It was a chapel service, a thing at school where we had mandatory anglican church.  It was a special one for Remembrance Sunday, related to my school’s history to the military (fun fact – D-Day was planned there).

I was 17 and willing to do literally anything in order to impress girls that were at least ‘passably’ attractive.  So when an actually really, really pretty girl called Rachel texts me  asking if I want to do something after the service I’m pretty excited.

I knew her through my best friend.  They’d known each other through their parents for most of their lives.  She’d pretty much always crushed hard on him (probably because he looked like a young Daniel Craig).  Thankfully this friend’s strict parents never let him out that often, so this time, when he was busy with a family Sunday lunch, I was able to pick up the slack.

So we meet up.  She’s looking very WASP-Girl-on-Sunday; neat hair, white knitted cardigan and a dress with an orange print (I think).  We start talking about girl who would later become my first girlfriend, and she’s educating me on the niceties of dating and how to flirt while sober.

I really like talking about how people work – not gossiping, but just trying to understand them and their motivations, and trying to do the same thing to myself.  I’d end up calling this ‘studying Ethics’.  Talking about ‘ethics’ with Rachel defined how we knew each other.  Normally people react with either severe disinterest or incomprehension.  Rachel was ready to talk about this stuff, and had all this insight into what was really going on with people – especially girls.  And like I say, she was a pretty girl herself, which was great for me.

This no doubt has something to do with why we were good friends – the girls I’ve had the biggest ‘things’ for are the girls who can teach me something about people.  Rachel was, emotionally and intellectually, ‘my first’ in this fashion.

So we’re talking girls and I’m trying to seem all worldy and pseudo-intellectual (still am, incidentally).  We go past a Tescos and Rachel asks if I have any money for cigarettes.  I do, somehow (the mysterious wallets of unemployed teenagers).  So I buy my first packet of cigarettes ever.

Now we have a ten-pack of Lucky Strike.  She offered me some, which I think I awkwardly refused at first (inexperience mostly).  Then she offered again and I was like “Oh!  Cigarettes are cool!  And hot!”  She was trying to make me more ‘cool’, which was really sweet of her, and much appreciated given how much I needed it.  So I take my first attempted toke.

I learned my first lesson.  Don’t ‘butt-suck’.  That’s when you over-moisten the filter by putting too much into your mouth.  Mortifying for me, but again she was sweet about it.

Rachel gave me this whole education about what it was like to be cool.  A gentleman never tells, but it would be a while before I reached the point of having had as exciting a life as she’d had at 17.

She taught me a demeanour about alcohol and drugs and cigarettes uncommon among my set of peers.  Basically, ‘don’t brag about it, share experiences, be open to new ones, and be sensible’.

She taught me how to talk to girls, especially all the stuff I didn’t know.  For example, ‘Don’t be afraid of them’.  ‘There are girls who will fall in love with any guy who lights her cigarette for her’.  ‘They’re just people’.  ‘They’re nice’.  ‘They’re cool’.  ‘They think almost exactly like you do, probably because of how much O.C you watch’.

Now that I have more conversations to compare it with, it was a pretty great one, objectively speaking.  And a great introduction to smoking.

Smoking in company is an intimate thing.  Especially in the pre-ban days.  We could smoke in coffee shops.  We could smoke in bars.  Over our time living in Bristol our friendship became beautifully inseparable from smoking.  And later when we were at Uni.  After extended periods of abstinence, we would smoke heavily when meeting up for a 6-monthly coffee or drink or meal.

I don’t smoke as much as I used to.  I’m actually almost entirely smoke free for about 8 months now, except for precisely 3 lapses.  Coming from 40 a day, I’m down with that.

My current roommate, who doesn’t smoke, asked how it was even possible to get through 40 a day.  The answer is good company.  I could smoke with Rachel for days straight and enjoy it.  Smoking is a commitment to a conversation, and that’s something you can only make with someone you love.

Last Sunday I spent consecutive hours watching ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ and scanning every piece of paper I’ve collected over a 3 year degree into Evernote.  It started out as procrastination, but it’s maybe the best thing I’ve done to make working and studying easier.

