Good videos. I loled at the black dude that tried to do a back flip. So funny when he tries to use the nunchucks whilst clearly suffering concussion.
I'm a bit happier today. Still hard at work though, but.. working from home as I have no commitments today.
I like all your ways of thinking, you all have said some very interesting points. Its nice to know were all in this together. As for the consumerist thing pointed out earlier. I try to survive that by stepping out the frame and looking with interest how people have become completely entranced by the whole process of consumerism to the point they are zombies or puppets. I think its sad. However, I do like my 50" TV and large three screen computer desk so to a point I've been sold on it too. However, I try to buy second hand if possible. I buy really good second hand stuff, as I believe it's better than average new stuff (and its cheaper and more environmentally friendly).
Try Tai Chi it is supposed to be a great relaxer !
Are you Dr Bruce Banner by any chance;-)
Nah! If I could turn into an immeasurably strong green monster that never seems to have to answer for anything he "Smashes" I'd probably be a lot less angry tbh :D
Damn, for some reason YouTube videos still don't show up for me on WOS anymore ... but from the last couple of posts I know 100% it can only be that classic "I hope you like pain!" vid :D
I'd been married, acquired a couple of kids, was living the dream (or it seemed that way - I'd ended up doing pretty much what I'd expected from my life).
Then it all fell apart.
I think at that point I realised that much of this stuff is a facade, that I didn't have to follow that route, that I could be myself and enjoy the things I do and really not worry too much about anyone else but those close to me.
I pretty much meander through my life now, I'm not chasing some stressful career, though I'm doing alright, I remarried and that's been working for near 20 years, my new kids eventually accepted me. On the whole, things are fairly chilled and easy going. I don't expect to make much impact in the world (but I did work at the Jobcentre for near 20 years so I've done my bit for society), I don't expect many will remember me when I'm gone. I'm fine with that, I won't know any different then anyway. I'm content not to have messed up too many people along the way, the universe is a big place so its pretty hard to make much difference in it really.
When they say things like " You need " that instantly implies that it is YOUR fault and not a workload or training problem. Implying that everyone but you is managing ok, get all of the others to speak up as well and if there is no change, speak to the head honcho of the company, explaining the problems and suggesting how you would do things BETTER if you were the manager. You never know, I have seen it work for a former workmate. I have also seen 3 people get a job promotion by stealing ideas which I have talked to them casually about and were wholly my ideas. Think up some solutions, formulate them, then submit them to the highest person in the company, if you can make the company better, they WILL listen.
I did think up a couple of ways to make our work a bit easier, when i said my idea was not to answer any more calls funnily enough they said no!:grin:
Nah! If I could turn into an immeasurably strong green monster that never seems to have to answer for anything he "Smashes" I'd probably be a lot less angry tbh :D
Has he ever smashed a soup bowl ?;)
Although his clothes do fall off a lot !
Every time I read that the oldest person in the world has died, I have to do a quick check to see it isn't ME..........
Funny enough I had a manager suggest that once. He did indeed get a administrator to receive all the developers calls and funneled any 'extra curricular' work oportinities to his 'clueless' external friend. When his friend could not come up with the goods burning them both and a few clients to boot, our phones started ringing again.
It's funny though, as some managers have a way to do that and somehow remain unscathed, still in their jobs or possibly even promoted.
when I was 10 I was convinced that I was going to be a spaceship pilot. cos when I was going to turn 22 it would be the year 2000 ie futuristic like star wars or 2001.
You wouldnt need all that astronaut training because of artificial gravity making it like flying a plane in difficulty :)
when I was 10 I was convinced that I was going to be a spaceship pilot. cos when I was going to turn 22 it would be the year 2000 ie futuristic like star wars or 2001.
You wouldnt need all that astronaut training because of artificial gravity making it like flying a plane in difficulty :)
when I was 10 I was convinced that I was going to be a spaceship pilot. cos when I was going to turn 22 it would be the year 2000 ie futuristic like star wars.
Yep. When you're young you think that life will end up wonderful for you somehow, and that the future will have untold delights in store for you. Then you wake up one morning for your ****y, deadend, badly paid job, and you're approaching fifty, and not only have you never changed the world, or even saved it from aliens/terrorists/other assorted evils, but that island you were going to own, the one full of naked women, will never be yours either.
