blog.djstead.net

2016 has truly been a sobering year. But for me, this has meaning beyond the standard aphorism - 2016 was a sobering year, with the added kicker that I hadn’t even realised I had been drunk. Allow me to explain… [WARNING: This post deals with personal death and a whole load of other features of 2016 that - frankly - have no right to be ruining your Christmas spirit.] - One of my favourite tropes in films and books is the ‘Loss of Innocence’. Off the top of my head, Almost Famous, the Chronicles of Narnia, are two examples that deal with that emotional transition. This typically takes the form of the beginnings of sexual discovery, or the realisation of responsibilities that you previously never had. I guess ordinarily this lasts into your twenties by which point you have been given most of the traditional ‘adult’ education you need - certainly from an academic point of view [bar further education], but also from a social ‘finding your feet’ perspective, an...

Every time you encounter a new person, you essentially are trying to share your world view with them, and see if you are a comfortable fit. Except you don’t share it all in one go - you would literally have to recount your life experiences to that point; all the changes you’ve gone through - and of course the other person is effectively doing exactly the same; sharing their world-view. It is literally impossible for one individual to share their world-view instantly with every single person they encounter. If we could, you could therefore plot the entirety of human social relationships as one GIANT Venn diagram. And by that I mean that you would see your Venn diagram that includes your world-view to date; your views, your opinions, your tastes, your standpoints (political and otherwise), why exactly you are you and not anybody else. And, intersecting your Venn diagram, would be everyone else’s. So you could identify the people that share most of your worldview (...

I’ve been thinking a lot about coping mechanisms recently. More accurately, I’ve needed to use these quite a lot in recent months; and that got me thinking. In times of loss, frustration, upset, anger, bewilderment; I have turned to Twitter and (on occasion) Facebook. And this is nothing new for me - before these I put my thoughts together in a blog (who remembers Revelations Online?), and I have continued this blog in the same vein. And here is my key point - very often this is the coping mechanism through which I express my self; my inner thoughts. My immediate thoughts. Some of them are well-formed, but the majority are not - they are new, unfiltered, immediate thoughts. That occasionally are - in hindsight - pretty poor, and they have on occasion upset people close to me. And here’s the thing which I wonder might be an issue not just for me - but for many in this brave new world: Social media is my primary outlet of emotion. And at my darkest times, it is my...

Back in the Good Old Days™* of the early 2000s I was part of an online community known hereafter as the OceanCrew. As has already been written before now, it was a great group of people (hell, still is). And the best thing about it (well apart from the endless quotes of course) was that we all cared about each other. (Hell, still do). Whenever we logged onto that community (as I did pretty much every day); there was always a familiar username, a friendly avatar, on the forum and in the chat - and when we asked each other ‘how’s your day been?’, it was because we genuinely cared (hell, we still do). *GOD may appear greater than they are - Why bring this up? Well, for me I think that sense of belonging I had with the OceanCrew is akin to what I felt much more recently in the last few years with two relationships in particular. You will notice I said ‘had’ there - not because I don’t consider myself close to the OceanCrew as I once was - but because the reality...

There is a theory - he says in a voice loaded with pretentiousness not unlike Adam Curtis’ work (thereby alienating either those of you who have watched his work and don’t approve; or haven’t heard of him) - that nobody really knows what is going on. I’m going to confuse things even more by disrupting my actual point in this blog by taking time to post the initial inspiration for this post: Now I do enjoy Curtis’ presentation style, but don’t necessarily buy into all of his often breathtaking assertions (although ‘ All Watched Over By Machines of Love and Grace ’ was my watershed introduction; and ‘ Bitter Lake ’ is pretty terrifying). What I do know is that this wasn’t really the aim of this article, to talk about the big geopolitical stuff; it was to try and express the difficulty I am having responding to what is going on on a daily basis. I actually can’t begin to list the tragedies that are occurring on a seemingly daily basis - Nice and Turkey seem ...

Oh the irony. Here comes a blog whining about the EU Referendum, at the almost apex of the culmination of weeks, nay months, of people going on and on and on about it. So I completely understand if you decide to skip over this one. - I would too, if I didn’t feel the need to write it… Rather than a comprehensive flowing essay, I’m going to jump between points. Why are we even having this? (read from bottom to top) @DavidAllenGreen on twitter makes a fair point. I tweeted the other way - if we’re going to have a referendum on EU membership; why don’t we have a referendum on retaining the NHS? Or scrapping trident? Obviously I sense the slippery slope here - and don’t necessarily mean that we should have a referendum on all of these things. But I do make the point again the #DemocracyIsBroken Why have I been given an arbitrary say in Britain’s membership of the European Union (something I am not aggressively educated about), and not about oth...

I tried writing a blog about Orlando. Specifically how disconnected I felt from it all. This blog will probably get off-track and into dubious territory pretty quickly, so probably best abandon all hope ye who enter here… I didn’t mean being disconnected *specifically* from that most recent event; I meant all ‘similar’ events (apologies if classing it as ‘just one of yet another mass shootings in the US’ diminishes people’s particular emotions with regards to this most recent one) - which expands to include the Paris shootings (Bataclan/Charlie Hebdo), “current events in Syria” [which frankly I just don’t know what that is anymore], and quite probably the countless tragic events/ongoing situations in recent months and years that have either passed me by; or just washed over me as yet another example of how I shirk the impossible task of fixing all that is wrong with humanity. Orlando is undoubtedly a tragedy; especially for the community that has been specifical...