wordsmith.social/jonbeckett

I read a newspaper headline yesterday parroting the words of a fringe “scientist” that the human race was well on it's way towards extinction. I didn't pay the article much attention, given that it was published in a newspaper that's famous for it's end-of-world bias (a few flakes of snow generally herald the arrival of the next ice age in their breathless reporting).

I'm not so sure they're that far off the mark any more.

In the past 48 hours I've had to deal with somebody gaslighting a group of people, seen my words taken out of context, and then woke up this morning to Will Smith punching Chris Rock – which caused the world and it's dog to weigh in on social media with their take on it.

All the drama has made me realise how much of a chip I now have on my shoulder about the way people present their opinions. It seems lots of active users of social platforms project from the point of view that everybody else must share their views – and if they do not, then they are wrong. This is all fine, and you can largely take no notice of their foaming invective – until you know they are wrong.

I remember an XKCD cartoon some time ago of somebody hunched over their computer in the early hours of the morning – being asked if they were coming to bed. They answer something along the lines of “I just have to respond to this person on the internet – because they are wrong”.

I haven't just noticed this in social media – it goes on in all walks of life – politics, religion, peer groups – all sorts of things. It almost seems there is an unwritten contract that friendship or inclusion is predicated by shared views – no matter how twisted, fraudulent, or invented those views might be.

Anyway.

Quite enough for a Monday morning. I need to get on with some work. These thoughts have been burning a hole in my head all night though – so better to get them out. Feel free to ignore :)

It was “Mother's Day” in England today. Apparently the origins of mother's day in the UK date back to an era when people worked in service (think Downton). It became a tradition for service staff to be allowed the day off to visit family each year. I only heard this story on the radio this morning – I've never heard it before.

We spent the entire day standing in the cold at a rugby tournament.

It's been a tough year for our middle daughter. Rugby has always been “her” game, but she has always struggled to find a team where either she belonged, or where the club had any numbers of players in the same age range as her. This year has seen her as one of the few experienced players in her entire team – and while the rest have next year to progress, improve, and see success, she will not – she moves on to the senior team after facing defeat, after defeat, after defeat.

The surprising thing? She still loves playing, and looks forward to every training session, and every match.

Something rather odd happened today. Actually – scratch that – something very odd happened today. You need some back-story first though.

Several years ago my other half bought me a subscription to service that delivered a box full of nerdy stuff to you once a month. It was called “Loot Crate”. I received all manner of wonderful junk – from space invader neck ties, to spiderman mugs, and Superman figurines.

At some point during the subscription I received a “Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure” t-shirt. I've worn it. Lots.

While taking a break from work this morning – waiting for the kettle to boil – I busied myself with folding washing that had been taken off the washing line last night. In the middle of doing so, I folded the blue “Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure” shirt.

A few minutes later I wandered past the mirror in the hallway, and something deep in my subconscious noticed that I was wearing the “Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure” shirt. For a moment or two I frowned at myself – struggling to put together what I had seen, and what I was seeing.

I walked back into the lounge, picked up the pile of clean clothes, and started frowning. I even took a picture of myself – wearing the shirt, and holding the shirt at the same time – and sent the selfie to my other half.

“I think I broke the universe...”

“What?! How!?”

“I don't know!”

Neither of us can work it out. I've only ever owned one of the t-shirts, but now I have two. I wonder what else I can duplicate, and where I have to put it for it to happen?

Also – given the conservation of mass law, I wonder what disappeared in order to conjur the replica t-shirt?

After a few days break from the blogging universe – during which time I built myself a rather lovely island on the internet and then quite predictably burned it to the ground – I'm quietly re-connecting a little this evening.

I'm still not sure if it's a good idea.

Time appears to be my enemy at the moment – which invites it's own guilt trip. It feels like I haven't kept in touch with anybody for quite some time now. I need to devote an entire evening to just writing emails, calling people, and so on. I know men are traditionally terrible at the whole social thing, but it's no excuse really.

I suppose working from home hasn't helped much. While out for dinner with close friends last night we talked a little about it – about not leaving the house for days on end sometimes -about working through countless lunchtimes. It's a slippery slope.

I really do need to get the running shoes back out, and force myself out of the house early on a morning. I love running as the rest of the world wakes up – seeing deliveries arrive in the high street, newspaper boys and girls, bakeries opening their doors. It's the best part of the day.

Anyway. It's getting late.

