Thinking about thinking

Stop for a moment and focus on breathing normally, in and out.  Can you continue to breathe normally while consciously thinking about it?  How about blinking?

The science is that these are both things our bodies do with no conscious effort on our part, when our conscious minds try to take over they can - but not as effectively as our subconscious.  There are many bodily functions that happen like this, including swallowing and shivering.  There are also functions can't be taken over by our conscious though no matter how much we try including sneezing, yawning and the beating of our heart.

I was recently caught up in an argument about whether thinking falls into the former or latter group (because apparently my friends are even more ridiculous than I am) and this led me to a startling discovery:  Thinking about thinking hurts my brain.

Before I explain the arguments, I feel I should point out that the question of how much the observer changes the observed looms large over this discussion.  When you (as observer) try and understand the way you (the observed) thinks, you can't help but be aware that you are observing yourself thinking thus negating the value of the observation in the first place because you can't be sure that the knowledge of the observation isn't having an effect on how you're thinking.

It's generally about this point that this happens:

Source

If, however, you've managed to understand everything so far then you're a) doing better than me and b) probably some sort of genius philosopher.

So the first side of this debate claims that the very fact that you can turn your thinking on itself and try to understand the way you think is proof that you can consciously control your thinking.  Fair point.

The other side of this debate claims that the process of thinking is still happening without you being aware of it and what you are thinking about is the progression of thoughts rather than the thinking itself.  Also fair point.

The response to this is that the awareness of the difference between thinking and thought demonstrates that thinking is what is being thought about, but this is rebutted by the fact that this difference is a thought itself.

From this point the argument gets into circular logic with both arguments supporting each other and there aren't enough gifs in the world to illustrate my confusion whenever this happens.

If you know the answer, or can explain this back to me in simpler terms, then please put me out of my misery!

Interesting?

The other day I was reading a request for bloggers with interesting blogs to get in touch, it finished with the following statement "be honest, you know if you're interesting or not."

The problem is, I don't.  I find my writing interesting, but I am well aware that different people have different tastes.  An example of this is my undying love of blue brie, a taste I am well aware is not shared by a great many people.

I believe I have mentioned before that I have social phobia.  This manifests in many ways, often intermingling with my anxiety disorder, but the most common is that something as simple as "you know if you're interesting or not" makes me overanalyse everything I know about myself and how people view me.

The thought process goes something along the lines of:
Do other people know if they're interesting?
They must or they wouldn't say that.
So other people know what is interesting and what isn't?
Am I somehow defective for not instinctively knowing this?
Maybe I just shouldn't say anything.
I have absolutely nothing to contribute to this situation.
I have absolutely nothing to contribute to any situation.
And eventually:

I try to avoid feeling like that through mental and behavioural control techniques, and I try to avoid talking about it because acknowledging that I have this thing hanging over my head which could cause me to break down in tears and thoughts tending towards the macabre at any given moment.

I like to think that on the whole I tend to present myself as fairly happy and upbeat and as people are often surprised when I tell them I have social phobia I assume I do that reasonably well.  However, I am never sure how much faith to put in other people's responses because they may just be humouring me.

So I don't know if anyone other than me thinks I'm interesting, I don't know if anyone else wants to read what I put here.  But I'm going to keep doing it because I enjoy it and I'm hoping that others will as well.

The Pretense of Adulthood

So I've decided that I should probably stop pretending that I'm a responsible adult type person and admit that for all intents and purposes I'm still roughly eight years old.

I have good reason for this conclusion, I spent most of yesterday playing board games, watching cartoons, reading comics and playing video games and eating almost every variety of food that is guaranteed to give you either diabetes or a heart attack.  Also, but I did all of this with a group of friends, all roughly my age, who also claim to be adults, some even responsible ones.

These are all things that I am regularly told are for kids and I should have grown out of it by now and, oh my absolute favourite, that I "should act more my age" which I'm starting to understand just means be more boring.  I don't, however, intend to let anyone else tell me what I should and shouldn't enjoy doing at what age - if I'm not hurting anybody and I'm not breaking the law then butt the hell out.

So I've decided not to bother pretending that I'm an adult with adult sensibilities.  I like YA fiction, I like wasting summer afternoons playing with water pistols and winter afternoons playing with nerf guns, I like my music too loud and my drinks too strong, and I enjoy awkward jokes about various bodily excretions more that I should.

Source is probably somewhere on Tumblr

I'm going to try and be more confident about it and not try and hide that I have the maturity of a squirrel with ADHD.  Except in job interviews.

Singing in Public

I'm one of those people who gets songs stuck in their heads really easily, usually this isn't a problem because it's almost as though my life has a backing track like in the movies.  Sometimes, though, it can be fairly annoying like yesterday when I had "We Are Never Getting Back Together" which although I am ashamed to admit that I even know that it's by Taylor Swift, I am pleased to say I have never, I repeat NEVER EVER EVER EVER, heard all the way through - so why the hell did I have it stuck in my head?

