Those who read

My attention has been brought to the fact that at least one person I know reads this blog, or at least has once. So, would any readers mind going to goatse.cz/hello.jpg? (Warning: may damage minds, sear souls, and so forth. I suggest looking at the wikipedia article before actually going there (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/goatse). Any mental damage cannot be construed to be my fault - after all, I could have put it as a link saying "Cute kittens!" - which, speaking of which, is Here.

See you next month.

Reflections on Valentine's Day

On most years, I consider Valentine's day to be a capitalist thing, barely worthy of the effort required to insult it. However, I must admit that it does have some things going for it: it is one of the few days in the year when it is considered to be a social neccessity to parade one's emotions in front of the entire world (wait, that's a good thing? I'll get to that in a moment), no matter if those emotions be happiness (at being in a relationship) or sadness (at being alone again).

So, I was in a relationship this Valentine's day, for the first time. Well ... to be exact, it did not begin this Valentine's day. In fact, I had (have?) been in a relationship, by and large outside of the public eye, for ... well, at least two months. I don't remember the exact time it began, but it certainly occured sometime before the beginning of December of 2007. Yes, this may surprise people who know me. It was a surprise to me as well, I suppose.

So, by and large outside the public eye? While many people may have noticed something, most of them probably thought that it was one-sided (and not on my side). One of my friends, in fact, thought that it was one-sided until just a few days before Valentine's. However, not until around Valentine's day was I sure that pretty much everyone knew.

I'm doing my best to take this all in stride, and to remember that almost all relatonships end. However, I still hope that I can prevent it from ending. I know that, if it does end (when it does?) I will have done my best to prevent it from ending. Short of drugs, force, etc., of course. And maybe I'll be one of the lucky ones and it won't end until I'm so jaded by this terrible world of ours (yours? I don't consider this world to be mine by any means) that I won't care. Or maybe it won't end, which is certainly what I hope.

Anyways, that was your dose of descovering that I am capable of human emotions, such as affection and love. Expect a does of sarcasm, satire, social commentary, and so forth tomorrow, if my plans for tomorrow don't work out - or maybe even if they do. I'm not sure what to write about, though. Maybe a sequal for The Seed? Maybe a rewrite? Something that will let me get away with both social commntary and gory descriptions of deaths, for sure.

(Written on the Eee, again. No spellchecker, and it's running quite slowly right now - probably because firefox has some other tabs open right now.)

A Short Note ...

As you have probably noticed, Descent Into Logic has moved from aetuneo.blogspot.com to descentintologic.blogspot.com. If you're here, you probably know already. Update your bookmarks accordingly.

Ravings from before Sleep

Warning: This is from when I should probably be going to sleep, so is not entirely coherent, probably. Also, written with the Eee, so pardon any typoes - also, it doesn't have a spellchecker built into firefox right now. If I remember, I'll look over this post sometime tomarrow, and clean it up a bit (I probably won't remember).

So, to begin, the sensation of being sat on by a cat, while in bed. Specifically, the sensation of having one's lower legs sat on by a cat, in bed. It is very warm - the blankets mean that almost all of the heat from both the cat and my legs remains in the general region, so it feels very hot. The weight helps; cats, while perhaps not that heavy, are heavy when on your legs, putting out warmth.

Continuing, my political affiliations: Other. Not simply Other because I don't want to say, or Other because I'm part of a party which is not quite mainstream enough to be recognized, but other because my beliefs swing between the extremely liberal and the extremely conservation, taking into account most veiwpoints in between, as a factor of the subject and my mood. In things which involve freedom of choice (abortions, army service, etc.), I tend to be very pro-choice. In fact, I actually think that there should be no supervision to prevent people from getting an abortion or joining the army if they want to. Their parents do not need to know - even if they are under 18, or whatever happens to be the standard where you are. The same goes for assisted suicide (or, as one might put it, the choice to be aborted).

I am both anti-war and pro-war. I believe that the deaths which wars cause are terrible and should be avoided, but I also believe that wars are a neccessary part of human development, as they prevent all of the idiot jocks from trying to figure out what I spend my time doing, and, in general, lounging around and being stupid while the rest of us are trying to do something. On the other hand, those idiot jocks are probably worse overseas then the would be here; after all, the marines keep on raping people, and even though a bit of it is admitted, most of it is never officially condemned nor reported by the victim. I am also told, by a person who I am inclined to believe, that the marines try to make their recruits very misogynistic - supressing the sex instinct, and making it seem dirty, a tactic right out of 1984. Wars are one of the things which are simply not supported in my social groups, along with rape, stupidity, and standing in hallways (the later two people in my social groups often fall victim to. Stupid, stupid people who stand in hallways, blocking the entire thing!)

