I encounter this question a lot. Both from myself and from others who have sometimes had the misfortune to come across someone who is intolerant of railfans and model railroad enthusiasts. I use the American terminology here because I find it less cringe-inducing, and I use it in lieu of other names like "people with a train set" or "someone who likes trains". I think you should understand where I'm coming from here if you yourself are a railfan or model railroader! ;)
What I find interesting is the relative similarity between model railroaders, railfans, and enthusiasts of other subjects. What I find more interesting, is how society chooses to accept or reject enthusiasm based on the subject. For instance, a classic car enthusiast is somehow more acceptable and regular than a railroad enthusiast. This poses the question of why exactly that is the case.
My point of view, is that it's all down to a matter of familiarity. A classic car carries a sense of nostalgia and heritage that many people will be familiar with; because many people own a car! It's no great mental leap to justify an interest in cars, because it's often in our best interests to have a working understanding of cars, their manufacturers and the many models available. Even if they don't know much to begin with, an eventual veteran car driver will know quite a bit from researching car purchases and having their cars repaired. This level of knowledge is only one step away from a beginner enthusiasts knowledge of a subject.
Now take a locomotive. Not only does it have a make and a model, it also has a year, optional extras, horsepower ratings, different paint schemes, and vintage predecessors going back a further 100 years compared to cars. But how many passengers are likely to encounter that information? Even fewer still, are the number of passengers likely to find themselves interested in researching this information. From this perspective, it's easy to understand why people don't understand railfans or model railroaders.
People can relate to cars, gardens, homemaking, DIY, food, drink, music, etc. because they are things that they frequently encounter, and have a working knowledge of. When relating to an individual, knowledge is everything - you cannot relate to what you don't know.
Interestingly, I find football enthusiasts repulsive, because I cannot relate to them on any level. I find it utterly impossible to empathise with someone who has such an intense, narrow and all consuming interest in what, in my opinion, is such a trivial game. We are probably not too different when it comes to enthusiasm for a subject, but we are a world apart in terms of taste.
In short, there's nothing really all that different or bad about people who find trains interesting compared to people who do not, so in my opinion there is no good reason that they should be considered "bad" or "boring". I have never encountered another like minded railroad/model railroad enthusiast who fits the "trainspotter" stereotype, except maybe a couple instances (out of hundreds) involving people with autism. And I'm pretty sure that an autistic enthusiast of any subject could bore someone regardless of whether they were interested or not. In fact, most railfans and model railroaders I know really defy the stereotypes - everyone from hardcore skateboarders with piercings and tattoos who got interested in trains by painting graffiti onto them, to football jocks turned hardball army men who started out in the hobby by building a layout for their kids!
Saturday 24 January 2009
Friday 16 January 2009
I have found the person I NEVER want to become...
Whilst browsing for reviews on banks, I happened across this. It's a review of Natwest, about 3 years old. While I wasn't particularly interested initially given the age of the review, there was something else that caught my attention. There was just something about the guy that wrote this that came across to me in his writing.
The first thing this guy does, is he drops a subtle (yeah... right...) "hint" that he trades shares, by babbling on about the share price of whatever company he's reviewing, or the company who made the product. He does this a couple of times in this particular review, as well as elsewhere in his other reviews and on his many (very poorly designed) websites.
The next thing he does, is he gives us a fascinating insight into precisely the type of person he is, by making it known that not only is he on jobseeker's benefit, but also that he mostly spends his benefit on domain names, broadband, model railways and christmas presents. Seriously is that how jobseekers spend their benefits on these days? His entire complaint with his bank, centred around his own inability to keep up with his payments and manage his finances, rather than any fault of Natwest. While it sounds as though the bank may have made a few genuine mistakes, rather than going about it the right way and requesting that the situation be put right, the author of the review, who goes by the name of "John Duck", decided to just go off in a big huff down to his local branch and have a moan at one of the advisors.
"Ah, and now we come to the early months of 2005, when there's about £75 in my account and both Webhosting (£73) + ISP (£47) fees are due at the sametime..... and instead of bouncing one or both of them due to insufficient funds, they accept both at once and put me overdrawn as a result." So as you can see, instead of putting the extra £50 in his account BEFORE the payment was due, he just left it, hoping that the bank would bounce one or the other charge, when he'd already moaned at the bank to stop bouncing payments because he was fed up with having his services disconnected. They were doing what he'd asked them to do, but with this guy you're fucked if you do and you're fucked if you don't.
I love people like this, they fascinate me. It's like watching something disgusting; you don't want to look but you're too fascinated to turn away. He reeks of contradiction, self delusion and illusions of grandeur. His high flying "stock broker entreproneur" image contrasts fantastically with his jobcentre funded financial fiasco reality.
