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

In the true spirit of teenage clique-ism, I’m going to have to point towards our friend Will Morland’s appearance on them.

While generally I make quiet hints about stuff causing me angst, I think I’m going to have to step it up for this…

Enthusiasm for technology…

Mm, ok.

…being good at it…

DEBATABLE, WILL! DEBATABLE!

You can’t just sort of like… luh [pause] become a social luddite [???] and sort of hang out in a corner sort of like staring at your old phone…

That kind of speech really takes itself apart.

I do realise that [pause] what I do does inf…er some social st-stereotypes on some people

…I don’t think you deserved to pass your English (Lang.) GCSE…

The internet isn’t working; quick, we must fix it!

HA HA HA!

As my sort of listening habits have changed, it’s changed me as a person OH GOD NO! OH GOD NO!

A skinny tie sort of worn without much sort of [pause, strained expression] well-tying and sort of just sort of slung around in a trUH! An uh… an attempt to look sort of formal

Sort of sort of, sort of? HA HA HA!

Just shove [jeans] in the wash, iron it [sic]

Iron… jeans…?

You have to pay for the T-shirts! They’re £7.50…[pause]… so we’ll have to go somewhere else […] the best thing about the event has been… the free pens and stuff that you get; all that crazy stuff.

Oh. I see.

[Hey There Delilah plays in background trying to make us feel sorry for suspected neek] An interest in technology conflicts with an interest in fashion and an interest in staying cool

As plaintext this seems like a good point but the situation made it ridiculous somehow.

Shop assistant:

Out of all our customers, they’re our favouri[laughs]

I have to give kudos to Dabson for this one - it’s funny:

My computer… just… crashed…

I think a quotation from Elliot sums this up quite well:

I have the utmost respect for the cameraman and crew: you don’t hear any laughing.

HA HA HA HA HA!

For the record, Will initially asked Elliot and me to accompany him to the MacExpo. We refused. Can you see why? Let us just consider, before we part ways, one more thing. Do people feel the need to identify with a group so strongly that they will create a persona? Let us ask ourselves this: should the BBC add a new profile to their list - that of the gutbustingly infuriating poser? Surely I would then be able to join the ranks.

Will, I’m increasing your traffic. Final word: HA!

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:

• Déjà vu
• Derealization
• Existential crisis
• Solipsism syndrome

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.

• 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

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

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3FEKJNAE3c]

Pax

Not the kind of thing I usually post about, but if anything can distract me from randomatic mania, this can:

While speaking at Carnegie Hall on October 19, 2007, a young fan asked J.K. Rowling whether Dumbledore finds “true love”. Rowling said “Dumbledore is gay” and “fell in love with the charming wizard Gellert Grindelwald but when Grindelwald turned out to be more interested in the dark arts than good, Dumbledore was terribly let down and went on to destroy his rival.” That love, she said, was Dumbledore’s “great tragedy.” The audience reportedly fell silent after Rowling’s admission, then erupted into applause.

Citation: Wikipedia

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

My problem with things like V for Vendetta, Serial Experiments Lain, Fight Club and The Matrix is that they’ve all appealed to me because they confirm or present themes that I have considered independently and thus tie into my whole life. They mean different things to me than they do to other people, I think. This is often why I dementedly force people to research everything they can about sprawling continuities like Lain and The Matrix - I want to give people I know a chance to love the fiction and maybe even understand me a little better.

I like soap.

Pax