Newspeak vs. my Facebook feed

Last night I went to see a theatrical production of George Orwell's 1984, and it was pitch-perfect in the exact way that it should have been: a black-as-all-hell rendition of a state that commands absolute power, a surreal, cerebral lens of study for totalitarianism and all the awful things that come with it. It was my first time truly engaging with 1984 as an adult: I read it once when I was a teenager, when angst and rebellion were right up my alley, but in the time since then everything but the most cursory details of the plot had fallen away from my mind, thus enabling it to be thoroughly blown anew.

In a telling tale of how my priorities have shifted, the main thing I took away from 1984 this time around was not a rousing round of 'woo fuck the system', but a serious gnawing horror about the very idea of Newspeak. For those who aren't aware, in 1984 'Newspeak' is what the ruling party call the new language they are building, a severely reduced version of English that serves to reduce the population's ability to form contrary opinions by taking away their ability to vocalise them. In Newspeak, the word 'free' does not include the definition 'able to consider opinions other than those that the ruling class beams into your head'; the only meaning that the party allows it in the sense in which we might say 'this cat is free of fleas'. Semantically, we can argue for a similarity, but the characters of 1984 can't, because the alternative meaning has already been crushed out of existence.

Y'all probably know already that I'm a massive fanboy for the sheer capability of language, for the infinite amount of expression that it allows, so you can probably imagine my reaction to the idea of taking a purposefully reductionist approach to it, of chopping off bits you don't like, shaping it into  form that benefits you and you alone. It makes me goddamn mad, all the more so because it isn't just a fictional conceit; this shit happens all the time. I've been especially aware of it of late because of the recent UK Labour party's leadership election, because of poor Jeremy Corbyn, who suffered through a deluge of shit from pretty much the entirety of the UK media in order to get elected nonetheless; for the past month or two it has been pretty much impossible to swing a cat round in journalistspace without whacking it against someone who was lining up a shot at Corbyn. The spin is everywhere.

Check this out:

Notice how 'I've no interest in being part of a cabinet and have held this position for decades' becomes, with but a deft revision, 'this man would not take a job from Jeremy Corbyn'. I mean both things are ostensibly true, but one is a neutral fact that only speaks of Skinner's character, and the other is positioned to be an attack of Corbyn's legitimacy as a leader. And even that is build on the false dichotomy that there's a difference between 'working' for Corbyn, and being an MP in the Labour party. The two are one and the same, unless they can be used to make an anti-Corbyn point: then, words can only mean one thing. Newspeak, bitches.

I mean good grief. Now I'm not an out-and-out Corbyn fanboy, but the more of this sort of crap I see, the more I want him to carry on upending this system - as Skinner quite cathartically does above. It's not just the right-wing media that's on with this either; even institutions like the BBC, which I previously considered to be fairly even handed, and which you wouldn't expect to have much love for a Tory government, are getting in on this action. Even the Guardian, one of the few left-leaning media institutions I thought I could trust, was full of pieces from 'big' names like David Miliband doomsaying the prospect of a Corbyn government, for reasons that I can only assume are borne from fear of him being too liberal to win anything. And yet, as these articles were appearing, it was becoming increasingly apparent that he was going to win the shit out of that election.

And that's what gives me hope. For all the endless spin and bullshit that the media tries to pour into our ears, there are increasingly things happening that give me hope that we're not going to go the Newspeak route, that the people of the world are getting increasingly pissed off by this nonsense. There are smart people out there who won't stand for it any longer, like Dennis Skinner above, and like this dude:

Both this video and the proceeding one came from, you may be surprised to hear, my Facebook feed. Judging from some folks who I've spoken to, there's been a marked increase in recent months of reposted bullshit - namely niche, Britain First-esque nonsense like repurposed nationalist images accompanied by completely fabricated anti-immigration, anti-feminist, anti-whatever messages designed to provoke defensive, xenophobic responses. I don't know if that's true of your Facebook, but, actually, it isn't of mine! Instead, my Facebook trades in the exact opposite of this: mostly informative, progressive stuff that either satirises the aforementioned content or condemns it, pleading with the kind of people who post it to please, please, think for yourselves. Add that to stuff like the tidal wave of amusing memes that have arisen from David Cameron's pig-gate scandal, refreshingly transferring the shoe to the other foot for a change, and, well, it's good for the soul.

