Category: ramblings

Hand Over Mouth

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

If you know me, or have read this blog before, then you’d know that I am not one to keep my opinions to myself. I feel that if you have an opinion, the you should speak out and let the world know your thoughts. Because that is what things, including this blog are there for. Expressing.

Except, yesterday, I held back. If anyone has spoken to me or read what I have written about ‘The War on Terror’, you will know why I held back. I have a lot of American friends who are part of a country which still mourn the fact that 9/11 happened. And speaking my thoughts, I was scared that I would offend one of my friends. Why? Because, if you say anything which makes the distruction of the twin towers seem equal to anything, such as the suffering of victims of the ‘War against Terror’, you are a disgrace. I know this, because that is what I have been called each and every year I have braved to open my mouth.

So this year, I stepped back, and tried not to be annoyed by the contradiction that occurred because of that fateful day. The fact that the world grieves for America’s richest city, but nothing is said about the innocent men, women and children who died as victims of the resulting war. If you are going to mourn those poor people who died in the attack that started the fight, then mourn those children who died in their sleep as their homes were burnt down in Afghanistan. No one death should be deemed more important than another.

And if you read this and have the nerve to say that the death of New Yorkers was more serious than the deaths of Afghans, then you need to take a long hard look at yourself. All innocent victims were killed because something happened that was beyond them. Something that they had nothing to do with. These people, all of them, died for someone else’s cause. And that is horrible. That innocents need to die.

It has been bothering me. It also bothers me, that for someone to show they ‘care’ they need to publicly show that they are mourning. Why? Yes, pay respect, mourn if you need to. But don’t dismiss someone who doesn’t mourn with you. Some people find it uncomfortable shouting I AM SAD THESE PEOPLE DIED. It seems cheap to some, and it makes it impersonal. If you are to mourn, it is a private thing. A prayer, or positive thought to those who you are mourning for. The internet has encouraged this, and if someone is struggling. Someone has lost a husband, a child, do they really want to see memories about it splashed around everywhere as if it is gossip on the Kardishans? Is that respectful? I don’t think it is.  There is a name for the sensationalism linked to a disaster in this day in age. It is called Manufactured Mourning.

—-

I wish I could say it was respect that caused me to keep my mouth shut yesterday. But it was fear. Fear that someone would take what I said the wrong way, and would send me death threats. It has happened before. So I bit my tongue, but still wanted to put across my thoughts. All people who die innocently should be mourned. But in a way that is respectful to them. Rest in peace to the 3,500 people who would have lost their lives as I have written this entry. 

If I had a million dollars…

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

Would it change me?

Someone asked me this over Formspring, and I thought I would take to my blog to comment about it. Mostly because I would like to go into the matter in a lot more detail than Formspring allows.

I think getting that kind of money would change my life, no doubting it, and as a result it will probably have an effect on me. So it probably would change me. I would like to hope it would be, in that I would be happier because it would irradiate any money problems I currently have. I would quite my work, and do a solid push of making my websites and things take off. I could focus on my portfolio and take classes help me do this.

I would also buy my own house. A house that would have a studio so I could work on things. *sigh* I would be able to pay off all my debt, and I think that would have the biggest effect. Knowing that I wouldn’t have anything else to hold me back, and the relief that would bring would make me so much happier.

I hope it wouldn’t change how I treat people, because I like to treat people the way I expect to be treated. And I would hope that I wouldn’t change this just because I had money. But I guess that anything on that would be guesswork, cause I can’t even imagine being in that kind of scenario. Especially seeing as I don’t play the lottery, nor do I have any rich elderly relatives. -.-

Oh well, I can dream.

Any readers out there? What would you do if you came into a large amount of money?

Return To Normality

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

This is where I am going to pretend that I have had a life away from the computer, long enough to get behind on blogs and everything… but it would be lies. Well, not complete lies, but maybe more an exaggeration. I have spent my time off work concentrating on myself, and just off-lining a bit. I say a bit, because I was on Tumblr and Twitter still, I just didn’t update everything.

