psyche

Maybe this is why I’m not a people person but again I am highly annoyed by people doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, or in this case choosing the right worldview for the wrong reasons.

Take, say, Elliot or Richard Dawkins or Dr Zetie. They are firmly atheist and secularist because they have considered the problems of faith and religion and have reached a logical conclusion. Now take several other people: they champion an atheist view because it’s easy to defend and it’s still countercultural. This makes me annoyed. If at some point they dropped the mind-melting arrogance and superiority complex they gain from touting such statements as “Religion was invented to control people.*” (Great, now stop telling people who worked that out when they were eight and go find some zealots to cleanse, you attention-whoring piece of… human) and perhaps sit down and really think hard, they could be nice!

Of course in Dawkins’ case as he said (paraphrasing): it’s okay to be arrogant because he’s right. But it’s not if you’re just being a twat and utilising some of the most clear and beautiful philosophies in the world for fucking social fodder, so FUCK OFF.

Pax

* Controlling people is difficult and annoying - so probably to make money off people, not to control them (although controlling them is a natural extension of making money off them in the most efficient way possible [cf consumerism])

Check this out: it’s pretty interesting. One of those Google guys is involved; this technology is pretty impressive. My dad is excited at the prospect of a business-oriented version. Aggregation of feelings - welcome to Web 2.0!

http://wefeelfine.org

I feel oxymoronic.

Pax

I think that when any product is successful, it takes an emotion or feeling and reminds you of it so powerfully that you will pay money to have it, lest you forget that feeling forever. I believe that The Matrix was so successful because it encompassed two main “film feelings” but in an original and interesting way. The first was obviously the sort of epic war idea but that was overplayed in the sequels and pissed people off, and the scenes inside The Matrix became completely abstract philosophy and a lot of people got lost there. However, in the first, it was inside The Matrix that the second theme was captured - the same thing that they really nailed in the Animatrix - and the Matrix Comics… SHIT are those two good… I don’t really know how to describe it - it connects people. It’s everyone living out their lives with a sneaking suspicion that they push to the back of their minds and ignore, something most people do successfully. It’s the millions of people independently awake at 03:00 eating Cap’n Crunch from the box, hunched over their computers, genuinely wondering what’s up, from disillusioned teenagers in families scraping by in the worse-off areas of New York to rich Japanese software engineers pausing from their jobs for five minutes to really think.

It’s that notion that there’s a whole world there somewhere - not really far away, but hidden. A happiness or a sadness, a profoundly different environment that one simply must discover.

I used to stay up because I had homework. Then I began to stay up out of habit, randomly increasing my general knowledge via Wikipedia. Now I don’t know why I stay up. When I am dead and my life has come to nothing of real value, whoever you are, I ask you to think hard. These ideologies and philosophies seem to divide us but really, across infinite distances they unite us. They are written in books, most of which are never read by the right people or lost in conversation with uninterested people. Everyone goes their own way.

So yeah, The Matrix. How is this all connected? I don’t know. I don’t.

Pax

I think life will be fun. As far as I can tell, it’s full of hypocrisy, jealousy, suffering and delusion; it seems like a good challenge. Everything I see is based either on some random cosmic chance, a human selfish desire or a human misconception. Maybe the right thing is never done for the right reasons. I think my viewpoint is skewed because I’m not much of an empathy guy, but what if it’s a trick? The most extreme end of this viewpoint is fairly egocentric and consists of the belief that the entire world is a fabrication to deceive the believer. As one traverses the scale one enters “deception of masses”, “deception of humanity” and finally “lack of reality” territory. Applied specifically to this situation, these principles yield the possibility that no-one is really a good person - neutral at best - but no-one admits it. A sad facet of our strange tradition of, well, tradition? The involuntary absorption of the ideals and beliefs of our forerunners and contemporaries!

No-one really does the right thing, and even when it seems to be the right thing, it’s never for the right reason!

I am neither a pessimist nor a nihilist - by choice at least. I don’t choose to see a set of beliefs and adopt them. I choose to describe what I see in the simplest terms possible and what I end up creating is a rather sobering vision of a completely twisted species, entangled in its own perverse artifice.

Alas.

Pax

Before I begin, I’ll just clarify the situation: at some point in my youth my grandfather gave me some pirate copy of Tiberian Sun which I played with interest. It felt like quite an odd game and I didn’t really think of it as part of the mainstream gaming media. I saw Firestorm in some shop one day and made my uncle buy it. It had a manual! I began to suspect that this elusive “Westwood Studios” company was in fact well-funded and professional. Then I bought Red Alert and to top it all off, Red Alert 2 came out. I didn’t buy it but my friends did and then they bought Generals etc. and then after massive disc loss, I bought The First Decade and preordered Tiberium Wars. So here I am.

Right. Now, I think the reason I prefer Tiberian Sun to, say, Red Alert 2 (which is dementedly fun) is that it’s a bitch. No superweapon disabling! Retarded Harvester AI! Veins! It makes it hard to play. The Hunter-Seeker - so annoying BUT it kicks everyone out of apathy and says “Look, play well or die.” The EMP and Firestorm walls give enemy tank/plane rushes and missiles the finger. The tactical possibilities were just great. Conversely, Red Alert 2? Race to build superweapon. If superweapons are disabled, race to build 5 Prism Tanks or 5 Apocalypses. Assuming you’re not a dumbo, you can just go and win.

I wonder what Tiberium Wars is like. In a strange way, I don’t really want to find out.

Pax

11:00 - Ah! Today I will be very productive, yes. Such a day!
12:00 - I like the internet.
17:00 - Ah, … shit.
19:00 - TV?
00:00 - Wikipedia is good, no?
06:00 - Will sleep soon.
07:00 - Soon!
10:00 - Eh!? Why’d you wake me up?

Alas.

Pax

You can just keep building cranes. What the fuck, man?! It’s micromanagement on steroids! A who-can-click-all-the-tabs-at-once competition! FUCK! And I barely got the hang of having a separate “Support Structures” tab in Red Alert 2.

Pax

Well, I haven’t heard from Elliot since he finished the C&C3 installation so I’ll assume that it’s either very good or it’s killed him. I attempted to run it on my Dad’s very small Vaio but it crashes after less than a minute and brings up that welcomed error report dialogue (”cnc3game.dat has encountered a problem…”). Snippets from the web imply that it’s to do with copy protection in some cases but also that it may be to do with mobile processors - I guess I’m getting an iMac instead of a MacBook then!

Reviews predictably reviewed what previews predicted: C&C3 is a predictable amalgam of the older titles in the series but graphically polished. Good but not great, apparently. Eh, that’s fine. I like Command & Conquer. It does not make me sick.

I think other people have started revising for “GCSEs”.

Hmmm.

Pax