Sometimes technology is awesome.

Much of the time I'm a right old bastard when it comes to embracing the new. The prime example of this would be mobile phones, or mobile devices as they should be called nowadays, having evolved so far beyond simple phones as to be only one step away from taking over the world in an horrific trapper-keeper calamity. I still hate mobile phones, no matter how brilliant they undoubtedly are.

However, where I very much make an exception is in the way I'm beginning to consume music. For the longest time, online was anathema to how I thought music should be collected. I would always argue (rightly, I still think, in many cases) that there was no substitute for discovering music than spending an afternoon in a music store, browsing endless shelves of CDs. I arrived too late for LPs and I'm very glad of that fact, for they are shit. I like my noise crystal clear, thanks all the same. You know the 'warmth' those aficionados go on about? It's known by another name: poor quality. This attitude towards the humble LP would offer clues as to how I would come to embrace new technology in the future, but for the longest time I would not join the download bandwagon. In a way, I still haven't; I don't download music, I still buy CDs, but I no longer use music shops and NME (at least not exclusively, but I will forever be in debt to NME for turning me on to Polly Scattergood) to discover music I've never heard before.

Most bands still release music the old-fashioned way, but there are a few who've experimented with new ways of releasing music. Arctic Monkeys made a name for themselves largely through MySpace. Radiohead released the phenomenal In Rainbows online, allowing the buyer to choose their own purchase price. Ash have abandoned the old 'new record every two years, release a few singles, tour relentlessly, repeat' rut they had become stuck in, and are now almost at the end of their A-Z project, where they've released a new single online every month for 26 months.

But where the whole thing really came alive for me is upon the discovery of Blip (http://www.blip.fm/) via Twitter, and upon the receipt of an invite to join Spotify. Blip allows me to listen to other people's favourite music from around the world, and it's where I've discovered many previously unknown artists from The Veils to Mazzy Star, and countless weird and wonderful cover versions, like Blondie's amazing version of We Three Kings. It also allows me to interact with people the world over with similar tastes to mine (who would've thought there'd be an American who liked Echobelly as much as I do?) Spotify allows me to do similar things - I can tailor a radio station to my own tastes, I can share playlists with friends, and I can road-test albums before buying them (thank goodness I listened to the second Elastica album before wasting my money). I can see Spotify leading the way to future technology where CDs are extinct, and people listen to music by streaming it directly out of the ether, and when you find that rare gem of an album or song so good it changes your whole life for the better, you can share it with others who'll understand instantly, instead of just going on and on about it down the pub to people who aren't really that bothered. I would, of course, be sad to see my CD collection go, but I can honestly say I think it would be much better that way. Bring on the future!

The best example I have yet seen of how this technology can work happened recently, thanks to Twitter. Amanda Palmer, that most amazing woman from The Dresden Dolls, who is married to Neil Gaiman, that most amazing man who writes the most amazingly beautiful stories, was accosted by a young music student outside the Berklee College of Music. That's in Boston. The other side of the world from me. The young man was named Tristan Allen, and when he sat down in front of a piano in Amanda's house, proceeded to blow her away. She tweeted about it. She then went on to showcase Tristan's talent to the world via the live video streaming website UStream. The kid was genuinely incredible. He would take well known pieces like the Halloween theme or a Philip Glass song, and just improvise the hell out of them. Thanks to this technology, I was (via a computer monitor, obviously), in Amanda Fucking Palmer's house on the other side of the planet to the sofa I was sitting on, listening to an impromptu performance of genuine excellence by a teenage music student in real time. To be able to share in the goosebump moment with Amanda as she discovers something amazing for the first time is incredibly exciting. It's so far removed from meetings with record company executives and the suicide-inducing X-Factor that it was like a ray of perfect sunshine in the midst of a miserable day. See Amanda Palmer's blog about it, including the entire streamed performance, here: http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/962861244/my-answer-to-grayson-chance-presenting-tristan. It's over an hour and a half long, so if you haven't got time to watch it all (although it is highly recommended), go to the duet at one hour twenty seconds and be as amazed as I was at the 10 minutes that follow.

This is the potential of this technology. This is the benefit of making everyone and everything connectable. This, hopefully, is the future of music.

Atheist or creationist? Still human, it turns out.

I read a piece online the other day written by a guy about losing his faith and becoming an atheist. The blog, to me, seemed a little bittersweet - I felt there was grief over the loss of the comfort of blind certainty that usually comes with a faith, and along with it the person he used to be, but it also had the feel of a man who was happy to have woken from a lifelong delusion and is able to see clearly for the first time. He now uses Twitter (@ZachsMind) to debate with people over their beliefs. Overall, he's usually pleasant and respectful towards the faithful and doesn't tend to criticise them personally, but he can get pretty disrespectful over their faith. I do share in his disdain for all religions, but where I occassionally disagree is where he sometimes insults people directly, particularly their (in his view) lack of intelligence. I don't feel that @ZachsMind does this to be malicious, but rather out of frustration when the set-in-their-ways creationists won't debate with him properly. But I do think a small number of Twitter atheists can be dicks. (If you're a Twitter atheist and are reading this: if I follow you, I'm not referring to you - I don't follow the dicks.)

