Random Thoughts

Habits of a thoughtful person: reads widely, with a dictionary and online search at hand; listens to the considered thoughts of others; seeks out and appreciates knowledge, beauty, and art; writes a record of thoughts.

The same tool can take you to heaven or hell depending on how you use it. The more powerful the tool, the more acutely you get there.

In most cases, it is possible to curate a much better education from free online resources than attending schools and universities.

Can I have a “filter out politics” category on Twitter? I don’t want to see more than half the tweets in my feed.

I think that Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is a remarkable historical document on how stoic philosophy was interpreted and practiced in antiquity; it’s all the more startling that it was written as the private thoughts of a man who ruled Rome.

Art is a metaphysical act to be experienced in its raw entirety. Overanalysis subdues and confines the meaning.

If you are going to be addicted to something, be addicted to knowledge.

Journal 2022-10-22

If you are not trying to appease anyone; if you are not trying to appeal to a market demographic; and you don’t need anything: watch out, you might actually do something worthwhile.

The first-person narrative voice in novels should be unreliable if it is to be realistic; and usually, the narrator shouldn’t realise that.

Good acting makes any script interesting.

Imagine telling people in the pre-internet days that if they pay a few quid a month they would have instant access to over one million books. I remember there were subscription services of a similar cost that would send two or three books a month in the post. Public libraries were always a thing though, to be fair, and most books could be ordered to the local library if requested.

As well as the books and online services, libraries have great community importance in providing free internet access to people and a quiet space to study or work.

Random Thoughts

Just as the health of the body is shaped by what is eaten and when, the health of the mind is influenced by the diet of information. If your mind is subject to poison, you need to build a resistance and reduce the intake.

The main reason for staring at my phone is to read. All human knowledge is there and available, now.

If we were to imagine an advanced alien species visiting Earth, and we projected our values on their likely motivations, they wouldn’t colonise us, they would farm and eat us. Our structures would be like termite mounds, our language like grunts and hisses. They would put us in packed filthy cages, experiment on us, steal our skins, slit our throats and bleed us to death as we struggle for life.

I think, therefore I use algorithms. I am, therefore I can think.

Infinite loops: doubt the doubt; hate the hate; love the love. 

Mediums of words: lyrics - singing; poetry - speaking; plays - performing; text - reading.

Performative text has dramatic, lyrical and poetic qualities. 

“Novlay” - a novel that is mainly dialogue. Noun.

Invest in trends, preferably before they begin.

Art shows nothing and everything.

A usual human failing is to get carried away by hype. There were a certain set of conditions in place that instantiated quality; once personal perceptions change, those conditions change too.

“Politics” and “career” should be incompatible words. In a highly functioning democracy, politicians are representatives of public will; their role is to lay out a vision, for approval by the people, that is enacted by the nation.

Someone started talking to me in French, apparently whilst he was visiting London. I was able to respond in his language, but it turns out he could speak English and didn’t realise he was in fact speaking his native words. My bad accent gave it away.

In the balance between the individual and the whole, both should be honoured.

Random Thoughts

It’s usually a safe bet to assume that the person you are talking to has some degree of mental illness. They need the kindness you would need if you carried their hurt. For the ones who actively hurt others, they need to be stopped.

Countless individuals have carried the flame of life before passing it on to you; a good life helps life flourish in countless more.

Life requires action. Death requires peace. Live and die every day.

Art becomes rancid when it is political. It must speak with universal truth.

For any task, know the best tool and how to use it.

Instead of handing over data to various platforms, people will upload their content in one place. Competing apps will provide interfaces on the content.

Making mortal enemies of tens of millions of people and stealing their land is not only evil but also insanely stupid.

Could you imagine the sacrilege of an invader’s tanks rolling over England’s green hills? The thought creates a feeling of outrage much deeper than anger.

Potent words cast a light on what couldn’t quite be seen.

If a universe can be created, why create just one? If a universe can exist, why only one?

Random Thoughts

I wrote 13,350 words in 11 days. So it looks like my run rate is about 1,200 words of draft text per day when I have an idea.

My internal soundtrack on headphones represents the mood I need to be in at the time.

If time isn’t a significant constraint then the same outcomes can be achieved by people of very different levels of ability.

My ongoing challenge has been the destupidification of myself.

Absentmindedly putting cumin instead of cinnamon in porridge is not a good idea.

To overturn a despicable regime, a significant amount of people who had previously collaborated with the lie need to overcome their self-deception.

