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16/11/07: Well, it's been quite a while since my last update, so I thought I might as well put something up new. The website is sort of ticking along at the minute - I've put some more stuff up in the --Downloads-- section, and done a mass link-check, so at least I'm doing maintenance.
Nothing new on the "Reality And Reason" rant, although I AM planning a second article, tentatively titled "Fading Away: How Plot, Character, and Setting are being eroded by the trend towards 'steady-state' storytelling". This will be a collection of my thoughts about the current Western "storytelling" industry (TV, comics, even novels to some extent) and in particular its increasing tendency towards a "premise for adventure", soap-opera style, rather than an actual story that progresses, even in "epic sci-fi drama". As a result, we are seeing more and more static, stagnant settings with "story arcs" that the work-by-committee writers make up as they go along. They're so afraid of alienating their audience that nothing ever really changes (hence "steady-state"), bar a few "shocking" kill-offs of cherished characters or "kewl", "grim n' gritty" plot twists. Yet the setting is still so convoluted (due to the mindless accumulation of worthless continuity) that new viewers/readers have no idea what's going on without extensive research into the "rich" (read: "messy", "careless") backstory.
My --Age Of Mythology-- map is on permanent hold at the minute, but on the plus side, Abyss: Scorched Earth (see my --Settings-- page) is perilously close to being finished. I've finished the Orders section and have been nibbling away at re-working the thing to remove a slight problem with model facings, so I can go on and add the rules for Vehicles. After that, it's just special rules, scenarios, and some optional extras (and then, of course, the actual army books...). Now, if only I can find some time to work on it...
I've had plenty to keep me busy at University - at least the Prose Fiction and even the Toward Publication modules (regular readers will remember my --last update-- and my response to the latter) have been useful in keeping my eye in, writing-wise. However, the whole experience has been marred somewhat by a little thing called "Professional And Academic Development". A compulsory module (sort of the modern, brain-damaged equivalent of General Studies), PAD is effectively a sustained corporate sneer at healthy, creative humanity, with special bile reserved for quiet, shy (read: non-drinking) people, particularly if they are also religious. Rather than learn useful "developmental" skills such as CV-writing ("Maybe you thought this was going to be a CV workshop and feel a bit disappointed" - our tutor) or even job interview roleplay, we get stuff like the following:
- A "Values clarification" exercise in which we are encourage to "discover" and "challenge" our "values system" with an eye to altering our values so that they better conform to "employer expectations". Unsurprisingly, in the section where we were meant to rank our values in order of priority "creativity", "spirituality", and "work ethic" were separate values and each had to be ranked above or below the others; you were not allowed to say that one value informed the others. Hmm, now, what would an employer want to see at the top?
- Psychometric tests. Apparently, because companies now value pop psychology over actual skills (and apparently no longer even bother looking at your CVs until they've dumped all the people they don't think would be "fun" to work with), we need to learn about these, even though we're told you "can't cheat the system" with 'tailored' answers so there's no point knowing about the tests beforehand anyway. The online resources we had to read through on psychometry were invariably enthusiastic (save a lone article from the Times included for "balance", even though we were explicitly told in the seminar that the article proved that we needed to learn about it because it shows how many employers use it), yet the section was accompanied by a disclaimer saying that the University did not necessarily "endorse" the test. Now, why would they say that? Read on, people.
I wasn't too happy with taking what I already knew to be a pseudo-occultic horoscope, but anyway, my result was ISTJ (Introverted Sensing Thinking Judging) - which is apparently the "Inspector-type" and leaves me in the dubious company of the Queen, President Truman, and J.D. Rockefeller. I was surprised to learn that I "feel right at home with difficult, detailed forms and columns of figures" (FORMSARRGHTEARSOUTHAIR) and that my "bastions" are "social clubs, government, schools, military, and the churches". My suggested career paths were utterly devoid of creative merit - some experimentation revealed that the "artist-type" could only be unlocked by answering questions in an extreme extroverted or empathic way. Biased much?
Read --this article-- on introversion/extroversion, which also mentions Jung, the chap who thought up the psychometric test in question. Then read --this article-- and notice that this is a broad societal trend. Jung took many of his psychoanalytical ideas from Freud, who, and I --quote-- : "considered introversion a mental illness". Now isn't that just peachy? I sent an email to my tutor asking whether the module coordinators shared Freud's assessment. She never replied. --Another article-- on the topic agrees that "our modern culture (Western, particularly) tends to overvalue extroversion". According to reliable estimates extroverts make up 75% of the population, and this proportion will only increase as they basically exterminate the introverts through growing hiring bias. Extroverts take all the top jobs and will also tend to have more children (connection between the two left as an exercise for the reader). The labouring classes also tend to extroversion, and, as lower IQ families, again tend to have more children.
