This morning was the perfect example of one of the many ways in which I'm rubbish.
I tend to get in to work very early. Officially my work day doesn't start until 9, but I'm usually in just after 8. Well this morning I used that earliness in order to pop over to Sainsbury's and drop off some recycling at their recycling place.
This is fair enough, you may think. I mentioned how over my holiday I was furiously sorting through boxes and had identified loads of stuff to chuck away or send to recycling.
But what makes me rubbish is that I've been carrying around the bits and bobs I recycled this morning with me all week.
Now the reason I've had them in there all week are as follows:
I put them in my boot on Monday morning. My thought was I'd put them in the recycling bins at Tesco that lunch time when I went shopping. I didn't do that because there just wasn't the time. By the time I'd got my bits and eaten my lunch it was time to head to work again.
On Tuesday I went to Homebase to buy some more crates to hold stuff in, and that's not near Sainsbury's. Of course I could have gone to Sainsbury's as well, but I couldn't be arsed.
Wednesday there is literally no excuse - I could easily have gone to Sainsbury's and dropped it off, but I just couldn't be arsed.
Thursday is washing and shopping day. I drop my washing off at the laundrette and pick up last weeks load and then I go and buy a few bits of shopping. Guess where I buy these? Yup - Sainsbury's. Did I drop the recycling off? Nope.
I did go and have a look at the recycling place, but the door was closed and I couldn't see a way to open it. However, after I'd bought my bits I happened to see someone else open it (bizarrely the opening push-thing is on the inside, so you have to reach your hand in through the bars :/). However, by that time I had to go back to work.
Also, it had actually occurred to me that what I had thought was simply a tip down the road from where I work was actually a proper recycling centre. A quick Google also revealed that its opening time was 8am. Perhaps therefore I should just drop it off as I come in to work?
Well then this morning I had two options and in the end I went for Sainsbury's. So all that fannying around and I did what I should have done earlier in the week anyway.
You see when you think about it, even though I'd gone to Tesco on Monday I could easily have dropped the recycling off after work. Or before work like I did this morning. But I didn't, because I'm rubbish.
See mainly this was because I'm very lazy, but the other part of the problem I think is an issue I have over being embarrassed. I absolutely hate being embarrassed and of course if you've never done something before then the possibilities for getting it wrong and therefore being embarrassed are endless.
I mean, what if I went to this community recycling centre and they told me actually they won't take the things I had? Or if I put them in the wrong bins? Or if something is really heavy and I drop it? These would become excruciatingly embarrassing if one of the people that work there had to somehow fix my mistake or tell me off or something like that.
This is the thing that really tends to hold me back - my mind gets stuck thinking of all the things that could go wrong and that will therefore lead to me being embarrassed and so it's far easier for me to keep being too lazy. And so my entire bed-sit ends up so full of stuff that needs throwing away I can't see the carpet any more :/.
Friday, 14 May 2010
Thursday, 13 May 2010
so it's dodgy dave then
I know politics is boring, but it looks like we finally have a government.
I can't claim to be happy about the result, but it's actually been quite fascinating watching it all unfold over the last week or so.
I think the most important thing that's come out of the hung parliament and the wrangling is that finally more people are starting to realise that our current system does not produce results that are fair on the people doing the voting.
There's actually an interesting summary of the different electoral options on the BBC news site. The system they're going to have the referendum on is the Alternative Vote System.
While this is a very mild version of PR, it would certainly address one of the biggest problems of the current system. If you look at last Thursdays vote, nearly a quarter (23%) of all the people that voted voted for the Liberal Democrats. And yet they ended up with just 57 seats, which is only 9%.
How can that possibly reflect the true feelings of the electorate?
I know there are lots of arguments for the 'strong' governments that tend to be formed under 1st past the post, but lets face it - giving total power to one party just gives them a mandate to ride rough-shod across the feelings of the majority of the UK population. How can that possibly be considered fair?
And isn't the whole point of democracy that it's fair - that it reflects the balance of opinion of the entire population?
I mean look at the Lib-Con coalition. The Lib Dems are, generally speaking, a centre-left party. The current incarnation of the Labour party is also broadly centre-left. A total of 52% of the electorate voted for these centre-left parties, and yet even combined they fell a long way short of %0% of the MPs.
It gets even worse if you look at the other party votes - many of these other parties are also either leftist or centre-left, so when you start adding their votes in, the proportion of left-leaning votes gets close to 60% and yet we've end up with a right wing government!
