Bipolarity and spectrums.

Bipolar.

It's a rather self explanatory term, used to indicate that something has two distinct and - usually - opposite aspects.

It's also a diagnosis. Since the diagnosis has become popular, it seems that the word itself has suffered rather. I am, I should note, bipolar. What I am not is pathologically bipolar.

The distinction comes - as you must have known to would - in statistics. So we have to start by establishing our sample; the whole planet.

You see, to say that the whole planet is bipolar means more than that the Earth itself has both a North and South end (although being only barely off-spherical, the earth physically speaking does not really have poles... it's only because of the weather and magnetism that we can really identify the points of convergence of positively charged ions and lines of longtitude...

Where was I? Oh yes, the whole planet is bipolar. I refer here, in an intentionally confusing (and, if you think about it, rather inaccurate) manner, to the entire human population (although many of my arguments apply to a diversity of related lifeforms, too).

Humans, bags of meat, salt and water, exist in a state of "Homeostasis", and we are kept in this state by the fact that we die if we leave it. As such, evolution has prolonged the lives of humans that are better at maintaining homeostasis, with the result that we are, on the whole, now very good at it.

The only trouble about homeostasis is that it sounds as though we exist at a comfortable  "zero deviation from ideal". In practice, we're almost never actually at zero, but, should we start sprinting away from it in any given direction, the various squidgy bits (technical term) inside us pull the other way with all their might, and we spring back with almost as much speed in the opposite direction, and then back again when our body corrects for that overshoot, in ever decreasing swings of the pendulum until something else sends us rocketing off in a new direction.

This brings me to an interesting point about hormones. They come, broadly speaking, in pairs: uppers and downers. Adrenaline and Noradrenaline (or Epinephrine/Norepinephrin if you really must) are the classic example (and, more to the point, the only two that I can confidently talk about. Physiology and Pharmacology was a LONG time ago). One brings you up and, to make sure that you don't do yourself too much damage, the other one sits in its receptors and says "No. This is an intervention. You're above normal levels, and I'm not leaving until you calm down."

Except without the speaking.

The point - which was supposed to be short - is that the way our bodies are designed means that they fluctuate around the ideal, and never really get time to settle on the ideal before something else comes along and sets us off.





As a result, an awful lot of human - and wider - traits are best defined by spectrums. If you want to be statistical about it - and I really do, because it's much easier than borrowing a psychiatry word that is designed to talk about light - a magical bell curve exists for every single trait. A lot like this:






And, to anyone who wishes to point out that Microsoft Paint has a handy function where you can write words in typeface on your bitmaps, I know. But I'm at the hardcore end of the pro-choice spectrum. Labelled here as "Really odd people".

This is, by the way, a perfectly PC description, because the proper name for a bell curve is a normal curve, because it represents the distribution of a trait within a "normal" population - normally, a lot of people are normal, but it's also very normal for a smaller number of people to be odd, and an even smaller number of people to be very odd. The squiggly line in the yellow area is there to point out that there is no clear point where "normal" ends and "odd" begins.

The point - which is at the end of a very squiggly (another technical term) argument, is that for there to be a normal, there must be an odd and a really odd, and something in between.

In human traits, the things we diagnose are the "really odd", because they're either potentially dangerous (to society and/or an individual) or because we think they're really awesome and people should know that they're fanta-pants-fantastic (e.g. MENSA people).

This is why a lot of modern psychiatry scores people on a scale. Bearing in mind that I am a hypochondriac, I score:

43 on this bipolar depression test online (moderate to severe bipolar depression... but it's an online test, and like British meteorologists post Michael Fish, they tend to overstate. That's what I tell myself, anyway).

63 on the same websites depression test (severe depression).

37 on the Autism Quotient (very high).


Which are all some distance from the maximum, and some distance from the normal. Am I clinically any of these things? No. I am fully capable of carrying on functioning and, as much as I have bad days (emerging from the job centre and finding lying my head under the moving wheel of a passenger bus a comforting mental image), the chances of me harming myself or anyone else intentionally are at virtually nil.

I fall on the skinny-but-not-anorexic end of the bell-curve. (not bodywise. I fall on the healthy-weight-but-could-cut-down-on-the-starbursts end, there). If my traits were an actress, they'd be Cate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal - thin, but not to such an extent that you wonder if they're skipping meals.

