Failing to Achieve Mindfulness

This weekend, I undertook an experiment: I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t muck about with my smartphone for two whole days.

The motivation came about on Friday evening, when I received a bunch of depressing work emails which I didn’t want to read. I knew, however, that I would not be able to resist doing so unless I took some dramatic action. So I declared to Elvira that I was going to “go without” until Monday.

By “go without” I naturally included a number of exceptions:

• Use as a music player was ok.
• People ringing me was ok.
• Amusing the children by showing them my photos was also ok.

Essentially, it was a matter of not using the internet.

What were the results of my experiment?

Well, I managed not to look at it all weekend.

I thought about looking at it a lot.

It’s the sort of thing one does at any empty moment. When you’re waiting for someone or something. When you’re bored and hoping something interesting might be there. When you’re in the middle of a conversation... and so on.

Did I learn anything from this experience?

No.

I’m afraid my life was not especially enriched. I didn’t discover new or wonderful vistas of anything that I was missing out on by not checking Facebook in every spare 30 seconds. The world didn’t end because I didn’t read the news. No new cat video went unshared. Nobody was deprived of important developments in my life. 

Maybe you have to do it for longer to achieve “mindfulness”. All I achieved was an inbox full of even more crap than it was on Friday evening. 

Skylanders: Pester Force

My kids are obsessed with Skylanders. Your kids may be as well. Alternatively, you will have no idea what I am talking about.

Allow me to explain. “Skylanders” is, in the first instance, a series of computer games and, secondarily, a gigantic range of associated tat. There are seemingly hundreds of individual Skylander characters (some of whom are pictured above) and in the games, they run around doing quests, fighting, upgrading and buying stuff.

What – as far as I can see – makes this different is that to play any of these characters, you have to buy a figure of them.

A Skylander on a Portal of Power

The figures themselves are no great shakes. You can’t move their arms or legs and they appear to be of the same quality as something you’d get with a Happy Meal (despite being priced at £8.99 upwards...).

But, you stick this figure onto the “Portal of Power” – some sort of data-reading device that plugs into your

games console – and, hey presto, you are controlling that character on-screen.

Boys' infantile mania for collecting, listing and classification of made-up fantasy worlds has been successfully harnessed. Pokemon's "gotta buy 'em all" mantra has been successfully transferred to the physical world. My kids are five and three, but this has them completely hooked. For this week, anyway.

Now, I am not a “gamer”. When I was a kid, I had a ZX Spectrum and a Commodore Amiga – and I played a lot of games on them, from Jet Set Willy to The Secret of Monkey Island. I did own a PlayStation One and the original Tomb Raider and subsequently a PlayStation Two and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. But I played the games I had when I had nothing better to do and had no desire to acquire any more or find out about acquiring any more.

My interest in gaming came to an end when I was unable to complete the “flying a ridiculously uncontrollable biplane through a bunch of hoops and then landing it safely in less than a minute” task about 2/3 of the way through San Andreas after about 100 attempts.

I wasted far more of my youth doing role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.

So yes, I spent a lot of weekends as a dungeon master – go on, get it out of your system and we can move on. Finished?

Role playing games then were like computer games are like today, only in your head. In principle, you could choose whatever you wanted to do within the limits of your character’s abilities.

Freedom of choice, simplified

Computer games can now appear to do something similar because their memory capacities are so enormous as to give the illusion of freedom of choice, by storing so many different option-scenarios (rather than the “go left”, “go right” or “jump” options I am familiar with).

The whole matter of my RPGing teenage years and the damage it did to my ability to function as a 20-something are deserving of a blog in their own right.

The reason I mention these games is that, sooner or later, everyone who was into it got seduced into the matter of buying more and more supplementary bits and pieces – lead men or additional rule books or whatever – so that they didn’t have to imagine quite so much. It's hard work using your own imagination, whereas buying stuff is easy.

What I have to show for this today is three biscuit tins full of Space Orks in the garage and a well below average stock of interesting anecdotes from my mid-teenage years. 

To return to Skylanders. What the company responsible has done is genius – they have created a computer game that you have to keep buying more things for in order to get more out of it. Some bits, I am told, can only be accomplished using a character of the appropriate element (you know - earth, wind, fire etc). So if you don’t have one, you have to get one or you’re stuck.