By the by, did I mention that, if possible, I intend to get a job designing virus's for the government?

I also tend to take rather extreme veiwpoints; I will adapt a theory which is almost unanimously condemned to make it completely logical and supportable. For example, social darwinism. Seems like a bad idea, right? That's because herbert spencer intended it all as a joke. The punchline: He was saying that having to struggle for everything makes people weaker, and inferior to the people who can simply reach out and have whatever they want given to them.

Everyone else looked at me as if I was crazy. I should have told them the actual punchline, not just the effects of it. Then they claimed that I misunderstood evolution. They only think of Genes, and completely ignore Memes. Incidentally, if childbirth is how Genes are passed on, then schools and discussions are how Memes are passed both down and around. Every conversation is sex, but the purpose is an exchange of different types of information - Memnetic, not Genetic. Debates are simply large orgies.

It is, however, a pity that the defensive mechanisms of most prevent the acceptance of really new ideas by a certain point in life. That's what insanity is: a collapse of the filters which keep all of the stuff that conflicts with a certain worldview out of the mind. True insanity is when the defense mechanism begins to actively seek out new information, and integrate it into the mind without going through the higher thought processes. That's why people think that trees can talk.

Of course, the corporations would like everyone to be insane, but only in certain ways: integrating desires for their products, but not the idea that everything they make is shit. I think that they've figured it out, too. The first step is to make people just phase out ads, so the higher thought centers are bypassed. The second step? I don't know.

Also, the RIAA is a Trust. It manages the intellectual property of the record labels, at least as far as lawsuits are concerned. Why hasn't anyone noticed this? It's so obvious once you think of it. Of course, if you, the reader, is like most of the other normals, you're only going to be able to accept that idea if I sneak it in somewhere, or if you actually think about what you read, not just read it.

The type of people I hate the most are those who think outside of one box, but inside of another, larger box. Too many people are like that. In fact, I probably am a bit like it, in some ways. You never run out of boxes, after all. However, once you get far enough away from the little gray boxes in the center, and have few enough other people to deal with, it feels like you aren't in a box any more. After all, the box I'm in is big enough that I never have to see anyone else if I don't want too.

I'm becoming a lot more introverted than I used to be. Why is this? Well, I'm only extroverted under certain conditions now, primarily relating to talking to a small set of other people. Even with most of them, I prefer listening to speaking. The fact that I'm rather more extroverted while playing sports probably has a bit to do with this; all of my ability to speak and do stuff gets exhausted during that. Sometimes, I'm so intoverted that I might as well not be there. I enjoy sitting under tables, especially when there's only enough space for me. It reminds me of the inside of my mind when I have a headache.

That's all for now; I need to be able to wake up tomorrow.

The Seed: A Short and Gory Story.

It's not especially gory, but it is short.

Note: I really hate using Abiword on my Eee. It tends to freeze up when I go into fullscreen mode, or when I open documents with more than a few pages. There has to be some way to avoid this ... But until I find out, it looks like most of the stuff I'll be doing with it will be using a normal text editor.

Anyways, the story:

Imagine a small town – not small in the sense of the word that it covered only a few square miles, but small in the sense that it had a small-town feel to it. Most people knew most other people, but not well enough that any of them would be threatened by the relationship. A bit like a suburb, except that it was almost completely self-contained; in fact, it produced more than its inhabitants could use, mostly in the form of food – vegetables, fruits, grain, and meat. It was one of those special places which grows and grows, until it expands for miles in all directions, but, through careful planning and a fair amount of luck, retains the small-town feel that was mentioned before. Most of the houses were separated from the streets and their neighbors by gardens – not lawns, but actually gardens, producing vegetables, fruits, and shade. In fact, the town was filled with plants. Even the approximate center of it retained the small town feel; indeed, there were a few tall buildings, but the town square was a quite large park, with a large grassy area in the center, surrounded by trees.

Perhaps in part due to the peacefulness of the town, the citizens were very complacent. More like good-natured sheep than anything else, really. Nice sheep, of course, the sort that you would like to know, the sort that you would feel comfortable allowing to stay in your house while you were on a vacation to a less dangerous place, but sheep none-the-less.

