People are not consistent

People are not consistent. Characters in stories are consistent, but only because if a character was as inconsistent as a real person, the audience would Bob Kelso took a number of seasons to become complicatedcomplain that the character was not well developed.

The annoyance to come from this is that a lot of our influence, our social information on how we should act, comes from media. And by media I don’t just mean movies and TV, I mean books, music, comics, YouTube and every way in which a story can be told.

Because of this, we develop a persona. We ‘create’ our own character,  and then we strive to portray this character in our day-to-day lives.

I have recently had the challenge (and the pleasure) of getting to know new people, and the question that has risen numerous times is “Is this person getting to know the real me?”

Continue reading “People are not consistent”

Death of the Author (And May He Stay That Way)

Picture 007 (200x150) I am currently going through my previous blog posts, so as to assign some tags to them. Prior to this, most of them were listed under the phenomenally useful “Uncategorized” category, or the deceivingly non-descriptive “General Posts” category.

General Posts. How can a post be a General Post? This thought amused me for a moment or two before I moved on to the next, far more interesting one.

If a post is about nothing, then it cannot be a post, can it?

General Posts, for me, was originally just a category to click at the last minute after having written a post and strongly disliking the concept of having a plethora of “Uncategorized” posts.

(The quotation marks are there because I am using the American spelling. I do not wish to confuse those who see the word “colour” in the same page as “Uncategorized.”)

In a few posts, I found some sentences which I would have liked to have written better. Some were linguistically iffy, some were grammatically stupid.

After a small amount of thought (that is, after all, the amount I am capable of without tangenting… er, where was I? Oh yes.) I decided that I would not, in fact, change them to the newer, grammatically superior wordings.

Continue reading “Death of the Author (And May He Stay That Way)”

TGIF.

Just in case you don’t know, TGIF means “Thank God It’s Friday.” And the reason I said that, just in case you’re braindead, is that it is in fact Friday. I’m still at work, but we get an early mark on Fridays, and the atmosphere of “Last Day of Week” is there.

I’ve been playing a bit of Counterstrike Source recently. I am in a CS:S clan named “nciac.” The story behind nciac is an interesting one.

About a year ago I was playing online, when someone came into the server and said that he was recruiting for his clan. He got a few responses from people in the chatbox saying “I suppose, am I able to get in?” but they were not very enthusiastic.

At this point I thought to myself ‘I wonder if I could do better.’ So I created the clan ‘nciac’, which actually means “Not Currently In A Clan.” I changed my name to [nciac] MaddenedMan, and got a Real Life friend of mine to add the tag to his name too.

Then I started pummelling people in the server with invitations to my ‘clan’ by saying that they didn’t have to apply to get in, everyone in the server was invited to join on the basis that nciac was an open clan.

By the time the other guy gave up and left the server, he had managed to recruit one person into his clan (the clan’s name derived sharply from toilet humour), nciac numbered around ten. Of course, not many of the people I actually recruited stayed with the clan very long, and now we number roughly three, but that’s still better than “**<PooPyClan>**” or something, which probably still only has one person in it.

But now, about a year on, [nciac] has occasional battles (the trick is that all three members know eachother in real life). NCIAC no longer means “Not Currently In A Clan”, except when people ask what it means. Now it is a source of pride for us, a simple collection of letters that sounds and looks good when arranged in a particular order.

But enough of that Counterstrike Sentimentality.

Can’t think of anything else to say right now, and I have a bit of work to do, so I’ll say goodbye. I may post again later today.

Adios