The scary thing is that extroverts (i.e. politicians) have their finger on The Button. Misogynists joke about women in power starting a nuclear war at their "time of month" - but extroverts are constantly outward-focused, unpredictable and aggressive. Even in their darkest moments of "if I could burn the world in fire", no introvert would dare to start a nuclear holocaust. This leads me to believe that extroversion is a manifestation of the Memeplex (I'll have to write some of this stuff down - in my fictional settings, the Memeplex is a semi-sentient meme which is trying to make humanity commit suicide; an obsolete overpopulation reflex, it is attempting to exterminate man so the Earth can recover).
Back to --Jung-- . I also knew he was a little dodgy, but :eek: - "Jung ... served as president of the Nazi-dominated International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy ... Jung was editor of the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie, a publication that eventually endorsed Mein Kampf as required reading for psychoanalysis. Jung claimed this was done to save psychoanalysis and preserve it during the war ... this after-the-fact explanation, however, has been strongly challenged on the basis of available documents".
Hmm, what "available documents"? I decided to do some more research. Let's hear what Jung himself has to say about all this:
Jung: "Soul means race viewed from within. And, vice-versa, race is the externalisation of the soul".
Jung: "...the Nordic soul is not contemplative - it does not lose itself in individual psychology, but it willfully experiences cosmic-spiritual laws and is architectonically constructed" (WTF).
Jung: "The differences which actually do exist between Germanic and Jewish psychology ... are no longer to be glossed over".
Jung: "The Jewish race as a whole ... can be compared with the Aryan only with reserve. ... The Jew ... has never yet created a cultural form of his own and as far as we can see never will".
He was also a Wotanist and neo-pagan who believed Hitler was "possessed by a god". I printed off a whole sheet of these rather damning quotes and brought them into class. After visibly cringing when I read them out and asked whether she thought using material by this gentleman was appropriate, our tutor rather feebly responded "well, you can always dig stuff up about people" and told me that I shouldn't "take it too seriously" and that she needed to move on. WHY, IT'S MY FAULT FOR BRINGING IT UP! As I wrote in my notes, "hey, maybe I'm just 'close-minded' for not uncritically swallowing crap from dead racist neo-pagans". Jung's views were not merely personal foibles but the foundation upon which he built his psychoanalytical theories. We were later informed that the tests were only included for "educational purposes", since so many employers used them. Hmm, many employers are prejudiced against women and non-whites. Shall we provide links to enthusiastic reviews of these "points of view" as well?
It doesn't help that the entire course seems to have been assembled by a trained monkey. The handouts are riddled with typos (in the "Creative Industries" class of PAD, no less) including some real corkers. "Extroversion" is repeatedly spelt "extraverson" or some variant thereon (and inconsistently capitalized for good measure). The Powerpoint presentation in our last class proclaimed that of all the individuals working in the Creative Industries, "3/4 work an average working days per day". Huh? I pointed out that this made ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE WHATSOEVER, even assuming a figure had been left out, and the tutor merely stated that it was "probably" an error and that she had "thrown it together last night". Great! Maybe I should just "throw together" my assignments the night before too, since I'm surely only obligated to MATCH the tutor's dedication to the course. Even our student rep picked up on the typos, as well as pointing out that the "lifeline exercise" where students have to plot their "life happiness" from birth, projecting through to their death, is just asking to get the University sued by a student who was abused as a child and doesn't appreciate being forced to re-live it and discuss it in class if they want their degree.
Another handout on Psychometric tests attempts to convince us that psychology is still a real science, and not, you know, illiterate neo-Nazi garbage. It asks the question "How accurate are psychometric tests?". The answer begins promisingly (sarcasm alert): "'Accurate' is an imprecise term that can mean a number of different things". The next question attempts to address the (some might say superfluous) issue of "Do psychometric tests work?". Apparently there is a "wealth of published (note: not 'peer-reviewed') research demonstrating that psychometric tests predict job performance" (yet on the next page "there is no such thing as a good or bad personality"). Strange, given that even the Wikipedia article on Jung claims his tests have come under criticism for having "no non-anecdotal data" to back them up. The handout discusses "trait theory", and the wide range of personality traits a person might exhibit across a range of different situations: "sociable, outgoing, friendly, talkative ... participative". Wow, the range there just blows me away. Hey, Jung - Corporate America called, they want their bias back.