Which brings me - finally - to my ORIGINAL point (as opposed to the many little points that have popped up the whole way through): I am bipolar, autistic, and on occasion depressed, and I wish that psychiatrists could sodding well learn that when they diagnose someone with one of these, they mean that the person is CLINICALLY or PATHOLOGICALLY bipolar, autistic, depressed, etc. ...






BECAUSE WITHOUT THAT, THEY'RE JUST ADJECTIVES. 


Adjectives that it is my human right (well... ) to use as appropriate. 

And if one more person with a Clinically/Pathologically Bipolar, Paranoid, Depressed, Autistic - or other - friend or relative gets all antsy with me for describing myself as bipolar, paranoid, depressed or autistic, I will ask for their psychiatrist's number and verbally abuse the offending doctor.

Actually I won't because I'm non-confrontational. 

To tell the truth, the majority of people who got antsy because I was "misusing" the adjectives were either a) My sister; b) people writing articles with the opposite message to this one; c) fictional characters in TV shows/films or  d) my own fictional representations of the public. So it may be that I'm attacking a straw man.   

Which is not the point.  

Je suis un volunteer... humide.

It's not in French, just so you know... and the title just means "I am a damp volunteer".

Which is true.

I've been volunteering lately... which for someone who is not naturally generous, is a big step.

And for someone who is generally a little bit scared of people (not pathologically), it's a VERY big step.

Well, not so much at Brent Lodge, the local (awesome) animal hospital. They have a fox that likes to sit in a little tree. Which is hilarious beyond compare.

As well as Brent Lodge, I've been a-volunteering at Barnardos (at least three days of actual volunteering, more than that including days going in as a volunteer and filling out the associated paperwork).

I've volunteered once at Age UK. Unlike Barnardos, they had me straight in doing stuff... which has its positives, in that you feel useful straight away, but also has its negatives, in that you're basically "Hi, I'd like to volunteer," and they're "Great, there's the toilet, there's the steamer, there's the till. Have fun!" and you're basically "AAARGH MY BRAIN IS MELTING!"

But with less teenagerish use of the word basically.

I think my feet have developed hypothermia, by the way. On the long (Well... fifteen minutes if you are a normal person, six if you're me) walk from Barnardos to the train station, there was a thunderstorm. Which was awesome.

And the puddles had begun to join up into a meta-puddle.

Which was awesome.

And I was wearing converses.

Which was less awesome.

One train ride, Pasty, asparagus cup-a-soup and flop onto bed later, and my feet are distinctly chilly.

Which is irrelevant. But then so is this entire post.


But never mind, because my brain has fallen out and I've got to fill out an application form for the Co-op AND the (only?) registration form for Age UK before tomorrow...

Nergh. I'm going to play computer games now and panic about that closer to the end of today.

And... Finished! Huzzah!

So, having just complained that I am a flake that can't meet deadlines...

I've finished the Microeufs animation (Youtube viewing here ). I am awesome beyond compare, etc, etc, but I still have to go and sign on tomorrow and point out that the leaflet does actually say that volunteering is encouraged because it expands your CV.

Anyhoo, I'm going to make with the embedding (and quickly, because the internet will probably be turned off shortly):

Wahey, embedded!


It's simpler than the Merde song, also it's in English (by the way: Microeufs/Microeufs = Litigation avoiding term for the awesomeness that is Cadbury's Mini-eggs and also happens to fry my brain...)


That's all, folks!


Smivel.

Animation progress - with sneak preview/teaser

I don't work well with deadlines.


Not even self imposed ones.


I should have learnt this a while ago when working on the second in a (not really readable) sequence of books. I told the interested parties (although not very interested, as it turns out) that the second and final part would be done by march that year, because based on previous work and current rate of progress, that was when I expected to have it finished.

Six (or possibly seven) years later, I've lost interest, left it unfinished for two years, lost the file for another year and then found and deleted it. The awful first book remains the only one in its series, with no hope of being joined by any further drivel about angst, werewolves and space travel (I was a teenager. It happens to us all at some point).

The point is not the awful book. The point is deadline fail. .

