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The ego and creativity

June 7, 2016 No Comments

The ego and creativity – Wolfe’s kiss farewell

Today I had an extremely offensive conversation with one particular friend. He has some very strange ideas about creativity, so I am going to address these ideas very slowly, in a format that he is very welcome to absorb in a space where he cannot commit an assault.

There is a chasm of difference between developing an idea, and developing a marketing strategy. We can see from our television channels that shooting for the lowest possible denominator in the hope of viewing figures is not the way to achieve quality. We can also see from many arthouse movies that self indulgence does not always produce something that you would want to watch.

My friend, who makes arty movies which he does not bother to market, likes to prevent me from speaking at all by attacking me verbally whenever I try to explain to him that he has his priorities a little confused, making it impossible for me, as an extremely patient and understanding friend, never mind anyone else to work with him.

Today, it was a possible sit com that became impossible to even conceptualise, because he imagines that finding a marketing person that will make the magic exposure problem go away is more important than developing a product. This means that you cannot even develop your idea sufficiently to make it worthwhile, never mind discuss it to the point that you get any actual work done.

I have previously tried giving him simple open ended tasks to complete alone, with the idea that if he is left to complete something himself, I will not be at physical risk, and he will gain the satisfaction of moving a project on a stage. Even this has resulted in such a strong stress response that it is not possible to get anything done, and so two projects so far have had to be abandoned. He then likes to tell me what he thinks I asked him to do, which is nothing to do with what I actually said, because he was not listening in the first place.

Now this problem is caused by stress. In particular a fragile and super-stressed ego, so today I tried using myself, and then Wolfe, as an example of how other people work. In my case, as money is not an issue at present, I like to spend one third of my time on the piece of work, and two thirds of the time allocated on marketing the piece of work, whether this is over a month, a year, five years really does not matter as long as I have the time and space. Therefore there is a fairly consistent flow. For someone like Wolfe, for whom money is very important, he spends maybe 5 minutes out of an hour doing the work, and 55 minutes out of the hour telling the world that he has done the work. This can be done by passive or direct means, but whether you believe him to be a loudmouth Yank or not, he is certainly more successful, in a very niche market, than anyone else.

You cannot market a product that cannot exist due to temperament. In order to market thin air, you have to be a convincing person with a track record of actually achieving what you set out to achieve. Your cheaply made arthouse movie can do this for you, if you actually bother to develop your skill to the level where you are presenting something watchable. In order to do this, you have to consider the wider public rather than trying to sell yourself to a ‘marketing person’ who probably doesn’t exist.

700 people a month look at my artwork on the website. I maybe tweet it twice a month to achieve that, the rest of the hits coming from the relatively unrelated blog. This is a good use of time, develops my writing ability and expression, and gives me time to dream up more complicated versions of my work. I picked up a lot of information from Wolfe in this respect. Worrying about what people think of you, or failing to promote yourself is not useful to you. Insulting your friends by preventing them from helping you and telling them repeatedly that their views are irrelevant whilst they try to give you the information that you need is also not useful to you, as they will simply stop trying at all.

A master of an art is not an egotist, too frightened to input feedback. Very much like a British academic, they will listen to the most obscure information related to their interest area in an effort to improve quality, improve audience figures, expand their area of interest.

In my case, since my work is usually produced when I am wounded in some way, annoying me is what usually gets you a piece of work in the first place, which is why Wolfe was such an excellent candidate. He lacks understanding or respect for other people, however, which is why it is now more interesting to me to find some fresh meat.

I cannot help my friend with the knot he has tied himself into. I am just not putting myself in that position again, which means conversation is now likely to be severely limited. If I acted towards him the way he behaved this morning, I would now be in hospital. The great pity is that I doubt a single word I said went in, and so nothing will change.

If you are a creative person, bear in mind what I have said. Even if you do not like your work, it is important to either bin it or promote it to allow others to feed back to you. Otherwise you could find your passion drained by circumstance, and unless your spark is as self-healing as mine, you could end up bitter, hostile and unable to access your own genius.

Thank you David, for being careless, rude and a bit sexist and stupid. Without you, none of this would have been possible.

The post The ego and creativity – Wolfe’s kiss farewell appeared first on Ina Disguise – Author.

creativity, motivation

Tired of the dislikes, Wolfe.

June 5, 2016 No Comments

It has been nearly ten years, since my mother’s stroke, a month before my father died. I have reached the end of my productive adult life as a female, in terms of having a career or having a child before it is too late (not physically, I am unlikely to trust anyone enough to procreate before the time is up, given my slow burn mentality.)

