Month: August 2021

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Me And Twitter – It’s Complicated

Many years ago I can remember opening a Twitter account to try and follow Formula 1 stuff as it kept being mentioned on the telecasts. I knew I wasn’t really into social media and had avoided Faceshit before then. I only kept that account open for a few days before shutting it down as I knew it was a rabbit hole I didn’t really want to enter. Not long later I had another go and got into Twitter. A while later I then decided to have a second Twitter account so I could follow all the stuff I was interested in while keeping one account for close friends and stuff I really wanted to see. Back in those days I definitely used Twitter as a distraction, a thing to look at now and then and while away some time, a thing for finding information and following the news.

I think I was reasonably happy with the system. I could see what friends were saying on one account and follow all the shit on another so I had it all nicely organised. Then. 2016 happened. In terms of a crock of shit year 2016, I think, still rates as the worst I’ve experienced. The lies and propaganda spread for the two big plebiscites that year really got to me. It was when I realised that this country [UK] is full of people who are a “little bit racist”. Actually, most of the things that have happened since that vote also confirm that the majority of people in this country are a “little bit racist”. Then, there was the presidential election in the USA where citizens of that country proved that they are definitely “quite a lot racist”. The comments and commentary on Twitter slowly got to me emotionally. There always seemed to be shit happening and people would jump on to make comments and yet, when I listened to the news on the radio, these things weren’t mentioned.

Twitter and other social media sites seem to spend too much time reacting against things rather than actually consider them. There is an instantaneous effect where rage flies around and then the storm dissipates quickly enough. I got caught up in this and it did not help my mental health to be confronted with all that confrontation. I eventually made the decision to get rid of my “other people” account and keep the personal account. This stopped me looking at all the shit that people decided to commentate on. I haven’t had Twitter on my phone for quite a while as I got into some trouble at work following a tweet at the beginning of the current pandemic. I’m still not sure whether that tweet should have got me in trouble and I ponder that a lot, trying to work out my responsibilities.

A part of me would like to remove myself completely from Twitter. But, it is too ingrained in this website. Every communication I write tweets a thing out to let the world know there is new content. There are also a large number of links within this site that go to Twitter along with quite a few embeds. So, in the interests of sanity in keeping this site working I won’t be shutting down the Twitter account. I only comment on Twitter now and then. I use it to keep track of my current #roundtheworldtrip in X-Plane. Twitter is with me now, but I only look at it once a week or so in normal working times and so I feel mentally stable with that relationship.

See my Twitter feed on this site.

This is communication number 1935, there are reasons here, this is what happened in that year:

  • There’s a coup attempt in Greece.
  • The king of Siam abdicates.
  • The north American Texan first flies.
  • Air Mail from San Francisco to Hong Kong.
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Themes – Vangelis

Not overly sure why I got this! I think I had seen Blade Runner and wanted some nice calming music in the same style. I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve played it al the way through. Sometimes songs will come on as part of a shuffle and it depends on my mood as to whether I skip or not.

This is communication number 1934. Here are some things that happened that year:

  • The Japanese invaded Manchuria.
  • The Philippines is given some autonomous control from the USA.
  • A typhoon in Japan kills 3036 people.
  • Australian Frontier Wars end.
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The Night House

Yesterday I went to the cinema because I like going to the cinema and there wasn’t really a lot else to watch. The film was being shown in screen 8 and that’s my favourite of them apart from the shitty right speaker which I might have to email the cinema about, but still, a film being shown in screen 8 is a bonus. The traffic was bad heading to the cinema so I missed all the adverts which can only be considered a good thing but I’m experienced enough to know that the film normally starts 15-20 minutes after the advertised time. While checking the state of the tide I decided to take a photograph to illustrate the view I have.

The View I Check Every Cinema Visit
The View I Check Every Cinema Visit

In the picture above you can see the Medway bridges, I wrote about them here, the North Downs and a little bit of Borstal along with boats and things.