Of course, this isn't Facebook's own doing. But it provided the platform for all of the excellent people I know to object to all the crap that self-serving idiots would have us believe. The poor doomed characters of 1984 didn't have that. They'd lost all means by which they could object to the bullshit they were being spoon-fed; their only rebellions were petty, individualistic acts that meant nothing, and in the end they lost that too, lost the ability to do anything other than just accept it. But we don't have to do that: we have the power to look at these endless reams of bullshit and say no. We've got our language, we've got our heart, and it warms mine to see people using theirs. That, in the end, is the point of this whole post: a shout out to those who won't be having with this gentle-into-that-good-night fatalism, a big internet hug to everyone who dares to give a shit. Keep being awesome.

The Men in Hats: Several Sides of SEO (sample copy)

Once you’ve finished with the nitty-gritty of setting up your business and are ready to hit the web, you come to the next problem, a rather major one: no-one on the internet knows who you are. In order for people to start finding you, you’re going to have to figure out a way to get yourself indexed on the various search engines that people use to sift through the internet. Thankfully there’s already a field of industry that covers this niche, and that is the process of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO uses a variety of different techniques that work towards the same endgame: your website, highly ranked on Google. But! Not all of these techniques are what you might call good – they’re effective, sure, but morally, they might leave something to be desired. These techniques are known as black hat techniques, the modern wild west of the internet having appropriately absorbed the nomenclature of villainy that a man in a black hat represented in Hollywood’s classic westerns. Similarly, the better SEO techniques are known as white hat; we’ll get to them later. First, let’s meet the villains.

The Black Hat Gang

Probably the very worst thing about the gang of vagabond techniques that represent black hat SEO is how obvious they are. The most sinister offender, the ringleader of the gang, is probably keyword stuffing, the technique of shoving whatever particular word or term it is that you’re looking to pop up in search results for into a text as many times as possible. This is the text-based equivalent of when you get sent to a dodgy website to download something and are greeted by fifteen different ‘download’ buttons in various fonts and styles, each of which is poised and ready to ruin your day with popups and malware. If my keyword was keyword, then using the keyword keyword as many times as possible ends up with sentences like this one, which feature the keyword keyword so many times that the keyword keyword starts to seem like it’s haunting you, keyword. This is no use to anybody, because it makes your content look amateur and doesn’t actually help anyone who finds it. What’s the point of being the top result for ‘western metaphors in SEO’ if someone who is looking for information clicks on it and finds garbage? Well, you got a click; if that’s all you’re after, congratulations. But we can do better!

Other black hat techniques include the application of tiny, hidden text, links that don’t look like links and will, upon accidental click, send the browser off on another adventure, sneaky redirects, and the incredibly cheeky act of directly changing the content of a page once it’s been indexed!

The White Hat Sheriff

The real heroes of SEO are the ones who wear the white hats, and who outdo the black hat outlaws simply by being better than them. The true sheriff, the most important difference between black hat and white hat SEO, is a focus on user experience. Implement keywords, sure, but where they’re relevant. Focus on putting together a quality piece of content that helps the person who’s searching for those keywords; if the second best result for ‘western metaphors in SEO’ is a complex treatment of the theme, then that disgruntled user who clicked off the previous result is more likely to stick around – and time spent on a page is just as important as the initial click that gets us there. So write like a human, not like a robot that got stuck repeating keyword keyword keyword.

The search engines themselves are designed to reward this kind of content; thanks to the continued evolution of machine learning, their algorithms are getting smarter at detecting context all the time. Google can tell the difference between keyword spam and a well-written sentence, and will sort accordingly; good content goes up, bad content goes down, and the worst content might even get removed if it’s judged to be suitably unethical in its SEO applications. The Black Hat Gang will, inevitably, end up in internet jail.