And as for future technology, there is none. Well, aside from chav/layabout stuff like mobile phones, 50" LCD televisions with fifty input sockets, more power than Jodral Bank, and all sorts of impression functions that you never use (but the ****ing think can't display old consoles like the SNES or N64 properly :x:x:x:x).
But there's no jet-packs, no holidays on the Moon, no android women, and when you buy a pair of glasses, they still don't have the option of being used as an LCD display too - we should be able to use spectacles as monitors, just plug the glasses into a USB socket and voila!, a crystal clear display in 2D (two lenses, one for each eye). They did demo that technology a few years back, and I've see nothing of it since.
By now computers should be able to converse in full English, intelligently question you to ascertain exactly what you want done, and then do it intelligently and quickly. Look at what science fiction promised us, with computers as intelligent and eloquent as the humans who used the computers.
Unfortunately, computer technology has gone a different way since the mid 1990s, and artificial intelligence has advanced about ten minutes in those twenty years. And most advances to computer technology in the real world seem only to happen because of porn, otherwise computers just stagnate.
Imagine if Captain Kirk gets attacked by some nasty ol' Klingons, and so he says "Computer, raise the shields and prepare the nuclear torpedoes", and the computer screen goes blue, with a meaningless error message.
"What the...", gasps Kirk in confusion, and Mr Spock says "Sorry captain, but we, er, un-installed Star Fleet OS, and replaced it with Windows. It's crap of course, but it does allow you to view porn".
Imagine if Captain Kirk gets attacked by some nasty ol' Klingons, and so he says "Computer, raise the shields and prepare the nuclear torpedoes", and the computer screen goes blue, with a meaningless error message.
Interesting system isn't it. Get born, encouraged / brain washed to consume, work to pay bills, die. We seem to be the only species who actually pay to live on the planet. You really need to step out of the system to see how corrupt and vacuous the system is. You don't need to become a hippy and live up a tree, it's all about attitude. Once Apple have failed to convince you that you really need an iPhone 6 to make your life better you're halfway there to escaping to a better place.
I live simply and enjoy the simple things in life. I never pay bills on time, I reuse and recycle where I can, I grow whatever food I can. Little things really, and I never did buy that iPhone.
Hear hear! It's "keeping up with the Joneses" that causes all this hassle in the first place. Finding out you don't actually need 99% of the **** that people try to bombard you with day in day out is very liberating.
We grow our own fruit and veg, make our own wine and if I find I "need" anything (clothes, for example, or a CD) I just wander round the 10 charity shops in town until I either find it or I find I don't need it anymore. Other than the smartphone I got a few days ago (?35 and out of necessity, as I'd lost the old one) I haven't bought anything new for ages. I'm an advertising agency's worst nightmare :D
Still going through a midlife crisis, but I can't help that - I'm 40 this year and my son has just turned nine. NINE! Jesus.
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
In a vast repertoire of quotable stuff, that's still my favourite ever Douglas Adams quote.
Although "Oh freddled gruntbuggly, thy micturations are to me, as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee..." has to be a contender :D
Yep. When you're young you think that life will end up wonderful for you somehow, and that the future will have untold delights in store for you. Then you wake up one morning for your ****y, deadend, badly paid job, and you're approaching fifty, and not only have you never changed the world, or even saved it from aliens/terrorists/other assorted evils, but that island you were going to own, the one full of naked women, will never be yours either.
And as for future technology, there is none. Well, aside from chav/layabout stuff like mobile phones, 50" LCD televisions with fifty input sockets, more power than Jodral Bank, and all sorts of impression functions that you never use (but the ****ing think can't display old consoles like the SNES or N64 properly :x:x:x:x).
But there's no jet-packs, no holidays on the Moon, no android women, and when you buy a pair of glasses, they still don't have the option of being used as an LCD display too - we should be able to use spectacles as monitors, just plug the glasses into a USB socket and voila!, a crystal clear display in 2D (two lenses, one for each eye). They did demo that technology a few years back, and I've see nothing of it since.
By now computers should be able to converse in full English, intelligently question you to ascertain exactly what you want done, and then do it intelligently and quickly. Look at what science fiction promised us, with computers as intelligent and eloquent as the humans who used the computers.
Unfortunately, computer technology has gone a different way since the mid 1990s, and artificial intelligence has advanced about ten minutes in those twenty years. And most advances to computer technology in the real world seem only to happen because of porn, otherwise computers just stagnate.