Medway Tides - Annotated
Medway Tides – Annotated

I look for the following as I drive along the esplanade.

  • A – the edge of the mud bank.
  • B – the little water channel.
  • C – the “dip”.
  • D – how high are the boats that are anchored over this side of the river.

Each of those four things and how much I can see or not tell me about the state of the tide. I suspect I probably have spent too long of my life wondering about and looking at this view – who cares anyway?

After watching the film I rated it on IMDB and there’re communications that deal with the rating system but the most important one is this one. At some point after I’ve rated it I tweet the result.

There are going to be spoilers ahead so you should consider yourself warned that I will give away a lot of the film plot points in the next few paragraphs. Overall I actually nearly enjoyed this film. About halfway through I remember trying to work out whether I cared about the main character or whether I was just staying in the theatre to see how it ends and it turned out I actually wanted to know how the person coped. Now, let me point out something I think film makers need to know:

You don’t need fucking pop-scares to make a film scary.

I Parish

It was a touch annoying, for me, that this film could have been a decent psychological thriller and an investigation into a woman’s grief for her husband and yet, for me again, it was spoilt very slightly by the supernatural aspects of it. The big problem for these films and their relationship to me is that I don’t believe in any of that shit and so I just write it off as childish. Let’s get into this in a little more detail:

One way of interpreting this film is that, following a near death experience, a malevolent spirit keeps trying to claim the “soul” he is owed by whispering to the woman’s husband that he must kill her. To avoid killing the wife he loves the husband kidnaps and murders women who looked like his wife to trick the spirit into thinking he had killed his wife. Eventually the husband kills himself to save his wife from being murdered by the spirit through him. The woman knows nothing of this until she discovers some photographs on her husbands phone and computer of women who look like her. She considers killing herself to escape the torture of the spirit who has finally decided to take her on himself rather than act through a proxy. The woman’s best friend saves her and the neighbour sees a dark shadow on a boat.

The upshot of this interpretation of the film is that spirits want what they are owed and are willing to act through someone else to get them even though they can interact with the main person themselves. They are lazy? Or just like contrived plots? I don’t know. The film seemed to want us to believe this interpretation because of the shadow at the end of the film. If the film was written with this in mind then it really opens up many many questions about an awful lot of the film and kind of removes all the mystery.

For me, a better interpretation is that, following her husbands suicide a woman descends into psychological and emotional hell. She discovers some photographs on his phone and twists her reality around to make sense of them. Slowly, she goes mad, including hitting herself onto the mirror and making up stories about finding bodies. She suffers many hallucinations, including some of extreme sexual torture. The alcohol keeps pushing her towards suicide and eventually after deciding that she needs to die to stop her emotional pain she rows out on the lake only to be found by her friend who “saves” her. Now, the film stops at this point but it would have been far more scary and mysterious if this was the acknowledged reality.

I wrote the words “extreme sexual torture” in the previous paragraph mostly because this was mentioned at the beginning of the film and close to the end of the film I found myself wondering where the sexual torture was. I didn’t really see any. There was a statuette thing that the main character found but there wasn’t really any sex stuff. The movie had teased me but failed to deliver. Not that I wanted to see that type of thing. Sexual violence [unless consensual in which case I suppose you could argue it’s not violent] is a horrible thing.

To think the best of this film is to remove all the supernatural and just read the meaning as the complete psychological breakdown of a grieving widow. Humans are complicated enough without adding all that god-shit to everything.

This is number 1933 and so here are some things that happened that year:

  • The bodyline Ashes tour.
  • Dachau is opened.
  • The birth of radio astronomy.
  • FM radio is patented.
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The Years Thing

I’ve taken to writing a few things about what happened in each year of the same number as the communication that I post. I’m can only vaguely remember why I started this and I will do my best to explain. I also want to give some reasoning to point out that I’m not a complete shit and quite respective of other cultures [generally].