If you look at AV then while it still wouldn't even things up properly, it would likely have gone some way to redressing the balance. And yes this still would have produced a coalition government, but at least that represents the balance of the electorates feelings.
And at the very least it would stop this tendency we have to veer from one set of extreme policies to the complete opposite, which in my opinion can be more damaging than what the actual policies are.
I've actually felt this way for a long time, but I think finally people are starting to really get the point that the current electoral system does not produce results that truly representative of the British electorate.
Of course the irony is that, even with all the complaining people have done, given the innate conservative-ness of the British people the referendum will probably fail and we'll end up with the same old first past the post bollocks we've always had.
I mean look at al those opinion polls that said the Lib Dems were doing to do better than ever and what actually happened? People voted for the Tories :/. I actually remember the same thing happening in 1992 - all the opinion polls said labour would win, but people lied to the pollsters because they were embarrassed about voting Tory. Bizarre.
I can't claim to be happy about the result, but it's actually been quite fascinating watching it all unfold over the last week or so.
I think the most important thing that's come out of the hung parliament and the wrangling is that finally more people are starting to realise that our current system does not produce results that are fair on the people doing the voting.
There's actually an interesting summary of the different electoral options on the BBC news site. The system they're going to have the referendum on is the Alternative Vote System.
While this is a very mild version of PR, it would certainly address one of the biggest problems of the current system. If you look at last Thursdays vote, nearly a quarter (23%) of all the people that voted voted for the Liberal Democrats. And yet they ended up with just 57 seats, which is only 9%.
How can that possibly reflect the true feelings of the electorate?
I know there are lots of arguments for the 'strong' governments that tend to be formed under 1st past the post, but lets face it - giving total power to one party just gives them a mandate to ride rough-shod across the feelings of the majority of the UK population. How can that possibly be considered fair?
And isn't the whole point of democracy that it's fair - that it reflects the balance of opinion of the entire population?
I mean look at the Lib-Con coalition. The Lib Dems are, generally speaking, a centre-left party. The current incarnation of the Labour party is also broadly centre-left. A total of 52% of the electorate voted for these centre-left parties, and yet even combined they fell a long way short of %0% of the MPs.
It gets even worse if you look at the other party votes - many of these other parties are also either leftist or centre-left, so when you start adding their votes in, the proportion of left-leaning votes gets close to 60% and yet we've end up with a right wing government!
If you look at AV then while it still wouldn't even things up properly, it would likely have gone some way to redressing the balance. And yes this still would have produced a coalition government, but at least that represents the balance of the electorates feelings.
And at the very least it would stop this tendency we have to veer from one set of extreme policies to the complete opposite, which in my opinion can be more damaging than what the actual policies are.
I've actually felt this way for a long time, but I think finally people are starting to really get the point that the current electoral system does not produce results that truly representative of the British electorate.
Of course the irony is that, even with all the complaining people have done, given the innate conservative-ness of the British people the referendum will probably fail and we'll end up with the same old first past the post bollocks we've always had.
I mean look at al those opinion polls that said the Lib Dems were doing to do better than ever and what actually happened? People voted for the Tories :/. I actually remember the same thing happening in 1992 - all the opinion polls said labour would win, but people lied to the pollsters because they were embarrassed about voting Tory. Bizarre.
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
twilight
DVD rentalage got a bit confusing while I was on holiday, but one of the things I watched was twilight.
Obviously I, like everyone else, have heard all sorts about twilight. This has ranged from it being the worst abomination ever to the best thing since sliced bread. As you might expect, the reality is somewhere in between.
The film is an adaptation of a book that I understand is immensely popular with young women. I knew it was essentially about a young human girl and a vampire falling in love and that there has been a lot of talk that the whole thing is a gigantic allegory/metaphor for pre-marital chastity.
Clearly I'm not reviewing the book, so I can't really comment on that, but I would say those sentences pretty much sum up the film version. Girl meets vampire. Girl falls for vampire while vampire tries to reject her. Vampire caves, admitting the rejection was to protect her. Vampire has to save girl from other vampires.
I guess from that point of view the film works - you don't really ever doubt the characters motivations and their feelings are tangible and on the whole understandable and relatable.
I have to say though that from my point of view the whole thing did seem a bit daft. It also felt very long - the film has a two hour running time, but dawdles through most of it. It actually reminded me of a gawky teenager, shuffling its feet in the corner of the room at a family do, not quite knowing what to do with itself.
