Bit Torrent is Baaad

Over at the BBC there's a bit of copyright propaganda.

My favourite bit is:

Researchers found 1.3m people using one file-sharing network on one weekday and estimated that over a year they had free access to material worth £12bn.

bold mine

Surely market values dictates the worth of something. Also, if I walk into Tesco I have free access to however much I can fill my pockets with. It is a *choice* to pay. Clearly people abuse copyright, but when so much stuff forcefed us by record labels and Hollywood studios is shit, why should we pay? Presumably, if anything's really worth it, we'll iTunes it or go to the shops.

Or maybe the BBC is worried about DVD sales, as well it should be when it invests in the likes of My Family, one of the dullest sitcoms ever to grace British screens.

Happiness part 5 - Generational Malaise

Why is happiness an issue for many people of my generation. Why are we obsessed with 'finding ourselves'?

I think that part of it is to do with the hippy generation, who espoused 'self-discovery' and seemed to create a synonmyity between happiness and freedom.

Why did they become the same? Is freedom actually happiness? I believe that my parents generation, who came of age during the punk years but who probably never had anything to do with punk, were a blip and did things the old way. They sought responsibility, mortgages and kids. They were happy and they were unhappy. My parents' marriage is one of the only happy ones I know among people I went to school with.

I must say that I don't find sadness such an ungainly trait at all. I think that a wide-ranging emotional repertoire is essential to truly appreciate happiness for all that it is.

Anyway, this whole post was sparked by a shoot-the-breeze conversation with a guy at work. We are not the first generation who has been told how to think, but we are, in my opinion, the first generation to be courted by those who would seek to prescribe trains of thought.

Why do we desire to go searching for ourselves. I'm not much of a follower of The Alchemist or Coelhovian pop-psychology but why does my generation think it needs to experience *everything*? One is somehow less real if one hasn't such experience, it seems to be assumed.

Yet surely happiness, or sadness for that matter, do not rely on a great breadth of experience; that is they do not depend on the kind of experience like riding camels through the Sahara, or seeing the Forbidden City of Lhasa or any other thing marketed to us by Lonely Planet or Trailfinders. We are all in search of the real, the authentic, but tourism is tourism however we dress it up.

We all drink the same figurative Coca Cola in the same figurative branch of McDonalds in the same figurative city of a figurative country anywhere in the world. Things are the same the world over. Maybe our malaise is about a search for the real, which is simply difference that has been replaced with homogeneity.

Part one Part two Part three Part four

Plot Shield: We Are Puppets

There is a great post on Plot Shield about the influence of French pop on Japanese pop. Beware, YouTube videos may contain vivid colours and more kawaii than the recommended daily allowance.

Happiness - Part 4 - Some things that make me happy

A home-cooked meal.

A nice song, but not necessarily a happy song.

Friends. The people, but sometimes the TV show too.

Learning something new.

Finishing a great book.

Part one Part two Part three

Happiness Part 3 - On reading 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell

I read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell this week, and it really helped me make sense of my life. In it, it mentions that there is a ratio for successful marriages of 5:1 positive feelings to negative feelings. This links to my first post on happiness, when I wondered if there was such a thing as a ratio.

Not only that, but there's a psychologist interviewed, Paul Ekman, who has said that smiling makes one happy when one smiles properly, using all of the muscles, and when one frowns of one's volition only, one can be sincerely unhappy physiologically speaking.

Sorry I've been internet mute this week, but I've been busy.

Part one Part two

Underwear

I've seen one of my neighbour's huge bra's hanging in the window. Perhaps her husband hung the laundry, because surely only a man could think about showing their underwear to the world. It wasn't the kind of bra to show off, it was a regular white, non-lacy bra. It just made me think, wow, there's something that you don't often see people showing the whole street.

Watching the wildlife

Frog
Originally uploaded by un-understand.

It's been so rainy that I saw frogs the past two evenings. Freaky as hell. I knew frogs existed in Japan, but not in Tokyo and certainly not in my part of it.

Suihanki Panky

Since I started living alone, cooking for one has become more commonplace. It could be a pain, but for one thing: my rice cooker. I've blogged about rice cooker recipes before but here are some more links:

Panasonic Rice Cooker recipe ebook for free (PDF file)

A pasta recipe I've used.

Share any links you may have in the comments, please.

By the way, suihanki or 炊飯器 is what Japanese people call rice cookers.

Happiness part 2 - Why is it important?

I've been thinking about why happiness is so important to us as human beings. What I've come up with so far is that there are two factors:

Achievement: Happiness is a goal, and as animals, we enter into goal-oriented behaviour. What brings us happiness is achievement, which brings satisfaction. The sense of achievement one gets from completing a challenge is greater than something which is easily achieved, which is why commodity fetishism never brings anything other than merely fleeting happiness.

Fear: Happiness is important to us because we have been taught to fear it's 'opposite', i.e. sadness, or even worse, depression. Both sadness and depression are natural states (though I feel compelled to clarify myself, I am not talking about clinical depression, but rather an intense sadness). We can't deal with sadness or depression in a constructive way ourselves, I think. There is a whole industry of self-help books and life coaching that says we must work towards resolving our issues in a series of (perhaps twelve) steps. It is no longer acceptable to just be sad; but isn't it a shame that everybody wants to be happy all of the time? Surely happiness just blurs together and becomes devalued if one is happy all the time.

Here is a video about the previous paragraph:



Happiness part 1 - Ratio

Writing

This Golden Week (the week of public holidays in Japan), I have the ambition of writing a minimum of 5,000 words of the novel in progress. Hopefully I'll manage it. I'll twitter about it, I think, unless I'm really busy.

Also, I have a few ideas about happiness, of which there will be more soon.