Sunday 21 December 2014

The Chemical of Courage*

I admit I am a drug taker, my drug of choice – heroin! No not really. It’s really Prozac. I have suffered with depression for many years and it mainly manifested as being extremely unmotivated. I also had no balls at all; I let fear of failure and what other people think control me. I was in denial about all of this for at least 10 years.

I believe many people are in denial about being depressed. You must remember that we evolved in completely different circumstances to what we live in today. People like me used to simply die they never got the opportunity to get depressed. When living day-to-day you don’t get the opportunity to be depressed either. Unmotivated people just died.

But the world is different now. Life has no purpose other than what we give it. My primary purpose is to have fun in life. Worrying what other people think is frankly one of the stupidest things you can do. Don’t listen to the part of your mind that puts you down or tells you that you can’t do something.

Some people have these ridiculous beliefs that hold them back. They believe that to take a drug like Prozac for depression is shameful and should be avoided at all costs. Only pathetic cripples, ex junkies and recent divorcees take them. They think it is weak to take drugs like this.

BULL-FUCKING-SHIT!!

If there is a drug that will make your life better that does not have adverse side-effects or any side-effects you would be an idiot not take it. I know, it is often that these sorts of drugs are over prescribed particularly to children. Parents that need to drug their children to keep them under control need to take a good hard look at themselves and maybe consider taking the drugs that you want to give to your child.

Many people are also mortified by failure or humiliation, particularly in public. All humans make mistakes - it's a fact. Virtually every other human on the planet recognises this fact, maybe not consciously, but they forget about your mistakes - as you should. You ask them a few days later about a mistake that you made, They will say, "what mistake?" If it is a particularly large mistake, they will forgive you and perhaps even laugh about it - just look at all those fail compilations on Youtube. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries have been made due to failed experiments - antibiotics being one of them.

I started taking Prozac in December 2013. Since that time I have blogged more, read more, learnt more, done more and played computer games a lot less. Before that date I was a useless meatbag that only played games all day.

Since then I have started Melbourne Eastern Suburbs Hackers or MESH. This is a group that is part of the broader maker and DIY movement. It is for people that like making things. Currently most of us are interested in computer programming, robotics, drones and all sorts of other nerdy stuff. We became an incorporated body late this year.

I have also started writing a book called, Future Shock, which, you guessed it, is about the future. I just wish that I had started taking this drug years ago, just imagine what I could have achieved.

So just ditch everything in your life that is holding you back - most of these will be inside your head. There is no limit to what a motivated person can achieve in this age. Nerds that would have died in the gutter a few centuries ago now can rule the world, think of Bill Gates, the Steves (Jobs and Wozniak), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), Elon Musk (space X, PayPal and Tesla) and you. Although that second last one probably would survive in the Stone Age.

Some people can achieve the same results as drugs if they simply gave up fear of failure, the stupid belief that humans don't make mistakes, they should never apologise or not forgive people for their mistakes. Maybe if people thought a lot more about the way their mind works, go through your beliefs and opinions one by one analyse them using logic - give up denial. If it means taking a drug to get you there - who gives a flying fuck!

*If you got this reference, good on you - now take some drugs! You will need them if you ever saw this atrocity of a movie, even if it was over 20 years ago.

Friday 19 December 2014

This Cowardice Has to Stop!

When Sony pictures cancelled the interview because North Korea threatened them it was both cowardice and betrayal. Freedom of speech is completely meaningless if some two bit dictator can censor whatever he likes from the other side of the world.

Since then a number of cinemas started to playing Team America World Police as a protest - guess what Paramount pictures ordered these cinemas to pull it. Cowards!

Sony got hacked a couple of months back and that has now been blamed on North Korea by the FBI. The US government has told Sony there is no credible threat against them or the cinemas, they yanked it regardless. Sony, ironically, has never had executives that understand technology. I don’t know how many MMOs they have developed that have failed miserably due to either early release, insufficient support or plain old greed.

It is so wrong for Sony and Paramount to do what they did, simply because it greatly endangers our freedom of speech not just in America, but throughout the world. Even if somehow North Korea managed to pull off an attack on thousands of cinemas simultaneously no one would actually die. Maybe North Korea found some information in its previous attack on Sony and is using that as leverage to blackmail Sony.

You may ask, “who cares it looked like a stupid movie anyway?” As Obama said, “What if it was a documentary revealing important information to the public or a news story?” When you cave in to bullies all you do is encourage further abuse. Now countries like Iran and Russia might start using these cyberwarfare tactics as well.

This whole episode could be a small sample of what we may face in the future. There will now be a cyber arms race, if there isn’t already one. If countries start to use tit-for-tat cyber attacks it could degenerate into an all-out cyberwar. It could destroy the Internet we know, or at least make it unusable, but who knows really? Our entire global civilisation now depends on computers and the Internet, it’s a big worry.

Sony, Paramount you are arseholes, please stop shiting on us! And I’m really not sure if you can call this terrorism…

hizzer