Imagine if Captain Kirk gets attacked by some nasty ol' Klingons, and so he says "Computer, raise the shields and prepare the nuclear torpedoes", and the computer screen goes blue, with a meaningless error message.
"What the...", gasps Kirk in confusion, and Mr Spock says "Sorry captain, but we, er, un-installed Star Fleet OS, and replaced it with Windows. It's crap of course, but it does allow you to view porn".
I wonder what would happen if kids were not shown this glamour stuff on TV and went to work with their dads a few times a year :lol:
Grandad worked down pit, dad worked down pit and I ruddy work down pit.
It's funny what we need and dont need. In the UK I had a sim only contract on Orange, as my old work used to issue phones like sweets. I only ever paid cash for a phone and was paying like $14 a month for 250 minutes and texts with no data plan (because I was always on WIFI, apart from when I didn;t need to be i.e. driving or walking from A to B). I lever used to use it all either.
I come over here to the US, and it seems you cant own a nice smartphone without paying over $100 dollars for a bells and whistles account. So I decided **** it thats too much and got some cheap pay as you go phones for me and wife which cost $35 a month to run, i.e less than what one contract phone would have cost.
My MIL was very much of the opinion I was not 'providing' for my wife and that a pay as you go device was some kind of primitive service. She ended up paying for a contract for my wife which costs $65 a month and in the process making me look like a skin flint. Its on the same service provider, as we were on (The only one we can receive), and the only extra my wife gets is mobile data which she never uses. So, its the same service but your paying double for piece of mind?!?
So, when you talk about people being conditioned into unnecessary purchases, the whole 'piece of mind' just' thing often makes sigh and shake my head. And...., don't get me started on the US health care... my wife is pregnant and already the vultures are circling around my bank account playing the piece of mind trick on my wife.
Can't believe how much things have changed since I was a kid.
I was talking to my Dad (who's 72) about it, and he says he can barely recognize anything from when he was young. He says he wouldn't like to be young again now and have to grow up in this era.
I have to say, I'm inclined to agree with him.
I was chatting with my co-workers about our kids, and it feels like they all live in a bubble these days. My lad is 9, and when I was his age I was always playing out with my mates all around the neighborhood or we were over at each others' houses.
He has mates at school and outside of school at his clubs and things, but he doesn't want anything to do with them outside of those environments. My co-workers pretty much said the same thing. Their kids come home, they do their homework and veg out with their electronics. If they do talk to their friends, it's over the Xbox or something.
Can't believe how much things have changed since I was a kid.
I was talking to my Dad (who's 72) about it, and he says he can barely recognize anything from when he was young. He says he wouldn't like to be young again now and have to grow up in this era.
I have to say, I'm inclined to agree with him.
I was chatting with my co-workers about our kids, and it feels like they all live in a bubble these days. My lad is 9, and when I was his age I was always playing out with my mates all around the neighborhood or we were over at each others' houses.
He has mates at school and outside of school at his clubs and things, but he doesn't want anything to do with them outside of those environments. My co-workers pretty much said the same thing. Their kids come home, they do their homework and veg out with their electronics. If they do talk to their friends, it's over the Xbox or something.
Feels like we're going downhill as a species.
What your family needs is a hippie commune and no electric. :p
I must say that's one thing my wife has got right with our kid, his toys are not electronic and at home he's quite happy with Lego bricks, Playmobil, Hot Wheels cars, a piano, or drawing. However, he's only 4 all that could change when he sees what others have.
I will introduce him to the Spectrum soon. I think he'll be ready for it. My wife wont though. :\
I'd typed in a longish reply - that i hoped was helpful, and the site didn't respond as it had logged me out. But fortunately I had copied it to the clipboard first (I thought) so I clicked paste and the above appeared. Truthfully though I had copied the image first and thought it could be used to address the topic of information overload perhaps in some way.
I could try and re-type my comment from memory if anyone wants me too, it was genuinely intended to be helpful.
My MIL was very much of the opinion I was not 'providing' for my wife and that a pay as you go device was some kind of primitive service.
If my mother-in-law ever tried to pull that kind of emotional blackmail trick on me (and she wouldn't, because she's not like that and wouldn't know the difference between a contract phone and a PAYG anyway) I would tell her in not so many words to **** off and mind her own business!
