Honesty and Equality

A bit of cod philosophy inspired by something Hagbard Celine says in Illuminatus!. (I read it on a kindle so don’t have a page reference, it’s somewhere near the middle I think.)

A truly honest exchange (of anything, ideas, goods, services, phone numbers ;D) can only happen between equals.

Why?

Because inequality fundamentally means that one party will be trying to get something from the other, while the other will be trying to retain the thing that the first party wants. It’s about dominance and submission (don’t read that too literally, its unconscious, involuntary and nothing to do with S&M). The submissive party will be trying to attain dominance, while the dominant party will be trying to retain their dominant position. This is messy, because each individual will consider themselves the dominant one (consciously, at least) .

Anyway, keeping things simple, Each party has something to gain from, or lose to, the other in an unequal exchange . Each party will be trying to gain an advantage over the other, whether consciously or not, and that gain will, in an unequal exchange, be at the cost of the the other party. It’s the mistaken perception that this is a zero-sum game that lies at the heart of this. “In order for me to win, someone else must lose”

Because of  this mindset (unconsious remember, you won’t even be aware of it) that no exchange between parties who consider themselves unequal can ever be truly honest. Each will lie, dissemble, mislead, and obfuscate in order to get what they want, because that’s the social conditioning that holds sway over everything they do.

In any interaction it is worth remembering that each party does not have to lose anything in order for each party to come away with what they wanted. Only then can a truly honest exchange take place. Honesty and openness are fundamental to a harmonious existence, both with yourself and with the rest of the world. Dishonesty distorts how you perceive the world and how others perceive you.

Keith


No More

I don’t always get political, but when I do…

No More

No more bread and circuses.
No more fleeting joy.
No more lies to children.
No more fancy toys.
They’re seeking to distract you,
With their baubles tricks and shows .
While they gamble with your bank account,
crying “Please, just one more throw?”

No more politicians.
No more Eton boys.
No more offshore wanking.
No more evasive ploys.
It makes no difference who you are,
They’ll sell you just the same.
They’ll treat you like you’re property,
Well I won’t play that game.

No more taking orders.
No more washing hands.
No more lying to ourselves,
It is time to make a stand.
Time to change the paradigm,
Stop the stealing, silence lies.
Don’t let them use divide and rule,
The old order has to die.

No more feeding fat cats.
No more monopolies.
No more bought elections.
No more overlords.
I know we can’t be equal,
Because we’re not the same.
But we can respect our differences,
And unite as humans who are sane.

No more indentured service.
No more wage slavery.
No surrender, no retreat.
And no more apathy.
Stand up and don’t be counted,
We’re not numbers any more.
We are the ninety-nine percent,
And we’re taking back what’s ours.

It is time we took the world back,
And said “Enough! No more!”
Don’t let the cycle start again
We have been here before.
A revolution’s coming,
It cannot come to pass.
Round and round we go again,
A blast straight from the past.
The haves and have nots swap around,
Oppressor is oppressed .
So starts the roadshow up once more,
And we fail the final test.
We pass parcels on eternally,
and all will get a turn.
It never ends, there is no prize,
It goes on till we burn.
We need to break the cycle,
We need to stop the wheel.
We need to get back what we lost,
and it’s up to me and you.

Keith


Is That Too Much To Ask?

The second poem from my old Moleskine. Yes it is directed at a specific person and no I’m not going to say who. Hopefully if they read this they’ll know.  Don’t worry it isn’t all adolescent crap like this, we’ll get to the good stuff soon. I had already published this on Tumblr but though I’d better include it here for completeness. I think it’s telling that my prose tends to score around 50 on the  Flesch Reading Ease scale while my poetry tends to score much higher, surely it should be the other way around?

Is That Too Much to Ask?

Take my hand.
Is that too much to ask?
Hold tight now
Don’t get lost in the crush.
Don’t let go
I’m right here by your side.
This is me
In your hand I can’t hide.

Take these arms.
Is that too much to ask?
Wrap them round.
Clasp yourself in their grasp.
Safe and sound.
I’m no danger to you.
This is me.
There’s no mask to see through.

Take my mind.
Is that too much to ask?
Reason rules.
and through thought, prevents act.
Here you play.
In dreams of what could be.
This is me.
Strip the logic and you’ll see.

Take my soul
Is that too much to ask?
Broken thing
Scarred and hurt by the past.
Light me up
Lift my spirit, share your glow.
This is me.
Where the damage doesn’t show.

Take my heart.
Is that too much to ask?
Feel it beat.
Speeding up as you pass.
Guard it well.
It is scarred but it’s whole.
This is me.
This heart is yours to hold.

Am I asking too much?
Don’t you want what I offer?
I give it up gladly.
Empty out all my coffers.
It is all that I value.
All I have that’s of worth.
May not be a rich treasure.
But but they’ve been mine since birth.

Keith


Poem One – Untitled

The first complete poem from my previous Moleskine. Yes it rhymes, I can’t seem to help it. Sorry

Poem One – Untitled

Every moment.
A bridge is burned.
Every second.
A lesson learned.

No erase.
No rewind.
No re-takes.
So know your mind.

Step forward.
Don’t step back.
Forge onward.
Press the attack.

Regret nothing.
Use failure to win.
Act on it.
Apathy is sin.