The idea of user experience goes beyond the text, as well. It’s also about presentation; if your content is pleasing to the eye, it’s pleasing to the owner of that eye as well. So optimise! Design a website that looks good, reads well, and presents itself nicely on computer screens, phones, tablets; any conceivable means by which people might visit it. Then apply some of the other white hat SEO techniques: pop keywords into URLs, use keyword tails that search engines themselves suggest, curate strong, legitimate backlinks; even something as simple as having a website that loads quickly is a boon. All of these techniques, when used well, will drown out the black hats, and send your content to the top.

The Taming of the West

The web is different now to the dark days of the early 2000’s, when the black hats had an easy time of it. SEO isn’t just about language anymore; search engine results aren’t driven by how many times one can stuff variations of a keyword into a text. Nowadays, the most important difference between black hat and white hat SEO techniques is that one type has a future. Here in the dying days of the new west, the black hats are the last few cowboys, clinging to a land of lawlessness that is slowly being tamed and remade into a civilised land of quality content, with reputable locales that are linked by serviceable infrastructure and curated by good people. It might not make for as exciting movies, but at least we can find what we need!

Sonnet 17

Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?-
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And with fresh numbers number your graces,
The age to come would say ‘This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces.’
So should my papers, yellowed by their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage
And stretchèd metre of an antique song.
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice: in it, and in my rhyme.

—————

I've really rather fallen for this sonnet. As opposed to its immediate successor, Sonnet 18, it feels incredibly human and fallible. The poet is far less confident of the infinite nature of his art, or more accurately, less confident of his poetic ability to represent the beauty of his subject without invoking such dramatic hyperbole that the scholars of the future think he’s lost the plot. I know the feeling, when words don’t work. It manifests here through the rather shaky start; 'come’ and 'tomb’ is a half-rhyme at best, and there’s no damn way I can make a rhyme of 'desert’ and 'part’ without severely mangling at least one of those words. But then the poet gets it; play to the impossibility, and do the impossible:

If I could write the fortune of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say 'This poet lies,
Such heavenly touches ne'er graced earthly faces’.

Even if I could tell the tale of your beauty, says the poet, it wouldn't matter, because I’d get called a hack for it anyway. This subtle jab against the very nature of the romantic sonnet, which is reiterated in the hilariously self aware 'stretchèd metre of an antique song’ at line 12, is Shakespeare at his most deconstructive, and a wonderful precursor to Sonnet 18, when he takes umbrage against the very nature of a summer’s day as a rubbish thing to compare such beauty against. But it’s also heartbreakingly romantic in how it pierces through to the very core of affection, and both laments and celebrates how the curious nature of love individualises our opinions of its targets in ways only we can see. The author tried to leave this note for the world, to mark his love, to save a portion of his subject’s beauty, and ultimately he doesn't seem to care very much whether anyone believes him or not.

Of course the point of this sonnet is a procreation sonnet, which is why the closing couplet turns towards 'have a baby, nudge nudge’ like its precursors. I'm not a big fan of this part of the sequence, as I honestly just think it’s kinda weird, but it doesn't faze me in this sonnet because, whatever the poet might have intended when he started Sonnet 17, the nature of procreation ends up as an afterthought, displaced by rising senses of affection and a preoccupation with survival through verse that leads us very nicely into Sonnet 18, and a'swinging off from there. 17 is ultimately a turn-point, a pivot, but that doesn't make it any less than what came before, and what will yet follow after.

So we've got romance, transitioning themes and deconstruction. No wonder I was so inclined to write about this rhyme.

Building English, one adjectivised medical condition at a time

Today I'm concerned about the word 'halitosical’, which basically means ‘of the nature of a breath condition’. Or at least, that’s what I’m deciding it means. It’s basically the adjective form of 'bad breath’ that doesn't officially exist - by which I mean, it’s not in the Oxford English Dictionary, a fairly solid resource for words that are real and words that are kblupt.