And so, when the rock – perhaps it was a meteor – landed in the middle of the trees in the park, no one paid it much mind. Sure, the younger people in the town went to look at it, and took some pictures, and some of the scientists (some of the sheep liked science. They tended to spend a lot of time building elaborate structures of glass, through which they arranged for colored liquids to flow. The fact that they would often drink these liquids suggests that they were juice, or perhaps some sort of alcohol) even went to look at it, and measure it. They spent a lot of time bustling around it – even after everyone else got tired of it – and no one noticed when they went somewhere else. The older people in the town politely looked at the pictures, and said stuff like “Well, things these days!” and “Rocks falling from the sky! What do you think they'll think of next?”

This attitude explains a lot, really.

And so, the youngsters went back to their normal lives, and some of them fell in love with other youngsters – well, they thought that it was love, and who am I to contradict the dead? And so, as was the tradition, they went into the woods to do, well, what youngsters who think they are in love do when no one else is around. Being in love, they did not pay much attention to the changes in the wood – the trees had, somehow, become taller and more sinister (I say more sinister, but, to be honest, they were very friendly trees before), and there were strange, slightly metallic vines on most of the trees, which seemed to move whenever one looked away. And so, coming to what they considered a suitable location for doing, well, what they were going to do, they leaned against one of the trees.

Their parents were a bit worried when their children were not home by midnight, but were not overly concerned. After all, when they were young ... well, let's just say that they understood how easy it can be to loose track of time. When no one saw them the next day, of course, it became time to start looking for them. Neighbors were called, the authorities were called, and, in the sheep-like way, went around asking people pointed questions about what they had been doing on the night of June the 23^rd. It was actually May, to the embarrassment of the authorities when someone told them. Eventually, the truth was clear: the two youths in question had last been seen walking in the park, possibly in the direction of the forest, but more probably in the direction of the store which happened to be on the other side of the forest, in each others company. They had not been observed to have left the forest, or to have brought any supplies in with them (well ... not the sort of things any should considered to be essential for survival).

The authorities congratulated themselves on a job well done, and had begun to give themselves the rest of the day off, when they were told that, in fact, the youths had gone in the last night, and, it being almost nightfall, they would probably have come out if they were able to. The authorities privately decided that the youths had probably fallen and injured themselves, and decided the the honor of finding two injured people in a dark forest is greater than that of figuring out that two youths went into a forest to ... well ... and didn't come out. Besides, there could be nothing that they had spent so long doing in the forest that could not be unhealthy in some way.

And so, the authorities secured a supply of lights, blankets, and stretchers, and went into the forest, along with some concerned members of the citizenry. One of them – a bit unhinged after years at war – even brought a few guns, muttering something about guerrilla warfare and “them dirty hippy bastards.”

Put yourself in the shoes of a police officer, well meaning, but having spent so much time in inactivity that your reflexes had been slightly dulled. You are venturing into a dark wood to ... well, you know all that. You go into the wood, with the rest of your squad and some citizens, waving your lights around and calling out for the two missing people. Privately, you hope that they had already been making their way back out of the forest, but had been distracted by something shiny, or possibly each other. You hope to find them quickly, and be able to get out of there as soon as possible. After all, one of the eyes just winked at you!

Wait, eyes? Why the hell does a tree have eyes? And more than eyes, sharp, spiny vines, which you had been walking on for the last few minutes, and which had been making a crunching sound so much like dead leaves, but somehow different, like old, brittle bone – indeed, it would appear that you've just stepped in a corpse's rib cage, a corpse wearing clothing suspiciously similar to that of one of the youths. Looking up at the tree, you see where the eyes had come from: the other youth sits at the bottom of the tree, it's – for it can only be called and it now – eyes bleeding blood, and limbs chained to the ground by vines. And, from the tree, the eyes keep on winking, as you are ripped apart, limb from limb, your life giving blood used to nourish the vines, and the trees, your eyes taken for another tree, and your blood, your glorious blood, giving life and motion to that which had been motionless for so long!

The other members of your party hear your screams, and are just fast enough to see your eyes being plucked out. They die in similar ways, except for one of them, who is able to run, and made it as far as the edge of the woods before he tripped, and, looking up, realized that the grass in the open area was moving towards him, gleaming a dark, red, like fresh blood on green leaves, in the light of the moon, and lived long enough to feel the grass plunge into his body by the way of those of his veins that reached the surface, and begin to pump his blood out.