At least it wasn't anything by Justin Bieber

Today I had a similar experience when I suddenly realised that I'd been singing on the bus, not particularly loudly or anything but still.  To make matters worse when I looked up there were a couple of gentlemen in yarmulkes and that was when it struck me that "Springtime for Hitler" is much less funny when it is out of the context of the Mel Brooks musical The Producers. Other songs that aren't so good to sing in public include "Map of Tasmania" by Amanda Palmer, "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" from Avenue Q, and of course "The Song That Never End" because then everyone else has it in their heads for the rest of the week too.

You're welcome.

Anyway, having suddenly realised I'd been singing the lyrics "Look out, here comes the master race" to a some rather unimpressed Jews I may or may not have started to freak out a little.  Right up until one of them said "Personally I preferred Men in Tights" and we got into a discussion of Mel Brooks films.  The moral of that story is not to judge too early.

The problem I had today was not particularly common, though.  Much more common is that people decide that because I am happy to hum, whistle and (obviously) sing in public, that gives them the right to pass judgement on my taste in music.  I'm happy to discuss comparative taste with you, but not when your entire side of the discussion is that my taste in music is crap, especially if you like anything by Taylor Swift.

Essentially what I'm trying to say is that I'll sing on public transport if I want to and if you don't like it that's fine, but please understand that it's a public space and I am well and truly allowed to sing if I want to.  I don't like it when people talk at the top of their lungs on public transport but I manage to put up with it and not complain.

"Sigh"

I have a friend who always insists on writing omgosh in online chat to show that she isn't blaspheming.  This got me thinking about the number of people who say this but are atheists, shouldn't they say omct rather than omg as they believe in the chaos theory rather than any sort of god.  As an agnostic I feel I should probably write omubogapdpttsiitfohawmomnae (oh my unspecified being of great and possibly divine power that takes some interest in the fate of humanity and who may or may not actually exist) although possibly worded differently for the sake of not taking up almost an entire twitter post just to write the acronym.

I mention this first because it amuses me a little.  There is a particular language usage doesn't amuse me in the slightest, though, and that is people who say sigh.

Now I'm not talking about the word in general, it is a great word that is useful to describe a forceful outlet of breath.  No, I'm talking about people who say sigh instead of actually sighing, or worse those who sigh and then feel the need to emphasise it by saying sigh afterwards.

My issue with this is that a sigh is supposed to signify that whatever is being sighed at is not great, but it isn't terrible either, it's just meh.  Spending additional energy forming the word rather than just breathing out heavily is far too much work for something that wasn't worth the effort in the first place.  And yes I realise that I am doing the same thing by writing an entire post about it...

Well at least she didn't say sigh at me.  Source

My theory is that ranting about it here will make it easier for me to put up with it when my friends say it, which is far too often.  Then again, I have been informed that it annoys others when I use weird worth order such as "my liking is of the not so much variety" or try and enlarge the English language with things like "nonsensicality" so I probably shouldn't complain about it.

The first of what promises to be many posts about my clumsiness

I walked into a table today.  This, it turns out was not an intelligent thing to do as it still hurts several hours later.  The table was exactly hip height and I jabbed the corner right into the joint and my entire leg had pins and needles for a while afterwards.

This, though, is nothing compared to Christmas Eve this year, on which day I managed to close a dishwasher on my fingers, roll my ankle on a stone in the garden and stab myself with a knife, this last being particularly impressive as it was right in the middle of the back of the hand in which I was holding the knife.  I kinda want to explain the knife thing but I think it may well be more fun to let you try and imagine how I managed that feat; I do not condone, though, going right now to pick up a knife and trying to get the blade anywhere near the back of the hand in which you hold it.

This is all to say that I am very clumsy.  It is something that often surprises people because I pretty conscious of my body and movement the majority of the time as I have done quite a bit of dancing in my musical theatre.  I do not know why this is either and if I could work out what I do differently onstage to the rest of the time I would definitely change it because being clumsy is neither charming nor amusing, it is painful and humiliating, something that Hollywood doesn't tell you.

The really annoying thing about it all, though, is that after a good twenty years of people expecting you to be able to put one foot in front of the other without falling over and bruising at least sixty percent of your body, they tend to give more annoyance than assistance when you do hurt yourself.  The only solution is to laugh about it, mainly because the alternatives are to cry or to cover yourself in bubblewrap and only buy plastic cups.

Hmm, I promised to only do upbeat and positive posts this year, didn't I?  Well in that case, I'm taking ownership of my clumsiness, it is part of who I am and although I may not like it at times it has as much to do with making me me as my hair colour or height.  I hope to be less clumsy in the future, but in the meantime I will just pick myself up, dust myself off, wince at the various pains from this particular fall, and hold my head high as I walk on.

