11: Humorous Photos

This has proved to be the most popular image yet, hitting nearly 70 views in the first 24 hours. The task was to show a joke visually, but while most people used an old joke I created a new one and then photographed that, adding a simple text comment on the image to drive the meaning home.

After producing a series of humorous images prior to this one, having to deliberately create one seemed a daunting task as I usually wrap the humour around the subject instead of inserting the subject into the humour. Rather than try to remember a joke and then ponder how to photograph it, I used yesterday's gay lumberjack image and thought about what would be funny if I put him in a dress, in a way that would be appeal to adolescents and adults.

10: Fabulous Embellished Party Hats

This one floored me, I didn't think I had any materials at all for a party hat, and the ones shown on the group were terribly bitsy and twee. Then I noticed the bottle of wine we got on sunday, and wondered if I could balance that on a hat along with a glass - much more like a party hat to me, I thought. Later I noticed wifies jewellery lying in the bathroom, and wondered if I could add that to my hat. However, pushing metal spikes through my cotton hat did not sound like a good idea - but my wooly, winter hat, that would be fine.

This image shows how much I have learnt over the past week about the best way to photograph myself - an angle shot and without glasses. Using a hand is also incredibly useful, a flat edge-on hand can chop the shape, while the almost-fist elongates the face chopped off at the top by the head, as well as the sensual near-mouth finger and the dominant thumb visible in a supporting role.

7: Inspire & Be Inspired

Inspiration is not what we do normally, it is something that occurs in the dark depths of our minds. Here is my invention, designed to shed some light down those dark corridors of the mind, along which we creep blindly, felling our way.

Inspiration, like some kind of strange rabbit, can be encouraged to poke its nose out of that dark waren, but that means we have to do something specific. It is easy to go through life and only occasionally notice the nose of an inspiration rabbit, much harder to learn ways of encouraging one to appear on cue.

3: Just Shots

Well, if I could get away with yesterdays, why not go the whole way, I thought. Originally I was going to take a shot of a small fridge-magnet taxi that came all the way from New York, but it turns out that the taxi idea was nothing more than a step to the one I needed to take. Today's group is about any picture that does not fit in any particular category, and I took the opportunity to use one of my favourite techniques - a collage. I was going to have ragged edges like it was ripped out of a magazine, but I did not really have the time to mess around or the necessary expertise with Gimp to get an adequately quality image.

I chose not to use the flash simply because my camera batteries needed recharging, but that muddy-green background effect is much like that you see with many portraits from the first half of the twentieth century, a suitable foil for the first exposure of my psoriasis. As I was putting the image together from the six shots I accepted, I began to notice how much it resembles one of those Hindu goddesses.