I just spent the last half an hour catching up with my cousin in California, rather than finish writing this. I suppose that gives you some insight into how easily I fall down rabbit holes – I wrote that paragraph earlier about needing to catch up – and messaged her in another browser tab. When the tab starts flashing to tell me she has replied, I can't carry on writing – or at last I try to, but the little flashing notification eventually chips away my resistance.

Maybe if I just switch the computer off, that will work? (he says, knowing Messenger will just start vibrating on his phone instead).

Holy crap – it's nearly 1am. How does that happen. Every. Single. Night ?!

We are heading out this evening for a meal at the local pub with friends – to celebrate my other half's birthday. Escaping for a few hours of sensible conversation with grown-ups. Except we know that's not true, don't we.

I wonder how long it will take the children to figure out that we are only sensible when they are within shouting distance? When left to my own devices – particularly when paired with good friends – I naturally transmogrify back towards my real self. I suspect most people do.

Of course it's not quite the real self that existed before kids and cars and houses and every other millstone that has dragged behind me for the last however many years – but I like to think it is.

I read a newspaper story recently about a man that faked his identity, became a student, and went back to college – ten years after he originally left. Nobody found out until years later.

It's appealing in a strange sort of way – the conceit of going back in time, but carrying the knowledge, skills, and experience you have with you. I suppose it's a bit like time travel. I'm not so sure it's such a great idea though – while the academic side of life would become a walk in the park, having you spent any time with teenagers?

They. Never. Stop. Talking.

Seriously. And the drama. Oh my word the drama. And the 24/7 availability for interaction on “Insta”, or “WhatsApp”, or whatever the hell other mobile app you might use to prettify, distort, or instantly cosplay yourself.

Anyway.

We are escaping to the pub for a few hours. A few hours with good friends, a drink of something vaguely anaesthetic, and a belly full of stodgy food. We can't afford to do it often, but today seems like as good an excuse as any.

The two week long internet island building escapade has come to an end. While looking at the collection of supposedly more thoughtful words I had migrated from the year-long descent into partner-programme madness at Medium, I realised something awful.

A great many of the posts I had published at Medium – while following instruction and guidance from the community at large – had become what I can only describe as instructional. While exploring thoughts, I often abstracted myself – writing about the thoughts you might have about something, rather than my own.

I had unwittingly become a mansplainer.

So. This morning I took an axe to my curated literary tree, and began chopping. I then set fire to a great deal of it.

Writing on the internet has taught me a lot – not only about writing, but also about myself. I have become increasingly aware not only of the words I write, but also how I present them.

It's a journey, I suppose.

Too much work and not enough play makes Jack a dull boy – or at least, that's what the pages from the typewriter in The Shining had written on them. It tends to be true of me too. Let's hope I don't go insane while writing a novel in a deserted hotel.

I suppose you could argue I've been constructing a deserted hotel in more ways than one though – firstly through this re-imagining of my blog, and secondly through a project I've been tinkering with for the last several nights.

I've had this small computer called a “Raspberry Pi” knocking around the house for the last several years. It's as powerful as a PC was a decade ago, but costs a hundred times less. Here's the thing – the Raspberry Pi can run Linux – and if you can run Linux, you can pretty much run anything. And anything includes an Amiga emulator.

Here's where we depart on a thirty second history lesson.

In the mid 1980s a computer was invented called the “Amiga”. It was horrendously expensive, and was filled with custom chips that allowed it to do things that were unheard of at the time. If you've ever seen “The Chart Show” or “Max Headroom”, you've seen the Amiga in action. It was decades ahead of the curve, and perhaps failed for that very reason. Oh, it might have had something to do with being acquired by Commodore too – perhaps one of the most dysfunctional organisations in modern history.

Anyway.

Over the last couple of evenings I have re-constructed a virtual Amiga in the study at home – or rather, configured the Raspberry Pi to pretend to be an Amiga. Suddenly I benefit from a world of long forgotten software, curated by a somewhat underground community filled with nostalgia, expertise, and endless know-how.

Why, you might ask? Why bother?

Distractions.

I have essentially constructed a pre-internet computer with a word processor that proves invaluable for distraction free writing. I'm writing this on it. The clever bit is that the “other” computer can see it – so writing can be transferred to and from it.

Of course none of this improves my writing, or the subjects I might write about – you might even argue it's detrimental in some ways, given that I've been tinkering rather than writing for the last several days. Let's see how the coming days unfold.

