Fantasy Personalities

We spend our entire lives being told that 'it's what's inside that counts' and that who you are inside is the 'real you'.

I think this is complete and utter horseshit.

At best, the person you are 'inside' is the person you want to be. The way you act and the way you behave is the 'real you'.

To put this in an overly cynical way, the world is only interested in what it can get from you. It doesn't matter if you have the heart of a saint and the best intentions in the world if you never act on them.

Basically, if you act like a good, caring person, you are a good, caring person. If you act like an asshole, you're an asshole, plain and simple.

For example, let's say one of your co-workers gets a phonecall that a family member has been in an accident and needs someone to cover so they can go to the hospital. If you volunteer to cover, that means you're pulling a 14 hour day.

Who is the real nice guy? The person who actually volunteers to stay, or the person who keeps quiet but is full of sympathy and feels really, really bad about not volunteering?

The person who kept quiet is sitting there thinking "If everyone knew how bad I feel about this, they'd know what a nice guy I am."... but the truth is, you're really not a nice guy... because when someone was really in need, you decided you'd rather go home at your regular time than work a few extra hours to help them out.

The nice guy is the guy pulling the extra 6 hours to help someone out. It's what you do, not what you think.

Basically, who you are inside is the fantasy, ideal version of yourself. The person who's always willing to help, the person who'll step up to defend a stranger...but if you don't act on it, it's a fantasy.

The 'real you' is the person you are, not the person you want to be.

To shop or not to shop...

So, after a couple of successful photoshoots for work, my boss (technically my Boss's boss) casually mentioned to me that the whole UK division of the company could use 'standard, professional pictures'.

The words 'train journey'' and 'visiting offices' were mentioned...and that maybe I should start bringing my camera gear into work every other week for the corporate inductions.

I laughed and asked where to send my invoice.

At first, my Boss thought I was joking. I explained that I wasn't. His point of view was that I'd be taking pictures during work time, so I was getting paid. I pointed out that that would be fine, if my job started when I set up my gear, and ended when I clicked the shutter.

Without going into details. my most recent shoot was around 25 people, which meant about 150 actual images on my memory card. After sorting, cropping, color correcting and a basic retouch job, I was looking at around 8 hours of my own time to edit the images.

Then the question was asked: Why do I need to do all that? These are corporate headshots, so why would I photoshop them?

My other Boss was beside himself. Why edit anything? The pictures should look exactly like the person, not an 'idealised version' of them. Photoshop is 'cheating' anyway.

I sighed inwardly. It was time for the Photoshop debate.

Here's the deal. A camera lens and the human eye are not the same thing. For one, the human eye is a lot more sensitive than a camera and, secondly, it has a lot more dynamic range (take a picture of a window from inside a room during the day. Either the window will be blown out white, or in inside of the room will appear much darker than it actually is.)

When I edit an image, my goal isn't to change the person in the image, it's to make the image closer to what the human eye actually sees.

For example, if I'm taking a portrait, more often than not, I'm lighting it with a couple of flashes. Flashes are really bright. A flash puts out approximately 1.4 million lumens in a split second. For comparison, a 60 watt light bulb puts out about 800 lumens.

If you were lit by nearly 2000 lightbulbs, how would your skin look?

Then we have the dynamic range to consider. For example, one of the women I was shooting had pale skin and really dark hair. My camera shat a brick. If I expose to get her skin tone right, her hair will look like a featureless black blob. If I expose to get the hair to look right, her face is going to be a big white void with a set of eyebrows.

(Yeah, I know, I could fix that with my lighting setup, but I had 2 minutes to set up in a small meeting room...I had a couple of speedlights with shoot-through umbrellas)

So I can either split the difference and hand her a crappy looking picture with an over exposed face and underexposed hair, or I can shoot in RAW and use lightroom to balance it all out and a got a shot of what she actually looks like.

Then we have white balance to consider. Sunlight is blue. Incandescent lights are orange. Florescent lights are green. Your eyes automatically adjust for you so everything looks 'normal', but cameras aren't great at this. If you have a mix of different coloured lights, it can be a nightmare.

Finally, there are the actual changes, when you actually 'alter reality', so to speak...but I don't see the problem with this if it's not overdone.

My philosophy (at least for corporate headshots) is 'here today, gone tomorrow'. If something is permanent, it stays. If it's temporary, I'll remove it.

For example, one young lady walked into the room looking like thunder, I asked her what was wrong and she just pointed to a huge spot right in the middle of her forehead and said 'typical.' She didn't have acne, she was just unlucky enough to wake up with a huge zit on picture day.