Also, if that teenage is dressed as a Goth - pale white skin, dyed black hair, black, ill-fitting clothes, then weirdly, that would match the film too. There's an odd artificiality to the look of the film - the images seem artificially de-saturated in an overly obvious way and while lots of the characters are perfectly normal people, they don't quite fit in the film.
It's almost like an exploration of a psychosis. The heroine Bella inhabits the real world, but she's also experiencing a series of fantasy-fulfilling delusions and visions involving Sebastian and his vampiric family. I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if it had been revealed at the end that Bella was experiencing some sort of breakdown.
And in a way that stylistic stuff and fantasy world thing worked better for me than the story itself, which I have to admit I found a little turgid and predictable.
As for the whole chastity allegory, it's certainly got a strong feel of that. I mean, vampires have always been wrapped up in sex, and so you can sort of understand it, but in a way it means they're like anti-vampires in twilight. To be frank, I personally don't think it works. Certainly there's absolutely no back-story or explanation as to why they're like that - introducing something like Angel from Buffy's soul would have helped no end.
Obviously I, like everyone else, have heard all sorts about twilight. This has ranged from it being the worst abomination ever to the best thing since sliced bread. As you might expect, the reality is somewhere in between.
The film is an adaptation of a book that I understand is immensely popular with young women. I knew it was essentially about a young human girl and a vampire falling in love and that there has been a lot of talk that the whole thing is a gigantic allegory/metaphor for pre-marital chastity.
Clearly I'm not reviewing the book, so I can't really comment on that, but I would say those sentences pretty much sum up the film version. Girl meets vampire. Girl falls for vampire while vampire tries to reject her. Vampire caves, admitting the rejection was to protect her. Vampire has to save girl from other vampires.
I guess from that point of view the film works - you don't really ever doubt the characters motivations and their feelings are tangible and on the whole understandable and relatable.
I have to say though that from my point of view the whole thing did seem a bit daft. It also felt very long - the film has a two hour running time, but dawdles through most of it. It actually reminded me of a gawky teenager, shuffling its feet in the corner of the room at a family do, not quite knowing what to do with itself.
Also, if that teenage is dressed as a Goth - pale white skin, dyed black hair, black, ill-fitting clothes, then weirdly, that would match the film too. There's an odd artificiality to the look of the film - the images seem artificially de-saturated in an overly obvious way and while lots of the characters are perfectly normal people, they don't quite fit in the film.
It's almost like an exploration of a psychosis. The heroine Bella inhabits the real world, but she's also experiencing a series of fantasy-fulfilling delusions and visions involving Sebastian and his vampiric family. I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if it had been revealed at the end that Bella was experiencing some sort of breakdown.
And in a way that stylistic stuff and fantasy world thing worked better for me than the story itself, which I have to admit I found a little turgid and predictable.
As for the whole chastity allegory, it's certainly got a strong feel of that. I mean, vampires have always been wrapped up in sex, and so you can sort of understand it, but in a way it means they're like anti-vampires in twilight. To be frank, I personally don't think it works. Certainly there's absolutely no back-story or explanation as to why they're like that - introducing something like Angel from Buffy's soul would have helped no end.
Tuesday, 11 May 2010
failed
Continuing on from yesterday, the big disappointment area of the holiday was getting stuff done.
Where I made fairly good inroads into the sorting out of boxes, it took far longer than I'd thought it would and so I didn't even look at doing half the stuff I'd hoped I could.
One of the main things was I'd hoped I could do a bit of scanning, but I didn't do any at all. I therefore didn't watch any anime fansubs, as I generally do that so I'm way behind on that too.
Well, I say that - just before my holiday I did sample a couple of new shows:
Kimi Ni Todoke
Well this was a surprise.
I had absolutely no expectations when starting this and what I found was a sweet and charming romantic show.
The basic gist seems to be something along the lines of a misfit finds her place type of show. This is a theme I've always had a soft spot for, probably because I am a total misfit.
If I was being brutally honest, the show does have a slightly benevolent inevitability to it. By that I mean that, despite the main character basically being picked on (bullied is probably going to far), she isn't too badly affected by it and the whole show has an air that things aren't ever going to get worse for her.
I suppose you could say that the story starts with her at the low point and charts her breaking through that, but it's more that you get the feeling the writer wants to tell a warm, affirming story, rather than a dark one.
Kiddy Girl-and
One of the big problems with the original Kiddy Grade was its structure. The first half of the series was very light and fluffy - sort of like a more modern Dirty Pair. However, about half way through it suddenly developed a proper plot. And I don't mean it was one of those shows were you realised there was a plot underpinning the early episodes - you could easily have started watching half way through and missed almost nothing.
