The Bard

Went to uncles house to pick up my new iPhone 4, and got fed an enormous meal/ talked about bullshit with aunt. Always nice to be fussed over.

Videogame culture at large is a petri dish for the cultivation of psychological defects. The Psychology of Console Wars

Do want...

Angry Birds has taken over my life. Don't know why, since I've had it for ages, but recently I got the urge to play Boom Blox, but since I didn't have my Wii with me at uni, I tried to find something similar. Angry Birds is fucking better. Its, quite frankly, amazing. So gratifying for the intuitive sense of physical laws that are hardwired into the brain. Love eet.

Yes, because that was a grevious understatement.

I disagree, but only because my writing style is mainly superfluous hyperbole In seriousness though, I totally agree, people need to be more articulate...

You're right. I wouldn't dignify it by calling it terrible, because terrible movies can serve as a focal point for amusement, bemusement and rage. Superman Returns, like Twilight, was just fucking boring as hell.

Why are gamers so obsessed with sales figures, marketing and financial bullshit? Is it because they use it as some sort of data to formulate a predictive evaluation of what they might be playing in future, or the trajectory gaming is taking? I really fucking doubt this, since most gamers are too stupid to calculate the timing of their next toilet break, but still, why? I don't get it. They talk more about sales figures than the actual content of the games.

Interesting interpretation. A lot more sedate, which I guess might be appropriate considering the lyrical content, but I think it works much better in the original. Ian Curtis' voice is pretty much an emotionless backdrop set against quite a sensual and punkishly energetic melody, which is thematically appropriate to my interpretation of a lot of Joy Division's music being about not finding assonance with the world. Also, don't like the way she enunciates, but that's getting very nitpicky. And now, a song from one of the most important albums (at least to me) ever. Crank it up and wave your arms like its the second summer of love, because this is beautiful:

Fuck yeah. When I get internet again I'll give you a shout.

I never get sick until the day after, any ability to consciously moderate my behaviour just shuts down after a certain point, which I can never anticipate. Its weird. Maybe I shouldn't drink. I need a babysitter when I'm drunk. Although I miss the good old days when I would come on here after a good old lash and type utter nonsense to get everyone riled up

I have tried this so many times and failed on the vast majority. Drinking begets more drinking, and because the onset of hangover and curmudgeonly rage occurs early on in the drinking hours for me, I tend to drink until I sedate myself into oblivion. This results in my doing heinously embarrassing things, such as on last friday, when I unashamedly hit on two girls I've been good friends with for more than two years, and bitched at my best friend about how pathetic my life is, while making him listen to really awful death metal. I don't know why I do and say things that have no basis in actual feelings when I'm drunk, but it happens. Then I spend at least the next three days walking around internally beating myself up for being an unabashed asshole. Its a very strange cycle. How do I stop? This shit should be in the confess your sins thread.

The perennial answer to this thread:

Love Pj Harvey, love her overwhelming insecurity, a lot of it directed towards her appearance which is what I was initally attracted to when I first started listening to her. She reminds me of a sort of female version of Jeff Buckley. On that note:

Steal this had a couple of tunes on it, but it was too spastic and formless, which should probably have been expected, since its a b-sides album from a band that is already afflicted with ADHD. I wouldn't mind seeing them, I went this year, and the only headliner I really loved was RATM.

I need to start playing this again. Probably over Christmas, anybody down to be my sparring buddy for a bit?

Cube controller. No doubt.

Avenged Sevenfold are such an atrocious band. Like a congealment of all the worst hair, thrash and power metal tropes you can imagine to create something overwhelmingly lame. Liked System when I was 15. They've been shit since Toxicity.

Sozzles, was in a weird headspace last night. Also, I didn't feel the need to "agree" necessarily, but was just playing off what the two of you said, without really reaching a conclusion.

