psyche

I just watched it and it wasn’t really very good. Sure they acted fine and there were CG zombies and a hint of survivalism and everyone laughed at “AUUGH! I WAS SAVING THAT BACON!” but the heart of the book was notably absent.

The book was a masterwork. The crippling paranoia and dark humour were gone from the movie. The phrase “I am legend” becomes devoid of meaning without the context of the book.

If you see the film and come out thinking “Meh.”, you must read the book. It’s not long. It is, however, awesome. I haven’t given details here but if you feel like the movie has no plot at all, you are correct - the plot was apparently left inside Mr Matheson’s book.

Pax

I Pownced this before but having been since removed from Pownce, I’ll put this here:

Alex Wright - The Web That Wasn’t (embedding was disabled by request…)

It’s pretty awesome.

I watched The Golden Compass and it was okay - they did the person/daemon thing quite well.

This is my critique of Will’s performance on them and I’ve posted my thoughts on his new podcast on the accompanying blog post.

It’s worth a listen as Will is really spearheading the “I like podcasting”… movement… at school… He’s right, though - twitter is worth looking into, although I use it and jaiku rather half-heartedly.

I’ve just realised that while sometimes my thoughts are ugly, I really do try to blog beautifully. Every English essay I have scored full or close to full marks on has been angst-ridden and cynical. So be it!

My father somehow won a second Nintendo Wii (???) by accident and I’m thinking that rather than selling it, I could do something involving some of this stuff? That is, if my brother will let me. He probably won’t. I wonder.

Abandoned playground? The Lain PSX game movie media038.avi (stuff mirrored here [much more disturbing than anime, only gave me sound when I used MPlayer]) contains a weird moving still of her on a swing. This reminds me a little of the Animatrix short Beyond. The whole atmosphere of Lain, The Matrix (first one), The Animatrix and the Matrix Comics is one of despair and confusion. It seems to be my favourite thing in the world.

It appears that the new I Am Legend movie again fails to accurately mirror the novel. This is a shame as the novel is awesome.

I was recently put onto Denno Coil by weirdo in #lain while discussing how I thought Lain showed “augmented reality gone wrong”. How chillingly specific this is.

Why has the iPod been so successful? Because it enables people to quickly and easily turn on, tune in, drop out…

Pax

In the true spirit of teenage clique-ism, I’m going to have to point towards our friend Will Morland’s appearance on them.

While generally I make quiet hints about stuff causing me angst, I think I’m going to have to step it up for this…

Enthusiasm for technology…

Mm, ok.

…being good at it…

DEBATABLE, WILL! DEBATABLE!

You can’t just sort of like… luh [pause] become a social luddite [???] and sort of hang out in a corner sort of like staring at your old phone…

That kind of speech really takes itself apart.

I do realise that [pause] what I do does inf…er some social st-stereotypes on some people

…I don’t think you deserved to pass your English (Lang.) GCSE…

The internet isn’t working; quick, we must fix it!

HA HA HA!

As my sort of listening habits have changed, it’s changed me as a person OH GOD NO! OH GOD NO!

A skinny tie sort of worn without much sort of [pause, strained expression] well-tying and sort of just sort of slung around in a trUH! An uh… an attempt to look sort of formal

Sort of sort of, sort of? HA HA HA!

Just shove [jeans] in the wash, iron it [sic]

Iron… jeans…?

You have to pay for the T-shirts! They’re £7.50…[pause]… so we’ll have to go somewhere else […] the best thing about the event has been… the free pens and stuff that you get; all that crazy stuff.

Oh. I see.

[Hey There Delilah plays in background trying to make us feel sorry for suspected neek] An interest in technology conflicts with an interest in fashion and an interest in staying cool

As plaintext this seems like a good point but the situation made it ridiculous somehow.

