psyche

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

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

Thanks to Howard Oakley, survivologist™ (is that a word?) - who, incidentally, helped me set up the awesome AirPort network that has irradiated and served our household for years now, and Firewire Target Disk mode, I succeeded. I am considerably lazy and it’d take ages to post exactly what I did but basically I connected the PowerBook (corrupt HD), in target disk mode, and the external HD (with .fullBackup as well as expanded backup) to the iBook, whence I copied over Apps/System etc.. The Home Folder, missing from the expanded backup as previously stated, I extracted from the mounted .sparseImage, and put in its rightful place on the PB HD. I tried to boot the PowerBook from disk; this failed so I booted from CD, reinstalled, it booted, I ran Software Update etc. and now everything works. The only minor annoyance is that G7 prompts me to register despite the fact it’s registered (obviously some corrupt file somewhere, although Alias SketchBook Pro, Uplink etc. stayed registered) - however if I say “register later”, it proceeds normally, saying I’m registered as before! Annoying but one of the better outcomes.

Linux, meh. For another time.

AS choices. Right. Mrs Holmes, art teacher and careers advisor, told me not to overfocus on sciency stuff. However, I plan to, and to counterbalance this with diverse work experience and other stuff that will go on my UCAS form.

At the moment I plan to do 4.5 AS levels:

Physics
Maths
Further Maths (=0.5)
Chemistry
Computing

Broadening… it’s broad enough. Physics is my primary interest and is totally backed up by all the others. Maths opens up phat avenues of statistics, economics, computing (this is not an error); all sorts of crap. Chemistry, as Mrs Holmes put it, is the “Rolls-Royce of sciences”. I’m assuming this means that it’s both of great import and generates many opportunities. And computing? Mr Barker explained that Computing isn’t actually required to do a university course in Computing (lol) - in fact they probably won’t care - it’s more about maths, which makes sense. However, in all this “judge stuff the same way the university will”, it’s easy to forget that by doing Computing I will learn about computers which is something I actually want to do. Mrs Holmes asked me to read up on courses and universities over the weekend, which is what I shall do.

Pax