Quality Cheaper Better

Quality cannot be defined absolutely in terms of price, although a more expensive product might look better quality their is no guarantee that the quality really is any different to a cheaper product. Which we all know, great, it's good to know that we all understand the same things, but I would like to explore the idea in terms of some of my own experience, or maybe it is just that I feel a need to talk about my old motorcycle.  
When you buy something new and you are past that initial stage when there might be a need for a few adjustments, the reliability for that product should level out and, if you maintain it well, it should remain reliable for some reasonable amount of time before the effects of wear starts to make themselves known. If the product is something fairly simple, like a shirt, you might at that point decide to throw it away or turn it into dusters, but if it is more complex do you get it repaired or replaced? Which decision contains the most quality and which decision will minimise your outlays in terms of money or time? Saving money or time can be a kind of quality, if you are able to use what you save successfully, although this can be almost impossible to define as we cannot really be sure how our life would have progressed if we had made a different choice.  
Imagine we have a car and after a few years we have to decide whether to replace it or keep it and spend increasingly more time and money in maintaining it. If we use the car for business then changing it is likely to be the best choice as time and money spent on repairs should be more effectively spent on making more money. If the car is used merely for pleasure then keeping the car could be an investment in experience. 
If we have a car that we need for work and something goes wrong with it - we know that garages repair cars, but do we really know how to get the best out of them? How to make the kind of requests, at the optimal time to get the kind of service that we desire? If instead we work in any service industry and come face to face with customers we quickly see that many of them fail to get the best out of us and what our company offers, and how easy it is to blame them, to think of them as being stupid or foolish. What, though, if the real problem was that neither side really understands what is happening when customer and customer service meet, both throwing away quality by a reluctance to learn?  
Learning takes much more effort than blaming someone else, and learning will never occur if we continue to block it. In the customer service position, we have to ensure that what we present the customer is understandable in the same way the way you file customer information has to be understood without thinking by the other people you work with. You know that feeling when you start work in a new job - everything is different, it is confusing and not a little alien. Well, that is often how we make the customer feel when they meet us for the first time, it is not enough that we understand the logic and apparent necessities of what we do, they have to be transparent to other people, to them. We need to spend time approaching other customer service departments to re-affirm within us what it feels like to deal with that unfeeling expert that we can so easily and unconsciously become. 
I once bought a very dead, 15 year old Honda step-thru motorcycle with broken plastic components and exhaust, disintegrated seat and nothing to kick the engine over with. It cost me about fifteen pounds, more than most people thought it was worth - but it was instantly available and it allowed me to get to know the person responsible for the student blocks I wished to move into while at university. 
Buying things like this helped me to realise that a successful personal sale was also an opportunity to get rid of things that I did not want that would feel like bonuses to the buyer. The actual sale was only part of the interaction, the change in my circumstances that the process of the sale brought about were often of more significance. I now possessed a motorcycle that was going to significantly expand my horizons, I was going to get a room where I wanted to be and my ability to take risks was to be confirmed with all who knew me. There were some who thought I was mad, but I was not paying them any attention.  
Let's say that you had a car that you wished to sell. The traditional business view, and peasant's view, is that you go through the car with a fine-tooth comb and remove anything of any possible value to maximise potential secondary sales (or to minimise value for the purchaser, if you are a peasant). There is nothing wrong with that, if you can successfully dispose of what you find without negatively influencing the rest of your life. Most people keep too many things for too long without generating a system for the effective disposal of these items. 
The longer you keep something, the less desirable it becomes in terms of condition, and longer it consumes storage resources that reduce the quality of the rest of your life. If you keep something so long that it comes into vogue again, the basic storage costs to your life is more than likely to counter the financial gain. Before selling the car it does make sense to look through it in case we have left something we need under the seat - and I do not mean something 'we could use'. Next we look in the garage and see what we do not want - maybe that old footpump could be put in a clear bag and placed in the car as a surprise for the purchaser. Hide anything valuable, position anything you do not want near the front of the garage and leave the garage doors open at some stage. You are selling a car after all, a car a purchaser could fill with some of your unwanted goods. Which could you sell, and which could you offer for free simply to engage the quality of freed up space? It is this understanding of the qualities of time, money and resources that can put anyone ahead of other people in a similar position. 
I know many translation companies where the managers are recruited from translators, and these managers continue to translate to make more money for themselves under the banner of 'reducing overheads'. This tells us that there is either not a requirement for a manager, or that the opportunities that focussing on managing should achieve are simply not being achieved. Perhaps this is partly due to a lack of training, where the managers are not able to fully develop the potential in their position through not being able to imagine the potential or having the skills to do so. We are all guilty of putting duties and pleasures before the task of assessing whether we are getting the most out of our life, and often the invisible costs of what we have not been able to do are not balanced by the profits of the things we actually do.  
Motorcycles were not things that I was so familiar with, but this little Honda was stripped down to its essentials and then stared at. Conventional wisdom said that if I wanted to have a bike that I could ride both on and off the road, I should have bought a bike designed for that purpose. If I had done so, I most likely would have repaired it, ridden it and then moved onto other bikes or activities, and my level of wisdom and reputation would have remained at the conventional level. I looked at some books about off-road motorcycling, I stared at some bikes at the local motorcycle agent's and then I thought, drew things, made lists. I then cut, welded, sewed and, yes, tied things on with string and elastic straps before riding it around a local wood. It was fun to ride for an hour but, even forgetting the need to tie things back on every ten minutes, it was hardly a good bike. The riding made me think some more and over the next few months the bike evolved into a street legal, lightweight, high-performance 6 horsepower machine.  
Eventually we packed the bike in the back of a van, along with my brother's and my friend's bikes and drove all the way down to the Alps. Once there I was on my own in terms of resources to support a shaky development bike, and when it broke down for the countless-th time half way up a mountain road with a mystery electrical fault, I knew it was time for some one-on-one communing with my machine. I waved goodbye to my brother and my friend and proceeded to remove every single wire from the machine, rolling each up and placing them neatly in a row. Brain-wire-bike. 
If I wanted lunch, I was going to have to get off this mountain, and my bike was the only route I was going to consider. Aside from those limitations, I opened myself up to what was possible, not what had been done before on this or any other machine in the known world. From first principles I produced a simple wiring system for the bike, one that worked, and which would continue to work reliably for the rest of the bike's life. The solution was achieved not in the comfort of a workshop with an expert on call, but from within, using the minimum of tools. We all know more than we realise, because we learn everyday about what we like and what we do not like, what works and what limps along. 
Working at a customer service point or as a branch manager we can often succeed without employing external resources by doing nothing more than becoming more familiar with how our own experience, and those of the people around us, can be applied to improve the way we work. One achievement builds confidence to look for the next, where failure becomes nothing more than a delay, an opportunity to consider a different solution. Living with our systems, rather than living with our head turned away from them, is one of the best ways of learning to understand it. Solutions come by tinkering and testing, looking for parallels in other industries, in other people's garages.