I frequently cry about this, I pretty much started crying as soon as I saw Wolfe. Not for the obvious reasons, just the polar opposite, confident male version of me. These are not all good qualities, given the errors in plain sight etc. He makes me feel very battered.

I did wonder, for a long time, whether there was envy involved in my interest in him. I also wondered why, as someone considered very knowledgeable by even my drinking buddies, I would seek what would be considered to the untrained eye a ‘himbo.’ These people would not understand as I do, the amount of time and commitment Wolfe has had to put in to make his extensive knowledge of natural health look superficial and effortless to the jaded European passing interest eye.

I have been horribly bullied since childhood. I wondered, as a child, why I got on better with my teachers than I did with my own family. I remember at ten or so, having to leave the room because my sisters were shrill, inane, and extremely nasty.

Last week I tried to notify one of them of my mother’s impending operation. Her response was that this was not good enough for her. She only really sees things in terms affecting her. The fact that she had already had a letter explaining the operation had escaped her, because apparently my ability to write frightens her. Were I to describe a summer’s day, she would find it weird and patronising.

So, as you can tell, I am not dealing with brains of Britain. My mother used to tell me I would have to look after them after she was gone. I thought this was very odd, given that I was a small child, and they were ten and sixteen years older, and consistently nasty. Now I am less surprised. My mother, herself pretty unpleasant until her stroke, was identifying the stronger party.

Being strong sucks, however. You get dumped on, everyone expects you to cope on your own, and they think it is quite alright to attack you over and over again. I am a bit fed up, to say the least. I have had to say to her, in all seriousness, that either I have to now demonstrate some form of parental discipline, or she will have to go into care as I am not safe from my own siblings, who have proved themselves to be greedy, dishonest, extremely nasty and extremely ruthless in their pursuit of role playing power points and financial entitlement.

I did not take care of their parents for reasons of power-mongering, but this is what they have always been so scared of, and which is now a horribly self-fulfilling prophecy, and the only way out of it, it seems, is for my mother to live elsewhere in case they want to visit. (in my brother’s case, the visits are now every five months, so this seems like an expensive waste) I am not sure that I see a way out, other than our moving so far away that they cannot visit at all, and this would be complicated by my mother’s progressing illness, leaving us open to further legal attacks from her own children.

So there we have it, the opposite of a go-getting, driven, confident and rather slutty male, is a shy, harried, equally loquacious but somewhat different female that gave her life away for a family who neither deserved nor appreciated it. I have distracted myself from misery, by investing myself in amusing my opposite, who remains unamused.

I do realise that part of the reason that Wolfe hates everything is to let me know he has seen it so that I can take it down, and I also realise that I am insufficiently worthy of note to really affect him at all, but it still pisses me off that I could not even manage to get a sensible conversation out of him in the first place. He spotted me, and then apparently made several incorrect assumptions, based on erroneous ideas about worth, purpose and interest.

I just wanted one thing to go right. I wanted one thing to be appreciated and used appropriately, and I wanted to make something of a life that had already been taken away.

You could say that something else was created, but whether it is worthwhile beyond comforting a few thousand other emotionally scarred people, I don’t know. At least it got me writing in the first place, I guess.

It is unlikely that my family will notice that they have messed up until they have lost everything. It makes me very sad that other people cannot even let my mother die the ways she wants to, and that I am becoming less committed to fighting them. Being strong sucks, and being kind sucks even more.

creativity, motivation

Amos Yee and David Wolfe

June 4, 2016 8 Comments

Sorry I have not updated in a few days – I have been catching up with the backdrop for Wolfish, working on finishing some work under my own name, mother has been super – ill and even I thought she was dying of old age, rather than her persistent infection becoming even more persistent. It just goes to show, you must fight even when it seems utterly hopeless. She is now recovering from a particularly virulent UTI in hospital whilst I take a rest from being me from a few days.

Yesterday I discovered the story of Amos Yee, a charming yet precocious 17 year old in Singapore, who has turned performance art into protest and is facing many charges and years in jail for simply speaking his mind via his blog and youtube channel As a formerly spritely 17 year old myself, I recognise the spunk, but I have to say he is exceptionally brave to be putting himself at risk to change his country’s culture in this particular way.