Just to be fair, though, I googled 'halitosical definition’, and got three results. That was thrilling enough in its own right for being such a rare combination of words to not even generate a full page of results, but the real point of this was that none of those results I did get were definitions, from the OED or otherwise. This doesn't change the fact, though, that if you search for 'halitosical’ on its own you get 66 results of people who have used this word, in defiant ignorance of the fact that it doesn't actually exist.

Anyway, I joined the halitosical party (which would be the worst party ever) because I needed the aforementioned adjectival form for my book, and it was either that or 'bad breathy’. The only other option that OED does have an entry for is 'halituous’, but since said word only takes the Latin root 'halitus’, for breath, and omits the suffix 'osis’ that denotes the medical condition aspect, 'halituous’ only means 'of the nature of breath/vapour’, and so wasn't quite sufficient.

Basically what this all means is that I've discovered myself to be part of a small group of people who have thought fuck it, bent the language to their will and made a new word happen when they needed it. I'm a witness to a live change to the English language, and it’s pretty cool. A prescriptivist like the person I raged at on Facebook last week when she sniped at people for daring to use non-standard English in conversation would probably be reloading their shotgun right now, but fuck 'em; this is what our language is - effervescent, constantly in flux, changing to the needs of the speaker - and I wouldn't take it any other way.

“Swelled with the potency of potential agency, Marcus found that he just couldn’t quite bring himself to go along with letting this halitosical hustler nick his stuff.”

P.S, or more aptly, Note-to-self: In delving the etymology of 'halitosis’ I've also discovered that a more apt translation into layman’s English would be 'breath condition’, not 'bad’ breath’ as I've always considered it. The more you know.

In the Fog

Today was our second day proper in Fort William, and rather than lounge around and do nothing to the best of our ability as we did yesterday, today I wanted to go climb some mountains. So I chivvied Jen out of bed and then lay around playing Pokemon for a while before we collectively got our act together and managed to exit the hotel. Doing so is hard work when you know that you're at least a mile of loch and B&B scenery away from what scant facade of civilisation Fort William offers, but we made it. Walking through the pitch blackness with all our luggage and no true idea where we were going was much less fun than taking a pleasant stroll into town, though I can't quite place why that would be.

Our hotel is an old, rambling building that seems to only have three members of staff, two of which are almost disarmingly eager to please their guests. I don't know if they're just a bit too intense for my liking or if they just don't have much to do since the tourist season is pretty much dust, but for whatever reason it can be kind of unnerving. They're also remarkably ill-informed about bus and walking routes involving the huge mountain that is pretty much the only reason that people would come to this place, but they're trying their best. Alistair, the dude who runs reception most of the time, did clue us in as to the gondola ride at Nevis Range, which sounded like a feasible alternative to my 'lets walk up Ben Nevis' plan that Jen enthusiastically vetoed, and so we set out today with intent to make our way there.

Fort William has a high street, which came as quite a remarkable sight after three months on Harris. That is pretty much all that it has, though, aside from a small standing army of hotels and B&Bs, so we didn't spend much time in town itself, stopping only by the travel centre to find out where and when to catch the bus to the Range, and at Morrisons to buy some tasty snacks for our miniature adventure. The bus itself was cheap in comparison to the Hebridean bus services, which were pretty pricey but admittedly had to cover a much greater distance. Instead of an hour of mountains and lakes, we were treated to ten minutes of trees before being dropped off at the visitor centre. Here it was quick and easy to buy tickets and leap aboard a gondola.

On the way up I was irresistibly reminded of what Dad would say in such a situation, something like 'we'll be fine, only nine people died on this gondola last month'. The elder couple we were sharing our ride up with took this all pretty well and even joined in with my increasingly dark predictions for what we'd find at the top. This all took on a rather ominous tone as we ascended into the clouds, and the gondola station at the top was but an indistinct looming shape ahead of us, but in the end we neither found ourselves attacked by mountaineering zombies nor accidentally ascended up to Heaven.