I was chatting with my co-workers about our kids, and it feels like they all live in a bubble these days. My lad is 9, and when I was his age I was always playing out with my mates all around the neighborhood or we were over at each others' houses.
He has mates at school and outside of school at his clubs and things, but he doesn't want anything to do with them outside of those environments. My co-workers pretty much said the same thing. Their kids come home, they do their homework and veg out with their electronics. If they do talk to their friends, it's over the Xbox or something.
My son is 9 now and we're holding out on giving him any sort of tablet or phone even though he's got enough in savings to afford one - he already spends enough time on the laptop as it is. His friend came round the other day for a sleepover and every five minutes he was fiddling about with his phone, eventually we had to take it off him at the dinner table - he's 8!
We were talking about this last night and said we will let him have a tablet or phone in a year's time but only if we can get him into something else - a sport or musical instrument - anything to distract him from Minecraft and bloody cat videos!
But we're lucky I guess, we live in a village, my son and daughter both have best friends who live opposite and they're round each other's houses or outside on their bikes and scooters all the time in the summer... we're almost certainly the exception though.
Oh, don't worry about that - natural selection will sort that out when the oil runs out and we're all fighting over the last pack of Cheesy Dibbles :D
Don't worry about oil running out. Scientists have been panicking about it for years, but I thought about it and have worked out the solution. When the oil runs out, we just buy some more. They sell it at garages.
Next I'm going to think up a solution to global warming. As soon as I work out how to get my head out of these railings. ;)
Does anyone else find that in the modern world we live information overload is an overwhelming problem? I feel this right now. It's like I have so much to think about both at work, at home, and just in general managing day to day life such as bills, commitments, tax, medical bills and keeping everyone close to you happy.
I feel this right now and to be honest, it feels a bit much.
Sometimes I think I should just pack it all in and go and live in a hippie commune.
Yes, I feel this sometimes but about the internet, and have felt like this for at least a couple of years now, but my reasons, experiences with information are quite different from yours no doubt.
[FONT="]Because one of things I struggle with occasionaly is perplexity (I am starting to master it a bit better now that I am in my forties) the internet has been both a blessing and curse for me at times.
But really the other day I began to hope some of it would just go away - vanish, disappear, get binned, deleted etc, with or without a little bit of notice (I really can't see any other solution than [FONT="]not keeping it all[/FONT]) .... I mean there is so much fluff. I mean the human race is currently archiving shed loads of fluff (at best)[FONT="] - no I don't me[FONT="]an retro stuff, but the [FONT="]mostly[/FONT] i[FONT="]nane babble on the interne[FONT="]t.[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]
I see things the way others don't sometimes.
For instance is the Internet itself not the most stupendous use and development of an out of date and [FONT="]mostly useless[/FONT] piece of technology in history? If [FONT="]s[/FONT]o perhaps "there is nothing new under the sun" after all?[/FONT]
And no harm in writing stuff and developing, or following some threads on an old computer if and for as long as that is of interest to you, anymore than one would need to give a reason for collecting sea shells.:-)
I sometimes go off on a rant about the pointlessness of Facebook or Twitter, but I rarely convince people. I felt exasperated about this for it seems people are prepared to put up with small benefits even though there seems a kind of false-logic to the benefits as there would be in thinking "Hey I won a competition!, why didn't I do competitions before this."
At least minecraft which I know next to nothing about seems is a bit about creativity, and there is real lego minecraft now, but what seem of more learning value to me are the Lego Architecture sets.
But really what is the facination with technology? the government has been pushing info-tech at least since the 80s, not just recently, but then others pushed the paradigm shift before the government - the gov. never really initiates these changes, they just tend to get behind them - and im not anywhere near as fascinated now as I used to be, at least with most of the new hi tech stuff - I still like giving the older stuff a glance.
But the need was always to manage information, so the internet does help with that to some extent while we go on producing more of it perhaps. So thinking this through as I go, info-tech is not a bad thing, nor the internet itself, but really people have a choice, read something, or not - post something or not. But sometimes it seems to become perpetuating in a pointless way, which wasn't so widespread before the internet era. So the tech is there and the goal is to manage the needful information to avoid overload, and not waste time on stuff we don't need to bother with.
There are some things that we really need info on and are important, and no way to make everyone happy, and in any case growing up is about not depending always on others to make us happy. So if you can't make people close to you happy because they are depending too much on you for that then you are not doing them any harm.