When I finished animating the critically acclaimed (slight exaggeration for dramatic effect) foreign language short "That Merde Song" (here), which pokes fun at pop artists who sing in foreign languages by sounding like catchy eurotrash while being about a soiled bicyle, I assured the composer that I would have completed the animation for our second video within a couple of weeks.

This was not unrealistic. The second animation is infinitely simpler, consists of only three scenes and tends to have only one element moving at any given time (even if repeated). This is as opposed to the afore-mentioned That Merde Song, which consists of:

• A twenty second intro depicting two dung flies discoving that they were made for each other only to have their hearts broken, Joss Whedon style...
• A twenty-four frame loop and a six-frame loop playing at different speeds for the first two choruses, including sixteen frames where a character's mouth in synched to the music, and several overlaid frames of an asynchronous villain character.
• A first verse divided into three scenes: a) a Lowry-inspired computer-generated cityscape with two moving characters, one of which sings; b) a close up of said character singing and c) a fairly awesome black-and-white parody of Munch's "The Scream", with one character singing.
• A second verse divided into three completely different scenes: 1) two rabbits discussing the title theme; 2) A theologically interesting meme-duck and 3) a character singing while being complimented by an ASDF-inspired stereotyped frenchman (Eiffel Tower included) who then starts smoking before the entire landscape is covered in custard.
• A third chorus integrating the six-frame loop and an asynchronous villain character.
• A short scene on the birth of a burlesque sausage (No idea why...)
• A final chorus set to a Clint Eastwood-esque Wild West showdown between singer and villain, including close ups of two very disparate weapons firing...

Point is, it wasn't simple.
Hence the underlining.

The current project (well, the main current project) is a much simpler hybrid of an ASDF tribute and a campaign for year-long access to Easter-themed Cadbury's Projects. It really should have been doable within a day. If my computer wasn't full up of 60GB or thereabouts of photographs, not to mention hundreds of redundant Windows features and several independent programs.

Even without that, a week was pretty generous. And I finished the main animations within that period (roughly). But the bookends have been stalling... stalling... stalling... and I've taken up Sporcle... and a wierd Risk-style game on my computer... and volunteering... and basically I've been doing everything and anything to put it off.

But, yesterday evening I felt like doing some animation.

And now it's almost finished.

And so, because you are my loyal nonexistent readers, I thought I'd give you a special sneak preview before it goes up on Youtube (whenever that happens). Sound effects and so forth still need a little work on their timing.

Enjoy this 15 second intro.

And if you work for Cadbury, tell them that I really like Mini-Eggs and want them all year round.

Smivel and spread the word that I am awesome beyond compare. For a flake.

Brave - Reviewdom

So I was going to write about age-based discrimination (and will probably follow with a short post on it) but I realised that I hadn't revied the awesome Brave yet. 

BRAVE

                 -Disney/Pixar,
                 -conceived by Brenda Chapman,
                 -directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman.


The first thing I have to say is that it doesn't remotely seem 93 minutes long, which has two implications 1) at no point is the plot uninteresting and 2) You leave feeling a tiny bit cheated because it was over so soon.

This possibly has something to do with a short animation (a delightful little piece entitled "La Luna") at the beginning, which accounts for about ten minutes of that running time, not to mention that credits always take much longer for animated features. But La Luna is worth seeing (7/10 at least), and Brave isn't all that short... it just finishes before you're prepared to leave.

The premise:

Our heroine, the fiesty Scottish Merida, who is also a princess, considers it grossly unfair that she has to get married just because otherwise her peaceful land will be torn asunder by war. This seems a little brattish, but we soon meet the suitors, whereupon we instantly forgive her.

Anyway, Merida picks up on the fact that her father is more interested in belching, role-play and hunting bears than he is in actually keeping the kingdom afloat, and thereby deduces that it is because of her mother, Queen Elinor (Shock, horror, a Disney flick with a living mother???). She quickly offends almost everyone present by ably demonstrating that anything men can do, she can do better, and with the assistance of teenage hormones and her lovable horse Angus, she storms out of the castle to have a private rant. 

The rest of the basic premise is pretty standard - she looks for a quick fix to her problems, it all goes horribly wrong and everyone learns something about themself in the process. But, in fairness to Brenda Chapman's story, no plotline is really original when you break it down to a single sentence. 

The finer details...