Quite a while ago the number of communications written for this site was a question in a quiz at work. I was somewhat surprised that people cared enough to try and create a question based on what I write but you should also be warned that a lot of flattery is just used sarcastically. Anyway, I started adding the odd tweet after a communication tweet just saying what number those words were.

I think I might have started doing some “year” things way back in communications 1660 or so as it seemed that a lot was happening around the world that time and maybe I should just add it as a feature of this site. I think I gave up. I’m not sure what happened and I’m not even sure how long ago I was writing those communications. FYI I’m also considering shortening “communication” to Comms but that just feels wrong at the moment. I made a conscious choice to call these things communications and so I should continue to use my own terminology.

Recently I have been heading to communication number 2000 and so I wanted to make sure that I mark that with the respect that is suitable and required. Also, I wanted to mark some of the things in history that I feel people might not know. Most of the things I have written at the bottom of my verbiage aren’t going to be the most famous events that people seem to know. I have deliberately chosen particular happenings that I think tell a story or give some ideas of the human sacrifice to get us to this point.

The things I chose to write at the end of each communication are what I find interesting. I’m trying to point out the tragedies, the hard fought rights, the little things that show just how terrible and horrible we are as a species to our fellow people. Once of the things I have learnt in the short period that I’ve been doing this the amount that countries/governments/organisations have changed over a short period of time. In the early 1900s as I am now the “west” are still carving up Africa and the Middle East along with massive political changes in the far east. It’s quite amazing really. I wonder if growing up in the relative stability of the Cold War gave me a false sense of security with the political organisation of the world. As I write this Afghanistan is going to shit, again.

There is quite an issue with dealing with what year it is. I am using the calendar of the “common era” or at least the one that most of the world agrees to use to cope with organising business. I do not endorse that particular calendar or any other. Many cultures use different calendar systems and as explained in this podcast the casual use of language can really exclude or affect many people.

So, here we go with a few things that happened in 1932 [according to the common calendar].

  • The Anglican church bans the church re-marriage of divorced people.
  • Johnny Weissmuller first stars as Tarzan. I write this as those films were such a part of my childhood and I now suspect they are hugely problematic!
  • WW1 veterans march on Washington DC to claim money they are owed – clearly Govt gives very few shits about the human cost of imperialism and armies.
  • A hurricane kills around 2500 in Cube.
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The X Factor – Iron Maiden

I am not sure if I’ve ever really listened to this album.

This is communication number 1931. Here’s what happened that year:

  • Oswald Mosely founds the New Party.
  • Porsche is founded.
  • The China floods have deaths between 400,000 and 4,000,000.
  • The Panama Canal is closed for a while due to damage by earthquakes.
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The Wrong Side Of Heaven and the Righteous Side Of Hell – Five Finger Death Punch

I think all I had to say about FFDP I said in the previous communication about them. There seems to be a bit of a dip in quality albums in this area of the alphabet. Or, it’s just that there are a lot of Ts and coupled with my mistake of the “THE” word creates a stretch of albums I’m not fussed about.

This is communication number 1930 and I’m kinda trying to beat my “most in a month” record while at the same time trying to keep the quality up. It’s 19 days into the month and progress is good. I’ve got some ideas for longer communications too so maybe they will get written when I have some more time and freedom? Here are some things that happened in 1930:

  • The existence of Pluto, dwarf planet, is confirmed.
  • Lili Elbe begins sex reassignment surgeries.
  • A fire in the Ohio penitentiary kills 320 people.
  • The last recorded lynching of African Americans in USA.
  • The Pope stresses the sanctity of marriage, the ban on artificial birth control and the church’s view on abortion [what a cunt].
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Base Progress

I spent a few hours yesterday gathering resources to start the landscaping project on my base area in the Caves and Cliffs part one section of my world. I expect to move to a new base area once the next part of the update is released.

