Forcing cousins to read Watchmen. Used Matlab at OpSci. Trying to remember everything I have to do before school.
Looking forward to grid computing and interplanetary internet. Also, waiting for BBS: The Documentary to get here. Still.
I LOVE IPv6.
Pax
In my experience, nostalgia is BAD because it reminds me that things change. It’s a wistful feeling not far from regret.
Sometimes I feel that my experiences MUST be shared. A sort of twisted existentialism makes me feel that unless someone knows about how happy I felt at some point, that happiness will mean nothing. But is that true? Am I just seeking some kind of validation? What IS meaningful? When you see a movie about some touching or amazing secret, it’s like you’ve been given a window on something that would otherwise go untold… and be wasted. I don’t know.
How “meaningful” are secrets? If I say “my experiences have meaning for ME and that’s all that matters”, I seem to slide towards a clunky and endlessly depressing solipsism. On the other hand, if I say “total meaning is meaning of experience times number of people who know about it times total product of how much they care about it” then most of my life is meaningless.
I am now happy, active, productive and perpetrating lulz whenever possible. It seems the only way around this is to ignore it or punish it out of existence, because otherwise I’d always stay up at my computer and not do work and coast through everything etc. … I read some book (details when I find them) in which the author stated that we get ourselves down/stress ourselves out simply - SIMPLY - because we focus on the bad points and complain in little groups and otherwise become sad/angry. If that’s true then I should be fine as there aren’t really any bad points.
Just strange, apparently neutral clouds of nostalgia and anxiety: anti-lulz.
I saw Hellboy II. It was okay, through I liked the first one more.
Pax
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
The things in Lain were probably just meant to be thought about, talked about and forgotten about. Ironically, while having extreme trouble remembering the minutiae of my life, I have no trouble recalling this stuff - stuff that makes me very uneasy. It hadn’t really soaked into my heart before. I’d understood it all from thinking about The Matrix and such but something just happened. I don’t know.
Consider:
Together, these things have taken something from me. It was a delusion of some kind. I WANT IT BACK.
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
I won only one fight during the BYC qualifier (proper results to follow) but Hugh Emerson came 2nd in the U16 sabre and Adam Zethraeus came 2nd 3rd in the U18 sabre (I don’t know how Adam did in the épée but Adam also came 6th in the épée and I’ll link to results later anyway). I felt rather sicktastic afterwards and got quite a bad two-point moving headache which intellectually incapacitated me on Monday and earlier today. This offered me time to re-evaluate something, though…
Going back to Rosebank Avenue, where my grandfather lives and where we lived a long time ago, reminded me of track 9 (or was it the other way round…?). This, predictably, brings me back to The Node. I think I’m going to need to formally define it and strategies for dealing with it if I’m going to be able to continue living.
Here it comes, then:
The Node is an event or concept which I cannot recall but which is somehow linked to many other certain events, concepts or situations in my life. I suspect this because of extreme feelings of déjà vu or nostalgia when confronted with certain events.
Now, what exactly reminds me of it? These are elements common to works of fiction or situations which remind me of …it.
This brought up some funny stuff:
Places like Rosebank and other locations in Greenford where my family have lived have heavy doses of wires and suburban gloom. Council flats with satellite dishes on also remind me of it… hmm. Durston had those old Macs that felt old even when they were new… and the Macbeath Hall in the Haven Green churchy place evoked a feeling very similar to the suburban gloom feeling (in me, I mean).
This leads to my hypotheses. The questions I must ask are:
So, possibilities for what The Node is:
Well, it seems quite clear-cut, doesn’t it? However, I no longer have faith in the truth as a solution. Instead, consider which of these viewpoints it is most advantageous for me to adopt. The first gives me nothing. The second gives me some quirkiness but mostly nothing. The third gives me purpose. Memento, anyone? I’d rather have an artificial purpose than be swallowed by nihilism. I hope I somehow… urgh! I hope this turns out well.
This was Warren Zevon’s final public performance; he died about three months later, I think.
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=WhRRWwH3Fro]
Isn’t this interesting? Why did they want to call the internet the intergalactic thingy anyway? To think I wouldn’t have known that had it not been for the Lain artbook, I wouldn’t have know that… I really need to research the history of the internet properly. Why didn’t we get taught this?!
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
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
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
Recent Comments