manaknight's blog

QotD: Can you hear me now?

What's your cell phone's ringtone? What made you pick it?

Mog's theme. Because he rocks.

Nothingness, Being, Video Games, and that place others call Home.

Heat, friction, dissapation. I miss the sciences. So accurate, so unflinchingly delibrate and careless to implication, all that matters is the process and the analysis of the result. Beyond careful, precise.

So let us return. The returning is always of course an awakening. In the return to previous experience, the recollection of memory not as experience but as memory, one is forced to realize the how of the past, and how that how no longer can be. Swept up in the great hope that as once has changed, the old world has changed too, that after the great adventure one can return, but as all our tales have told us, this is but a small hope they we all to readily realize can never be. The return is an attempt that only results in alienation, oneself form the past, the others from oneself. There is no return as such, and often this leads to the nostalgia that plagues the living life of modern men, a thing that only the living had for the dead in precious ages. This phenomenon exposes modernity's most dire change in human orientation.

The old style in a new form, the old book cracked open to its unchanging text. These will always be returns, welcomings that engender the new man who has been apart from them a long time. One learns why one loved a thing, even in the process of learning that the very thing he loved only exists as such in its past. Yet sometimes the 'new' recaptures the past, and in so doing brings back a respect for its progress cited and revealed in numerical measures of worth and satisfaction, 'success.'

In a word, so far this summer I've remember why I loved certain things I'd learned to detest, but at the same time they will never cold the great excitement and joy they once did, only a slight hope and a random delight in re-discovery. My past is a tomb, and as such is only a marker of memory and remembrance. I am a total fool in my desire to actually try and bring the something out of it and make it alive again. I changed, it did not.

Dragon Quest lifts up my heart. Only to make me realize how little does, and the falsity of all that slavish excitement and anxious anticipation that is the very lifeblood of consumerism. Once in a while is what is best to give myself, as is proper to remember. I must resist the temptation the dwell in that tomb.

What freedom it is to let Being be, instead of the being out of Nothingness that is the very operating metaphysic of human beings beyond default.

EVE Online

I played EVE online today for about 10 hours. I kid you not. It's friggin addicting, but a lot of it was downtime warping between star systems, where upon I was reading or fooling around with the interfaces. The tutorial took several hours to get through. This game is mind bogglingly complex, and a X4 gamer's dream come true. Apparantly it's continually added content every few months since it's launch. Hence now there are super deluxe battlecrusiers, titans, and massive particle beam weaponry ala the deathstar. Not that I've seen any of this... I mean all I did all day was run back and forth across the galaxy delivering booze and papers.... Papers? Anywho, it was addicting, and I ended up buying 3 more ships, including a pretty neat little mining specialized one. 

I suppose I should join a faction after I earn a few 100K and start having territorial conflicts. Pretty much all the space I've been in is secure, hence no one blowing the crap out of me in my little frigates. The entire aesthetic is very taken straight form Homeworld, the music, the ship designs, the backgrounds..but its' not liek you can imagine space to be something radically different form what it is...full of stars, nebulae, and planets. Maybe I will go warping off to hostile territory tomorrow. But there is just someting smugly satisfying about ferrying a cargohold of boozeacross the galaxy so some special agents can get wasted on it.

myspace

Things like myspace make me feel like an innocent little boy who has just been victimized. I sort of want to go cry. It hurts my web browser too.

Thank God I was a teenager when the internet was still new.  I may be only in my early twenties, but this scares me. My generation is giving up it's basic rights before they are even capable of knowing what those rights are. Even people I care about are willing to whore themselves off on the internet for a little self esteem.

Thank God she never posted those pictues.

Comics+Academics

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,71442-0.html?tw=wn_index_3

Conference co-founder Coogan acknowledged that academia can be a fun- buster. "You have this dog and you love it, and you want to find out why you love it. You dissect it, and you're left with this dead bloody dog on the table," he said. "That’s one of the things that academics do."

Yes. It's so true. I so want to be an academic.

Sex in Second Life

I was playing as my Male avatar this morning, and it was reinforce to me again how much SL is geared toward female avatars. Just hitting the ground running as a new player it's infinately easier to find a large variety of cheap items of high visual quality for female avatars. I was looking like  "hot babe" in a few minutes and a few landmarks. My poor male avatar however, having been in the game longer and purchase rather expensive items, still looks, well....boring and subpar. There just isn't enough volume and variety for male items to be driven down and prices and made available.

I suppose it also feeds into the whole virtual sex, which comprises such a huge portion of second life's economy. Females are suppose to look good to attract men who will pay them for their services. It doesn't matter what a male avatar looks like, and chances are there are very few male escorts. Playing as a female is just more interesting socially and economically. As a male avatar I just feel outclassed by others, while with my cheap 1 Lidenen hair as a female I feel on par with other avatars. Oh social constructions/roles in virtual spaces, how you baffle and confuse me, and well...bore me.

QotD: Celebrational Muppetational!

Who is your favorite Muppet ? Why?
QotD submitted by knitwitology.vox.com .

Gonzo and Rizzo. Of course.

Quotation

Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon

"I want to be small so I will be spoiled and I will be cute, because when you grow up, for example at the age of twenty, you are already not treated the same way, youaren't hugged and kissed and spoiled and played with." p. 178

Oh small Israeli girl, how wise you are.

profound!

tiff: you're mr. profound
me: WHAT
tiff: so you like your vodkah straight
me: ok

Wiki!

I joined Wikipedia, and edited my first article. I feel like I have a child now.