Dealing with stress

Life is stressful. This is a given whether you are Prince or pauper. There is good evidence from recent scientific papers to suggest that as a society we are finding it harder and harder to cope with the demands of modern life. The rates of mental health issues, self harm and self neglect are rising year on year, and there doesn't seem to be an easy solutions. In the UK the prevalent treatment for mental health conditions is medication to control the symptoms. I can understand that this is the start point in treatment since with most mental health conditions, the symptoms can be a block to effective treatment of the underlying condition. The problem comes in the lack of professional support once the symptoms are under control. This is in part a function of the lack of mental health professionals in the NHS and in part because we still do not take a holistic approach to health care.

When you look deeper into the whole question of mental health there is an underlying theme. It appears that for a great many people modern life is unsustainable as it is currently lived. The pressures that we place on each other to perform and achieve leads to a general feeling of dis-satisfaction, not just with other people but with oneself, and this leads initially to depression and subsequently to more serious mental health problems. We are finally beginning to understand the complexities of the brain, and it is likely that from this research we will begin to understand the far more complex question of mind, the function of the brain that defines who we are as individuals, and how we perceive reality.

So, what is the solution? That really depends on the root cause of the problem. Personally I feel that there is a good case to be made for the lack of a sense of community in the sense that we live in a heavily populated world but certainly in the UK rarely know who our immediate neighbours are. I think a strong case can be made for thinking locally and developing strong supportive communities such as those seem in the interwar period when extended families shared in the duties of care for each other and problems were shared between a small tight knit community. One potential downside of this is the fracturing of "Big picture" society into discrete social units that would potentially then compete for finite resources. I think it is worth a try though.....

The joys of social gaming

I joined Facebook recently, primarily to play games. I have always loved the idea of working collaboratively when playing games, and a friend of mine who knows my tastes suggested that I signed up and had a look at a game called War Metal. It is a multiplayer Facebook game that allows the player to work their way through levels of missions collecting rewards as they go. There is a particularly strong community around this game, and that is primarily why it was recommended to me. I noticed quite quickly that the developers are regularly on the game forums, and respond to players posts, and also that players who acted in the spirit of the game actually developed a sort of status within the community. It was interesting to see this interaction in what is, after all, just a game. It even extends to a couple of respected players being immortalised within the game after they passed on in real life. I like that.

There is an aspect within the game that highlights this particularly well. There are battles which are described as co-operative battles and generally require multiple players to co-ordinate their attacks against a much more powerful opponent. In one case this can be up to 1000 players. An etiquette has developed within the game, as I understand it, at the instigation of the players themselves whereby the initiator of the battle, called the host sets a cap, or limit to the amount of damage each player in the fight is allowed to do. This is not a hard cap in the sense that the host can physically limit the players, but is a soft cap more in the style of a gentlemans agreement. It is a question of respect for the host to keep to the cap, and players who break cap are considered valid targets for player versus player attacks. Some players even refer to this practice as farming and keep lists of consistent cap breakers for the purpose of having people to attack.

It is, by and large, a self policing system that seems to work. There are periodic spats and squabbles and some internecine warfare, but it is quite a fun little game and I am enjoying it at present. That is all that one can ask for really.

Celebrating the original blockbuster

It is one of the most overused words in the entire lexicon of hyperbole that is Hollywood, but 36 years ago today there was one cinema release that earned its epithet, and started the trend of ig summer movies. It was the film for which the word was coined and it ctapulted the director, one Steven Spielberg to international fame. it is still one of the highest grossing films of all time and tells the tale of one mans battle against the forces on nature personified and indeed demonised in the shape of a killer great white shark with a hunger for human flesh. The film of course was Jaws, and the epithet was coined for the queues of cinema goers who lined the blocks around movie theatres throughout that summer.