Another handout kind of shoots itself in the foot:
Psychometric tests are used because otherwise "the recruitment process can be very subjective". Keep that in mind as you read the following extracts from the handout (emphasis mine):
"Interviewing candidates alone is THOUGHT to be unreliable".
"...the introduction of testing is THOUGHT to bring in more objectivity".
"Tests are THOUGHT to provide scientific, unbiased information" (ROFL).
"HR Directors THOUGHT" (oh, and don't you love the way you're "human resources" rather than "employees" now?)
"psychometric testing is a "useful" or "very useful" aid ... ACCORDING TO 92 per cent of recruiters surveyed".
What was that about "no non-anecdotal data"?
PAD's very inclusion on the course is schizophrenic, given that our professors in our other modules repeatedly tell us we're never going to get a job related to our degree outside academia (so we should join their parasitic Ponzi scheme or work in a call centre), whilst in PAD we have to research jobs in the "creative industries" (neither academics nor phone operatives need apply). Of course, I suspect everyone's in the same boat: whether they're studying Maths, Physics, Music, Drama, or Sports, you just know every one of them has sat in a lecture whilst the professor has said something like "Of course, very few people in (field X) actually make a living out of it. When they do, it's always very hard, unglamorous work, and poorly paid - the only reason you would do it is for the love of working with (numbers, equations, music, actors, balls, mix n' match as [in]appropriate) Your best course of action is to go into academia, or support yourself in an utterly humiliating job at a takeaway or something and be a (physicist, musician, actor, football player, etc.) part-time".
In other news, I finally got Certain People to admit that the insane distinction between "opinion" and "reality" which I have noticed seems to be rife now (and which will be central to the "Reality And Reason" article when I finally get time to work on it) IS a new phenomenon - perhaps not even ten years old. I managed to squeeze out of them that they realized there had been a broad societal shift in thinking patterns, but that the "old" way of thinking (you know, that rather archaic idea that there is such a thing as verifiable truth) "caused hate and violence", because everyone would argue over their "perception" of the truth. Fantastic. Note that this is the first time in my life that someone has admitted this to me (namely, that some time between 1997 and 2002 everyone decided to completely change the way they think without any fanfare whatsoever). It actually explains an awful lot.
This ties into a forum sig I noticed on --bbs.stardestroyer.net-- , obviously belonging to an individual of the liberal persuasion: "Hi, I'm Pat Robertson, and MY family values start in YOUR bedroom". Nonsense. Absolute, terminal, nonsense. The sentence doesn't even have a real meaning. I know what he MEANS, but ... Look, Pat Robertson doesn't think like this. He doesn't think "Hmm, I have family values, whatever those are, that mean I don't want to (insert litany of sexual misconduct here). Those are my personal values and I accept that other people can do what they want to do". He thinks like this: "There is a right thing to do and a wrong thing to do. There is a law which humans must keep. Those who break that law are in the wrong". This is the essential conflict of our times, between people who think there are facts (and maybe an essential law beyond what the government dictates) and between people who think there the world consists of a vague fuzzy matrix of societally acceptable and societally non-acceptable statements. GAH.
Oh, and employer oppression? --It-- --gets-- --worse-- . This is the new concept of "digital dirt", where job seekers are being encouraged to cauterise any hint of individuality from their online presence in order to have even the slightest hope of getting a low-paid job from corporations that seek employees capable of projecting a positive image of their "brand", even when "off-duty". I read a chap's (clean, inoffensive) blog where he announced out of the blue that he would be removing/censoring all technology reviews from his backlog, just in case a future employer thought they made him seem too "confrontational". Yup, that's the way to go - if they think you'll endure mediocrity and being ripped off now, you won't complain when they make you work yourself to death for a pittance. Oh, and if you happen to share a name with someone even remotely controversial? You're --screwed-- . The mouth-breathers at Human Resources will throw your CV in the trash without even checking to see whether the individual/s with the same name as you even live in the same country.
Two evil quotes:
"I recently Googled my name and found that the top two results were pages I'd rather recruiters not see. One was a link to a page from the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division. My name is there only because someone posted a response I made to reader mail about an article on real-estate commissions. All the same, I'd rather not be associated with the matter. The other link is to a gushing article I wrote about an online game I used to play. Nothing scandalous, but recruiters might not know I wrote it when I was 14".
