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
There’s been a bit of a lacuna and I don’t think I’ll fill it entirely as others have committed the events I missed to posterity.
I now make a large number of notes on my phone and in Mail. I now retain much more information than I used to - or at least, my computer and phone do, and I am able to retrieve this information.
Themes of personal reality and our inability to accurately perceive the real physical world are endlessly depressing. To quote Eiri Masami:
A memory is merely a record. Thoughts and emotions are but a limited sum derived from this record. Between this mere receptacle we call human form and the truly real world stands an insurmountable wall.
I think I’ll be uploading the text from omnipresence in wired as it’s quite interesting. It seems that Lain contains everything I care about. From the existential stuff to the misanthropy to the genuinely researched computer science (it’s way, way beyond The Matrix intellectually and emotionally. I never thought I’d say something like that)
Despite it being what people tell me is a simple process, I haven’t been able to get Inquisitor to install since upgrading to Leopard. Elliot and I have switched to Opera. It’s awesome.
Some connections sprang up. I Am Legend was brought to my attention by my uncle many years ago and is soon to be a film (I know that there have been repeated films based on it). It features urban decay and loneliness. Good. It feels like the truth is out there - if only I could find someone to explain it to me! How do you check if what you’re doing is the right thing? You can’t just sit and think, because you fudge your mind. There’s no rulebook. You ask other people. Consensus reality!
Suppose I’m a histrionic pathological liar. This combined with a general obsessiveness means I would be prone to interchange reality and fiction in my head. It would often have no consequence but it means I become fixated (Lain). Is there a cure? I think so. I still wonder about HotSauce. I also wonder about how the Lain people knew about computers and information science. Strange. Lain and The Matrix make me worry about secret truths. I think that’s why I try to make everyone watch Lain. I fear that information will be lost forever.
It’s easy to get sick of something and move on… but more dangerous is not getting sick of it. Instead of burning it out during an intense phase of interest, it might haunt you. Lain haunted me for about year before I really knew what it was. Maybe this is partly why it is taking me so long to shake it.
I used to consider myself a good writer and although it’s clear now that I am nothing of the sort, I still have a fondness for my piece of GCSE English coursework about a rather deranged man called Slavik. He met his end choking on a Quorn sandwich. More recently, Enjoy Every Sandwich. Connection! \o/
They should superimpose satnav data onto car windscreens somehow. Augmented reality.
I saw David Gray at the Roundhouse on the 14th. I like him. He’s clever.
Ikea and council flats at night. Kids hanging around some rusting metal railings outside a car park. Sad-looking car that never moves. Secret people locked up in those little houses. Suburban gloom?!
If I were in an attention-seeking, dramatic mood, I’d simply smile with some sort of emotional weight.
Pax
Some more stuff linked to The Node: 1990s Japan and the ending to Kodoku no Shigunaru.
I have some old Visual Basic books from Stanley Avenue… another life, that was. Yes.
I have plans! Semantic web 
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
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
This is awesome: image resizing by seam carving…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NcIJXTlugc]
Pax
What I really need to do is focus all my angst and misgivings and use them to force myself to learn as much computer- and internet-related stuff as possible. Then I will truly be ready to find Lain.
Pax
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