Like in most aspects in life we tend to talk about the negative stuff more than the positive, it’s human nature I think. So although it may at times sound like schools are full of violent, alcoholic, sexoholic retards in reality the good kids far outnumber the bad. In fact some are just plain lovely.
So to counterbalance yesterday’s moan, I tip my virtual hat to the lovely kids out there. Even though you will never likely know, you’re the ones that make it all worth while.
It’s a phrase that Me and the Missus often joke about. That if only everyone was like us, the world would be perfect. But just why are people the way they are?
When I’m being shouted at by someone, their face screwed up with hate, and all I’ve done is ask them to do something that is expected of them, I just think “Why are you being so rude?”.
When I dodge out of the way of someone who’s not prepared to move an inch I wonder “Why do you have no respect for others?”.
When I hear people talking loudly about their sex/drink/drug habits in public I think “Why do you have no respect for yourself?”.
I understand factually that there are many things both nature and nurture that affect how a person turns out, but I cannot truly comprehend why people are intentionally rude and aggressive. I almost feel incapable of empathizing with them. I’ve never been the ‘Alpha Male’ type and following rules and doing what I’m told by authority figures is just in my nature. When I’m with a group that’s just been told it’s time to leave the pub for the second time and they all casually laugh it off I start to feel very anxious. They’ve just asked us to do something we know we should do, why aren’t you all doing it? They have a job to do! We expect that kind of respect and basic compliance in our respective jobs so why should it be different when we’re the ones being asked to do something?
In a few of the books I read there variations on a technology that lets us share thoughts and/or feelings and I wonder if we would be a better society if we had this capability. If I had the ability to show someone how their actions are making me feel, would they change their actions? Would we all be more considerate people?
Blah. This has taken me forever to write. I’ve deleted sections and re-written them a million times because I can’t just spit it out. The reason for writing it came from the fact someone was rude to me for no real reason and I just felt incapable of understanding why they would behave like that towards me. What events have happened in their life to make them act that way not just on a one off, but the majority of the time. This is a wreck of a person who I can only see going further downhill through life.
Good job I believe you reap what you sow.
I think if we all just followed these wise words, the world would be a better place:
“Don’t be a dick.” – Wil Wheaton
Ok I’m having an uncharacteristically productive morning.
I’m behind on my OU work as per usual by a few weeks, but have managed to do a weeks worth of reading in an hour, so in theory by day’s end I can have caught up significantly. Due to training at work there are no students in and most people are involved with training so I have very little risk of human distraction. I’ve had my laptop off and just the gentle sounds of a fire burning away thanks to the lovely free iOS app “Sleep Pillow”.
After finishing Unit 1 of one of my courses I have allowed myself 10 minutes of Twitter time and thought I could also cram in a quick blog entry. Go me!
So who else out there is a master procrastinator? Do you have frenzied catch up sessions like me, and what are your usual ways of delaying what must be done?
It was nice whilst it lasted but I’m throwing in the towel. I’ve not done too badly but the thought of keeping it up for another 10 months is not a happy thought.
I will of course make posts still but I think just when I feel the need to, not doing them because I feel I should.
Not much to say today. Hannah started the holidays off nicely by waking up at 5:10am. We’ve watched lots of Shrek. I’ve started Dragon Age again, this time I’m determined to play past the first 3 hours.
That’s about it! Now about to watch Inception. Loved it at the cinema, wife hasn’t seen it yet.
Must write more belongings during the day. By the evening by brain is too tired!
YAAAAAAAAAAAY!
It’s half term next week. Working in a school has many drawbacks but also some pretty good perks, 14 weeks holiday a year being one of them.
We don’t have much planned other than going to see Paul at the cinema. I need to catch up with some OU reading, but other than that it’s the usual lazing about. Hannah will still go to nursery and then one day with each set of grandparents so nicely we will have time to ourselves. Will probably sink in a fair bit of time into my book and possibly try to finally get into Dragon Age: Origins as the sequel is out soon and the PC Gamer review is very glowing. It did take me 3 tries to get into Mass Effect and I ended up loving that so perhaps the same will happen with Dragon Age.
Anyhow, let the lazing about commence…now!
(Yes, yes, no change there :p)
Well who’d have thunk it? The eternally single me of 5 and a bit years ago has been married for 4 years now. Very happily, might I add!