Practical Application

It might be all very well talking about the problems of classification on the way we think, but what can we do about it? Well, nothing, this is not one of those magical self-help books which describes the author's wonderful life, and all because they did X, Y and Z - and you can do the same too. But, are you me? Is my life so perfect and sorted? No and no. All I have done is figure out the root causes of some of the limitations we unconsciously put on our lives, not all of them, and there is nothing I could advise you to do specifically for your life, for your life is beyond what I could imagine. So, what should we do?

My suggestion is that we try looking at our lives in a different way. The idea that we can 'fix' our lives is what I call the Golden Age Dream, where we can achieve some level of perfection as described by one of those fake histories which suggests that at some point in the past we were all happy, or your choice of magazine or film and the perfect life in another country or in a different income bracket they describe. There is also the Me Spiritual approach where, instead of our problems being magicked away, we accept them all with equanimity, as we float above our lives, rippling away from all the punches. The truth is that we are not these people, because their lives do not exist. We are each a watery punchbag where the best we can hope for is better damage limitation and a little wisdom.

The first thing is that we are limited by a small brain that we starve regularly of food, sleep and love, while just as frequently expect it to deal with overdoses of sugar, alcohol and overwork. Even under the best circumstances, it will not remember everything for us when we need it, and changing the way we that we think is not easy, even with professional help. But your brain is your best friend, and what friends like most is when you play with them. Playing is one of the most undervalued methods of improving our lives, in fact it is potentially the most powerful way we have of permanently improving ourselves. Sadly, as we mature we are pushed away from toys and play, and are told that playing is not serious enough. This is particularly prevalent among women that I come into contact with here in Poland, for some reason, where 'running the home', 'bringing up family' or 'doing my job' are the the antipathy of play. I wonder if the same is true of stay-at-home fathers?

Play is the way the brain learns, increasing its store of knowledge, it's ability to understand and to control our bodies with a higher degree of skill or even new skills. The more new things that our brains have to learn, the slower it will degrade over time and the more likely that we will be able to cope with changing circumstances. Play in the workplace is generally frowned upon, it does not appear to generate income and in fact is considered to be a waste of resources. What is going wrong is that we will not take play seriously as an essential learning process, we do not learn how to manage it properly. And when a course comes up that could be useful in the eyes of the employer, employees often do not take the course content seriously because they cannot accept that aspect of play which is the acquisition of abstract, non-job-core or non-traditional knowledge. Putting the training into use may mean a change to some non-serious techniques or the acceptance of non-traditional processes and a resulting exclusion from the group of tradition-users.

