Theunluckydip.com
Adventures in Nowhere Land.
CryWolf Blog: I’d like a Degree, with a side of knowledge and a Coke.
Jan 31st
(Words I hobbled together for an opinion article for CryWolf, the University of Wolverhampton’s student newspaper/blog. Click here for original post)
It is a common occurrence for everyone to be asked by ill-seen acquaintances and family, as well as strangers, a question along the lines of “What are you up to now then?” It’s an innocent enough question, yet it is from this innocuous enquiry that a gripe I have is, on a day-to-day level, most regularly experienced. I, of course, usually begin answering the question by stating that I’ve continued on at university to study for an MA in Popular Culture. This is then often, as expected, followed up with the secondary question of “What sort of job can you get with that?” On the surface this seems like a fair enough question, yet it’s not. University should not be means to employment as an absolute, but should in fact be viewed as an ends unto itself, yet politicians and much of the media have turned going to university into a human resource production factory rather than being the house of enlightenment it once was.
This change from seeing higher education as being good in its own right, to needing to have an economic value, could arguably said to have begun under the Thatcher years, whereby nothing was free from economic rationalisation. I find it troublesome. Just because something makes little or no money does not mean it doesn’t have value in other ways. Comedian and Writer Stewart Lee recalls a piece of news in the 80’s in which Margaret Thatcher toured a university and asked one of the students what they were studying, the student replied “Ancient Norse Literature”, to which Thatcher commented “What a luxury”. Again, as with my introduction, this doesn’t seem like much, but what it demonstrates is how ingrained in her thinking economic rationalism was and this has now sunk into all of us. There is clearly a limited direct financial future from studying Ancient Norse Literature, but as a society we need to keep information such as that alive because, as Stewart Lee says, “it’s a cliché to say, but you understand the modern world through it’s echoes in the past”.
More recently we can see this economic rationalisation of university via both the introduction, and the raising of, student fees. University courses are now products, the Prospectus, rather than being an index of knowledge that can be attained via study, is now a brochure selling us a future dream career. This has severely altered the student/teacher relationship to that of customer/provider. Because students are paying customers, the way in which university operates has been corroded, mainly on a teaching level. Rather than doing heavy amounts of research, students expect to be simply given the information, after all, it has been paid for; when you pay for milk you expect to have it in a bottle and not simply to have access to a cow. But, this is of course where thinking with an economic mindset falls down. University should be about genuine ‘self-betterment’ or self-improvement; this cannot simply be paid for like a conventional product, but requires hard work. I am not saying that students are lazy now, however, university education is much more signposted as a result of economic rationalisation than it would have been for students gone by and this is not how it should be.
It should be said that getting a job at the end of university is what many people want once they have finished studying (this can’t be entirely denied), but this should not influence too harshly ones choice in course; going to university and getting a job should be thought about separately. If any new potential students are reading this I would strongly recommend to them that they do not think in terms of future income when choosing a course for university (although with higher fees this is of course harder to do) but to select something which truly interests them. Just because a course doesn’t have a direct route to employment does not mean it is useless and unimportant.
- Robert Wright
Advertising Space Not for Sale.
Jan 23rd
I suspect this blog doesn’t get all that many views, and to be perfectly honest that doesn’t bother me in the slightest, I do intend to write more regularly so it may improve but that would be entirely incidental as I’m not going out my way to “advertise” this place.
However, out of the blue I have received two adverts over as many weeks, asking me, in different ways, to place advertisements on my blog. This can only mean a handful of things, either my blog is more popular than I give it credit for, something I highly doubt, the people who have e-mailed me are bad at their jobs in finding moderately well viewed sites or they are desperate to spread there messages in a random scatter gun approach. (I strongly suspect that there are more scenarios but I’m not going to give it too much thought)
The first of these came from someone claiming to be “Tammy Foster” from More Digital, ‘a UK based Digital Marketing Consultancy” The e-mail continued as follows:
We represent clients interested in social media marketing on smaller sites with little or no existing advertising and we’re currently looking for advertising partners.
We pay a fixed upfront annual fee which we will agree on with you. Once the ad is in place, payment is made within approximately 48 hours.
Would you be interested in placing a small text-based ad on Theunluckydip.com?
As you’d expect I tried to research the company, the conclusion I came to as to their authenticity was inconclusive. Their website looks genuine enough, but there are also many blogs out there claiming it to be a scam. Regardless of the truth of the matter, I’m not that interested in placing advertisements on my blog, not only because any money made would be minuscule, but also because I wouldn’t want to litter my blog with them, there’s enough advertisements all over the fucking web as it is, I’m noticing them more than ever, and I’d like to try and keep this microcosm clean from the infection.