End of Days: Epilogue

Well the 21st of December 2012 came and went and nothing out of the ordinary happened the world ended, but it's okay because I fixed it.

Thank you, animated gif collection.

That's right, I averted the apocalypse, or at least that's the story I'm going to be telling my gandkids one day. Anyone who didn't live through the apocalypse will be relying solely on the word of those who did.  This means that they have to believe me if I say that when the Earth was on the brink of being destroyed by, I don't know, face-eating space monsters from Neptune or something and it was only due to the fact that my crack group of hardened circus enthusiasts discovered that the way to defeat them was to unleash the lemurs on them.

Utterly terrifying to Neptunian face-eating space monsters, true story.

All it needs for this plan to work is for everyone to get behind it, and the beauty of it is everyone gets to invent their own stories of glory in the heroic battles to defend our planet against the evil alien invaders.  I'm thinking I might also have hijacked one of their attack craft and flown it back to the mothership where I sabotaged their entire supply of tomato juice, meaning, of course, that I had severely crippled their fleet until they found another fuel source for their missiles.  Having completed my mission I jumped from the ship and did a James Bond style skydive where I wrestled a parachute from a soviet alien and successfully landed in the middle of a fashion show in which the models were exceedingly grateful.

So make sure that future generations are appropriately thankful that there were people willing to put their lives on the line to overcome this apocalyptic threat that the Mayans somehow managed to successfully predict over 5,000 year ago.

Either that or not even the alien invaders were prepared to miss the Doctor Who Christmas special.

I finally get it.

As an owner/operator of a set of balls, I have been kind of satisfied that I'd never seen either Mean Girls or Bring It On as I had been assured they fall squarely into the category of "you will not enjoy this film unless you have the capacity to ovulate, a tendency to eat copious amounts of chocolate when sad, and are avoiding doing maths homework.  Not having seen these films, I have just descovered, has meant that I have missed out on soooo many pop culture references.

For a few weeks now I have been frequently told by friends that I should see them both so that I can officially be part of the 21st century.  Today I had absolutely nothing else on so I decided to bite the bullet an watch them both, and I have to say, they were not bad.  Well played friends, well played.


I now understand the following quotes, presented in gif format for your viewing pleasure:

I do musical theatre so I've been saying this one for years anyway.  Source

My friends do in fact say this - far more often could possibly be called for.  Source

I know at least one person who knows this cheer (including moves) off by heart, her reciting this to me may or may not have been what convinced me to actually watch this film.  Source

And of course how could I not like this scene, it's Eliza Dushku dancing all sexy like! Source

As for Mean Girls:

Its been eight years since this film came out and I only now understand the many long and boring conversations about whether fetch is going to happen eventually.  Source

Overnight everyone went from saying "there is no limit" to "the limit does not exist" I now realise why.  Source

30% chance has in fact come to simply mean yes for so many people I know.  Source

Also, I now get so many more of the pop culture references in blogs and generally online that refer to these movies, how have I survived so long without understanding this?  Stuff at Snark Squad (which is awesome) is particularly good at referencing both these films, I strongly urge people to check it out, for no other reason that it's awesome and deserves more readers.

There you go, I now get to consider myself officially a part of the 21st century apparently.

...Unless there are other major gaps in my pop culture experience, like committing some sort of terrible faux par involved in the use of gifs or something.

Movie Trailers

I was watching a film that I own on DVD today.  Once I finished the film itself I watched the trailers part of the special features because I like watching movie trailers, I'm weird like that.

The reason I like watching trailers is that there is a definite art to making them appealing without including too many of the best parts of the film.  The truly fantastic trailers tell you everything you need to know to make a choice about whether the film is in a genre you like and whether it is worth you watching it without giving away a single major plot development.  Most trailers, though, give away some plot points in the hope that you'll be swept up in the movie enough to forget that you've already seen this particular joke/twist/whatever already - and yes some films even achieve this.

One of the trailers on this DVD (the main film was Men Who Stare at Goats btw) was for Nine which, being a musical, seems an odd choice to pair with this film.  Beyond it being a musical, and something to do with directing for either stage or screen, I still know absolutely nothing about this movie's plot.  I know it has a pretty exceptional cast, but as much as Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman and Daniel Day-Lewis make the film an appealing prospect I have no desire to see a film that I know nothing about, and don't feel an inclination to find out more (ok that's a lie in this instance, but only because its a musical - and I'm sure there are many people out there who wouldn't be swayed by the SINGLE SONG that the entire trailer is set to).  You can see it for yourself here.