Journal 2022-09-13

Someone was asking me about the constitutional settlement in the UK, and I had to correct myself fives times by saying “the monarch” instead of “the Queen”. My mind just didn’t want to use the new words.

Kim Jong-un has a 100% approval rating by his adoring serfs. The Kremlin is getting there with all their 180-degree advances.

I think the biggest compliment I’ve had in my office life was, “if we could clone Rob, everything would work.” I remember because I laughed. 

When in ultra-efficient robot mode, I prefer asynchronous written communication over imprecise talking. I appreciate short, focused written updates at standard intervals, such as by a certain time of each day. A feature that sends reminders and tracks the updates would be useful.

Your state of mind can affect how you interpret the behaviour of others.

Search for a good lesson in a bad situation. Avoid bad habits in an easy situation.

Listening to podcasts helps me transition to and through unappealing routines.

Stress mode is not enjoyable but is productive for getting practical things done when the energy is focused on positive action rather than negative thoughts. My personal bests for creativity arrive when I am relaxed.

🖤 Dark chocolate with black coffee 🖤

I’ve got a thing for supremely dark chocolate. Sometimes I do speak literally.

Stories determine wellbeing. The ability to put self-told stories down, change them, or rewrite them, determines wellbeing. Every syllable counts.

The best stories speak from fundamental truth; the worst from secondary distorted sensations.

People assign themselves an identity from what society tells them. Imagine if that social situation is warped. Imagine if all that fell away. What is left, in terms of intrinsic worth?

Everything was interesting.

Journal 2022-09-04

Listening to classical music on headphones is a hack for me when I need to concentrate on one task for a sustained period of time. I think it calms the sea of thoughts that want to compete for attention.

I like designing apps using Figma. Bubble is a very easy way to prototype those designs.

I think I need to listen to the classical music in case other random massive project distractions just pop in.

I can only do comedy as a bizarre character, such as myself.

Just as we cringe at some of the motifs in old film and TV, hopefully future viewers will squirm at some of the current output.

Thinking based on the current point of the zigzagging trend can make you a well-fed sheep, on a mutton farm.

Random Thoughts

Beliefs control people. It takes kindness and bravery to drop an interpretation that is used for cruelty.

Any person can do a lot of good. Instead, most energy is spent spinning from the algorithm operating on you.

Imagine a world where people live for hundreds of years, still living day-to-day with the mentality learnt from some medieval mud pit.

I do not fit into the 18th century left-wing/right-wing classification system and neither do most thinking people on most issues. “Conservative” implies past beliefs must be conserved, even though the world is constantly changing. “Progressive” in the political sense is a marketing slogan that suggests anyone not conforming to every current enforced dogma of the group is regressive.

Communism was a bourgeois philosophy designed for cult members to assume power; the people who actually worked were all the same and expendable.

I am neither interested in market ideology nor the discredited social ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries. I am interested in what works. I’m interested in truth and facts, not politicking. I want what is self-actualising to be open to all.

I am not relaxing if it becomes a challenge to see how much I can relax.

I would like functionality where the user can configure and share their own automations for personal finance and investments. Machine learning suggestions in this sphere also has enormous scope.

I have wasted a lot of time in my life, preoccupied with being low quality and crap; although I suppose it’s been interesting to know what that is like. It would be nice now to compare to the opposite.

Random Thoughts

If there were a simulation, instead of being just one character, how about being eight billion simultaneously? Your consciousness would constantly alternate between every person in an infinitesimally small period of time, giving you the illusion that you are in the same individual continuously. Each person would have different memories, personality and context, and you would have no knowledge that your consciousness is living everywhere, in everyone.

Authoritarian governments will find it ever easier with technological advancements to zombify and control their populations. When such a government, helped by surveillance technologies and AI, is able to know what you are thinking and feeling, where you are and what you are doing, has control over all the information you receive, and knows your personality impulses precisely - what hope has anyone to escape from the hell constructed for them by the resident psychopaths? China is already a long way down this path, Russia is hurrying to this end too.

There must be a model of openness that prospers in democratic countries. The algorithms that will increasingly guide our lives should be open source and publicly reviewable. There needs to be better realtime checking of fakery, using methodology that is publicly available. There must be a culture and processes in place to ensure transparent, accountable decision-making.

The time window for getting this right is now and we may never get the chance again.

Journal 2022-08-24

To be ultra-confident you can either be a deranged narcissist or you can be yourself completely. The former is fragile, needing lies and selfishness to delay its inevitable demise; the latter invites a playful, open curiosity to life and what is.