This was what I needed to do before Evernote.  I had various folders labelled with an individual topic.  There were as many as 100 pages in some of these.  To get to the library I need the useful information, which is stuff like reading lists, old essays, maybe some notes.  Sorting this stuff out from the collection of papers took maybe 10 minutes if I was lucky.  The process involved looking at every piece of paper until I found the right one, mechnically.  I pack this in my bag, pray nothing bad happens to it or that I don’t leave anything to be trashed by the cleaners at the library.  This all of course assumes that everything was filed correctly.  Mistakes can take hours to correct.

Now that I have Evernote things are different.  I don’t even do anything at home.  When I get to the library, I either go online, or just use my phone.  I look to see what my weakest paper is.  I find the reading lists, or notes, or whatever I think I need right then, and I’m done.  It takes about 10 seconds.

It’s pretty sweet.

It’s flexible. If I’m going to a coffee shop, I can get at lecture handouts and chapter scans and journal articles in the same way, in the same 10 seconds.

Evernote has 3 important features.

1)  It keeps everything in one place.  It can handle any kind of file.  When you need to deal with something, the first step is always simple – put it in Evernote.

2)  It uses tags, not folders.  The problem with folders (physical or digital) is that you can only have an item in one place.  So you have to find the right folder to find the item.  With tags, an item can basically be in multiple folders at once.  So if you want to find your draft for a blog post you’ve got a higher chance of finding it first time around.  It can be in ‘work’ or ‘drafts’ or ‘blog posts’.  With folders, you’d have to search each of those until you found it.

3)  It backs up everything.  Evernote saves all the documents, in the chosen filing system, online.  You can use it from a phone, tablet, browser, or desktop in exactly the same way.  So if you adapt, you’re golden.

Here’s how I’ve broken all my study materials down for access.

I work by using reading lists to find material to study from.  So the first thing I did was tag all my reading lists.  Each list was tagged ‘reading list’, ‘[module], and ‘[topic]’ .  So the reading list for utilitarianism, a topic for my Ethics module, is tagged ‘reading list’, ‘Ethics’ and ‘Utilitarianism’.  When I want that file, I select all three tags at once.  If I want to choose a topic in Ethics, I might just choose ‘reading list’ and ‘Ethics’, which would give me lists for all my topics.  And so on.

If I want an essay on a topic I can replace the ‘reading list’ tag with the ‘Essay’ tag.  Or if I want all the notes to go with utilitarianism, I can can use ‘Notes’.  Or I can just choose the ‘Utilitarianism’ and get everything on that topic, essays, reading lists, notes, and possibly more.

I can find out what my weakest area is by looking at which topic has the least notes associated with it.  I feel like the more I’ve worked on a topic, the better prepared I am.  Everyday I work on my least prepared topic.  I can do this by looking at the numbers of documents in each topic.

So this is how to build an Evernote system that works like this.

The first step is just scanning.  There are solutions for Mac and Windows that allow you to keep pressing a button that will scan a document and automatically add it to Evernote.  This takes time, but unless you’re talking thousands of items, if you’re efficient and caffeinated it can be done in a matter of hours.

Applying Evernote to a workflow is about identifying something you do frequently, and then translating that into an Evernote action.  My example was every morning I needed to know what I was taking to  the library.  So I turned that from a process of looking through folders for the right pieces of paper to clicking “<topic> + reading list + essays + lecture handouts + etc etc etc”.

Tag each file twice.  First tag with a single noun.  This should be simple and generic (‘Work’, ‘Money’, ‘Academic’).

Second, tag with a phrase.  This will probably be more than one word, and quite specific (‘Reading List’, ‘The Johnson Account’, ‘Starbucks Receipts’).

When you need to find a file, select the relevant tags.  If it’s not immediately intuitive which tag you’d need, introduce a more specific phrase.

Hope that helps.

The idea is that in Oxford University society the obsession is with the weight of responsibility. The ARG would run over a term, and slowly grow in scope and demand more and more from the players. Tasks would eventually take over two hours, and no one would commit to them. The game would achieve nothing more than give people something else to feel guilty about. It would end in 7th week by seeing if it can ‘break the back’ (proverbially speaking) of visible percentages of the student body. Success would be getting someone to severely drop their grades in a subject by preferring to engage in the game.