If everyone just left the doors open on their fridges and freezers, this global warming thing would sort itself out in no time :D
lol
Actually global warming seems to be a load of rubbish.
The polar glaciers are growing, there was the incident a year or two ago where a research ship got caught in the ice, then a rescue ship was sent, which got caught in the ice, then another which rescued them I think.
the overall weather in the winter was cold more days last year than most.
Actually global warming seems to be a load of rubbish.
The polar glaciers are growing, there was the incident a year or two ago where a research ship got caught in the ice, then a rescue ship was sent, which got caught in the ice, then another which rescued them I think.
the overall weather in the winter was cold more days last year than most.
Global warming may be a load of rubbish IMO. However climate change is worth understanding and studying if only to know what is going on, and get a balanced picture. Counter bad science with good science.
but the availability of videos (TV programs, films, fan made or funny Youtube videos, etc) has somehow cheapened things so that it's more difficult to appreciate a good film/TV program/video.
Why isn't it easier to then appreciate good quality stuff :-) I mean that seems to be equally likely to be the result - logically speaking.
Comments
Thanks Vampyre! That surely cheered me up! :D ROFL
Try Tai Chi it is supposed to be a great relaxer !
Are you Dr Bruce Banner by any chance;-)
I'm a bit happier today. Still hard at work though, but.. working from home as I have no commitments today.
I like all your ways of thinking, you all have said some very interesting points. Its nice to know were all in this together. As for the consumerist thing pointed out earlier. I try to survive that by stepping out the frame and looking with interest how people have become completely entranced by the whole process of consumerism to the point they are zombies or puppets. I think its sad. However, I do like my 50" TV and large three screen computer desk so to a point I've been sold on it too. However, I try to buy second hand if possible. I buy really good second hand stuff, as I believe it's better than average new stuff (and its cheaper and more environmentally friendly).
Yeah this sh*t is timeless :lol:
I NEVER LOSE! :D
Nah! If I could turn into an immeasurably strong green monster that never seems to have to answer for anything he "Smashes" I'd probably be a lot less angry tbh :D
I'd been married, acquired a couple of kids, was living the dream (or it seemed that way - I'd ended up doing pretty much what I'd expected from my life).
Then it all fell apart.
I think at that point I realised that much of this stuff is a facade, that I didn't have to follow that route, that I could be myself and enjoy the things I do and really not worry too much about anyone else but those close to me.
I pretty much meander through my life now, I'm not chasing some stressful career, though I'm doing alright, I remarried and that's been working for near 20 years, my new kids eventually accepted me. On the whole, things are fairly chilled and easy going. I don't expect to make much impact in the world (but I did work at the Jobcentre for near 20 years so I've done my bit for society), I don't expect many will remember me when I'm gone. I'm fine with that, I won't know any different then anyway. I'm content not to have messed up too many people along the way, the universe is a big place so its pretty hard to make much difference in it really.
I did think up a couple of ways to make our work a bit easier, when i said my idea was not to answer any more calls funnily enough they said no!:grin:
Has he ever smashed a soup bowl ?;)
Although his clothes do fall off a lot !
Perhaps not one to take to Management:smile:
Funny enough I had a manager suggest that once. He did indeed get a administrator to receive all the developers calls and funneled any 'extra curricular' work oportinities to his 'clueless' external friend. When his friend could not come up with the goods burning them both and a few clients to boot, our phones started ringing again.
It's funny though, as some managers have a way to do that and somehow remain unscathed, still in their jobs or possibly even promoted.
You wouldnt need all that astronaut training because of artificial gravity making it like flying a plane in difficulty :)
Did you become a Pilot? If not you still can.
Yep. When you're young you think that life will end up wonderful for you somehow, and that the future will have untold delights in store for you. Then you wake up one morning for your ****y, deadend, badly paid job, and you're approaching fifty, and not only have you never changed the world, or even saved it from aliens/terrorists/other assorted evils, but that island you were going to own, the one full of naked women, will never be yours either.
And as for future technology, there is none. Well, aside from chav/layabout stuff like mobile phones, 50" LCD televisions with fifty input sockets, more power than Jodral Bank, and all sorts of impression functions that you never use (but the ****ing think can't display old consoles like the SNES or N64 properly :x:x:x:x).