There is no desire to convince others that you are happy when you are actually happy. There is no desire to show off to others when you have a sense of fulfilment. There is no hunger for external validation if you appreciate yourself. Showing off a glamorous lifestyle on social media as the suggested purpose of work is no purpose at all.

Initial ideas are easy only if they arrive from the lightbulb moment. The conditions that had to be in place for a person to be able to form original creative ideas were probably far from easy to obtain.

Journal 2022-08-21

I tried work once, but I prefer cake, selfies and sunsets.

Your mental state affects your physicality. It’s also true the other way round.

An interpretation of Human World is that Guy/John is mentally ill and is projecting the thoughts of his split personalities on his interpretation of events. It actually looks quite good on camera when he is in the location of the scenes and just speaking the parts of the first-person narrative to himself as a monologue, cut with green screen shots to camera. Projecting my narration on other characters in the scenes has a weird effect and also works. Film length will be about 8 hours. Accompanying music videos will use the same scenes and characters.

The novel will also be uploaded into the Wiberty app – which will enable effective indexing of themes and meta commentary. I want shared and collaborative indexing available for any text or body of work.

“Am I real?” It’s just you I’m afraid. We’re all NPCs.

If the fundamental questions are unanswerable as a condition of existence, then what matters is not what you think, but what you do - or more precisely, the quality of how you express life, now.

It is common fallacy that because a person believes they have thought through an issue logically and arrived at an objective conclusion, anyone who does not arrive at the same conclusion must be either stupid, dishonest or mistaken. In fact, taking the example of the judicial panel system, well-informed people can be presented with the same evidence in the same context, applying the same rules, and arrive at different conclusions.

People who mindlessly follow the current trend look moronic in the fullness of time. If they could momentarily step outside and look from a better vantage point, they would be ashamed of themselves. The heroes are the ones who held true, who showed bravery to resist. True wealth is the quality of your character, the actions you displayed, not the treats you received for picking the convenient easy option. Nothing you accumulate can be taken with you - your character and the quality of your actions were everything.

Random Thoughts

A journey of a thousand lines of code begins with a single import statement.

Deserts are giant sun mines.

Negative generalisations about a person based on demographics is bigotry.

Thinking out loud… Legislature: Lower Chamber: 1,000 randomly selected people, each serving 1 month over staggered terms. Each vote by secret ballot. Upper Chamber: 1,000 experts in their fields, appointed by Lower Chamber from independent shortlists, each serving 1 year over staggered terms. Each vote by secret ballot. The Legislature rather have the government appoints members of public committees and nominates people for honours. Government: Head of Government appointed by national election. Serves 1 year. Legislation must be approved by the Legislature. Provision to be removed from office if two thirds majority in both chambers. The HOG cannot serve consecutive terms. They have a 12 month contract to do a good job before they are out. No honours, titles, or special treatment for having the job. They are not allowed to ever monetise their position beyond the salary they are paid. National referenda required for constitutional changes. Framework: No political or private funding allowed for the HOG candidate. The most popular candidates are mandated time in the national media. No political bias allowed in the media within 1 month before the national election.

Journal 2022-08-16

Anything creative is therapeutic to me, even if it is just some simple words like these.

These are both acting and writing requirements:

Describe the scene in detail. What is he seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. What is he thinking? What is his emotional state? What does he want? What is his backstory? What happened immediately before? Describe him. What is his personality? What are his physical characteristics? What is he wearing? How does he talk?

Improvisation is realtime writing immersed in all of this. 

Random Thoughts:

Dogma is typically deceit enforced by cruelty and murder. Freedom of expression is the foundation of civilisation that emerged (after much struggle) from our brutal past.

Casting off the shackles of the KGB means winning the right not to be raped, tortured, mutilated and murdered.

Journal 2022-08-06

I’m collating my lyrics from dozens of songs at the moment.

Random Thoughts:

If you drop the story in your mind for one minute, what happens? You don’t have the thoughts in your mind that distress you. You are alive, now, in this fascinatingly weird and beautiful place.

Lying is the language of Evil; an ugly, twisted distortion of truth.

Happiness is a state of aliveness - no things are needed.

Random Thoughts

The goal with current gaps and an action plan. Has anyone done this analysis for humanity? (I mean one that is based on universal flourishing and kindness, not written by useful idiots and implemented by empowered psychopaths.)

Energy builds up internally through relentless thinking and wants to be released.

Working is more fulfilling than chilling.

Reduce work by doing it.

I am a writer. I perform for necessity or fun.