The major focus of this film - in a break from both Pixar's and Disney's general ideas - is the mother-daughter dynamic. As is Pixar's trademark, though, there are very few points in the film where the major focus is the only thing happening, and it does its best to make you laugh, cry and think all at the same time. 

Kelly Macdonald and Emma Thompson (Merida and Elinor, respectively) dominate the plot, and, in good old Disney fashion, their performances are perfect. Billy Connolly and Julie Walters, despite having a lot less to do with the plot directly, both voice very memorable characters that entertain without upstaging the main pair. Characters gain depth and fallibility within just a few lines, as much from the well though-out script as from animation so fluid that you can almost forget that it's not real.

I have to tell you that bears feature. This is shown in the trailer, so I don't consider it a major spoiler, but it needs to be said anyway because of the quality of the animation. It is extraordinary.

Forget Sulley's fur in Monsters, Inc. and the sea anemones in Finding Nemo (based on Sulley's fur) - they were ingenious and groundbreaking, yes, but they have nothing on this. The animators for Sulley, for those of you who don't know, went to extraordinary lengths to make the lovable monster's long hair look realistic - an onorous task which entailed animating thousands of individual hairs to respond to position and environment. In Brave, the animators have produced hair which is long enough to respond to environmental influences such as the wind, water etc, but short enough that it also shows the movement of flesh underneath this. And it is incredibly realistic.

Overall, it is the incredibly attentive animation that forces the viewer to take the plot seriously, and unlike many animations, make it easy for even older viewers to forget that the danger is imaginary. 

Any further ado will inevitably lead to spoilers, which I don't consider a good thing, so let's get straight to the scores:


Visuals: 10/10, although - as it moves the bar upwards - probably 11/10 when compared to any previous animation.
Writing: 8/10 - most of it was beautifully original, and it certainly flowed like a 10, but some details of the plot were annoyingly predictable.
Voice Acting: 10/10, easily. Accents were either real or pulled off beautifully, some complex vocal work was done and every emotion written was expressed precisely in the voice.
Score: 10/10. A touch of celtic goodness kept it out of the land of cliches for a Disney score, but still managed to create the mood and set the scene just as required.

so, Overall: 9.5 (brilliant)

I should, however, draw your attention to the fact that if you watch films just for the plot, you're looking at an 8/10 - very good, but not brilliant.

Volunteering... animal shelter.

Wildlife shelters are wierd.

I say this not because I consider it odd to want to save animals that have become injured by modern society and thereafter retard the species evolution by returning these injured animals to the wild. As a general rule, I do not believe that animal shelters do retard evolution for two major reasons:

1) In the UK, most species handled are either city-thriving species that have already adapted to modern life or at such low numbers that as many animals as possible have to be kept going, regardless of genetic quality just to prevent Allee* effects.

2) The bulk of animals treated in these animal shelters are birds and mammals, which are indisputably able to learn from their own mistakes and - in many cases - have also been proven capable of learning from the mistakes of others. Thus Action A, if followed by pain and stress, will be avoided in the future even if the animal survives.

Be that as it may, Wildlife shelters are awash with paradoxes:

1) Human hospitals smell of two things (in my experience) - Disinfectant and bodily fluids, even on non-surgical . With all the herring-gulls, ducks, pigeons and hedgehogs distributing their business as far and wide as possible, you'd expect that the predominant smells in the shelter would be similar. But instead, it smells of disinfectant and food (as far as you can call the cat-food that hedgehogs seem to love above all else "food").

2) When you open a cage, there is no way of saying how you'll feel after you've cleaned it, weighed the resident and closed the door. A mangy little hedgehog with no fur can be happy and hyper and quite definitely planning on living, and you'll leave (and scrub your hands) with a huge smile on your face from the adorable little zombie... while a larger hedgehog with a very positive history can have suddenly decided not to drink and losing weight at a rate of knots, and you feel like you're going to throw up just seeing it fade.

3) When someone walks through the door with a box, you're heart goes up and down at the same time. You can't wait to see this new and exciting animal, but then, of course, this new and exciting animal has to have been injured in some way (most probably by idiots with guns and/or dogs).

4) You can be the shallowest, least philosophical git on the surface of the planet (me) and you'll still feel obliged to find flowery euphemisms for death afterwards.


It's made me feel really good and really awful at the same time.