But there's no jet-packs, no holidays on the Moon, no android women, and when you buy a pair of glasses, they still don't have the option of being used as an LCD display too - we should be able to use spectacles as monitors, just plug the glasses into a USB socket and voila!, a crystal clear display in 2D (two lenses, one for each eye). They did demo that technology a few years back, and I've see nothing of it since.
By now computers should be able to converse in full English, intelligently question you to ascertain exactly what you want done, and then do it intelligently and quickly. Look at what science fiction promised us, with computers as intelligent and eloquent as the humans who used the computers.
Unfortunately, computer technology has gone a different way since the mid 1990s, and artificial intelligence has advanced about ten minutes in those twenty years. And most advances to computer technology in the real world seem only to happen because of porn, otherwise computers just stagnate.
Imagine if Captain Kirk gets attacked by some nasty ol' Klingons, and so he says "Computer, raise the shields and prepare the nuclear torpedoes", and the computer screen goes blue, with a meaningless error message.
"What the...", gasps Kirk in confusion, and Mr Spock says "Sorry captain, but we, er, un-installed Star Fleet OS, and replaced it with Windows. It's crap of course, but it does allow you to view porn".
Reminds me of this. :smile:
That's great!
Hear hear! It's "keeping up with the Joneses" that causes all this hassle in the first place. Finding out you don't actually need 99% of the **** that people try to bombard you with day in day out is very liberating.
We grow our own fruit and veg, make our own wine and if I find I "need" anything (clothes, for example, or a CD) I just wander round the 10 charity shops in town until I either find it or I find I don't need it anymore. Other than the smartphone I got a few days ago (?35 and out of necessity, as I'd lost the old one) I haven't bought anything new for ages. I'm an advertising agency's worst nightmare :D
Still going through a midlife crisis, but I can't help that - I'm 40 this year and my son has just turned nine. NINE! Jesus.
In a vast repertoire of quotable stuff, that's still my favourite ever Douglas Adams quote.
Although "Oh freddled gruntbuggly, thy micturations are to me, as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee..." has to be a contender :D
I wonder what would happen if kids were not shown this glamour stuff on TV and went to work with their dads a few times a year :lol:
Grandad worked down pit, dad worked down pit and I ruddy work down pit.
Im not really a pilot person,
I come over here to the US, and it seems you cant own a nice smartphone without paying over $100 dollars for a bells and whistles account. So I decided **** it thats too much and got some cheap pay as you go phones for me and wife which cost $35 a month to run, i.e less than what one contract phone would have cost.
My MIL was very much of the opinion I was not 'providing' for my wife and that a pay as you go device was some kind of primitive service. She ended up paying for a contract for my wife which costs $65 a month and in the process making me look like a skin flint. Its on the same service provider, as we were on (The only one we can receive), and the only extra my wife gets is mobile data which she never uses. So, its the same service but your paying double for piece of mind?!?
So, when you talk about people being conditioned into unnecessary purchases, the whole 'piece of mind' just' thing often makes sigh and shake my head. And...., don't get me started on the US health care... my wife is pregnant and already the vultures are circling around my bank account playing the piece of mind trick on my wife.
I was talking to my Dad (who's 72) about it, and he says he can barely recognize anything from when he was young. He says he wouldn't like to be young again now and have to grow up in this era.
I have to say, I'm inclined to agree with him.
I was chatting with my co-workers about our kids, and it feels like they all live in a bubble these days. My lad is 9, and when I was his age I was always playing out with my mates all around the neighborhood or we were over at each others' houses.
He has mates at school and outside of school at his clubs and things, but he doesn't want anything to do with them outside of those environments. My co-workers pretty much said the same thing. Their kids come home, they do their homework and veg out with their electronics. If they do talk to their friends, it's over the Xbox or something.
Feels like we're going downhill as a species.
What your family needs is a hippie commune and no electric. :p
I must say that's one thing my wife has got right with our kid, his toys are not electronic and at home he's quite happy with Lego bricks, Playmobil, Hot Wheels cars, a piano, or drawing. However, he's only 4 all that could change when he sees what others have.
I will introduce him to the Spectrum soon. I think he'll be ready for it. My wife wont though. :\
I'd typed in a longish reply - that i hoped was helpful, and the site didn't respond as it had logged me out. But fortunately I had copied it to the clipboard first (I thought) so I clicked paste and the above appeared. Truthfully though I had copied the image first and thought it could be used to address the topic of information overload perhaps in some way.
