Talking To The Taxman About Poetry

Two different tasks.  Talking to the "taxman" is something i'll probably be doing in the neighbouring future regarding the mess that is our current tax situation.  In fact there are of course plenty of women who work at HMRC, and in fact some of our friends work there, which helps because it makes it harder for me to demonise them, or in fact impossible, although i suppose i could always demonise a different stratum.  I won't though.  In fact, i won't even talk about it any more.

That leaves us with "about poetry", which is what this is:

I am of course both afraid of poetry and married to a poet.

I would describe myself as afraid of poetry rather than having a phobia of poetry.  Phobias are irrational fears which have a cause but not a subjectively coherent reason.  I have a subjectively coherent reason for being frightened of poetry.

Humans differ from other species in that we use language.  While i see our discovery of language as a lucky accident rather than a genetic adaptation, language use is nevertheless the most important thing about our species and constitutes our being.  More sophisticated language use makes you more human and the better you express yourself, the "better" you are, not morally speaking, but in the sense that you are the epitome of humanity.  In aesthetic terms, a human being is a more human being.

Literature of a high quality is better than trash culture.  Poetry is a more nuanced, subtle, original and creative use of language than prose, at least at its best.  The appreciation or creation of good poetry is the highest act to which one can aspire.  Therefore, the pinnacle of humanity is the ability to write, read, recite and appreciate poetry.

Since i cannot grasp poetry, that actually does make me an inferior human being in that sense - it makes me less than human, subhuman so to speak.  For that reason, reading or listening to poetry is a huge risk to my self-esteem, and it's not possible for me to appreciate it because the fear of poetry crowds out any residual capacity i might have to understand it.  Therefore i am afraid of poetry.

From now on i'm not going to bother saying that the bit underneath is the description.

Anyway:  Ben Jonson and W H Auden, inter alia.  Ben Jonson is by some measures (there i go being quantitative about an entirely qualitative matter) as good as Shakespeare, and in fact i think according to some, actually is Shakespeare.  Casting my mind back before the two years during which the ordure collided with the propeller in the mid-'80s, i used to be a contender in the lit stakes.  I was planning to do a degree in Eng Lit and - well, you've read it all before.

Ben Jonson wrote this:

Hymn To Diana

Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,

Now the sun is laid to sleep,

Seated in thy silver chair,

State in wonted manner keep:

Hesperus entreats thy light,

Goddess excellently bright.

Earth, let not thy envious shade

Dare itself to interpose;

Cynthia's shining orb was made

Heaven to clear when day did close:

Bless us then with wished sight,

Goddess excellently bright.

Lay thy bow of pearl apart,

And thy crystal-shining quiver;

Give unto the flying hart

Space to breathe, how short soever:

Thou that mak'st a day of night -

Goddess excellently bright.

I've probably mentioned this before, but my ten-year old self would heartily recommend it and i bow to his superior judgement.

There's a load of weird framing underneath this now.

Regarding W H Auden, he was probably the last poet with whom i came in contact whom i appreciated unselfconsciously.  I'm pretty sure his stuff is still copyright though.  One poem in particular stands out nowadays of course, but this was a decade before 'Four Weldings And A Funnel', so at the time it wasn't particularly remarkable except for the fact that it seemed to be about a gay bereavement.  Ignoring that then, what have we got?  Well, there's this:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15549

And this:

http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.co.uk/2003/07/miss-gee-w-h-auden.html

The second, of course, mentions sarcoma, and now i have to tread carefully, so i'll just mention that i'm currently reading 'Not In Our Stars' by John Green and leave it at that.

Secret Messages

The CD rack is my friend.  I have now decided that the title should determine the content, or rather the slant, of the post rather than the other way round.  To this end, i mozied on over to that relatively recently anachronised piece of furniture and extracted an ELO CD - Secret Messages:

For some reason this album is more obscure than the ones either side of it, namely Balance Of Power and Time, and is of course littered with secret messages, which were however heard by very few due to the relative obscurity of the album.  The same applies to my life.

I play games.  These games fail to make contact with other people - they are like a chess game with only one set of pieces set out because nobody else is willing to play.  I react to this by changing the rules to make the messages more obscure, which is probably passive-aggressive.  However, this is only how i see the world.  Maybe it's a lot more disturbing than that.  Maybe in reality people know what i'm saying.  However, i very much doubt it (but then i would, but let's not do this).  Most of the time, the truth is probably that people don't notice and wouldn't care if they did.