My feelings about this trailer:

So for all that I just said I enjoy watching trailers, this one I didn't.  Think of it like someone saying I like fine art and then going to an exhibition of work by colourblind kindergarten children.  There seemed to be no understanding that some effort needs to be made to suggests more of the story than "I'm in the entertainment industry and I have some sort of directorial problem.  People sing at me."  Although at least it didn't resort to overenthusiastic voiceover man to just tell us what the story is about, that's usually a pretty severe cop out and even when it isn't it's pretty much been done to death.

For an example of a much better trailer recently, you need not go past the Les Miserables one, this has some truly great visuals and gives some indication of the story without giving it away, such as setting up the animosity between Valjean and Javert with the shots of Valjean pulling the rope to move the tallship while Javert looks down condesceningly from on high.  It gives snatches of a range of songs and even though it has a huge cast there is an indication of the motivations of most of the main characters and the world they live in.

My feelings about this trailer:

And this isn't just because, well it's Les Mis either.

What I'm getting at here is there is a definite art to making a trailer for a film and it can be so very enjoyable to watch a trailer that is well done and excruciating to watch one that isn't.  It's even more so when you have a particular interest in them.  I really don't understand why companies that pour millions of dollars into some of these films don't put more effort into the trailers and marketing for them, maybe someone could explain it to me?

An Appointment with the Doctor

Well I finally got around to watching the new trailer for the Doctor Who christmas special and I have one thing and one thing only to say about it - Damn you Moffat!  Also damn you Matt Smith and damn you Jenna-Louise Coleman!

I'm sure there will be people out there who say "but the trailer only came out two days ago, how does this count as finally?"  To all of those people I say you deeply underestimate my epic levels of squeeing, fangirl-esque love of Doctor Who!

I've had this on my computer for some considerable time and don't remember where I found it.

This isn't where I'd planned to go with this post, but the gif made me wonder again about how people can make a fuss about which doctor was their doctor.  Although I have liked some actors better than others they are all the Doctor and the Doctor is awesome - even when played by Colin Baker.

People who say this doctor or that doctor, usually David Tennant these days, was the 'best' or 'real' doctor need to understand that they are all the same character, and without the previous ten incarnations the version portrayed by Matt Smith wouldn't be the same without Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee, Baker, Davison, Baker, McCoy, McGann, Eccleston and Tennant.  If you pay attention you can see traces of all of them in the current doctor's personality, attitude and mannerisms.

The same goes for every doctor stretching right back to Patrick Troughton, they build on the character developed by all of the previous doctors.  So please stop telling me how much you miss number 10 and how much better he was than his, as Hartnell would put it, 'replacement' and just enjoy the show which is still the best thing on television.

PS. The same goes for Amy, Rory and our new companion who may or may not be Oswin or Clara or someone else entirely, again damn you Moffat!

Enough to be going on with

So, with one post down which explained virtually nothing about me or my blog, despite being all about me blogging.  I thought I'd dedicate this post to some kind of (probably half-assed) explanation of these topics.

First, me.  I am a person of the male persuasion from sunny Melbourne, Australia, for those of you who know Melbourne I say sunny because for at least five minutes now the sun has been out and as this is surely some sort of record for consistent weather I hereby add the appropriate epithet.  I am studying a masters in Information Management (librarianship for all you laymen (and laywomen? although that sounds vaguely sexist for some reason... (also, yay for nesting brackets!))) which actually has a hope of finding me a job unlike my BA in creative writing and media studies and honours in adaptation studies.

I have many interests including Doctor Who, Star Trek, using big and unusual words, musical theatre anything by Joss Whedon and reading (yes jsut reading, although I have favoured authors I felt it was unfair to my overall love of the printed word to single anyone out).  This is by no means a complete list of things that interest me, but its probably enough to be going on with.  Oh, also pirates.

Second, blog.  I think I might actually have said this last post, but I don't really know what I'm going to put here except that consistency between posts is unlikely and I make no apologies for changing opinions from one post to the next (I know weird for a blog, right?).

There is no intended theme for ths blog except my strange ramblings but that isn't to say that one won't develop in future. Stay tuned for further developments as they occur and refer to the previous paragraph on apologies for details about this.

Third, me blogging.  Ok, the majority of what I know of internet culture comes from the film Hackers and what has generally passed into everyday offline, face to face parlance.  That and Lolcats.  So to sum this up my knowledge of the interwebs esstially consists of the knowledge that animated gifs are:

Shamlessly stolen from A Quick Sucession of Busy Nothings

So there is my first animated gif, my first Tom Hiddleston reference and my first acknowledgement of another blogger, all in my second post.  I seem to be clocking this game!


As a final note to leave you with I was planning on labelling all my various references, both to pop culture and other, but I figured that would result in a ridiculous cloud with little relevance to anything.  So I won't, I will instead only label what I deem to be sufficiently well covered in a post to be noteworthy based on my mood at the time of posting.