4'33"

No, this is not a blank post, but it is about silence, and silence of a particular kind.  Here it is:

Sometimes the worst thing you can do to someone is to ignore them.  Hatred can be mild by comparison.

Just to get the links out of the way:

J K Rowling's website:  http://www.jkrowling.co.uk/
Pottermore:  http://www.pottermore.com/en
The Harry Potter Alliance:  http://thehpalliance.org/
Harry Potter at Bloomsbury:  http://harrypotter.bloomsbury.com/

Marianne Williamson's website:  http://www.marianne.com/
The quote i'm referring to:  http://skdesigns.com/internet/articles/quotes/williamson/our_deepest_fear/
Link to her book:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060927488?tag=skdesigns&link_code=as3&creativeASIN=0060927488&creative=373489&camp=211189

Right, now we've got all that out of the way, the situation is this:

Liz, Bettina and i all have in common a tendency to say things where others are silent.  We also say and do things without becoming aware of a response.  Indifference or a failure to respond means two very negative things.  Firstly, it can involve you trying to fill in the lack of information with your own negative speculations about what might be happening.  Secondly, if you get no negative feedback you're never going to get better and it's tantamount to being written off as a hopeless case by the people who are ignoring you.

Bearing in mind that the silent treatment is used as a punishment or a form of bullying, indifference is not just some innocuous thing which we should allow ourselves to get away with doing, but a truly harmful and hurtful destructive force.  Deaf people, for example, suffer terribly from not being able to hear and can become paranoid, which is entirely understandable.

I'm not judging anyone who hasn't the time, confidence or energy to acknowledge or respond to stuff and realise the world doesn't revolve around me, and i expect i'm often guilty of the same of what i'm accusing others.  However, we are kind of committing ourselves to a world where people are unlikely to improve, feel isolated and give up when we ignore each other, so we need to pay attention and listen, and feedback effectively, even if criticism is not always positive.

Incidentally, though this is not a subscriber drive i will sub for sub.  I don't want you to subscribe for its own sake, but a response would be nice.  I will, incidentally, approve all video responses i get to this.

Except of course that i probably won't get the chance to for the precise reason that it's about, if you see what i mean.

One thing this manifests is the degree of paranoia triggered by YT's doubts about the intellectual property in the previous video (which is not previous by publishing but by when i made it), because i've extensively credited everything.  I really don't think there's going to be a problem with this now, but it does mean i've had to slap together a new intro and outro of whose quality i'm entirely uncertain.  Here they are.  The Deep Field intro:

and the Deep Field outro:

These are probably going to be the kind of thing which i initially intend to be temporary but turn out to be permanent.  The reason i changed it was to avoid a dispute about the nature of "Test Card Nineteen", which is based on a public domain copy of the test card but whose central photograph is clearly a parody.

The thumbnail for the main video is also clumsy because of the uneven saturation boost on the hoodie and the uneven placement of the text.  The text itself is from a Jupiter Ace of all things, a computer which is proving to be remarkably useful in the 'teenies.

I think i've said it all in the video, so i shall schweigen about it here.