The story was written by Peter Benchley, perhaps the best author in the genre of nautical adventures being a highly experienced diver and quite a passable marine biologist. He had written the story of a rogue shark lured away from its usual hunting grounds into the shallow of American coastal waters, and kept there by the ready availability of prey items, namely Americans enjoying their summer. There has been a lot written about the unlikely circumstances of the story, but it is in fact based on real events 30 years earlier when there were a series of attacks on swimmers around the American coast and even in tidal creeks and rivers moving inland. The most likely candidate for these attacks was actually the more aggressive Bull shark, which can effect the transfer from salt to fresh water, and is the only shark so far known that can achieve this. However for the purpose of the story the more well known, and feared Great White was substituted.

This transference mirrors nicely the scene in the film when the response to the shark attacks is to demonise every species of shark in the area, with a nurse shark being hailed as the killer, which is very unlikely. It also highlights the prevalence of the American attitude found throughout the cold war era that threats should be met with overwhelming force rather than perhaps rational thought. In the end it comes down to the efforts of a small group of unlikely heroes to rescue the beaches of America from the lurking menace in the best traditions of the disaster movie and creature feature, but Jaws did something that was very new. It approached what had traditionally been B-movie fodder as a major feature with a strong story, high quality cinematography and a stunning soundtrack including that now iconic theme music based on the sharks heartbeat accelerating as it prepares to attack.

So heres to the summer blockbuster, those big ticket super films that appear each year and stimulate so much debate about quality and content, and more specifically to the film that started it all. Happy birthday Jaws!

The developemnt of a design concept

There are times in my professional life when I find myself challenged by client expectations. There are all sort of ways that this can happen, but the one that comes up most often is an expectation that I can create a company profile from scratch with no information whatsover. Now, don't get me wrong, I am a creative writer, I create original content, and I'm quite comfortable writing fiction, but given that my clients range from engineers to shopkeepers to estate agents to bankers, I'm pretty certain that if they thought about it they would probably not simply want me to make content up for their corporate website. I try to start my working relationship with a client by getting an understanding of who they are, and what is it that their business does. In the brief period that I have with a client there is no way that I am going to understand fully all of the technical aspects of their business, but I pride myself on having at least a basic idea about most of the business types that I interact with.

I have, in the past had clients who were very reticent about discussing any aspects of their personal styles and tastes and even in a couple of case about talking about their businesses. If I don't understand what is is you do as my client, how am I going to convey what you do to your customer through the content on your shiny new website? It is only through a collaborative process of communication and shared understanding that I can do my job to the standard that firstly I, and more importantly my clients require. I make no apologies for this, but I am  aperfectionist, and I set myself extraordinarily high standards in all of the content I create. It is a challenging process to create something unique for each client, and it is a challenge that I love, but a little co-operation can be very useful....

Developing an online persona

Here's a question that has been exercising my old grey matter for a little while now. Am I the same person online as I am offline? By this I mean do I have a different personality when I am communicating online as when I meet people face to face. Certainly there are inherent differences which I guess everyone to a greater or lesser extent encounters. There are the differences caused by the lack of visual cues to communication. Working online I have to find a way to express emotion through language rather than gesture or facial expression. I also find a change in that face to face I can be quite shy and reserved but online I find I can express myself more freely.

So, how am I different online? More verbose perhaps? (You, dear reader may have your own opinion on this!) More avant-garde? Less inhibited with relative strangers? I believe so, bacuse it can take me quite a long time to become comfortable with people in real life, and I am quite reticent about sharing personal information with people, prefering to keep things private. Online I am happy to chat about all sorts of things. I think for me, there is an anonymity to online interaction, even when I know the person I am interacting with in real life.

I'm not sure why this is, but it is something that I will be monitoring over the coming months to see if there are aspects of each personality that would be better combined into one over-arching, universally acceptable me...

