Yeah, I know, I completely ignored Christmas this round.

I already made a post last Christmas about its pagan roots and several things about Norse-man sex. So I figured that anything I wrote this year would just pale in comparison. Also I was lazy to do any more internet research. And I didn't know what I would be saying, anyway.

Yeah you can check the archives if you want. I think I included a few pictures, as well.

It wasn't a bad Christmas. It seemed rather short. Both gatherings seemed to just go by without me really doing much. I slept late. I woke up late. I got $30 for my Christmas present. I ate turkey. The turkey was good, but I didn't like the ham. I've never liked the ham. It just wasn't hammy enough. I like breakfast ham, the thin pink slices of finely ground pork that go really well with mayonnaise and white bread. Dinner ham is different. It's not as refined as breakfast ham, and so it is less smooth on the tongue. Also, for some reason, people like to cook it with some icky sweet stuff on the outside. A mixture of honey and mustard. It tastes like acid-treated plastic to me.

I guess I wasn't really in the Christmas spirit to begin with.

And now the New Year approaches. I'm not entirely excited over this either, seeing as that it falls in a school week for me. That's just cruel.

It looks like I'll probably be using that day to catch up on late work, or to plan ahead for the coming weeks. Forget resolutions.

Earlier, I watched a movie with my parents. It was some early 1990's film, that was supposed to be a comedy. Well, maybe it was hilarious back then, but the comedy of today has certainly evolved a great deal. The entire film was laden with things that I could tell were supposed to be funny. But they weren't. It was like watching a child attempt to play the piano; you could sort of tell what song he was playing, but it was jerky and fragmented. It would need much refining. Like a clumsy hatchling learning to use its legs.

Also, the film had lots of little filler scenes, scenes that had no relevance whatsoever to the plot, but apparently were intended to hold comedic value, or perhaps character development. Character development itself was rather limited. The dialogue was tolerable, at best. The villains of the show weren't even named, and simply existed to be taken down by the main protagonists.

All in all, I'd rather have used the time to read.

...

It's been really long since I've gotten together with my friends, for something other than schoolwork. I thought that I'd use these two weeks to do something, but nothing really got off the ground. And now I have to go back to school, that hive of idiocy. Of all the polytechnics, why this one? If what I hear is true, the other institutions don't employ morons, and the students who attend lessons there aren't a totally unmotivated bunch.

I miss my old school, where group work was actually fun, because I had people to rely on. People that I could trust to pull their weight and pitch in good ideas. People who actually knew what they were doing most of the time. People who I didn't have to explain every little thing to.

Not anymore. Now I struggle. Now I strain. It's frustrating, and I'm going back to school in little more than thirty hours.

Regret is not a nice feeling.

All I have left is to hope. That maybe this is just another phase. That soon enough I will find my place, and realise that things will work themselves out. And so, for now, I need strength.




On a lighter note, I'm buying myself a Christmas present, that should arrive in slightly over a week. A new keyboard for my desktop, with scissor-switch key technology. Now, I need to think of how to explain it to my parents when a keyboard arrives in the mail. They're not exactly open to the idea of an unemployed teenager spending money on luxuries like that.

I'll probably have to lie about the price.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net
-Joe

Whoohoo, Echoes of War!

Blizzard has released its first music CD, featuring 15 tracks of ancient horror, medieval glory, and futuristic war. I don't actually know when it came out, but I have recently gotten my hands on it. I think it's completely splendid.

The music of the Warcraft universe is the grandest and most spectacular. Hm, "spectacular" is derived from "spectacle", hence it has a notion of sight. You can't see music. Can you even use "spectacular" to describe music? Anyway, it's basically all that nice brassy fanfare and base drums, intermingled with serene sequences and rough rhythms that make me think of the loading screen.

Seeing as that I have never played Starcraft, the music from there was all unfamiliar. Still, I think that they are very good, though a bit strange in several parts.

