The eye of the beholder

I’d like to talk about art. Art in all it’s guises. I thought I’d start by listing the things that are considered to be art, like sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, music, poetry, writing, dance, and theatre, but I then realised that there are so many other things that could fall under this heading that I may not personally deem to be art, how could I hope to list everything? And that’s the point of this post. Just because I don’t view it in that way, does that mean it’s not art? Who am I to make that judgement? Who is anyone to make that judgement? Art in any form is a personal, subjective thing that for some is a visceral, emotional epiphany and for others is a bland waste of space/time/oxygen.

Take literature. Some find books to be a rich tapestry of ideas and for others the last thing they would wish to do is sit and read. Often those are people that last read a book when they were at school or college, a well-known piece of ‘literature’ thrust under their nose and the contents clinically dissected and mapped out according to a curriculum. That’s not fun if the theme doesn’t interest you and the prose is difficult to follow. For example, I loved studying Hamlet, found it spoke to me deeply, but I also know that many people around me hated it. The problem was that they were being told how to interpret it, being told how to tease meaning from the dialogue, being told how to appreciate it. 

Stories aren’t for analysing - and at their base level that’s what even Shakespeare’s plays are, stories - they’re for feeling. A good story will take you in and show you a world that will make you feel…something. It will show you a part of the human condition (or non-human, I don’t want to be genre-ist) that will stir an emotion, be it empathy, sorrow, horror or delight. Emotions are personal, and they are subjective. You can’t teach a person what to feel when they read something any more than you can juggle water (before you start, you’re not allowed to put it in a container or freeze it!). You can tell them what you felt when you read it, what the general consensus is, but their emotions and their interpretations are their own.

The same goes for any other art form. I confess that I have little time for opera. I don’t doubt that it is performed by some very gifted people who can make aficionados weep during certain performances. I wouldn’t want to deny anyone else the right to clasp at their breast in wonder at the majesty of the voices soaring with passion. Please balance your miniature binoculars on your nose while dressed in your finest, I have no objections. Still sounds like a bunch of cats fighting in an alley to me. 

Ok, how many of you smiled and how many gasped and frowned? Some may even be thinking of not reading any further, but if that’s the case you are really missing my point. My dislike of opera may be because I haven’t experienced it properly or haven’t found a piece that captures me, I freely admit that, but that does not make my opinion invalid, just my opinion. I don’t expect everybody (or anybody) to agree with me, but what makes any other opinion more valid than mine? I don’t believe in going with the consensus just because it’s the consensus, I believe in every single person being able to make up their own mind about what it is they like, what touches them emotionally, what tickles their soul.

Is a pile of bricks art? An unmade bed? Half a sheep? I would say no, but many experts would state that I am missing the underlying metaphor, the nuances and statements that the artist is trying to convey by portraying the mundane in such a way. Whatever. To me it’s still a pile of bricks, a messy bed and half a sheep, and a canny artist that knows that some people will infer greatness from nothing and pay through the nose for it. You like it? Fill your boots. I’ll be over here rolling something in glitter for you to check out later.

The desolation of the mundane, or half a cup of coffee?

I’m not saying that they are wrong, just that it doesn’t float my boat. On the contrary, nobody is wrong. We are all individuals and we all see the world through our own eyes - we should be allowed to interpret it in any way that we want to. We won’t always agree, but if we were all the same life would be pretty boring, wouldn’t it?

If somebody doesn’t like the same things as you, sees things in a different way or laughs at different jokes, don’t dismiss them as being uneducated, uncouth, uptight, or any of the other labels we use for each other, ask yourself what they might be seeing or hearing instead. Tell yourself that they aren’t wrong, they’re just their own version of right. It’s worth remembering also that that doesn’t just hold for art.

So, your turn. What else do you consider to be art, and why? Or what really gets under your skin when it’s referred to as art? Share your insight, whether it be on kitten-juggling or smoke-origami. No answer is wrong if you can articulate a reason!

Superheroes

*No spoilers here*

I went to see The Amazing Spider-man 2 last night. The last film I watched at the cinema was Captain America 2. I recently re-watched Thor 2. You may be seeing a trend here (not that they’re all sequels, I’ll talk about that another time). I like superheroes. 

