30,000 viewers!

I have been informed that we have reached the 30k mark of viewers. I’ve been checking the viewing data and I have found some people have been making links to the blog which is most flattering.

Thank all of you readers, whether regular, first time, or those who love to hate our views.

Michael

shop-assist, not cease and desist

One thing I dislike is a shop assistant who has no clue. If you go to a restaurant, you may have a reasonable expectation that the waiting staff know their wines, may give suggestions and so forth. I was at a GAME shop the other day, and an assistant came up to me. I was genuinely looking for a game of a general kind, and not a specific game (as the latter is the normal case for me). So I say to the fellow who asks if I need any assistance, why yes I do; why not, I’ll pick their brains for a suggestion.

I said:

I’m looking for a game, maybe an RPG or RTS; RPG preferably. I played spellforce lately and I quite liked that, do you have any turn-based RPGs, yes I know those are old-school, or maybe do you have any games within the D&DIII ruleset with a sufficient class and levelling system, or perhaps a nice plot-driven RTS with sci-fi components and strong single player campaign.

I was met with a blank face. I guess he was mainly into inane PS3 fighting games

Michael

Some certainties in life

My old theology teacher once said to me that the only two certain things in life are death and taxes. One seems to be a truth about our very physical nature, and the other seems to be a fundamental truth about our very human and sociable nature.

My dad used to say to me that someone who works in a funeral director’s would never be out of a job, because people die all the time. It is this kind of rationale that I think people seem now to be adopting, or I hope they are, in maturing from this economic situation. Increasingly I hear stories and read articles about people who want to go into teaching from jobs far afield as banking and media. What is the appeal of teaching?

i. Teaching seems to be a stable and certain job
ii. There is a demand for more teachers both in general, and in the specific needs of inner-city schools; primary schools needing male teachers; and teachers from minority backgrounds.
iii. Teaching is probably the ‘best-worst’ job you can get from being a university graduate.

Perhaps people will think of those other jobs as being both important and necessary: resource production, such as farming, or manufacturing, as opposed to service sector roles.

Michael

A fascination with the ‘new’

Aquinas (or someone medieval) was right to believe that all actions contain an element of being good and bad; the proportion of which, depends, ultimately upon what the action is. We may draw good or positive consequences from evil, or horrific, or distressing acts and conversely, we may find unexpected and negative effects from what were intended to be good actions. That concludes my preamble.

In considering all the ‘fad’ things of the past few years, they seem to all point to some large global database that is accessible to all. It almost seems dictatorial in a way, but what seems more disturbing is that the forces of the free consumer has led to its wide proliferation, it is a ‘voting by feet’, if you would.

What kind of things do I refer to? Well, all sorts: iTunes, with its local area network capacities; Facebook, for being, well, Facebook-ey; Twitter, Linkdin, publically accessable RSS feeds. While the positives of these things are seemingly obvious, greater interconnectedness, the establishment of communities, interests and relations that are not constructed by geographical location but by shared interests, beliefs, or practices; breaking down of social barriers, particularly for the severely physically disabled (I am considering Second Life in particular); and, well, a more accessible face to contemporary technology.

This sounds all good right? Well, consider that each small ‘innovation’ does have an effect on privacy and the possibility of being monitored. The debate about policing the internet will inevitably rise (as it does in all sorts of other issues), a discussion which must be had. As people wholeheartedly embrace so many of these interesting innovations and dotcoms, we may find our rights and privacies slowly diminishing, and once this occurs, we have no-one to blame but ourselves. Perhaps a Leviathan appeal can be made: that the individual is at their most fundamental, stupid and ambivalent to the security and welfare of the whole such that an outside agency representing the manifold of individuals holds to protect all.

The fascination with the new should be seen with disdain and interest, while excess in either element may hinder us; a more critical use of the internet is crucial; the question is, how do we teach or foster this kind of attitude? I could assume that more familiar internet users (e.g. those who have been involved with or users of the web since the 1980’s or 90’s) have a native savvy about them; those who have grown up taking the internet, and new technologies for granted often have an uncritical acceptance of what it can do.

Sinistre