Monday, June 30, 2003

also, http://www.donniedarko.com is really, really cool and well done. it's got all this creepy secret stuff, and there are excerpts from "the philosophy of time travel," which explains a lot about the movie! definitely worth checking out. especially if you're at work. you have to turn down the music if you're at work, though, which is too bad.

and this is a pretty funny quiz. it's from this site i found the serial killer quiz which aptly named jess jack the ripper. one tip: don't pick beauty, or you'll be a girl. dammit.




Which Donnie Darko character are you? by Shay

so i accomplished nothing yesterday. no lab stuff. i made corned beef hash for lunch, dumplings for dinner. kelsey and i watched this is spinal tap, which is hilarious. anyone who's seen it knows about big bottom. when she was flipping through my dvds for one she'd want to watch, she stopped on donnie darko. that made me download "mad world" later. such a creepy song. it makes me want to commit suicide, or think i should want to, i'm not sure. i also got the original, by tears for fears, which is a ridiculous 80s version. they didn't fuck it up, since they wrote it, but gary jules turned it into this haunting, compelling piece. if you haven't seen donnie darko, listen to mad world and you should want to.

Sunday, June 29, 2003

re: comments on my 2 book posts. i did forget some things, and thanks to all of you for commenting.

i don't think i could ever like john steinbeck, after reading all 600295843029 pages of the grapes of wrath. and that whole thing about the grandma being dead during the drive to california... oh man, that's gross.

never read robinson crusoe or the three musketeers. i did start the count of monte cristo, i think i got to page 900 or something before something just gave out and i couldn't read anymore. i haven't picked it up again since.

i did forget the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. really funny, and if you play sci-fi ish video games you'll miss a lot of easter eggs that come from this series.

i can't read catch 22. i hear how good it is from friends, and i know it's a good book, but whenever i read it, i get a massive headache. heller's writing style or something drives me nuts, i think i'm allergic to it.

what is "on the road?" and i will pick up neuromancer after i finish insomnia, which is doing a pretty decent job creeping me out before i go to sleep at night.

whew. i just saw 4 movies yesterday. for $10. overall, though, it was an expensive day, what with 11.80 for lunch (a sandwich from milano of which the second half was dinner, a cannoli, and a root beer), then $10 for the ticket to the hulk, and $4 for a NON refillable soda. that's total crap, by the way. it seems to me like the free refills absurdly large soda is an integral part of the theatergoing experience. whatever. my thoughts:

the hulk, at 1:40. runtime 138 minutes
TERRIBLE. absolutely awful. an incredible waste of money. i wish the box office records didn't have me contributing $10 to this hulking piece of crap. i'll try to sum up how it was so deeply unsatisfying. i've never read the comics, but i know the hulk was created purely by gamma radiation, and not this triple combination of genetic experimentation, nanomeds, and gamma. movies always lose points automatically for deviating from the original format, be it novel or comic book. why can't screen writers understand that their improvements always make the movie worse? well, i shouldn't say always. make a statement like always or never and you'll always be wrong (heh).
the first hour was an excruciating period of waiting for the fucking object of the movie to appear. i swear to god... it was just the most unsubtle foreshadowing i've ever seen. green lights on eric bana, eric getting angry and his head shaking around like he's getting a seizure, but not ACTUALLY FUCKING TRANSFORMING, and people always telling eric how he's special and he has something inside him. we get the fucking point, already! jesus, everyone knows he's the hulk and he transforms when he's angry. if someone goes to the movie not knowing that, they should just be donkey punched.

so after an hour (that felt more like 3 years) of me turning to kelsey and going, "SMASH. WHY WON'T HE SMASH?" , he transforms. great. now he's a big green cgi guy. wait, he's invincible. wait, he can beat up lots of humans. wait, helicopters and tanks can't hurt him either. how suspenseful. how exciting. bullets bounce off him, he heals any injury in seconds, and it's terribly not exciting watching him jump really really high through a desert for 10 minutes while crouching tiger music plays in the background. it was good in cthd, ang lee, but it's just ridiculous here.

and jesus, nick nolte or kris kristofferson or whoever that even is, as bruce's dad, is awful. physically painful to watch. i don't know how much of the movie is just his ranting dialogue, but you can't understand him talk, and when if you could understand his words, they didn't make any goddamn sense. it's not entirely the actor's fault. the character doesn't make any sense. how does he feel about his son? does he love him, or think he's a monster? is he evil, and out to take over the world? who fucking knows...

i don't think i'm doing a good enough job trashing this movie. it's pretty hard to articulate how terrible it was.

right after we got out, ushers were waiting outside to push us towards the exit. this hadn't happened when mike liu and i came. so there was 5 or 10 minutes while we waited for them to go away, so we could walk into charlie's angels, and kelsey and tricia and her friend lindsay were sitting on the bench with me and i could feel their anger, directed at me. i am still really mad about this. i did not promise them 4 movies for the price of one. i did not owe them anything. i proposed the idea, and because AMC had changed procedure since last time i went, the girls felt they had the right to be mad at me. to sum it up, after we got out of our 4th movie, tricia said something like, what a great idea, eric! and lindsay said yeah, we were getting ready to kick your ass when we walked out of that bathroom after the first movie. i just wanted to . i don't know. grr

charlie's angels, at 4:20, about an hour forty.
action sequences were ridiculous. girls were too happy, all the time. all that buddy buddy annoyed me. and they were all really really malnourished, they had no fat on them, even where girls should have fat, and they scared me. but the jokes were pretty entertaining. bernie mac was in good form. and there's one scene right at the end that makes the movie worth seeing, i would say.

bend it like beckham, at 6:50, i think a little under 2 hours
any scenes with the indian mom were hilarious. the british girl, keira knightley, was hot. the main guy love interest ran like a retarded girl, or some sort of sissy t-rex, or something. the indian girl was 28 in real life when they filmed? and keira was 20? i guess the secret is having small boobs. the movie was really cute, and stuff. i enjoyed it.

eliza dushku - i mean, wrong turn, at 9:15, 93 minutes (i think?)
best movie of the night. they did a good job in building anticipation for eliza showing up on screen. oh my god, she is hot. and they did a really good job in casting another girl who looks a lot like her. in that she's short, brunette, skinny, perfect boobs, and HOT. there was some good violence, and some stupid teenagers, and it's the typical movie, but with eliza dushku, thus i will go see it again as soon as i can.

i don't know how i wrote so much about the hulk. i really hope i can save some people the movie ticket, and the over 2 hours, i wasted on it.

oh my god, eliza.

Friday, June 27, 2003

i'll do normal books now. let's see, books i liked, that are not fantasy...

1984, and animal farm, by george orwell.

old man and the sea, by hemingway. i thought the sun also rises was good literature wise, but it was so goddamn depressing, way too much to actually like it.

franny and zooey, by j d salinger. i thought nine stories, and "raise high the roof beam carpenters and seymour: an introduction" were ok, but weird. i really don't like catcher in the rye. partly because a bunch of morons in high school thought it was so cool, but i don't understand holden. he just seems like a confused asshole to me.

slaughterhouse 5, by kurt vonnegut, is pretty good. but then i went on a kick and bought a whole bunch of his books, and i couldn't read most of them. they're just insane and confusing. he's a complete wacko.

i think anything by ayn rand is creepy and mildly pornographic.

i want to read farenheight 451 at some point. never gotten around to it.

frankenstein, by mary shelly, is good! i remember writing a book report about it and enjoying it. amazing...
i think i liked dracula too, i forget what version exactly.

john irving is my favorite author, i think. all his books are autobiographical, sort of, and they all draw on the same ideas and sometimes steal from each other, but they're all hilarious in this real life kind of way.

the world according to garp is incredible. favorite book ever.
a prayer for owen meany just slightly less so.
the cider house rules also very good, it's funny how pearl harbor the movie completely stole their plot from this.
a hotel new hampshire, and a widow for one year, were ok. a lot in these 2 books is sad, and it upsets me how the characters abuse themselves, sometimes.
a son of the circus was just ok. it had its moments, but its nowhere near my favorite 3.
the water method man, and the 158-pound marriage are all right. around the same level as a son of the circus.
i think his latest, the fourth hand, shows he's running out of steam. maybe i've just read too many of his books.

come on, comment on any of these books, or feel free to suggest books for me to read, or do something. just show me you're reading!

