Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Reflections on Making the Right Choices

I am sick of this house.

I am sick of wak­ing up to filth; to dirty floors, the same piles of crap day after day because nobody can be fucked to lift a fin­ger to clean them up.

I am sick of my prop­erty being abused under the assump­tion that since we live together it is theirs to do with as they please.

I am sick of being treated like a piece of shit every time I try to get someone else to do some­thing that might be of col­lect­ive bene­fit to the household.

I am sick of being made to clean up after every­one else if I want to live in what might be described as clean and tidy sur­round­ings, and then receiv­ing no thanks for doing so.

I am sick of being forced to chase people for their share of bills, since the concept of prompt repay­ment is appar­ently some sort of fantasy.

I am sick of look­ing after every single admin­is­trat­ive facet of the house without a word of thanks because nobody else is pre­pared to take any respons­ib­il­ity whatsoever.

I am sick of hav­ing the piss taken behind my back every time I ask some­thing of my house­mates that might require look­ing bey­ond the ends of their noses at issues out­side of their imme­di­ate per­sonal atmosphere.

I am sick of being shown no respect by any­one in this house, who claim that they are adults cap­able of hand­ling their own lives without being told what to do, yet are utterly unable to main­tain any kind of decent liv­ing stand­ard without my con­tinual jan­itor act.

I am sick of liv­ing with people who have never had to take any respons­ib­il­ity for the care of their sur­round­ings, and so feel no need to start doing so now.

I am sick of liv­ing with people who through their own neg­li­gence, incon­sid­er­a­tion and lazi­ness cre­ate large amounts of filth and then have the gall to sug­gest our col­lect­ively pay­ing someone to come in and clean it up.

I am sick of liv­ing with people who can­not or will not real­ise everything I have done this year to help them and the house­hold, or look upon it as some sort of duty of care that mer­its no thanks or sup­port or recognition.

I am sick of being looked at like an idiot when I try to con­vey an idea of con­sid­er­a­tion for oth­ers to my house­mates, such as when they insist on scream­ing at the tops of their lungs while play­ing video games at 11pm on a Sunday in the liv­ing room of our ter­raced house.

I am sick of being told that I have a need to con­trol people when I try to get people to do some­thing to help.

I am sick of wor­ry­ing about hav­ing to fight for my prop­erty at the end of term as my house­mates con­veni­ently for­get what was bought and what was brought by me at the begin­ning of the year.

I am sick of the inev­it­ab­il­ity that I will have to work my ass off to clean the house single-handedly at the end of term in order to secure the return of my secur­ity deposit, as my house­mates who spent most of the year moan­ing about how they would surely be swindled out of theirs by the land­lord con­veni­ently find other things to busy them­selves with (or just leave).

I am sick of being brought to the end of my tether by people who simply do not give a shit about any­one or any­thing besides themselves.

Bedraggled Cat

The snow has given way to rain, and the town looks like an illus­tra­tion from a depres­sion pamph­let. I went for a walk last night and ended up in a 2-hour cir­cuit around the out­skirts of town, which suc­ceeded in clear­ing my head. For a few hours at least. I have been unsuc­cess­ful in estab­lish­ing how fast walk­ing pace is, but I’d ima­gine I put a few miles under my heels — so good exer­cise in any case.

My sub­con­scious battle of pro­cras­tin­a­tion against my Marketing essay cul­min­ated in my clean­ing of the entire house this morn­ing in pre­par­a­tion for the (brief) arrival of my folks later today, which was a bit­ter­sweet pro­cess if there ever was one. The house is now what might be described as clean (by those who don’t look too closely), but I’d bet my bol­locks to a barn dance (to use the ver­nacu­lar) that it won’t stay so for more than a day or two. Though Josh is going back to Geneva for Reading Week, so hope springs eternal. Nor, since a clean house is appar­ently not an expect­a­tion of my house­mates, am I likely to be acknow­ledged for doing so (as if the place magic­ally became clean again) — “well I didn’t ask you to do it” etc. Sigh.

Time to do some essay-writing. See? Yet again I find some­thing to do besides that. Hoho.

Rattling the Cage

The weather has taken a turn for the worse, in reflec­tion of my sour­ing mood. Oh, what happened to the care­free optim­ism of yes­teryear? Every day I find myself think­ing of the future, and every time I think of the future I am filled with fear and anger.

