necessarily mean it is pro-democracy and a lot of the media in China is very nationalistic especially towards the USA and Taiwan.

So, where do the blogs come in. Well, the Chinese government still has a lot of power over the media and can push out editors they do not like. They still control the 11 television stations and 40 provinicial television stations and they still produce numerous official newspapers. Even on the internet they patronise news digest websites and ensure that the news they include on them is not out of step with what the government wants to cover. However, the internet cannot be a closed loop in the way that even television media can be. The Chinese government has heavy filtering of internet material accessible from China and some western companies have been criticised for collaborating on such filtering. In addition now, if you visit sites that are felt to include material that is inappropriate to what a person in China should be looking at, automated images of Chinese police appear on screen to tell you off. However, blocking and monitoring the internet is costly. Singapore which has an authoritarian government had to stop trying to control the internet coming into its country in the way it does with newspapers and television because it began to cost too much. The Chinese government continues to foot the bill for such control within its borders.

The Chinese government's filtering, despite the numerous monitoring staff its Department of Propaganda employs, is not perfect and things sometimes slip through, sometimes only for a few hours before they are eliminated. Now, apparently, however, there are bloggers waiting to snatch up such nuggets of news from the outside world. They email them around very quickly and put them up on their blogs so that Chinese people can read what is otherwise being denied to them. Obviously the Chinese government can go around eliminating blog by blog, but speed of communication and the number of bloggers will always mean some escape to post news of that kind in the weeks and months to come. Sometimes I worry that much blogging is little more than navel-gazing, so I guess my faith in its value was partly restored by realising that some bloggers out there are actually helping to spread knowledge and indirectly (hopefully) move the world's most populated country closer to (true) democracy.

Blogging the Blog 2: A 10th Century Blog

In August I produced a posting outlining what I saw as the types of blogs that are in existence (in my view - journal, scrapbook and anger management) and also thoughts on why blog for a certain period of time. Meanwhile I came across a book published in 1967 called 'The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon'. Before you jump to any conclusions 'pillow books' have nothing to do with erotic literature. They originated in Japan in the 10th century and in modern times have been termed zuihutsu, i.e. 'random notes' or 'occasional writings'. They are termed pillow books as people generally wrote them when they went to bed. Also, Japanese bedding tends, even now, to be rolled up during the day and people do not have the bedside tables that are common in the West, so things were kept inside the pillow instead. Now Japanese pillows even into modern times have not been textiles and soft, rather they are made of wood and are more like headrests than pillows. See the movie 'Memoirs of a Geisha' (2005) for a good picture of what they look like. They were often hollow and had little drawers that could be pulled out from them to hold personal things like pillow books. Pillow books come from court life as courtiers had the time and (unlike their Western counterparts) the literacy and writing skills to keep them. Poetry as a form of interaction was also highly rated in Japan throughout history and led to such developments.

Sei Shonagon was a lady-in-waiting at the Emperor's court from about 989-999 CE (also known as 989-999 AD). She came into regular contact with the highest officials and their families in Japan at the time. The pillow book started off as something that was personal to her, but from about 996 onwards it seems that it became known to the court and she began to write in a more formal and better organised way. It is clear that like the blogger, Sei Shonagon was bringing the personal into a format that she kind of half expected to become public or at least readable by a certain circle of people. In nature the pillow book throughout resembles a blog. There are lists of varying lengths about what she likes and dislikes, gossip from the court, comments (often quite cutting) about people and their behaviour.

The personality which comes through in the book is very believable, with her snobbery, her emphasis on doing things 'properly', her respect for rank and manners, her adoration of the Imperial family, her dismissal of the behaviour of the lower classes, combined with her enjoyment of the seasons and various festivals, plus affairs with men of the court, all strike the modern reader like a typical upper or upper middle class woman working in the UK today. The fact that she discusses things in her life and experience on a non-chronological basis, often reminiscing about the past or speculating on the future and juxtaposes these with general discussions about the world and society seems incredibly like a blog, in a way that historical diaries such as that by Samuel Pepys (writing 1660-1669 CE) do not do. Obviously she lacked the modern technology but this enabled her to include physical things such as cloth from clothes worn during a certain festival or dried flowers in a way that a blogger can only do in visual form.

Having encountered Sei Shonagon's work, I do now wonder if people have been waiting a thousand years for the blog to be invented and that in some people it is a natural tendency that can now be realised. I suppose many people, myself included, feel their views and opinions are of value to more than just themselves and so have this desire to bring to the public view what they think about things. Maybe too we seek, like Sei Shonagon, to point to what we see as good and bad behaviour in the hope that we might shift people to act in what we view as a 'better' way. A thousand years from now, it will be interesting to see how many blogs of today will be accessible to the people of the third millenium and whether the continuities in what at the base interests and annoys us, and that desire in so many humans to draw attention to such things, remains.