I probably own all of the superhero films from the past 10-15 years on Bluray or DVD (except Daredevil; Ben Affleck, you and I need to have words). I’ve likely watched them more than once. I can probably go toe-to-toe with anyone when discussing these films, and most people that have gotten into discussions with me about them now tend to wish they had the power of invisibility when I start holding court.

I’m a geek (and a nerd, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, people) in that I follow the movies, read about the movies, sometimes look things up about the characters in the comic book mythology, but I am not a full-blown, underpants-over-my-trousers, fighting-over-a-comic-book-so-I can-keep-it-in-a-plastic-sleeve geek. I collect the films but I only own a few graphic novels. I appreciate the genre and I feel that it has a role to play in my life, but I don’t need it to become my life.

Why do I like superheroes? A simple question with many answers. I guess the first and foremost one is that they are role models, beings to look up to. I know that there are those among you that think that’s ridiculous, that I should have role models that are real, but I have those too - one does not preclude the other. The difference here is that we can watch the journey of the superhero, right from the beginning, and see the choices that they make that turn them into that role model in the first place. In the real world we can admire people and even get a back story, but for the most part we are in awe of their achievements and have little concept of what they have overcome to get where they are. In the comic book world it is all about the journey and we are shown that explicitly.

Another reason for enjoying the genre is that everything is larger than life. We aren’t meant to take these things literally. I don’t for a moment believe that there’s a giant green rage monster inside of us all, just waiting to be released by a burst of gamma rays (although, if you happen to wander past any of the clubs in Southampton in the early hours you’d be forgiven for looking for the smoking radiation gun), but I do believe that these characters allow us to investigate certain aspects of life on a bigger scale. For example, in The Avengers (or Avengers Assemble, depending on your location) we are shown by the Hulk that it is better to control rage than let it control you (and how to deal with a cocky demigod that’s a bit big for his britches). 

By giving us a much exaggerated scenario in which to play it out we can look at motivations, conflict, emotions, responsibility and resolution, to name but a few. We don’t on a daily basis have conflict on the order of explosions and long, protracted hand-to-hand fights with the woman behind the counter at the Post Office, but we do need to learn to stand up for the things that we believe in. We do need to learn that to make a difference we have to be willing to act, not just wait for someone else to do it. We do need to learn that if we do act, those actions could have consequences and that we must take responsibility for them. The scenes that we watch in these movies may all be huge and far-fetched, but that does not mean that we can’t take away any moral learnings from them.

For me, dwelling for a time in the comic book world is also about escapism. I can forget my day, my work, my worries about money, and just be told a story. There is usually some conflict, a villain, some angst, possibly even some emotional turmoil, then good triumphs over evil and we all go home to kittens and ice cream. 

Most of the time I don’t want an emotional drama that’s going to leave me a blubbering wreck afterwards, unable to see past my snot-sodden tissues while I’m making a cup of tea (it happens, all too frequently). I don’t want a period piece where nobody says what they mean and they can’t even move properly due to the amount of starch in the high collars. I want some explosions, the bad guys being shown the error of their ways and a rather heavy-handed moral lesson.

I love a good story. I can escape into a book (I do, frequently) but here I have a self-contained story that I can experience in a couple of hours, start to finish and I don’t have to use my brain too much. I don’t have to imagine a world, I don’t have to furnish the characters with clothing, or hair, as that’s all done for me. It’s not as fulfilling as a book (see my blog post http://jmeveesbrain.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/whats-in-book.html) but it’s a quick fix and then I can get back to the business of living.

Lastly, superheroes engage our imagination. We can for a moment forget the real world and wonder what it might be like to fly, or to be invulnerable, just like we did when we were children. Back then nothing was impossible and the future was whatever we wanted it to be. It wasn’t about hope because we had no concept of that; what was coming was going to be amazing, no question. We were only limited by the scope of our imagination and superheroes helped us to spread our wings, look beyond what the world held to be true.

Comic book superheroes don’t make me feel young again, I am young again. My imagination is unshackled and I can be whatever I want to be. The future is amazing, it is wondrous. Now please excuse me, I have a single bound and a tall building to aim it at.

