No time! Also clones.

I have hardly any time at all to blog recently because my mock exams are coming up and all I've been doing is revision. I'm doing about 2 hours of revision an evening and because of this I've not been able to play guitar or listen to music or blog or anything of the things I enjoy doing. So yeah, that isn't very fun.

Tomorrow I am going to Wembley Arena to see one of my favourite bands... You Me At Six. It's been described as "The gig of the year" so I'm really excited. I've got standing tickets too so it will hopefully be pretty mental.

Also (as you should know by now) I'm quite a deep thinker and today I had an interesting thought. I am an only child so I have no idea what it's like to have a sibling. But this got me thinking. What would it be like to have an identical twin? If you think about it, an identical twin is a perfect clone of yourself and is therefore essentially you. So imagine interacting with yourself everyday. That would be really quite weird. Also does that mean you both like the same things and feel the same emotions and similar things like that? I think I'm going to do some research on this because honestly it's weird.

I was born, I have lived, I will surely die...

but what happens afterwards? nothing? Well as an agnostic I consider a lot of possible options when it comes to the subject of the afterlife. It's basically my only fear and I often spend a lot of times thinking about possible answers. Here are a few that I've considered:

1. There is no afterlife. As scary as that sounds, it is entirely possible that there is nothing after death. No conciousness. Nothing.
2. Reincarnation. When you biologically die, your soul/spirit begins life again in a new body (be it spiritual/animal/plant).
3. Ghosts. Seriously, I know the idea of ghosts is childish but my family and I have had supernatural experiences. Call me crazy but there is a lot that has been recently discovered that has lead to technology that people would have thought to be supernatural e.g. mobile phones, cameras. Perhaps I will stay in ghost form for a certain amount of time as my soul detached from my body and then maybe points 2/4/5 follow on from this...
4. Judgement. This is my one and only life on earth. My actions in this life will be judged by something (a deity if that's what floats your boat) and I will spend eternity in Hell/Heaven.
5. Resurrection. The Christian theory that my soul will depart from my body and then be returned to my body at the end of the world by a divine miracle.
6. Time is a loop. This is something that I considered yesterday. Hypothetically, what if after the universe ends, it instantly begins again. As if the big bang follows a big crunch directly. Therefore, if that were true, that means destiny exists and no matter what actions we take in this life, they have already happened and will happen again forever.

I hope you've found what I have to say insightful and not too depressing.

See you all soon,
Reubzen x

Skill Mastery

"Outliers: The Story Of Success" is a book written by Malcolm Gladwell in 2008. Throughout the book, Gladwell mentions the '10,000 hour rule', saying that in order to master a skill, one must practice that skill for 10,000 hours.

I find this a very interesting prospect, that anyone has the potential to master any skill with a finite amount of practice. However, when you begin to break down this number, you soon realise how daunting the prospect of 10,000 hours practice is.

For instance, if you (yes you reading this right now) decided to go and learn how to play the piano and practiced for 30 minutes every day, you would be a master pianist in the year 2067. Yes, you heard me right. It would take you about 55 years to master a skill with 30 minutes practice a day. Although, if you doubled the amount of practice and played piano for an hour a day then you cut the time to master the skill in half and you'd be done by about 2040.

So I decided to apply this to my own guitar playing. I wanted to see how far I'd already come to see if I'd already travelled a significant distance towards mastery. I found that between 2001 and (rounding to the nearest year) 2013 I have practiced for about 2400 hours.

About 800 hours between the ages 4 and 12
About 300 hours between the ages 12 and 14
About 1300 hours between the ages 14 and 16 (Projecting the data towards March next year)

I am delighted that as a 15 year old I am already about 25% of the way towards mastery. At my current rate of practice, I'll be a master in 15 years maximum. I think that my ambition in life is to become a master guitarist, I mean let's face it I might not be the next Jimi Hendrix by the year 2027 but I'll be pretty darn good.

Fun, fun, fun...

So...

I'm currently in the process of a meltdown as my tiny little brain is struggling to cope with the amount of information being crammed into it. In December I have my final GCSE Mock Exams and luckily I get study leave during this period so I don't actually have to go to classes, only my exams. I apologise for how awful this picture is (my camera was stolen but that's another story altogether)

In other news, I've found all of the photos documenting some of the process of my custom guitar paint job.
I'll upload all of that when I've finally finished because hopefully it should look really good.

See you soon x

The near future

Just a quick update about the near future of my blog.

I enjoy cataloguing, arranging, organising, and listing. So, just in case anyone is remotely interested, I'm going to be making some pages in my blog dedicated to listing: my film collection, my guitar collection and (seeing as I now have Spotify and don't actually own a music collection) the albums I actively listen to.

I am also working on a custom paint job for one of my acoustic guitars and I hope to show you some photos of my progress.

Twinkies, Slipknot, Bathtubs and Harry Potter.

Twinkies. Seriously, Twinkies. So the American company Hostess has gone out of business and I headed down to my nearest sweetshop that sells international goods and luckily they were doing 6 Twinkies for £2.30. What a bargain.

I've got a little story to tell you. So I went to Brighton today and I popped into this massive music shop and tried out the Jim Root custom Fender Stratocaster. I've bought enough stuff from this shop that one of the staff members (I think his name is Matt) recognises me and gives discounts and stuff. Anyway... he and I start talking about this Stratocaster and he mentions that he sold Jim Root his own Stratocaster as mentioned right here in this video. For those of you that don't know, Jim is the guitarist from Slipknot and Stone Sour so I kind of idolise him.

You know what else I realised recently? Bathtubs and deep thinking definitely have some sort of correlation. Whenever I'm taking a nice warm bath I start thinking about a lot of things. For instance if I live to be 90 years old then I've already used up 1/6th of my lifespan. I tend to end up thinking about the afterlife and what my purpose in life is etc.

Oooh! I just remembered something else that happened today. At about 10:30 I was in bed dreaming about my film collection and I noticed that the 11 disc Harry Potter Blu-Ray boxset was on my shelf. I thought to myself  "That's cool yet slightly weird as I don't actually have this". I then proceed to wake up, get dressed and I hear a knock on my bedroom door. Lo and behold... my mother is standing there holding the boxset.
Now is that weird or is that weird?

Please ignore how badly photo-shopped this is. Please ignore this message.

Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?

I am currently part of a social experiment. Along with over 900,000 other people I am chipping away at a humongous cube made of billions of cubelets to try and reach the centre (where something life changing awaits one lucky person). The app is on iOS and Android to download for free, however, there have been,and still are, a lot of bugs such as coins being deleted. For more information on this fascinating experiment you should take a look at the Wikipedia article.

The picture is how the cube looked a few minutes before this post.

Revisiting my blog

I honestly completely forgot that I had a blog. It's almost been a year since my blogging hiatus and I'd like to return and perhaps try to maintain a blog this time round. I feel like it will be more successful if I try not to adhere to a topic too much and, instead, just try to talk about whatever is going on in my life at the moment.

TL;DR: Hello.