Siesta

I sometimes wonder why I keep starting these blog entries with incidents from my childhood. Perhaps it was when I was young that anything actually interesting happened to me? Yes, that's probably it. Anyway, as a child, I hated naps. My mind couldn't grasp the purpose of sleeping during the day. I had a hard time adjusting to kindergarten standards of the siesta after lunch. That's probably the only time in my life I regularly slept at any time except in the night. According to Wikipedia, my repulsion to this thing was justified and I was supposed to acquire the need for siestas during adolescence. Only I never did. I keep hating sleeping in the day as much as always. I've always rationalised it: I thought that it was a waste of time, which is ironic. I am an individual who really values his time in theory but wastes immeasurable amounts of it in practice, something I am really ashamed of.

So, for today, I tried to do something simple: Sleep for one hour. It was hell. As soon as I lay down to rest, I started thinking what I would write for this blog. Isn't it strange? I'm supposed to report my experience but that was just thinking about the report. I kept thinking about these things. Then, it occurred to me that I do this for all things. I keep thinking and planning about things of the future. This is not a bad thing in itself but shouldn't there be limits? I find myself thinking of things that require no planning. Yet, I keep thinking about these again and again. Then a sudden realisation came to me: Planning something and thinking about it drains your motivation to do it. So, if you plan too much, when the time comes to act you may find all your motivation depleted. I decided that was one great mistake I've been doing and that I shouldn't think so much of my future activities, especially when there's nothing to plan about them and know in advance.

So, I just slept.

As if. This would be the fairy-tale ending to my coming to conclusions about my life and my mistakes. It's funny how books and movies and all that condition people to believe once they reach a great conclusion about the meaning of life or something, then that immediately puts them in a position to act upon it and become better. Well, it's certainly not true for me. Accepting my mistakes and reaching abstract conclusions is the first and shortest part of a journey that only ends when you make habits out of them. And that's truly something.

I will be changing the schedule of this blog to release new content once per week, every Saturday. I'm hoping to return to the regular every-day schedule as soon as October comes.

With my Apologies

This day's novelty was... having an argument with my brother. Really, that's what I did between 4 and 5 pm today. It was an unfortunate circumstance and honestly not much of a novel thing to do. We had a disagreement and argued for 3 hours or so. In the end, we kind of reached a resolution of our differences, so it wasn't a complete and utter waste of time. This is hardly comforting, though.

In related news, I will probably stop doing this blog during September. I'm not sure if I will do it only a few time per week or only once per week or not at all, but I my schedule doesn't allow for giving up about 2 or 3 hours a day for this. Sorry.

Sequential Knowledge

When I was younger, my parents sent my brother and me to summer camps. Save for the first time, it was always the same one. It made for good times and good memories, I guess... most of the time. Anyway, you know how these things have many little cabins? The funny thing is that we always ended up in cabin #16. I'm not sure if someone was doing it on purpose but for all the four or five summer months I spent there, I didn't get to sleep in any other cabin than that one. It was the worst one too. It was half-buried into the earth on one side, with a window exactly there. It was hell to clean it and we had to do so every morning. This has led me to loosely associate the number 16 with fatalism.

Now, you may wonder: "What kind of one-of-a-kind one-hour activity relates with someone's experiences from summer camps? Well, I'm sorry to disappoint but it was just a trap to make the reader wonder that. For this day's novelty, I did reading again. I picked up volume 16 from the home encyclopaedia and just started reading it. I read about "kamikaze", furnaces, the Camorra, bells, bell towers, a handful of important historical and/or mythological figures and an indeterminate number of small villages. As always, keeping my concentration was half the work I had to do; only now am I realising how bad this thing is.

So, among other things, I learned that:

• Kamikazes were named that because the same name was used before for a wind that created problems for the Mongolian fleet when it tried to attack Japan.
• There are way more types of furnaces than I thought there were.
• Bell towers took their shape from watchtowers.
  
• Greece is full of little villages that just need to have an entry in an encyclopaedia.
• Tommaso Campanella lived an interesting but tough life (and I really liked him for some reason).

Internet Argument

Once I asked my mother: "What do you do when you get angry with someone at the office?". I was expecting something like "deal with it", "make something good out of it" or the classic "count to ten to calm down". Her reply surprised me. She said: "I go to the toilet, close all doors behind me and then swear my eyes out". Maybe that's why internet arguments end up a bloody mess most of the time; people want to swear at other people but they feel awkward to do it in front of them.

