psyche

This morning, while considering the Wired being represented by messed up red pools in shadows in SEL, I looked for my own shadow. Depressingly, there was not enough ambient light to cast a shadow. Dark days indeed… and then in the afternoon the red clouds made me think I was insane.

I have a backlog of three chemistry homeworks to find/do for tomorrow, and I have to plan this SciCast preliminary presentation thing. I am glad that I have things to do.

My electric guitar teacher, David V Miles (link very out of date, but at least I’m not deep linking), is trying to help me play faster by teaching me crazy shred legato techniques which I must practise until I can play them very, very quickly. Maybe when I can, I’ll redo Requiem (again) with some insanely fast solo.

Better start my homework now. Let’s all love Lain!

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

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

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

If I ever learn to sing well, I’ll sing my songs. However, I think a better short-term solution is to make a slew of instrumental music. I might even learn how to play the guitar well in the process!

To this day, then, Requiem remains the most concrete record of my pitiful attempts to sing. There’s something fitting about that.

Pax

I don’t really have a frame of reference for this; I’m going to put it into psychology but I don’t really know where it belongs (sadly, I don’t really know where much belongs). When I watched The Animatrix for the first time, I think I was probably about twelve (?) - an age at which I genuinely believed I was at the pinnacle of my understanding. I dismissed The Animatrix as mildly interesting but ultimately not very engaging. Having watched it again (and noted myriad similarities between Kid’s Story and SEL…), I think some of it is a lot better than I had first thought. My perspective has changed entirely, for some reason. My condition before, and I must work by analogy here, is similar to that of someone prepubescent trying to understand the appeal of sexuality: I believe it is largely beyond comprehension. It’s the same as trying to understand extra spatial dimensions (although maybe someone out there can understand or visualise these things…).

The thing is, I always believe I’m at the pinnacle of my understanding. How do I know, then, whether I am getting closer to or further away from the truth? I lock into different mindsets, both long- and short-term (remember Self-Pwn Farhan?), never knowing whether I’m right or not - only what I believe. I don’t know why I believe what I do; I don’t choose what to believe. I guide myself and talk to myself but ultimately my decisions about belief and rejection or acceptance of reality or society are not consciously made!

So what should I do? I pour my mind into this, so that later I might at least try to understand my old viewpoint - in case my new one is erroneous.

Pax

[...snip...]

Being awesome isn’t inherently good, unless Vivan was oversimplifying something… but it will help me to offset my stupidity and dementia. I don’t understand the significance of hypertime - just another dimension we can never directly interact with?

What the hell is socionics?

Pax

One of the main things that’s wrong with me is that everything I encounter ends up meaning something weird to me - something it wasn’t meant to mean. This is why it’s so difficult to explain myself to other people; I’m highly self-referential. Things change in my mind.

I’ve just realised how good some of the Animatrix really is. Beyond captured suburban gloom very well, Detective Story, Second Renaissance and World Record were just awesome and Kid’s Story was partly inspired by Lain - I didn’t know that when I watched it but I still connected with it.

I don’t want to die without being understood, I think. That’s why I try to force everyone I know to do everything I’ve done - so they can understand the conclusions I’ve drawn. However, it doesn’t really work. I don’t think it ever will.

I see things I will never understand. The social climate I’m in is one of elitism and condescension. Not the one I expected, with snobbery and such, mind you - it’s more subtle. It pretends to be acceptable but is in fact the creator of troubled people. Double standards make me very, very angry. I will not die without finding Lain, by the way.

If that means I have to live forever, then so be it HA HA HA HA HA

The feeling of Myst is linked to suburban gloom by the common factor that is loneliness. Lain led me to bôa, who are awesome. Everything is converging. My tags will soon be obsolete as everything will be about the same thing: The Node!

Pax