0nl1ne $ecur1ty

I'm posting early this week as I thought this post may be helpful in calming a few nerves (or confusing a hell of a lot of people). You’ve probably all seen the headlines in the news recently about the Heartbleed security bug that has got the world panicking, but for some of you the headline and the first few lines are likely as far as you got. At first they were saying that you should change all your passwords, then they were saying that you shouldn’t do it yet. So what’s going on and does it affect you? 

[To anyone that knows about IT, this post may offend you with it's clunky metaphors. Back away slowly, nobody needs to know you were here.]

Before we discuss anything further it will help you to know that when you delete anything on a computer it isn’t actually erased. All that happens is that the memory location where that data sits is flagged as available. That data will still be there until the computer sends other data to overwrite it. You may not be able to see it, but it’s still there.

Heartbleed

Heartbleed exploits this fact. This is it in an extremely simplified nutshell. Heartbleed is basically a problem with the communication between your computer (or tablet, or smartphone) and pretty much any server (web computer) that it talks to when requesting secure web pages. To check that both ends are still connected and ready to exchange secure data they perform a ‘heartbeat’ - your end sends a message that effectively says “if you’re still connected, send me back this word “badger”, it has 6 letters” (it doesn’t have to be badger, it can be any word. I like badgers). The server receives it and sends back “badger”. Both ends are happy and they get on with the exchange. This happens hundreds of times for each exchange. With me so far? Easy, right?

The problem arises when a computer sends a ‘heartbeat’ that’s a bit tricksy - “if you’re still connected, send me this word “badger”, it has 100 letters”. Spot the deliberate mistake? The server doesn’t (or didn’t). They simply see it, respond with “badger….” and the next 94 letters that are sitting in that part of it’s memory. It could be rubbish. Most of the time it probably is rubbish, but sometimes the thing that’s sitting in that next bit of memory is a password, or bank details, just waiting to be overwritten.

This comic from xkcd.com is a fantastic explanation, if you’re still unsure. To be honest, I’ve just read back my explanation and now I’m confused!

From XKCD.com, where a wealth of knowledge and humour resides

The scary thing is that this bug has affected secure servers across the world, because they all use the same protocols and the same code. The bad guys (the ones with goatee beards, you’ve seen them) can send thousands of heartbeats, one after the other, just to see what they get. Sometimes they’ll get lucky. 

Computer companies, banks, online security firms are rushing to correct the problem now. The fix is a simple one (well, the code is relatively simple), but it has to be done absolutely everywhere so it will take some time. The major browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari) have all been updated (let your computers update, people!), but the biggest issues are probably smartphones. This code is built into the operating systems and they can take some time to get a refresh.

What about me?

So, are you compromised? Who knows? Keep an eye on your most sensitive things for the moment, but hold off on changing your passwords. Chances are that if you haven’t been caught out by it yet you’ll probably be ok. The papers were clamouring that we all need to change our passwords, it was the end of the world, but if we all rush to change them now and the code hasn’t been fixed? Yep, you’ll actually be giving your new password to the goatee-clad evildoers! They’re all there now, like the child-catcher, poised with a big net to steal all your data.

A few rules:

• If you receive an email telling you to change your password on one of the sites you use, don’t click on any links in that email, especially if it’s from ‘your bank’. Legitimate emails will ask you to visit in the usual way to change your password. Fake emails could send you to fake sites and then you’ll be giving the miscreants all your information.
• Go to the homepage of a site that you regularly visit - the big names will all have information or links to tell you if their services have been affected by this bug.
• If you really must log on now, use a computer rather than your phone, it's more likely to have been patched.
• Keep your peepers peeled for updates on your computer, smartphone and tablet. These are the only way you will become immune to this bug. This is not a computer virus, so your antivirus program can do nothing (make sure that’s up-to-date anyway, always. If it has an auto-update feature, use it. Don’t make me come over there…).
• As the late, great Douglas Adams wrote, Don’t Panic! If you haven’t been hit yet, and have no need to log into any of these sites, then just sit back and wait. The data can only be grabbed when you try to connect, so if you don’t connect, you’re safe. Waiting then gives those sites time to update their code.

