Project Mayhem

I just saw Fight Club, a little later than most people who have seen it. Except those who just finished watching it in the past 4 minutes, of course. It's an interesting movie, in both meanings of the word (weird and engaging.) Personally, I can appreciate the irony the portrayal of the destruction of commerce being vended by huge corporations, and I don't tend to enjoy watered-down philosophy grafted onto a film. Like in The Matrix.

SPOILERS FOLLOW. If you have any intention of seeing this movie I would suggest scrolling past or something. If you haven't seen it yet, I doubt you care, but I'll be vague anyways. I did like the movie, even though I don't think violence is exactly therapeutic. I don't believe that the plot holds together, but I'm willing to suspend my disbelief. Like I said, I found the anti-materialistic message ironic, but what bugs me more is the notion that you have to hit bottom before you can be redeemed (I mean the bottom of what humanity can be, not the bottom of our own personal struggle. Redemption implies that there was a bottom,) and that similarly destroying commerce will redeem our society. Materialism implies many negative things, but I don't think we can escape from it, or that we should.

That was fucking disgusting, though. I think I'm desensitized to violence at least until I wake up tomorrow.

Requirements of Living

In an online game I was playing, one player went by the moniker of "Life Demands Lysol." Now, I think that's fairly silly, because generally a bucket and soap is a fair substitute, but it had me thinking about what exactly I need to live. No, this is not some post where I end by saying "We need nothing! Goodbye material world, hello hermitage and a life spent alone in a cabin growing an impressive beard!" It's just a small list of things I require to continue functioning properly.

Some of these things are food, like breakfast. Recently I've been getting up after 12, in which case I'll usually eat "breakfast" at 3 pm, in which case it's hardly breakfast, but I still need toast, cereal, or something better than that on a daily basis. Oatmeal is also delicious. Under the food category there is also bread, usually brown bread. The white bread you get here is either cardboard or so processed that it's sweet, which is just weird. Other necessities are hot beverages like tea and coffee. The last item: chocolate, preferably dark.

Food is a fairly obvious prerequisite to survival. To actually live, I need trees. Trees, mountains, rivers and whatever other nature I can find. Animals are cool, too. I don't think I could live in a place that didn't have some of these things nearby. Part of why living at UBC is so cool is that we have a full forest next to campus on one side, an ocean on the other, and mountains looming to the north. It's not like I commune with nature on a regular basis. But I do love nature, and want to spend more time in it (therefore, the outdoors club.)

I'm not going to lie and leave something out here, but I need a computer as well. A digital camera is fairly awesome, but I can imagine living without one (seeing how rarely I use it.) But I currently maintain contact with most of my friends through the computer, entertain myself for hours with it, and occasionally do actual work on it. Obviously I could physically live without a computer, the question is only why I would want to.

So far, this list is missing one very important object, namely books. I haven't been reading very much recently, which makes me sad. I read No Logo when I first got here, honestly because I had nothing better to do, followed by The End of Faith, and am almost done Collapse (by the same author as Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is possibly one of my favourite books.) Considering that the first two were finished within the first few weeks of being at UBC, I think I could have done more reading. But I have read a fair bit, and I read a variety of books. The occasional fantasy book, for fun. A modern novel (I quite like Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity and About a Boy), for more serious literature. A non-fiction book, such as political or economic texts, or a polemic, for quite serious reading and for my education. There are more, but I think you get the point. Books are good.

Obviously this list is not complete, but I think it's dragged on enough.

Insomnia

It is currently 2:19 AM on the 11th of December, 2006. I have a computer science exam in 6 hours and 10 minutes. After reading that, you are no doubt questioning the wisdom of being up so late. There is no wisdom to question: I went to bed around 11, and have tried to fall asleep for the past three hours. The fact that I am awake right now is entirely voluntary.

I can tell you why I can't sleep. I can't sleep because at 7 PM, after finishing my reading for computer science, I fell asleep. I then slept for about an hour and twenty minutes. Long naps at odd times consistently spells insomnia, for me. On the rare occasion that I cannot sleep, it will almost always be because I took a nap that afternoon (even more occasionally it will be too hot to sleep.)

However, I have a fatalistic attitude towards insomnia, and other aspects of life. I refuse to worry about events beyond my control. That doesn't mean I assume I have no control, that I believe a divine hand shapes our actions, but merely that if I cannot do anything to change an issue, I will not fret about that fact. Before a test or exam, I will be calm because I cannot prepare any more, so I may as well proceed from there. And when I suffer from insomnia, I accept that I cannot sleep, and it does not bother me. Instead, I choose to write about it, because I think my attitude is fairly unique and also because it probably will help.

(There are, of course, other things that bother me while I lie in bed, since I have plenty of time to think about every insignificant problem I have, but those are not the subject of this blog post. Or any blog post, for that matter.)

An Analysis of the Matrix

Because that's always a good idea.

I've just finished watching the cool parts of the first two Matrix movies. I noticed a lot of things. It's fairly common knowledge that humans are not a source of power. The energy we get ultimately comes from the SUN, so to feed us the robots need an alternate source of energy, in which case we're completely useless anyways. There goes that idea.

First of all, why have the Matrix. If they can project a whole world into our minds that is run by an unbelievably complicated program, why the hell not just make us unconscious? It's not like we're doing anything anyways- we're just chilling in a bubble of some foul-looking liquid. Making us comatose is infinitely less complicated than a program that outputs the world's display realistically (down to every detail of our existence) with 6 billion of us simultaneously affecting the whole world's state, the results of which must then be dumped back into our brain. Just... WHY?