Creationists (and all those of any faith), I can't deny, do believe in what I consider to be superstition and nonsense. As @ZachsMind likes to point out; if god does exist the sheer volume of unnecessary suffering and general shit in the world would prove beyond doubt that he is a dick and not worthy of worship. And yes, all those shitty religions are responsible in large part for many of the hateful attitudes in the world today - America's greed? That's because the bible told them to subdue the Earth. Violent Middle-Easterners? That's down to them being ridiculously caught up in the 'my god's better than your god...so I'm going to kill you' game. Homophobia? That's because god hated the gays. Obviously I'm simplifying a complex issue, and there are many, many people of every faith that don't completely misinterpret the message of their religion and try to live as decent folk. Like my christian mother or buddhist in-laws. And these people are not stupid. They usually have their faith because it's been ingrained upon them from a young age, and they cannot believe otherwise. It's not that believers are stupid, it's that it's human nature to take comfort from easy answers instead of really questioning the whole idea of a conscious, imaginary force providing your reward for you when you die. It's because the fear of death can become so palpable that telling yourself there is an everlasting existence for you in the beyond, or that you get to come back as something or someone else stops this fear from crushing you. Even the homophobic, Earth-subduing suicide bombers aren't really stupid, they're just conditioned from youth to think and to see the world in a certain way. When a person is conditioned in that way, it is almost impossible to break that conditioning later in life (making @ZachsMind's story a rarity, I think). At least, that's how I see it, although I base that entirely upon my own perception and not on anything actually researched, so I'm probably wrong.

So yeah, religion winds me up quite a bit. But it's not the individuals themselves. It's the pope making excuses for serial child-rapists. It's the educational systems that despite the fact that the answer to how we got here was answered completely and absolutely irrefutably by Charles Darwin over 200 years ago, won't teach evolution as the accepted scientific fact it is. It's the continued insistence of some faiths that women are somehow subhuman. It's a thousand other things that continue to hinder the development of a society based on free thinking, reason and true equality. You shouldn't behave like a decent human being because of some supposed god and his promise of an eternity of torture when you die if you don't, you should act like a decent human being because that's what decent human beings do.

However, atheists don't get off scot free either. Many atheists consider themselves superior because of their rejection of religion and have a nasty habit of personally insulting people of faith simply because they think differently. This is a typically human attitude, which is especially disappointing given their supposed rejection of unenlightened superstition and the acceptance of logic and reason. Insulting people of faith won't change them, it will them more stubborn and less open-minded. (Besides, the trend, as far as my limited research indicates, shows a general moving away from faith and towards atheism in the U.S. despite (or perhaps because of?) the idiotic Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and their retarded take on christianity taking centre stage so often, so they might not need to worry about it for long. Oh, and by the way, purveyors of the special Beck 'n' Palin brand of christianity, opposing the ground zero mosque on the grounds that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by islamic extremists is a bit like saying the religion itself is to blame. Which is a bit like saying all muslims are terrorists. Which is a bit like saying all catholics are paedophiles. Which, in direct contradiction to my earlier point (hey, like the bible!), is fucking stupid.)

It's not really surprising that whatever the faith or lack thereof, there are people who are cool and there are people who are dicks. Because, regardless of belief/non-belief, people are still people.

Sometimes I do fit in.

This is a follow up to the entry called 'Sometimes I don't fit in', posted back in May, in which I have further problems with the same woman, only this time, I don't feel out of place for not lying to my child and making her believe that she's the only thing that matters in the entire world. Familarise yourself with that blog before looking through this one, because I can't be arsed to repeat myself: http://experiment627.blogspot.com/2010/05/sometimes-i-dont-fit-in.html

So, after that minor drunken altercation in which she expressed to me her feelings about the correct way to bring up a stable, balanced individual, I recently heard her talking to someone else about how she hates these parents who treat their kids as though they can't do any wrong, and how they act like they're all that matters. At first I didn't understand what had happened - had our conversation in the pub got to her and had she taken the things I said on board? Probably not. On second thoughts, I considered that it may have been that morning's Horoscope telling her how to act. As the conversation continues it seems she's stressed because some kid was giving her boys a hard time yesterday. It is this kid's parents she's referring to. She continues by declaring, in all seriousness, that she intends to kill the kid if he does it again today. Yep, she will murder a child if her kids have a couple of bad days with an older boy. It turns out they're all on an outing somewhere today. If anything happens to them, she also makes it known that she will kill the adult supervision. She is not joking.

Obviously, I would die to protect my daughter. Obviously nothing is more important. Obviously I don't want anyone to bully or pick on her. But this woman's loud declaration of her intention to murder a child for acting out of line as well as the adults charged with supervising her children as if it's an attitude to be proud of is a dangerous over-reaction, and is the very same thing she is complaining about in other parents. She is incapable of noticing behaviour like her own in others.

As it turns out, the person she was talking to thought this was all a bit of a twisted way to go about bringing kids up, so I didn't feel like the whole world had gone mad like I did the last time this came up. When she acts as though my own, less-crazy take on things is terrible parenting and dangerous to my child, I don't know whether to laugh, cry or scream in her face.