Shop assistant:

Out of all our customers, they’re our favouri[laughs]

I have to give kudos to Dabson for this one - it’s funny:

My computer… just… crashed…

I think a quotation from Elliot sums this up quite well:

I have the utmost respect for the cameraman and crew: you don’t hear any laughing.

HA HA HA HA HA!

For the record, Will initially asked Elliot and me to accompany him to the MacExpo. We refused. Can you see why? Let us just consider, before we part ways, one more thing. Do people feel the need to identify with a group so strongly that they will create a persona? Let us ask ourselves this: should the BBC add a new profile to their list - that of the gutbustingly infuriating poser? Surely I would then be able to join the ranks.

Will, I’m increasing your traffic. Final word: HA!

Pax

This is awesome and this at least gives me an end date for this mania. This seems familiar.

From here:

…it’s possible for a person to have many of the symptoms of mania and yet also suffer from severely depressive thoughts. This is especially the case if the person experiencing mania has insight into what’s happening to them…

I’ll be careful what I say, because reality offends, but here: I’m quite angry about fencing because even if I beat someone a lot, they will always think of themselves as better than me. It’s kind of annoying. Fencing is fun but in this school scenario it is not. I will try to do well in the Public Schools this time around.

From last year:

Rank	Name	First name	School
1	BRIGHTMAN	Samuel	LEICESTER GRAMMAR
2	SALTER	Michael	WHITGIFT
3	HOWES	Anton	WHITGIFT
3	PEGGS	Ben	BRADFIELD COLLEGE
15	MANNAN	Farhan	ST PAUL’S
17	EMERSON	Hugh	ST PAUL’S
21	DABSON	Oliver	ST PAUL’S
27	WOOLLCOMBE-MORRIS	Alex	ST PAUL’S
38	SPRAGG	Elliot	ST PAUL’S

I suppose I’d better mention that this is the new canyouhearme.wordpress.com…

Pax

I got an iPod Touch today. It’s pretty great.

Pax

I thought this was quite interesting.

Also, this.

This work could help better understand disorders linked with timing, such as schizophrenia. Still, in the end, “it’s really about understanding the virtual reality machinery that we’re trapped in,” Eagleman told LiveScience. “Our brain constructs this reality for us that, if we look closely, we can find all these strange illusions in. The fact that we’re now seeing this with how we perceive time is new.”

Pax

I am so tired. It’s almost the end of the thing. The term. Or whatever. I’m so tired all the time. I can sleep for any length of time between 0 and 14 hours and have a random tiredness level. It sometimes works out in an awesome way and sometimes… in a not so awesome way. I think I’ll have to sort this out.

I will probably never learn to code properly, will I? I will probably never understand anything… meh. Suburban gloom.

Pax

Well, I’ve registered and populated disinformatics.com.

psyche will now be the name of this blog and disinformatics the rest of the site. I redid the tactical calculator. Now there are fewer tables. Eventually I need to extend it to allow for you to define an enemy squad and have a squad recommended to you, perhaps with financial constraints. Later, maybe.

The BIO was good although I got 28%. It was nice to try to program without distraction.

This blog has been updated for nearly a year now. In the past year, stuff has happened. Computing replaced physics and my guitar playing improved slightly. It’s been a good year.

I have a really bad headache.

There have been talks at school by Thomas Vander Wal, Riccardo Cambiassi, Paul Farnell + David Smalley and most recently, Jeremy Keith. I’ll briefly talk about Mr Keith as his talk is the only one I can remember properly at the moment. He was pretty awesome - the talk went far beyond what I thought it would be and actually it touched on many of the things I’ve been wondering about recently. As well as appearing to be some sort of web development god, he seemed acutely aware of everything to do with the web. Unfortunately a statistics test prevented me from talking to him after the talk but it was still awesome. David Smith and Adam Zethraeus have blogged all these appearances, I believe.

Reading through the science page confuses me a little. I seemed to consider lots of stuff in detail only to find it foreign when it presented itself again later in my life. Strange.

Pax