Diablo music is what I am most familiar with, and now it's the same creepy music, only in epic orchestral style. The oboe was created for Diablo. There can be no other reason for its existence.

The soundtracks were always a big part of the fiction I enjoy. I even have the soundtracks of certain games that I have never played. The books may always be better than the movies, but books don't have soundtracks. Movies do.


Speaking of movies, Tom Hanks will be returning to play Robert Langdon, in the film adaptation of Angels & Demons. This is good news, I suppose. Now I have a reason to go to the theatre and eat an entire bag of potato chips.

I've always thought that Angels & Demons had a better story than The Da Vinci Code. The only reason that the latter novel was more popular was because of the whole controversy with the Christian community. Because of that, Angels & Demons became "the other book that Dan Brown wrote", instead of "the Dan Brown book that you should read".

I'm not expecting the film to be much. But with films come movie memorabilia. And in this case, that means ambigrams.

I will watch it, though. It's been a while since I've heard about a movie and wanted to see it. This past year has been all about superheroes. The previous year it was pirates.


Actually, the only reason I wrote this post was that I wanted an excuse to share this awesome comic with everyone, without looking too lazy.



Ah, but I think scientists should unite against the common enemy before training man-killing squids.

-Joe

This is blasphemy, I say! What kind of an organisation schedules a vacation to end before the New Year? What ever happened to the pointless-yet-fun activity of using the New Year as an excuse to give yourself a makeover? Okay, not that I'd do that. I can't be bothered. But the point is, I was kind of planning to go back to school after 2009 had begun. You know, like I used to.

Instead, I shall be going back on the Monday of that week, and the Tuesday... And the Wednesday. Then I get Thursday off. Seriously, what good is Thursday off? There's no point. Maybe with a slightly different set of rules it might matter, but my school has this annoying habit of not planning ahead. They see a public holiday and go "Hey, look, we can't have lessons on that day. Let's add to our student's agony by scheduling make-up lessons on another day, preferably when they have something important to do. Oh, and while we're at that, let's feed them with wrong information and bad calculations." Why can't they be like other schools and plan around public holidays?

Also, why can't they just give us proper assignments that are actually interesting, and put more weight into assessments, rather than presentations. The thing about presentations is that you're basically forced to boil down whatever you learned into a simple summary tailored for lesser minds. Explain too much, and it gets boring. Explain too little, and the intellectuals will cringe in agony. Not that that's a real problem around here.

It'd be nice if the presentation topic had anything to do with our syllabus.

I challenge my readers to find out how the body responds to a lowered serotonin level on a cellular level.

...


I need to do something. Also, I'm hungry.

I can see my log of recently uploaded pictures. Too few.

-Joe

Holy crap, a Star Wars MMO.

I mean, another one. That isn't Star Wars Galaxies.

Bioware and LucasArts are teaming up to create Star Wars: The Old Republic, which they hope will become the World of Warcraft of the Sci-Fi universe. Right now, we don't really know much about it, so all I can go on with is that the graphics look amazing for an MMO.

The game will be set about 3500 years before the rise of Darth Vader, so we're not going to be seeing any of the characters we already know. Except maybe the ancient Sith Lords. I'm not sure if they're canon though, as they mostly appeared in the games.


Anyway, thus begins my two-week break after the common tests. Ah, the common tests. I really should have stayed at AJ. I presume that they don't ask for history in biology tests there.

This is going to be a short two weeks. I look forward to spending my time re-watching my favourite movies and television series. Hm. "Series" is a bad word. It doesn't have a plural form. That's misleading. I expect that I will waste countless hours waiting for bad-mannered players to gather online to kill a boss in WoW, and then scream and bitch about people "not healing them enough". Seriously, in the time that it takes for any given group of people to gather for an activity in that game, I can read a book.

