andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2002-08-22 03:47 pm
andrewducker) wrote2002-08-22 03:47 pm
writing on the train
Written yesterday, on the London->Edinburgh train:
It seems quite strange to me to be sitting on a train typing away at a journal entry. Sadly, I have to wait until my return home before I can actually upload this to my journal itself, but with the advent of 3G phone systems, and the steady shrinking of computers, it’s only a matter of time before I can sit in a railway carriage, laser keyboard projected onto the table, LCD goggles propped on my nose, happily typing my passing thoughts.
Warren Ellis (acclaimed author of Transmetropolitan and various other wonderful comics) already does this, his info-mailing list having slowly veered from the latest update on his work to whatever amusing idea crosses his mind at the time. This has, of course, alienated a fair chunk of his readership, who signed up to hear more news on the Spider Jerusalem front, or the latest on the adventures of Jenny Sparks and her stalwart freedom fighters The Authority, but for those of us who are happy to read almost anything, providing it’s written with a modicum of wit, the daily missives provide a welcome interruption to the daily routine.
The blog/journal phenomenon provides an awful lot of that, vast numbers of people keep journals, jotters, notebooks, scrapbooks, jokes and plans for world domination online. You’d therefore think that there’d be no problem for me to find a suitable number of such distractions to keep me both amused and stimulated (in any sense of the word that you may happen to impose upon it). You would, however, be nosebleedingly wrong. There is, in fact, a vast amount of utter, utter rubbish, baloney and nonsense online. Going to livejournal’s "Random Journal" link and repeatedly selecting it has so far been my passport to nothing but teenage angst of the worst kind, philosophising from the kind of people who thought The Matrix was deep and what appears to be the complete cast, crew and audience of The Jerry Springer Show.
Now, I’ve nothing against any of those things in their place, and may, in fact, have indulged in these things myself from time to time. And I have, from time to time, bumped into people of wit, charm, sophistication and thought (see my friends list for more details). But by and large the content of these diaries and journals has left me despairing for humanity. I’m left with a feeling that I’ve intermittently since I was about 18, that all of the real human people are hiding somewhere, having decided the human race was beyond redemption, and are only visible through occasional sightings of their interplanetary spacecraft as they return to the huge underground caverns they now live in.
I first got this feeling when I arrived at University, expecting to finally be free of the idiots that surrounded me at school (not universally idiots in terms of intelligence, I knew some quite smart people), and amazed/disgusted to mostly find the same people waiting for me here. Where were the people discussing philosophy? Where were the people who were passionately interested in the whys, wherefores and how-comes? Why was it that the average student wanted nothing more than to head down the bar, get riotously drunk and leer at members of the opposite sex making a tit of themselves in exactly the same way?
It seemed that people were happy enough to study various subjects, but almost nobody cared about them except as a means to a passing grade, which was in turn a means to a decent degree, which was a means to a good job. That’s for those who actually thought that far ahead; many people just kept their heads down and got on with the day to day slog, never looking ahead any further than the next weekend and its attendant chance to 'pull' and 'get pissed'.
Fortunately, I did eventually (November the 6th of my second year) find a group of decent people and ended up with some good friends. These people liked the same kinds of activities as me, enjoyed similar films, books, music, etc. and were generally great fun to be around. Most of them were still not interested in discussing stuff on a deeper level, but finally I found some people who were. The problem is that it seems that they/we seem to be outnumbered about 100:1.
One of the things I’m looking forward to in the new job (Standard Life, starts 28th October) is the smart people. Now, as I mentioned before, I’ve known smart people before who weren’t inquisitive, but a higher percentage of them seem to be, so that’s cause for hope. Standard Life gave me some bastard hard aptitude tests to see if I was up to the job, and I’m happy that anyone I’m working with is going to be rather smart (the tests, of course, only measured the pattern matching, mathematical and linguistic comprehension skills of the applicants, but then the group tests and interviews probably weeded out those people who are complete arses; well, hopefully). I’ve got my fingers crossed that there will be enough smart people there to find a clique that suits me, or at least bump into a grouping of people that I can fit in with. It will provide a welcome substitute for university (one of the reasons I stayed at Stirling after I graduated was that universities are great places to meet smart people. I had no faith that I could arrive in (say) York and make contact with my kind of people within (say) 10 years).