Which is unusual for me, I usually at least keep my blogs updated, but I just haven’t been on top of things. Mostly because I haven’t been wanting to write anything substantial. So I can post bits and bobs on my Tumblr, and the other blog sites get ignored. Which is not my intention.

Anyway, I am back at work tonight, so that means that I am trying to get myself back into some sort of routine, where I can update things again and such. I am always so re-energised after a holiday, so I am making the best of it, by motivating myself to do things. And those things include hitting property and job websites. I need a full time job, and a place to live. Or at least I can keep an eye on price from afar. Which leads to some progress in the situation, which makes me happy.  So as long as I keep momentum up, things may be a-changing soon.

Riot! Riot!

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

Spending another morning watching the news, feeling greatful that I live in a small town in Scotland. The riots that have gripped various parts of England. These are riots, which don’t have the expected mood of ‘normal’ riots. By this, I mean rather than protesting and shouting at police, they are burning down shops and looting on a level never seen in the UK.

The people doing the looting, are described as being young people (teenagers/ early 20s). People who seem to show a complete disregard for their surroundings. What makes people want to torch their own community, and destroy lives? The protests originally started because a young guy was shot by police in Tottenham in London. The peaceful protest that occured afterwards, was to march to the local police station. As with many peaceful protests, others appear to have hijacked the cause, and started to riot.

I don’t claim to know the ins and outs of this, but I feel the need to show my own thoughts on the situation. First off, no matter what the reasoning is behind the disturbances, they are wrong, and should never, ever be tolerated. People’s lives have been destroyed, and now people are being killed to protect their own property. I feel for the people affected, and is it mindless. The shops being targeted have ‘high value products’, like phone shops or sportswear shops. The shops are being destroyed, and some have been set fire too. With people losing businesses generations old within a matter of hours.
I do think there is a lot of issues obviously needing tackled. Yes, the government do appear to have failed to help certain areas in the UK, but is there really any reason to react in such a way, that people are scared to live in their own home. I think that there is a distinct lack of respect in communities. The problems started in my generation, where kids rights were deemed more important than the law. You couldn’t keep kids after school, because they’d miss their bus. Parents who punished their kids, could be threatened of cruelty. The boundaries that people had became blurred, as no big sense of authority was present. Police are now scared to lose their job, if they act harshly. They are the LAW INFORCERS. If you break the law, the police have every right to smack you with a baton if you act like you are endangering others.

But arresting the people responsible isn’t going to fix what are underlying issues. Over the last 10-15 years, the destruction of Youth Centres to build supermarkets and private housing has destroyed what community was left. It is happening in every city in the UK, hearts of communities teared out so that the big corporations and richer commuters move in. Why should everything representive of the people who have intruded on these communities not be destroyed? When you think about your own community, the towns and cities near you, you know of old factories, apartment blocks, community centres being flattened for new housing and supermarkets. You can understand why people are getting upset and annoyed. The poorer classes are moved out the way so that people with more money can move into their Identi-kit houses.

The housing developers are circling, to build their new estates around my town. It leaves other local things in question, as sport fields, parks and community centres look to be the site for the new developments. I can see the areas I spent my childhood being taken from the people who have lived here for generations. The local people, are being shunned for the council to make money selling of land for houses. That makes my blood boil. And this is happening on a large degree in almost every town in the UK. When you look at this way, you can maybe understand why people feel helpless. Why they want to make those who have money and what they don’t, suffer.

I in no way condone the looting, just saying that they are no different from anyone else. But if people are feeling like they are giving the people who are destroying the communities, grief, maybe it make more join in. These riots have been a long-time coming, and people are shocked at the damage being done, but not too shocked at there are disturbances occuring.

Help the people affected, make the offenders see who they have hurt, make them apologise. But, don’t mark every youth in poorer areas the same. Don’t start a class (race) war of ‘them and us’. Don’t think that this will simply go away in a few nights.

Please look after each other out there.

Kopa Real? (The Lion King Controversy )

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

So, after another immense and long discussion on the nature of Kopa, I decided I needed to say a few things about it. Kopa is a character who has become connect with Disney’s The Lion King.