my last post still came off as offensive. i always want to try to be more cuddly and not so covered with spikes, but i don't think i can. i actually think this hedgehog thing is a rather accurate (spirit) animal. i'm pretty sure that no matter what, i will be

blunt tactless honest rude funny offensive and so on.

it's so hot here. i can't think in here. even with air conditioning. i need to bring a fan, but i don't want to buy one, i've got 4 or something at home and i'm going home next weekend. maybe i can buy one from the school store and then return it after a week...

stoops, thank you for the comment. and for not labelling it as a "pity comment."

to try to elicit more comments, i'll pose a question. what's your favorite book? series? i lean towards fantasy, bleh. i'm a dork. if you're still looking for good stuff, amanda, have you ever read:

his dark materials by philip pullman
a trilogy, it's really good. the 3 books are
the golden compass
the subtle knife
the amber spyglass

a song of ice and fire by george r. r. martin
it's 3 books out so far, i don't know how long the series will be. like robert jordan's wheel of time, but BETTER. meaning more organized, more entertaining, not all that shit from those stupid women's heads about a man's calf. he keeps his stuff comprehensible. i couldn't even finish book 10 of the wheel of time, i abandoned it in disgust, because out of the 50 different simultaneous storylines, i could only recognize maybe 6 of the names.
a game of thrones
a storm of swords
a clash of kings

the dark tower by stephen king
4 books out of the 6 are completed. he wrote the first one over 20 years ago, i think. this series and the world it takes place in will not leave stephen king alone. it's really incredible. it's about the classic knight and his party of loyal companions, only he's a FUCKING BADASS COWBOY with these sandalwood revolvers. i devoured these, they were impossible to put down.
the gunslinger
the drawing of the three
the wastelands
wizard and glass

i've read david eddings, and i think it's trash now. the belgariad, the mallorean, the elenium, and the tamuli, all crap. i would say they're the equivalent of marijuana, a gateway drug into better fantasy books. i never read their newest stuff, about althalus or the codexes. polgara the sorceror and belgarath were good books, i think, if you've read the belgariad and mallorean.

if you like the redwall series, you really just like redwall and mossflower. those 2 books are awesome. every other book is the same thing with the same plot, the same animals, just different names. jeez, how do those animals eat so much goddamn food? those feasts are disgusting displays of animal gluttony.

the chronicles of narnia are lots of fun to read. they're fast, since they're for children. the end is extremely creepy, though. i was weirded out for maybe a week after finishing it.

alice in wonderland and through the looking glass are really cool. and if you're remotely interested in the matrix, you should definitely read cs lewis first, i think the wachowski brothers used a lot of his stuff in their trilogy.

and what about dungeons and dragons... wow, that's a lot of books to get. i'm embarassed to admit i own almost every dragonlance book written... i stopped a few years ago when i realized they were getting worse and worse, and just how plain dorky that was. good ones:

Dragonlance:
the chronicles. spawned it all, of course. raistlin is so awesome. and with that, legends. also very good. as far as the infinitely many series that come from the world of krynn, i would say anything written by richard a. knaak is very good. especially the legend of huma. and kaz the minotaur. land of the minotaurs, and reavers of the blood sea, all by knaak, are worth checking out. jeff grubb is a hilarious author, lord toede (villains #5, i think) had me laughing out loud during it.

i haven't read d&d stuff from any other worlds, besides the drizzt books by r a salvatore that takes place in the forgotten realms. they're ok. i think he does too much description of drizzt's total awesomeness and invincibility and his friends and all their dropping and rolling and cutting and dodging. it gets boring to me. still, the icewind dale trilogy, and the homeland series, are pretty entertaining.

i really want to read about the time of troubles in that world. it sounds so interesting to me, when gods are forced to become mortal and kill each other and stuff. i want to know what happened and what elminster's story is. but there are way too many books, i wouldn't know where to start. i'm no longer the dorky kid with too much free time on his hands... oh wait...

margaret weis and tracy hickman also did the death gate cycle, 7 books, which was really good, UNTIL the ending where everything sort of falls apart and doesn't make sense. oh well. the first 6 books were worth it.

terry goodkind has an all right series that started off really well and is kind of floundering around now. i don't knwo the name of it, but up until book 4 are all worth reading. after that, it gets all weird and not so good. actually, 5 is worth reading now. i didn't like 6, it was all about socialism, somehow, and 7 i didn't even read, because it was about some new characters. bleh.

comment! tell me what books you like! i can name some normal books too, that would make me sound mildly intelligent rather than ravenously geeky. maybe i'll do that later.

oh, i almost forgot. ender's game is incredible. so is the newer series (it's actually a parallel series, sort of), the whole shadow thing, which he hasn't finished yet. orson scott card is some weird mormon dude, though, watch out. i even read the other 2 series by him, alvin maker and homecoming, which were mildly ok. but ender series are definitely worth reading.

Thursday, June 26, 2003

wow, amanda really did write something nice about me. hmm... wow. let's see, now i should try to defend myself. (joking. that really was a nice post, amanda. thank you)

as far as being quiet, or keeping to myself, or not letting people get to know me easily, it's because i don't like people. i don't like making friends easily, because then it's harder to tell them how much they suck when you decide that they do, in fact, suck. i don't see the need for having a lot of friends who i don't really like. i don't know how people do that. i'd rather spend time with people who try to spend time with me.

there are some reasons i try not to post on the newsgroup, as much as the impulse strikes me. first of all, many people are morons. they don't understand some very simple rules governing what is "funny." to me, at least, and i think a lot of people would agree with me.

1) be clever
2) don't make fun of someone about something that's true
3) be clever
4) don't jump into the middle of someone else's smack
5) don't be eytan

how hard is that? if you're a retard, you should keep your fat mouth shut and never post. if someone's bad at frisbee, you don't make fun of them for it. if someone insults someone else in a post, you probably don't know why, or if it's a joke, and you have no reason for butting in.

i'm a hypocrite, i violate these rules every so often. i think, but i'm not sure, that the key is being ironic. if i'm being distinctly unclever, it's so stupid that it's funny. or that's what i tell myself. anyways.

so i am a hypocrite. i form grudges easily and keep them, forever. i could just say i have a long memory, but who needs to sugarcoat it? i also can dish it out but can't take it. i'm not nearly as bad as mary in that last aspect, but i've got pretty thin skin for the amount of shit i give out. really, though, if i don't find it funny, i don't appreciate it. when someone rips me a new hole, i'll laugh too, but only if it's done in a stylish manner. sai said something to me to the effect of having a high standard of humor, expecting everyone else to perform up to that standard, and unfairly despising anyone who can't. i think that's kind of true. except for the unfairly part.

let me make it clear: i don't appreciate short jokes.
1) they are not clever.
2) i consider it a serious disadvantage in life, in all sorts of ways. call it a complex if you want, but it's true.
2a) i make fun of rachel for having deep eye sockets, but i don't think they're really deep. mary's just nuts. plus, even if they were deep, i can't tell, so it's not unattractive or anything like that. i think that makes sense...
2b) i make fun of amanda for being irish. this doesn't seem bad to me, either. perhaps if we were in that era where everyone hated the irish (heh, oh, i guess we still are). but i don't think it's an actual bad thing, despite being not witty and beaten to death.
3) i've been hearing them since 4th grade.
4) i shouldn't need to explain it beyond, they bother me, please don't make any.

the people who find me offensive are the people i don't need as friends.

and i am friendly! if i don't hate you.

thank you for the nice post, amanda. i love it when people tell me good things about myself, because sometimes i wonder if there are any.

as far as feeling fuzzy, i would suggest going to the nearest drugstore. they have creams for that, you know.

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

i don't understand. can someone explain to me how:

the same foundation
makes 2 separate payments
to 2 different grants
in 2 different accounts
to the same professor
to the same project
in overlapping grants? what is wrong with these people? they haven't even finished one grant to this professor for the "gulf 2000 project," and they start an initial payment for a new grant for the same project. my head hurts.