So many par­al­lels to school. Now as then, our sta­bil­ity is to be uprooted. I find myself think­ing of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and as the song describes its answer, I know mine is also “yes.” Right now, the only stable circle is what’s left of those I knew from school — and those rela­tion­ships seem so much truer than these. We have been here two months and already talk is of next year and liv­ing plans — and the fore­cast is for more unrest. Last year’s decisions made anew; another search for solid­ar­ity among dwind­ling numbers.

I have lost the plot here. What I am doing is becom­ing less and less rel­ev­ant — I have stopped exist­ing from day to day, com­pletely lost sight of the object­ive here because the object­ive has lost all mean­ing, because with every day my loath­ing of the stuffed-shirt busi­ness world grows, and all I am doing here is hard time on a degree that will put me into just that, unless I can come up with a solid altern­at­ive plan. That is why I fear the future, becase I can’t yet see a valid, self-sustaining path that doesn’t involve work­ing to the bone in a shitty office to make enough money to live.

*

Already I’m hav­ing twis­ted fantas­ies about get­ting up and leav­ing this house, tak­ing all my stuff, and clos­ing all my util­ity accounts, just to show the rest of them how much I take care of here. Every time I tidy up tossed-aside shit down­stairs, empty the trash, wash up, sort out bills, fix the net­work, drive them to the super­mar­ket; every left-on light, oven hob, shower, and TV I turn off reminds me that I do this without ask­ing for thanks, just out of a basic desire to improve liv­ing stand­ards for all of us — and, in most cases, because if I don’t, noone else will. I do these things unasked, yet the moment I try to ask for a little sup­port in return, I am shouted down.

We received an elec­tri­city bill yes­ter­day for £135, for the last two and a half months, so I took the time to write a friendly note to the rest of the house high­light­ing a few ways in which energy could be saved, to ease our col­lect­ive wal­let strain. Coming home in the even­ing to find lights on in empty rooms, and the shower empty but switched on, I asked Josh if he had read the note, which res­ul­ted in another hitting-head-against-the-wall argu­ment. He endeav­oured to set me straight on a few points, namely that I shouldn’t try to “nanny” the rest of the house, nor should I feel com­pelled to “tell 20-year-olds what to do.” Naturally my defences were worth­less — the very idea that I would do this for the good of the house, and not out of some sort of preter­nat­ural vaunt­ing of author­ity, was out of the ques­tion. And so I died a little more.

You can see the attrac­tion of this idea though, no? A quiet escape in the dead of night; they wake up to a house with no water, elec­tri­city, gas or Internet con­nec­tion (no ded­ic­ated fire­wall, media server or cabling through­out); to a kit­chen free of half its equip­ment, a fridge free of beer, and no car out front to shuttle them around. Not look­ing for praise or reward, just the tini­est hint of recog­ni­tion. A sav­age demon­stra­tion of my part in the run­ning of this house, but too late :-).

4

Bad Vibrations in 67

Another pearl of wis­dom I wish I had been handed last year: enjoy hav­ing your own space while you have it. I wish I had appre­ci­ated it that bit more.

The close­ness of this house is start­ing to grate. No mat­ter how good your choice of house­mates, con­fine­ment in a com­pact space is bound to amp­lify ten­sions, espe­cially when you end up with crazy cari­ca­tures like mine. Today was not a good day. Possibly because I was hung over from another Halloween party, or because it was another dark and grey day — about to get darker as the clocks go back. But those were really only ancil­lary issues.

The crux of it was an argu­ment about pet­rol, as we arrived at Sainsburys for our week­end shop. I drive a Suzuki Vitara, the fuel tank of which tops off at just over £45, which gets you between 200 and 250 miles. I drive to cam­pus at least 3 times a week, and if any­one is around when I leave or set off to come back, I take them. This hap­pens at least twice a week, usu­ally more. So you can ima­gine my sur­prise when I gently announced that the tank was nearly empty and in need of a fill-up, and that I would appre­ci­ate a con­tri­bu­tion of, say, £8 each towards it, and was met with not a small amount of dis­quiet and deni­als from two of the three that they rode with me more than “once in the last month”. And this, not to put too fine a point on it, is a crock of shit.

I’m sure you can do the arith­metic here: three con­tri­bu­tions of £8 is £24, mak­ing my share of the fuel a tidy £21. I freely admit to using more fuel than any­one else, hence the uneven split. But no, even this was not enough for the lifts to cam­pus, into town, and to the super­mar­ket a dozen times a week. Sadly, I was so enraged I failed to point out the irony that, as they argued about how little they made use of the car, we were stand­ing in the car park of the super­mar­ket that I had just driven them to (for the second time in 24 hours).