The difficulty with Kiddy Girl-and then is that this sort-of sequel, sort-of spin-off also starts in a very light and fluffy way. Indeed, it' possibly more light and fluffy than the original. My problem then is that because I only sample the first few eps on fansub, I've no idea whether it will also develop a substantial plot.
There are hints given in the prologue, but they're not very useful hints. My default position is that if it were ever licensed I'd probably pick it up, but it would be more due to the fact that I quite enjoyed the original than because the eps I watched blew me away.
But those are from a while ago and I was simply to lazy write them up for the blog before now.
I also didn't read any manga until Sunday, when I was basically taking the day to rest and recuperate. The manga I read was the latest volume of Ikki Tousen, so nothing interesting. I did read a lot of manga before the holiday - I'm now totally caught up with Oh My Goddess, but I've talked about that before
I also didn't get the chance to do any sorting out of files or backing up, which are things I usually take the opportunity to do when I'm on holiday.
So yeah, in terms of getting the usual stuff done, it was a bit of a failure. The consolation is I did make a lot of progress with non-usual stuff.
Where I made fairly good inroads into the sorting out of boxes, it took far longer than I'd thought it would and so I didn't even look at doing half the stuff I'd hoped I could.
One of the main things was I'd hoped I could do a bit of scanning, but I didn't do any at all. I therefore didn't watch any anime fansubs, as I generally do that so I'm way behind on that too.
Well, I say that - just before my holiday I did sample a couple of new shows:
Kimi Ni Todoke
Well this was a surprise.
I had absolutely no expectations when starting this and what I found was a sweet and charming romantic show.
The basic gist seems to be something along the lines of a misfit finds her place type of show. This is a theme I've always had a soft spot for, probably because I am a total misfit.
If I was being brutally honest, the show does have a slightly benevolent inevitability to it. By that I mean that, despite the main character basically being picked on (bullied is probably going to far), she isn't too badly affected by it and the whole show has an air that things aren't ever going to get worse for her.
I suppose you could say that the story starts with her at the low point and charts her breaking through that, but it's more that you get the feeling the writer wants to tell a warm, affirming story, rather than a dark one.
Kiddy Girl-and
One of the big problems with the original Kiddy Grade was its structure. The first half of the series was very light and fluffy - sort of like a more modern Dirty Pair. However, about half way through it suddenly developed a proper plot. And I don't mean it was one of those shows were you realised there was a plot underpinning the early episodes - you could easily have started watching half way through and missed almost nothing.
The difficulty with Kiddy Girl-and then is that this sort-of sequel, sort-of spin-off also starts in a very light and fluffy way. Indeed, it' possibly more light and fluffy than the original. My problem then is that because I only sample the first few eps on fansub, I've no idea whether it will also develop a substantial plot.
There are hints given in the prologue, but they're not very useful hints. My default position is that if it were ever licensed I'd probably pick it up, but it would be more due to the fact that I quite enjoyed the original than because the eps I watched blew me away.
But those are from a while ago and I was simply to lazy write them up for the blog before now.
I also didn't read any manga until Sunday, when I was basically taking the day to rest and recuperate. The manga I read was the latest volume of Ikki Tousen, so nothing interesting. I did read a lot of manga before the holiday - I'm now totally caught up with Oh My Goddess, but I've talked about that before
I also didn't get the chance to do any sorting out of files or backing up, which are things I usually take the opportunity to do when I'm on holiday.
So yeah, in terms of getting the usual stuff done, it was a bit of a failure. The consolation is I did make a lot of progress with non-usual stuff.
Monday, 10 May 2010
return
Well that would be my holiday over.
As is so often the way I achieved some things, but generally fell short of what I'd hoped to get through.
At the beginning of the holiday I popped down to see my Dad. It was my birthday and the bank holiday too and I'd not seen him since Christmas, so it seemed like a good opportunity.
It was good to see him, but it obviously absorbed three of the days.
When I got back my big plan was to go though the plethora of boxes I have and sort things out. The stuff in the boxes falls into three basic categories:
1) Junk I need to throw away, but through a combination of laziness and my pack-rat instincts I end up just sticking in a box.
2) Stuff I need to get rid of, but the bin isn't the way. This includes old electrical bits and bobs which are too big to chuck (and you're not supposed to throw away of course), and other stuff that I should take down the recycling place for example. Or there's tonnes of stuff that should go on e-bay.
3) Stuff I either need to or want to hang on to.