The joy of reading lists

It was a while ago that I was at university, but I still remember the thrill I used to get at the start of each academic year when the reading lists came out. That guilty pleasure of seeing my peers scanning through the list bemoaning the quantity and length of the books whilst I sat there planning my library trips and organising my reading time. By the end of the first week of term I had generally already digested the first couple of books and was making copious notes and writing draft essays on the more obvious topics. I can't remember a time when I haven't loved reading. It doesn't matter what the subject matter, whether it is fact or fiction, the genre is irrelevant, I just love the feel of a book in my hands, and the process of reading and learning.

I still create reading lists and have a spreadsheet of the books I am looking forward to reading, but this integration of technology and passion is causing me a slight problem. My aquaintances who are aware of my little hobby and have seen my spreadsheet have been very helpfully showing my their iPhone apps, iPad readers, Kindles and e-books and the reading lists that these useful pieces of technology can provide. They have demonstrated the "paper screen" technology that makes these electronic books as easy on the eye as paper books. They have shown me how easy they are to use in bright sunlight. They have taken me through the ease with which books can be loaded onto them and how many free books there are, and yet, for me, they are just gimmicks. I can use them well enough, I'm happy enough with technology, I'm certainly no Luddite, but in the end it comes down to one thing - they are not books.

I can't explain it any better than that, I guess I am more of a traditionalist than I realised but there is something about the look, feel, smell of a book that just works for me. It was in thinking about this that I realised that this mindset informs quite a lot of what interests me. I think it is the sensory experience that is the key for me, and certainly when I am browsing on the internet it is often the sites that feel more organic, as though they have been designed with care and attention to stimulating as many senses as possible that work best for me. It is almost a form of synesthesia whereby a visual cue on the screen can trigger a smell or taste sensation in my mind. It can be quite a strange experience, but it is not one that I have experienced with an electronic book yet. Maybe one day.....

The ethics of magic

Within the world of magical practice there is a tremendous debate about the morals and ethics of magical practice. For me this debate starts with a personal decision on how magic is viewed. There are generally two schools of thought, people who believe that magic is essentially a placebo effect, and people who believe that magic is an external force that can be accessed to effect a change in the World. It should be noted that defining magic as a placebo effect is in no suggesting that magic is not real. There is clear evidence of the reality of the placebo effect in medical studies, but this belief system with regard to magic does have implications for me on the question of ethics.

If we think of magic as a placebo we are considering it as a set of techniques that are specifically designed to effect an internal change be that physically or psychologically, potentially leading to a change in the external world as a consequence. To use an example, one could decide to work magic to encourage wealth, the magical process effecting a psychological transformation making one more aware of money making opportunities. To compare this to magic as an external force, we would be considering the possibility that the same magical working to attract wealth would have a more direct impact on the external world taking money from someone else to increase the magic users personal wealth.

Clearly there are implications in each of these cases, but personally I see a far clearer ethical dilemma with the latter case whereby the magic user, unless they are extremely careful, appears to have limited control over where the wealth comes from. I believe that this may have been a thought that occured to the early pioneers of the revival in magical practice in the late 19th and early 20th Century, and can be seem expressed most clearly in the Wiccan Rede written by Gerald Gardiner and modified by Doreen Valiente, particularly in the final line "These words the Wiccan Rede fulfill, an' it harm none do what ye will". This also echoes the rather less ethical injunction favoured earlier by Crowley encapsulated by his epithet "Love is the law, love under will" and further "The overwhelming first principle of magical practice requires an understanding of ones true will and the strength to act upon it".

The idea of magic as an external force requires a practitioner to consider the ramifications of their actions in far closer detail than if magic is simply a placebo in my opinion, and in so doing forces that magical practitioner to hold themselves responsible for their actions if they are to take any morally acceptable position. Therefor I would argue that it is intrinsic to the pagan mindset that magic, if it is considered at all within Paganism, is considered to be an external force which may be tapped and utilised as any other tool might, and accorded a similar level of respect. It is only be thinking in this way that the necessary mental discipline will be achieved.