Why? Well in November 1994 Grolier Enterprises, Inc. released a series of books which were a spin off from the original Lion King movie, called Six New Adventures. As you can probably gather, they were six picture/ story books which had new stories, taken from the Lion King universe. All sounds very happy. But these books conclude that the cub born at the end of the first movie, was a boy called Kopa. And Kopa is at the centre of many of the stories in the books. However, when the second movie (Simba’s Pride) kicks off, the cub born, Simba and Nala’s ONLY cub is a girl called Kiara.

These inconsistances has lead to some conspiracy theories that Kopa was killed or he went rogue and left the Pride. The inconsistances which occured with the crossover in animation between TLK and SP, has also broken any sense of continuance that was intended. For example, the end of TLK the cub is ‘shown’ at dusk, at the start of SP the cub is ‘shown’ at dawn. These inconsistances, are what have lead people to believe that there was a passing of considerable time between TLK and SP. So another cub could exist.

Why the controversy? Well a lot of Pride Landers (including myself) do not accept Kopa as part of TLK saga. Mostly because these additional characters (Kopa) were created by individual authors and were not actually produced by Walt Disney. Also, the Six New Adventures series WAS NOT sold outside of America. The reasoning behind this, is because the company that made the books were not believed to sell the trademarks outside the USA.

This is where it gets complicated.

The suspected process of the books were this, some stories were outlined by a group of authors. Grolier, the company making the books, contacted Disney to get permission to use a variety of trademarks, including characters, logos, etc. Disney would have green-lighted that Grolier could use so many trademarks. And because of this, and the rules, to get a character they could fully shape, Grolier and the authors decided to create an original character, called Kopa. They had more freedom of the stories including Kopa, and could get the storylines the wanted, whereas there would have been stricter regulations if it was cub Simba the stories where about. One of the rules on allowing a company to use some trademarks is that the agreement would be purely domestic, which means that the books could not be marketed anywhere outside the US.

This means that whilst Disney gave Grolier permission to use a number of trademarks, the actual stories were not authorised by Disney. It sounds strange, and more than a little muddy. But the stories themselves were not created by Disney, and have been denied as part of the saga by the makers of both TLK and SP movies. This leads you to believe that Kopa is not a recognised character, and therefore is non-canon, as he has no direct relation to the original material.

The inconsistency in animation are still there between TLK and SP, but this is more because of the change in budget and the people working on the films. To say that another cub had been born, had all these adventures, and just vanished makes no sense. So sorry. Kopa is a non-starter as far as I’m concerned.

Homesick

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

After all the carry on getting the art blog up and running, I have been posting over there and have inadvertently left my internet home (ie- here). I didn’t mean too, it just happened. I wanted to update something, at it was easy to update over there because of this ( http://splittingink.blogspot.com/ ).  And no matter how much I use blogger, I am always a WP lover first.

Almost sounds like a line from a bad romance novel, a really, really bad romance novel. But dammit, I am going to get back on top of things. I am going to be using the internet a lot more over the next week, mostly because I HAVE NO MONEY!! Yes, the typical aspect of internet usage, it peaks as it gets closer to payday. Coincidence, I think not.

Anyway, if you have a sec, click on the link above, to go visit Splitting Ink, a collaborative art blog I am doing with my friend Paul, and his mate Darren. It is something we are trying to do, to try and get ourselves motivated to create new things. I post on a Monday, so I will have to complete a piece of work, and write an accompanying entry, to be posted early every Monday. Should be interesting. As you are well aware, I do try to post at least once a week on here, but I hope it will start to become more frequent again.

Free Press?

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

So obviously anyone who has any idea about News and the like, would have heard about the News of the World phone hacking scandal. It really is disgusting the levels some people seem to have gone to, so that they can have exclusivity on a story or event. Kinda makes me sick. I mean, hacking into someone’s phone is wrong, something made even worse by the very idea that even death didn’t protect some people’s private information from these ‘reporters’. In a, much delayed, reaction, News Corp International, The News of The World’s owners, have decided to stop the paper. And that Sunday will be it’s last edition. Which, to be honest, is fooling nobody.