The idea was that I'd identify all the stuff that that fell into 1 and dispose of it in the rubbish. This I basically did, although because I didn't tackle every single box, I'm sure there's a bit more stuff.
The idea with 2 was that I'd identify it, and then take the stuff that needed recycling down the recycling place, which would free up a huge amount of space (there's a lot of it). This would then allow me more room to sort stuff that I could e-bay or whatever.
This was a partial success, in that I identified quite a lot of stuff to go down the recycling centre. But the problem was this too so long (Tuesday I did domestic stuff, and I was still sorting stuff on Saturday, and I didn't even finish then) that I just didn't have the time or energy to haul it all away.
The third group are more tricky.
My ultimate aim is to basically just be left hanging onto a handful of manga, anime and other stuff that kinda represent the 'cream of the crop'. In other words, they either quintessentially define my taste or are things I could watch/read over and over. The problem is really pinning down what these are.
The other problem is the stuff I need to hang onto. See, I seem to have ended up in a situation with manga especially where I'm collecting about 20-odd series.
The real problem with this is that the western companies tend to dawdle quite a bit when putting stuff out. There can be twenty or thirty volumes already out in Japan, but they only release three or four a year.
And on top of that, only a handful of the series I'm collecting have actually finished in Japan. This means I have a huge number of volumes of manga, many of which don't fall into the 'keep forever' pile, but it's not really going to be worth my while to sell them.
I mean, because I'm up to date, they will sell quite well - "all so far released" collections tend to do about as well as complete collection - but the problem is I don't really want to stop buying the new volumes. That means I'll end up with lots of random volumes, and those really don't sell well.
For example, I ended up with 3 random Bleach volumes, and to confirm my suspicions I put them on e-bay. I believe they finally sold for 5p each. That makes them total money sinks - it costs me money to auction them.
But the problem is there are loads of volumes now and they really take up a hell of a lot of room :/.
As is so often the way I achieved some things, but generally fell short of what I'd hoped to get through.
At the beginning of the holiday I popped down to see my Dad. It was my birthday and the bank holiday too and I'd not seen him since Christmas, so it seemed like a good opportunity.
It was good to see him, but it obviously absorbed three of the days.
When I got back my big plan was to go though the plethora of boxes I have and sort things out. The stuff in the boxes falls into three basic categories:
1) Junk I need to throw away, but through a combination of laziness and my pack-rat instincts I end up just sticking in a box.
2) Stuff I need to get rid of, but the bin isn't the way. This includes old electrical bits and bobs which are too big to chuck (and you're not supposed to throw away of course), and other stuff that I should take down the recycling place for example. Or there's tonnes of stuff that should go on e-bay.
3) Stuff I either need to or want to hang on to.
The idea was that I'd identify all the stuff that that fell into 1 and dispose of it in the rubbish. This I basically did, although because I didn't tackle every single box, I'm sure there's a bit more stuff.
The idea with 2 was that I'd identify it, and then take the stuff that needed recycling down the recycling place, which would free up a huge amount of space (there's a lot of it). This would then allow me more room to sort stuff that I could e-bay or whatever.
This was a partial success, in that I identified quite a lot of stuff to go down the recycling centre. But the problem was this too so long (Tuesday I did domestic stuff, and I was still sorting stuff on Saturday, and I didn't even finish then) that I just didn't have the time or energy to haul it all away.
The third group are more tricky.
My ultimate aim is to basically just be left hanging onto a handful of manga, anime and other stuff that kinda represent the 'cream of the crop'. In other words, they either quintessentially define my taste or are things I could watch/read over and over. The problem is really pinning down what these are.
The other problem is the stuff I need to hang onto. See, I seem to have ended up in a situation with manga especially where I'm collecting about 20-odd series.
The real problem with this is that the western companies tend to dawdle quite a bit when putting stuff out. There can be twenty or thirty volumes already out in Japan, but they only release three or four a year.
And on top of that, only a handful of the series I'm collecting have actually finished in Japan. This means I have a huge number of volumes of manga, many of which don't fall into the 'keep forever' pile, but it's not really going to be worth my while to sell them.
I mean, because I'm up to date, they will sell quite well - "all so far released" collections tend to do about as well as complete collection - but the problem is I don't really want to stop buying the new volumes. That means I'll end up with lots of random volumes, and those really don't sell well.
For example, I ended up with 3 random Bleach volumes, and to confirm my suspicions I put them on e-bay. I believe they finally sold for 5p each. That makes them total money sinks - it costs me money to auction them.
But the problem is there are loads of volumes now and they really take up a hell of a lot of room :/.
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