Things that the game would also play on

The idea that someone, somewhere has a more satisfying sex life than you
The idea that soon everyone will find out how much of a fraud you are
How much effort it takes to make everything seem easy
how it would feel to have a weakness without a strength in another area that compensates for it

–
If you were psychic you’d see some event happening in the future.
Suppose that the future is determined by what the state of the world is now (time1).
A psychic sees an event in the future that follows naturally from time1.
If a psychic tells anyone their prediction, they change the state of the world, and (butterfly wings etc) introduce the possibility this event might not come to pass. Events would follow naturally from this state of the world where the prediction was made (time2).
If a psychic doesn’t tell anyone, then the event comes to pass, but no one will ever know the prediction took place.

Maybe a psychic could prevent the event from happening without admitting they were a psychic or that they knew anything about it – they could reset someone’s alarm to stop them going on an otherwise fatal car journey. But 1) we wouldn’t know how often this happens because the event would be prevented, and 2) this wouldn’t necessarily imply that nothing bad would ever happen because not all events are necessarily predicted, and not all psychics are necessarily able to act on their prediction.

It seems like if you were going to have knowledge about the future it would be in the form of either a future event, or a series of events leading to a future event. If you share this prediction, you introduce a new element and invalidate the prediction. Maybe the way the world actually works is that no matter what any agent does, ‘the world’ will continue towards some events. But if this were true then we’d probably have seen psychics more often.

The question is basically “if someone predicts accurately that you will die tomorrow under a piano on 5th avenue can you do anything to prevent this?”

Basically it doesn’t seem that implausible that if someone knew something was going to happen that he couldn’t say anything about it without preventing it, making his claim impossible to verify

It’s brief, requires little context to cohere standing alone, rewards wit, demands an editorial eye, and is simple to explain and practice.

There is a recognisably ‘twitter friendly’ way of seeing the world, a combination of declarative descriptions and internal observations.

Reading a twitter-feed is like speaking to a public figure set to ‘sound-bite’. Everyone is ‘always on’, a strange struggle to see play out.

‘livetweeting’ is the noun for long-form tweeting.  Tweets ought to retain a meaning either with their sisters, or individually.

Twitter is interesting for reporting because it conveys the passing of time, the development of events, without cluttering the text.

When you cannot find a thought to hang as a tweet, you don’t have anything to say.

Tweeting nothing is relatively rare compared to articles that repeat themselves and paragraphs that say (comparatively) little.

People that use the 140 character limit to neglect punctuation aren’t playing to a high enough standard.

I still don’t know what to say to people who ask how to use hashtags.  I do know that I wish I had them in real life though.

Do we need paragraphs?  If we rely less on relating our sentences to each other, should we bother grouping them? #therearetoolsforthat

Think how many words are used to establish ‘who is speaking to who’ in fiction.  We could lose that too.  #therearetoolsforthat

Questions of style are maybe irrelevant if you’re only here to share links, network, cluster-fawn over celebrities or whatever. This is sad.

It feels like in Twitter I’ve finally found a form of ‘reality media’ that I can happily lose myself in.  Aren’t people fascinating etc

If anyone reads anything decent about the ‘style’ of tweets, of different tweeters, of this evolution, of its applications, let me know.

–

For the curious this is the above formatted as a standard paragraph.  

I think I get twitter now – the tweet is the gold standard for the sentence.  It’s brief, requires little context to cohere standing alone, rewards wit, demands an editorial eye, and is simple to explain and practice.  There is a recognisably ‘twitter friendly’ way of seeing the world, a combination of declarative descriptions and internal observations.  Reading a twitter-feed is like speaking to a public figure set to ‘sound-bite’. Everyone is ‘always on’, a strange struggle to see play out.  ’livetweeting’ is the noun for long-form tweeting.  Tweets ought to retain a meaning either with their sisters, or individually.  Twitter is interesting for reporting because it conveys the passing of time, the development of events, without cluttering the text.  When you cannot find a thought to hang as a tweet, you don’t have anything to say.  Tweeting nothing is relatively rare compared to articles that repeat themselves and paragraphs that say (comparatively) little.  People that use the 140 character limit to neglect punctuation aren’t playing to a high enough standard.  I still don’t know what to say to people who ask how to use hashtags.  I do know that I wish I had them in real life though.  Do we need paragraphs?  If we rely less on relating our sentences to each other, should we bother grouping them? #therearetoolsforthat  Think how many words are used to establish ‘who is speaking to who’ in fiction.  We could lose that too.  #therearetoolsforthat  Questions of style are maybe irrelevant if you’re only here to share links, network, cluster-fawn over celebrities or whatever. This is sad.  It feels like in Twitter I’ve finally found a form of ‘reality media’ that I can happily lose myself in.  Aren’t people fascinating etc.  If anyone reads anything decent about the ‘style’ of tweets, of different tweeters, of this evolution, of its applications, let me know.