So, here are a few of the deliberately secret messages, or rather where they are:

The first Mark's Herbalist leaflet used Monotype Corsiva and did not use an apostrophe where one might be expected.  This links back to an earlier poster i drew in early 1989 which used an almost identical calligraphic hand, which itself links back to a slightly earlier piece of correspondance i sent which used the same one.

My website used a number of meta tags which had no connection to the content.  Someone looking for a particular thing would've found it unexpectedly.  Nobody ever did of course - the number of page impressions on the site was probably around one a fortnight, which led to me giving up on the whole idea of having a website and i trashed it in 2010.  I never got an enquiry off it, which made the whole text content of the site a secret message in a way, though an unintentional one.

The way i dot i's and cross t's is sometimes steganographic.  I'm pretty sure nobody's picked up on that either.

Each YouTube video i make has at least three secret messages encoded in it.  Some have more.

I don't really know why i bother with them.  I suppose i just enjoy it and do it for fun, not really caring whether anyone picks up on it or not, which may contradict what i said earlier, which was in truth recreational histrionics.  I do a lot of that as well.

Unfortunately, as well as all the intentionally secret messages, i also produce a lot of unintentionally secret messages - i fail to communicate.  Today, i've produced an unintentionally secret message about an unintentionally secret message, and presumably this entry is a further secret message.

So anyway, here's another one:  i bought a dress today, something i haven't done for many a year.  I obviously have problems pulling dresses off (ha ha), not least because they are designed for people with different body shapes, but on this occasion it might actually be OK.  The reason i've bought a dress is, well, to be honest, because it's an experiment in image again, though probably not one i'll be trying outside the house.  I realise i've gotten stuck in a rut about this.  I'd show you a photo but since i already know what it looks like, that would be a bit pointless.

Going back to the secret message thing, well, if i do intentionally secret messages for fun, why not also do the unintentionally secret ones for fun too?  Daniel insists quite correctly that this is where to go with this and other people have said the same.

Imagine Dragons

Cheated there, didn't i?  Also, i've not knowingly heard a single track of theirs.

Today i was scared in the now memetic way, so i did this:

(which is currently a grey rectangle from this blog's perspective and to be honest there's little point in there being a thumbnail as this is really addressed to people in the know).

Description:

This is mainly addressed to the people who are peed off about what i did about 'Here Be Dragons', whose rather chaotic unfinished draft is interred here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/118958662/Here-Be-Dragons

Basically, i annoyed people by my decision to abide by the deadline.  I feel guilty about going back on my word and releasing this monstrosity to the public, but i think there's probably not much choice about it, so i have.  My plan is now to publish a paper version of the book, but printed in black and white with spaces in which people can draw their own versions of the beasts.  I don't know how long it'll take me to do this because it probably needs a lot of cleaning up as well.

Also, i very probably will organise a free giveaway of the paper version of the book as part of a subscriber drive at some point in the near future, probably as a sort of prize draw.

The question now arises, of course, of what the other video was going to be about, and having delayed it i now present myself with a problem because if i don't get it out of the way by tomorrow i'll be distracted in church, which i really don't want.  I suppose one answer to that might be to make a completely different video for tomorrow than the one i planned for today.  I am getting to the point where i am procrastinating making videos because i expect them not to be seen.

In other news, i have bought a sharpie and am reviewing various images which i plan to trace so i can include them in the animation, so that's going well.  I expect that to be seen.  I think one reason the Other Channel is more successful is that it was not subject to the video deletion policy and was therefore able to build up a following before YT did whatever it was they did last April.  Rather than bemoaning this, i suppose i'll just have to make the best of it.  It seems unlikely that i'd either be able to change the tone of the Other Channel and retain my audience or get them to subscribe to the "main" one, so i'll just have to live with it, i suppose, until i can find some kind of solution.  It is, however, the case that many people over there are loyal.

Another rather annoying phenomenon can be illustrated by these two graphs.  Here is the viewing performance of the penultimate video over there:

and here's the viewing performance for a video uploaded on the main channel at about the same time:

So this video, which is clearly much less popular than the other, hasn't been watched at all since about the 3rd December, whereas the other one has never dropped to zero views per day and has to some extent recovered.  However, the first day only brought about twice as many views of the first than of the second.  However, there are also videos on the Other Channel which show a steady rise from the start which just keeps climbing.

Just to reiterate:  my book is now available as a PDF here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/118958662/Here-Be-Dragons

Just done the arithmetic on it, and it works out at £12.70 as a black and white book, so it's viable i think.

Goin' Out West

Apparently.  Anyway, here's this:

The D thing:

I probably shouldn't put anything here.