"Don't worry," I said, "Photoshop."

She suddenly looked a lot happier, and I removed the zit in post. After all, why should I immortalise a spot that will be gone in a couple of days on a picture she'll probably be using for five years?

On the other hand, one of the guys had a very prominent mole on his cheek. That was there for life, not just a few days...so it's still in the picture.

I find the idea that this is 'cheating' to be a little bizarre. Most people who turned up to get their picture taken had obviously made more of an effort to look nice. Plenty of ladies who usually turn up to work with their hair in a ponytail and no makeup arrived looking like they were dressed for a first date. Guys who usually turned up in wrinkled shirts turned up in full suits.

If it's wrong for me to remove a zit, should I have forced everyone to wear their normal work clothes and wash off their makeup?

That's what editing is, and that's why I do it, and why it's necessary.

Losing weight.

I've been overweight for the majority of my life. No, scratch that... I've been fat for the majority of my life.

I think I'm almost unique in admitting this, but I'm fat because I don't exercise enough and eat like an idiot. My relationship with food has always been simple: It tastes nice, I like it, so I'm going to eat it. I very rarely give any thought to what's actually in the things I eat or how unhealthy they are...because who wants to eat a salad when you can have a double bacon cheeseburger?

However, I do have limits. Every so often I'll catch myself in a mirror and realise that I've gone past 'chubby' and straight into 'heart attack before 40' territory. That's when I decide to lose weight to get down to a healthy level...and I've never had a problem doing this.

For example, Christmas was one of those times, and since December 26th, I've lost a steady 3-4 lbs a week.

Here's the big secret: Losing weight is not complicated. It's the simplest thing on the planet. If I wrote my own diet book, it would be a single sentence: Eat less calories than you burn.

That's it. It's simple physics.

A calorie is a measurement of energy. Food is fuel that contains energy. Any energy you don't expend is stored by your body as fat. If you burn more energy than you eat, your body is going to use that stored fat as fuel.

So, if you burn 2000 calories a day and eat 2500, you're going to gain weight. If you burn 2000 calories a day and eat 1500, you're going to lose weight. It's that simple. You can keep your 'good carbs' and 'bad carbs' and 'metabolism boosting foods'...that's all bullshit. Follow that rule and it's physically impossible not to lose weight.

But if it's so simple, why are there all these people on TV claiming that if you eat a slice of grapefruit before every meal, the 'special enzymes' will burn the fat...or that you can eat as much as you like as long as you avoid dairy or wheat or whatever?

I'll tell you why. Because losing weight is difficult. It means getting off the couch and going for a run, or giving up foods you like and, god forbid, actually being hungry once in a while.

As a species, we don't like difficult...and we prefer a comforting lie over an uncomfortable truth.

It doesn't matter how ridiculous or nonsensical a diet is, if it's easy, people will jump on it like a pack of dogs on a three-legged cat. It's like the 'save the children' facebook petitions. It's a way to feel like you're doing something while not doing anything.

We want to lose weight, and we get the feeling of accomplishment from buying the exercise video and diet book, rather than actually exercising or dieting.  

You see, the problem with the diet industry is that it's just that, an industry. It's a business, and the purpose of a business is to make money. It's not about making you thinner and more healthy, it's about keeping you spending.

If there was a quick, simple and easy way to lose weight, there wouldn't be a diet industry. There wouldn't be a need for it. If you really could lose weight by eating a slice of grapefruit before every meal, everyone would do that and wouldn't need all the different books and exercise plans and overly complicated, pseudo-scientific bullshit.

Now, I'm not saying it's some big conspiracy to keep you fat, the diet industry just follows the same rules that any business follows to get and keep customers.

For example, it takes approximately 10,000 hours practice to master any musical instrument, but how many times have you seen books and videos advertised claiming that you can learn the piano or guitar in just 10 easy lessons? The first step in selling anything is to over-promise.

Does any of that sound familiar? How many infomercials have you seen where some super-fit 'health guru' has claimed you can get washboard abs in just 15 minutes a day, or drop a dress size while still eating whatever you want?

Why do they do this? Because 'Washboard abs in 15 minutes a day' sells a lot better than 'washboard abs in about 6 months if you're already in decent shape and spend 3 hours a day at the gym'

It begs the question, if you can get an athelete's physique is just 15 minutes a day with one piece of exercise equipment, why do all the real athletes spend 8 hours a day training?

Over-promising gets you in the door. Then you're given a little bit of success.