This morning a gas engineer arrived to do a service on our boiler. No sooner had he arrived, the boiler started throwing error codes – triggering the most amusing jobsworth description I've heard in some time – “I'm only here to service – not to diagnose faults” .

We realised that the boiler was behaving much like a portable television set from the 1970s – if you stayed away from it, it worked fine – if you so much as breathed near it, it acted up.

Towards the end of the engineer's visit, he asked about seeing the radiators around the house – and probably saw my horror-struck expression. That would mean entering my teenage daughters bedrooms. Anybody with teenage girls will probably start laughing at this point – let's just say that if you didn't know a room belonged to a 14 to 18 year old girl, you might imagine the house had either been burgled, or that we had squatters staying in those rooms.

Suffice to say, Miss 16 in particular is in all sorts of trouble this evening for the state of her hell-hole bedroom, and the lies she had pedalled when asked if it was tidy.

Shortly after the engineer left, I joined a conference call with work – the second of the day – which I repeatedly had to leave to answer the door.

Why do random events stack up in such ridiculous ways? I'm struggling to remember a work meeting where somebody didn't come to the door half-way through the call. I suppose it's the same for everybody though – and having to leave mid-call usually raises a few smiles throughout those participating.

Most of the parcels were presents for my other half's birthday next week. At least I'm doing better this year than the year I was working in Germany, stayed up half the night trying to pull a project out of the fire, and completely forgot. She was not happy.

In other news, I started watching season 2 of “Upload” last night – the comedy on Amazon Prime about a guy who's consciousness is uploaded into a virtual world following his death. It's become something of a late-night favourite.

Anyway.

Time to wind things up for the day. Somehow it's already 6pm. Time for dinner, and a dive down the internet rabbit hole to see what friends have been up to today.

Twelve days. That's how many days I managed to stay away from publishing an almost-daily journal on the internet. If I'm entirely honest, I started writing again almost immediately – experimenting with traditional diary entries. It all seemed so pointless.

When writing a blog post, I tend to see it as a conversation of sorts – telling the story of the day to a good friend over a cup of coffee or tea. Writing a private diary entry loses something along the way. I suppose I'm just not a very receptive audience for my own thoughts.

Of course I wouldn't be me if I hadn't debated for rather too long about the most appropriate platform to house an almost daily journal once more. Should I pivot the cathedral that houses the more thoughtful writing, or resurrect the bazaar that I burned to the ground several days ago?

That's right – I didn't just walk away – I set fire to everything. Or clicked the “delete account” button. Setting fire to it sounds much more spectacular, doesn't it.

Anyway.

As you can see I have chosen the resurrection route – or rather reconstruction in this case. You might almost imagine I was never gone. Only for some people I have gone. In the past I leveraged the machinery of the internet to automagically cross-pollute both Wordpress and Tumblr with my writing – I'm not doing that this time.

If you were wondering how you ended up on the mailing list for the new blog, I'll guiltily hold my hands up, and murmur “it's a fair cop”. Some copying and pasting of e-mail addresses happened this evening. If you would rather just receive the hopefully not too mansplainey think pieces, click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email. If, however, you quite like this – hoorah!

Oh crikey – the clock is marching towards midnight, and all I've done this evening is waffle on for far too long about far too little once again. I should probably stop.

It's amusing really, isn't it – that after so long struggling to conjure words, as soon as I tried to walk away they arrived in something of a torrent.

After struggling to find time to write, or words to fill posts with for many months, I have decided on a change of direction.

Rather than even attempt to write an “almost daily” journal, I am only going to write when I have something to write about. This sounds like such an obvious statement, but in a world where every thought, sight, and sound is shared, manipulated, amplified and broadcast it’s surprisingly difficult.

When I was young my grandfather would occasionally volunteer a well worn phrase from the north of England – “Hear all, see all, say nowt”. I’m wondering if it might be as good a method as any to quiet the cacophonous mayhem that generally surrounds the social internet.

I’m also taking the opportunity to finally bring the words I have written in the past under my own umbrella. I have signed up with a hosting provider, purchased a domain name, and struck out on my own. A destination where my thoughts, ideas and stories can be found.

Starting this new endeavour is both exciting and terrifying. While constructing an island on the internet allows me to shape it as I see fit, it also stands alone – with nowhere to hide. I am no longer a face in the crowd. It feels like a certain amount of confidence and bravery will be required.

I’m still not sure if this is a damn fool crusade, an idiotic escapade, or a great adventure. Only time will tell.