Your ideas of morality and doing things are based on the idea that the things we do, the moralities and predispositions that give us shape, are informed by conscious thoughts and acts. I don't believe this to be the case for you, me, or anyone. I believe that we are syphoned into a narrow tract that we cannot avoid, and whatever semblane of choice we think we have, exists only because we see things on such a microscopic scale. Once asked to defend our moralities (usually, in my case, through an inner monologue rather than with other people, because I have no friends), we rationalise to the extreme, because we seek to defend the very ideals that take us hostage. Also, I tend to take Heidegger's opinion about our sense of self; it has very little to do with a holistic self contained being, since, firstly, I think we are a bank of reference points, a set of reactions for everything around us, and what we are and do is limited by, and in response to the world around us. Secondly, any solid sense we can concieve of who we are, comes about through a projection of ourselves into the future, we act in the present according to the way we see ourselves in times to come. I cannot remember the last time I did something that wasn't done through a sense of duty either to myself, or to the paranoid, overly anxious sense of morality that has been hammered into me. If I had my way I would do nothing all day other than lie in bed and snort amphetamine. I am coerced into being, into docility through the machinations of a world that is horrendously out of control. We are all players in a grand narrative that we augment but cannot shape. I feel as if I'm speaking in vagaries now, which, undoubtedly, I am. So whatever. I'm sure there are a great many holes in my understanding, but unfortunately I really don't care, since my kind of understanding has no practical applications, serves only to make me miserable, and is pretty much liable to be incomprehensible to others. Look at the way we process "music." Random combinations of sound that work on the basis of the fact that our brain projects a pattern. If this mental patten is corroborated with by the actual sounds we hear, our dopamine neurone pathway gets excited, we feel pleasure. We feel great at the fact that we had an internal ability to make sense of something. That something, outside us, is nonsense. It has no meaning, and all we have done by listening to music is find a way to manipulate our pleasure pathways. We crave "meaning," and a sense of understanding. We want to be a part of something, rather than just buoys in an ocean of unreason. Why do you think religion is so popular? Because it gives a sense of overwhelming purpose and meaning.

Yeah, well I think its fairly obvious that the way we percieve the world is not the way it exists outside us. Also, the way that guy talks about nouns and verbs indicated a sway towards linguistic determinism. We do "cut nature at its joints" to better understand it, but we don't think of it solely in terms of grammatical units. I guess his argument was really to do with the fact that we artificially subdivide phenomena and things, which are really convergent and inter-related. The thing is, when you come to that realisation, it takes some of the brunt off your own opinions, because you come to realise it means that nonthing you believe is cast in stone, and is only "true" in comparison to a normative yardstick, which is usually culturally or socially ordained, and therefore everything you think is entirely subjective. I just don't have the same drive to be "right" as I did a few years ago. Which is probably all fair and well because I was the most egregious motherfucker around.

I tend to think I'm getting slightly sick of Thom Yorke and his infinite sadness, his inability to do much other than croon over a minor chord, until I actually listen to his stuff, and its usually phenominal, which makes me a bit angry. I hate the guy, but he's a genius. Atmospheric song, don't think I've heard it before. Edit: I have no opinion on Gwen Stefani. Musically though, that song bugs the shit out of me.

Its really funny how people repeat the same argument about essentialism and posit it as mind blowing. Like Fouault says "human knowledge is made for cutting, not for understanding." Our cognition works along mostly utilitarian lines. We see the world in a way pertaining closely to semiotics; once we see or feel or sense something for the first time, we come to attribute meaning to it, and from thenceforth, stop examining it, since we have already fit it into our conception of reality. Look at the way we process language; when you read a book in your native tongue, you're not examining every letter, every syllable, and all the minute details of structure (unless you consciously go out of your way to do so) but instead, you chunk them into larger phrases, glazing over the minutia. We do this with everything. The funny thing is, that this "expertise" of interpretation, makes it far far more difficult for you to incorporate new information into your tightly formed paradigm of understanding. What this video is trying to get us to do is to fight a fundimental artifact of our cognition. Which is all fine and good, but it assumes we have the capacity to find another way of functioning. Biologically, it is our frontal cortex that allows us, unlike other animals, to objectify "things" in thought and speculate as to their interactions. This part of our brain is woefully underdevelloped, being a relatively recent evolution, and is unlike the hind and midbrains which have had the benefit of millions of years of refinement. Ramble ramble.

Jayseven you are a sexy man.

I just think it would make an interesting sociological experiment to see how these people come to develop a sense of sexuality solely through the lens of, like, Sonic the Hedgehog or something. Yeah, but I'm not freaked out on the level of individual people, I'm slightly baffled by how they come to accrue and internalise these esoteric cultural phenomena and associate sexual gratification with them. I think it reflects something on society that people are, in fairly sizeable populations, fetishising the same things, that are in fact based on shows, like Digimon or Pokemon for example, which are aimed specifically at children. Are these shows deliberately sexualised in nature? What is it about them that causes this response? Then again, think of a fetish and I guarantee there is a website enshrining it somewhere on the internet. I have nothing against fetishes, I'm fairly weird about sex myself, but if there's no part of you that finds furries funny, then your funny bone is busted.