Goals

This year, one of my goals is to post fairly constantly. As I have a lot of free time right now, since classes are only just starting up again after the finals, I think that I might as well take the chance to lay out the rules which I'm going to try to hold myself to:

1) At least one post every month (setting the bar low, so that it will be easy to meet).
1.1) This post must contain content. In other words, not simply a post saying that I'm really busy and am going to post something as soon as I get to it.
1.1.1) Posts which I consider to contain enough content: A Segment of a Story (08/02/03), Eee! (08/02/02), I Hate Technology (07/12/01), Quad-core for $700 (07/11/20).
1.1.2) All of these posts are fairly long, and contain content, which may be interesting.
1.1.3) Quantity does not trump Quality. If it makes the most sense to post one well-thought out post, perhaps four pages long, every month, then so be it.
1.2) This post does not count.
2) Posts do not have to use logical or sensical numbering systems, words, languages, and so forth.

A Segment of a Story

(Again, posting from my Eee. Pardon any typos.)

A while back, I felt creative, and so wrote four pages of a story, which I eventually hoped to grow into a novela or even a novel, set in a cyberpunkish world, with at least a bit of biopunk thrown in for good measure. However, having written the prologue and some of the first chapter, I ran out of creativity, and haven't come up with more creativity yet. So, here's the prologue. I'll post the first part of the first chapter later, probably after I finish the second part of it, and so on. Or maybe I won't.

Prologue:
An Escape

They ran through the sky, laughing and carrying what they had stolen away. Their bodies ran along the ground, ducking and dodging between the pillars of the ruined city, holding nothing but air and memories of what they had done. Behind them, nothing happened. The guards did not wake, the bells did not sound, and the dogs did not run after them, howling for the return of what they had taken. Even so, they were pursued, followed by memories and truth, hounded by guilt. None of them were entirely sure that what they had done was right, and all doubted the truth of the matter.

No matter. They ran, and, in running, left what they had done long behind them, perhaps further behind than any could have possibly expected.

When they first woke, the electrodes scuttling away from their minds, repulsed by conscious thought – for, by law, none must enter except when asleep, and none not asleep may remain – they were elated, the adrenaline of the dream persisting beyond its domain. However, they soon calmed, and, in the harsh reality of reason, began to think. It had begun as only a drunken idea – not drunk in the simple way that you might understand it, where hidden facets come to light, but true drunk, when entirely new entities form within the depths of the mind, and then surface – which had, as usual, been met with approval by all parties. The drink had lent itself to convincing the electrodes to let them in, and to fooling the silicon minds which controlled their world, tricking them into opening the gates. It would also lend itself to hiding what they had done: all they had were memories, and memories are easy to hide – or remove.

But the electrodes would know, and remember. They would tell their masters, the smallest tendrils of the silicon minds, and the knowledge would slowly – or perhaps not so slowly – filter up, and flow around, until no place would remain where they could hide.

The destruction of an electrode – or even a hundred electrodes – was only a minor crime, since the electrodes were technically property, and the punishment would be much less than that for the theft. And so, the electrodes were destroyed, crushed beyond recognition by the brutality of fear.

And the Idea was safe. Nothing would find it, or notice it. At least, not before it was ready.

Eee!

I finally have a laptop: the 4G model of Asus' Eee PC. It's a lot smaller than one would expect, but it's a great machine. The screen is very readable, the keyboard is, while small, okay for typing (I'm using it to type this, in fact), and, all in all, the hardware is great. The software it comes with ... well, I'm sure that it's good for some people. Personally, I like having a full desktop, which means, in this case, eeeXubuntu. Basically, Xubuntu with tweaks so that it will work better on an Eee.

In other news, a week or two ago I was working on a list of components for computers in various price ranges ($500, $1,000, $2,000, and $10,000 - everything from a budget machine to an overpowered monster), and I gave up after figuring out that even a $500 computer could contain a Core 2 Duo (1.8GHz, I think it was). Computers are cheap enough that even a very minimal machine is far faster than most people would need, and after you get to $1,000 on a single machine, all you can really do is add in RAM, Hard Drives, Optical Drives, and cooling. After all, one processor is the limit on most commercial systems (server boards tend not to support SLI, which I, for one, would want).

Anyways, my intent was to make the following points: 1) anyone building a $10,000 system probably knows more than me. 2) anyone building an overpowered system for as little as possible probably knows at least as much as me. 3) anyone interested in taking my advice probably knows less than me, and thus should not be trusted to build a system from the component parts.

If anyone is really interested in my advice, speak up, and I'll give some advice. Depending on how you ask, the advice might be along the lines of "learn to spell, or get an excuse as to why you can't spell."