Compare his efforts to the genius Seo Taiji, sometimes referred to as the South Korean president of culture for his efforts to develop his country’s cultural life via his music career and influence, and you can see that Amos has some hope of achieving his goal of encouraging free speech in Singapore, but his methods are scarily brave, and I see from some of the comments on his videos, that even his followers are terrified by the risks he is running. His parents, too, have been frightened of the repercussions, resorting to reporting him themselves.

Singapore has an appallingly repressed culture. The birth rate is low, due to men being encouraged to be ‘too polite’ to girls, and the economy is geared towards commerce at the exclusion of freedom, meaning that there are an awful lot of shopping malls but not much in the way of freedom of expression. I would encourage you to watch Amos and listen carefully to what he has to say. Although I question his need to ‘destroy David Icke,’ I remember only too well the clarity of thought and limited scope of action involved in being 17, and I hope, for this reason, he wins his personal battle with the jackboot of capitalism. Witness for yourself the future for countries indulging business over people. It ain’t pretty.

I see that David has caught my video. I hope he hasn’t missed hating me too much. (he still does, boohiss) I am working on the book, and will be a bit nearer publication in a few days. I will have to spend some more quality time researching Peru.

Kisses,

Ina

Uncategorized

FTAO Ina Disguise Blog readers

May 30, 2016 No Comments

Hi,

Just a note to say Amazon is causing me some problems with getting the stolen book removed, and I am busy at the moment developing the marketing side of things, and getting the blog onto youtube, minus a few strategic posts that are really just here for Google and Wolfe rather than tag generating publicity.

Studio work progressing and I need to focus on the programming languages if I want to get ahead with the digital side of things, which requires a different mindset than writing and sewing.

Made a video for Wolfe yesterday, for the first time in about three or four years, so evidently I am feeling better about myself. Hopefully he now understands me a bit better, but who can tell? If not, no loss in trying I guess. Am thinking of doing a series of more general comedy nagging posts. Unfortunately, nagging requires a face, and Ina has no face, so if I do it, it will probably be under my Second Life name. (my real name is even more ridiculous than Ina Disguise)

Have entered one of my once a decade randy (horny) phases, so who knows what mischief is going to ensue with the creative work, since I tend to pour it all into that. I will probably be looking a bit different shortly, as I usually metamorphosize during these phases.

The blog will return shortly, when the workload is up to speed, unless something dramatic happens that I feel the need to notice.

Thank you so much for all support so far.

Ina

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Has Amber Heard, Johnny Depp?

May 30, 2016 No Comments

Has Amber Heard, Johnny Depp?

I see that this is big news in America, worthy of comment from bitter old men and chirruping ladies alike.

I have seen Amber Heard referred to as a gold digger, and trailer trash. I have seen the somewhat overblown and unnecessary rallying of Johnny Depp’s exes and friends around the unfortunate but seemingly universally loved star.

So, since I actually have some insight, and have been in many, many terrible relationships, here is my unusual take on this sad episode.

From the information provided, Johnny Depp pursued a challenging relationship with a stimulating young woman that he could not take for granted. From this we can assume his more visually appealing relationship with the lovely Vanessa Paradis ran smoothly to the point of catatonia.

From looking at him, he currently wears the cold sweat puffiness of the regular drinker and drug taker. This does not make you an abuser, but to decide to go on a bender at fifty-odd, stimulating change is clearly overdue.

Amber Heard, very ambitious, bisexual, apparently not that blown away by his stardom, seemed like a good idea at the time.

I have been in several abusive relationships. I am still on speaking terms with two of them, and two others I told to get lost when they tried to return. Not because of previous history, but because I could not be bothered with their lame conversation and tired old bad habits and lack of self regard.

Let’s get something straight. Throwing a mobile phone at someone because they are emotionally attacking you just after your mother has died is not abuse. It is the self protective act because you cannot speak. Even if he did throw his smartphone at her, she should not have been there causing drama in the first place. That is far more abusive than throwing smartphones around.

I am by no means the most abused person in the world, because primarily I am a deceptively tough lady, and secondarily, I take my part of the responsibility. Sometimes, battered victims, it really is your fault.

It is your fault for agreeing to stand and be a punchbag.
It is your fault for inciting drama in order to get the attention that you want because there is something wrong with you.
It is your fault for not respecting yourself and demonstrating poor judgement.
It is your fault for not loving your partner enough to leave the first time it happens so he can sort himself out.
It is your fault for not waiting long enough to change YOURSELF before seeking another relationship.

