Relevantly Irrelevant
We need way more games like this. Thanks Garret for linking me to this little tidbit.
Play it. If you don’t manage to see the ending, don’t worry — I didn’t and had no problem with having the impression that there was no ending. To be frank, I was even a little disappointed. You’ll see why.
And enjoy the music.
Dale Carnegie’s Lifetime Plan for Success: How to Win Friends and Influence People & How to stop worrying and start living by Dale Carnegie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book’s title is so very easily misunderstandable. It’s sort of like all the conspiracy theory videos out there. People will catch a wiff of “global elite” or “federal reserve” and will turn their noses straight up in a matter of seconds. Conspiracy “sceptics” have poisoned so many wells, its a miracle that remote villages the world over haven’t yet been completely wiped out.
The reason its title is so misunderstandable is because, similarly to the alleged conspiracy theorists, it alludes to techniques and practices used in picking up women or something; devious hypocrisies of socially challenged, sad little people that practice their speech in front of mirrors and reduce human contact to rules and habits; strategists of human contact that know about as much of real bonding between people as a typical child knows about chickens from its early rearing on McNuggets.
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Six Ways To Make People Like You
Become genuinely interested in other people.
Smile.
Remember that a man’s name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in the English language.
Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
Talk in terms of the other man’s interest.
Make people feel important, and do it sincerely.
Twelve Ways Of Winning People To Your Way Of Thinking
The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
Show respect for the other man’s opinions. Never tell a man he is wrong.
If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
Begin in a friendly way.
Get people saying “yes, yes” immediately.
Let other people do a great deal of talking.
Let other people feel that the idea is theirs.
Try honestly to see things from the other man’s point of view.
Be sympathetic with other people’s ideas and desires.
Appeal to the nobler motives.
Dramatize your ideas.
Throw down a challenge.
Nine Ways To Change People Without Giving Offense Or Arousing Resentment
Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.
Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other man.
Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
Let the other man save face.
Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement.
Give people a fine reputation to live up to.
Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
Make other people happy about doing the thing you suggest.
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Mr. Dale Carnegie in his book that gave birth to the self-help genre is suggesting, simply put, that we care about others. That’s about it. A little active interest can go a long way, whether its for other people’s sense of pride, problems, aspirations or interests. If “How to Win Friends and Influence People” does something excellently in its quaint, ’30s American way of dealing with things, is to show how in our self-centredness we forget how much we like other people treating us since we so often refrain from doing it ourselves.
The awesome thing about the list above is that the book doesn’t suggest you do these things just to win others over and be likeable, it doesn’t tell you: “OK you loser, this is what people like so you better do it. Of COURSE I know you hate being kind and interested in others, you’re a self-obsessed bastard like all of us, time to quit acting like a loser and be a champion”. No. That’s the end, or course: improving the quality of your social life; but the means is being a better person in all honesty, someone who others would like to be with and share things with because, damn, it’d be worth it! What can ever be wrong with that? In fact, we see so little of the above these days that suspicion is immediately raised when people seem to be genuinely interested in others. What can I say? Let’s stick to being nice for a change and see what happens!
After reading this book I didn’t come out thinking that I knew how to better “make people like me”, “win people to my way of thinking” or “change people without giving offense”. I don’t even want to make people like me or win people over; I just want to be kind to others for the pure joy of it! In all actuality, I now feel that the titles above are there only to lure unsuspected people in and help them, by the end of the book, get over the limitations and close-mindedness of wanting to “change people over to their way of thinking”.
The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Wilson Watts
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Seldom before have I read 30 pages of printed .pdf so tightly packed with meaning. A lot of it was profound, written in a time when psychedelic substances were a new unexplored area of the human experience. Research was being done on their medical and other properties (with Watts being sceptical about whether the proper environment for relative experimentation really was research laboratories and clinics). It was an innocent time, before the powers that be had really found out about what a gaping hole into their walls of modern vices their initial allowance of the use of LSD and mushrooms had blown.
“The active and the passive are two phases of the same act. A seed, floating in its white sunburst of down, drifts across the sky, sighing with the sound of a jet plane invisible above. I catch it by one hair between thumb and index finger, and am astonished to watch this little creature actually wriggling and pulling as if it were struggling to get away. Common sense tells me that it is the “intelligence” of the seed to have just such delicate antennae of silk that, in an environment of wind, it can move. Having such extensions, it moves itself with the wind. When it comes to it, is there any basic difference between putting up a sail and pulling an oar? If anything, the former is a more intelligent use of effort than the latter. True, the seed does not intend to move itself with the wind, but neither did I intendo to have arms and legs.”
Descriptions of powerful and deep insights only possible during a psychedelic trip are what the meat and potatoes of The Joyous Cosmology is. It’s a journey with the aid of these substances to planes of thought and existence impossible before to reach, far away from the egoistic mind and squarely in the consciousness behind the thinking mind. It’s a story of a temporarily selfless being experiencing the world.
It’s very hard to describe actually. I’m not at all sure if anything from this book stuck with me for good, but I’m not even sure if it’s supposed to, in the same way that powerful psychedelic trips are fleeting and strong cosmological realisations during them feel like dreams after the trip is over. Tim Leary warns in the foreword that this is a difficult book. Perhaps a couple of powerful entheogenic experiences are indeed the correct required “reading” for tackling it. The fact that the substances needed for having these experiences are almost ubiquitously illegal says much more about the laws, the lawmakers behind them and their intentions, than it does about the substances themselves.