Monday, June 23, 2003

7. 23 June 11:56 Dade County Public Schools, United States
8. 23 June 12:42 University of Nebraska, Lincoln, United States

who are you? why are you reading my blog? please tell me, i would really like to know.

i think haloscan is down again.

i have to go to lab.

rawr

that last post was heavy, eh? sorry about the lack of weekend updates. reason 1 being i am not stuck in my office. reason 2 being mary's been giving me a lot of shit about not emailing her like i said i would, and she actually has a point, so presented with the choice of 1) blogging, 2) emailing, 3) blogging, then pasting that into email (which would have made me feel vaguely guilty), 4) emailing, then pasting into blog (which would've been weird), or 5) writing separate emails and blogs, i chose option (2). i'm not even in the office today, but i thought i'd give my loyal readers just a taste. suckas.

tonight -- well, this afternoon -- i'm going to bryant park to save seats for butch cassidy and the sundance kid. i will leave as early as possible out of lab, zoe... but i might not be able to leave at 3:30. we will see how the circuit goes.

i was thinking about inviting some people back to longmeadow for july 4. any thoughts?

Saturday, June 21, 2003

here's a temporary panopticon, of sorts. you want a window into my thoughts? well, you shouldn't. and i don't think you ought to read what's coming, unless you're jess, or you want to know how much i hate you. if you're completely honest with yourself and you really are my friend, go ahead.

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are you sure you want to read it?

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you probably shouldn't.


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i really mean it.

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ok, here goes. get ready to hate me.


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i realized tonight, or rather, it became crystal clear, since i really have thought this for a while: i hate almost all of my friends. maybe hate isn't the right word, though. i despise them. sometimes i absolutely can't stand being around any of them and just need to leave. i don't know what it is. maybe i'm not cool, or i'm not likable, or i am an asshole, but i think it's because i don't have this magical ability to start bleating and eating grass, otherwise known as fitting in.
i don't detest most of my friends individually. it is when they all get together and act as this one disgusting unit that i become nauseous.

why are these people my friends, anyways? because some computer randomly picked us to live on the same floor? what kind of bullshit is that? i used to think i was so lucky to have been placed by chance onto a floor with such cool and generally good people. but i barely have anything in common with most of them.

so what am i left with. the frisbee team? these people are my friends because they also enjoy throwing around a piece of plastic? well, i guess i have one thing in common with them, for sure. that's better than these fucks from carman 10. but, some of these people on the team, i completely and totally hate even more. funny enough, every case is because of someone from carman 10. sasha, i can't stand the sight of you. whenever you say something, i want to tear out your tongue and shove it down your fucking throat. whenever you grin, i want to take a brick and smash you in the face with it until your head is a combination of blood and more blood. mike liu, i feel sick just looking at you. i don't want to, i liked being your friend, but now hearing you talk makes me want to vomit.

i had a great spring break freshman year in montreal with 3 friends from my floor and one friend from home who shared our break. i had a really awesome time sophomore year with maybe 10 people from my floor, despite housing issues. junior year wasn't such a big deal, i chose woodbridge to avoid being left out. then housing for senior year. i hate everyone now because of that. except judy, because she actually made a big deal about me hating her and made me feel bad about it. towards everyone else, i still hold this resentment that will never go away.

so what am i supposed to do on spring break next year? go with the frisbee team? cuz there's no fucking way i'm going with the same shitty crowd as before. but i don't want to spend any time with some of the fucks i hate on the team. maybe it'll be enough people that i won't have to. i think i will end up being angry and not having fun.

what is with that drunken lesbian slut orgy shit? it's terrible. i used to joke about that sort of thing in my typical crude, offensive fashion, but i can't anymore, because i've seen it and it sickens me. 2 girls making out? makes me want to be somewhere else. if any party even begins to start looking like it might possibly be going in that direction, i'm leaving.

speaking of offensive, karen "complimented" me tonight, by first asking me for permission to be drunk, and then thanking me for being offensive, but keeping it real. so i got a compliment nestled within an insult. or an insult nestled within a compliment. either way, what the fuck? if you want to say something nice, say the nice part. you can leave out the insults. thanks, i guess.

so i guess i'm just a crude, offensive, asshole, insulting piece of shit. without any friends. not any that i want, or like, anyways. i miss my friends from back home, who i got along with without trying, and who i could hang out with without being thought of as a crude, offensive, asshole, insulting piece of shit.

i think i'm done, for now. i'm pretty sure i left some stuff out of this rant by accident, i forgot it before i could get it down on paper, or type it, or whatever, but that's probably for the best.

for anyone who is really my friend, yeah, this isn't directed at you. for anyone who tells me to grow up, fuck you.

Friday, June 20, 2003

i am a huge hypocrite. i come to this realization every so often, feel bad about it for a few days, then promptly forget all about it and go on with my hypocritical ways. i don't think i like hypocrites. but i still like myself, kind of. is that hypocritical? amanda, i liked your post about judging people and all that. bill, i commented on your comment.

so today i'm doing the MacArthur, John D. and Catherine T. Foundation file. it's almost fun to do it after the last couple of files... almost every piece of paperwork has a grant number, cuads acct number, and fas acct number. and the ones that don't usually have at least one of those numbers, or the professor or the project name so i can link it to that. but even with all the good record-keeping, there are 12 different grants sitting on my desk right now. i'm not halfway through the file either, and i'm out of room on my desk. that's why i'm blogging.

i saw finding nemo last night. it was really fun, and cute, and at some points completely nuts. oh man, those birds were so awesome. mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine

i haven't been getting enough sleep. final fantasy tactics has been keeping me up til 3 am every night, and getting up at 8:30 isn't so much fun. i also haven't touched the circuit since we got it running. i have to write up a weekly progress report, too, and there has been no progress.

i said i wasn't feeling well on wednesday, so i came in on thursday instead. my boss has been so concerned since wednesday that i feel pretty bad. that's killing with kindness... take notes, rachel, you dirty, dirty tramp, you. and put on some clothes, for god's sake.

Thursday, June 19, 2003

oh, if you don't want to read these 2 really long posts about the matrix, you should skip down to the really long post i wrote myself just before i posted the matrix posts. please?

son of a bitch. i don't know why all the quotation marks in the last post turned into boxes. sorry. i'm not going to go through and edit each one, though. here's another cool post from that website:

(by the way, i absolutely detest the matrix within a matrix theory. sure, that could be true, but how incredibly lame would it be? i give the wachowski brothers more credit than that)

In the scene where Neo meets the Architect of the matrix, we see Neo in front of a wall full of TV monitors. Each monitor displays an image of Neo himself, and each image shows a bank of monitors behind Neo, forming an infinite regress. At first each image of Neo looks identical, but later when the architect makes statements, we see the Neo images reacting in a variety of different ways.

This scene evokes the work of artists like M. C. Escher (link). (Escher, like the Matrix movies, featured many mirrors in his work -- compare Escher's reflecting sphere with Neo's reflection in the spoon in The Matrix.) Rene Magritte's work also comes to mind. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the image resembles the Buddhist/Hindu image known as the Net of Indra, which some consider an apt metaphor for cyberspace and the web:


"The Net of Indra is a profound and subtle metaphor for the structure of reality. Imagine a vast net; at each crossing point there is a jewel; each jewel is perfectly clear and reflects all the other jewels in the net, the way two mirrors placed opposite each other will reflect an image ad infinitum. The jewel in this metaphor stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness, or a cell or an atom. Every jewel is intimately connected with all other jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change, however slight, in every other jewel." -- Stephen Mitchell, quoted here


Where do the images of the "other" Neos come from? Are they simulations, projections by the Matrix of how Neo might react? Are they recordings of things that happened in other versions or copies of the Matrix? Or are they views into alternate realities -- like the "many-worlds" theory of quantum physics -- superimposed on the current situation?

Consider the camera work in this scene. The camera moves from Neo to an image of Neo in the Bank of monitors, then zooms in on a single monitor until its picture fills the screen, and the scene continues with the viewer now observing that picture rather than the original room. This same camera movement occurs several times in the scene, so by the end of the scene we are several levels removed from the original room, watching an image of an image of an image. This serves as an important clue, hinting that we must consider multiple nested levels of representation/simulation -- the Zion world may be just as much of an illusion as the Matrix.

If we use the "many worlds" metaphor, then we first see possible futures for Neo, but don't know which one will "occur." When the camera picks a monitor and zooms in on it, we experience the "collapse of the wave function" subjectively, and so in our reality only one of those futures happens (though they all happen in some universe). But does this result from "choice" or "fate?" It seems that question is one of the central meditations of Reloaded.

here is some really awesome stuff i copied right off of http://matrixessays.blogspot.com

i'm pasting it here not because i'm stealing, but because i figure people will be more likely to read it if it's here than if they have to click a link. plus i picked out the stuff i liked best, a lot of it is rehashed crap by incredibly stupid people who think they're smart.

warning: this is pretty long. but if you're at work, you've got time, eh?