This is a controversial way of looking at domestic abuse, but I have tried it on a couple of pathetic women that were sleeping with a previous boyfriend who tried it as an excuse. (eg, “Please don’t tell my husband I slept with your boyfriend because he is so big and brutal and he will hit me.” Tough tittie, if you aren’t ready to move out, do not bother me with it.)

It has always alarmed me also that the perpetrators are offered no help. In recent history, the attention is focused on the little victim who frequently turns around and says she/he is returning because ‘she/he loves him/her.’ No you don’t, if you loved him/her you would leave until they have had sufficient relationships to increase their emotional intelligence and figure out what went wrong. Then you would remain celibate for as long as it takes not to pick another hitter.

Domestic violence, in my experience of it, is caused be several alternative factors:

The physical chemistry is such that the great make up sex compensates for the fights, and the fights are incited to get each other into bed.
The violent partner is inadequate, mentally ill or simply so dumb that they cannot communicate.
Anxiety – two of my violent exes had a significant anxiety problem that they could not control and were unmedicated.
The abused partner actually finds ways of requesting that his/her partner abuses them for some other reason, such as guilt.
Drugs and alcohol, and general boredom thereof.
Immaturity.

It is my view that women, in particular, need to grow up when it comes to relationships. One article I came across in the last year had a woman claiming she was being abused because her boyfriend insisted that she watch him playing computer games. This may be manipulation, but it is up to you to get off your own fat ass and go and do something else. It certainly isn’t abuse unless you choose the role of victim.

I chose not to be a victim after the first couple of guys attacked me, and I have to say that the most recent assault, by a stranger in broad daylight, was pretty much water off a duck’s back. A couple of my exes have tried to assault me in my own home, and been summarily removed and/or disarmed. It is not something I enjoy having to do, but guess what, Amber?

SHIT HAPPENS.

Now grow up, cut people some slack when they are grieving, and since you clearly do not love him and probably never have, please fuck off and find yourself a woman, or whatever your real, very immature problem is.

Some abused women have lost limbs or have permanent scars, visible or invisible. We are not amused.

creativity

Describing Yourself

May 24, 2016 No Comments

Getting your ideas across is a complex process, especially when you have an incoherent concept that you are in the process of rendering coherent.

I have only made any effort to go public at all because I (and even this sentence is a struggle to write) felt I had touched on something that Wolfe either did not understand, or had made a life choice not to understand, and for some intangible reason it was very important to make sure I made as many efforts as possible to get it across to him. Not so much a matter of getting my claws in, as opening a door for him and letting him do whatever he wants with it. In addition, there is a smattering of potentially valuable knowledge scattered throughout if one chooses to pick it up. Most of my feedback has indicated that people take the emotional hit, and depart satisfied without really examining why they feel better, but this is a sign of success as far as I am concerned.

I am in the process of widening the net, in terms of publicising Ina Disguise, in preparation for the completion of Best Adventure Ever. I see that for many sites, the blog posts themselves are too personal, too opinionated, and do not contain as many pictures as they should. Everything has to have a kind of reader’s digest uniformity, for many sharing sites, and I stick out like a sore thumb, as per usual. My lizard self tells me that I should edit, rewrite and add pictures to fit in with this ethos and get my work out, and my actual self tells me I would be losing my USP. As an advanced reader, headlines and pictures actually put me off, when reading, but I see that this is another example of my being out of touch.

Somebody very kindly interfered with my Alexa ranking, and has replaced my keywords with ones which are less to do with me, and more to do with getting me more hits. Thank you to whoever it was, as they have rendered the website much more attractive to search engines etc and have increased the value of the website by quite a chunk. I am not sure what the intention was, but I got a nice surprise when I saw that it had been done and why.

I am quite happy to write articles separately from the blog, I have managed to get quite a bit of material down now, so it is not a huge hardship, but I think it is best for the blog to be the blog, for good or ill. Journalistic stuff is really for a separate section, so perhaps I should insert an invisible page and stick them there. I will let you know how this process goes, but so far the products page has raced up the leaderboard overnight due to the large pictures, so I surmise from this that large pictures are what people are responding to. In the meantime, I am going to get the blog up on youtube as it is, before I start editing if this is necessary.

So now I have the problem of describing my work again.
What is Ina Disguise all about?

Joining the dots in terms of your intellect, your emotional state and your ability to convey your ideas is not something that is really encouraged in Western society. There are many good reasons for this, the main one being that you can trap yourself if you do not keep these things separate, and things like your magnum opus being abandoned for several years because of being stupidly in love with a stranger happen. A bit like choking on a smoothie when you have had bad family news.