This is a level of corruption in the British press, which has been dumped on the News of the World’s door, and to be honest, it runs a lot deeper than this. This is something which has being going on for a generation of at least 30 years. Whilst dumping a 168 year old institution seems like an escape, the fact is still there that the lackies got sent to the dole queue, whilst the people who are in charge will have a job, just somewhere else. This is what happened to the banks, and every other company that has problems. Those at the top are spared, and the people who really are the face of the company get sacked.

The British public have gotten used to seeing sensationalist headlines on their tabloid newspapers, with the various publications screaming like children to get the consumer’s attention. And to stand out from that crowd, a publication must seem more ‘breaking news’ than the rest. And this need to be the loudest, is what has created this problem. It is not about opinions and views, it is about the headlines that belong in an episode of Jeremy Kyle.  Journalism has always been an area I have looked on fondly, admiring the writers who get to write their feelings, and get paid for doing so. But how much of what they write, is what they think. The Newspapers should be something where people can read discussions, and see viewpoints on two sides of the ‘fence’. This way they can make a truly educated judgement on what they believe has happened. It is a forum for opinion, and for a paper to do so, it should be adequately mixed with a variety of opinions and values. Give the reader credit, and don’t make decisions for them and say what is right and wrong.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that the Pro-Labour press are condemning Rupert Murdoch and News Corp as they prepare their take-over of BSkyB. A company which wouldn’t be where it is without Sky Television, a company partially created by Rupert Murdoch. So they lather on the abuse to News Corp, and back it up with why they should be unable to take a 100% stake in BSkyB, and the phone hacking seems to be getting used as an excuse. When, there is not a doubt in my mind, that other publications in the UK, have taken similar methods, to make sure that their paper was the one with the most breaking news.

Which is surprising when you see the volume of jibes coming from other publications in the press. Look past their ‘booing’ and ‘hissing’ for the News of the World villain, it appears to be unsettling over-done. By that I mean, they are acting almost too appalled. Almost as if they are trying to put on a front to say they are against what happened, when secretly they have employed similar illegal tactics. And they think that rejoicing the death of the News of the World puts the situation to rest. No. Every news publication in the country should be investigated, so the public can see how deep this runs. And if a paper is true and honest, they should pay for it themselves, to show that they are innocent and give the money to an independent company to investigate.

British journalism has hit a low, and it is going to take drastic action to fix things. Because, right now, the idea that we have a free press in this country is becoming a running joke.

Just To Save A Life

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

So yesterday, if you follow me on any social networking site at all, you’d have heard that I saw a cat get knocked down yesterday. I carried it off the road, onto the grass, tried to make it comfortable and phoned the SSPCA (Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals). The poor cat was dying as soon as it was hit by the car, as his head bore the brunt. As an animal lover, I was devastated, but acted automatically to make sure the cat wasn’t hit again.The cat was taken away by an SSPCA warden, at which point he was dead. Nothing could be done for the cat, and thankfully he seemed to die relatively quickly.

But what bothers me, is that as well as me, and the poor woman who hit the cat (she came back to scene), 5 other people were walking past, and none of them even looked. It was like they ignored it. Surely, a person who is nice, would at least make another creature comfortable if it was in pain. Or maybe, that’s just me. I was crying out loud, and the pool of blood on the road was evident of an accident. But people just walked past, after glancing at me and the cat, and then at the road. I would have wanted someone to sit with my cat, so that’s what I did.

I had a think about it afterwards, about how people reacted to the situation. Which if you witness, is the worst thing ever. But even to see someone in distress, and crying openly, I would stop and see if they were ok. A lady who saw the accident from my work came out, as did a girl I work with. But everyone else just ignored it. I was about 7 feet away from a bus stop, and the guy waited for his bus and watched me trying to keep the cat breathing. I felt a bit strange at that. It was like he didn’t want to be involved.