HAHAHA! Expressing an opinion on a political matter? OUT! Writing ANYTHING AT ALL, ON ANY SUBJECT, before you have sufficient qualifications to get a job? Apparently, OUT! Because they're watching you.
"If you ranted in a letter to the editor about the local school board, posted a racy profile on that online dating site, chat with buddies about your hobby collecting beer cans, or even posted on your high school web site about your upcoming reunion, it leaves a cybertrail and a potential employer will find it".
""Let's say photos of last year's neighborhood block party turn up on a web site somewhere," he says, "and there is the job applicant, passed out on a lawn chair at three in the afternoon, beer bottle in hand." Yikes".
"Yikes" indeed. When I read that last quote, I started laughing. I shrieked incoherently; hysterically. I crashed off my chair and writhed around. THE IDIOTS! THEY'VE DESTROYED THEMSELVES!! TEN --BLEEPING-- YEARS AND THEY'VE DESTROYED THEMSELVES! The "party people" have undone themselves in the face of a Panopticon neo-Victorianism they themselves helped to create. Even the slightest hint of impropriety will be enough to destroy them. What will happen to our coke-snorting, spliff-puffing friends, when this becomes the norm (already 70% of recruiters admit to rejecting applicants based on --bleeping-- Google searches)? My guess is that they'll still be "wasted", "hammered", and "smashed"; just not in the way they're used to.
Seriously, you couldn't make it up. The technology they used to turn their world into a perfect Babylon, a decadent pleasure garden full of all the pierced, ganja-saturated "delights" you could imagine is going to come crashing down on them. I use the word "Panopticon" in preference to "Big Brother" - in Orwell's work, you WEREN'T constantly under the eye of the Party; people policed themselves through FEAR of being watched (see --here-- for a discussion of what happens when our current law system meets absolute surveillance - basically, the answer looks like something out of the city of Drainpipe in --Zorian Saga-- , where nigh-omnipotent psychic vampires make you live, sleep, and rut in a puddle of your own feces and forbid the expression of any higher functions of the human brain). Today, with gait recognition software and police CCTV making its way into rented accommodation, you ARE being watched all the time. To be honest, even "Panopticon" fails to describe this system. In Bentham's original --prison plan-- , prisoners were again kept in line through fear that someone MIGHT be watching. Maybe I should just treat the --Holy Vehm-- lyrics as a progression: "Hollywood Triumphant > Panoptical Surveillance > Murdered Human Race". It seems the next logical step.
Check out this comment on the "digital dirt" issue:
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/l_comments/5404994?context_id=2984279#1796
An excerpt:
"Employers and recruiters who seek "digital dirt" on job candidates and employees rather than concentrating on on-the-job skills and performance infringe on employees' and job seekers' privacy and dignity - and undermine our most basic rights and freedoms. Once one allows any employer to dictate one aspect of one's private life, where does it stop?
Why not require employees and job applicants to submit to employer monitoring - again, the technology for this is already widely available! - of whatever they, even (indeed, especially) on their own time and off employer premises, read, watch, or listen to; who they associate with and what kinds of groups they're in; what Web sites they visit and what they send or receive online; and the like?
We can't have employees who dare to write or read postings like this one or otherwise explore, much less spread, ideas about "controversial matters" that the employer might not like, such as notions about fairer tax policies and a stronger "social safety net," or - horror of horrors - about (gasp!) employees having rights, now, can we?
Employment discrimination based on off-the-job political activities, indeed, seem (sic.) to be rising to a level not known since the era of McCarthyism.
Many people, especially in today's job-scarce economy, are now hesitant to take part in any form of political activism - writing a letter to a newspaper, calling a radio talk show, posting on the Internet, taking part in a march or a rally - for fear that their employer might somehow frown on such action".
All of this, from psychometric testing to "digital dirt", is happening now because the economy is so employer-sided (see above: "job-scarce", though no-one dares to say it openly). That is, there are so many people competing for each job that employers feel they can safely root out even the most qualified people if they are shy (no fun to work with), religious (likely to have that pesky "reality is not statistical" thing going on, after all we need them to believe that the chocolate ration is going up from 30g to 20g, also, we won't be their "higher power"), strong-minded (they might question instructions, like, --killing millions of people-- ) or in any way damaging to the corporate image. After all, there's inevitably going to be someone out there with almost as good qualifications who also passes the "brainwashed" test. "It's life - there are 100 people for every job", we're told by our lecturers. No-one seems to feel the need to point out that there's also a name for when things get like that, and it's called "Great Depression".