Passwords

And if you do need to change your password? We all know we should have a different password for every site, but who actually does? Most of us probably have the name of a relative or pet with a number at the end, and that gets recycled on all the sites we visit. Unfortunately, if I can guess that, so can the naughty people. Here are a few tips that might help:

• If possible, use substitutions of numbers or symbols for letters (see the title of this post)
• Most password cracking tools use ‘brute force’ attacks and try thousands of options, mainly with words from the dictionary. Changing the spelling to something unusual is a good idea.
• Put a space or two (or three) in the password. A space isn’t in the dictionary (thanks for the tip, Dom T!).
• If you refuse to have to remember a different password for each site you visit, come up with a code or abbreviation for each site and put that at the front, end, or somewhere in the middle of your regular password. That way each password is now different but still easy to remember.
• Put in symbols that are infrequently used, such as §, ±, } and ~ (there are hundreds, have a play).

Hope this has helped. I’d like to leave you feeling all warm and fuzzy, but I’m not wearing my magic hat. Hopefully I leave you a little better informed, able to ask the right questions and look out for the right things. Any questions, just leave a comment and I’ll try to answer them as best I can.

Smartphone, dumb person?

I love technology. Gadgets are great. I think we are lucky in so many ways to be living now, with the vast amount of life-saving, world-shrinking, information-at-our-fingertips tech that only 50 years ago would have been seen as science fiction. 

I have in my pocket a smartphone that has more computing power than that of the first craft to land men on the moon (if you think that was a conspiracy, get your coat, there’s the door, don’t let the internet hit you on the ass on the way out) and I can use it to have a live video chat, at any time, with somebody on the other side of the planet. For free. 

We have enormous machines that are smashing together the building blocks of matter at incredible energies to find out what’s in there. We are able to peer into the furthest reaches of the observable universe to probe the moments after the Big Bang. We can image the inside of the human body in such detail that we can diagnose illness and disease more and more accurately, pushing up our life expectancy in the process. 

So why do I genuinely see people walking along, nose glued to the screen of their iPad, jumping and waving their fists when they are narrowly missed by the car that so inconveniently wants to drive on that road they’ve wandered onto? Why do I see people repeatedly trying to feed a ticket into a closed barrier that clearly has a big red ‘X’ displayed on it, while the one with the big green arrow goes unused?

We are such an intelligent race, but sometimes I despair. Technology is fabulous and shows our ingenuity, but are we in danger of dumbing down, or are we just losing our common sense, if we put ever more reliance on them?

I’ve discussed many times the fact that nobody remembers telephone numbers anymore. When I was growing up, many moons ago, you memorised all of the important numbers you needed. Home, your best friend, family, and that was it. The rest went in a little book. Nobody had mobile phones (yes, I’m that old, and if you’re not that just makes me feel older), so you remembered the landlines you needed to and always carried 10p just in case. Nowadays we have mobiles, cloud storage and a contacts list that still contains the garage you had your car serviced at three cars ago, in a different county. Nobody can remember all that, but we don’t have to.

Often the retort to that is that we’ve just shifted our focus. Go online today and the chances are you’ll have to login to something. Every time you want to buy something on the web you have to sign up for an account, to receive a newsletter you’ll never read, or news of a product you’ll never buy, and that means another password. We have passwords everywhere we turn, so how can we be dumbing down? But passwords are the telephone numbers of years gone by. You have a few important ones for the things you log in to all the time and the rest you’ll never remember. Some people may echo the past and write them down in a little book (frowned upon, you can’t trust anyone, what are you thinking?) but I’m willing to bet the majority of you recycle the same password over and over again (OMG, you might as well throw open your doors and invite the criminals waiting just outside to take whatever they want!).

Satellite navigation devices (sat-navs from here on, I’m not made of letters) are another prime example of technology making us lazy. I have one. I have three apps on my phone that do it. Using them I don’t have to worry about pulling out a map-book, finding the right page, locating the right spot and then tracing backwards through possibly numerous other pages to my starting location. I just tap in a postcode, press go and follow. Fab, have a biscuit. 

