I see pro-independence¹ rhetoric all the time at the moment in social media posts, which refers to “Westminster” as if it’s some sort of sinister cabal. Usually implied, if not explicit, is that Westminster is populated by “the English”, who are an army of clones that speak with one voice.

These posts often carry a good underlying message - that you should question the motives that lie behind what you read and view, and that there is ignorance and bias at work, even that there is a small elite who do not have the interests of the majority at heart - which is why good people tend to repost them.

However, I worry deeply about this sort of simplification.

It’s very much the m.o. of the Trump/Farage brigade to take a complex situation, or a disparate group of people, and turn them into cartoon plots and villains.

To take inconveniently detailed facts and distill them into a single “truth”.

Then these cartoon messages set up the simplistic notion that somehow “they” are bad, but “we” are good. “They” are all flawed and corrupt and out for their own self-gratification. “We” are competent and pure and have everyone’s best interests at heard.

NOTHING IN THIS WORLD IS THAT FUCKING SIMPLE. STOP SWALLOWING THIS SHIT, AND STOP PROPGATING IT. YOU ARE MAKING THINGS WORSE.

I believe that everything worth celebrating about humanity is universal.

It’s not tied to a particular place, a particular language, or a particular set of people.

I’ve been pretty bad at blogging any personal / political stuff recently.

There are various reasons for this, but the fact that I’ve generally been taking a break from most of my (previously quite enthusiatic) social media interaction may have something to do with it.

I have however been doing some sporadic technical blogging.

These days, those posts live over at Elegant Chaos.

Here’s the latest blog post, with an update on what I’ve been tinkering with (in between watching World Cup games… and playing Witcher 3… and various other distractions…).

When I stopped work on Sketch, one of my resolutions was to blog a bit more.

I’m not doing very well on that front!

To be fair, I’ve had a few distractions, including recently standing for election for a local trust here (unsuccessfully!). There’s also been a lot of time spent fighting fires and battling trolls on issues relating to Secularism, Sabbatarianism, and other things starting with an S. I could tell a few tales on that score, but frankly the trolls don’t deserve the oxygen of publicity, so the less said the better. Suffice to say that my faith in human nature, which wasn’t stellar to begin with, has not been improved by the last year or so on the Isle of Lewis…

On the software front, I’ve been having fun working on a few private projects. Most recently, I’ve taken tentative steps towards working on a new game. Games these days are generally massive affairs, with large budgets and multi-disciplinary teams. Having worked in the industry, I know all too well what an undertaking even a modest game would be - and in my case, at this stage, it’s just me in my office, hacking away.

I don’t know if it will go any further than that, and to be honest, right now, I’m not worried. It’s proving to be great fun, and it’s also a useful vehicle for a whole bunch of learning / catching up with new technologies, including getting my head round the best ways to use Swift.

I’ve also been working on a bunch of unrelated side projects, and mulling over ideas for more. Highlights include Swift build systems, Javascript-Block bridging, and some (still private) thoughts on long-term backup/archiving software and project management software.

Most of what I do these days is open source and available on Github.

The game is currently an exception to this, but probably won’t be forever. I just need to find a way to protect my IP (in the unlikely event that it becomes a commercial project), and probably also need to get to the stage where I’m not too embarrassed to let other people see it.

One other note on the technical front: don’t forget that I’ve moved my technical writing over to the Elegant Chaos blog. This blog will continue, but focussed on more personal musings.

Self-knowledge is an elusive beast.

By nature I’m an introvert. I don’t want to be the centre of attention, and I don’t like conflict.

Unfortunately, I’m also someone who tends to analyse stuff. I take things apart, try to figure out how they work, and to solve problems. Whether or not I really ought to doesn’t seem to matter - it just happens. Look, here I go, doing it again.