Jesus, Buddha, and Gödel : Unraveling the Matrix Mythos

By Eric Furze


What do Christianity, Zen and formal mathematical logic have in common? If you look closely, “The Matrix: Reloaded” will tell you; beneath its shiny, heavily stylized surface, the second installment of the “Matrix” trilogy reveals a mythological sophistication that surpasses anything the genre has produced before. The trilogy’s penchant for religious iconography is, of course, already a widely celebrated phenomenon – philosophical essays on Neo’s messianic qualities began appearing in magazines and on websites shortly after the film was released in 1999 – but what has yet to be understood is that “Reloaded” profoundly redefines the structure and scope of that symbolism. While “The Matrix” was content to simply update ancient myths with modern images, the release of “Reloaded” reveals the Wachowskis to be attempting something much more ambitious: a synthesis of Oriental and Occidental mythology wholly new to the western literary tradition. If “Revolutions” can complete what “Reloaded” has begun, in fact, the trilogy could very well become the first mythology to unite East with West since the dawn of Occidental culture over 2500 years ago.

But the Wachowskis have more on their bookshelf than the Bible and the Ramayana, and in order to fully understand the framework of their creation, it is first necessary to grapple with a seminal, and famously difficult, result from mathematical logic. Fortunately, this detour through the esoteric is worthwhile: the good thing about math is that it is, if nothing else, predictable. The Wachowskis have adhered to it so faithfully, in fact, that its structure is readily visible and points to some fairly unavoidable conclusions about how the trilogy will resolve itself in its upcoming final installment.

I. The Gödel Sentence and The One

Structurally, the mythology of the Matrix is patterned directly after a central result in 20th-century mathematical logic known as the Incompleteness Theorem, first discovered by the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel in the early 1930’s. For an excellent, mostly non-technical introduction to the Incompleteness Theorem, the interested reader is referred to “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” by Douglas Hofstadter. (There are also numerous websites dedicated to the topic, though they vary considerably in both didactic quality and requisite level of mathematical background.)

Gödel was able to demonstrate that any “formal system,” of which mathematics and computers are examples, is inherently incomplete. “Incomplete” has a very specific technical meaning; in broad strokes it means that there are truths that exist within a system that are not provable using the rules of that system. If the system is a set of mathematical axioms, this means that there are mathematical truths which are not provable (or “decidable”) using those axioms. Such an unprovable truth is known as a Gödel Sentence (G) and all formal systems have them (each particular system having its own unique G).

The relationship between Gödel and the Matrix is made evident when Neo confronts the Architect at the end of “Reloaded.” It is explained to him that:

Your life is the sum of the remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the Matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly which … is systemic, creating fluctuations in even the most simplistic equations.

Neo is a destabilizing anomaly inherent to every conceivable Matrix: in the language of mathematics, he is the Gödel Sentence itself.

The Prophecy of The One revolves around the fact that the Matrix is a computer and therefore is nothing more than just another formal system. As such, it is inherently incomplete and so there exists for that system the equivalent of a Gödel Sentence, G, which is true but undecidable within its framework. Neo, as The One, is the organic instantiation of G for the formal system of the Matrix. The Incompleteness Theorem tells us that every system has a G just as, in the movie, every version of the Matrix inevitably produces its own incarnation of The One.

According to the Architect’s explanation, whenever G for a particular version of the Matrix is found (i.e. The One is born) its incompatibility with the rules of the system leads inexorably to a “cataclysmic system crash.” In “Reloaded,” this progressive system failure is embodied by Agent Smith. Notice, for example, that his 'new purpose' was a direct and immediate result of Neo assuming his role as The One; he is the destructive consequence of the Gödel Sentence. His continuing 'replication' is simply the exponential spread of the instability (or anomaly) throughout the Matrix, and once it reaches all parts of the system (remember Smith admitting to "wanting everything"?) the Matrix will crash.

Fortunately for the Matrix, there is a way to avoid this disaster scenario. Mathematically speaking, any formal system can be ‘saved’ from a given G by simply incorporating that G into its axiom schema: making it a by-definition part of the system, thereby removing its undecidability. Within the framework of the movie, this is accomplished by having The One “return to the source,” which renews the Matrix and saves it from the instability introduced by his arrival. This is not a permanent fix, however: this new version of the Matrix is susceptible to its own version of the Gödel Sentence, which will ultimately lead to the birth of yet another One and a continuing cycle of death-and-rebirth of the system, ad infinitum. According to the Architect, what happens in the movie takes place during the fifth repetition of that cycle.

That’s the end of the math, but it is only the beginning of the story of “The Matrix,” for while mathematics provides the foundation, the Wachowskis have looked elsewhere for the materials with which to build their mythological edifice.

II. The Hero’s Journey

As the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell described in “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” there are symbols and patterns which are common to myths and religions the world over, regardless of culture or era. This commonality manifests itself in what Campbell called the hero’s journey: a cycle of separation, initiation, and return that provides the structure on which the vast majority of myth is built. It is exemplified, for instance, by the “Star Wars” trilogy (which George Lucas admits borrowed heavily from Campbell’s work): Luke, the hero, leaves his home on Tatooine, proceeds along a road of trials through which he is initiated into his role of Jedi, and then returns to Tatooine to rescue his friends and, ultimately, liberate society. Another example, from ancient Greece, is “The Odyssey”: Odysseus leaves to fight against Troy, has a long road of adventure, and ultimately returns home to his reward. The Oriental tradition has the story of Buddha: Prince Gotama leaves his father’s home to discover the true nature of the world and in so doing awakens to his role as the Buddha. He then returns home as a teacher and guide to enlightenment. The list of examples is endless.

The fundamental difference between the Occidental and Oriental modes of the hero’s journey lies in the nature of the hero’s awakening. The Occidental hero succeeds by gaining relationship with the source of divine power external to himself (e.g., Luke gets his power from The Force, Christ gets his power through his relationship with God the Father). The Oriental hero, by contrast, awakens not by communing with a separately individuated divinity but by recognizing within himself the power of the divine (recognizing the godhead within, as the Buddha would say). The Buddha achieved enlightenment by realizing his lack of individual identity or ego: he was simply a part of a greater universal consciousness. The differing Eastern and Western mythological traditions spring, at their most basic, from these different understandings of humankind’s relationship with the divine. The Oriental hero recognizes his own divinity; the Occidental hero, separate from the divine, establishes a relationship with it.

What is unique about the “Matrix” trilogy is that it blends both the Occidental and Oriental modes of the hero’s journey. The 'ordinary' cycle of the Matrix, as explained by The Architect, is very clearly an example of the Eternal Return common to myths of the Orient: a static, never-ending cycle of life and death punctuated by the repeated incarnation of a world-saving hero. The first movie was the hero's journey in the Oriental mode (despite the popular, though inappropriate, identification of Neo with Christ in that movie): the protagonist succeeds via a transformative realization in which he recognizes within himself (in contrast to the Occidental mode) the unity of life and power of the divine. In that sense, the first movie was about Neo awakening to become the Buddha and, accordingly, that movie was rife with references to, and symbols of, Eastern mythology (e.g. bald, enlightened, lotus-sitting children dispensing Zen-koan-like wisdom and bending spoons with their mind).

“Reloaded,” however, breaks from this tradition when Neo refuses to fulfill his "Buddha destiny" of merging his consciousness with the Universal in continuation of the cosmic cycle (which is what would have happened had he chosen the “door on the right,” and it would have been the typical conclusion to an Oriental myth). Neo instead embraces the Occidental mode of the hero's journey, in which the protagonist succeeds by gaining connection with the power of the divine beyond himself. He affirms his individual identity (as opposed to the egoless monad of the Oriental tradition) in the most fundamentally human way possible: he chooses the romantic love of Trinity. In so doing, he turns away from his Oriental destiny and towards his Occidental one.