If you can manage to pull it off, however, it leads to far more engaging and arguably important work. You are only as good as your level of passion, and your need for connection and engagement. Expressing a rather primitive interruption of this flow has been a major feature of the work so far on the Sheep in Wolf’s clothing project.

On the plus side, it meant that taking something traditionally used for another purpose – I made rather advanced textural pieces in two dimensions prior to this unfortunate episode, as can be seen with Saxophone, and On the Beach, but it was clear to me that two dimensions just were not enough to satisfy my visual communications in relation to Wolfe. This has led to a kind of naive sculpture which also means I have strayed into the realm of interior decor and fashion, which has been rather fruitful in terms of encouragement from appropriate interest groups. I also quite like the fact that there is no real reference point. This makes me challenge myself more, since I am the explorer in my current creative field.

In terms of the books, I notice that although I have written at some speed, spilling whatever I have to say out as it comes to me, that I have approached them in the same way one approaches a philosophy essay. There are several possible readings you can make of the same book, and you get a consistent number of points each way. Superficially, they are just rather entertaining cartoon stories, but you can pull different things from them depending on how you read them. So I think we can safely say I picked on the right muse on this occasion. Time will tell if a decent reviewer picks up on any of it, since I am still very lazy with marketing. We are at the point where I need to put a week or two into expanding the audience however, so this is what I am doing as I work on the next collection whilst listening to programming lessons.

Describing what you do is immensely important to your creative work. A good bullshitter is often far more successful than a moribund master of the arts. Finding a more mercurial person to devote themselves to the bullshit side of things is, therefore, invaluable for most creators. Twisty often likes to tell me that I need an agent, but Twisty is himself the world’s worst for not promoting his work, so I think perhaps he needs one more than I do.

To conclude, any spare time that you have left when creating needs to be spent on exploring the world of marketing, especially if you want to keep your overall costs down. I am fortunate that the magazines devoted to the rich and famous came to me, but not everyone is that lucky. Be shameless. Be positive, and do not allow your own cringing to grind you down.

creativity

A creative post

May 22, 2016 No Comments

I cannot move in the studio at the moment, as four Victorian bannisters that I have been working on for about three months are sitting there, dominating the workspace and sitting on wool boxes that I cannot open as a result.

The enlightenment project is also taking up a lot of messy space and money, as it is another resin related project. This is likely to continue for weeks to come.

It is amazingly annoying, not being able to move around your own studio. Amazingly annoying, and amazingly messy when the reason for it is dripping chemical pus all over the floor.

Tomorrow I will spend about two hours sanding off some of the resin that I have added today. This is annoying also, since it costs around £40 per litre, and cheaper casting resin will not do. The enlightenment project involves an awful lot of resin, so it is taking a very long time.

Meanwhile, in my bedroom, which I half-heartedly attempted to declutter last night, I have half a dozen boxes of shades of green, as I am working on a coral reef for Wolfish, and a large selection of leaves and butterflies for another piece or two. Folie a Versailles, meanwhile, languishes elsewhere as it is too big to put anywhere unless I am actually working on it. It is too hot to work on during the summer, so I have to wait until the weather gets colder.

Wolfish himself is staring at me, with his so far dead eyes from the other side of the room. The cats enjoy cuddling him, since he is bigger than them, but until I make up my mind whether to stuff him and how many friends I plan to make for him he has nowhere to go, as his tank is in the box room awaiting tiles and paint.

What’s the time Mr Wolfe? is keeping company with Perfect Posterior elsewhere in the room, as I have a little job to do on both of these. I still have a computer to finish also, so I will probably put that together today, in the computer room, alongside the other computers I have completed in the last couple of months.

In the meantime, Kira is starting to invade me a little, since my economics posts this week. She is still back at last year so far, but I suspect that it is coming up for time to finish the book. I have a good idea what is coming for the next one now, so it is probably time to finish this one. I also feel a bit more like going through my depressingly abandoned academic notes, so you can probably look forward to more careless fact dropping in the next book.

Feeling slightly better today, although my mother apparently thinks we are at a grand ball on a so-far unnamed Scottish island. This side of things is very tiring, so I try to avoid talking or thinking about it.