So, like most people on the internet, I'm a member of several forums (I refuse to call them fora for some reason), but only with one of them have I been any less than one of the well-behaved "good" people. It's a forum about fantasy and science fiction literature, geared towards writers. I won't bore the reader with all the details. Suffice to say that I strongly feel that most of the moderating team are imbeciles but worst yet big hypocrites.

It's funny how one can delete a post because it mentioned politicians and included a sniper emoticon while at the same time go on big unreasonable rants condemning every religion out there. It's funny how one is allowed to bash people's well-thought arguments with one-word sarcastic replies while at the same time banning people who do the same. It's funny how one can dismiss someone's years of work with a witty comment while at the same time be offended when there's anything remotely negative mentioned about something even remotely associated with himself... and be a moderator. Then, if you tell them "Hey, I think you're doing it wrong" or even dare to use the report button, you are swiftly accused of backseat moderating.

Still, that's not the point of this post. The first time I was really warned about such a behaviour, about a year ago (the funny thing is that the formal warning was removed in the end but I was never told why exactly), I decided to take a back seat and only write a) long informative posts-articles about events or things I knew well about and b) stories. Time passed and at one time I came at the opposite end of the argument. Someone said something that I found very insulting to me. That someone was a moderator and of course nobody ever told him anything. So, it was clear to me that these moderators were only abusing their powers, protecting only themselves at the sligtest of provocations, while leaving everyone else exposed. I then decided that I would only use the forum as a library to publish my amateur short stories.

Alas, it happened again, yesterday. I posted a short story which was a parody. It contained a single sentence that could be offensive, if one took it to heart and too seriously. Of course, they did and this morning I was promptly informed that they would remove it, not only because it was offensive but because it lacked artistic value.

Now, for today's novelty: The past times I felt I was wronged by those people I kept a grudge. I decided to distance myself from the forum more and more and the respect I had for them was replaced by contempt. Today, I decide to do the exact opposite. I have already complained about the decision but I won't do anything more about it. I won't get angry with them, I won't say I will leave the forum forever or any other melodramatic thing. I will just ignore it. I shouldn't mind every silly thing anyone does, so I won't.

PS: The comic above is xkcd#438: Internet Argument.

A Study on my (not particularly fast) Reading Skills

I have noticed in my life, that I have my hobbies and my perceived hobbies. What I mean is, there are lots of things I find myself wanting to do, on a theoretical level, but never actually investing in. This is a depressing situation, when you think about it. One of those things is reading. I have always loved the idea of reading but never really made a habit out of it. On top of that, I'm distracted rather easily, which makes reading anything, particularly non-literature an exhausting and frustrating experience. However, there was a time when I managed to almost make a habit out of it. It but a few years ago that I read something before going to sleep. One of my teachers once said that reading on the bed before sleeping is a cure for insomnia, because it makes your mind make you feel tired in order to escape from the labour. While I can't say I fully endorse such sentiments, I can't deny that that time is not the best for understanding concepts and clear thinking.

Then, it happened, during a visit to my godfather. He has a really immense bookcase in his house, it's actually a whole room. He asked me whether I read books and I replied that I did, almost every night, before bed. He frowned a little and said "Well, I only read in the morning, so I don't miss anything". So, that's how I stopped reading before bed. Then, I started reading books during the breaks in university, but that's a different story.

So, yes, I read: occasionally, some periods more, others less. These days, it's the latter. I started reading a book containing all the works of Edgar Allan Poe a few months ago. Unfortunately, I only went as far as the first story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". It's a pity, too, because although that story didn't leave a really good impression on me, I loved the way it was structured and the way Poe had with words.

So, for this day's novelty, I took the challenge of starting reading the book again, as fast as I could, to see how far I could get in one hour. The second story is "The Mystery or Marie Rogêt". It starts on page 26 and ends on page 61. The results were really discouraging. I managed to read until page 49, which means one hour's worth of reading equals to a mere 23 pages read. That's about 0.4 pages per minute, which -with some rough calculations- amounts to about 208 words per minute. Even with my concentration constantly breaking, other thoughts creeping in my mind, especially ones about how much time I had left, I really expected more out of myself. I always thought I was a fast reader; apparently, I was wrong. Perhaps with enough training, I may learn reading faster.