What if it was a person, or if the car had crashed, would he have helped then? I don’t think he would have. I don’t think a lot of people would have. To me it is nature, because I would always expect someone to act like that to help me. But what if they don’t? What if people just watch, like they did with the cat? I have seen it where people have fallen and hurt themselves, and it is the same, people stand and watch as one person tries to help.

As a person who values all living life in the same light, despite what type of creature it is, I struggle to understand the concept, of people not helping. I would always expect someone to help me, or any of my family or friends, and I wouldn’t dare expect that, if I wouldn’t do the same for someone else. This is also the same for animals, as I didn’t have the heart to leave that little kitten in the road to be run over by other cars. I would hope that other people would do the same. But, if I wasn’t there, then I think the cat would have lay on the road, untill the council would scrape the remains off the road the following day. If you have a pet, or know anyone who has one, you would want it to die as comfortable as possible.

If you can reason letting one animal suffer without aid, what’s saying you would not use the same excuses if it were a person? Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see why there would be a difference, and why you wouldn’t help any creature that was in pain?

Illusions of Grandeur

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I don’t have an issue with people who have self-belief, I mean, it is that belief that helps a person achieve. So to achieve something, you need to have a little bit of confidence about yourself. I have an issue with people who pull others down, to make themselves look better.

And it happens everywhere. Rather than giving someone kudos for achieving what they want, people feel the need to bring the person down by demeaning themselves to make the achievement seem less worthy. It is just a person’s need to feel superior. It is strange, because most of the time people do it without thinking. Like, it is some natural instinct. Which is not too hard to imagine, when you think that other animals try to make others look weaker, so they can get a mate, etc.  Which makes you wonder, how much of this behaviour is us acting natural.

So whilst I frown about the behaviour of a ‘put-down’, I can only really disagree with people who do it on purpose. Like, they want to make that person miserable. That is something I don’t understand, why would it make someone feel better, to make another person sad? Surely I can’t be the only person who feels like this? I mean, I don’t see where a person can draw the line. If you attack someone because they annoy you for being happy, and it makes you better to change their mood, what are you next going to do to make you feel better? Is making someone sad going to become like a thrill to you? What are you going to stop at to get that thrill?

To be honest, everyone is the same. People have good things happen and bad things. It doesn’t mean you should avenge people who have good things happen to them. Because that feeling of achievement you may get from ‘knocking someone down a peg or two’, will only be short lived, and you will hurt someone else.

So if you catch yourself trying to kill someone’s good time, stop. Because if there is one thing the world doesn’t need is someone trying to spread more negativity.

Happy July

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I feel like July should be celebrated for a few reasons.

1) It’s closer to my holidays, and much needed time off work. It feels as though the end is actually in sight. I am actually on holiday the first 2 weeks in August, and am beginning to countdown. This year I am spending another week in Blackpool, for Rebellion punk festival. It really is the highlight of my year, and I am so excited to go.

2) The weather is getting nicer. Yes, even in Scotland, the land of perma-rain, there is a notable improvement in the number of hours we get sunshine. And it isn’t the sun hiding behind a clump of grey clouds, it is blue skies and actual warmth. It’s the kind of weather where I could easily sit outside with a few beers and some good music.

3) Every month, nay every day should be welcomed with open arms. Not everyone gets to enjoy the freedoms that we do, so I feel we should take a moment and be grateful. If you do, and look at the things that make you happy, you will be a happier person as your mind will be in that mindset. So if you read this, do something that makes you happy. Yes work may suck, but do something fun outside of work that makes you smile.

You will notice that the person of the last few entries is a much happier person of past blogs. This is a mixture of reasons, one which is the nice weather. I am sure sunshine benefits everyone in that way, as it just makes everything seem so much happier in general.

I have also went into work with the idea that I will kick its ass. Basically, head down and focus on what I need to do. Basically forcing myself out of the lethargy I seemed so comfortable in. The best thing is, that I can see results, both in my productivity in work and my general attitude.

So doing what I do best and sharing, because good moods are contagious. So give in to summer, and go have yourself a wonderful first of July.

xox