OK, so it's an old joke, but obviously only about a dozen years max.  Why is it there at all?  Well, i hadn't got enough time to put together a more sophisticated idea so i decided on this instead.  It is of course far from tent-pole, so no change there.

Also, there has finally been a bit of movement on 'Here Be Dragons'.  I'm going to email the document to the person interested in illustrating it and relinquish control over it, but also am considering inserting blank rectangles so that readers can illustrate it themselves.  Moreover, i'm going to upload a PDF of the book as it stands right now to Scribd, having vetted it for personal references.

Other book-related plans:  revise 'You Could've Thought Of That', which incidentally is something i've had in mind for quite some time but is not a priority because i'm not expecting to sell any more, not because it's not good but because i can't market it further without money, whereof i have less than none if HMRC have their way; put together a second anthology and acknowledge that it was me that wrote it this time; finally make the dodecahedral atlas of the Solar System.

In the meantime, i posted this as an example of a sound effect from the Other Channel:

The video here is beside the point - it's just there as pretty pictures and is poorly timed.  This is one of the sound effects from the animation i'm making over there, the others of which are now thoroughly mixed into the audio track and no longer exist as such.  An explosion is, however, less likely to be mixed with other sound effects.

I now need a "ka-ching!", but that's another story.

If It Doesn't Come Naturally, Leave It

Here's today's video:

And here's the, er, description (can't spell):

The history of the Nerdfighters sign, so far as i can tell, is that it's descended from "Live Long And Prosper" in Star Trek, which is the Vulcan greeting.  This in itself has a prehistory in the actor who played Spock, Leonard Nimoy, inventing the sign from something he glimpsed in a Jewish ceremony where the rabbi held his hand up in that shape.  The shape of the hand itself represents the Hebrew letter shin, short for El Shaddai, the God of High Places, itself descended from the Ugaritic Shaddai, again a god of high places.  Whereas there's clearly no need for religion or its lack to mix with the Nerdfighter ideals of being awesome and reducing suck levels, the science fiction ideal of utopia in space is reminiscent of a similar projection by religion of utopia into high places or Heaven.  Therefore, the whole idea behind Nerdfighteria is entirely consistent with the ideals represented by El Shaddai, provided we drop the patriarchal judgmental side of what is sometimes associated with religion and spirituality.

I'm not trying to assimilate anything to anything else here, just point out the essential goodness and unity of the two attitudes at their best.

It did come naturally to me, as it happens, although i worry a little that my YouTube videos could become a little incestuous, which reminds me of my attitude to counselling, where it often became a session about the session, meaning that i would adopt a persona for the session whose problems would presumably disappear with it, i.e. at the moment the session ended.  I have major issues with counselling, but won't go into them here.

Just in case anyone's still reading this, i came across a blogger the other day whose entries are a little like a cross between mine and Liz's.  Her blog is here:

http://trudymorgancole.wordpress.com/

Her YT channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Hypergraffiti

While i'm at it, i should mention Liz's blog in case anyone reading this isn't aware of it:

http://lizardyoga.wordpress.com/

Anyway, so i did a video on the Nerdfighter sign, which i then didn't edit enough because the audio is now recorded separately from the video, and astonishingly, the wave form displayed on the audio is not in step with where it appears on the video in Windows Movie Maker!  This raises the issue of whether the bad worker always blames his tools.  I am currently finding Windows Movie Maker a pain in the neck, and am aware that it is from the dreaded Microsoft stable, so it wouldn't be surprising if it really is bad rather than it just being me.  I will probably break out AVLinux in the near future, though it has sadly apparently now been retired.  Another link for you:

http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html

One thing i've been messing about with recently is audio editing, with Audacity, which can be downloaded for Windows here:

http://audacity.googlecode.com/files/audacity-win-2.0.2.exe

Right, enough with the incessant linking!

The sound on the above video is edited using Audacity.  Unfortunately, removing the hiss may have degraded the quality, although it is probably at least a bit louder.  I worked on the animation project quite a bit today too and have now completed the soundtrack to my satisfaction, though i may add breathing sounds and a heartbeat to it.  I've also gone through it, worked out some approximate timings, and started on a few frames.  Here's one of them:

It's not finished and it's just occurred to me it's the wrong colour - it needs to be blue.  It's something like the penultimate frame.  Totting up the total number of frames, it's a two gross, six dozen and five seconds, meaning a maximum of a zagier, eight gross, three dozen and four frames at eight frames a second.  However, i'm doing them as cels (actually layers in the Gimp), there are many repeatable frames and there's even some live action, so it's not so bad as it sounds.  For instance, much of it consists of breathing movements and static scenes.