It is in this sense, then, that Neo becomes the Christ figure. If the Matrix is about choice then Neo, in his role as The One, is choosing for the entire population of still-connected humanity, choosing an existence apart from the Imposed Choice of the Matrix. Just as Christ fulfilled the law so that Christians would be free of the law, Neo will (presumably) fulfill his choice so that humanity can be free of that choice. What that fulfillment for Neo will actually entail has yet to been seen, but undoubtedly it will involve his confrontation and destruction of Agent Smith, the embodiment of the anomaly (sin) inherent to every human.

The identification of “choice” in the Matrix with “sin” in the Christian tradition can be understood by recognizing the first “perfect” Matrix as representative of the Garden of Eden. Biblically speaking, Eden represents a state of Man without knowledge of good and evil and therefore without the ability to choose between them. By introducing choice into the Matrix, as the Architect explains was a necessary evolution, humanity is banished from Eden, banished from the ‘perfection’ of the matrix without choice. Original sin is what drove man from Eden just as the first 'perfect' Matrix was doomed because of the "imperfection inherent to every human being." Christ died to free humanity from the stain of Original Sin; Neo will die to free humanity from the bondage of Imposed Choice.

III. East Meets West and What “Revolutions” Has in Store

At their most basic, the Oriental mythological forms are far older than those of the West: they stretch back to the very dawn of civilization, predating all known religious traditions. Zoroastrianism, around the turn of the first millennium B.C., was the first religious system to introduce the concepts and patterns which distinguished the Occident from this older tradition (the dates ascribed to Zoroaster vary rather widely, but by the time of the Jewish enslavement at the hands of the Babylonians in the sixth century B.C. Zoroastrianism had already become the dominant religion of the Persian Empire). From that branching point began the ever-widening gap between the Occidental and Oriental religious traditions that today divide the world into East and West. In the East, the unity of life and the never ending cycle of death and rebirth held sway; in the West, the inevitability of death, the separation from God and the yearn for return.

The interesting thing about the mythos of “The Matrix” is that it has managed to combine the Eastern and Western mythological traditions by creating, in Neo, a “hero’s hero” of sorts: a character who possesses the redemptive power of both Buddha and Christ, the egoless and the individuated, identification and relationship. The Wachowskis are certainly the first within the cinematic community to succeed at anything like this, and are perhaps breaking ground in wider arenas as well. They have created a proto-myth which is attempting to unify what became divided at the beginning of the Zoroastrian tradition. While within the Matrix, Neo functions in his role as the Buddha: at one with everything, able to manipulate ‘reality’ at will. Outside the Matrix, in the ‘real’ world, Neo will function as a Christ figure: apart from divinity but able, through his relationship with it, to direct its power.

What, then, does all this point to in terms of what we can expect from “Revolutions”? Nothing is certain, of course, but there seem to be some likely possibilities.

First up is the question of how Neo managed to stop the sentinels at the end of “Reloaded.” The mythological structure just formulated provides some answers which manage to explain this mystery without resorting to something as banal and unimaginative as – to take a popular online theory – a Matrix within a Matrix. Since it happened in the real world, Neo was necessarily functioning in his Occidental role as the Christ. It was therefore not accomplished through any organic power inherent to Neo himself, but rather he was able to somehow communicate with the “God of the machines” (presumably the Architect) and through that communication control the behavior of machines in the real world. That is, Neo (by some physical channel that has yet to be made clear – perhaps via a device implanted in his body along with his plugs and input jacks and not activated until he chose “the door on the left”) essentially “prayed” to the Architect, asking him to stop what was about to destroy him. The Architect, being a benign divinity, had mercy and complied. This will require confirmation in “Revolutions,” of course, but it seems, for now, to be a reasonably satisfying explanation.

If “Revolutions” has Neo continuing in the pattern of Christ, he likely must die in the real world before assuming the proper role of savior (just as, to assume his role as Buddha, he died in the virtual world of the Matrix). The mechanism of that death has already been hinted at, with Bane being an obvious candidate to play the role of Judas: perhaps he will “betray” Neo by convincing the council (or even Morpheus himself) that The One’s choice has doomed the Matrix and that it can only be saved by sacrificing Neo. Morpheus would actually be an interesting choice as it would provide a compelling parallel to the New Testament: Christ was, after all, crucified at the behest of the Pharisees, the leaders of the old religious tradition. But whatever the mechanism, that death will result in Neo being sent, like Christ, to hell: presumably to be symbolized by a Matrix completely taken over by Smith. Neo will enter this hell to confront and ultimately defeat Smith, thereby banishing the anomaly from the Matrix and saving (in both the literal and mythological sense) every person still plugged in.

Fulfilling his destiny, Neo will return (resurrect) to the real world where he will assume his true role of savior: he will be a means of communication with the machines through which humanity will be able save itself from the wrath of the sentinels. He will enable the establishment of a true relationship between humans and machines, just as Christ enabled the establishment of a relationship of expiation and forgiveness with God the Father (John 14:6, “I am the way … No one reaches the Father except through me”). This relationship liberates believing Christians from the burden of Judaic Law just as Neo will liberate humanity from the bonds of the Matrix and spare Zion from the wrath of the sentinels.

In the garden of Eden grew two trees of particular significance: the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. When Adam tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” … So He drove man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every direction, to guard the way to the tree of life (Genesis 3:22-24)

As Campbell explains in his volume on Oriental mythology, thence comes the separation between East and West:

Of the tree that grows in the garden where God walks in the cool of the day, the wise men westward of Iran have partaken of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, whereas those on the other side of that cultural divide have relished only the fruit of eternal life. And if man should taste of both fruits he would become, we have been told, as God himself – which is the boon that the meeting of East and West today is offering to us all.

This boon is exactly what the Wachowskis are aiming for: a union of Eastern and Western religious traditions. Assuming “Revolutions” is able to finish what “Reloaded” has begun, the “Matrix” trilogy is virtually assured of becoming the definitive sci-fi mythology of this generation. And, if it does things really right, perhaps even the first universal myth of the post-globalization era. What Zoroaster divided, let the Wachowskis reunite.

_____

1 Joseph Campbell, Oriental Mythology (New York: Penguin Books, 1962), 9.

why do i still have 2 hours left? jeez. i came in at 9:03 this morning, which is the closest i've been to on time since my first day. I'm almost done with the Kress file, but some of these files have absolutely no clues on them to explain what grants they pertain to. Why couldn't someone have just written the fucking grant number on the sheet? how hard is that? or to even say, re: grant blah blah blah. it's really not that hard.

i'm in the office today because i was not in the office yesterday. i had forgotten to set my alarm when I fell asleep on tuesday night. i woke up wednesday morning thinking, shit, i must be late. it was only 8:10. so i thought, cool, sleep more, and i woke up again at 9:10. i called and said i wasn't feeling well, and could i come in tomorrow? and my boss was super nice about it. she's so nice :)

so instead of working, i went to west way with kelsey, where they tried to charge me 40 cents each for lettuce and tomato on my tuna salad sandwiche DELUXE. what the fuck does the delux mean, if not, comes with lettuce and tomato? we got fries with it. that would be a tuna salad sandwich with fries. the waitress was all sorts of bitchy.

edit: oh yeah, i mailed my speeding ticket in and faxed my score cancellation to kinko's. hopefully they're both on time.

then we went down to barnes and noble at lincoln sq, where i proceeded to buy 3 stephen king books (i can explain. one was a hardcover in the bargain books section, which i can't resist. hearts in atlantis, was that a good movie? the other two were insomnia and the eyes of the dragon, both of which have some crossover or overlap into the world of the Dark Tower, which is an incredible series by him. if you like westerns, you should definitely check it out) and shadow of the hegemon, which i've already read, but don't own, and it was hardcover in the bargain books also. kelsey amused herself reading "the devil wears prada," written by the fresh out of college assistant to the editor of vogue, and people magazine. yeah trash. she also had the most incredible ink stains all over her face. how did you manage to do that?

then i wanted to go see finding nemo, but 68th is not showing it, only 84th. i hate that. i also hate having to pay $4 whenever i leave the columbia area. fuck that.

so i came back home, then ordered from giovanni's with london. i almost stayed to watch lizzie mcguire (how old is hilary duff? amanda bynes is hotter, though). heh, i made a comment of which i am extremely proud, so i have to write it down here. kelsey and lightshow came down, and said, we're going to max soha for dinner. i said, niiiice, and then i saw bonnie too, who was also apparently going. so i say, what the fuck? what are you doing? and so on, and then some more words, and i dropped the gem, "do you want a fourth wheel to go along with your third?" i'm really proud of that. you don't understand.