I met my wife through work. She was an English teacher and I was an IT technician at the time. Didn’t speak more than a dozen words to her for the first 6 months or so working at the same place. Then one magical work night out, we both got blind drunk, played thumb wars, snogged in front of everyone and I went back to her house afterwards where we stayed up until the wee hours watching Father Ted on DVD. In between being violently ill of course, like all true romantic beginnings.
I moved in about 2 weeks later and 5 months after that I proposed (again romantically, after an Asda shop). We were married another 9 months after this and here we are today still together with the addition of a dog and a child. I wouldn’t describe it as love at first sight, but it took only days really to realise we were soul mates. The time scales make it sound rushed but each step has felt so natural we never thought we were rushing into anything.
Since meeting my wife my life has got exponentially better. There is nothing I’ve ever done, or will likely do in the future, that can compare to the pride I feel for the family we’ve created together. Neither of us is perfect, and for my part I know exactly how annoying I must be to live with at times. But we have a lot of laughs together and there is never any doubt we will be calling each other Bugger Faces, laughing at seeing each other naked and blowing raspberries across the living room well into our 90s.
So here’s to 4 years of marriage, and many, many more. Here are a few rare pics of us together over the past few years:
Today’s post is just to recommend to those of you with children under 5 a book, “Trouble At The Dinosaur Cafe”.
There are three main reasons why I like it.
So yes, highly recommended. It helps that Hannah loves dinosaurs but even so I find it a great bedtime read and she asks for it every night.
I have always loved spaceships. As a kid I would turn any Lego set into a spaceship, none of that rubbish like a castle or a race track they put on the box. When I first got into PC gaming I was allowed the joy of flying them. It started with TIE Fighter and it’s various sequels, then onto Freespace 1 and 2 which remain the pinnacle of the space dogfighting genre (sadly a dead one these days). The thrill of flak cannons and laser beams firing across kilometre long ships was really exciting stuff.
I-War holds a very special place in my heart, it is one of the very few space combat games to use proper Newtonian physics in it’s flight model. Flying that ship took real skill, needing to understand inertia and thrust to really master the combat. It’s missions were excellently varied and exciting. One moment you were fighting off a dozen weapon platforms and 3 frigates, the next sneaking into a base by building up speed and then cutting all power, drifting slowly in.
Since joysticks went out of fashion there have been very few space combat games. The occasional strategy game will appear, the Homeworld games were very enjoyable. Star Trek: Bridge Commander (and much later, Star Trek Online) gave the fun of commanding a much bigger ship too. But all in all it’s a dead genre.
I have recently had the itch to tinker with space ships so I fired up Gratuitous Space Battles. The idea is you design your ships and fleet, set loose tactics and watch the battles play out. I love the idea, but the execution is a little flawed. I think with a bit more effort with the tutorial and some UI improvements it would have been better, but it wasn’t quite enough for me. I didn’t like the loss of control once you set your fleet free. I know it’s the point of the game, but there is no way of you turning the tide of battle.
So I was thinking about the games I’ve got, and one I didn’t play much (due to hitting a huge bug at the time) was Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. You command a small fleet of ships and you can really tinker to your heart’s content. Each weapon can target a specific ship and subsystem, you can toggle your power levels and repair priority, send boarding parties to sabotage the enemy ships, send fighters to protect an ally. Or you can just say “Ship A take down their shields, Ship B disable their engines” and leave them to it. Of course I love to micro-manage everything to feel I’m really making the most of my fleet.
The game is not perfect, the plot seems a bit bobbins, it has unskippable cut-scenes and can get ridiculously hard. But it still looks beautiful and it really scratches my space captain itch. I’ll endeavour to give the game a proper go this time round.
The crafty Rhian pointed me in the direction of this great article by Philip Pullman on the Big Society and Libraries.
I highly recommend you read it if you’ve not come across it yet. I would love to know how David Cameron would respond to the points on volunteering especially.
Here’s a choice snippet from the article:
What I personally hate about this bidding culture is that it sets one community, one group, one school, against another. If one wins, the other loses. I’ve always hated it. It started coming in when I left the teaching profession 25 years ago, and I could see the way things were going then. In a way it’s an abdication of responsibility. We elect people to decide things, and they don’t really want to decide, so they set up this bidding nonsense and then they aren’t really responsible for the outcome. “Well, if the community really wanted it, they would have put in a better bid … Nothing I can do about it … My hands are tied …”
Go on, give it a read!