This exclusion from the group of tradition-users is like asking a sheep to suddenly become a lone wolf or a football supporter to change teams, to no longer be one of the old herd. Play is one route out of this herd instinct, giving us the opportunity to learn confidence for when we nee to move into new circumstances. This is not something that we can go on a training course for, it is something that, where possible, is practised in the environment where we want the change to occur. Changing jobs within one organisations is similar to playing, and there is no reason why people cannot temporarily swop jobs that are geographically close or where sufficient support is given. Surviving in the new environments for a day or a week is like a game, and along with the confidence building there is a genuine opportunity to learn about how other job processes function and to exchange ideas and views about the jobs.

One weakness of most organisations is that the management never really know what their staff are truly capable of, but by moving people around and creating other types of play, managers can see their staff operating outside of their own area, as can the staff themselves. Not everything that we do at work is something that we have trained for. A lawyer does not spend all day with law, there are other tasks such as report writing, moving furniture around, organising bookmarks on the computer, and other things that it is not practical to go on a training course for. But what if our best report writer is working down in accounts, the janitor has an eye for office aesthetics, or that office manager two floors away could show us a more effective way of keeping our bookmarks - it is unlikely that they are going to write a memo about it, and if we do not here about it on the grapevine and have the right contacts, well, it just does not happen, does it.

Gossip is a form of social play, engaged in by most people and too often the only way that you get to hear about things - it is rarely well enough accepted to be effective, but without it many companies would be in serious trouble because the ability of most managers to communicate is from poor to abysmal. The role of the manager is seen as someone who makes decisions because they have a more global view, but they make decisions based on things their underlings do and which as a consequence they do not understand nearly as well as they imagine they do. The role of the manager is to make things happen, which means being a communication channel that functions equally well in all directions and keeps employees and management adequately supplied with job specific and general company information.

Play should not just happen when the serious work is done, although there is nothing wrong with doing it then. It should also be practised deliberately, during normal working time, although not perhaps during a panic unless we have a solid and reliable methodology for dealing with the resulting problems. This solid structure is largely unexplored, remaining out of practical reach unless we start to explore the potential.

At the end of the day, I continue to play and to experiment, allowing myself to move slowly into new areas. This blog is a visible sign of my intention to play with writing and with philosophy, and already I am using what I have learnt here in other parts of my life. That is good, and about the best that I can reasonably expect from a self-start project, and although the opportunities it might create in the future could change my life, I play for the benefits I can achieve in the now and the near future because these are important times as well.

Persona Play

Personas are imaginary people we create in our minds, which we use all the time in our social interactions: at work we might appear to be super efficient, but then to our family we might appear to be laid back or angry. We switch persona to try and maximise success in each situation we are in, however we choose to evaluate success at that moment. Success may be measured as getting a good deal, not being killed by a robber, not annoying our friends and family too often, seeing our partner being successful and so on. It is currently popular to create personas of imaginary people, based on market research data, and to use them to help members of design teams visualise the 'average' customer who will eventually be using their product. The logic behind creating them is that everyone in the team is designing for the same persona, instead of each member designing to the persona that they personally visualise. In the normal human way, some people see them as the answer to everything in design, while others see one or a few drawbacks and reject the concept completely.

This full-acceptance / full rejection is what I think of as a 'yes or no' vision of the world, either the world is all yes or its all no, its either this or its that, and cannot be anything else. Reality shows us that pure yes and pure no is almost impossible to achieve in all but a limited number of situations. Yes/no, this/that and similar concepts are hard classifications, in that they are limited in use but very quick to use. "Are you hungry?" to which we can give the hard classification answer "No". If you answered, "Well, a little bit, maybe in half an hour or so." you would be giving a soft, or more real answer, but to keep returning to the full reality just slows things down - we are all human and experienced with life, we know that things do not have to be exactly defined every time we use them. After all, what is hard concept of 'hungry' anyway - does it mean you are within moments of dying of starvation or you have not eaten for twenty minutes or so and my, doesn't that cake look mouthwatering?

Yes and no and hungry are hard classifications, they define a whole bagful of things under one umbrella term to speed the communication process. Soft classifications attempt to generate closer models to reality: "How hungry are you, can I make you something?" Soft generates slow communication, and you need to spend time thinking about what you are discussing. The problem is that it is very easy to get used to hard classification and come to believe that it expresses reality. I am hard classified as a 'man', and therefore you expect certain behaviour of me - perhaps that I love football, beer and ogling nubile women (well, one out of the three is correct). I have to be the persona of man because I am a man.