then, more final fantasy tactics, then poker, during which i won 4.60. i came in second though, behind dave's 5.25. blimey bastard.

tomorrow is the mets yankees game. but it is also tom's birthday. but it is also christian's party. tom, your parents picked a terrible time to conceive you, or your mom picked a terrible time to pop you outta there, i'm not sure which.

i love eating lunch here. i had salmon with mexican corn and smashed sweet potatoes for 5.08. and i get 5% off if i get a ziptic, which i'm going to. it's like dining dollars, but i guess not as good, since 5% is less than the NY tax. grr

i want comments! how come no one comments on my page?

btw, new record on tuesday of 40 page views. so i know you fuckers are reading it. where are my comments? unless it's the same person 40 times. you bastards.

the reason this is so long is because i'm typing it in notepad and posting the whole thing at once. i figure it's less obvious that i'm fooling around on the computer if i do it that way.

mary, you don't read this, do you? i love you mary! come home already, jeez.

oh oh oh! almost forgot. our circuit fucking OSCILLATES. almost perfectly, too. .940 instead of .993 MHz, but that's probably due to the parasitic capacitance of the oscilloscope probes. oh well. since we got it working around 10:40 on tuesday night, i have not talked to my partner about it once. heh. i told kinget the good news on wed morning, and he sent me this long email almost immediately that i just have not bothered to read yet.

wow, this is long. jess, your desperate polls suck. stoops, post more crap. makiko, come back! mara, you're a jew. amanda, you frighten me. mike liu, chilllllllllllllll. pardo, good luck with the aliyah. susan (susan? do you read this?) finish your semester already for god's sake. who else do i know reads this? um, whoever that is at smith college, hi. jillian, come visit me! and who is it at SUNY stoney brook that comes here?

whew, wasted 22 minutes writing this up. i rule.

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

ok. i'm going through files, and there's a letter addressed to

3215 West Big Beaver Road

that is all.

good:
lunch today. flank steak (edit: originally i wrote "flank stank" instead of flank steak (edit of edit: i just wrote flake steak instead of flank steak in my edit. it just wants to rhyme!). odd.) with tri-color relish (relish? it was red yellow and green peppers) on a roll, with one side. 4.84 after tax. so good! the mac and cheese, regrettably, was pretty bad. but only bad in a not hot, tasteless, mushy way, not superburned john jay bad.

bad:
i went to lerner during lunch so i could fax my lsat score cancellation form at copyquick. of course, the guy was out to lunch.
i went to lerner during lunch so i could buy stamps to mail in my speeding ticket. of course, the machine would not accept my $10, or either of my two $1 bills.
i'm going to lab tonight after work. at least we finally have the correct components now.

i'll just hope it's not too late if i fax it in after 5. and i'll hope my fine will be on time if i put it in a mailbox after 5, so i don't get arrested. and i'll hope we get our circuit up and running in time to go to trivia night.

hope is for idiots.

i think i'll get another steak thing and save it for dinner.

LAUNDRY CLEAN. ROOM CLEAN. DISHES CLEAN. ERIC ANGRY. ERIC SMASH! and by smash, i mean clean.

i was 14 minutes late to work today, instead of only 8, because as i walked past the front desk in broadway, the flip flopping noise finally registered in my brain, and i realized i was wearing my blue flip flops to work. amazing how turning around, going up the elevator, putting on socks and sneakers, and going back down can take 6 minutes. it must have been all that cursing. or possibly the sobbing. or maybe just the self-mutilation. that stuff takes time if you want to do it right, you know.

i'm dealing with my first well-kept file. meaning it's in order already and nothing seems to be missing. before, it was all files with massive gaps and missing documents, which translated into a big headache for me. now i don't think the alternative is much better. christ, these things generate a lot of paperwork. i don't think i'm going to document all of it. who's going to notice, anyways?

isn't it someone's birthday soon?

whew. 5 loads. in the washer. only 3 trips. the last one made necessary by my flex running out after the first washer.

room cleaned, somewhat.

dishes now. i need more shelves. and pants.

i need to throw out/recycle these cans. there are, let's see, 17 total on my windowsill and desk. most of them still have stuff in them. dang. i wonder how much money that would be worth if they were all poured into one bowl and then someone drank it? would it be worth more or less if one could see what it actually looked like?

i really hate how i left my favorite pair of shorts in my room by accident. those will be dirty for another month.

i tried changing my template so each entry would display "posted by your mom at," but blogger dislikes having its code altered. and by dislikes, i mean, you can't. and i didn't want to change the author of this blog to "your mom," and i didn't know how, anyways.

rawr.

Monday, June 16, 2003

i'm going to post this. how can i get code to show up as normal text and not be code? is there a way to comment it out, sort of?

i'll use brackets instead of carrots. [] instead of <>. i suck, i know.

ok, right after the [$blogitemdatetime$][/a]

i added a(n) | to separate it, by means of a [a] | [/a]
and then i pasted in the haloscan code. make sure you paste the haloscan code before the

[/span][/div]
[br]

i am so smart. i am so smart.

terrible, awful, incredibly odd dreams. i should just take a power drill to my temple.

what i remember: i'm in the car, with my mom, my brother, and my brother's friend (i've never seen this person before, but in the dream him and my brother were pals). we've been on the road for 3 hours. we're driving down south somewhere for vacation. mary's coming along too, in fact, it's her house in georgia or somewhere that we are staying at(not maryland). in the dream, mary lives close to me. i was supposed to pick her up. 3 hours ago. i don't think i've ever felt so horrible. there was some calling and begging for forgiveness, eventually the dream sort of melted away.

at some point, i was in a car (different car, different people, except my brother was there again), and we took an exit ramp up to a different level of the highway, only the exit ramp was at a 80+ degree angle from the ground and the new level was thin as paper and incredibly hilly (like a ribbon). i could see the bottom of our highway from inside the car. also, pieces of the highway kept disappearing. i don't think i like highways anymore.

at some other point, i was in the pirates of the caribbean. the movie. that hasn't come out yet. only some of the skeletons were really badly drawn cartoons. but it was real. and link, from zelda, was in it, i think in the role of orlando bloom, and he kept stabbing skeletons (where would one stab a skeleton? everyone knows slashing and piercing damage only does 50% to skeletons. well, it's a dream, people) and making pithy comments at the same time. that arrogant bastard... i wonder if he was a cartoon in my dream? i can't remember

at some point this dream turned into that 70s show. and i was caught in an incredibly uncomfortable argument between kelso and jackie. damn, she's hot. especially when i'm dreaming.

then i finally woke up because i had to meet with my professor today and explain how i have nothing to show him.

pardo, i didn't know you had a blog. i added it to the list of blogs. your list sounds incredibly arrogant. you just have to insert the haloscan code in the right spot.

makiko, here is the definition of a pinata:
a decorated vessel (as a pottery jar) filled with candies, fruits, and gifts and hung from the ceiling to be broken with sticks by blindfolded persons as part of especially Latin-American festivities (as at Christmas or for a birthday party)

that's all for now.

Sunday, June 15, 2003

wow, this weekend goes down as the most useless i've been in quite a while. let's see... what was i supposed to get done

laundry
shower
clean room
go to lab and work on circuit
use laptop SITTING RIGHT IN MY ROOM to work on model of circuit

what i have actually done
played a lot of final fantasy 5
got drunk at amcafe, friday
got drunk at lion's head, saturday
i just showered, thank god. now i'm not completely worthless.

central park was nice, too, with judy. although there was a man with way too little speedo and too much everything else on the lawn near us. and pluck u with xiaoti. oh yeah, i got drunk downtown around 8 pm on friday, too.

oh, i bought a pinata! not bad, not bad.... this weekend's looking better and better. i think that was on thursday? maybe wednesday? who even knows anymore.

the laptop is still sitting here, silently reproaching me.

rawr

Saturday, June 14, 2003

it's 74 and sunny right now! must... go... outside... i have to do something with actual sun or i'll feel like a huge suck. it's only been 3 weeks or so since the sun came out, after all.

Friday, June 13, 2003

Comments are up! Can you people from weird places please tell me who you are? I'm quite curious.