Make a choice.
Choose it well.
Wrong or right.
Time will tell

Keith


Publish and Be Damned…

Well, I hope not but we’ll see.

Here’s the thing, I got my first Moleskine last year for going to Fanfest and taking notes. I finished it on the 8th of October and have already started another. It took me a while to get into a rhythm of writing in the first one so the first half is mostly full of doodles and miscellany for work. The rest though is full of snippets of ideas, fragments of poetry, complete poems, ramblings and other miscellaneous thinkage. This continues in the second book, which was started the day the first one finished. I’m going to publish these meanderings here, you can read them or not as you wish. I would seriously recommend doing so if you want to know me better.

I had been thinking about publishing selected pieces from volume one but was worried about who would read it and how they would react to some of it, but then I thought “how else is anyone going to know who you are?” I’m not the most open person when you meet me IRL, I keep my thoughts, feelings and internal neuroses to myself for the most part. Brooding on perceived problems, worrying about whether I’m the person I could be, trying to figure out if the woman I like feels the same way about me (I know, terribly adolescent. I’m nearly 35 FFS) and wondering what her reaction would be if I got up the courage to tell her. Fairly standard teenage diary stuff. There are some nuggets of beauty and truth in there (if I do say so myself) and it seems silly to keep them to myself.

So, instead of publishing carefully selected bits and pieces, I’m going to publish everything that I consider to be complete. Names will be changed (where they appear) to protect the guilty and innocent alike and I will stand by my writing no matter the consequences to me. An awful lot of what follows was written from the heart and with the best of intentions, please remember that in your assessment of it.

This is merely the first stage in a process by which I mean to sort myself out and start getting what I want out of life instead of blithely drifting along letting things happen around me. There’ll be more on this as various bits and pieces are published and hopefully you’ll be able to watch as I transform myself from the person I am into the person I want to be. It should also be remembered that where I was when I wrote something, may not necessarily be where I am now. The first  series (up to the end of the first notebook) aren’t dated but they appear in the order that they were written in, more or less.

Anything written in italics was added at the time of publication to this website and may comprise some insight into my current thinking/feeling on the subject at hand.

So, this is me. Read on and find out who I really am.

Keith


WordPress Theme Explorations

I think I might start posting more about my adventures in WordPress theming. I’ve been doing this for a while, and although I could consider myself anything but expert, I’d like to think I have a pretty good understanding of how to put a WordPress theme together.

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Dust 514 E-Sports: A Vision, Part 5

- Dust 514 E-Sports Concept | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 -
Dust Forum Thread (Beta Access Required)

So here we are, the last post in this series presenting a concept for the integration of E-Sports into the universe of Dust 514 and EVE online. In the first post I presented the general concept whilst in the second I listed some of the possible participants in the industry that could grow up around those E-Sports. I talked about the economics of the proposed industry in the third post and listed some of the things that CCP could do to make this vision a reality in part 4.
In this last post in the series
Let’s get on shall we?

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Blog Banter 38: A Decade of EVE

In his recent “That’s just the way it is” post on Jester’s Trek, blogger Ripard Teg posits that the established EVE player-base has come to accept many of EVE’s design idiosyncrasies, rarely questioning their purpose or benefit. Conversely, he also suggests that new players might not be so forgiving of these “quirks”. In an interview with Gamasutra, Senior Producer CCP Unifex describes EVE Online’s developers as “relatively hands-off janitors of the virtual world”, underlining that he has only four content developers but “a lot” of programmers and engineers.

Has a culture developed where CCP has started to take player effort for granted – expecting the “social engine” to fulfil tasks that might otherwise be CCP’s responsibility? Or should this culture be embraced as part of “emergent gameplay” with these quirks accepted as the catalyst for interaction?

This banter question seem to be a little schizophrenic. Let’s get it down on the couch and talking about it’s mother shall we? Continue reading »


Dust 514 E-Sports: A Vision, Part 4

- Dust 514 E-Sports Concept | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 -
Dust Forum Thread (Beta Access Required)

We’ve reached the fourth post in my series presenting a concept of how E-Sports could work part of the universe of Dust 514 and EVE Online. In the first post I presented a brief summary of the concept and an introduction to some of the ideas behind it and in part 2 I looked at the various roles that participant could play in such an E-Sports industry. In the third part I looked at the economics of such an industry, covering ISK flows and a possible avenue for a Real Money/AUR economy.

In this, Part 4, of this series I will present a wishlist of tools and tweaks to current systems that CCP could implement to improve the experience of players participating in the E-Sport economy.

Read on Macduff!
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Dust 514 E-Sports: A Vision, Part 3

- Dust 514 E-Sports Concept | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 -
Dust Forum Thread (Beta Access Required)

Hello again, and welcome to the third part of my 5 part series exploring the potential for E-Sports in New Eden, across EVE Online and Dust 514. In Part 1 I introduced the general concept, while in Part 2 I looked at the various participants and their roles. I apologise for the lack of a header image on this page, it’s quite tricky to find a picture that encapsulates E-Sports and economics.

In this part I’ll take a look at the economics and financial implications and opportunities that my vision might bring about. Now, I’m not an economist, and neither am I some sort of financial wizard. So there may be errors, feel free to correct them in the comments.

To the Dust-cave!

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