The thing is, the next time I need to go to that place I have to pull out the sat-nav, tap in the postcode, press go and follow. Again. And the next time. Back in the days of using the map-book or street atlas I wouldn’t have had to do that as I’d have been taking notice of where I was going and likely (maybe) reading the road signs. Need to go there again? Fine, I’ve been there before so no problem. Now? Blindly follow the instructions and hope you don’t drive into a river that it thinks is a motorway. 

How many times have you started the sat-nav while you’re still on the bit of the route that you know and shouted at the screen when it tried to take you a really bizarre way? I have personally been taken off at a motorway junction, across the roundabout at the top of the slip road and straight back down onto the same motorway. It was highly amusing…the first two times (to be clear, it was a long motorway and the sat-nav tried this several times on the one journey, I didn’t repeat this trip after trip).

Cars are another thing. There are so many safety features and gadgets on the cars of today that some people don’t even have to remember not to crash into the vehicle in front of them as the car will brake for them. There’s power steering, ABS brakes and a computer to tell you how far you can go before you run out of fuel. There is less and less that we have to do in the process, but what happens when these things aren’t there? We are left without the skills needed to perform the most basic of tasks. The more we turn over to tech the easier things become, but that doesn’t mean they have become less complicated, just that the bulk of it is now hidden from us.

My point is we shouldn’t let ourselves become complacent just because we have a wonderful piece of technology that can do the job (sometimes better, sometimes not). Gadgets are great tools when they free up time for us to do something else, but my brain rebels at the thought that we’re not using that time constructively, we’re watching YouTube videos of cats looking cute or looking at photos on Facebook of a distantly remembered ‘friend’ and their dinner.

The world we live in is getting smarter, but that doesn’t by any means mean that we are too. Now that we have the entirety of human knowledge at our fingertips, why aren’t we all super-smart? Maybe because we know that we can look it up again if we ever need to, so why go to the trouble of retaining it? There’s disgruntled avians to be catapulted, you know.

I could go on (perhaps I will, another time), but I suspect you’re already itching to use the marvel of engineering and science that you’re reading this on to do something important, like look at how much fat celebrities are carrying today, or slice fruit (if only you ate that much fruit!). 

I will finish by sending a couple of messages: to the person glued to the iPad above, yes, it’s a brilliant piece of technology that allows you to do so much, but there’s a time for using it and I’m pretty certain dodging traffic isn’t it. To the person fruitlessly jamming their ticket again and again into an unresponsive barrier at the station, I have no words, you’re beyond help, please leave the planet at the next stop.

What's in a book?

Why do we read? Strange question coming from someone that would like you to read what he writes, but I’m not talking about the concept of reading, the transfer or sharing of information via the written word, I’m talking about the fiction reading we do for fun, be it novels or short stories, hardback or Kindle. I mean, there’s television, right? And movies. They tell stories. Sometimes they tell stories from books. Surely that’s better. They give you exactly what a book gives you, so what’s the point in reading? Two and a half hours and I can digest the same story that may take you weeks to read, case closed, move along, nothing to see here.

Except I don’t believe that’s true. Yes, you can tell a story with a film or a television programme, sometimes very well, but I do not believe that you can get as rich a grasp on the most important part of a story, it’s characters, as you can in a well-written book. Ultimately, every story is about the characters. Film, TV, play or book, if you have wooden characters that I don’t have any reason to care for then I will switch off (sometimes just mentally), regardless of the fascinating plot, special effects and wonderful sets. I need to have an interest in these people and what happens to them, whether that’s because I care for them or because I really want to see them get what’s coming to them. It’s that emotional attachment, or judgement, that makes us keep going, keeps us turning the pages or leaning forward in our seats, and for emotions to form we need to have some sort of inkling about what is going on with that character, what motivates them. 