For those readers who wonder why I am talking about all these things in one post, this is how you have to learn to pace yourself. Life is messy. Probably the most important thing I learned, from all the things I learned in the course of my intensive exploration of life, is that it is perfectly fine to do 30 things slowly, and you get a much better result than doing one thing fast. You only learn to have the confidence to put things aside by doing it. Yes, you will finish the job later, and it will be much better, so do not be afraid.

creativity

Ina Disguise Q and A

May 22, 2016 No Comments

I have had some challengers this week, although they do not choose to actually discuss anything, I am going to answer their fascinating questions anyway.

Objectification

There are many videos on this available on Youtube. The questioner asked me about this blog post, or rather made an attempt to say I was talking nonsense without actually reading it all the way through:

Social Conditioning is a bitch, ain’t it?

The questioner was a young American goth, who did not realise that even questioning it meant that his masculinity was a bit shaky.

I am not the kind of chick that has ever really required feminism. As I have previously mentioned, I was so obsessed with work that the question of my out-working the guys never arose. The mistake people make with objectification is mistaking it for seriousness. Whilst some uses of young men and women, in particular, are a bit OTT, we are past the point at which it becomes some subliminal form of making you feel bad. Everyone is aware what it is for. Please now watch the entire video below.

As you can see, objectification is here reduced to a matter of levity. Men like looking at women. Women are not to be encouraged to look at men in a societal set-up that favours them, since women are to be rendered dependent on them, hence our young man’s objection to my statement. The recent growth in male stripping etc indicates that America is developing a system of dual intimidation rather than relaxing gender roles as Europe has made some effort to do. This is for commercial reasons. They have also introduced a new concept of ‘ugly sex,’ which is what everybody else has been doing for years.

I do not come from a culture in which this is particularly relevant. I will do a post at some point on Scottish flirting, which I am sure will enlighten poor confused Wolfe no end.

When I say that men like to be objectified, they enjoy the humour and attention involved. I do not mean they necessarily like being treated as toys any more than a relatively serious woman does. In some cases, entire careers have been set up purely to get the kind of attention they crave in the case of men who really do like being treated as toys.

A great many men have openly commended Best Romance Ever which is a book very much centred on Kira’s peculiar anti-objectification of Sam. She maintains distance to achieve intimacy, in a way. This tells me that men are a lot more flexible than many women give them credit for, although the cover does indicate that it is a unisex book.

2. Conservatism

Some tiresome American Ayn Rand fan tells me that conservatism is about personal responsibility. No, conservatism is about having a life so easy that you cannot imagine it all falling apart and needing any help. The idea of something happening to you is unthinkable, and you refuse to imagine it. You do not care about other people in society, whether they live or die, or whether they ever get the chance to thrive. There’s no two ways about it, there is nothing moral about conservatism, American or British. Society is about the survival of all, not how much you have managed to get for yourself.

Ayn Rand was a darkly humorous psychotic narcissist who had the naive American media around her little finger. This doesn’t make you look very smart. Why not buy another gun and shoot some poor people, and cut out all the middle men? What do you mean no? Are you afraid you might be put into a private prison and subjected to capital labour for the rest of your life along with the massive proportion of your population you choose to incarcerate? Land of liberty, my fat ass. Land of free speech, spending your time and money suing each other for saying what you think. No thank you, America.

3. Brexit

America does not want us to leave the EU, because they are waiting for the EU to sign TTIP and TISA. This is a good argument for leaving. Cameron does not want us to leave the EU, because there is a fat job waiting for him if he keeps us in it. He is also waiting for the EU to sign us up to TTIP, as he knows perfectly well if we choose to leave, he will be doing it, and then he will have even bigger riots on his hands as we all object to TTIP. You can look forward to yet another spurious war to distract us.

It depends really on who you trust less, the faceless people in Europe, or the absolute scum the English voted into government. Leaving the single market on the promise of finding new markets outside seems like a spurious argument on one hand, on the other, will Britain get the chance to leave ever again? I do not trust either side of the argument, going by the people making the arguments, so it is important to examine the facts. In the absence of hang-ups about immigration, there is still something to be said for exit.

Having said this, I would have preferred the European experiment to have worked, but the fact Europe is even prepared to entertain TTIP or anything like it makes me think we would be better off without it. It is far easier to stop a small machine than a large one, as I have discussed in previous posts.

4. Twisty

Someone asked after Twisty. We are on an off period at the moment, as I am avoiding confronting an issue neither of us can do anything about. This is not a romantic issue, Twisty is an old friend who is very helpful, or very hateful, depending on mood. He will be annoyed that I referred to him as a finisher, but I will explain this in a different creativity post. To make up for this, here is Twisty’s film, much acclaimed and which, like his others, is all his own work.