What's more delicious, is that the more I poked around and read his reviews, the more I began to realise what a perfect example of a loser this guy is. He has his own forum, which consists of one active member; himself. He owns approximately 100 domain names, and 27 websites, yet none of them do anything, nor recieve any traffic. He wants you to believe that he trades in stocks and shares and yet claims jobseekers allowance (which in case you don't know, you can't claim if you hold such investments - doh!). He ran a stock photography and website design business as part of a new deal self employment scheme, but he didn't advertise his services, nor did he have a single customer, nor did he register his business. He even wrote a review on a car that he'd never driven because he can't drive. He still lives with his parents, and he's never ever done any more than work experience.
Then I found out his age. He's 28. Twenty fucking eight.
This guy is everything I never want to be. Unemployed, bad at what he does, unable to drive, and living in a fantasy about being a share trading, stock photographer, webmaster and web designer.
But I've got to wonder about what the hell the jobcentre and social services are doing letting someone like this just sit around on his arse, playing on his computer with what he probably thinks is his internet empire of websites. After all, those are my taxes going to work there, being spent on budget domain names and hornby train sets. Didn't any of them ever stop to ask him if he actually knows anything about earning money from the internet? Did any of them ever stop to ask him if he's REALLY trading shares? Did any of them stop to ask him if he's learning to drive? Did any of them ever stop to ask him what he spends his benefits on?
The first thing this guy does, is he drops a subtle (yeah... right...) "hint" that he trades shares, by babbling on about the share price of whatever company he's reviewing, or the company who made the product. He does this a couple of times in this particular review, as well as elsewhere in his other reviews and on his many (very poorly designed) websites.
The next thing he does, is he gives us a fascinating insight into precisely the type of person he is, by making it known that not only is he on jobseeker's benefit, but also that he mostly spends his benefit on domain names, broadband, model railways and christmas presents. Seriously is that how jobseekers spend their benefits on these days? His entire complaint with his bank, centred around his own inability to keep up with his payments and manage his finances, rather than any fault of Natwest. While it sounds as though the bank may have made a few genuine mistakes, rather than going about it the right way and requesting that the situation be put right, the author of the review, who goes by the name of "John Duck", decided to just go off in a big huff down to his local branch and have a moan at one of the advisors.
"Ah, and now we come to the early months of 2005, when there's about £75 in my account and both Webhosting (£73) + ISP (£47) fees are due at the sametime..... and instead of bouncing one or both of them due to insufficient funds, they accept both at once and put me overdrawn as a result." So as you can see, instead of putting the extra £50 in his account BEFORE the payment was due, he just left it, hoping that the bank would bounce one or the other charge, when he'd already moaned at the bank to stop bouncing payments because he was fed up with having his services disconnected. They were doing what he'd asked them to do, but with this guy you're fucked if you do and you're fucked if you don't.
I love people like this, they fascinate me. It's like watching something disgusting; you don't want to look but you're too fascinated to turn away. He reeks of contradiction, self delusion and illusions of grandeur. His high flying "stock broker entreproneur" image contrasts fantastically with his jobcentre funded financial fiasco reality.
What's more delicious, is that the more I poked around and read his reviews, the more I began to realise what a perfect example of a loser this guy is. He has his own forum, which consists of one active member; himself. He owns approximately 100 domain names, and 27 websites, yet none of them do anything, nor recieve any traffic. He wants you to believe that he trades in stocks and shares and yet claims jobseekers allowance (which in case you don't know, you can't claim if you hold such investments - doh!). He ran a stock photography and website design business as part of a new deal self employment scheme, but he didn't advertise his services, nor did he have a single customer, nor did he register his business. He even wrote a review on a car that he'd never driven because he can't drive. He still lives with his parents, and he's never ever done any more than work experience.
Then I found out his age. He's 28. Twenty fucking eight.
This guy is everything I never want to be. Unemployed, bad at what he does, unable to drive, and living in a fantasy about being a share trading, stock photographer, webmaster and web designer.
But I've got to wonder about what the hell the jobcentre and social services are doing letting someone like this just sit around on his arse, playing on his computer with what he probably thinks is his internet empire of websites. After all, those are my taxes going to work there, being spent on budget domain names and hornby train sets. Didn't any of them ever stop to ask him if he actually knows anything about earning money from the internet? Did any of them ever stop to ask him if he's REALLY trading shares? Did any of them stop to ask him if he's learning to drive? Did any of them ever stop to ask him what he spends his benefits on?
Monday 5 January 2009
The Inch to the Gallon rule
For those of you who aren't fishkeepers, the "inch to the gallon" rule is a general rule of thumb for how many fish you can keep in your tank. According to the rule, you can have one inch of fish per gallon of tank, so if you've got a 20 gallon tank you could expect to be able to keep 10 x 2 inch fish. The idea of the rule is to make sure that the filter (which keeps the water clean) does not become overloaded.