Of course, my Panopticon theories are spoilt somewhat by the fact that every corporation I've had the displeasure of interacting with this year has proven itself completely incompetent. It seems we're not heading for 1984 so much as --"Lord Of The Files"-- (a short satire of my own composition where the Party-like entity gets everything wrong but holds together through a form of red-tape bureaucracy elevated to the realm of IngSoc). Some examples:
- --British Gas-- left us for the whole of the month of October without central heating or hot water. Engineers left without saying a word, and the premium-rate support desk operators HUNG UP ON US mid-sentence and refused to give us an email contact for the department that was supposed to be receiving the new parts (they're a national company, but apparently don't keep spare boiler parts on-hand for their included maintenance service).
Weeks passed, and they said the parts hadn't arrived. They blamed the postal strike which had finished before we even discovered the boiler wasn't working. Then one of the help-desk operators admitted to us they "didn't know" whether the parts had arrived. Again, they refused to give us the phone number of the department in question, as it was "internal use only". Meanwhile, the girls in the house are wearing their duvets around the house and the broken boiler is still grinding away, making such an alarming noise that Redvers, in whose room the thing is located, had to sleep on the floor of the lounge. --Trustease-- , the company through which we rent the property, said they couldn't do anything, because they were contractually forbidden to hire non-BG engineers (come on, seriously, WTF?) and all their electric heaters were broken. Eventually the landlord gave us £20 to buy one ourselves.
In the first days of November, they started claiming that the parts had come ages ago, but we hadn't been in when the engineers had come (liars - they had promised an engineer would come half a dozen times; one of us would stay in all day, but no-one would call). They said they would phone us back the next day to arrange an appointment. The next day, they said they would phone us back the next day to arrange an appointment. The next day, they said they would phone us back the next day... Eventually, someone did come and the boiler was fixed! ... Except, next time I took a shower, something went --pop-- in the boiler and water started running down the wall. At this point, our landlord started throwing legal threats in British Gas' direction (because, of course, previously it was just US getting damaged, now water's soaking through HIS house right over where all the electrics come in). The next engineer admitted to us the previous chap hadn't reinstalled the waterproof seal correctly.
- The --NHS-- took two months to post a simple student exemption form for medical expenses. They falsely claimed we hadn't ticked the box to allow them access to my student data, then said we needed to post the forms again. After that, it emerged that they "didn't keep" the documents we sent them the first time (i.e., they incinerated them) and that we would need to re-send them with yet another copy of the forms. Apparently they didn't think that maybe if we SENT the documents, we wanted them to LOOK at them. Then they claimed they hadn't received the new documents and that they must have been lost in the post (yeah, right). On our FOURTH BLOODY ATTEMPT, they finally managed, after a further month of pontification, to send the actual exemption certificate.
- --Bath & East Somerset Council-- has now threatened us with a court summons for non-payment of council tax despite on no less than five occasions phoning them, emailing them, and finally going down to their offices in person with our certificates of entrance to the University. Each time we've been told everything is now fine and we don't need to worry about paying. I suppose the next step is the police showing up to arrest us. Holy God.
- --i6networks.com-- has decided that despite the fact that I no longer use the account I registered with them for free (in fact, the domain I used expired since I first signed up with them), and never asked it to be renewed, they will bill me --$107.40-- anyway for a service I didn't ask for and they have not been providing! Fortunately, the payment was billed to my credit card, which suits me just fine, as I don't own a credit card and didn't give them a number (because, it being a free service, they didn't ask me for one)! I actually emailed them before the payment was due to "go out" to point out that their system is broken - it shouldn't even be charging me at all, given that I signed up for their "LIFE-TIME FREE HOSTING" offer. Of course, I received no response. Given that the date in question - 07/11/07 - has passed uneventfully without even a reminder email from i6networks, I feel justified in ignoring them; as far as I'm concerned this is a phishing scam.
GAH! How do my updates get this long? I swear, it was just going to be a short update letting my (mostly fictional) regulars know how I was getting on and apologising for the lack of new content. As it stands I could probably just copy-and-paste this thing into a new rant (OH NOES, I'll never get a job). Anyway, better be going.
Signing off, blessings all round, keep watching for the lightning from the East, etc.