psyche

If my muddled understanding of cellular automata and neural networks (and indeed the human brain itself), logic gates and the internet has taught me anything, it’s that the networking of nodes (simple[r] systems) can yield impressive, unpredictable or lulzworthy results. For me at least, pieces of fiction (films, books and such… not like, rubbish stuff) have an effect because I pick up on certain connections within the material to other parts of itself as well as to other things I don’t fully understand and stuff I already know etc.. This generates a kind of feel which I struggle to capture with my poor photography and endless blogging.

Maybe these complex network “feels” are also what govern sociology, love and anti-lulz! I think of this “feel” as a generalisation of the term zeitgeist, removing it from time. Geist, then? It already has a definition; I like mine better. How about nGeist? For network Geist? WordPress seems content with it… yes, that’s fine. Maybe The Node was just one Geist. Or the Universal nGeist. The uGeist! I MAKE WORDS UP.

Usually when I’m not fully acquainted with someone - or something - I get a more attractive “feel” than I will when I get more familiar.

Occasionally though, it just gets better and better until I get lost completely. Very occasionally. But when it does, it increases O(x^x!). These cases have been computing, maths and a few other special cases which maybe I’ll write about later.

Ha ha! Later!

Pax

AS level exams soon. I am really, really going to have to revise. I don’t know any chemistry. Maths is okay but in my case (I’m not particularly intelligent), understanding without practise* means nothing. Some parts are very easy. Some are tricky. Computing will be the easiest if I can pin down Module 2 (it’s full of hand-wavy definitions and irritating database terminology) to the algorithmic process I have going for Module 1 (which has worked pretty well so far). Physics is again okay but as everyone who sits near me frequently reminds me with looks of disgust and horrified comments (I can’t tell if they’re simulating them to belittle me - they don’t really use insults which I suppose is designed to give the impression that they’re trying to help me and therefore suppress my urge to request forgiveness). Essentially, I can’t intuitively understand basic physical concepts. Things that people just “know” seem to evade me. The pressure in a hydraulic system is uniform? It’s obvious NOW. Braking distance proportional to the square of initial velocity? Obvious once I’ve gone home very confused and derived that by rearranging v² = u² + 2as.

The social climate offends me. Apart from computing, in which either Mr Rokison xor [sic] Erroll crushes any sort of retardation, there is almost no social punishment (or it’s unreasonably deferred) for the usual transgressions (showing off, being annoying, cheating etc.).

What makes me slightly worried is that almost everyone from this school will probably “succeed” in later life. Not really something to rely on, but, you know, a reasonable hypothesis.

What am I going to do? Revise hard, get good A levels and gloss over some terrible problem in my understanding? Yes, probably. I suspect people will be loath to tell me how stupid I am in order to make themselves seem like better people. It’s quite difficult to get people to recognise just how terrible they are when this … terrible …ness … is the accepted norm. What to do?

Life is awesome.

*Brit. variant

Pax

I was recently assessed by some counsellor-type people who decided that they “didn’t want me on their books” - I’m not mentally ill; success!

They were quite flattering overall, telling me my interpersonal skills were “highly developed, if in the wrong direction” (highly developed? Hmm…) and I think I realised during the course of the thing just how much psychology, psychiatry and philosophy I actually knew from reading, despite not reading enough. I felt a pang of bitterness that most of my insights (which have recently turned out to be true in many cases but I shan’t go into this for ego-inflating reasons) are ignored by peers who believe they know better*, I think I am beginning to realise that things are going to fall into place, although they may take a long, long time.

This should be interesting.

From the Wikipedia article on psychosis:

Thomas Szasz focused on the social implications of labelling people as psychotic; a label he argues unjustly medicalises different views of reality so such unorthodox people can be controlled by society. Psychoanalysis has a detailed account of psychosis which differs markedly from Psychiatry. Freud and Lacan outlined their perspective on the structure of psychosis in a number of works.

Pax

* There is definitely such a thing as a mixed state in bipolar disorder, Will, and I’m sure Stephen Fry knows it…

Adam Zethraeus provided useful linkage which helped me upgrade my WordPress thingy. I wholly recommend the WPAU; it’s totally awesome.

Storrs Kegel (case of fractured virtual identity, hence Googlage) put me onto Coda which is possibly the greatest app I have ever used. It’s also the first thing I’ve used my debit card on. Yeah, I’m a real man (…I also think wtf at this).

I spoke to Elliott Katz about computer science at Cambridge (he’s been offered a place there to do that) and he seemed very modest and repeatedly claimed that he had simply “got lucky” (regrettably, I’m getting Americanised, I think: I kept trying to type “gotten” for “got” back there). In any case, awesome. I need to know more stuff.

Everybody loves subnet masks. The internet is serious business.

I’ve attempted another rather weak redesign of the main site but it’s ultra-clean, so, you know…

In CompSoc today, I realised just how retarded some of the things in Mac OS X really are. The ability to remotely control the GUI (not just background processes and stuff) via the shell and stuff… urgh… it’s like… whatever. And then being able to (re)set the root password by having the install disc: this makes me nervous.

However, it was entertaining to use the following sequence I devised to annoy family, which caught on pretty quickly at school too:


user$ ssh loggedinuser@x.x.x.x
Password: ******
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ osascript -e "set Volume 10"
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ say -v Zarvox
I AM WATCHING YOU
YOU ARE UGLY
^Z
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ ps -x
[A bunch of processes and their numbers are displayed; too lazy to type them out properly]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ kill [pid of something like web browser]
[actual loggedinuser now tries to open System Preferences to disable remote login]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ ps -x
[pid of System Prefs displayed]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ kill [pid of System Prefs]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ sudo shutdown -h now
Password: ******
SYSTEM GOING DOWN NOW or something to that effect


And then I win!

Pax

My to-do list for this web stuff:

• Update WordPress
• Do a proper WordPress theme

The front page of disinformatics is the only bit where there’s markup that serves no semantic purpose (the glider). Adam2z is the ultimate fusion of form and content, while Blue Eye Labs is mostly form and disinformatics is mostly content - a shame that there isn’t even really much content.

Anyway, I don’t know where these thoughts belong so I’ll leave them here.

Pax

I’m still here. The blog survived a year (kind of). Computing is interesting. The age of the high-performance individual is upon us (Putin?).

I need more storage space. I need a haircut.

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

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.

• Suburban gloom
• (Old) computers
• One or many lonely people
• The telephone system

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:

1. What is The Node?
2. What should I do?

So, possibilities for what The Node is:

1. It’s simply an exaggerated form of nostalgia for places I used to live or technology I used to use (very likely)
2. It’s my subconscious trying to give my life a purpose in the absence of any obvious external source of purpose (quite likely)
3. It’s a repressed memory of something very important (unlikely)

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