If you start any diet when you're significantly overweight, you're going to lose weight in the beginning... If you're 350lbs, you can burn 200 calories by walking a half mile for the simple reason you're carrying so much weight around (the same way a 150lb athlete will burn more calories by carrying a 200lb rucksack)...you're also putting in the effort to eat healthier...but once the novelty wears off and you fall back into your old habits, andyou can follow that fad diet all you like, you're not going to lose an ounce

Then to keep you, they make simple things seem complicated.

The diet obviously isn't going to work, so now they start talking about genetics and metabolism and body-chemistry. It's not that you're not losing weight because you're still eating too much and not exercising enough...it's for lots of extremely complicated scientific reasons... in fact, it's just about impossible for you to ever lose weight... unless, of course, you go on our advanced diet which is personalised for you and takes your specific body chemistry into account.

Finally, they pull the switch and put you right back to square one.

So the super-mega cheeseburger diet didn't work for you. Obviously it's not your fault, it's your genetics or your metabolism or whatever. It's a good job Doctor Asshat of the totally non-fictional Asshat Institute has discovered and totally new way to lose weight! Never mind a slice of grapefruit, it turns out that if you activate the amino-acids in cheesecake with the fat burning, metabolism boosting enzymes in our specially over-priced yoghurt, you can literally eat whatever you want... but first we need to analyse your genes, so buy this book and video that explains it all, and you too can be slim in weeks!

Long story short, it's all horseshit. You can lose weight in one of two ways: Eat less, exercise more...or better yet, a combination of the two.

Saying you can't lose weight by burning more calories than you eat is like saying your car can't run out of gas no matter how little fuel you put in and how far you drive. However, every day I run into a dieting 'expert' that tells me I'm doing it all wrong.

Let me explain something. If you've been dieting for 20 years and are still overweight, that makes you a failure... not an expert.I don't care how many books you've read, how many videos you've watched, I don't take financial advice from someone £50,000 in the hole, so I'm not taking dieting advice from someone who's morbidly obese.

Here's my diet 'plan': I don't eat breakfast. I never have. I'm not hungry when I wake up and eating before noon makes me feel physically sick. So I'm not going to eat anything. Then, for lunch, I have whatever I want as long as it's less than 300 calories. This is perfect for me. It's the right amount of food to stop me being hungry until dinner. Then, for dinner, I allow myself up to 900 calories. That's a nice big meal... and then after dinner, I don't snack or eat anything.

That's 1200 calories a day, the minimum recommended by actual doctors (That's people with PhD's, not a certificate from a dodgy website and a daytime talk-show) so you can lose weight and get adequate nutrition.

But then...on a regular basis, someone will notice I'm losing weight and ask what my 'secret' is. Then comes the bullshit:

I should never skip breakfast because that 'kick-starts' your metabolism. The large pretzel I had for lunch that day is all bad carbs and gluten. My dinner is too big and should be spread over the day...and stopping eating at 6pm is all wrong because you should eat every 2 hours.

Excuse me? I've lost more weight in the last month than you've lost in 10 years... and you're going to sit there with a straight face and tell me I'm doing it wrong? Doesn't the fact you've got 30 different diet books on your shelf tell you that they just might not, you know, work?

Once again, losing weight is hard, but it's not complicated. Eat less calories than you burn.


 

The Friendzone

Ok, it’s become a bit of a meme, and it’s starting to piss me off...so I’m just gonna come out and say it:

There is no such thing as ‘The Friendzone’. It is impossible to be put there, and it’s impossible to be trapped there.

When you say you’re stuck in the friendzone, what you’re really saying is this:

There’s this girl I like, but I’m way too much of a pussy to tell her I like her or make any sort of move. So, what I’ll do is actively hide my feelings from her while generally just hanging around in the hope one day she’ll fall in love with me and make the first move, despite me showing no romantic interest in her whatsoever... then, one day, when some other guy asks her out and she says yes, I’ll bitch and whine about how nice guys finish last and how girls are only interested in jerks.

Ok, guys, here’s a tip.

Women don’t like jerks. They don’t like douchebags or assholes. What they do like is alpha-males who will take charge once in a while. What women don’t like are passive, doormat yes-men.

I know, you’re calling bullshit on that (probably some women too), but that’s only because I used the term ‘Alpha-male’ and that’s come to mean ‘self-obsessed frat boy douchebag’.

Trust me, you can be an Alpha Male, without being a douchebag. 

Ladies, what do you find more attractive:

Valentine’s Day is coming up, your boyfriend:

              A)     Asks you what gift you want, then buys you that gift. Asks you where you’d like to go to eat, then takes you to that restaurant. If you ask him what he’d like to do, he shrugs and says “I don’t know, whatever you want to do.”

