psyche

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

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

Some more stuff linked to The Node: 1990s Japan and the ending to Kodoku no Shigunaru.

I have some old Visual Basic books from Stanley Avenue… another life, that was. Yes.

What?!

I have plans! Semantic web
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 have to go to the southeast region U18 sabre BYC qualifier tomorrow, meaning I have to be at school at 07:30. Oh dear. I was thinking about Lain its random references to Ted Nelson and of course Vannevar and his Memex and was just wondering about why they chose that theme. I mean, Chiaki J. Konaka appears to be a computer enthusiast but his web presence didn’t come across as too… involved.

Oh yes, and SEL’s other reference to HotSauce still makes me think. Strange. SEL is really the perfect thing to destroy me: it seems like it’s been perfectly designed to distract me completely. Computing, informatics, psychology and philosophy and something that causes my reality connection to fail and my paranoia to increase. It’s something to do with suburban gloom! It’s The Node! WHAT IS IT? WHAT AM I LOOKING FOR? Am I just hopelessly lost in a mental fight to define myself, or is there something else?

Leader with info = Lain of the Wired

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

When I look back at this, I want to truly understand who I was. Even if the nihilist in me is dead and I am ready to start the end of my life (that is to say, be happy), I want to remember who I am. I don’t want to end up being someone with Farhan’s memories and body and life but a different set of algorithms - no! I want to stay the same. Not some evolved Farhan, better-suited to integrating with a society that I have rejected (well, a society that rejected me).

I am tired all the time. The classical music they play at Hammersmith Station in the morning (to make us docile?) is … it becomes insipid. Society has reached a level of abstraction I simply cannot tolerate. I don’t work! My brain doesn’t go well.

I have to somehow justify my own state. There’s no way to make everyone understand who I am. I have to trust that I can keep everything I have ever seen or known alive simply by remembering. Even if no-one else understands or remembers, I must, right? That’s enough, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

What is The Node? It’s something to do with suburban gloom and computers… it has some anti-consumerist leaning… urgh. I have to know. I’ve got quite close to discovering through SEL and The Matrix. By that I mean their extended universes. The Lain anime, game and book together remind me of it, as do the The Matrix (first film), Animatrix and Matrix Comics. I have to somehow find out just who I am! It’s not something I’ve forgotten. I don’t think I ever knew what The Node was or is or whatever but I still feel like I did. I also feel like I will never know.

I don’t want to be dismissed as a quirk or an anomaly. There’s something going on here!

When I watch the Lain intro now, it’s no longer the interesting chords or funny animation that I’m concerned with. I see media convergence, reality and perception being truly accepted as separate etc. but I also see a girl with a funny hairclip, a child playing video games… I see something that is somehow connected to something. Basically. What is it? Why have I reacted so badly? Is my subconscious artificially giving me a purpose by filling in gaps with non-existent facts to promote the idea that I somehow have some reason to exist?

Am I finally breaking down, trying desperately to justify my own existence? Who am I? Who is Lain? What is The Matrix? What’s The Node?

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

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