The second e-mail I get was a different proposition, free content! I received an e-mail asking me to post an info-graphic covering the topic of Bad-Science.
Before I continue I’d like to say that I’m not necessarily apposed to mentioning businesses, or other websites in general, on my blog, for example I previously reviewed Graze.com and added a voucher code (which has been used a surprising number of times), but this was of my own volition and not because I’d be prompted to by the company (although one could argue I was incentivised by getting people to use the code I provided, this wasn’t actually the case, I’ve in fact never used any of credit I’ve gained)
I can only assume the reason this person found my blog to e-mail me is by finding my site via a google search on bad science; I have in previous articles discussed and mentioned both Ben Goldacre (author of Bad Science) and also Science in the Media more generally. I had a few back and forth e-mails with this person before it was revealed to me that the purpose of her contacting me was to place an info-graphic she had recently created to advertise a website she was trying to promote. As you can see I’ve not posted the image, but I have been in a quandary as to wether to do so or not. As a general rule I’m against whoring out my written space to advertise things for a third party, but this person, from what I can gather, is a recent graduate who is trying to get their foot on the employment ladder, something which I can greatly sympathise with, thus my confliction.
As I said at the start I doubt I get that many views to this blog anyway (I never check the statistics), so based on that it could be said that I haven’t really got any integrity of which to uphold, but, I still do not want to place an advertisement from a third party in any form directly on my blog. As a compromise, because I would like to help the stranger out, being the kind guy I am, I’m going to link to the info-graphic she sent me here.
Forgetting it as an advertisement now and looking at the piece itself, another reason for being slightly apprehensive about posting it is that it comes across anti-science, yet some of the points raised are interested nigh important. I am not anti-science yet I think the religious like nature it sometimes can have is concerning. basically I agree with most of Alan Moore’s points in this video:
In summery I do not intend to place advertisements from a third party, of any kind, on this blog anytime in the near future.
Stewart Lee: Arts for Cash.
Jan 22nd
Just wanted to point people in the direction of a great article by Stewart Lee on David Cameron’s recent proposals for the British film industry. More specifically he, rightly in my mind, criticise the tendency of Tories to judge the value of things my monetary value alone which is clearly a flawed scale to use. Below I’ve also added a video of Stewart Lee expressing pretty much the same points he makes in the article but related to education, do check them both out.
Today’s Conservatives rationalise everything by financial value. When I was still young, Mrs Thatcher toured St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and asked a girl what she studied. “Norse literature,” she said. “What a luxury,” replied the prime minister, anticipating the current government’s suspicion of humanities, but not anticipating the subsequent global financial value of the Lord of the Rings franchise. Fed by Tolkien’s study of Norse myth, the trilogy bled out of The Hobbit, which he originally wrote for a minority audience no bigger than that comprising his own bedtime children.
Final Fantasy XIII-2 Trailer.
Jan 17th
I’m not that much of a gamer really, I don’t follow the industry the way I once did, but one game I really am looking forward to is Final Fantasy XIII-2. I can’t stop myself from watching the trailer and once my class at university today has ended I’m going to most likely be playing the recently released demo.
I am, it seems, actually one of a minority that liked the first incantation of this game (FFXIII), I do so mainly because it did try hard to focus on story, and did so successfully in my mind, but as a result of focussing on story the gameplay become too linear in the eyes of many, a complaint which is justified. From the little bit of the new demo I’ve played already this seems to have been rectified, here’s hoping however that the story can be just as strong as it was before, although, having comparing the trailers side by side it seems unlikely, but nevertheless I’m excited for its release.
Week in a Tweet.
Jan 16th
I’ve decided to setup a new “diary” project. I’ve tried doing Project 365 and failed many times, I just don’t take enough photos, I guess the point of it is to encourage you take more but I’d just forget or lack an interesting or useful sight to capture (I’m sure if I thought hard enough I could create good images but then it would become a hassle when it’s required daily).
Anyway, my new project is called Week in a Tweet, and as the title suggests I’m going to sum up my previous week in a simple tweet length message, that way I can keep pithy updates away from the main page (which I always try to do) but also it should be a nice page to look back over at the end of 2012. I’ve made a new tab for it above so take a look if you so please.
Well I’m shortly off to watch The Iron Lady, I’ll spare this blog a review as there is enough talk about it anyway (I’d suggest checking out Stewart Lee’s non-review) I may fire off a tweet later though. Going to be doing a few minor changes to this blog over the next few days, one of which is revise my blogroll, one person I’m going to be adding is friend and author Sinead Kent, do check out her blog Painting Lies here.
Ink and Paper.
