Compuslive behaviour

Whilst reading one essay on another site moons ago, I came across a statement so fundamentally true that its obviousness makes its elusiveness worrying. Pretty much all adherents to the sciences of understanding how people think follow one basic precept that can serve as a litmus test concerning the individual’s intelligence. Namely, our intellect serves our emotions, not the other way around.

How to not get welcomed as a reader, a look at a point I have made previously…

I write a lot about the abuse of children and how it comes back to haunt others around that child as said children become adolescents and adults. Given that things do not go away if you ignore them, no matter how many times people in a position of say over me have tried to tell me otherwise, I feel more than just driven to talk about it. I feel compelled, in much the same way as a ten-ton bomb feels compelled to hit whatever surface is below it when it is dropped from ten thousand feet above.

Want to make an computer or operating system that does not shit people up the wall?

As I sit here and go through the process of toying about with several devices that are based on computing principles, most obviously the desktop and laptop computers I own, it occurs to me. In spite of development that has gone on during my lifetime, and before, no real improvements have been made to the humble computer. In fact, as of June 2012, psychological professionals are still dealing with a phenomenon they refer to as Technology-Related Anger.

World changes, but we do not

In Interview With The Vampire, both the novel and the film, there is a moment in which the protagonist, Louis, has a meeting with a vampire who goes by the name of Armand. According to what Louis tells the interviewer, Armand tells him that after several hundred years, he (Armand) is the oldest vampire that he knows of.

Rambo Syndrome, a discourse

If you are as old as you feel, then I am one of those things that archaeologists write about at great length. But rather than get into that, I want to talk about something that was briefly talked about during a prolonged conversation in my youth. I believe I was somewhere between the ages of fourteen and seventeen at this time. I do not remember exactly what segment of the year it was, but some people that I met during one trip into central Sydney came with me on the ride back. In order to understand the nature of conversation, you have to understand a bit about the Sydney to Parramatta (and beyond) route.

Sydney is easily the biggest place in the country called Australia. Although it stretches out from a “central” business district on the coast in Northern, Southern, and especially Western directions, the West is by far the longest arm, with growing branches so long that traveling from the Westmost point of Sydney to the central district by private car can take upwards of three hours. A journey by express route train from Sydney to Parramatta is approximately thirty minutes. Depending on conditions such as passenger pick-up times, a train that stops at more stations in order to pick up passengers along the lesser-visited areas generally doubles that time. So conversations along the Sydney to Pendle Hill route tend to go on for a while. Now, this was back in the days when bulletin board systems (BBSes) were just beginning to lose users to the Internet as it existed then. Companies like CompuServe and America Online (or Assholes Online as I liked to call them then) were being hailed as the next big thing in investment terms. Given that I do not believe I had even turned eighteen or nineteen when Assholes Online folded and declared bankruptcy, you can imagine how laughable that all looks to me now. But at some point in the conversation, talk turned to certain users of the BBS we knew one another from, and the tendency of certain users to issue verbal threats on forums or in real-time chat like they were going out of fashion. Now, one of the participants in this conversation was a bit older than the rest of us, and I did not have any problem believing his claim that he worked as a bouncer or security guard. He, not surprisingly, was the one that used the words that we are going to talk about here today: Rambo Syndrome.

What I write about

Sometimes, when I inform people that I speak to online that I am an aspiring author who still would like to find a break even though he has given up hope with much of anything else, I get asked what it is I write about.