1. Love has never been totally, accurately, universally categorised. I feel like whatever my greatest remembered sensation of love has been, there could be a stronger version of it, more intense, more clear, more present, more total, more all-consuming.

2. Love that exists totally at a distance from another person is ‘just’ crushing. This can be intense, powerful, all the things that also are a feature of love. But it is not ‘love’. An interaction, a relation between two beings, an expression and reciprocation of whatever it is that love is – that is love.

3. Love is like sex. Love is not sex. Sex is not love.

4. It isn’t possible to say ‘truthfully’ when feelings for someone are love. But it is impossible to be in love and not know it – if there is a possibility for you to say ‘this is not love’, then ‘this’ is not love.

5. That what you have is love is a reason for anything, but not a jutification. Love, the possibility of love, the search for love, is the ultimate excuse to do anything, absolutely anything. Nothing can ever be excused, absolved, made acceptable, because of love. Love will not pull you from the grave you dig for Her.

6. There are no good statistics with reliable answers for love. It may happen, it may come to you. It may not. You may find love, but it may not stay forever. You may love before you die, but you may also not die in love. If you go to the end having loved, then congratulations – you have won something.

7. Love can make anything better, and can make anything worse.

8. Love is real. It is a thing. You cannot buy it, you cannot train for it, you cannot ‘achieve’ it. But it is real.

9. Love is something that is believed in. Other facts about the world can at best, not contradict the existence of love. When you have never loved, you have to force yourself to believe in this thing that you’ve never seen. When you are in love, you will only come to be sure that you are in love through the act of loving another, through feeling love. When you are in love, and do not have the reinforcement of that ‘loving’ sensation, you will question whether yo were ever in love, and have no way to answer. When you are out of love, you will only have the memory of love, and will have to remember that there was a time, once, when you knew, simply knew, that there was such a thing.

10. Love is the greatest thing that you will ever find in a bookstore, a supermarket, at college, in a conversation, in bed, in the street, over coffee, over dinner, at the top of the Eiffel Tower, under the watch of the Hollywood sign, in the moment when it seems that things are at their worst, in the moment when it seems that things could never be better than this. Never stop looking.

The girl is explaining her work to her male companion – “You know JC Delaney, the advertisement company?  They operate most billboard and bus advertisements, and I’m on the team that rotates them in South Gloucestershire”.  This seems like the conversation that could only happen on a first date – something banal like what you do.

They’re both pretty overweight, BMI’s of maybe 28-30, with no significant muscle mass.  The girl has bad skin and the guy has unkept facial hair, and they both dress pretty badly.  They both wear glasses, and not in the good way.  The clothes are loose, because there is nothing to accentuate.  

The guy has been having a conversation on his phone for ten minutes.  I always assumed that it was well known that this was something that was simply never done on dates, especially first dates.  I mean, things that can go wrong – talk about pets, talk about kids and / or marriage, talk to someone else.  Everything else is undramatically recoverable from, I think.

I wonder if he’s secretly aware of most of this, and is just so bored of the conversation he was meant to still be having that he’s just entertaining himself before enough time has passed that he an simply excuse himself with “and I really should be getting on” or something similar.

I see too many couples like this.  It’s tragic.  They do the first date in Starbucks, the most traditional and uninspiring of first dates, in the most homogenous-verging-on-platonic of coffee shop chains.  I wonder if when they met, maybe at an office party, or a dinner party if that’s something they do, they asked each other across their Marks and Spencer china “We should go for coffee sometime.”. Maybe they both thought about how silly and American an idea that was, secretly enjoying that they were out, meeting people.