Haven’t ever posted enough of this fantastic band…
And I wonder what the papers are going to say, another actress, another war, another day
But everything’s changed, the world woke up today, and I wanted to be with you
We know every word to the song, but we don’t want to sing along…
I don’t want to sing about rights and wrongs, I don’t want to sing the same old songs, but I’ll sing them and sing them till there’s no need to sing them, and then I can sing about love, then I can sing about love…
There’s stuff dressed up as truth and there’s stuff dressed up as lies, and it all ends up as stuff that you can buy, on eBay, from Babylon back to Babylon…
I had this song on mySpace. Ah, mySpace… *same look people have when they’re being nostalgic of DDR — no, not the game, I mean East Germany*
I’ve added Paris and Britney and you and Tom, I’d like to find your address so I could visit you at home, I don’t like people but I like to pretend, would you like to add me as a friend. Add me, add me, me mother says she wished she’d never ‘ad me…
…when fine society sits down to dine, remember that someone is pissing in the wine, pissing in the wine, pissing in the wine…
ABOVE: Link to working applet on blank html page somewhere in the guts of the cubimension server. Click the image.
BELOW: Embedded link to the very same applet that refuses to reference the sound files. I’m posting here for reference purposes in hoping I might at some point figure out why it’s not working as it is now.
My project for Object-oriented Programming II for university (Java), one of my four remaining subjects to FINALLY get my degree in cultural technology and communication.
This may take some time to load. Looks at some of my other stuff on other tabs perhaps and come back!
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I started replaying Majora’s Mask a few weeks ago and that was enough reason for me to start looking again for books, movies or other games with a similar central idea. Replay appears to be the original work of fiction which examined this particular kind of thought experiment this exhaustively. In Replay, it’s not three days or a single day like in Groundhog Day –which this book directly inspired; it’s 25 years.
The concept sounded very exciting — if you’re fan of this narrative gimmick like I am, of course. 25 years sounds like enough time for anyone to be able to do pretty much anything they want in and live comfortably. What could possibly go wrong with Jeff’s new life, what could possibly produce any kind of drama and make the book interesting? Well, let’s just say that long-term relationships, including families, don’t exactly thrive on such circumstances…
Every replay was a mystery and the possibilities were spreading out in front of me together with Jeff every time he returned to 1963. But I could not always identify with some of his choices or the way he opted to handle some matters, like
I also thought it was sloppy writing having all the sporting events conveniently turn out exactly the same way every time. In what kind of cause-effect comological system do teams of players play exactly the same way, the same horses come first 25 years in 25 years out? This story could have a lot of extra worth as a feast of alternate history but unfortunately it does not deliver anywhere close to what it could, apart fromthat little bit close to the end when
I gusss Ken Grimwood (great name for a writer, btw) wanted to have the best of both a clockwork and a quantum theory world.Another of my qualms:
You know what? Now I want to watch Star Sea. It would be my favourite movie ever. I bet I’d also be one of the geeks that liked Continuum.
Detaching onself from material posession, bringing less stress and trouble into one’s life (just because there’s fewer stuff to worry about!), producing less trash… Zen. Like, like.
Ineresting posts:
21-day journey into minimalism (the whole process!)
Everything I own: my 288 things (sounds like a lot? think again)
The troubling nature of pop culture
The short 16-step guide to getting rid of your crap
Insert compulsory, relevant Steven Wilson song here:
European time lapse map από stefanelonikitelo
Awesome! Reminds me of all the hours I’ve spent playing Civilization, Europa Universalis, Victoria and Crusader Kings. 🙂 I had a similar idea for a time lapse but more interactive… I guess that’s not needed now.
Also: the music is EPIC!
Highlights:
0:00-0:30 Muslim Spain… <3 0:16 Breakup of Byzantine Empire into Latin duchies. 0:25+ THE GOLDEN HORDE! 1:05 Constantinople/Istanbul changes colour. 1:25+ Poland-Lithuania. Will you look at that! 2:35 Wild Greece appears! 2:45 Unificiation of Italy and Germany 2:50+ Greece, Balkan Wars and Asia Minor campaign. Around 2:50 the change is almost poetic, in its fashion...
What kind of music is this? It’s… entrancing… Thanks Wilhelmina for the hook-up.
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Another work I enjoyed in Audiobook form, this one from LibriVox — Oscar Wilde comfortably belongs to the public domain, after all. Most of the voice actors were quite good, especially given the fact that most, if not all, of them were amateurs. As always, however, no measure of generalisation can capture the full spectrum of reality; some of the actors were bored with the text and were yawn-inspiring and others were very much into their role. By the end it was impossible for me to disconnect those actors’ voices from their respective characters!
So, what about The Importance of Being Earnest as a script, as a work by the great Oscar Wilde? It’s a fairly standard play. I mean that in the sense that everything falls into place by the end, it has a first, second and third act, all clearly defined. The characters are as delightfully unrealistic as they perfectly working symbols of late 19th century upper-class England. Even the surprises of the plot are carefully measured, predictably unpredictable. That said, it’s excellent insofar as standard, classic plays go. It’s rather a lot like anything perfect, be it a book, a film, a person or a work of culinary art: ultimately forgettable. The little quirks so common in contemporary, postmodern art add much-needed flavour to things. Some would say that lack of such quirks in any given work, especially by Oscar Wilde and others of his time and prestige, could count as proof of its timeless quality. I wouldn’t have any qualms with that opinion, even though for me the quirks are the soul of any piece of art.
Note: I still enjoyed it, laughed a lot with it and would attend a performance of it in a heartbeat.