Secondly, we have the agents. Assuming that you, as a robot, feel bad for those humans and want them to have some sort of existence, and you want to run it smoothly, you could do better than the agents. Presumably if you have control over every facet of our reality you could simply REMOVE the anomalies from the system? The Architect sort of explains Neo's purpose, namely that the system cannot be perfect as choice is required, but that doesn't explain the agents. If his existence (and presumably the existences of his allies) is required, why are you trying to kill him? If it's not required, REMOVE him.

The agents behave very oddly given that they're programs. First of all, they take over human bodies. Why is this necessary? No one's going to believe that someone just transmutes into a completely different person. It would be much more believable to have someone randomly pop into existence- they could be testing a teleportation or cloaking device. They're definitely not human, given that Mr. Smith is worried about our smell infesting him: if I were a program possessing a human body, I'd freak out about my OWN bodily functions. Could you imagine Mr Smith being hungry, or needing to pee, while chasing down the next goddamn meddler?

But despite being inhuman, they seem to carry over some of our flaws. The miss almost every shot they take, and Mr. Smith clearly has strong emotions regarding our species and some of its members. For the first part, they are a program operating inside the Matrix, and as anyone who's ever played counterstrike can tell you, programs don't miss. They consistently line up their gun with your head. (In most online first-person shooters, some jackasses run programs called aimbots that do the aiming for them.) Secondly, the last time I checked computer program implied cold, hard logic, not all-encompassing hate and a wont to monologue.

I'm not even going to touch the actual physics of the movie, I'm just going to mention that the Mythbusters team shot at a gas tank repeatedly, with different guns, and nothing ever happened. Of course, Hollywood doesn't care. Hollywood doesn't care for the same reason that the Matrix premise has so many flaws. Comatose humans on a desolate planet with no plot isn't exactly going to sell one movie, let alone three, and suspension of disbelief means that Hollywood can make lots of money.

Which is fine, it's just fun to tear holes in things.

Rantosaurus? Drunkosaurus!

Yesterday I wrote a bitter, bitter, totally serious rant mainly focused on the weather. Today I have a more cheery topic: alcohol. I drank today, the first time since I got here (surprisingly enough for a college student) and the first time since mid-August when I partied it up on the Queen Mary II. Much of the reason I drank tonight was that I was with nice, friendly people. I don't like drinking with strangers, particularly as I take a dim view of the inebriated, even when fairly soused personally.

Today happens to be the last day of classes, surely a cause for celebration. Some friends of a guy whose girlfriend is a friend of mine were celebrating this in the aforementioned friend of a friend's room. This involved a lot of alcohol. I felt bad about drinking other people's alcohol and so was sober most of the time. Someone invited me to drink, I drank someone else's beer (they didn't mind), and drank some rum that that the friend's friend definitely didn't want, and lo and behold I was fairly drunk. On the sillier side of tipsy, one might say. Also known as the most drunk I ever want to get.

It was quite fun. I was more animated, had fun playing drunken ping pong, accidentally kicked someone in the head while trying to climb over the back of the couch, had some excellent drunken debate, and eventually at 2:30 decided I was tired enough to go to bed. In my livejournal blog I once wrote about alcoholism and how I hate losing control of myself. Well not only do I know that first of all, I never do anything I couldn't think of doing while sober, and secondly I rarely get to the point where that's even an issue. And since I had a lot of fun tonight, more fun than I would have had sober, I'd like to propose a toast. To alcohol, neither the cause of nor the solution to all of life's problems, but definitely excellent in moderation.

(Ha, I can write proper sentences while tipsy.)

Rantosaurus

It's currently 2 AM. Woohoo, first post in December. Let's kick this month off with COMPLETELY irrelevant shit that may not be entirely valid.

Seriously, what's up with the fucking sidewalks here? Why is it that in Vienna most sidewalks are cleared and gravel is spread over all the icy parts by the time I wake up, and yet as I walk to class at 9:30 in Vancouver the sidewalks are a fucking sheet of ice. Yes, Vienna HAS to be prepared for snow and ice, but it's not like it never snows in Vancouver. You'd think they'd be prepared for the one event of the year involving water crystals. Exhibit A) whiteness blanketing everything. Exhibit B) the cut on my hand I got from falling on my ass walking to class, which is totally irrelevant compared to the wrist I fucked up which means I couldn't go climbing this week.

So far Vancouver's infrastructure has been fairly shitty. It rains and we have fucking dirt in the water, it snows and the fucking power cuts out. Maybe you can't do all that much about the dirt (seeing as how what makes the water undrinkable is what the filters MISS) but for fuck's sake, keep the trees off of the fucking power lines. There's a fucking thing called wind.

Another thing that pisses me off about the sidewalks is the fact that people insist on jauntily and slowly strolling down the sidewalk, taking up both sides of the now narrow sidewalk and moving at about the pace that I crawl. You can walk at whatever speed you want, but when I am already 10 minutes late for class, feel free to move aside so that I don't have to jump through the fucking snow, thank you. And no, being late is totally not my fault, and this doesn't just irritate me because I got up half an hour earlier after too-little sleep, it's the fault of the fucking weather because it is too cold for me to want to walk outside.

Let me rephrase that. The cold doesn't really bother me, it just means I have to summon even more will to leave me wonderful, comfortable room.

Actually I don't really care about the sidewalks, the people, or the lack of basic services, although the maintenance people here could do a fucking better job with the sidewalks. What I'm really ranting about is the weather. By all means, snow, please, but do so in a way that doesn't deprive us of power and warmth. And don't fucking rain to the point that I don't drink anything, because that's just fucking cruel.

Goodnight everyone. Happy December, and I promise I'll make real posts later.