Uncategorized

Tired and Lonely

May 21, 2016 No Comments

It strikes me that one of my cats and I have a lot in common. She doesn’t really go out much, as she bothers the hunting cat by clinging to him, and she checks in with me every hour or so to verify that she is still alive. I now check hits on things to verify that I still exist.

This is an improvement on ten years ago. Ten years ago I was having to accept that my life was over, after having done nothing but work for years, since that was all I really cared about.

Ten years ago, I imagine Harry was still coming here, although he had probably starting seeing someone else at the time. Our relationship ended about two years before we actually split up, which is the opposite of Twisty and I. When we were together, fifteen years or so ago, we split up long before our friendship ended. He was so stressed that I felt I would have been killing him otherwise.

Not being able to talk about your actual skill is a very unhappy state to be in. It was not until a week or two ago that I finally lost my tolerance for small talk. Small talk is great fun, but when your mind is actually working on something much bigger, it eventually causes you to become extremely stressed. Even if you do get them on topic, they tend to run off with a different ball, and you lose interest in redirecting them.

I became intolerant of my sisters at around ten years old, whereupon it was decided that I was weird and not one of them. My mother did not help at all with this, as she is highly suspicious of anybody who is not like her. It was not until she had her stroke that she exclaimed that I was more like her mother. Us creative intellectual types don’t have much interest in making other people do things for us, or dressing snappily. We are busy doing something else, so it is wise to either get us to actually do something, or leave us alone. My mother was fortunate to have her mother, my father and then me in her life, as we were/are all pretty much the same, grumpy, positive introverts that apparently exist to do things for her.

Still, it gets very lonely when you have nobody to talk to about the subject that interests you. I have had to listen to years of ranting about immigration, and as a former ethnic minority specialist, I have quite a lot of counter argument to people who rant about immigration. Nobody has noticed that I have not bothered to respond to this.

The most intense egomaniac I was with, the chef, only learned what music I liked about two and a half years after I met him. Either I am a very quiet partner, or I have picked people that swither between self interest and not being particularly interested in me. I think I deserved better, on reflection.

Maybe we should be less tolerant. Make way for the optimists, and shed our skin more often when it comes to people. Maybe we should all be more like Wolfe, and ignore everything that does not instantly gratify. I have coped with too much, most of it for other people, and now I am left thinking that I will never get to discuss anything real with anybody.

This could be a good thing. It might lead to some interesting work.

I’m tired, and I do not see an end to being alone.

economics, motivation, politics

I’m right, quite a lot of the time

May 20, 2016 45 Comments

The entire story of this blog can be summed up in one word. Confidence. From the day I went from a disparaging stranger to first commenting to Wolfe in an effort to initiate the conversation we never had, almost six years ago now, the entire episode was all about confidence. Why would a keen thinker even bother trying to explain herself to a promiscuous dude selling health food in the first place? It all comes down to confidence, and in my case familial abuse. I thought for a long time before I even tried talking about my ideas to him, and then a lot of emotional upheaval took place which has led me to where we are now.

There are good elements and bad, in terms of consequences. I offer up a far more well rounded and arguably useful package now, since I have always been reasonably good at breaking down complex subjects into terms that even my not-particularly-interested friends could understand. I am less inclined to be flashy for a small audience, rather than down to earth and faintly comedic for a slightly larger one. You may not listen, and you may choose to block it out, but at least I now get a hearing in the first place.

There are several things which came to my attention have assured me that I was right and David Wolfe is/was wrong to ignore me:

A report, possibly two relevant reports, have indicated that GMO has failed to do anything at all for world hunger, as predicted in the writing he did not care to discuss with me.
Yanis’ view indicates that I am right in my thinking in relation to the ethics of allowing corporations to legally challenge governments. We have been at the mercy of false information via discreet lobbying for years, and now we are to get less than discreet legal challenges to force us to live according to profit makers’ wishes. Also as predicted in the original book.
The information on the European Union, provided for the referendum, indicates that the US encirclement policy against Putin is indeed at the heart of these not-particularly-nice trade deals we are being told we have to negotiate. (ditto) We are all supposed to form a giant trading circle around Russia. This is unhelpful, childish and stupid, and frankly I have more respect for Russia as a result.
The Asean nations may be quite happy to go along with this, but the Asean nations have a host of different costs and benefits to Europe. I always previously thought of Europe as being the responsible continental bloc, with less pressure in terms of suffering populations and being more fussy about food in particular, I imagined that the EU would save the world from the mortgage on life that GM has been turned into by American corporatism. As the German chemical companies are also rather keen on modifying genes to accommodate chemical profit-making, this is not going to be the case.