I've been keeping tropical fish for a while now and I've discovered that while this rule is useful to newbies, on the internet it has become no more than a fish keeping forum meme. For a start, the rule is the same in the US as it is in the UK, however a US gallon is four fifths of a UK gallon, so already we see that the rule is flawed, and either all US tanks are overstocked, or all UK tanks are understocked. Considering that the rule originated in the UK, I think we can safely say that the rule is more of a rough guide than an absolute law. Yet to see how people will bark at you about how you're "abusing" your fish if you don't stick to it, you'd think it was more of an upper limit than an approximation!
The other flaw to the rule is that it does not take into account the type of filtration you are using. For instance, on my 20 gallon tropical tank I have an oversized, high power external filter capable of supporting a MUCH larger tank. As a result, I can safely keep many more fish than someone who had the same size tank but was just using under-gravel filters or even worse, internal power filters. Even so, I have in the past managed to maintain a 6 uk gallon tropical tank with an undergravel filter, with 7 fish in it! Not only did I not suffer from problems with water quality, but my fish remained very healthy indeed and are still alive today.
A lot of people maintain that the inch to the gallon rule is more to do with water aeration, and that if you exceed it then your fish will suffocate. I won't go into this because as much as anything else it's pure garbage anyway, since in order to suffocate your fish you'd have to have it so badly overstocked that they'd die of toxic water sooner than they'd run out of air. But the point is that people will make up whatever theory they want to justify the rule, because in truth a lot of them don't even know what it's based on.
So as you can probably see, this rule is far from accurate, it is just a general guide. Technically a tank is only "overstocked" if the filter cannot cope with the load, resulting in toxic water. So long as the fish are happy, you're doing everything right.
However, like I said, this rule has become a forum meme. These days you'll see photos of forumers' tanks and be hard pushed to actually spot any fish, because they've fallen into the trap of working to gain peer approval, or avoid abuse, even if it is only from people they've never even met. Unless you want to have abused hurled at you by forum zealots, it's probably best not to announce that you have an overstocked tank. Even on the practical fishkeeping forum there's a lot of misinformation, misinterpretation and zealous behaviour over this rule.
So the point of this post is to just forewarn all of you out there who are looking to find their way into the hobby; beware the forums, and beware their bizzarre fetish for the inch to the gallon rule.
I've been keeping tropical fish for a while now and I've discovered that while this rule is useful to newbies, on the internet it has become no more than a fish keeping forum meme. For a start, the rule is the same in the US as it is in the UK, however a US gallon is four fifths of a UK gallon, so already we see that the rule is flawed, and either all US tanks are overstocked, or all UK tanks are understocked. Considering that the rule originated in the UK, I think we can safely say that the rule is more of a rough guide than an absolute law. Yet to see how people will bark at you about how you're "abusing" your fish if you don't stick to it, you'd think it was more of an upper limit than an approximation!
The other flaw to the rule is that it does not take into account the type of filtration you are using. For instance, on my 20 gallon tropical tank I have an oversized, high power external filter capable of supporting a MUCH larger tank. As a result, I can safely keep many more fish than someone who had the same size tank but was just using under-gravel filters or even worse, internal power filters. Even so, I have in the past managed to maintain a 6 uk gallon tropical tank with an undergravel filter, with 7 fish in it! Not only did I not suffer from problems with water quality, but my fish remained very healthy indeed and are still alive today.
A lot of people maintain that the inch to the gallon rule is more to do with water aeration, and that if you exceed it then your fish will suffocate. I won't go into this because as much as anything else it's pure garbage anyway, since in order to suffocate your fish you'd have to have it so badly overstocked that they'd die of toxic water sooner than they'd run out of air. But the point is that people will make up whatever theory they want to justify the rule, because in truth a lot of them don't even know what it's based on.
So as you can probably see, this rule is far from accurate, it is just a general guide. Technically a tank is only "overstocked" if the filter cannot cope with the load, resulting in toxic water. So long as the fish are happy, you're doing everything right.
However, like I said, this rule has become a forum meme. These days you'll see photos of forumers' tanks and be hard pushed to actually spot any fish, because they've fallen into the trap of working to gain peer approval, or avoid abuse, even if it is only from people they've never even met. Unless you want to have abused hurled at you by forum zealots, it's probably best not to announce that you have an overstocked tank. Even on the practical fishkeeping forum there's a lot of misinformation, misinterpretation and zealous behaviour over this rule.
So the point of this post is to just forewarn all of you out there who are looking to find their way into the hobby; beware the forums, and beware their bizzarre fetish for the inch to the gallon rule.
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