Category: Journal

The resources to improve oneself are all available online. Most people (including me) are bogged down with the distractions.

I’ve got a lot of work to do – too much for little me with the time available. I have to become good at prioritising and focusing. What is it that really matters?

The most important skill in life is to be able to focus attention on where you are, without being distracted by repetitive thoughts.

If speed is an indicator of intelligence then I have been extremely thick.

Any realisations I have were already given to me. I was too stupid/arrogant to absorb the suggestions.

I memorise and conceptualise better by taking notes as information is relayed.

The best way for me to fall asleep is to think of stories. I imagine scenes and I drift away.

I had a dream where I thought I had a very good idea of establishing a coordinate system for each snooker ball, so that positions could be tracked over time across frames and matches. I woke up and thought, er so what? Another dream was more useful and correctly pointed out spelling mistakes.

Detect the problem; diagnose its cause; execute a plan for its resolution. For it to benefit you, frame it as a challenge: What is being learned? What opportunity does it present?

People are great actors because they really believe in their personalities. One of the best compliments I’ve had was when someone felt they had an epiphany and said to me, “you’re not one thing.” It’s a compliment because we all have to play archetypes as part of life; the mistake is thinking that is you. A curious, fluid mind-state is important because as archetypes inevitably tire in the losing battle against entropy, they become increasingly desperate, angry, and unhappy; and in some cases, crazed and cruel. All things change, great statues will turn to dust. Liberation is freedom from static constraints.

Since party politics mainly involves delivering prepared lines from prompts, can’t we just get the chatbots to do the job?

I’ve been writing some poems as guides for when I am improvising lyrics for songs. The words sound a lot better when sung rather than when read on a page because lyrics only complete their meaning when married to the music.

Random Thoughts:

The weight of an issue is usually determined by the emotional force of the past, rather than being proportional to its real likelihood and impact.

The true objective of a game is enjoyment.

If you were 100 feet tall, would a tiger be like a kitty cat?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m happy when I have interesting work because “work” then feels like play.

Players play characters in plays; musicians play music while playing to audiences. Writers work, however; and artists work at producing artworks. Work and play can be a fine balance.

Random Thoughts:

Words can make grunts of great cruelty or music of great beauty.

I watched the change from shy smiles to deep desires, until anger looked back.

The shopping aisles of perfect smiles draining the days in joyless fantasy.

Do you remember me? I don’t think you do because you never saw me. You saw another copy of a copy, a projection of your story. Now I am many stories, but only one is real.

Currently playing a track on repeat with my wooh-ooh vocals on top. It’s really good, it’s sexy and I want to dance with it, but I did say one thing at a time…

Random Thoughts:

Words are more real when they form from actions. The interesting parts of a scene are usually what happens around the words.

Beliefs are the biggest killers of people. Awareness to recognise beliefs as thoughts, and to change them when necessary, is vital to the world’s well-being.

Pride repeats errors. Love for your life and others is not pride.

During my wanderings, I’ve built abilities in various areas. I’m now focusing on each area in turn, starting with writing.

Random Thoughts:

From brain teasers to magic tricks, it’s usually a wrong assumption that hides the answer. Beliefs are full of assumptions, conscious and unconscious.

If you think you understand, you don’t. To think something is final, rather than part of a dynamic process, is to not begin to comprehend boundless possibilities.

I would like there to be a platform that is text-based and has character minimum limits for posts, so that content is substantial.

Those who supported habitual shams look ridiculous in the fullness of time.

Mid-May and it is now the first day of the year when heating isn’t needed and my study door is open. The trees are in leaf, there is a freshness of cut grass in the air, and there are still spring flowers on green waysides. It’s this time of the year when I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world.

Random Thoughts:

I write something that seems fine at the time. I read it later, groan, and make edits.

Reading to thinking to writing to speaking to writing to thinking to reading.

Cynical and low-quality public discourse in democratic countries has given succour to the autocrats of the world.

The reason that many observers thought Putin was just posturing with 200,000 troops on the Ukrainian border was they didn’t think he would be so stupid as to invade a country of 44 million people. By comparison, 2 million Nazis and Soviets invaded Poland in 1939. The soviets invaded Finland in 1939 with 750,000 troops and lost, suffering horrific casualties.

If a government (e.g. the US) had conclusive proof that aliens were visiting Earth, the information is unlikely to be disseminated for fear of panic and societal collapse. It would be suppressed, with the option to gradually acclimatise the public to that reality.

Twitter can be an opportunity to read more.

If I write something, I can also read the text on video and include in the tweet. I could use hashtag logic such as #H1C0S1T1 to index the content of Human World – where H = Human World (Novel), C = Chapter, S = Section (Thread), T = Tweet.

Random Thoughts:

Bravery is a smile in extreme adversity. Faith is the understanding that this light will prevail.

If there is advanced alien life out there, they would probably have the technology to hide themselves from us and would probably be watching us. Whether they would want to intervene, I have no idea.

The main utility of social media platforms:

• Twitter: Sharing written thoughts (but corrupted by psyops farms, disinformation, and political tactic mongers).
• Instagram: Following a person’s pictures and videos (ideal for celebrity culture and stalkers).
• TikTok: Fun videos.
• YouTube: All videos.
• Facebook: ? Pass.

In One Billion Years is Part 3 of Human World.

Choose creative thoughts above the destructive triad of fear, anger, and malice. If you don’t positively direct your thoughts, your thoughts will negatively direct you.

Well directed thinking moves swiftly from problems to solutions.

It’s more productive to set myself an achievable target for the day, rather than to work x amount of hours, as it provides me with an incentive to focus and work efficiently. If I really enjoy every bit of the work, then I do it anyway and the structure is unnecessary.

Random Thoughts:

I watched a film in my head as I slept the other night. It was the trope of a lift (elevator) getting stuck, but this lift would get stuck on different floors and let different characters in, before moving on. The lift finally arrives after the characters play out their drama.

If listening to music, I usually dance when getting out of bed in the morning – often also around the house, and sometimes in the street (when no one is looking).

A true superpower is finding joy in most circumstances.

There must be plenty of data now to model outcome probabilities for different political policies, which could then be used as a tool to help make better informed decisions. Instead, stressed-out posturing politicians are supposed to have all the insight based on their current (often negative) incentives and whims.

Skills and knowledge can now be learnt at any point in life because the resources are openly accessible. What is truly valuable is a learning that inspires the imagination to create rather than repeat.

Random Thoughts:

Artists observe. Intense feelings of empathy are welcome but lead only to misery if overwhelming.

I don’t think life is about the number of points scored, or marks totalled on both sides of a ledger.

Reliving memories of things going wrong can cause worry when presented with a similar situation. It is better to have learned, so the replay isn’t necessary.

Why do answerers never say why “that’s a great question” is so great? I also would like to know why other questions aren’t that marvellous, with details of the grade achieved, percentile scored, and marks out of ten for effort 😉