When he goes, he touches her shoulder in the most awkwardly affectionate way imaginable.  Like, he’s going to follow these motions through to the bitter and uncomfortable and passably, technically sexual conclusion.  Which makes me sad.  Didn’t his friend on the phone have some advice to offer him about the situation that he found himself in?  I mean, Jesus.

This makes me look further across the room, to a couple about as classically attractive as an American first family.  They’re another, different stereotype.  They’re reading the paper.  It’s three o clock in the afternoon on a Sunday and she’s wearing pyjamas.  She’s blond, and he has excellent facial hair.  I imagine they have a puppy, that occasionally obtains modelling gigs working for Andrex.  They seem…comfortable in each others presence.

Where Mr and Mrs Wrong filled silence with awkward conversation, they’re just reading. And I mean, aren’t first dates for never shutting up and throwing out the highlights of your tastes and watching sparks happen?  Awkward first dates?  You’re doing it wrong!

It feels a little like the difference between relationships as things that people have and relationships as things that people are seen to have.  When its just motions whether they’re to the coffee shop or from dinner or in and out of each other, with no sentiment behind it… Feels empty to me, as an idea.

A sleep deprived hunchback in British History is struggling with the (theoretically impossible) task of keeping the most minor details of an entire century in his head all at the same time.

A young couple are in the relatively unpopulated Mathematics section trying to figure out what will make their relationship work, but the numbers aren’t adding up.

An aspirational future leader in Politics is trying to talk himself into taking another break, longer this time, for the greater good of more steady progress later.

A theologian sobs into his hands thinking ‘why God, what’s the fucking point of any of this anyway?’

An economist just gets on with what needs to be gotten on with and doesn’t see what the big deal is anyway, it’s just work.

A physicist is 89 seconds away from starting the experiment that will scorch most of the skin from his right forearm, leading to a long series of surgeries and grafts.

A geographer is trying to decide on the right shade of blue for the sea, and whether she wants to shift between shades of green and brown for Africa, as to represent the area of vegetation and desert.

A cunning linguist in modern languages is trying to understand why, after 3 years reading Proust and a year spent living in Paris, she still can’t get the chorus of Lady Marmalade out of her head.

A computer scientist in the lab is fucking around on YouTube waiting for a new program vaguely related to making the writing of another program easier.

An engineer is next to the computer scientist filling a digital shopping basket on the Lego website.

A Cornish Studies student is packing about how the fuck he’s going to get a job when this is all over.

A lawyer with a place on a competitive graduate program at a major firm is ignoring a plea for donations to help refugees in Sri Lanka on her online banking website.

A doctorate student in Advanced Mediaeval Metaphysics actually had a breakdown 6 months ago, but not one has realised that he has been writing ‘SEND HELP’ over and over on page after page of lined note paper.

A masters student is all too aware that in 6 months he’s going to be applying for graduate jobs again, and hopes he has better luck this time.

A student journalist is this close to blackmailing a former room mate in order to pay his rent.

A wannabe-writer is masturbating in the toilets thinking of his own erotic fiction.

I read early Hunter S Thompson because he was going somewhere

I listen to Yellowcard because I sympathize at a fundamental level not related to my age

I watch The O.C because there’s so much more truth there than in the posturing of strangers

I listen to Jimmy Eat World because I always have

I listen to Avril Lavigne because I always have

I listen to Nickelback because I always have

I listen to The Rolling Stones because I never did

I read Tao Lin because it’s rare to feel a connection with anyone, and he acts as a good short-cut

I read Graham Greene because I was told to

I read Brett Easton Ellis because he knows how to impress people and I want to learn how to do that

I read Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’ every six months because something good always happens so long as I keep doing that.

I read Philosophy because it is the only way to reliably become confused about something.

I read Theology because it is the only way to reliably find consolation and advice about something

(There is an argument for all of the above being Theology in their own way)

The basics of the story – PSN goes down; Anonymous suspected; PSN still down many days later; Sony release statement explicitly containing no expected date of return to service; oh and Portal 2 was just released; SKYNET to blame?  And so on.

There’s a sliding scale of reactions.  If you didn’t own a PS3, you probably didn’t notice until recently, as the farce-o-meter ticked over into the red.  If you didn’t play online, again you probably didn’t notice beyond the recurring error box atop your homescreen.  If you play online regularly, you were probably pissed.  If you had a Playstation Plus membership (*author sighs inwardly*) you probably even felt a little ripped off.

