psyche

I just watched Memento on the advice of Oliver Jones and it was ridiculously awesome. Its hyperlink style was awesome and the themes it dealt with reminded me a lot of some of Lain. Not the anime so much, but definitely the Nightmare of Fabrication thing as well as other creepy memory things in the artbook…

Awesome.

On the theme of convergence, David Gray’s lyric “Somehow it don’t feel real” and Jakob Dylan’s “I hallucinated that you were in my arms” are beginning to haunt me. The cold, rusting suburbanity of the residential roads around where I live fill me with a feeling of nostalgia, happiness, sadness and confusion. They remind me of The Matrix and Lain in some way. It’s so strange. Everything seems to link to other things which all eventually link back to this messed up feeling. The connectedness of everything is unnerving. The quiet suburban emptiness, with wire fences coated in plastic and slightly rusted railings and secret bus stops and blank-faced people who don’t quite remember just what it was they came for. It reminds me of a picture in the Lain book which I’ll scan in. Or does the picture in the Lain book remind me of the feeling? I need to give it a name… how about… The Node?

Pax

Oh dear; I tried to make my mother watch Fight Club. She totally freaked out. I think I misjudged her taste, although she did like The Matrix, V for Vendetta and Serial Experiments Lain… it’s similar to Mr Rokison rejecting SEL as “not good enough” but more of a sort of shock reaction. Anyway, I guess it’s time to admit that I understand things differently to other people.

She attributes her reaction to childhood trauma involving violent movies and hospitals.

Oh well.

Pax

My problem with things like V for Vendetta, Serial Experiments Lain, Fight Club and The Matrix is that they’ve all appealed to me because they confirm or present themes that I have considered independently and thus tie into my whole life. They mean different things to me than they do to other people, I think. This is often why I dementedly force people to research everything they can about sprawling continuities like Lain and The Matrix - I want to give people I know a chance to love the fiction and maybe even understand me a little better.

I like soap.

Pax

I shouldn’t really be awake. Every day is the same. I am hopelessly deluded. I will never win. My friends are just complicated enemies lost in the confusing search for purpose that robs us all of reason. I am not awake or asleep. I am not dead or alive. I am a thinking, growing and dying array of organic particles. I refuse to die. The state between alive and dead is not unusual - it is this. One day, everyone will be connected. It’s not an end in itself; merely a local maximum.

I foresee great things.

Pax

Lest I forget.

Pax 

In light of this talk and obviously in reaction to WordPress’s recent adoption of tags, I really want to use them as more-specific categories. However, it’s simply unfeasible for me to go through every post. There must be some kind of software solution! While a computer may not know I’m talking about JavaScript when I mention my Tiberian Sun Tactical Calculator, it could at least scan my blog for commonly-occurring words or phrases that aren’t too common (not “and” or “not” or “the” or “I am feeling” etc.) and auto-tag?

To make that more effective, it could take into account the tags and categories I’ve specified - as well as those that others have specified across the blogosphere. It sounds useful and shouldn’t be that hard - should it? I suppose it’s again a question of practicality on a large scale… maybe Google or someone should do this.

How about a neat statistical thing of which words I use the most, and when I click on a word it shows the most common words that accompany it? That would be cool.

Pax

I went to a talk by Thomas Vander Wal at school today (it was organised, I believe, by Mr Smith. It was very interesting. Social software, to use the phrase of the day, is continuously evolving and binding us to the network, wherein we are all connected. As Mr Vander Wal noted, communication is the key to our success - even as a species. Collaboration and massive data retention ability are what defines us as a civilisation. We are continuously getting better at it.

I dream of this. Then, this.

Pax