That’s where the best books and the cleverest authors can triumph over the tellybox every time. On screen we see an evil genius trying to destroy the world, performing horrible acts that no sane person would condone. He (or she; evil doesn’t have gender) is a one-dimensional character doing these things because he’s evil, and that’s what evil people do. There may be a bit of exposition along the way to say that his mother didn’t love him, he was bullied at school, or his pet gerbil ran off to join the circus, and that is supposed to explain why he hates the planet. It doesn’t explain where that leaves him when the world is burning, but who cares, he’s the bad guy. In the book we get to see inside (his head. You at the back, leave the room, we’ll have none of that here) and find out that he thinks he’s doing the right thing. We don’t just get to see his actions and his reactions, we get to hear his thoughts and his internal processing while he is acting. He is the protagonist, the hero of his own story, and there is a reason for everything he is doing. We as the reader may not condone his actions, may believe that we would behave differently in the same scenario given our superior moral compass, but we can see why he feels that what he is doing is right, and this in turn makes him a richer, more rounded character, instead of a cardboard caricature. We are privy to something that, within the story, only he is aware of and that draws us in. How long until the hero figures out what we know? Can’t they see they’re being manipulated? Are we complicit if we know something they don’t? Books can do this with one or multiple characters, good and bad, and we aren’t just relying on an actor’s ability to interpret or express the nuances of the script.

Books also give us a chance to take in every aspect of a story. We can notice every glance, see every twitch and be aware of every little thing that may become relevant to the plot further down the line. We read every word. We are shown everything. We must read sequentially and take in all that the author intends for us to read. Whether we choose to process and retain all of that information is up to us, but it is all there, without fail. Film and television, however, can misdirect. The important artefact is there in the room, but the heroine is talking and you can’t keep your eyes off her fantastic gluteus maximus, or the hero’s chiselled pecs, so how would you notice it? Sometimes a repeat viewing (or several) is needed to pick up on all these little things. You already know what is going to happen, perhaps the big twist has been revealed, and you can look out for all the clues the next time round (if you can get past that gluteus maximus, of course). The stain on the floor or the scuff on the shoe that explains everything, that points to the murderer, was there all along but last time you were distracted. 

In a book the only thing that is distracting you is you. There is no artistic panning past that cute actor's behind, there are only the words, and every word is there for a reason. The author has told you about that stain, explicitly. Whether you thought it was part of the environmental description when you read it is beside the point, you definitely read those words. You had to to get to the next sentence. The author can't put something there and hope that you noticed from the corner of your eye; if it's important it has to be in the words in front of you.

The last area where books can triumph is imagination. Your imagination. Film or television show you everything; the way the characters look; the monster in the closet; the heart-wrenching moment when the old man tells his wife he has cancer. We are shown these things, but we are removed from them. They are somebody else's interpretation of the words. Anyone that has read the book before seeing the film knows what I mean - nothing ever looks as we imagined it and sometimes that can be quite jarring. Done well, it can influence your interpretation of the way things should look. The Harry Potter films, for example; who doesn’t picture Hermione from the films when reading the books? But most of the time we struggle to reconcile the two and the reason is that the book is allowing your imagination to do a lot of the work, which means your interpretation of the book is unique to you. A book can give you a few details of a person, and then your brain will fill in the missing details in a way that only you can see. Consider the following:

The man pushed open the door and stepped into the room, his limp making the action awkward. He was unshaven, his shirt rumpled, and the scowl on his face only deepened when he saw the people already there…

Picture that man in your mind. You already have an idea what he looks like to you, I guarantee it, but I’ve told you very little. I’ve given you a few details and you have inferred the rest from your own life experiences, the people around you, things you’ve watched on television. What if I now told you that the man I’m describing is Gregory House MD, played by Hugh Laurie, from the television series House. Some of you will have that in your head already, but to some of you that would have been a shock, which is exactly my point. Interestingly, go back and read it again and I bet you can’t now picture it any other way. By giving you all of the information, showing you what this world looks like, I take something away from you. I take away your input and that means that the story is no longer your personal version of the story. Put 37 people in a cinema to see a film and every person there will see exactly the same thing. Get that group of people to read the same book; if you were then able to get a photograph of the main character from inside their heads you would end up with 37 different images. 

Books pull you in and make you part of the process, whether you realise it or not, and your imagination helps to craft a story that is yours and yours alone. Tell me that’s not special. Tell me that’s not better.