It’s new year’s eve. Taking the night off. You should probably do the same.
The saddle is high. I mean really, really high. So high, I have to struggle to get back onto it. (And, you know, I’m tall.) I’m having difficulty putting things together about stuff I want to write. So instead of writing a cohesive blog post, instead I’m going to write a small list of things that I’m currently thinking about. (In no particular order.)
It’s telling that the first thing mankind did with rules – at least, according to Western thought and religion – is break them. It’s even more telling that, having broken the first rule, mankind was instead rewarded with more rules to follow – as if, somehow, that would make the problem go away. I wonder what this says about us – or about religion. (For example, the word “religion” comes from the roots “re” [meaning "again"] and “ligare” [meaning "to tie down"]. Is it surprising, then, that what we consider religion is really simply an attempt to tie us down against our natural inclinations.)
I have a set of lines in my head that I think might hatch into a poem, but they refuse to come out in that particular order. Something about dreams, or maybe a dreamer. I saw Dune the other day, and the line “the dreamer must awaken” stuck with me.
Am watching 10 Things I Hate About You. This movie has too many associations for me, so I am watching it with a bit of bittersweetness.
Did anyone know that nematic is a word?
I’ve decided, and this is D&D related now, that “campaigns” are, in general, a bad idea for a good D&D game. I theorize that the game works best when there’s a series of small adventures, as opposed to one giant epic storyline. This mode puts less pressure on the DM in some areas, whereas maintaining the DM busy doing the sort of thing the DM has fun doing; vice versa, it takes the pressures from the players, and instead allows the game to focus on the characters. That being said, campaigns do have their uses.
Was seriously inspired reading me some The Two Towers into working something extra for Mystara. (Again, D&D.) But now I want to play a LotResque game. The double edged sword of gaming inspiration – too many ideas, too little time to play.
The Good Shepherd was disappointing. (On a related note, so was Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.) It’s like they crammed three movies into one – when are people going to learn that it is a lot better to have just one storyline to which you can devote your full attention and do it well than try to cram three stories into the same amount of time and do it poorly. Matt Damon’s character was an inhuman, unfeeling, bastard who only shows signs of life – and therefore any interest whatsoever – in the flashback sequences to his Yale days. And everyone else appears for – at most – three scenes, thus meaning you don’t get attached to any character on screen. I will give it this: for its bloated run time (and there are at least four over-minute scenes that could have been cut without losing a single moment of story, and in fact would have probably helped make the movie clearer) it is entertaining, if only because you spend most of the time one would normally be bored trying to figure out who’s who (because, again, characters only show up for one scene and then are shown years – and dozens of minutes – later, and you’re left to remember that Character X was “that guy who was on screen for 10 seconds and said that thing” in order for it to make sense) in order for the plot to make sense. At the end of the day, the plot doesn’t make sense, unless you break it down into no less than three separate plots, none of which tie together in the end. (Except to say they share the same character – Matt Damon’s character – in common.)
The movie did make me think about one thing. I truly believe there are two types of people in this Earth: Those who were born for greatness and the rest. Those who were born for greatness need to struggle to get there, but they can get there. If they don’t struggle, they’ll fall comfortably short of greatness, into that vaccuum just above mediocrity but just below the spotlight, the runner ups of history whom nobody will remember. Those who weren’t born for greatness can struggle to get to greatness, but will never get there. They’ll fall right there alongside the lazy other half, in that nebulous place in the shadows of giants. And I have to wonder what would have happened if I had worked just a little harder, struggled a little more, had that desire built into me from the start. (Not for lack of parents’ trying. What actually ended up happening is what happens whenever a parent tries too hard – you beat the desire to excel right out of your children. So I was never motivated to reach beyond what I could naturally grasp.)
I think that’s it, for now. End of the year tomorrow. Ringing ‘07 at my aunt’s place, and then heading home… odd that I just typed that reflexively. Sometimes I feel I have no home.
This amused me to no end:
Windows Vista’s content protection (and DRM in general) assume that all of this copying can occur without any copying actually occurring, since the whole intent of DRM is to prevent copying. If you’re not versed in DRM doublethink this concept gets quite tricky to explain, but in terms of quantum mechanics the content enters a superposition of simultaneously copied and uncopied states until a user collapses its wave function by observing the content (in physics this is called quantum indeterminacy or the observer’s paradox). Depending on whether you follow the Copenhagen or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, things then either get wierd or very wierd.
From this article by Peter Gutmann, analyzing Window’s Vista’s DRM hardware costs and overall failures to the consumer. As a legal scholar, the issue of what constitutes a “copy” is an incredibly difficult one, as each “copy” created by the computer is technically each its own little possible violation of copyright. (IE, if you were to download an illegal music file, you would in fact create about a half dozen illegal copies of the file just to get the one copy in your hard drive. If you were to then play that file, you would create about three more copies, each of them just as illegal as the next.) So it’s kind of amusing to see this interplay between DRM and copies going on.
Dreams are, decidedly, not a wish the heart makes. Not unless – judging solely from the rather vivid dream I had last night – I wish to go on a funky interplanetary easter egg hunt, do barrel rolls on a commercial jet liner, solve strange riddles with mystic golden coins, and have make outs with beautiful women. Ok, well, I suppose I think each and every one of those things would be their own level of awesome. But when you put them all together – for example, having the jet liner you’re traveling in on your way to the next destination of your interplanetary egg hunt start doing barrel rolls moments after you start making out with a beautiful woman – it gets kinda weird.
“Fortune, fame
“Mirror vain
“Gone insane
“But the memory remains”
-The Memory Remains
“Excuse me while I tend to how I feel
“For things return to me that still seem real”
-Hero of the Day
#15:
The reason I still breathe: because I have
Forgotten how you taste in bitter times
When sweetness does demand that I should have
To quench my lonely state, there is no rhyme
Nor reason why I should go on without,
Once more bring forth and taste your sweetest draught
And laugh not lightly for you cast me doubt
That such a one as me would fall by side of crafts
Enchanting as those spells you’ve cast upon
My mind that I have yet to lose your scent
Despite the scars and battles I’ve not won -
And not a moment’s swing nor shot repent –
Though long delayed, the reason I draw breath
Is that, in vain, I’ve put the memory to death.
-ARE
The craft among you will note that the last line isn’t iambic pentameter. My brain muscles are still atrophied, give them time to rest and recover their strength. Both quotes above from Metallica songs.