Jan 6th
(apologies for any spelling/grammar errors but It’s getting late as I finish this, will go through and edit tomorrow :P)
Most of my day today, and in fact the past couple of days previously, has been entirely dominated by reading, something which I do very much enjoy. This reading has been dominated mostly by academic texts and journal articles about science fiction and fantasy as I have an essay due to be completed in less than a week and I still haven’t decided firmly on a topic to write it on, the first time I’ve ever had this problem. I have a few vague concepts so I may just have to start writing and see what I get.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about print media recently, firstly, and something I may very well have blogged about before, e-readers. My opinion on them is already well formed, and also very slightly conflicted. It’s assumed by many at work and by acquaintances that I would own one or intend on getting one simply because I know how to use computers and electronics, well this is not the case; furthermore I’m in fact becoming slightly anti-technology (or at least I feel disturbed/pessimistic by its overbearing influence on society) I prefer and will always prefer the real thing, a real book, over any digital copy. I know the technology behind Kindles and other such e-readers is actually really good, and that it actually makes digital content easy to read, i.e. it’s easy on the eye, but I like the physicality of real books, and while the text is the same in both physical and digital books the medium it is presented on does change message, all be it subtly, as I’m sure Marshall Mcluhan would have attested. I can understand why the devices are appealing, in 21st century technological fetishism is really easy to get sucked into, I’m guilty of it quite often, but ultimately such devices are shallow, I’m by no way anti-tech but there is something enchanting about the form of a printed book which would be lost with we al used e-reader devices. Think about that feeling you get when walking along an isle of books in a library, each new book one dusts off is an adventure waiting to rediscovered and lived or a theory waiting to both excite and educate the mind, and of course while the texts themselves would not disappear due to e-readers themselves, the public shrines to the works would certainly be damaged beyond repair. I may just be a romantic fool but I think that capturing a intangible and vaporous idea and then reconstructing it into a form that is then physical is a much more fitting tribute to the magicians behind the thoughts and ideas than simply encoding it into another untouchable form which then requires a device in order to reassemble the idea once more.
I’ve also been thinking about magazines. I and a few friends are currently trying to create a zine which is currently called Bricolage, and as the name suggests it is a hodpodge of features, stories, poems, and art and so-forth. Why are we doing it, well firstly I guess because we’d quite like to see something we’ve made in physical form, it’s much more satisfying to see something properly printed and bounded than simply on a computer screen, but secondly it’s because the mainstream magazines which are readily available are really depressing. Of course we know that our little project is unlikely to get anywhere, but it is essentially a minor backlash against the state of the industry, which is of course clearly facing tough times due to the Internet, but feeling the magazines with even more adverts or paid editorial is not the way forward, quality should rule the roost. Flicking through a technology magazine here the amount of pages is impressive, but when you strip back all the advertising there is little more than a skeleton left, no wonder they are dying and it really is a shame.
As I’m currently studying science fiction and fantasy, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve of course looked at some of the pulp fiction being produced in the 20s and 30s, much of this was not quality it has to be said but it is still a shame in my mind that one can’t go to a newsagents and buy a magazine of short stories (well I guess you can by “real life” stories, but as stated in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that’s just fodder to keep people distracted) Of course in the period when the pulps were at there height there wasn’t as many easily accessible media forms vying for peoples attention, but I still think that should surely still be a market for such content. Well as a result of this thought I’ve gone out my way to find some indie magazines which feature short stories, mainly fantastic literature, the first one of which is entitled Postscripts. As the year progresses I’m planning on buying some more such magazines as and when I find them and I’ll undoubtedly post some comments about them on this here blog, so be sure to stay tuned for that.
And with that ramble I depart.
Happy New Year! (Leaving Facebook Edition)
Dec 31st
My blog is looking pretty dusty, and this post, rather than being a deep clean, is little more than me rubbing my fingers across the accumulated decay and letting out a disapproving tut.
I just looked over my “New Years” post from last year where I claim that as a New Year’s Resolution that I was going to blog more; I could pretty much repost that 2010 post and just relabel it as a 2011 post… but there is one key difference. I am actually going to do it this year. “Yeah, sure you will”, you may be thinking, and of course most New Year’s Resolutions are, it would seem, doomed to failure but my first one will not fail. This is to delete my Facebook account, which is trying with it’s new timeline feature/layout to become more like a blog, I already have a blog, so I do not see a need for facebook, a ‘service’ which I’ve never much liked anyway and whose practices, along with other web properties, I’m becoming much more deeply distrusting of and cynical about. Anyway, the detailed reasons behind the decision may make a further post, by deleting Facebook I anticipate making better use of this blog, but for now, I wish you a Happy New Year.
By the way if you’re struggling for New Year’s Resolutions, you could get some ideas from the start of this (I may very well use them all):
