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People seem to like giving advice to children. It's like the song says, they're our future, teach them well and let them lead the way. The problem I have is that the advice we give to our kids is always useful, yes, it's stuff you need to know, but it's never the really PRACTICAL stuff. The stuff you have to learn through life experience.
I reckon I should start making a list. A list of things that, if I ever have kids, I will tell my child on their 16th birthday. I think there's alesson here for all of us:

If something's genuinely fun to do but it's a job, don't expect to get paid much for it.
If it's tedious or unpleasant to do, you might get paid a lot for it. You're not forced to.
Find things that are both cheap and fun to do, then do them a lot. I take drinking pints of bad coke in pubs and laughing at nothing in particular, for preference.
Work is work. Social time is social time. Personal time is personal time. If you're going to mix them, only mix them with their immediate neighbour and only one at a time (make friends at work, spend your personal time with good personal friends, but don't work when it's time to be yourself and don't mix your personal friends with your work friends as they'll not likely have much in common).
Once you hit 18, meet as many people as possible. Talking to strangers for some reason becomes alright after you've hit a certain age.
Sometimes you'll grow up and not notice it at all and sometimes you'll wake up, feel completely different and never look back.
Never buy a drink that has more than 3 colours in it.
Never buy a drink that has more than 8 colours on the label's logo.
Make as many mistakes as you can while you're young enough to get away with them and to recover from the results.
If it seems like kind of a bad idea, it might not be. If it GENUINELY seems like a bad idea, if you kow deep down that it's a stupid thing to do, it most certainly is.
Do things that scare you. It's unpleasant, but it'll make you a lot wiser and staying in your comfort zone is a great way to never develop.
Don't worry about the little things, but don't ignore them or they turn into the big things. Prioritisation is the key thing.
Be careful about trusting anyone who really seems to want to be your friend. Like, to the extent that they're almost being aggressive about it. They're trying to sell you something.
Likewise, don't trust anyone who starts a conversation with you when you're walking down the street. They're DEFINITELY trying to sell you something. Or trying to mug you.
People who actually look very strange normally aren't as strange as people who look entirely normal apart from one or two very slight things.
Cheese is a reasonable thing to add to anything.
Do something embarassing on occasion.
Find the people that matter in life and make every effort to keep in touch with them no matter what. There's little worse than finding a good friend and then one day having to say goodbye.
Reinvent yourself a few times until you find a style that you're comfortable with, regardless of what other people think of it.
Try new things whenever you can.
And finally, no matter what happens in life, there's always going to be a cup of tea, a bed and a new day around the corner.

A brand new day

BioCorp. Tirelessly working to ensure that you, the consumer, have nothing short of the highest standard of tyranny in your unquestioned global ruler.
Although I think I'd prefer to be a baron, when all's said and done, because that sounds much classier.
And y'know, maybe someday I'll finally get around to specifying what it is that BioCorp does. There's an evening's entertainment right there.

Might as well tackle a large issue for the start of something new, here. Might as well tackle the world. Everything. I mean, it's a peculiar thing. Go back 200 years or so, which really isn't a huge length of time, and people were still trying to drill holes in people's heads to let autism escape or selling snake oil. The world as we know it, nothing seems to stay the same from one decade to the next. Personally, I blame the Internet. Again. There's an old quote out there, something along the lines of how computers haven't made us smarter, they've just made us wrong but a lot faster. The Internet's just accelerated that even more. Now everyone can share everything they know in an instant, so everyone has to race to be the first to discover something and even if you are wrong, someone's going to hit the nail on the head eventually. I mean, alright, information sharing doesn't really work like that unless you're in open source software, but technology is spiralling out of control. Everything's moving at such a rate now that I honestly can't keep up.
And so, let's return fondly to the past:

In the old days, medicine might have actually killed you. Now, waiting for your medicine might actually kill you. I'm not sure what's preferable.
In the old days, we had stocks or tarring and feathering to humiliate people. Now we have reality TV. Except tarring and feathering probably doesn't destroy any chance you have of landing a normal job ever again because you decided to get naked one night and sing the national anthem.
In the old days, all people wanted was the technology to improve their lives. Now, a surprising amount of people seem to want to go back to the past. Medieval re-enactments, Victorian murder mystery weekend, ren fairs and such.
In the old days, little would have made a musician happier than for the world to hear their music. Now, they try to sue you into submission for using download services.

Maybe things really don't change that much. Maybe we're all just crazy, but in a different setting and with more inventive ways to blow ourselves up.

I do sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be interesting to at least see the past world, if only for a while. There's so much we're losing by progressing as far as we have. The art of conversation, the ability to actually relax. I mean, the fact that people have to actually schedule time out of their lives to properly relax, that you have to book your quiet time, that's terrifying. But I think what I'll miss most of all is the names. People in the past got all the cool ones. They had planets named after gods, things like excalibur, triremes and such. And what do we have now? Phones4u, a town named half.com and football stadiums named after beer.
But the future. I really don't know what to say, there. We've gone from being very British (granted, we were making a good go of conquering the known world), slightly posh and uptight to being fairly American with industry, business and a general fast paced nature to things. It's exciting, if exhausting, but I'd like to know where we go from here. I hope it involves flying cars. I mean, everything the Jetsons taught me so far has been a lie.

Well, here's to the future, anyway, whatever it brings.


A new blog needs a new gimmick, I think. I can't do emotions, here, so let's go for alliterative blog tags.

And for reference, 80 posts worth of previous blogs are stored over at myspace.com/biospark8000. Some are good, some are bad, one is about Jesus' personal truck. It was quite astonishing to see.