It seems quite strange to me to be sitting on a train typing away at a journal entry. Sadly, I have to wait until my return home before I can actually upload this to my journal itself, but with the advent of 3G phone systems, and the steady shrinking of computers, it’s only a matter of time before I can sit in a railway carriage, laser keyboard projected onto the table, LCD goggles propped on my nose, happily typing my passing thoughts.
Warren Ellis (acclaimed author of Transmetropolitan and various other wonderful comics) already does this, his info-mailing list having slowly veered from the latest update on his work to whatever amusing idea crosses his mind at the time. This has, of course, alienated a fair chunk of his readership, who signed up to hear more news on the Spider Jerusalem front, or the latest on the adventures of Jenny Sparks and her stalwart freedom fighters The Authority, but for those of us who are happy to read almost anything, providing it’s written with a modicum of wit, the daily missives provide a welcome interruption to the daily routine.
The blog/journal phenomenon provides an awful lot of that, vast numbers of people keep journals, jotters, notebooks, scrapbooks, jokes and plans for world domination online. You’d therefore think that there’d be no problem for me to find a suitable number of such distractions to keep me both amused and stimulated (in any sense of the word that you may happen to impose upon it). You would, however, be nosebleedingly wrong. There is, in fact, a vast amount of utter, utter rubbish, baloney and nonsense online. Going to livejournal’s "Random Journal" link and repeatedly selecting it has so far been my passport to nothing but teenage angst of the worst kind, philosophising from the kind of people who thought The Matrix was deep and what appears to be the complete cast, crew and audience of The Jerry Springer Show.
Now, I’ve nothing against any of those things in their place, and may, in fact, have indulged in these things myself from time to time. And I have, from time to time, bumped into people of wit, charm, sophistication and thought (see my friends list for more details). But by and large the content of these diaries and journals has left me despairing for humanity. I’m left with a feeling that I’ve intermittently since I was about 18, that all of the real human people are hiding somewhere, having decided the human race was beyond redemption, and are only visible through occasional sightings of their interplanetary spacecraft as they return to the huge underground caverns they now live in.
I first got this feeling when I arrived at University, expecting to finally be free of the idiots that surrounded me at school (not universally idiots in terms of intelligence, I knew some quite smart people), and amazed/disgusted to mostly find the same people waiting for me here. Where were the people discussing philosophy? Where were the people who were passionately interested in the whys, wherefores and how-comes? Why was it that the average student wanted nothing more than to head down the bar, get riotously drunk and leer at members of the opposite sex making a tit of themselves in exactly the same way?
It seemed that people were happy enough to study various subjects, but almost nobody cared about them except as a means to a passing grade, which was in turn a means to a decent degree, which was a means to a good job. That’s for those who actually thought that far ahead; many people just kept their heads down and got on with the day to day slog, never looking ahead any further than the next weekend and its attendant chance to 'pull' and 'get pissed'.
Fortunately, I did eventually (November the 6th of my second year) find a group of decent people and ended up with some good friends. These people liked the same kinds of activities as me, enjoyed similar films, books, music, etc. and were generally great fun to be around. Most of them were still not interested in discussing stuff on a deeper level, but finally I found some people who were. The problem is that it seems that they/we seem to be outnumbered about 100:1.
One of the things I’m looking forward to in the new job (Standard Life, starts 28th October) is the smart people. Now, as I mentioned before, I’ve known smart people before who weren’t inquisitive, but a higher percentage of them seem to be, so that’s cause for hope. Standard Life gave me some bastard hard aptitude tests to see if I was up to the job, and I’m happy that anyone I’m working with is going to be rather smart (the tests, of course, only measured the pattern matching, mathematical and linguistic comprehension skills of the applicants, but then the group tests and interviews probably weeded out those people who are complete arses; well, hopefully). I’ve got my fingers crossed that there will be enough smart people there to find a clique that suits me, or at least bump into a grouping of people that I can fit in with. It will provide a welcome substitute for university (one of the reasons I stayed at Stirling after I graduated was that universities are great places to meet smart people. I had no faith that I could arrive in (say) York and make contact with my kind of people within (say) 10 years).
no subject
As the person who teaches those emptyheaded bints how to make their journal "kewt and kool in summery colors" (don't laugh, real request once), I could not agree with you more :)