I am sorry Wolfe. I am sorry that I am not also 22, blonde, wearing a bikini or whatever your limited criteria is for speaking to people without messing about like a squirming five year old for several years. I am sorry that I am not a confident person. I am sorry that I thought that you would understand anything that I had to say.

It is a shame that I was going through so much at the time that I did not just dismiss him as an idiot instead of putting myself through all this in order to come back to the point where I appreciate my own mind. I could have lived without the food related self torture too. That side of things isn’t his fault, if I hadn’t bothered actually speaking to him at all, I could have avoided any of it. Discovering that he is even more insecure than I am in some respects, clouded my vision even further.

For the benefit of the rather stupid science ‘experts’ I frequently come across online – here is a short, concise description of what GMO actually does.

Patenting a seed, and then suing landowners if that seed is blown onto their land is a bit like granting the company doing it ‘God-like’ powers for the purposes of profit. It would have been very easy for a supposedly ‘God-fearing’ nation like America to simply spot the ethical problem with this and make an ethical decision that life is not patentable. They did not.
As with the Green revolution, where the USA sent chemical-treated seeds in an effort to feed the starving, instead of paying a blind bit of attention to local foodstuffs and issues with land, profit is at the heart of American altruism. All that happened was that small landowners were put out of business in favour of larger landowners who could afford equipment and chemical supplies to support the growing of unsuitable and unsustainable crops which did not provide year round food availability. This led in one notable case to a poorer village having to feed the next village, the next village having been stupid enough to agree to accept American donations. GM simply took the Green Revolution a step further. According to America, the entire world should pay them for growing food. This is what TTIP will lead to. It is a social and capitalist revolution, not one of altruism or concern for others.
Nature is extremely good at coping with interference. The only thing GM actually does in terms of reducing pesticide or herbicide use, is ensure that ecosystems develop systems for defence against man-made chemicals. This means that the aforementioned chemical company gets to invent another chemical, and stays in business indefinitely, passing the costs of development on to the idiots that agreed to this moronic system in the first place. It is only a matter of time before, like the movie, the Americans produce a crop which can be watered only with Coca Cola.
GM may have saved the papaya, but it kills thousands of suicidal Indian farmers every year. Yes, of course these people matter.
TTIP, TTP etc means that the very very large chemical companies will have the right to challenge any government objecting to feeding the population with GM food. They have already sneaked in a few without telling us, and now they will insist on the same non-labelling policy in Europe that they have inflicted on the American population. This will ultimately lead to a global disaster of mammoth proportions, with the double whammy of chemical resistance and no labelling. Who cares, right?
In addition, TISA can still allow American health companies to lobby for the right to invade our health services. You can look forward to lots of not very tempting bad food advertisements, in tandem with solutions for health problems you need never have had. That is how America works, and they would like us to share their bad management for fun and profit.

Do you want to exist in corporate slavery, to please a few lobbyists and politicians too stupid and irresponsible to see the consequences of their actions?

Do you want to live in a world where you are effectively forced to spend a large part of your life ill, in order to pay someone to make sure you do not become even more ill?

Do you want a world of opportunity, or do you prefer to live in a world where you have to toe the corporate line, whether that is about what you eat or what you do for a living?

Do you want to put up a barrier to your own entry to a market, whether that be by being a small landowner, growing whatever you want rather than being told, as many Americans are, that you cannot grow food on your own land because it doesn’t fit in with the fascist regime? Or by starting a business in an impossibly regulated market?

Do you want private prisons and capital labour?

Do you want armed police turning up if you milk your own cow? (yes, this has already happened in the US of A.)

Do you want an inferior, uncritical corporate education to enable you too to cheer people like Trump?

Do you want to be denounced by a faceless PR company or even your own doctor if you speak out against any of this?

If this is what you want, keep going as you are, because that is the future we are looking at. Sit and play some more Candy Crush Saga, and see if that helps. Make sure that you rid yourself of conscience, self directed thought or any feeling that you can do anything about it. Look forward to corporate militia, because once the stupid politicians and corrupt individuals willing to agree to this retire to their tax haven, this is what you are left with.

Right, Mr Superhero, read it and weep. Move your ass, if you know how

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