I took the time to survey the comment threads across various outlets relevant to the outage, hunting for beerspit night and cursing to illuminate what the world thinks of SCE right now.

Append (sic) where necessary.

-

From the Sony “no updates” update post…

“Awesome. Keep up the good work. We are grateful for your efforts.” – GameLordGX

“keep on updating us that’s all we your dedicated fans ask for.” MaxPayneV3

“Thanks for the update, but I believe what everyone wants to know is whether credit card info and the money already in our accounts was compromised at any point.” – Santesdai

“Boy I sure am glad I paid $50 for a membership I cant use, and pay $15 a month for a game I cant play. I was fine with a day or two, but we are hitting on day 5.” – NecroC

“How about a work around to let me link my steam account to my PSN one so i can play my PC version of portal in co-op!??!?!?” apoc_reg

–

From various outage related threads on Kotaku…

“I lost a week of my DCUO subscription thanks to this. Knowing Sony they won’t refund it either. 

I won’t be renewing.” – Levyiur

“In the end, this ends up being the ultimate argument against the cloud as the sole means of storage.” – MyPonyRocks

“Just because we dont pay for PSN doesnt mean we should just shrug this off. We bought a PS3 expecting to be able to play games over PSN. When the service doesnt work for days, it’s kind of a problem.” – Saint In

“I think subscribers should have free time added to their account based on the length of the downtime. 

I don’t think anyone else is entitled to direct compensation however Sony definitely needs to change some things in their system. 

They owe it to their users to fix the vulnerability and make sure it cannot be exploited again. They owe it to their customers to change their products and allow for purchased games to be played offline (minus multiplayer modes/content for obvious reasons). 

This seems like a text book example on how DRM seems to be more an inconvenience to the customers than the pirates. I’m making an assumption of course however I think that games with single player content should be able to operate without an active internet connection.” - Teran

–

From Eurogamer comment threads…

“Brink is out in two weeks! If it’s not fixed by then, there’ll be hell to pay. “ – DozyKipper

“Only thing that’s bugging me is that I bought Portal 2 on the PS3 simply so I could activate it on my PC for free while still being able to enjoy split-screen with my girlfriend at some point in the future. Very frustrating that I can’t play it on the PC – really don’t want to play single player on the PS3. 

I should add that as a fairly responsible 38 year old male, I really do think the way Sony is treating its customers here is beyond the pale. I shudder to think what would happen if I treated my customer in this way.” – nobloodyname

“I like the word outage. Sounds like something that might be whispered in a debutante ball” – jellyBelly (I just really liked this one)

–

Here’s some brief analysis as a side-dish for your comments.

The selection above was chosen on the basis of clarity of message, rather than to further any particular bias or opinion I have on the matter.  The selection leans towards the negative because there are a variety of reasons that people are pissed that want airing.  But over the endless pages of opinion, trends are more difficult to notice.

People are irritated, and worried.  There are fears about credit card details escaping.  There are fears about how long this is going to take.  There are fears about the money being lost by those with subscribed services.  There is irritation about how this happened as Portal 2 was launched, which is really just unfortunate for Sony.  There is irritation that the only comment from Sony is No Comment, even though that’s maybe not something Sony can be blamed for.

The fallout from this will be interesting to watch.  The difference between PSN going down and the WoW servers going down is that it is, of course, a platform rather than an individual game.  This happens to be one of the risks that goes along with the structure of console online gaming (verses the dedicated servers of the PC that is).

There’s the question of being owed something for all of this.  Personally, I don’t think this extends beyond extensions of service for DCU, Playstation+, etc.  But don’t listen to me necessarily, I’m just a boy, standing in front of a Japanese electronics giant, asking him to let me play Super Street Fighter IV with twenty-fingers savants around the world.

Add your own comments to the discussion below.

–

Sources

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/04/25/psn-update/

http://uk.kotaku.com/5795650/sony-must-help-out-devs-affected-by-psn-downtime

http://uk.kotaku.com/5795474/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-playstation-network-outage

http://uk.kotaku.com/5795055/does-sony-owe-you-anything-for-the-psn-outage

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-04-26-psn-outage-woe-enters-seventh-day