Map Of The Land
Map Of The Land

In the above image you can see railways over the sea connecting the main components of the base. Sitting in a minecart allows me to eat and get my inventory sorted while also travelling from one place to another. I am going to keep the railways but I wanted to make it look a little prettier. So, I decided to claim back some land and build an artificial island.

Obviously Man-Made
Obviously Man-Made

The above picture shows the start of the landscaping works. My first thought was to try and make it look natural but I’m actually now keen to make it obviously man-made. Let’s see what I can be bothered to do. It turns out I’ve also made a secret harbour area and so I need to add in railways to that somehow. The pond in the middle is going to be for the axolotls I gather. I also need to light up quite a bit of the work so to avoid mobs spawning. I don’t want all of it to look the same so I have some other ideas for joining to New Holland. Look out for a walk around video on my YouTube channel at some point.

This is communication number 1929 and so here are some things that happened in that year:

  • Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu moves to India. This woman is horrible.
  • The gulag system is created in Russia.
  • A rocket powered aircraft is demonstrated.
  • The Afghan civil war ends.
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The Way Of The Fist – Five Finger Death Punch

I got a number of FFDP albums after I saw them at Download and then a location in London. I don’t mind when one of their songs comes on in a shuffle but I am definitely not bothered about playing a complete album. I’m not too fussed by their double bass drumming all the way through complete songs. Chaps, you have to have variation. But then, I’m old so maybe that is the way to go? So, there may be good stuff on here, there may not. I’m also trying to beat one of my previous best communications-per-month totals so that is why I’m publishing a lot this month.

In 1928 some of the following things happened:

  • Frederick Griffith proves the existence of DNA.
  • A dam failed north of LA killing 600.
  • The voting age for women in UK lowers from 30 to 21. Prior to this only women over 30 and with property could vote.
  • Farnsworth demonstrates the first all-electric television system.
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The War Of The Worlds – Jeff Wayne

This is actually a really good album in that late 1970s way. I’m glad Jeff has made a shit-ton of money from this. I like the fact that the first Martians land near Jase’s house, also loads of the place names are places I know. But those two things were more about HG than Mr Wayne. Oh well.

Communication number 1927 so in keeping with recent tradition and recognising this communication feels like a “cheat”, there’s not much to it, here’s what happened in 1927, curated by me:

  • British troops land in Shanghai which is British [apparently].
  • The UK formally becomes the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
  • The Mississippi floods and kills 700,000.
  • Iraq gains independence from the UK.
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Not Everywhere Has One Of These

One of the things I did this summer was go and see my parents whom I have seen little since early 2020 because, you know, Covid and pandemic. It was nice to travel out of Kent for once and see them. It turns out my father is somewhat interested in history which, much like his love of frogs, is something that I was never really aware of, it is something he has rarely ever spoken of. Anyway, a local, MR, gives walking tours of the village with history talks and as much as he wasn’t doing one this day, my mum had been on the walk and so we covered the same grounds.

POW Camp 116
POW Camp 116

The huts you can see in the picture are the remains of a World War 2 prisoner of war camp that housed around 1500 prisoners. It’s about four hundred metres from the house where I grew up and I can’t believe that, as a kid, I never trespassed and explored, but I didn’t! There were plenty of other places in the village I explored but not this. There are quite a few links to blogs and such like from other people who have explored this urban land and so if you just google POW Camp 116 you’ll see loads of results including national news about a planning application being turned down [good].

It would be a shame for these buildings to be demolished. I would hope that somehow funds are raised to at least preserve them as they are as a monument to the folly of human interactions and power seeking. I write this as Afghanistan descends into hell after the US and UK completely pulled out. I’ve been adding information about years of the twentieth century to my communications and it is quite clear to me that global politics has never been stable and it’s all about power and wealth for the few.

This is communication 1926 and so here are some of the things that happened that year:

  • Marital Law in the UK following a General Strike.
  • Portugal has a military coup.
  • Women are banned from holding public office in Italy.
  • Deutsche Luft Hansa is founded.
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