I could try and re-type my comment from memory if anyone wants me too, it was genuinely intended to be helpful.
If my mother-in-law ever tried to pull that kind of emotional blackmail trick on me (and she wouldn't, because she's not like that and wouldn't know the difference between a contract phone and a PAYG anyway) I would tell her in not so many words to **** off and mind her own business!
My son is 9 now and we're holding out on giving him any sort of tablet or phone even though he's got enough in savings to afford one - he already spends enough time on the laptop as it is. His friend came round the other day for a sleepover and every five minutes he was fiddling about with his phone, eventually we had to take it off him at the dinner table - he's 8!
We were talking about this last night and said we will let him have a tablet or phone in a year's time but only if we can get him into something else - a sport or musical instrument - anything to distract him from Minecraft and bloody cat videos!
But we're lucky I guess, we live in a village, my son and daughter both have best friends who live opposite and they're round each other's houses or outside on their bikes and scooters all the time in the summer... we're almost certainly the exception though.
Oh, don't worry about that - natural selection will sort that out when the oil runs out and we're all fighting over the last pack of Cheesy Dibbles :D
Don't worry about oil running out. Scientists have been panicking about it for years, but I thought about it and have worked out the solution. When the oil runs out, we just buy some more. They sell it at garages.
Next I'm going to think up a solution to global warming. As soon as I work out how to get my head out of these railings. ;)
[FONT="]Because one of things I struggle with occasionaly is perplexity (I am starting to master it a bit better now that I am in my forties) the internet has been both a blessing and curse for me at times.
But really the other day I began to hope some of it would just go away - vanish, disappear, get binned, deleted etc, with or without a little bit of notice (I really can't see any other solution than [FONT="]not keeping it all[/FONT]) .... I mean there is so much fluff. I mean the human race is currently archiving shed loads of fluff (at best)[FONT="] - no I don't me[FONT="]an retro stuff, but the [FONT="]mostly[/FONT] i[FONT="]nane babble on the interne[FONT="]t.[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]
I see things the way others don't sometimes.
For instance is the Internet itself not the most stupendous use and development of an out of date and [FONT="]mostly useless[/FONT] piece of technology in history? If [FONT="]s[/FONT]o perhaps "there is nothing new under the sun" after all?[/FONT]
And no harm in writing stuff and developing, or following some threads on an old computer if and for as long as that is of interest to you, anymore than one would need to give a reason for collecting sea shells. :-)
I sometimes go off on a rant about the pointlessness of Facebook or Twitter, but I rarely convince people. I felt exasperated about this for it seems people are prepared to put up with small benefits even though there seems a kind of false-logic to the benefits as there would be in thinking "Hey I won a competition!, why didn't I do competitions before this."
At least minecraft which I know next to nothing about seems is a bit about creativity, and there is real lego minecraft now, but what seem of more learning value to me are the Lego Architecture sets.
But really what is the facination with technology? the government has been pushing info-tech at least since the 80s, not just recently, but then others pushed the paradigm shift before the government - the gov. never really initiates these changes, they just tend to get behind them - and im not anywhere near as fascinated now as I used to be, at least with most of the new hi tech stuff - I still like giving the older stuff a glance.
But the need was always to manage information, so the internet does help with that to some extent while we go on producing more of it perhaps. So thinking this through as I go, info-tech is not a bad thing, nor the internet itself, but really people have a choice, read something, or not - post something or not. But sometimes it seems to become perpetuating in a pointless way, which wasn't so widespread before the internet era. So the tech is there and the goal is to manage the needful information to avoid overload, and not waste time on stuff we don't need to bother with.
There are some things that we really need info on and are important, and no way to make everyone happy, and in any case growing up is about not depending always on others to make us happy. So if you can't make people close to you happy because they are depending too much on you for that then you are not doing them any harm.
[FONT="]
[/FONT]
lol
Actually global warming seems to be a load of rubbish.
The polar glaciers are growing, there was the incident a year or two ago where a research ship got caught in the ice, then a rescue ship was sent, which got caught in the ice, then another which rescued them I think.
the overall weather in the winter was cold more days last year than most.
Why isn't it easier to then appreciate good quality stuff :-) I mean that seems to be equally likely to be the result - logically speaking.