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.

Apologies

Hello world. Firstly, Sorry. You know how much I love you and I didn't mean to ignore you these past few days. xxx <3


Okay. So in all seriousness I have been very busy these past few days and I haven't had the time to do my daily blog post as promised. A lot has been going on recently and this blog has really been the last thing on my mind. I hope to continue blogging as much as possible but I just wanted to clarify that I haven't just given up, I just can't blog at the moment.

Reubzen xx

Modern Video Game Challenges

Well I've had yet another great day being completely f***ing destroyed killed in video games. Today I've played some really difficult adventure maps on Minecraft (with my good friend Tom) by Vechs in his "Super Hostile" map series which were really brutal and very fun yet frustrating at the same time. So yeah I managed to waste a good few hours dying repeatedly which was..... erm "fun". I also played some Portal 2 Co-op (linking my PS3 with "Tom's" laptop) which was a lot of fun despite having both already completed co-op before. You know a game is a good fun challenge when you keep coming back again and again right. We both also played some Team Fortress 2 on PC (can you see my worship for Valve beginning to emerge?) on a modded server to time waste which was also a whole lot of fun. Seriously Valve make bloody good games don't they.

Basically we spent a good 6 hours or so (maybe more) playing some modern games for a change which shows there are still good games out there if you know which rocks to look under. However, we both agreed to try and accomplish some more on good ol' Super Mario Bros. 3 our old adversary, which let's just say didn't end well. Basically we spent 2 hours on multiplayer and ended up giving up on World 3. Seriously, I'm not joking. How were children in the 1980's with no Youtube to cry to for help honestly meant to complete this beast of a game. With NO save! Well congratulations to anyone out there that has beaten the game legit. I take my hat off to you. And with that I bid you farewell and indeed a good night. x

TheDougLog: Stop the Stop Online Piracy Act

One of my friends and fellow bloggers TheDougLog has written about the Stop Online Piracy Act. "SOPA" is complete internet censorship. This will give the Government total control over the internet and the power to shut down any websites they don't like. This is a serious issue that we need to protest about otherwise websites such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter could be deleted permanently.

Visit TheDougLog for a much deeper insight into this catastrophe: http://thedouglog.blogspot.com/2011/12/stop-stop-online-piracy-act.html

Video Game Frustration!!!!!

So I've spent my day getting killed on video games. World 8 on Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES is one of the most challenging video game experiences I have ever had. Compared to most video games nowadays, games from the 80's were close to impossible to beat. Besides the lack of a save feature, irritating game glitches and unfair hit detection, the overall challenge of games back then was a lot greater. Every November we are presented with the latest brain cell killing edition of Call of Duty which everyone is suckered into buying because of the name Call of Duty. Why?! We are just spoon-fed easy games which distract us with stunning graphics and linear game play. Long gone are the days where mainstream games were a challenge and you had to really really try to be able to beat it. Beating Contra on the NES was an achievement worthy of boasting to your friends about. But who gives a shit if you beat Call of Duty 17: Modern Zombie Shooting 5. I admit that there are some excellent games around that present a fair challenge such as the Portal and Half-Life franchises to name but a couple but I just find it sad that the video-game market is dominated by easy first person shooters. Now off to play some Minecraft xx ;)

Welcome to my Blog!

Hello. I am Reubzen, a teenage geek and musician who is currently going through his GCSE's. I am in a band with a few of my fellow school members and I am seriously into my music so expect reviews of new albums as I get them. My life is pretty much dominated by gaming whether on the good old Nintendo Entertainment System or the Playstation 3. I also have a rather extensive film collection so again I'll probably end up talking about that too at some point in my life. I hope you will enjoy listening to what I have to say and please bear in mind that everything I say here is simply my opinion. So Welcome! xx