Neither the Nazis nor the Soviets nor even fizzy drink manufacturers ever found a way of turning kids on their parents so effectively. You have to had it to Activision . They’ve come on a long way from the Spectrum version of “Ghostbusters” I used to play in the mid-1980s - complete with incomprehensible speech synthesis that mangled the word “ghostbusters” into something that sounded like “granny bastards” being shouted through a paper-and-comb.

Yes, I have to applaud this Machiavellian brilliance, even while I am disquieted by my three-year-old talking to me about “the undead”. I have to applaud it because I wish I’d thought of it. 

Top Five Pointless Conventions

Lots of things we take for granted in everyday life do not serve any reasonable purpose. Today, ODHSNM considers some of the most egregious.

Encore

So you’re watching a band. They’ve been on for a while and they haven’t played their most popular songs.

What’s this? They’re walking off the stage? But...but...NO! You must return! We, the audience, demand it!

What is the point of an encore? Everyone knows you’re going to do it. Band - you are not spontaneously responding to the audience. You’ve got a LIGHT SHOW sorted out for this bit, FFS.

Audience – you could all sit there in total silence and they’d still come back out and play the same three songs they intended to play all along. They're not going to waste that light show. 

Perhaps once an encore was a spontaneous response to audience demand. Now – like most of the grammar of pop music - it’s a ridiculous bit of play-acting nobody can remember why they do. Just don’t bother. 

Outside Broadcast

Suppose there has been some big news event, with a political element to it. Cue TV reports beginning:

“I am standing here outside Number 10 Downing Street...”

WHY? That is the last place on earth where anything relating to this news event is likely to happen. Nor are we convinced by the presence of a TV crew there that you are somehow at the heart of what is going on. You read a press release (or whatever) and drove the crew over there, the same as everyone else!

Why is it considered necessary to put a man in a coat in front of a well-known monument or some building that has a bearing on the story in question? Do you think we can’t grasp the idea of “politics” without a picture of the Houses of Parliament?

The 9 to 5

OK, not everybody works those particular hours, but the vast majority of us do. This is incredibly inefficient and detrimental to our collective well-being.

Rush hour, peak time fares, lunchtime queues, “all our operators are busy at the moment” – these are all side-effects of the idea that we all trying to do the same things at the same times.

Couldn’t we all stagger our working hours to avoid getting in each other’s way?

Yours sincerely

 Perhaps this valediction is in irreversible decline with letter-writing heading for extinction, but I for one will not miss it.

Firstly, at 37 years of age, I still struggle to spell it. Secondly, the whole sincerely/faithfully thing is a tiresome pinhead for pedantic angels to dance on.

But thirdly and most important, what the hell does it mean? In what sense am I claiming to be “yours”?

“I remain, Sir, your obedient servant”...? Is that what it’s derived from? If so, that’s not really how I want to sign off a letter. Because I don’t.

Parliament

Ha ha! A pun on the word “convention”.

But seriously, in what way is (i) the ability to get selected by a party machine as a candidate and (ii) the ability to make lawyerly speeches in the big green debating club in any sense correlated with (iii) having ideas about social and economic organisation that are likely to do any good and (iv) being competent to implement them?

It may have been suitable for a 19^th century Britain run by gentlemen for gentlemen, but it looks pretty preposterous today. 

PLEASE BE ADVISED - The convention that the photo and the text should be in some way related has been bypassed - this is a picture of a pelican put through Glitche.

As a Symbol, I Can Be Incorruptible, Everlasting

Dinner dinner dinner dinner: The Batman

Elvira and I watched The Dark Knight Rises last weekend. If you know us, you’ll know that our having gone to the cinema to see it when it first came out was a big deal – we don’t get out much.

And these films today are so bloody long that you need to watch them twice to make sense of them.

The conclusion was that we liked it more second time around than first – not least as (i) knowing the plot twist helps you look out for the signs and (ii) we had braced ourselves so as not to start laughing every time Bane speaks.

Two things will I say about the Blu-Ray experience:

• Just take me to the main menu. Do not FORCE me to watch trailers by telling me it’s “forbidden” to skip through them. Forbidden by whom?
• Special features you have to download? Piss off. Why do you think I’m still watching discs at all?

Re the above: Lovefilm – sort it out. Because I will ditch your punk ass and go to Netflix just like I ditched Blockbuster for you. 

Anyway, it started me thinking...which is always a bad sign in any piece of entertainment media.

In these films (I won’t call them movies because this is ENGLAND NOT AMERICA) the Batman could be anyone.