At the summit, the views were nonexistent, as the thick cloud cover engulfed everything, leaving a space of only about twenty metres in every direction where we could see. Though this meant we couldn't get any pictures, as someone who's climbed mountains and oohed and aahed over the view plenty of times, I actually found the change quite refreshing, the feeling of being amongst the clouds pleasingly alien. Looking out from the viewpoint into the thick bank of fog, which offered occasional glimpses of the world beyond, I was reminded of the various city in the sky myths, as well as the Northern Lights - you know, strange things in the sky that can only be glimpsed at certain times, shrouded from sight of the common man.

That was about it as far as mountaineering went for the day, so we took a more sedate gondola ride back down and hung out in the cafe, waiting for our bus. In due course we discovered that the nasty lady at the travel centre had in fact lied about the time when the last bus came by, and we'd missed it. Luckily, we were able to entreat the kindness of a couple of holidaying Londoners for a ride back into town.

Since Fort William had failed to metamorphose into an interesting place with lots of stuff to do whilst we'd been away, we stopped off for some food before heading home. At the bar place thingy that we stopped at, we finally took the opportunity to try out this haggis stuff, which was alright. I think in having unconsciously avoided eating it for so long I'd pedestalised it to some extent, and it didn't live it to whatever preconceptions I'd build up around it, but still, it was nice enough. I'd eat it again. Unless there was something more interesting on the menu.

So, that brings us back to the hotel, where I decided that I was going to finish writing my post about Harris and then start that blog I'd been thinking about for a while. Hi!

Here be dragons.

Leaving Harris

This post finds me in sad spirits. Though as I speak our ferry is pulling up to Skye, and we embark on the first leg of a whole new adventure, it’s an adventure that will ultimately be the opposite of the one we return from. Three months ago we left behind everything we knew and the passive disdain for it of which we were so well acquainted, and went on a brand new adventure to a brand new place to meet brand new people. Now, though we embark upon distractions en route, we are returning to what we already know of. This time, there’s no aura of mystery.

So anyway, I thought it was about time I got myself a personal travel blog, rather than just guest-editing on Jen's from time to time, because we do have different interests and different ways of looking at things, and expression requires room to breathe. Hence we are here, myself poised to write of the Outer Hebrides, y'all hopefully poised to read of them.

Tarbert from on high, looking towards South Harris and Skye.

The problem with goodbyes, for me at least, is that often the true impact of the departure does not hit until you've already gone, and so it’s only now that Harris is a lumpy sprawl on the horizon that I appreciate how much I enjoyed my time there. For someone who arrived sick of city life, it was a highly refreshing breath of fresh air. No longer are houses stacked up against each other like the unholy brickwork of a patchwork city; construction makes the most of the space, with towns of any size being a remarkable rarity. I am reminded somewhat of Edmonton’s natural urban sprawl, unconstrained by such things as green belts that confine and contribute to the claustrophobic nature of many English cities, but to a lesser extent. Ironically, both Alberta and Harris, for all their quite notable size differences, share the same trait of having more than enough land in comparison to the total population.

The Hebrides, and to an extent the Highlands as well, are very sparsely populated. The most notable result of this is that in a place where a (comparatively) large amount of people gather, everybody knows everybody, and a lot of the people are related as well. For good or ill this means that there’s little that goes on without everybody finding out about it, thus breeding a very small-town feel that is, well, it’s pretty understandable really given that Tarbert is indeed a small town.

Quickly moving on from that rather tragically formed sentence, I’d have to say that I much preferred this particular small-town feel to the one I got living and working in Sandiacre for many years. Maybe it’s because I was the perennial outsider, or maybe I just liked the people more. Who can tell. That’s not to say that island fever doesn’t set in from time to time, because it does and it’s driven us all mad. Island fever is what I came to call the strange, listless pressure that comes from having very little personal distance, both from the workplace (which was one of the few nearby places to hang out in our off time) and from other people, and puts everyone a bit on edge and is a terribly effective means of deftly conjuring drama from the air and throwing it about inconsequentially.

