The Activities of the Lively

Bonjour à tous!

Which is apparently French for “Hello everyone” . . . anyways.

Initially this thought struck my mind while walking home today, it was only until later in the afternoon that thought traveled back into my thoughts, whilst waiting for a video to render. [I’ve been the ‘editor person’ for a school news show, imaginatively named “NeWs!” that’s the video that what was rendering]

As I sat there watching the progress bar slowly sliding along at a pace of a nanometre an hour, I began to recall previous comments I’d received during the day.

Comments that involved the statement, “You don’t have a life,” and of course the main dish (the question), “So all you do when you get home is go on the computer?”

 

I find it rather crude, that today’s teenagers can take the mickey out of me for going home and going on the computer, when for the duration of the school day they have their phone stuffed away in their pockets or tucked alongside their genitalia, taking their attention away from their education, their future, just so that they can receive some silly text message along with the latest Facebook ‘goss.’

 

I’m personally not a big Facebook user, probably go on there for a few minutes a day, sometimes don’t go on for weeks on end, and I’m definitely not into texting, which in my opinion, is the biggest money (bull$@&%) scam out there, charging you money for the ability to send less than a handful of words, on a screen most often the size of a 50c piece. Me being a person that struggles to summarise, texting simply drives me batty; it is essentially degrading English and grammar by dangling a carrot labelled “Spell bad, pay less.”

 

But here’s where this post is really meant to be heading. What on earth do other people, you know, the ones with these so-called lives, actually do when they get home?

I can say for a fact that most the ‘peeps’ on Facebook probably get home and go straight on Facebook, then spend the rest of the night after that texting. I can most definitely say that some will get home and start playing video games, an entertaining, yet unproductive activity. Then there’ll be probably those that read a book, go to soccer training, or sit down and watch television till teatime.

 

As far as I’m concerned, only one of them is a productive activity, and sorry all those gaming fans, but it’s NOT the latest online co-op, whatever that may be these days, probably some role-playing, shooting load of mouse dung. 

The only productive activity I said there was soccer training and read a book. The reasons, is that if your planning on a future in the sporting industry well, this will help you. You’re actually learning something, improving at something! Whereas improving your ranks in a video game really isn’t going to teach you much, yeah sure you have the chance of becoming a world class professional gamer! . . . *sarc*. . . seriously though, they’re games, unless you’re a really good professional gamer (which would earn you about $16,000 a month) you’re not going to benefit out of it. I’m not saying video games are terrible, nor am I saying that the people who play them are terrible (they are =P [joke]), the fact that video games can effect you emotionally and entertain you is a great thing. But it’s when they’re played excessively that they become a problem, because then you end up with nut jobs who talk about them all the time. There’s a fine line between mentioning a game, and driving me gawd-dam-nuts.

Reading a book helps you improve English skills, which is good, because we need some opposing force to the fend off the ‘leet-speek’ syndrome which appears to be swallowing up all modern-day youth. So of course reading a book is productive, but as for sitting watching TV till teatime, the most you’ll get out of that is a few news headlines, but most likely whatever recording of MasterChef you have on your set-top box from last night. Again, like video games, watching TV allows you to unwind, relax, and it also can effect you emotionally. But as for being productive . . . well, catch my drift.

 

So why did I list all that? Well, actually I just kind of squashed it all into one big blob of words . . . it’s not really a list, but still. The reason for all that is so that we can compare with what I do when I get home.

 

“Going on the computer” isn’t just . . . Going on the computer, the variety of different things you can be doing on the computer is immensely large. I don’t waste my time on online flash games, everything I do on the computer is entirely creative and productive, everything I do results in me learning and developing better knowledge in how to do certain things, whether that be video editing and production, website design, blogging, game making, graphic designing, programming, music creation. All that I do, is in no way, pointless.

At the end of the day, you can’t criticise me, for “wasting” my time on the computer, when I can produce material that you can’t. If I were wasting my time, I would not be able to produce the videos, graphics, homework assignments, songs, or any of that to the standard that I do. Get it into your heads people, stop bagging out others because they’re more talented with technology and know how to do stuff you don’t, if you didn’t waste your time on facebook or watching television, you’d be able to do the same.

 

The things I know how to do using technology, also come into real life. I can produce good looking projects from the skills I learned designing graphics, being able to set things out in a way that looks nice, and as for spelling and grammar . . . I probably write more using the computer than I do by hand, simply because through typing my fingers can keep up the pace, and I don’t lose anything that I wanted to include in my written piece. Although, the downside of being able to relay information at a thinking-pace results in, sometimes, odd documents with a lot of different meanings, stories and thoughts crammed into combinations that don’t work.

 

 

Thanks for reading this blog, it’s good to know that there’s people out there that want to THINK instead of sit there with the computer screen flashing in their face as they click on coloured balloons and virtual restaurants.

 

 

 

Ben.