Categorisation (and the archive page)

So, usually when it comes to blogging, I pick a subject that I have a decent amount of knowledge on already and give my thoughts on it - a little more tentatively if it's a subject that I haven't encountered a lot. Occasionally, I write a blog on the spot with no forethought as to what it'll contain. Usually, this ends badly, but at the time of writing I decided "Know what... fuck it, I need to write more casual posts, remind people that I have a life, and musings from the top of my head."

I keep an archive. I add every post I write to this archive - it's nothing fancy, it's the fourth tab along, and by this point I've got everything under rudimentary headings. So I write a piece of ramble about glockenspiels and think "Where shall I place this in the archive?" My first instinct is to put it in with the group of blogs I've entitled "Rambly miscellanea" but that got me thinking "Hey, I'm proud of that ramble. That ramble was worth a lot more than any miscellaneum out there." And it got me wondering: am I categorising too obsessively? Should I categorise my blogs at all? XKCD comics don't. To this day, I've never known if anybody actually makes use of my archive, it never occurred to me to ask and I don't think I'll ever find a reason to. I don't know if pigeonholing my blogs is helping anyone, or if it's just my neat-freakiness showing through.

I've been an obsessive labeller for quite a while now. Always I would love to categorise and label things, to fit every little thing in life into my own lil' boxes - which lead to me wanting to create a reverse dictionary, where you look up the meaning and find the word (why aren't there hard copies of those?) For anyone who doesn't play Minecraft: in it you collect lots of unique resources, which you can store in chests - a room entirely dedicated to chests is not an uncommon feature in the house of any Minecrafter, and Zeus I spent a long time organising everything I owned into chests. That's when my label-obsession really shows through.

It can be more than just pettiness, though. A while ago I used to start thinking that I had Asperger's Syndrome, and I was seeing all the signs of it, of course (woo confirmation bias!) It was a good friend of mine who put me right when I was going around telling everyone that I have Asperger's that I shouldn't identify by that label, shouldn't use it to mark me by something that doesn't mean anything about me as a person.

I still do things like that today. Sometimes I think that I'm partly proud to be pansexual simply because I belong to a category.

The ultimate question is: where the heck do I place this post in the archive?

~Love Leonidas

P.S. I've just counted my posts and it looks like this is Post #102. My #100th post was "On the afterlife"

Glockenspiels and the word "aridity"

You know, I don't write nearly enough casual blogs. A lot of people use their blogs as their Facebook, as a "Just stopped in France, having a brill time!" or "Bought this cool new book, can't wait to read it," type thing. I don't do that, I wait until I have a meaningful topic that I think I can offer a decent insight into, or a subject that interests me - hence the aridity of these past few weeks. And to this day I have no idea if it makes a difference that I'm a 16yo blogger who uses words like "aridity." Does my style of writing seriously not put anyone off?

#100th blog: On the afterlife

Death is inevitable. All creatures evolve in such a way that survival is one of their main instincts: death is a pretty crappy thing, therefore, by the standards of any animal. It's hardly illogical, then, that we should fear death. But then, in attempting to find ways around it, of making the idea of death seem easier, we do something utterly unique to humans: we imagine an existence after death, an end to the end, an eternity of glorious paradise in which to live as one with the creator of the world.

My issue is not with death, but with this afterlife.

On standing around and watching Football

I don't know about boys. My upbringing has left me careful to generalise everything, but I've always found myself more comfortable hanging around girls, because generally, they're a lot nicer. Of course, this means that I haven't gone out and make an effort with lots of guys and consequently found a lot of the nice ones (though almost all of the guy friends I do have are amazing,) but I nonetheless find that girls are generally the superior sex. They're certainly a hell of a lot less lazy than we are.

Maybe if girl's ruled the world of football I'd be put in goal less.

On Football

I've noticed I've been using the word facilitate a lot lately. It's a nice word, which shares the French word "facile" or easy. It is literally to make something easier. That wasn't related to this post at all, just thought I'd share my word of the... day... week... time-period.

You know, whenever I don't plan my blogs, this happens...

http://ruminidas.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/i-dont-need-title-for-this-blog.html

http://ruminidas.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/my-brain-is-sahara-desert.html 

http://ruminidas.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/i-dont-like-this.html 

Because it didn't take to "Thomas"

It must have been five or six years ago now, the memory came to me randomly today, that we were having a sex ed lesson in our Junior School. Mr. Payne was not, perhaps, the most comfortable person to be having a Q&A on the birds and the bees with - he was one of the more feared ones: with a grey Santa beard and the rounded belly to match, as well as a propensity for shouting as us littlies quite a bit. I don't remember much of it, but what I do remember is someone saying "Why is a penis called that?" or something to that effect. Mr. Payne being a primary school teacher and not a literary genius, his response to this was "Well, why is a tree called a tree?" with no further explanation.

The question is, why is a tree called a tree?

The steady insanity of Haruki Murakami

It's a funny thing, how ideas take root in our heads.

I don't need a title for this blog.

You know, it's been a while since I've sat down to write a blog without a single idea of what I was going to put in it. I briefly thought about what I might title it, but then I thought, well that rather defeats the point of a spontaneous blog, if I put a heading at the top and write with it leering over me. So I'm going to write with a blank title. What significance do headings have when the content is the greater picture? See, I don't need to plan these things to sound like a philosophical genius.

Society's prisons

There's been something on my mind more and more lately: what right does the government have to rule over us? Usually this is a question regarded as insolence, immaturity, held in the same vein as children complaining about parents or teachers - but I think that this is a negative attitude that we need to get out of, because in the question of why are we ruled by a government lies a very serious point. And that is - well, what rights exactly do they have?