I say “the Batman” rather than “Batman” not to show my complicity in the idea put across by these films that featuring a man who dresses up as a bat is not inherently ridiculous. No – I say it because "Batman" cannot be anyone: he is, of course, Adam West.

So, the Batman could be anyone because he’s a symbol of something rather than an individual. Which means that the boy from Third Rock from the Sun can be him in the next one.

It occurred to me that this is an idea that our politicians need to adopt. Because every time a political idea gets out and achieves some sort of popular support, the media tears apart the politician at the forefront of that idea’s movement on the basis of his or her human frailties.

So the theory goes – and let it not be said that ODHSNM is unbalanced politically (psychologically is another matter) – UKIP’s ideas are implicitly invalidated by the “colourful” lives of their candidates, or the idea that Amazon and Google ought to be some sort of tax is invalidated by the MPs quizzing them taking perfectly legal and rational measures to minimise their own liabilities. 

This being the internet, we might as well see that through to the Reductio Ad Hitlerum and declare that vegetarianism was to blame for the Holocaust.

My point is that the failings of the person putting across an idea do not necessarily condemn the idea itself. 

So politicians – put on a mask, and become a symbol of your cause instead of a mere mortal! 

Just like the criminals of Gotham City can’t kill a symbol, an idea can’t be caught avoiding tax, molesting children or strangling prostitutes.

POST SCRIPT: This is my 150th post - please help me to celebrate by sending me money or booze. Preferably money. No vouchers. 

The magic of e-reading

Do you remember that there was once a time when you didn't have a mobile phone, and no one else you knew did?

So if you wanted to get in touch, you'd have to (i) remember their phone number and (ii) call their house to see if they were in? Or alternatively – and even more outlandishly – you'd have to (i) remember where they live and (ii) drop by to see if they were in.

How on earth did we get by wasting so much time? Walk round to someone's house! The very idea of it.

It's very odd how mobile phones, laptops, social media, iPods etc etc have all insinuated their way into our lives subtly and irreplaceably, to the point where we take them completely for granted.

They start appearing and you think: "That's ridiculous – I never needed [whatever the gadget does] before. Why would I need that now?" Before you know it, you get panicky if you can't check Facebook while you're on the toilet. The medium is the message, innit?

So I must report unto you – my readers – then, that I am now the owner of an Amazon Kindle (thanks to all the Sicilies for my Father's Day present!) And having been sceptical about them before, experience suggests that I should approach this new bit of technology in my life with the innocent openness to having one's mind changed of a new boy turning up for his first day at Pyongyang Central Penitentiary College of FE.

Having lugged a hardback copy of "Against the Day" (1,085 pages) around with me for the months it took me to read (TWICE), I am already feeling the benefit in terms of improved posture.

However, the Kindle is affecting my habits in other ways. It is changing what I read – for the simple reason that there are hundreds of great books out there (many of them here) that are FREE.

Now, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't pick up a second-hand copy of Herodotus' "The Histories" for any price. On the one hand, it would take up too many of the sparse cubic feet in my tiny house. On the other, if it was shit, I would feel obliged to read it to the end because I'd paid for it.

I know what you're thinking. No, not "oh god, he's talking about Greeks again – I thought this was going to a funny one or an angry one". What you are thinking is Herodotus' work would probably not have survived the last 2,600 years and become a central part of the Western literary canon if it had been shit.

Well, believe me – despite the lure of "The Histories" being effectively the novelisation of 300, I would not have stuck with old Herodotus past that endless description of "how big various things in Egypt are" in the second book if it hadn't been free. And I am probably a more enlightened person for doing so. My bag is certainly enlightened. BOOM BOOM.

It still hurts me mentally to think that I gave up reading "On the Road" TWICE because it was so awful after paying full price for a brand new copy. And that was about 17 years ago.

But now, I can pick up books by a whole host of authors and give up on them if they're a load of old crap like Kerouac, because they didn't cost me a penny! In your face, economics of publishing! And in your face, self-imposed obsessive-compulsive rules of behaviour!

So, if you like sci-fi and you haven't read HG Wells or Jules Verne – stop paying money for new books and read the foundations of the freaking genre for nothing. If you like horror, Arthur Machen and HP Lovecraft. If you like crime, Conan Doyle. And you needn't spend a penny. Well, if you already have an e-reader that is.

Plus, it's better than the library, because (i) you don't have to remember to take anything back, (ii) it's likely to exist for more than a couple of years to come, and (iii) best of all - it's not full of smelly vagrants and weirdos!