In other news, connected to Nerdfighteria, i have, remarkably, borrowed John Green's 'The Fault In Our Stars' from the library and am about to start reading it, having returned 'The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob de Zoet' after reading only a few pages.  This is not an adverse comment on David Mitchell as an observation about my poor attention span.

That's it for today then.  It's Theintrostealer's sixteenth birthday today and i'd like him to present a guest vlog.  If not, i'm not sure what will happen tomorrow as it's quite busy.

Oh, and the herbalism seems to be getting going again after the Winterval.

Rum, Sodomy and the Lash

OK, not so good a title but at least it's thematic.  Maybe i can write this to make it fit.

Today's video:

This is all speckly because we live so close to the sodding pole that the Sun occasionally peeks over the horizon in winter and decides against bestowing its rays on us for another few months.  The light's on but the colour temperature is too low.  I should get one of those scandium jobs which my nephew broke with a plastic helicopter.

So that's "rum".  This is the doublydeu:

Though i wouldn't judge others for drinking it, the last time i drank alcohol deliberately "for fun" as it were was on 12th August, 1997, fifteen years ago.  I see drinking alcohol as a form of self-harm, rather like banging your head against the wall for fun.  Drinking alcohol has some value as a means of overcoming social inhibition and because i lack that, i have to push myself harder in social situations than i would otherwise.

If i drank to avoid my problems, i wouldn't deal with them then and there and get them out of the way.  Instead, they'd loom on the horizon and i would've given myself the additional problem of something like a hangover and impaired my ability to deal with them.  I don't understand why i'd put myself through that.

Having said that, in a way i'm addicted or obsessive about not drinking alcohol, which is probably not very moderate or healthy in itself.

I honestly don't judge others for drinking it and the fact that i think of wine, for example, as merely gone-off grape juice probably makes me a bit of a Philistine.  It's perfectly fine to drink wine and in fact i really miss whisky, which was my tipple of choice when i had enough money.

Come to think of it, it's also a vast waste of money unless you make it yourself.  However, it does make a good solvent, sanitiser and fuel.  Also, in a way we're all teetotal because there are certain alcohols we wouldn't imbibe in large amounts, such as geraniol and menthol.

Although i aim not to judge people for drinking ethanol for fun, to be honest i have a confession to make:  i do actually find it quite hard not to judge people negatively for drinking it when it seems to expose their aggressive tendencies and people get hurt psychologically or physically, including themselves.  However, I used to get drunk sometimes and have lost my memory at least twice.  On the second occasion, it took me nearly a week to get back to what appeared to be normal, and even then it could've simply been that my ability to judge what was normal had been blunted by that point.

On the other hand, it might just be that i've led such an easy life that i've never needed to resort to it.  If that's so, however, it still seems to be irrational because it makes it harder to deal with problems, so it presumably results from having problems so big you are overwhelmed with them.

Another aspect of all this is that I associate temperance with veganism, not because they're similar in aim but because they involve abstinence from a set of substances which the majority of people in this society consume.  I don't consider my vegetarianism to be a valid diet - it's a pointless sentimental gesture which is at best only transitional and a mere salve to my conscience which fails to address the root problem and is worse than some diets which include meat.  Like vegans, teetotalers no longer need to operate the denial and rationalisation which leads them to believe certain other things to justify their position.  My initial reason for approaching veganism was tropic levels, but once i'd started on that journey i no longer needed to pretend to myself that it was OK to kill animals unnecessarily for food or that it was healthy to eat the factory-farmed flesh of cadavers.  Had i pursued a different angle, such as eating roadkill, insects or only wild animals which i had hunted myself with a home made bow and arrow, i would probably have discovered other kinds of denial in which i'd previously engaged, but that's not the route i took.  Equally, there are psychological buttresses around my current position of not drinking large quantities of ethanol.

So what about sodomy and the lash?  Well, both of those are considered fun by some consenting adults, i suppose, so that's a link.  I realise it refers to the Royal Navy.