And I have. I've been re-reading the Animorphs series. Not the actual paper books, because that would be expensive. Besides, I don't think they even sell them anymore. Instead, I have settled for reading them online, in an electronic book format. Sometimes there are small typographical mistakes and there are almost always issues with paragraph spacing. Still, I find them good enough, and the errors do not impair the entertaining quality that the books have always had.

This doesn't mean that I won't buy the lot if I can. One day, I will have them.


The snow on this blog is finally not out of place again. Yeah, we added the snow last Christmas for the festive feel, but we never bothered to take it out. We probably won't be changing the tunes either, since iMeem did this whole thing that prevented anyone but the uploader from hearing more than the first 30 seconds of the songs. Some DRM thing.

And I'm off now, as my parents require my input on what computer they should buy to replace that piece of junk downstairs.



-Joe

Four primitive hominid skulls have been found in the Republic of Georgia, Dmanisi. The working theory is that these skulls belong to a transitional species of hominid, possibly a direct ancestor of Homo erectus. Leg bones unearthed indicate that this hominid walked on two legs, and upper-body fragments suggest that it had the upper-limb anatomy similar to Australopithicus. Which is awesome news, really. These finds provide yet another piece to the evolutionary puzzle, filling in a gap between our ancestors and us.

Anyway, I did this little thought experiment today. Suppose we would like to see evolution in action. In humans. Now, the major problem here is that for evolution to occur, you need your subjects to reproduce. At best, we could observe three or four generations before our own demise. Now, three or four generations, by regular odds, is not going to yield any significant change in genetic structure(although I would be inclined to argue that each subsequent generation is magnitudes of order dumber than the previous). We would thus need to be able to observe these specimens over hundreds of thousands of generations, and in different conditions to our own.

So now, to overcome our problem of dying, and therefore being unable to observe our results. We'll assume that no human rights people burn our houses down, and that we'll die of natural causes*. We'll need to somehow extend our lives beyond the natural limit. I've thought of a few ways we could achieve this. One would be to exploit this nifty phenomenon known as time dilation. The principle is basically that when something moves faster, time slows down for that object, in reference to the rest of the universe. So here's what we'll need: A vehicle of some sort that can travel near lightspeed, and for extended periods of time. Also, there will have to be toilets on it. Next, we'll just need to find a suitable location to set this vehicle in motion. Outer space sounds like a good idea, so long as we stay clear of little meteoroids that'll blow holes in the machine.

We start off by gathering a few human beings, preferably has genetically average as possible. For a fair test, we'll have to wipe their memories of modern civilisation. They'll be set into a large enclosure, with environmental conditions similar to that of the Triassic. The oxygen level would be about 80% that of our current conditions, so they might... Not die. For flora and fauna, I really don't know yet. I figure that by the time I embark on this experiment, mankind will probably have the technology to clone any animal or plant, allowing us to place whatever beast or flower we like into the enclosure.

Now, assuming that our test subjects have not died from eating poisonous plants or being killed by Tyrannosaurus Rexes that weren't supposed to be there, us jolly scientists would then get into the aforementioned spacecraft, and fly around a bit. Relativity will help us to predict how much time would have passed in the universe around us, per unit time spent in the spacecraft. After some time, we'll stop, get out of the spacecraft, and look at our subjects.

Assuming that we have been moving fast enough, the world would have changed dramatically. Our test subjects would have gone through multiple generations. Basically, we just need to stay in our superspeed spacecraft until say... Five hundred thousand generations have been reached in our subjects. Hopefully this would not take more than several years on board our spacecraft.

So, then we just get off and see what our population has turned into. They probably wouldn't have changed dramatically, but there are bound to be differences. What differences, I don't know. It would depend on what conditions we set for them initially, and how these conditions changed over time.

Also, everyone else we knew would be dead, so maybe this isn't that good of an experiment.

Then, again, everyone we knew and didn't like would be dead.

Mumble mumble.

Okay... So that's the experiment. Alternatively, we could somehow make cryogenic sleep not destroy us.

-Joe