             B)      Turns up at your house and tells you to pack a bag because he’s taking you to Paris for the weekend. He’s already called your boss and arranged for the time off. He’s booked the hotel, a table at a restaurant he heard about online and arranged a tour to show you all the sights Paris has to offer.

Paris, right? 

He’s acting like an Alpha. He’s being confident and taking charge. He’s being exciting. You know what’s not exciting? A guy who does whatever you want, whenever you want and will never make a decision without your approval because he’s too shit scared to upset you.

The friendzone makes no goddamn sense, because the way you escape it is to walk up to your crush and ask them out on a date. You just grow a set of balls, look them in the eye and say “I really like you, I want to be more than friends.”

I know, I know, but you can’t tell her you like her because she means so much to you. If I ask her out and she says no, it’ll ruin our friendship, and I love her so much, I’d rather have her in my life as a friend than not at all.

Step one? Horseshit. Step two? Grow the fuck up.

Here’s the thing, your perfect little princess? She isn’t. She’s a human fucking being and human beingss have flaws. You know that picture in your head of you living in blissful happiness for the rest of your lives? That’s never going to happen...because if you’d ever spent any time in a real relationship, you’d discover that relationships are hard.

Let me explain something. I love my wife as much as it’s possible for one sentient being to love another. I moved halfway around the world twice to be with her. We’ve been though shit together that would have most couples running for the hills. I would take a bullet for her without hesitation and would walk through hell every day to protect her... and you know what? Some days she annoys the shit out of me. There have been days when I’ve actually given thought to where I’m going to hide her body when I beat her to death with a lawn chair...and you know what else? She’s probably fantasised about killing me in my sleep.

You know why? Because we’re people...and because we’re people we have personality quirks and habits that drive the other person crazy. That’s called being in a relationship.

But yeah, I’m married and cynical, and I have no idea what true love really is. So, let’s imagine for a second that you’re not living in a deluded fantasy world where you’re projecting your image of the perfect woman onto a normal human being, and that I’m completely wrong.

Think about what you’re saying.

This is a person that you’re truly in love with, who is the world’s most perfect human being who has ever lived...and you’re willing to risk absolutely nothing to be with her. 

Let’s say you don’t ask her out, there are two possible scenarios:

Scenario 1 : Eventually, she falls in love with you and you end up together: Great, glad that worked out. Good job you didn’t waste years of your life keeping your feelings secret, right? I mean, think about all that fun you would have missed being alone and miserable,  listening to her complain about all those guys she had sex with while you were washing her car and picking up her dry cleaning!

Scenario 2: You live out the rest of your lives with her having no idea that you’re actually interested in her as anything but a friend. Hey, but at least when you watch the love of your life walk down the aisle with another man and move onto a whole new life without you in it...you can assuage the crippling loneliness by reminding yourself that, five years ago, when she actually had time for you, you didn’t ruin your friendship

Now let’s imagine you do ask her out. Again, there’s two possible scenarios.

Scenario 1 : She says yes. No further explanation needed.

Secnario 2: She says no. It hurts like hell for a while, but then you move on, meet someone else...only this time, you ask them out before you build an unrealistic fantasy around them. You have a real relationship and slowly come to realise that you didn’t really know the girl you were so in love with and laugh about how obsessed you were. Even if you are still convinced that girl was the love of your life...at least you know you tried.

There is no such thing as the Friendzone. Only being a completely passive coward with unrealistic expectations.

Grow a pair and ask her out

Breaking my silence with a rant.

About 15 years ago, I got a call from my Uncle asking if I could build a PC for my cousin.

This was a bit surprising because I’d built him a PC about a year earlier and I’d made everything absolutely top of the line. He had a PC that was still fairly high end...and I knew for a fact he’d barely touched it in the entire time he had it.

So I asked my Uncle why he needed a new PC.

“Well, his friend has got one of those with the fancy case with all the lights and stuff, so he wants one like that. Can you do it?”

My answer was simple. 

No. Not just no, but fuck no.

First of all was the small matter that this was a family member who decided because I ‘liked computers’, I just fucking loved doing completely free tech support. (I’d spent entire days in the past scrubbing viruses off their family machine because the virus scanner I installed “wouldn’t let him go to this music site he liked” and didn’t get so much as a fucking coffee while I was working)... and I was fucked if I was going to spend a few hours modding a case for a PC he never fucking used.

Sadly, I didn’t realise it at the time, but this was the beginning of a trend.