Another fuel source for this listlessness is that, as implied above, there’s not a lot to do in one’s off-time in Harris. There’s plenty of scenery to gorge oneself on, but since neither Jen nor I are currently drivers we were slaves to the rather lackadaisical island bus service, which is faulted only in its doing as every other bus service in the world does, and running only as needed. On Harris, buses aren't need that much, except for school runs, and so they run infrequently and not very late. It makes sense but it still kinda sucks. Without that we’re limited to what’s available in Tarbert, which is for the most part either a) drink at the Mote or b) drink at the Inn. Even Stornoway, the closest thing to a city that you’ll find on the islands, has very little going on when the latest you can stick around is 5:30pm.

This is probably unfair. Jen and I arrived quite late into the tourist season and only really had a solid month of summer in Tarbert. During that time there was quite a bit going on, such as bi-weekly craft fairs, frequent live music and various summer festival events. Sunday was the only exception; the people of the islands are very strict in their observance of the Sabbath, especially on Scalpay, where washing your car or leaving your laundry on the line would be met with the modern social equivalent of fire and brimstone. I'm not sure exactly who these ‘people’ are, as for the most part I only met a bunch of old dudes who escaped Scalpay every morning for a few whiskeys at the bar, or the younger generation who didn't seem to give much of a damn anyway, but well, I guess the folks who are real serious about it aren't the type to pop down the Mote and wag their fingers at everyone present.

After August, and the passing of the season, every day came to seem a lot like Sundays, as Harris folded up and went into hibernation and we all started going crazy with lost listlessness. Ironically I even had trouble focusing on one of the things I could spend my time on, my coursework, as a result of this, although alternatively that could just be me being a lazy fuck. But, well, wasn't the point of escaping to the Hebrides to avoid doing all that rushing around? Whilst occasionally frustrating, it was always pleasant to be free of responsibilities beyond ‘go to work’. The management put us up for free in their staff housing, which was pleasingly vintage, and even supplied us with free bags of money for the remarkably steampunk coin-operated electric meter in the closet. We also got free food of various qualities that ran all the way from deep-fried beef burger to home-cooked curry depending on a variety of factors from how exhausted the chefs were and how many mouths they had to feed. I mean no disrespect for those guys, who battled their way through some of the most demoralizingly overbearing working conditions I've ever seen in pursuit of that much-vaunted 4 star standard, after having done that for fourteen straight hours it’s tough to feel inventive.

So yes we lived free of the consequence and endless monthly cycle of bills and pain that modern life brings, and that was pretty neat, but after a while I came to miss civilisation, if only for the many distractions it offers. We didn't even get reliable internet at home, which made internet procrastination so much effort that it was often easier to get on with what we were supposed to be doing instead. Surely something’s up there.

Oh yes geography. So here’s the interesting thing about Harris, and Lewis. These two islands are actually one island, separated by mountains rather than water. Their geography differs, though; Harris is treacherously mountainous, whereas in Lewis crags give way to rolling hills. Presumably that’s why Lewis is the more settled, and contains the vast bulk of the population; better land for farming. It’s not without its dramatic wildernesses, though, as we discovered when we took a ride with Vanessa and Murdo to a secret beach, where massive pounding waves and a boisterous, take-no-shit sea wind were hard at work making the Hebrides that little bit smaller. Staring out over the Atlantic storm with desolation all around, it’s hard to escape the feeling that these islands really are the end of the world.

You should go.

We did this a lot. Vanessa is a loser.

These guys were assholes.

This is Vanessa. She's a legend.

This also passed the time.

Harris has a lot of wind and a remarkably tolerant approach towards the idea of wind farms amongst its populace.

The Lewis Chessmen are a famous relic of ancient civilisation on the islands. This guy needed a hug.

The finest raging desolation.

This is Rolo. He was the first friend we made on Harris, joining us on a wilderness exploration adventure on our second day.

Also, there are beaches. Ridiculously fantastic equatorial beaches with diamond dust water.

Stornoway, administrative capital of the islands. Big enough to have a Tesco.

Sunset over Scalpay. Watch out for pandas.

No playing on Sundays. Not on my island!

Bye bye, Outer Hebrides.