On top of that I had to yet again face the issue of how to argue with a man who refuses to listen to any voice other than his own, or take into account the feel­ings or opin­ions of any­one other than him­self. This is a daily struggle, and at times I won­der why I bother speak­ing at all. An impossible conun­drum; a man who sets rules then breaks them, and won’t be told; a man who, des­pite hav­ing a very tenu­ous grip on real­ity, will not be swayed in any­thing he does by such trifles as com­mon sense or the con­cerns of oth­ers. A man who con­siders him­self to be above any other human being, and does not enter­tain the belief that any­one else could pos­sibly have any­thing of any worth to say. And I have to share a house with the fucker.

Nothing I have done before has ever felt so much like hit­ting my head against a wall, for all it can achieve, and today was one of those days. And I lost my rag, prop­erly, for only the second time with him, and imme­di­ately regret­ted it, for it can do noth­ing but fur­ther worsen his opin­ion of and atti­tude towards me. Any dis­senter is a dick, no mat­ter how right they are. But what can I do? Nothing I say will have any effect. I won­der what shock­ing cir­cum­stances of earlier life could lead to this ingrained, fas­cist self-assurance.

devi­antART: One Toke Over the Line

The art com­munity web­site devi­antART, with whom I’ve hos­ted my online pho­to­graphy port­fo­lio for over 18 months, has been through some ups and downs in the time I’ve been on-board. The recent trend has been for the artists to take a back seat to money-making, and I have put up with this as I didn’t think it was that much of a prob­lem. My pho­tos were still get­ting viewed, cri­tiqued and pub­li­cised, and that was fine.

Today I am angry. A few weeks ago the techs at dA caved in to pub­lic pres­sure and released their much-lauded “v5”, a fairly com­plete over­haul of the present­a­tion side of the site. Unfortunately they made the fatal mis­take of not wait­ing until the fuck­ing product was com­plete before they pub­lished it. Thus, a whole bunch of stuff on the site was broken or looked bad for some time until they got around to com­plet­ing those bits. This, it seems, is still ongo­ing, with many issues remain­ing unfixed.

Beyond the “reg­u­lar” side of devi­antART there is the Prints Service, a fairly pro­fes­sional and highly regarded ser­vice that allows mem­bers to sub­mit high-resolution cop­ies of their art­work and have the whole print­ing pro­cess handled for them. For this dA takes a cut of the face price of a print, but it’s a reas­on­able deal and mem­bers can set their own prices. The styl­ing of each member’s “Store” was dif­fer­ent to that of their main dA page, offer­ing a far more pro­fes­sional appear­ance to poten­tial clients.

Until a few days ago. Now, it seems, the Store pages have been tarred with the same shitty brush as the rest of the site, remov­ing the last vestiges of pro­fes­sion­al­ism from the oper­a­tion. There used to be a simple “Store” link from each member’s page to his or her Prints Store area, this is now gone. Instead a “Prints” link takes its place, which takes the user not to the store­front, but to a page list­ing the member’s prints without any other inform­a­tion at all. Nothing. Fuck-all. To get to the artist inform­a­tion that used to be present, the user must click a print, then click the artist’s name at the top of the dis­play, beside the title. This then shows the “redesigned” store­front. Are most users likely to do this? Fuck they are. And even when the artist inform­a­tion is dis­played, dA have deigned to show only the “bio­graphy” sec­tion entered by the user, not their edu­ca­tion inform­a­tion, nor their awards inform­a­tion — even the “email the artist” link has been removed com­pletely, leav­ing no way for cli­ents to get in con­tact. So full marks to dA for help­ing com­mu­nic­a­tion between artist and poten­tial client.

It used to be that the Store car­ried a more refined, business-centric atti­tude and style than the rest of the site, and this is now gone. For myself and other artists who relied on devi­antART as a chan­nel through which to sell art, the rami­fic­a­tions are not good. I have been con­struct­ing another web­site in which to show­case my pho­to­graphy, as I thought that the “gal­lery” side of dA wasn’t pro­fes­sional enough — but I was hop­ing to link inter­ested cli­ents to my dA Store to com­plete any sales. I am now very reluct­ant to do this. It’s great to see that sites like dA have the interests of their users at heart as they pub­lish unfin­ished site builds that com­pletely tear up the struc­ture and ideas that the pre­vi­ous site used to represent.