Poe's style didn't help either. The story was about how the narrator and his genius-of-analyical-thinking friend tried to solve the mystery of a young lady's murder. It was full of supposed newspaper excerpts and huge monologues highlighting every logical or factual mistake of the aforementioned newspaper editors. Even with my slow reading and re-reading of certain part, I cannot in good conscience say I was fully confident in knowing what was going on. Oh, well. Still, I am looking forward to finishing this story.

Damn them Clouds!

You take a deep breath of salty air as the first raindrops
begin to spatter the pavement, and the swollen,
slate-colored clouds that blanket the sky mutter ominous
portents amongst themselves over the little coastal town
of Anchorhead.

Today I decided to step into a world of terror like no other: text-based adventure games / interactive fiction. After consulting PC Gamer's 365 days of free games, I reached the section on interactive fiction, at the end of page 6. Anyway, I told myself I shouldn't be picky so I chose the first one on the list, that is Ancorhead. The description was both ominous and exciting:
Lovecraftian Gothic horror, subtle and spooky. Be brave and enjoy one of the most atmospheric games ever.
So, I started playing. Then, as soon as the game started, I remembered how much descriptions bore me. The game was filled with descriptions of houses and streets and clouds. I'm not sure if there's some relation to the central plot, but in every piece of text that was presented to me, there was mention of the clouds.

I wonder. Is it just me or do these descriptions bore more people? I'm not sure if what I'm doing and thinking is right or wrong, but this is exactly what I feel. And what I feel, for all its lack of substantiality, is a sense of boredom when I need to read about the ominous clouds and the rain, especially when I have read about them ten times already.

So, I'm supposed to meet with a real estate agent in this game. I go to the place and I'm left with no instructions. Thankfully, my spider senses inform me that by saying "north" you go north and so on. Shouldn't there be some kind of instructions for people who haven't played games like this before? Anyway, the text is so full of north's and east's and southwest's that it's not really hard to get it.

So, I move towards his house and then knock on the door. After a few failed attempts at managing to word the knocking correctly (writing only "knock" results on you knocking on the sky by default, apparently). Naturally, nobody's there, so I start roaming the town. Using my trusty "north", "south", "northwest" commands I move from one eerie description to the next, totally oblivious to what else I could be doing. At some point there was a window. I tried to look through it but it was too high. I tried to climb but I couldn't. Then, there was some sort of obelisk in the town square. By some divine enlightenment I "examine monument"'d but there didn't seem anything I could do with it. Then, I got lost in some windy little streets. At first, I thought that some kind of strange thing was going on, but after a few tries I took the correct direction and got out. Finally, I went to the local pub. I talked and the subject was Michael's family, by default. Some old man told me that these things are better left undiscussed by decent folk. Then, I tried to ask them about the real estate agent but they ignored me.

A hoary monument of crumbling, moss-eaten flagstones,
Whateley Bridge is possibly older than any other
structure in the entire city. Ponderously it spans the
dark, torpid waters of the Miskaton River, connecting
the north and south halves of the city and occasionally
raining bits of gravel and mortar from its underside
into the water. It looks just wide enough for two cars
to pass each other between the flanking stone parapets,
but you wouldn't volunteer to try it.                   

Well, I don't want to come off as ignorant or biased, but I spent an hour playing this game and didn't get an inch closer to finding this real estate agent or anything. All I learned was a) Michael's family is a taboo topic, b) there is a strange monument in town that will mean something later in the story, c) the clouds are ominous. This was both embarassing and frustrating. Perhaps I'm lacking in reading comprehension or am just slow but I don't think any game should treat anyone in such a punishing way. So, I stopped.

A dank, drafty old drinking hole lit by flickering,
oil-burning lanterns. Smoke collects in greasy pools
among the rafters, and shadows crowd thick around. The
bar runs the length of the room to your right, while to
the south a low doorway opens onto the street.     
                                                 
Mill workers and fishermen occupy a few of the tables,
drinking beer or puffing grimly at long-stemmed pipes.
Each is wrapped in his solitude, soaking up the general
miasma of dreary fatalism.                           
                                                 
The lantern sitting on the table nearest you sputters
fitfully, throwing distorted shadows across the wall.
                                                 
>talk about real estate agent                       
No one answers you, or even looks your way.         
                                                 
>FUCK YOU ALL                                       
No need to get frustrated.                             

