Oliver Booth

Dear friend

For the longest time, I was never able to find something to do for myself; for my own sake. My intentions are, and always have been, around what I can do for others.

Dear friend

Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia. It's maintained by a large amount of people, including anonymous people who only come to fix a spelling error; so you can see why some people might want to call it unreliable.  If anyone and any…

Dear friend

Every country in the world has adopted the metric system. Well okay that's not true. Liberia, Burma and the US haven't. But the UK has! Sort of. Almost… Okay, the UK has such a fucked up combination of measurements that it leaves many to…

Dear friend

I hate the term “immigrants”. It sounds dirty to most people, doesn't it? You can hear the disgust in the mere utterance of the word. Immigrants. To rhyme with scum. Why is that?

First off, let's get one thing clear. I understand ...

Dear friend

For a little while, I've wanted to start a series of blog posts in which I extensively explain my position on pressing controversial topics. My stance may or may not align with popular opinion, it may or may not align with yours, and I'd like to open the floor up to discussion about these things. The problem however, lies when people get defensive and aggressive about it.

Dear friend

On the afternoon of Sunday, July 13th, 2014, I skydived. Skydove? Skyduv? I jumped out of a plane… How far-fetched. I proposed the idea to my mother some months before my 21st birthday, and never actually foresaw myself doing it. But here we are. A birthday present, 5 months late, giving me a rush of adrenaline I hadn't felt before - and cannot wait to feel again.

Dear friend

I'm starting to dislike the expression don't fix what's not broken. I kind of wish people would stop saying it. I think it's human nature to not just fix what's broken, but to improve on things that aren't. Just because something works doesn't mean it's working the best possible way it can. Black and white TV wasn't broken, was it? Colour TV still came into existence. Candles and oil lamps worked well, the light bulb just made everything so much easier.

Dear friend

I've not been doing much game development lately, and for justifiable reasons (at least, to me).

Dear friend

Every writer needs some inspiration to get the ball rolling. Something to give them that boost. Something that they can write about, and it sticks out and tells the world “Hey! I'm interesting enough to spill my mindset to the anonymous blog dwellers out there!” Thankfully, I am not a writer. I like to think of myself as a hobbyist, given that I blindly let my fingers hit the keyboard and extract what's inside that brain of mine. But I don't dedicate myself full time to this sort of thing. Just on occasion. Most days. Whenever I feel like it. Potato.

Dear friend

I'd be lying if I said this course is teaching me anything. The majority of lectures aren't worth listening to, and those that are only preach things I've known for years. The lectures worth listening to dictate the conventions of syntactically correct programming, declaring variables, the practicality of Java (Ha!), and the like.