I conclude - it's wierd.

I plan to go again. 





*To put it simply, Allee effects come in when organisms cross a critical threshold and, although they are present throughout a large environment, their chances of finding a mate before they get eaten/expire are effectively nil, so the population rapidly dwindles and disappears

Volunteering in Conversation Rant

This one is a bit personal. 

So I suppose we need to actually talk about me.


I'm not just unemployed. I have aspirations. I have plans. I even have dreams (see my rather unrealistic to do list...). And - as much as I may joke about the impossibility of it - the core of it is that I sat through genetics lectures in order to get enough credits to keep learning a bit more about conservation. Because I love wildlife, and I love nature, and would really like to conserve it.


Then we get to the part with my s***ty dissertation. It was poor topic, more than regulation hours of lab work, and far too small a sample for there to be more than a fractional chance that anything of interest would be found. This didn't put me off, until my statistics showed me that actually I'd found something quite useful, but that unhelpful voice reassured me that nothing would ever come of an undergraduate dissertation. So I had a low patch and effectively self-sabotaged, turned in an atrociously under-written dissertation and as a result missed a good grade by 1.2%.


The result of this is that - in order to progress any further in academia, I really have to have some practical experience (not to mention money). Apparently self-directed practical experience from 22 years analysing the differences between the degraded UK environment and the rapidly degrading central african environment doesn't count. The best thing to do, or so I'm told, is volunteer.

And here lies the point which I want to discuss.

The UK's version of conservation sucks. Yes, their protective laws are groundbreaking, and their capacity for enforcement of laws is brilliant, but they seem to have forgotten that nature exists. It doesn't help that a lot of conservation organisations - home and away - are actually run by hunters who want to conserve nature in such a way that makes it easier to shoot (bluntly), but environments are overmanaged.

It is a garden state and many "pro-conservation" people firmly believe that maintaining the patchwork of farmland is important because the countryside has to be in use. They also can't seem to grasp that a healthy ecosystem is self regulating and, by controlling any native organism, you are reducing the food of its natural predator and thereby causing yourself to need to keep controlling.

Heathlands - which are a species rich but transitional habitat - are over-maintained. Naturally it would appear when woodland burns, and disappear once soil recovered and a bad season limited grazer numbers enough for trees to recover. But grouse are easier to shoot on open ground, so charities maintain vast areas of open moorland and heathland because the landowners have had centuries to instill in us that trees will destory the habitat.

Broadleaf forest - which naturally covers more-or-less all of the dry land in the country and thus regulates rainfall - is all but gone. Where it's not gone, the forestry commision has "dangerous" trees removed - that is to say, old trees which are becoming hollow and thus perfect for woodpeckers, bats and countless beetles. Dead wood is gathered up, and all our decomposers are disappearing as a result - or moving on to live plants (slugs being a notable example of an animal that, in the absence of its primary food source, become a major pest).

Waterways have been straightened and cleared, and I have actually seen parks noting their good work in clearing trees along banks where they were outshading other vegetation. Because, you know, that won't reduce soil stability and increase runoff and stifle the life within the pond/lake at all. Straighter waterways are maintained because it "reduces flooding risk" - my arse. It creates a flood/drought cycle instead: water runs fast down hills, creating flash-floods on the flats which, not dampened by bends, can become dangerous. On a small island, it gets to the sea quite quickly, and heads off into the channel leaving us parched for the rest of the year.

Britain is also the only country I know of where the vast majority of nature reserves are actually in use as grazing land.

Because "that's what the ecosystem needs".

Many of our ecosystems, such as heathland and some areas of downland, do benefit from low-intensity grazing. You can tell low intensity grazing because the grass isn't clipped right down to the earth in such a way that one good day of rainfall washes everything away. High intensity grazing creates a disturbed habitat which is about as species-rich as astroturf, and only slightly more natural.

And everyone says "you should get involved".

As an entry level volunteer, you don't really have any opportunities to innovate, change and sent things in a less ridiculously counter-productive direction. As an entry level volunteer in UK conservation, the best you can hope for is that your contribution doesn't do much extra damage.


Okay, rant over. Point is, I'm going to volunteer at a charity shop instead until I can get paid work at a zoo because frankly, they encourage wildlife a shedload better than british nature reserves do.