This is not the end, however. This type of game has me intrigued and even though my first attempt failed miserably, I won't give up so easily.

The Disc Jockey of Doom!

Many years ago, when my brother and I were little, our mother used to sing us to sleep. I think these lullabies were a really interesting experience and I am thankful to her for that. Later, she started to sing less and put cassettes for us to listen to more and more; cue the necessary evils of technology and all that.

Anyway, today I decided to put my media player on random and listen to songs without ever skipping them. To my surprise, it turned out pretty well. I used last.fm to keep track of what I listened to and also searched for the lyrics for some of them. I put on my headphones, sat on my comfortable chair, then changed its direction to look towards the balcony and to allow the wind to gently caress me. The view wasn't exactly breathtaking but at least I didn't have to move the computer elsewhere. It didn't matter, after all, I kept my eyes closed most of the time, anyway. After waiting approximately one minute for all the files to be loaded, the songs started to play:

• Dust and Echoes (God Is an Astronaut)
  This is a post-rock band I discovered fairly recently. They're nice. They also forced me to re-evaluate my opinion on how songs should be listened to. I used to think that if you ever do anything else while listening to a song, you're missing something. That holds true for many songs, especially ones that have lyrics, but doesn't mean this is the only legitimate way to experience songs. On the contrary, sometimes it's better to miss that aspect and add your own activity to the experience. For songs like this one, this makes for a very different and important experience, which may even be better than just listening to it without doing anything else.
• Wishing Well (Black Sabbath)
  Once in a while, you get a song you like. But then it's ruined by just one miserable stereotypical, clichéd lyric:

  Love isn't money, it's not something you buy

  While it's not very bad, it still ruined my perception of the song. Couldn't they have done something a tad more subtle? I realise this was in 1980 but still.
• Μαργαρίτα Μαγιοπούλα (Μίκης Θεοδωράκης)
  This is a song from one of the classical modern-era Greek composers. It's a very earthly song, which he wrote for his daughter. I really like it mostly because I hate most of modern-era Greek music and this stands as an exception.
• Battle of Sudden Flame (Blind Guardian)
• Οι Παλιές Αγάπες Πάνε στον Παράδεισο (Πυξ Λαξ)
  This is from a really famous Greek band. I personally think they are vastly over-hyped. I often get the impression their lyrics don't make any sense at all. Still, this is one of their better songs...
• Eva's Reminiscence (Norihiko Hibino)
  I have many songs in my library; perhaps they are too many. I haven't listened to all of them by any stretch of the imagination. This is why, once in a while, I come across little hidden gems, like this one, which I haven't listened to before. It's instrumental and minimalistic and ambient. What more can you want?
• Theatre of Pain (Blind Guardian)
• Kandatsu (Michiru Oshima)
  Soundtracks, particularly ones coming from animé, are a large part of my musical diet. I hold a special place in my heart for the Full Metal Alchemist one.
• Surrounded by Flames (Koji Kondo)
  Speaking of soundtracks, I have found that sometimes they happen to feel good in-context, but when you listen to them on their own, they're almost unbearable. This is one such song.
• Ming's Theme (In the Court of Ming the Merciless) (Queen)
  Sometimes bands experiment. Sometimes, when this happens, the results can be like this:
  

  Pathetic earthlings, hurling your bodies out into the void. Let us see.

• Premonition of a Snow Storm (Toshio Masuda)
• Puropera Jitensha (Joe Hisaishi)
• Fingers (Yoko Kanno)
  This one was lovely. It's a pity I can't find the words to express what I felt. Or maybe it's an elaborate way to turn this into an open invitation for everyone to try this one.
• Puppetmaster (Yoko Kanno)
• Jikai Yokoku (Misato) (Shiro Sagisu)
• The Glow (Mark Morgan)
  I have a big confession to make: I haven't played the Fallout games yet. It's on my long list of things to do in my life. My brother seemed to love them and since our tastes in videogames are similar, I probably will, as well. I guess the soundtrack should suffice for the time being.
• Back to Madness (Stratovarius)
  I liked this one's lyrics. They ask questions we all come to ask ourselves. Questions we reply "yes" to too often.
  