Religion is very good at creating hard classifications, even if the god they say they represent has other views on the matter. "We define persona of man, and you must mould yourself to match that persona otherwise 'our' god will tell us to make a social outcast of you." But how close does anyone come to the personas that our societies create, whatever the history of their development? And how much do people in power wish to maintain these personas only because it is easier to manage us if we do? Will our god love us more if we go to our temple every week, or will only our priests love us more?

The internet is a great opportunity for us to try and discover more about our own minds, to try out different versions of ourselves. This is not a new concept, people have been joining clubs and forming social groups since before humans became human, in a "Me man, me want to to join hunting group" kind of thing. The advantage that the internet gives us is that we can experiment with different physical experiences, such as fighting, without having to train our bodies to respond, or we can be a zombie, hang out in space bars on alien planets without getting a hangover, or becoming a beautiful angel. This is escaping from the hard classifications that society imposes, or we interpret as imposing on us. Personas are a soft classification method, it says, "look at all this that is me, how else can it be moulded, what else could 'I' be?"

As with any persona we create, it is important as social beings that we give some consideration of the effects our persona has on others. Just as it is socially unacceptable to pretend to be someone good so that we can steal someone's money or ideas in what we like to think of as normal life (another hard classification), it is equally unacceptable to attempt to use a persona fraudulently on the internet.

I have created many persona on different sites, sometimes even unintentionally when I have either created a group where I only expose a part of myself or I have chosen a name that is not my own simply to conceal my email address from potential spam - if I call myself 'Georgie Boy' then no one is going to be able to deduce my email address or track me down in one of the many social groups on the internet. Well, they might track someone down, but it will not be me unless they have the ability to illegally hack the internet structure at some point, such as the server my persona is logged on. Persona are created that easily, and only takes the mere suppression of a part of our personality. As a result of this suppression, to fully involve ourselves in the intended activity, other parts of our personality that normally do not get exposure expand to fill the vacuum.

Many people using instant messenger groups drop that part of them that keeps their behaviour acceptable in public areas, using it as an opportunity to express their frustrations or hidden desires to hurt others using words and what blocking actions the software allows them. I have no love of engaging in an environment of social abuse, as its humour quickly palls, but there are plenty of opportunities for me to discover other aspects of myself. Hosting a number of groups in which I have an interest allows me to practice being 'the expert' and 'the founder', a persona of responsibility and wisdom. Role-playing on forum-based resulted in a number of new persona, including 'frivolous' and 'dungeon master'.

Like in any social situation, there is often some fear when you first try out your new persona, especially if you have suppressed something significant in your personality - will your persona be accepted, successful? Will you be able to maintain it convincingly? Often the persona we create are very close to our own, and these are quite easy, but on one multi-player space empire game I decided to create a female persona. I was worried whether I could pull it off, but many of the people I know where worried that I should want to try - as if there was any real difference between what I was attempting and an author writing a female role. Again this is a problem of hard classification, I was not being the class 'author' therefore I must be in some other hard class, such as that of 'transsexual' or something.

Female or male, young or old, watching how the other people treated me was fascinating. How in my normal life can I have the opportunity to be something that my body image does not present without breaking the dress code morals of my society. Yes, I can imagine what people in Lublin would think if I went around dressed as a woman. It is much easier to shock other people with a persona, especially as you are less sensitive to the demands of the role, but the dual freedom of unaccountability and the freedom of action in an area that is normally off limits can be exhilarating.

Some of the persona quickly become boring, particularly if they fail to garner acceptability. Others become like old friends, an alternative body you can jump into to help you get away from the humdrum aspects of your normal life. If you make a mistake, well, you can always abandon a persona and create a new one, to try a different tack on the same group of people. Some of the skills you practice in-persona can also be utilised in normal life, extending your possibilities and perhaps surprising your friends. If this is a form of escapism, one has to wonder what society has done to us that we feel the need to escape it, so any criticism from people who see it as silly or threatening should really be questioning what kind of society have they helped to create that leaves a segment of that same society wishing to leave it.