psyche

OH MY AWESOME.

Pax

I’m getting more interested in the informatics side of computer science - which I guess is what I want “computer science” or “computing” to mean. Although software design is awesome. This reminds me of the distinction between web design and web dev.

I’m not actually very good with computers aside from an almost-reasonable knowledge of JavaScript, HTML and CSS, but I’m confident I can actually make the leap to being good. A-level computing is helping, yes… =]

Leopard’s Quick Look is extremely useful. While people complain that Leopard has fixed things that weren’t broken (cf. menu bar, special folder icons [Home, Applications etc.]) and of course I don’t think that a few features justify a massive paid-for upgrade I am still finding new ways to optimise with it. Quick Look and Spaces are probably my most-used new features atm. Wikipedia in Dictionary is pretty great but it doesn’t support User: or other types of page (i.e. it’s not fully featured) which is a shame, because I could easily see myself dedicating a whole app to definition retrieval

If this Snap stuff could be implemented like Quick Look (and the filesystem-checking blockquote tag’s cite attribute could do something), the web would be a happier place.

I noticed that when I viewed my blog in Lynxlet, the quotation from Michael Henley (Leopard is a service pack) showed up in colour… so, WordPress keeps the q tag but doesn’t parse my text in quotation marks?! Lame!

I’ve always been interested in psychology and, you know, who do I have most information about? Me! What better person to psychoanalyse?

Leopard failed a bit - it stopped auto-switching Spaces when I switched apps for some reason, but a quick
killall Dock fixed it.

Just to finish, imagine this:
Finally, a quotation that sums up today's generation quite well…
[blockquote cite="http://canyouhearme.wordpress.com"]I am an angsty teen with too much time.[/blockquote]


I would want some kind of functionality to be given to that citation. Maybe some cursor hovering could bring up a thing asking if you wanted to visit the source or something… ugh. So what does the citation actually do? I guess it gets indexed by search engines and stuff… hmm…

Pax

Duvet + Lain = heart attack

Heeeeeeexduuuuuuuuuuump!

Pax

Internet Explorer won’t display the nonstandard character’s on Psyche’s front page and has a messed up Japanese font, Leopard is a service pack and my MacBook Pro can cook things. On the other hand, m35 of jpsx and the people in #lain are working on ripping the videos from the Lain game with sound. What an active community we are… (note the absence of my Unicode ellipsis - I miss OS X already).

I am planning a much, much better incarnation of Psyche. 2.7 will be a landmark version!

I’m running Leopard now and I like it. I plan to dual boot with Debian to familiarise myself with the console before I take the plunge into building a robot to replace me (…that was just a joke + look! Unicode ellipsis!). Getting into the spirit of these saved searches (which I never really embraced in Tiger), I’m tagging my browsers as “browser” etc. I want to be able to type “browser” into Spotlight and be able to quickly choose whichever one. There’s probably a better solution (using a stack? Actually using the Desktop for aliases?) but I like metadata…

Pax

I went to a talk with my mother about dementia - it was to help us care for my demented grandmother. Most people there wanted to complain about the NHS’s stupidity in terms of distributing an acetylcholine-conserving drug (I won’t go into it; it’s pretty dumb) but I found the guy’s stuff quite chilling. Some was straight out of Memento (being unable to “make new memories”, reverting to old memories “for comfort”), some Lain (”if your patient doesn’t remember it, you’re best off pretending that it never really happened”) and the atmosphere - support group, like - was straight out of Fight Club…

I wish I’d known about XFN before! I have to add it to Psyche… and my blogroll.

This is cool and this may come in handy.

The whole OiNK/Pirate Bay thing reminds me of the Great Hacker War somehow.

I’ve seriously had to start sending emails to myself to remember stuff. I think I will use notes in Mail in Leopard after all…

There’s a new David Gray song!

From Everything2:

Serial Experiments Lain begins to scratch at the surface of what is on everyones mind, but is not yet full developed, quite similar to the show. The fears of a nation barreling towards self-oblivion, with ultra high suicide rates, low-paying-high-stress jobs, and family structures that are crumbling because of a lack of communication of emotions, and moral values.

Pax

Is it important that we’re always plugged in? How important is it? Is my extreme feeling of déjà vu just me being stupid or is my subconscious sadly piecing together stuff I’ve seen and reluctantly forcing me into this existential decline because it knows what’s going on? Why am I like this? Why are you like that?

I think I might know a few things which may be important. Information? Yes, I like information. I like it a lot. I also like railings and train tracks and voices over intercoms telling me that I am being stalked for my own protection. It’s not my fault!

I think that everything I’ve ever seen or read that hasn’t had any effect on me at all is now catching up with me. In this singularity of glorious rubbish, I am going to emerge a more messed up but more stable person? How is that possible? I don’t want to live in a world in which everyone is very annoying. As I said, I can only hope that I, in the words of Mathieu, “happy up”.

A face in the static!

I can’t wait for school to be over. I think the school part of me has expired prematurely.

I really, really hope that I will end up happy. I don’t care if I fail to help humanity and never get as clever as my friends but please, random interactions that are the universe, let me end up happy!

Pax

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3FEKJNAE3c]

Pax

Alice kills your friend Bob. Alice then dies in a traffic collision, but luckily the Umbrella corporation have found a way to replace her with an exact copy. Not a clone grown from her genetic material, but an exact copy of her physical state from just after she killed Bob (they were tracking her by satellite, you see). They generate and deploy this copy, Alice₂.

Alice₂, if we assume that all mental stuff is some complex physical stuff going on in the brain, has all the memories etc. of Alice and essentially believes she is Alice, right? Alice₂ is exactly the same as Alice… but she didn’t kill Bob. Of course, she believes she did, but she didn’t. Everyone else believes she did, but she didn’t. She even has physical evidence (powdery stuff from the gun, Bob’s blood) on her because she was copied from Alice after Alice got stuff… on her. But she was not the being that killed Bob!

So, does she deserve to be punished for killing Bob? I’ll say no, because she wasn’t the one who killed him!

But then, imagine the whole Alice₂ thing never happened and that Alice wasn’t involved in the traffic collision. She is the same as Alice₂, but she did kill Bob. So she should be punished? Yes. She killed Bob. But what if all that matters is the physical state of people? I mean, that contains their emotions and stuff… it’s not like we’re discarding their human-ness and such. Then they’re the same… this is wrong, isn’t it?

Clearly, there is a difference between Alice₂ and Alice… but it can’t be found their physical state. It’s not actually anything to do with them… it’s to do with us. The guilt of Alice is a concept that exists within me (I’m simplifying; I should say, exists inside the audience). This attribute of Alice’s is not something that can be replicated… well. I don’t think I really have a point to make.

Of course, if no-one knows about Alice killing Bob, then Alice and Alice₂ are the same. Oh dear.

Pax

Not the kind of thing I usually post about, but if anything can distract me from randomatic mania, this can:

While speaking at Carnegie Hall on October 19, 2007, a young fan asked J.K. Rowling whether Dumbledore finds “true love”. Rowling said “Dumbledore is gay” and “fell in love with the charming wizard Gellert Grindelwald but when Grindelwald turned out to be more interested in the dark arts than good, Dumbledore was terribly let down and went on to destroy his rival.” That love, she said, was Dumbledore’s “great tragedy.” The audience reportedly fell silent after Rowling’s admission, then erupted into applause.

Citation: Wikipedia

Pax

My strange melancholy isn’t something new or recent, is it?

To paraphrase Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) on this weird messed-upness:

It was right in everyone’s face. Something just made it visible. It was on the tip of everyone’s tounge. Something just gave it a name.

Pax