  Have you ever been hurt?
  Have you ever been abandoned?
  Have you ever been truly scared?
  Have you ever felt you don't belong here?
  Have you ever felt you don't have a home?
  Have you ever felt you don't have a chance?

  
  I don't really agree with the definition of freedom the lyrics seem to imply but I do think they do a good job of showing how close to madness every person is.

That's it for today. Now I wonder if the tracks were representative of my musical taste or not. I guess they were... kinda.

PS: The "lullaby" picture was taken from davidcarmacklewis.com.

Pigs and Cats

Today I tried drawing. I can't really draw, my most impressive creation being a house I designed when I was a fourth-grader. There's a silly story behind it too. The teacher was so impressed with my ruler-based creation that told me I should lead a class drawing project. It was about making a poster-sized version of a picture in one of our school books. I tried to tell her but she wouldn't listen. I'm not sure whether the problem was my own lack of self-confidence or that I really couldn't do it, but I failed. I gave up the project completely to someone else and I must say I remember it being pretty embarrassing. It's ironic, too, since my mother likes painting and drawing a lot, while I turned out shying away from it.

So, I googled "drawing lesson" and first found drawingcoach.com. I immediately went for the easiest tutorials and ended up starting to draw a pig. It was rather frustrating and I felt like something was amiss. When I came across a spelling mistake (which, in retrospect, seems like a silly reason to lose faith in a drawing-tutorials-site), I decided to look for something else. I came across drawspace.com. Then, I realised: there's no degree of proficiency one can get with one hour's worth of drawing. Besides, it requires proper tools and some studying before beginning. Which means I should plan ahead for future activities: I need to find things which spending one hour for isn't completely pointless.

I went back to the pig. I filled a page with the annoying little creature. When I was content with myself (read: "when the page was full") I went for the next one: the cat. That was really difficult. It took me half an hour to do the first one and by then it was already 5. Especially the nose; I ended up searching for videos of drawing cats in my strugle to interpet what a specific instruction in the tutorial meant:

Draw two diagonal lines sloping towards the middle of the head. These lines should almost touch at the middle. Add a curve to the bottom of each of the diagonal lines to form the nostrils.

Still, there was a certain point, while drawing the cat, that the frustration I had for my lack of skills turned into something else, something wonderful. I felt compelled to try to improve my drawing, to do everything again, to do it correctly. I'm not sure if I was right in enforcing my own rules and stopping when the time was up, instead of going on. That's something I'll have to consider carefully.

I hope I'll find something good to do tomorrow. Maybe I will finally convince my brother to give me that guitar lesson, who knows!

Insignificant Details

I think I have some explaining to do before I start. I decided that every passing day, I will dedicate one hour, between 4 and 5 pm to do something "completely different". That is, I will try to do something I haven't done before or something that is almost as if I haven't done it before. I'll probably end up using things from my "normal hobbies", only in a novel manner, I guess. What's the point in such an endeavour, one may ask. It's rather simple, really. New things excite me. The process of putting my mind to think in a way it isn't accustomed to fascinates me and excites me to no end. On the other hand, activities lose their appeal to me rather quickly, so I find it harder and harder to motivate myself to get things done. So, the inevitable conclusion is that I should give myself the opportunity to try out something new every day. Hopefully, that will keep me motivated throughout the day! I will post the results of this experiment here, usually a little after 5 pm.

For today, I was going to get a guitar lesson from my brother, but it didn't work out, unfortunately. Instead, I decided to get photos of insignificant details. Photography is one of my passions. It's not exactly a normal hobby, since I don't have a professional-quality camera and I haven't really done any research on the subject. But I do enjoy taking photos immensly, perhaps too much, so I guess it kinda counts.

Insignificant details are things we miss in our everyday life. It's a collection of photos of things I would normally never consider taking photos of, for various reasons. Today, however, I did. It was a strange experience, trying to find small details our minds automatically filter out because they aren't interesting to us. By "interesting", I mean "have an impact on our lives" and I say that because after seeing the end result, the photos aren't completely dull. Quite the opposite, in my opinion. Still, I can't say there's some real meaning in them or that by publishing them I have some sort of message for the world. Click here to view the whole album.