Mentalechoes

Ironically, after writing my last post, I actually came across a couple of online news stories about World of Warcraft addicts; the type of person that spends 16 hours a day, every day, to the exclusion of all else, playing World of Warcraft. It’s this person that actually gives the rest of us internet jocks a bad name, and for those in the know, there is a very big difference between this person, and me, and the people I have as friends, and the people I work with, and the people I cross paths with online.

I will actually admit, that people who get so sucked into a virtual reality setting (like WoW or AoC or LoTRO or EQ2), that they completely ignore anything else in their real life has a big problem. But someone spending 16 hours a day in a game, is not the equivalent of 16 hours online doing other activities. I’m someone that lives on the very bleeding edge of an internet technology lifestyle; I work in a company that operates on the very edge of internet technology and produces the latest in consumer entertainment services; most of my communication, entertainment, news all come from internet based services. In short, I am about 5 – 7 years ahead of the average joe in the burbs. For me being online means socialising; means keeping up with current events; means keeping in touch with my family back in Australia; means finding on what’s on around town; means checking out what’s latest and greatest in new stuff on the internet; and means buying those essential and luxury items from all over Europe, as I try to get the best bargain. It also means from time to time playing some games, but that represents a very small part of what I do online.

So people like me are the evolution of the cash consumer from last century. Eventually everyone is going to have a house connected 24/7 with a flow of information going in and out that will be their interaction to a new world. You can’t fight the digital future, but nor should it be demonised by pointing fingers at those fools who consciously choose to live life in a completely imbalanced way that causes themselves and others around them emotional harm.

In the end it all comes down to living a digital life in the same way you would a real one; everything in moderation, and keeping control of what you do. But just like in real life, some people just can’t do it, and so there will always be hopeless lost causes.

Don’t judge us all that way!

Andy.

I’ve been reading more and more articles in places where I get my news about the scourge of internet addiction! Yes apparently some very prominent – read: very fucking loud no nothing idiot – people in the addiction treatment circles are becoming worried that the internet is destroying lives just as surely as crack, heroin and Jerry Springer reruns. I normally laugh these types of things off, but wired news just ran an article about how one doctor is saying that internet addicts are most likely brain damaged with something akin to asperger’s syndrome!

Basically internet addiction, according to the experts , is something like this:

• Preoccupation with the Internet. (Thoughts about previous on-line activity or anticipation of the next on-line session.)
• Use of the Internet in increasing amounts of time in order to achieve satisfaction.
• Repeated, unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop Internet use.
• Feelings of restlessness, moodiness, depression or irritability when attempting to cut down use of the Internet.
• On-line longer than originally intended.
• Jeopardized or risked loss of significant relationships, job, educational or career opportunities because of Internet use.
• Lies to family members, therapist, or others to conceal the extent of involvement with the Internet.
• Use of the Internet as a way to escape from problems or to relieve a dysphoric mood. (e.g., feelings of hopelessness, guilt, anxiety, depression.)

Which essentially is me fucked! Hell… I don’t even DO withdrawls anymore because I always have two of the four computers I own permanently online! It’s been this way for about 5 years, so it’s totally normal for me… and all my friends, and the majority of people living in Amsterdam! High speed, low cost bandwidth is as much a part of my life style as is cheap and easily available drugs.

Which makes me wonder who the fuck are these people anyway that decide that this generation of high end internet users are mentally ill? I walk past residential flats of an evening after grocery shopping and I see the same people watching the same mind numbingly boring television shows week in, week out. Now reality TV is socially acceptable and therefore normal. However I play two MMORPGs very regularly, and watch almost no TV (let alone absolute crap reality television), and yet I’m the one about get listed as having a mental disorder (in some Asian countries)!

Which all just makes me wonder, who the fuck decides who’s normal and who’s not anyway! Seriously this could all go like a scene out of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. At some point someone is going to strap me into a chair and give me electric shock therapy to cure me of my Age of Conan enjoyment problem!

Obviously the only reasonable response is for geeks to arm ourselves with military grade weaponry, and defend our homesteads and bandwidth with lethal force! Actually fuck guns, I reckon I could pretty much dual wield one hand axes now after playing my Barbarian character on AoC! The only way someone is going to take my servers away from me is from my cold dead hands! Who’s with me? WHO’S WITH ME?

*sigh*… You know I only got one phone call over the weekend to see if I was up to anything. Maybe I do spend too much time in front of the computer…maybe I should unplug for a while and get outside?

AoC anyone?

Andy.

So this afternoon, after waking up at the very reasonable hour of 1.30pm, I decided that it was time to do something about backing up my babies. Those being my weblog posts across my numerous weblogs, and my websites, all of which I host at home, on a lovely little server that is something akin to Frankenstein in the PC sense; with a peice taken from this old dead computer, and a peice taken from that old dead computer… you get the idea. Believe it or not, this blog your reading is now over three years old, which is a lot of history really to lose to the inevitable harddrive crash that will happen again, as it has happened to me before. Fortune smiles on us in serendipitus ways, and through another – somewhat technical – blogger I learned of a cheap offsite storage service (called rsync.net for those who are into that sort of thing). Without boring the absolute shit out of you with details, yesterday I signed up for a storage plan, and this afternoon I wrote the backup script that will tuck all my babies into nice compressed beds each and every night and send them all to aunty rsync’s house for safe sleeping. Now if ever the worst should happen, which is definitely the harddisk eating its own head, which can literally happen I’ll have you know, I won’t even shed a tear, much less scream and go on a psychotic rampage with an axe. No, I’ll hack another working part from another computer and transplant it into the server and then replace them babies with a few taps of the fingers. Job done!

All this got me thinking, if only life could be backed up in the same way. Whenever we make mistakes, or we hurt someone, or ourselves; whenever something happens that we just wish hadn’t, wouldn’t it be just great to roll back to the last working version and continue on! Yes I do realise this is just a silly fantasy, but lets just suspend belief and say we could do that for a brief moment, we could roll back our lives to a saved point whenever we screwed up, or life threw us a curved ball we didn’t want to have hit us in the head. You know what the result would be? We’d end up learning nothing, because we only really learn anything when wounds are inflicted, and during the time it takes to heal. Maybe that’s why gawd didn’t give us the backup option in the first place. Because nobody would ever have a life that moved forward, we’d all just be pretty fucked up people from having everything our own way!

Which makes me wonder, is there some deeper meaning in the pain I hadn’t considered yet? This seems to beg for further introspection.

Andy.