You see, in those days, PC’s were big beige boxes. My main machine was a big beige box. I didn’t (and still don’t) give a fuck how ‘cool’ a machine looks as long the hardware is good. I’d rather have a V8 than a 2-stroke no matter how crappy the bodywork looks.

Then Steve fucking Jobs came along.

Prepare the nerd-rage because I’m going to say something controversial:

Steve Jobs was not an innovator. He wasn’t a visionary. What he was, was a marketing genius.

MP3 players existed long before the iPod, touch screens existed before the iPhone. In his entire career, he didn’t invent anything new...he just repackaged existing technology and made it ‘cool’

You know what his best idea was? Making iPod headphones white.

You see, all headphones before that tended to be black... so you put on a set of white headphones and your music player stops being a music player...it becomes a fashion accessory. You no longer have an mp3 player, you have an iPod, and that’s what all the cool kids have.

His next best idea? Bringing out a new version every 3 months.

It used to be pretty simple. You bought your gadget and used it until you needed to upgrade. I bought a new mp3 player when my music collection outgrew my storage space. I upgraded my PC when it couldn’t run new games any more.

Now? You buy the next iPhone because, despite the fact there’s almost no actual improvement in the new one, and your current one works just fine, being seen with last month’s iPhone is like being seen in last season’s fashions.

Of course, there’s always some new buzz-word. For example, a friend of mine gushed for an hour because his new macbook had a ‘Retina’ display.

Let me let you in on a little secret. There is no such thing as a ‘Retina’ display. It’s a fucking marketing term. Sorry to bore you with technical details (why would you be interested in technical details when buying a fucking computer), but your fancy ‘retina display’ means you macbook pro has a standard monitor that has 2800x1800 resolution.

You know what else has that? My fucking laptop...that cost about $500 less than your macbook, and has more memory, more hard drive space, a faster processor and a better graphics chipset.

Saying your Macbook is awesome because it has a Retina display is like me saying my toaster is better than yours because it has new Electromax Plasma Transmission Exothermic Technology (tm). That means electricity runs along wires that heat up. Does your toaster use Electromax technology? Fuck you.

Now don’t get me wrong, Macs are pretty slick machines. I actually like them... but I’m an IT guy and I know what’s inside the fucking things, and what it boils down to is that 40% of what you’re paying for is that big glowing apple on the back.

The saddest part? Apple have convinced you that you need this shit.

For example, A Nexus 10 tablet will cost you around £250 versus $300-£400 for the Apple tablet, and they’re almost identical in terms of specs...but  to take the piss even more, you can pay just double the amount and now you can buy the ‘iPad Air’ for over £500.

It’s got to be worth it, right? I mean, it so much thinner and lighter that the iPad 4!

Wrong. It’s a whole 180 grams lighter (about the weight of a large bag of potato chips), and it’s a massive 1.9mm thinner! That’s almost 7 one hundredths of an inch! That’s worth the extra £150, right?

Of course, the point is, when was the last time you were holding your iPad and thought “Wow, this thing is much too thick... and that extra 0.3 of a pound is really making my arms hurt.” 

I’ll tell you when...never...but they’re flying off the shelves and they’re selling for one reason. So you can pull it out of your bag, look down your nose at someone and say “Oh, you’ve only got the iPad 4, huh? I’ve got the iPad Air, it’s sooo much better.”

People are idiots. You know fuck all about technology, you don’t even know what a gigabyte is, but you’ll still spend ridiculous amounts of money because the man on TV told you to...and you’d rather have a shitty piece of technology with a glowing fruit on the back that a good bit of tech that doesn’t.

The funny thing is, I recently upgraded my phone, and I looked around for the best phone, not the most fashionable. I settled on the Sony Xperia Z1, and had a co-worker look at it, smirk and ask why I couldn’t afford an iPhone.

Actually, I could afford an iPhone.

Instead I got the phone with the better screen (441 pixels per inch vs the326), twice as much RAM, a far better processor (2.2ghz quad core versus 1.3ghz dual core), far better camera (20MP f2.0 vs 8MP f2.3) and far better battery (standby time of 35 days vs 10). Oh, and the Android OS that lets me put whatever the fuck I want onto my phone without having to invalidate my warranty by rooting it.

Both of these phones cost roughly the same price, but the Z1 is objectively better. In fact it’s twice as good as the iPhone 5 in almost every respect... but I have to put up with fucking idiots calling it the ‘poor man’s iphone’ because it doesn’t have a picture of a piece of fucking fruit on it.

Apple is not a ‘movement’, it’s not a community. It’s a company selling you goods. Reward the company that gives you the best product for the cheapest price, not because everyone else is wearing white headphones.