Summarise rather than simplify.

Right now, everything is probably fine. There will be challenges, and preparation for them is a good idea - but whatever they may be, this exact moment is probably fine.

Maybe a school exam question in the future: To what extent was the series of US imbecilic Presidents and broken political system responsible for the reaffirmation of totalitarianism in non-Western countries? Was this causally connected to the emergence of the Internet and social media?

Marcus Aurelius was succeeded by Commodus. As a metaphor, even philosopher kings beget tyranny.

In the totalitarian mindset, facts are attacked and suppressed if they do not conform to belief stories.

Journal 2022-07-12

Either use apps or read books of jokes, facts, quotes and vocabulary. Collated paragraphs of knowledge primers would be beneficial to learning as well.

Random Thoughts:

The past can offer lessons and warnings, but should not determine the quality of today nor the direction of the future.

These words are words. Your thoughts determine the effect on you, good or bad.

Anything great is always achieved outside of society’s expectations.

It is compassionate to be happy.

Be someone’s smile.

Journal 2022-07-09

I’m absolutely happy with the reservoirs of knowledge and culture that my phone makes available to me, including:

• Monthly subscriptions to Kindle, Audible, Spotify/Apple Music. 
• Follows of blogs, micro-blogs, video playlists and podcasts (with an option to support).

The one missing is a platform that provides the availability of any course of learning to everyone.

Random Thoughts:

Certainty is limited. Uncertainty is unbounded infinite possibility.

There was a brief interlude in the 1950s to 1990s when delusion and unfairness started to diminish. The desire for fairness has continued in this century, but people have become far more delusional and crazed, making fair outcomes less likely and opening the door to the truly vile forces that have wreaked misery through so much of history.

Are you a societal meme?

I am impossible to offend. “You’re a blancmange!” they say. Ok, well you have your opinions, and I’ll have mine.

Everyone you meet and everyone who is affected by you needs you not to be a twat.

Random Thoughts

There have been plenty of middle management monsters running countries in history - they are psychotic narcissists who copy from a playbook given to them and repeat the past.

Can creativity thrive under authoritarian conditions, aided by artificial intelligence? Can slaves be compelled and threatened to create? Can they create if they are constantly lied to and manipulated, rather than inspired? The correlation to date has been with freedom.

If consciousness can be programmed to live in a heavenly state of bliss, why bother creating simulations? If reality can be anything, then why this one?

People who put percentage probabilities on the origins and nature of existence have a myopic view of the probability tree.

Exploring was great, but I am now about to focus. I probably won’t be updating my word count here, for a while.

Random Thoughts

On a hot day, humans can outrun horses over long distances.

Thoughts determine your wellbeing. Fluffy thoughts are lovely; however if they are based on some personal deceit, they will turn sour. Negative thoughts destroy you and everything you experience. Positive thoughts based on what is true is the optimal state of being.

I enjoy sentences where different interpretations are all true. The sentence is the fact, but the meaning is multiple. The ultimate sentence is when, on some higher level, all the seemingly contradictory explanations harmonise as one great beauty.

Does the universe exist if your consciousness is not perceiving it? This question will usually be met with “of course”, eye rolls and the like, instantly dismissing logic which suggests: the only irreducible certainty is that an experience is being perceived in the current moment. I am not solipsistic by inclination; it’s just interesting to me how quickly the idea is dismissed as obviously false and egocentric. But people are often irritated when an axiom is touched, and advances in knowledge are usually counter-intuitive. So what if all assumptions are false?

Gamer: We’re living in a simulation. I have proof.

Religioner: That’s ok. God created the world that made the simulation and put the Holy ghost in the machine.

God: By the way, something created me.

Random Thoughts

Never quite here and not quite there, words are understood depending on you.

Further from reality, from warmth and humanity, bliss will fester in your lap. Love and be loved; don’t judge and be judged. Anger sees anger; the foolish see a fool.

Economic necessity hinders countless people from fulfilling their potential. Having some chance is better than nothing; however a situation where you are hostage to the manipulations and barbarities of some murderous thug is a forcible attempt to suppress your humanity.

Music is a mystery. Nothing inspires and moves people as music.

Writing is focused thinking.

It’s rare to meet an adult non-dog who is full of joy in most circumstances.

Blah blah etc.:

 - Sell me this pen.

 - What type of pen do you need?

 - I’m not really looking right now.

 - I find it useful to have my own pen handy if I need to write something down. Do you have one?

 - No, not on me.

 - Would you like to try this?