I got my paycheck today for last week. $275 after various government raperies , not bad for 3 days. also, they gave me more hours then I actually did... oversight? i'm not complaining... for some reason i got 28 instead of 23 hrs, but i got 314.5 instead of 322 total, so i got shorted for those nonexistent hours. puzzling. yay work.

tomo for lunch with kelsey. i'm makin lightshow jealous, heh. I AM A THREAT.

Malaysia (net.my) is the latest on my list. Well, Marketscore is actually the latest, but Malaysia? I need to add comments to my page, maybe then people will tell me who they are. who could possibly be looking at this from malaysia?

38 hits today! as in June 12, thursday. new record :) and i think less than 5 of those are from myself. not bad, not bad.

expect haloscan to be here tomorrow. i have 7 hours at work to do it, after all.

shit, i didn't do laundry. looks like it's dirty shorts day at work again.

Thursday, June 12, 2003

gil, you're reading my blog right now! you fucker. i see Radiografica Costarricense, Costa Rica on my counter, and it's at 11:21. the all seeing eye of mordor -- i mean eric -- is upon you, sucka.

wow. i had a surprisingly eventful day. some good stuff. before i forget though...

i just cleaned up in poker. CLEANED UP.

we're playing googily eyed pete. it's like criss cross, which is each person gets 5 cards, then a cross of 5 cards is dealt out, and everyone can use any combination of their 5 cards and one arm of the cross to make their hand. so out of 10 cards, they choose 8 cards to make a 5 card hand from. googily eyed pete is a variation of criss cross where the lowest card in the cross and all of that rank is wild. so if a 3 is the lowest card in the cross, then all 3s are wild, and everyone can use the 3 that's in the cross.

i get a 2,4,5,6 of hearts and a 3 of diamonds.
automatic straight flush. doesn't matter if i don't have the wild in the cross, just that one wild gives me it.
rachel had 4 aces. 2 aces and a 2, with a 2 in the middle. i think... dave was one card away from a royal flush, which would've sucked the big one. whew...

next hand: same game. mike comments on me getting the same cards somehow. i look at my hand of 5:

i get a 4,5,7,8 of clubs and a 2 of hearts.
same exact thing! only this time it's a higher straight flush...
i beat mike liu with - something. i can't remember. i'll have to ask him.
edit: it was 4 kings. he had a king and a 2, and there was a king and a 2 in the cross.

dave had 80 cents left, so we drew for high card. london did too... dave gets a 2, london a 3, and me an 8. ha.

that pretty much ended it.

other stuff i will blog later: emulators and roms, the greatest website ever, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and down with Film Forum.

i'm in a good mood now. despite work tomorrow and not having gone to lab today. whoops.

who goes to suny stony brook? huh? why are you looking at my blog?

has anyone ever been to alexchiu.com? i can get a free pair of 21000 gauss neodymium immortality rings if i host his banner and get 80 unique clicks. so if i did that, and just signed into a bunch of different computer labs, that's immortality! for free! don't go to the website now, wait until i put up a banner.

what if the rings really did confer immortality, but everyone is just too cynical to believe him? that would be great if we had the solution to injury, disease, hunger, and aging, and death in general, but ignored it because it sounded dumb. i feel like those last 2 sentences could have been written better, but i don't feel like revising it. this isn't a damn paper. or is it...

infoweb, japan
departemant of transportation, united states
smith college
embry-riddle university

i know who you are. heh... that's fun.

jillian, tell the government to fix that spelling error. it's gonna bother me.

i don't know who you sneaks are:

dsl verizon
verizon online
uunet
primusdsl
america online (nancy?)

so ever since my computer crashed right at the end of my sophomore year of college, i've been reluctant to keep stuff on this computer. it feels like it could crash again at any time (in fact, it WILL crash again, in exactly the same manner, the clock is ticking. the same symptoms that led up to my first HD wiping out are showing up again, but i'm too lazy to do anything about it), so i am unable to store stuff on here with the comfort that it will be there whenever i need it. that's why i kept all of my email on the .imap server - until i deleted that by accident, too.

it's not that bad, really. if it was, i could just go out and get a new HD, or figure out what in my system is destroying my hard drive each time, and do something about it. oh well.

i think the main thing i'm annoyed about losing are all of my roms. i must have had around 300 SNES roms and 200 NES roms on my hard drive when it ate it. that wouldn't be so bad, either, except nintendo's a punk and all rom hosting sites aren't allowed to host them or else they'll get sued for copyright infringement. now that's not so bad either. except they won't let sites host japanese games that never came out in the us. how am i supposed to play them? it's not like i would have bought an imported japanese super famicom and imported games if not for the rom. it's not hurting their goddamn sales at all. sons of bitches... i know final fantasy 3 and 5 were released with those PS chronicle or anthology or whatever packs, but seriously...

i don't want to do the whole message board begging for someone to email it to me... or going on irc and begging for them.

who's heard of these games?

never came out in US:
seiken densetsu 3 (secret of mana 2)
tales of phantasia (predecessor tales of destiny on PS)
star ocean (predecessor to star ocean 2 on PS)
bahamut lagoon
the 7th saga 2 (no one's working on a translation for this anyways)

this is a fuck. is there any chance someone reading this would have the roms? i highly doubt it... austin, lawrence, do you do this kind of thing?

Wednesday, June 11, 2003

i've been at work since 9:15 now (yeah i was pretty late) and i've gone to the cafeteria to get muffins, made hot chocolate, and i can't think of any other ways to waste time that aren't outright wasteful. i'm going to have to start filing soon. rawr...

someone update their blog. someone as in anyone. jeeeeeeeez... how am i supposed to keep abreast of your lives if you won't post about them? am i actually supposed to call you? heh, i said "abreast." haha... breast. i'm funny.

Tuesday, June 10, 2003

amanda's dream blog is scary. really scary. i was getting shivers while reading it. you should consider lobotomizing yourself.
edit: you meaning amanda.

oh wow. i've been keeping all the email messages saved on .imap or my cunix or in my inbox or however you want to say it, since last summer. and i just deleted them all. by accident. i was fooling around on my cunix account and trying to clean it up. there were a shitload of ~saved 892347023472 something something, so i deleted them all. could they possibly be important? nah... probably i should have deleted just one to see what happened. heh. i'm a moron. i don't think i really needed any of them, besides the ones of great sentimental value. it's all just 0s and 1s anyways. and i do still have my saved messages...

damn, PIESIN Is me. i'm responsible for pretty much 90% of my own hits. i like going to my page to see it in its newest updated incarnation every time. is that so sad? yes, yes it is. i hate you.

Monday, June 09, 2003

working simulation of oscillator! wooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! props to my professor, who gave us the netlist for the circuit, even though he said he wouldn't do anything like that. props to my partner, Wacek (pronounced Va sek) who learned p-spice today and got it all working while i was taking the LSATs today.

i had dinner with rachel, duke, london, sai, and karen. rachel managed to ruin her hosts' nice table by BURNING it. i recommended the mentos method of cleaning it. that is, popping a mentos in front of them and then proceeding to burn off the rest of the finish on the table to make it a uniformly sickly turquoise color. she rejected my reasonable and well-thought out plan. the ho. oh, kelsey came too.

OSCILLATION BABY

i added some more people to the links on the side of the page.

i have a counter on my homepage. that is, ~ec653. i don't know if that's really worth it, as it sucks (the homepage) and really has no purpose. i should just move my blog to my homepage, or at least my counter to here. i don't know which. what is PIESIN? who are you? good to see embry riddle and uchicago on the list of visitors. maybe i should add comments to my page as well...

specious buddha (2:16:55 AM): and i sure hope that you placed 25th hour above keeping the faith ... if you didn't, then you better hate me because i'll hate you.

stoops, you are completely wrong. i don't think less of you, though. partly because of the strength of your convictions, and mostly because of the hatred. i can respect that. in fact, that's one of the few things i do respect.

that test was awful! much much harder than the ones i've been taking. seeing as the exams i've been practicing with are real exams from past years, this means that someone on the testing board just realized that the old tests were for retards and decided to make the new ones incredibly confusing. i was skipping 3 or 4 questions in a row sometimes. i'm seriously considering cancelling my score and taking it again in october. plus out of the 5 sections, only 1 was games, and it was only 23 fucking questions.

the proctor was retarded. it was funny at first how bad she was. it stopped being funny when she didn't give us enough time for any sections. we got shorted 1 or 2 minutes every section.

i'm taking the goddamn test again in october. i wonder if i can get my money back for this session if i complain about how god awful the proctor was.

i am not happy.

i've still got 12 hours til i have to report to the NY Law School lobby with picture ID and a thumb. i imagine i should go to sleep soon. does that mean i will? probably not.

i downloaded peter salett's "heart of mine." whew... i am a sucker. it's a pretty song, especially if 1) you have seen the movie, and 2) you are a woman. yep.