A few plans:  tomorrow is the start of the younger offspring's seventeenth trip round the Sun and i have asked him to do a guest blog to promote his channel.  This is only partly because, like certain other vloggers, he's a young pretty male person with a fringe, and i think this may be to his advantage there, although he hasn't produced much content recently, something he plans to change.  I also wrote some more dialogue for the animation and timed it, and started to plan a monochrome video called 'Fifty Shades Of Sophie Grey' (spelling intentional), for which i have fairly high hopes.  There's also 'I'm Old', a vid on the prehistory of the Nerdfighter gang sign and another on Aunt Marge in the same vein as this Violet Beauregarde video:

The Terror Of A Blank Slate

Yet another new world.  It's getting old.  One reason i adopted the duodecimal system is that the time divisions are less frequent - longer "decades", "centuries" and "millenia" for example.  That means that the new start illusion can occur less often, and such things as New Year's Resolutions are discouraged.

This morning's second video:

whose doobleydoo (sp?) is here:

Why I resolved not to make New Year's Resolutions.

I'm speaking for myself here but think it probably applies to some other people.  People often say that when you make New Year's resolutions, you're setting yourself up to fail.  That doesn't apply to me.  I actually can't break them and as a result i no longer make them.

It's not a good thing that i keep resolutions because they're a trap.  They're promises or commitments which restrict me from doing things which would otherwise be good.  For instance, i'm teetotal with the exception of communion and medical uses of alcohol and as a result, if i'm asked to do something like toast someone at a wedding or their birthday, i take a mouthful of wine or champagnem then spit it back into the glass, which to me feels like i'm insulting them, so i do it surreptitiously.  This seems inflexible, but the distinctive feature of a resolution is that it is inflexible, or it would be meaningless.

Resolutions, promises, vows, undertakings and the like are speech acts which make themselves true.  When you make a resolution, that very act renders it unethical to break it regardless of whatever else happens, and you can't anticipate the circumstances which might arise in which it would be better not to do the thing you've resolved to do, so it kind of amounts to an obligation to do wrong in some situations, which is absurd.

I made a resolution to get a girlfriend once, and of course it worked because that's what happens with me.  The relationship i got into, however, was probably bad for both of us and though we are still close friends and it led to my marriage to someone else, it probably would've been better if i hadn't made that resolution.

Therefore, it doesn't make sense to make resolutions which you can't break unless you know everything which might happen, and if you make resolutions on the understanding that you might break them, they're not really resolutions at all.

The paradox here, of course, is that in a sense this amounts to a resolution in itself, and i don't really know where to go with that!

This has already annoyed someone this year, so that's a plus.

Last night's attempt to say the same thing and showcase my beloved offspring is here:

and its dublidu is here:

2012/2013 - What was good about 2012, what we want to leave behind in 2012 and what new stuff we want to happen in 2013.

...but as usual it seems to have fanell stillborn from the press, to misquote David Hume.

So, dear void, another blank slate lies before me, except this time i'm resisting the urge to project my fears onto it.  The two big ones are the changes to Working Tax Credit and the attempt by HMRC to remove all the money we use.  My contingency plan should the latter happen probably involves selling the medical screen, examination couch and otoscope, though of course that still won't be another.  The former takes me into the realm of failure not being an option, but in a novel way.  Whereas it's possible that we could've tried harder, it's hard to see how, but taking it beyond that, successful possibilities still exist, as follows:

1. The somewhat disturbing idea of doing something massively socially useful but highly illegal, whereof i currently have nothing in mind (but then i would say that, wouldn't i?).  The problem with this is that although it results in free accommodation, it also probably results in free sexual assault and being murdered, and removes exist ramp options due to one's shoelaces being removed.
2. The somewhat less disturbing but considerably more self-obsessed and apparently selfish (so people say) of taking the exist ramp without having one's shoelaces forcibly removed but probably doing so in a hotel room somewhere, since i wouldn't be paying the bill.
3. The option that tends to preoccupy me the most for reasons previously gone into, but which is, however, quite unrealistic:

(Yeah i know:  naughty).

It does strike me, however, that the last option is in a fantasy realm which the government seems to imagine i can enter for some reason.  The question arises of whether the same is true of others or whether my situation is unique in important ways.

In what seems to be a digression, i will now paint you a scenario:

One of the perks of being a Shakespearean actor is that you might get to wear fancy costumes, but from an external perspective, this is probably only something which works from the outside.  Presumably actually being a Shakespearean actor involves nerve-wracking toil and you never get to enjoy the tights and the ruffs because you end up associating them with your tiresome day job which sucks away at your life like a trovamp.  Yes!  I can use that here because only i'm reading this, and violate a completely separate set of intellectual property rights than the above image by posting this:

Other news:  I have embarked on a major project for the Other Channel which i hope will have positive fallout for the main one.  It involves animation and fiddling with my voice in entertaining ways.