Sunday, June 08, 2003

thanks again, london! :)

lots of good news! first, thank you, london, so much, for having me at your house. i had a really great time, ate really good food, drank really lots of beer, and watched 3 movies, one of which was okay, one of which must be the most vacuous, soulless 90 minutes ever recorded in the history of our civilization, and one of which i really, really, really loved. you can guess which is which.

keeping the faith, a romantic comedy
25th hour, a movie about a drug dealer about to go to jail
getting there, starring mary-kate and ashely

if you can't guess, i hate you.

that sort of weekend is absolutely necessary once in a while so one does not begin butchering random people on the street. mmm... butchering. mmm... street.

let's see... good news

1) i saw a friend who's in the city this summer, rachel ferris. she's really cool and eats like a pig, which i love in a girl. hopefully we'll hang out a lot.

2) i took another practice LSAT while at London's, and got the same raw score as last time (93) which translated to a 176 for this particular exam. i rock.

3) i took another games section because they're fun and got one wrong (just a silly mistake)

4) i took another games section and aced it.

that is so gratifying. it's been so long since something has made me feel smart. you'd think columbia would be concerned about my self-esteem, but most of my time here has been spent realizing/learning/being told i'm completely, totally average. thank god this standardized exam can tell me with absolute authority that i have more aptitude in something (law, but who cares what exactly) then 90 something % of the fucks who also took the test.

5) that puddle in my fridge is mostly dried/evaporated/become solid. or maybe the OJ decided to reabsorb it into itself. either way, score!

suck it jess

6) i got an email! from somebody! in somewhere! is it weird that i can read it over and over and smile every time? i know it's weird. i creep myself out too, don't worry.

the somebody starts with an M, and ends with an a. and it's 5 letters long.

7) my test isn't til 12:30 pm tomorrow! it's right on the 1/9 line! i just need to remember pencils. and my thumb. they thumbprint you at these things, can you believe it? good thing the police already have my prints on file.

8) i've got 7 pieces of Kentucky Fried C sitting in a bucket waiting for me. I've also got 10 krispy kreme donuts with me as well. I think i will bring those in to work tomorrow just to suck up to my boss. plus, it would be kind of nice.

where is everyone? i get back after being gone for 2 days and no one is here to welcome me home... i think they're all at pooja's house, curse her.

Friday, June 06, 2003

this test is terrible! the questions suck, and there are maybe 4 total. it's definitely worse than the X-men quiz, which gave me rogue. this one gave me trinity! what is this shit...

You are Trinity-
You are Trinity, from "The Matrix."
Strong, beautiful- you epitomize the ultimate
heroine.


What Matrix Persona Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

what the fuck? lustful? i swear, i didn't do any of the sleazy questions on the test. and putting oral and anal sex as the same thing in a question seems kind of odd... i really would think i would belong in wrathful and gloomy! i said yes to a lot of the violent and killing questions. this test is total bullshit... but the questions are kind of funny.

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:
LevelScore
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)Very Low
Level 2 (Lustful)Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)High
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)High
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)Very High
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)High
Level 7 (Violent)High
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)Moderate

Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test

by the way, the LSATs are way too easy. i took a practice test (granted, over 2 nights, and not all at once, but it don't matter) and got a 175. 24/28 on the reading comp (only one real mistake, 3 of those wrongs were bullshit questions), 23/24 of games (one really dumb mistake), 23/25 on arguments (one mistake, one bs question), and 23/24 on arguments (i guessed the wrong one out of 2 choices, but the question was pretty gay). i'll be happy with a 170 when i take it on monday... but the higher the better, considering my 3.0 gpa. amiya sen is a bastard.

jess, i don't know what the hell is in your fridge. it's orange, it's a liquid (right now, anyways), and i think it must have come from my OJ. but my OJ is fine. the carton does not leak, i took it out and tested it. so what the hell? and i'm not killing it, so stop your whining.

also, i hate milk. i bought some maybe one and a half weeks ago, the sell by date is tomorrow, and i've used the damn thing once with some cereal. i hate it so much, but the worst part is not the taste, it's that you NEED it to go with some things, like macaroni and cereal, but on it's own it's terrible and undrinkable. so when i have milk, i never want to make mac and cheese, but when i don't have it, that's all i want. rawr...

what i have been up to lately:

not counting work...

i've been hanging out with tricia a lot. it's kinda weird how much. she is a pretty cool girl, though. and she's friends with kelsey, which gives her points. but really, it's almost every day. let's see:

yesterday i did some lab stuff with vacek because i didn't have to go to work. then we ate at the ICC, even though i didn't have to go to work. then i took a 3 hour nap, because i didn't have to go to work. then i ate some leftovers, and took sections 3 and 4 of a practice LSAT. that shit was easy. heh. then i went to ABC with mike liu, sai, dave, and tricia. i'm going to call dave dave from now on, i like it better than duke.

the day before i went over to tricia, who is staying at her brother's place and we watched The Others. She didn't find it that scary. I jumped at least 1.5 ft out of my chair when I saw it in Astor theater. And that was pure butt muscle jump, i don't think i used my legs at all. Oh, and before that I took sections 1 and 2 of that practice test.

the day before that I went over to P-town to watch her move out. I guess I helped, sort of. We made stir fry in Broadway with all of her frozen vegetables. She did most of the cooking, (which she is pretty good at!), even though she had never cooked stir fry before. I'm pretty sure hers was better than mine, which is mildly upsetting. meh

Monday, I went to work, got out after one and a half hours, hung out in my room for a while, and then played dynasty warriors 3 with steiner. really fun. really, really fun. i could play that game for hours without getting tired of it. Then a bunch of us went to Sophia's to see Rubes in action. Then I went back to steiner's to play more dw3. No tricia on monday!

I wasted a whole bunch of last weekend hanging out with tricia too.

in short, tricia's hot. and kelsey is funny. but not intentionally.

things i want to do this summer:

go to cool bars

go to central park a lot

play a lot of video games i've been meaning to play

watch the movies in my hayao miyazaki studio ghibli collection

gain valuable work experience

one of the five is a faker. can you guess which?

edit: also something frisbee, considering i didn't sign up for summer league.

i'm wrapping up week 1 of work now. here's the deal for you uninitiated: i'm working 3 days a week at the ICC (interchurch center) as an office assistant. my job: filing. i take old messy files and refile them according to a new system. the new system is mostly made up by me, so that's kind of fun. and some of the grant information is pretty interesting. but, reading this stuff for longer than 1 hour straight makes your brain hurt. eh, it's money.

i'm here TWF, 9-5, with an hour for lunch, so i'm working 21 hours a week here. i came in 2 hours this week on monday, whatever, so i got 23 hrs, at 11.50 an hour, so i made 264.50 this week. not too bad considering i get to sit in a nice office with computer access and AC. that's really not bad when you consider my other job is paying me $50 a week. terrible...

the food here is also pretty good. today i got a pastrami reuben sandwich and mashed potatoes for 3.89 (after tax)! it was soooo good, too. man, that's a good deal. and my boss is really nice. so far i've been caught napping, writing email, and browsing the internet one time each and she only said something about the napping. and i wear a button down or a polo with shorts and sneakers to work and that seems to be fine. at least, no one has complained yet.

my other job is going pretty slow right now. we finally just got our lab station set up and our cisl accounts (for hspice) created yesterday. so far we've just stared at the circuit diagram trying to understand it. jeez... $50 an hour. that's the bare minimum to cover us insurance wise for lab use and so on. oh well, it's better than nothing, i guess.

i really do want to blog more. weird, i just wrote blob instead of blog because of jess' creepy diary. anyways, for some reason, even though i want to blog, i don't, so that must mean i don't really want to, because if i did want to, i would. so maybe now that i'm sitting here in this office, i will blog, meaning i want to blog, which is why i am blogging right now. right?

hopefully this will continue.