Altered-Screens

The past few weeks haven’t been good to me - please excuse me. Some serious anxiety following my return to school, and more recently a cold of some kind, have provided some rather unusual hurdles for me to overcome. Getting there though.

However, having felt so unmotivated to write anything in those past few weeks, I feel like it’s time to get back into the game. And what better way to kick off my return than with some good old literary controversy:

J.K. Rowling, Lexicon and Oz

The above link is a short article written by the famous Orson Scott Card. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, perhaps one of the most famous science fiction/fantasy books ever, Ender’s Game, will. Card starts the article with a laugh about Rowling’s latest move, suing a small publishing company for distributing 10,000 copies of “The Harry Potter Lexicon,” essentially a field guide to the Harry Potter novels. Rowling feels as though the Lexicon is just a rearrangement of her own material.

Card then goes on to point out the massive irony in that last statement - an irony that I, and many others I’m sure, completely missed until Mr. Card spelled it out for us quite clearly. Card presents the following plot synopsis:

“A young kid growing up in an oppressive family situation suddenly learns that he is one of a special class of children with special abilities, who are to be educated in a remote training facility where student life is dominated by an intense game played by teams flying in midair, at which this kid turns out to be exceptionally talented and a natural leader. He trains other kids in unauthorized extra sessions, which enrages his enemies, who attack him with the intention of killing him; but he is protected by his loyal, brilliant friends and gains strength from the love of some of his family members. He is given special guidance by an older man of legendary accomplishments who previously kept the enemy at bay. He goes on to become the crucial figure in a struggle against an unseen enemy who threatens the whole world.”

Does that synopsis apply to Ender’s Game, or Harry Potter?

…Exactly.

In other news, life’s pretty good, despite the anxiety (which I will delve into further detail about at a later date). 5 more weeks until I come home, but I know they’re going to fly by. A quick rundown:

Week 6 (this coming week): Physics midterm Friday. Cue me studying fervently all week.
Week 7-8: Another math midterm somewhere in there. Still haven’t gotten the first one back, I’ll get that this coming Monday - I only hope no matter what I got on it that I can come away with something decent in the class. I’ll simultaneously be searching for storage solutions for the summer, as well as packing things up.
Week 9: Dead week. Study like crazy for finals, although perhaps not since I only have 3 classes this quarter, and German’s easy.
Week 10: Finals week. More like a half week; last finals (Math and Physics in the same day, go figure) are on Wednesday, June 11th. Flying home the following Thursday.

I wonder now if the anxiety I’ve been feeling over these past few weeks has really been caused at least in part by the difficulty of the classes I’m taking. German’s not terribly hard, but I had a dream where I got back a quiz that I failed, and on it was written “C-”, and when I asked what that meant, my TA told me that was the highest grade I could get in the class. I’m not worried though - I’m more or less on par with last quarter’s performance and I came away with an A- last time. Math is pretty hard, but very randomly. I know I didn’t do hot on the first midterm, which I have to get back Monday, but this week’s homework is startlingly easy, so we’ll see how things go. My professor seems fair. Again, though, I had a dream where I got a 0 on the midterm. No Physics-related dreams (yet?), interestingly enough. My professors this quarter all seem very fair, but nevertheless I’m still going to have to work extra hard to get some good grades.

Well, I’ve got my next few weeks’ work cut out for me. Time to get to it.

I’m out.

Later.

Still alive, posts will come, the past few weeks have been rough…

Will update tomorrow.

Later.

I remember the first time I heard this word; my friend Liam threw it out there, nonchalantly, as though it were a word I ought to have heard before. No such luck. It ended up meaning something along the lines of “excess fat,” in the figurative sense; that is, garbage that manifests itself in various ways, from extraneous words or sentences in a paragraph to the dark lining around bread - wait, that’s crust. You get the idea.

The whole Bush Waterboard veto thing has me sort of confused. For those who haven’t heard very much about this: Bush vetoed legislation that would prevent the CIA from using, among other shady techniques, the practice of “waterboarding” on captured terrorists and other high-profile enemy figures. Waterboarding involves strapping someone down, orientating them so they’re flat on their back facing up, and pouring water over their head. This simulates the feeling of drowning, and panic sets in, and so on until the person gives up whatever information they’re withholding.

This sounds like torture to me, I’ll say that much. Official political and military designation notwithstanding, tricking someone’s senses into feeling as though one is dying is a number of rungs down on the humane interrogation ladder. The support for it isn’t convincing - an ex-CIA operative saying the technique “saved lives” would have more impact if it was conclusively shown that any and all of the CIA’s 19 available legal interrogation techniques had virtually no success in extracting information. Simply saying “the United States does not torture” does nothing to change mine (or anyone else’s, hopefully) opinions of this. At least, I certainly hope people aren’t standing there, listening to him say this and then nudging their buddy and going, “Oh, hey, it’s ok, we don’t torture, it’s not torture man.” All in all, this is to me just another bad move by Bush that will forever secure his place in history as an ill-informed, misguided president.

In local news, it’s almost dead week (actually, it is dead week, but I like to think “tomorrow” doesn’t become “today” until I go to sleep and wake up again), which means I’ll be studying until my brain sizzles with the searing-hot ore of knowledge, a wealth of information extracted from those ancient and mystic texts. My venture will not be without its perils - it would be easy to find myself consumed by an excess of worthless words and diagrams, so it’ll be an exercise in revealing the gems of useful information from the rough of the books themselves.

I have officially finished my first week’s schedule at the dining commons. All in all, it’s really not a bad job. I’ve met some extremely nice people, and the actual work isn’t terribly demanding. And the cooks make us food sometimes! That’s a nice perk. Yeah, I think I’ll stay.

I’m out.

Later.

This was my proposal, to which my good friend Ryan responded that he had in fact been president, for about an hour and a half…and he did pretty well.

Words can’t describe my anticipation of the new Indiana Jones. The anticipation was almost too much; I found myself going back to watch the original three, something which I haven’t quite finished doing, but I’m awfully close. Something about Jones just makes me smile when I watch those movies; perhaps it’s his cock-eyed smile, wry wit, his ability to wriggle out of situations that are almost too hairy for comfort, or something else entirely, but he’s a real hero, the kind I’d follow into a series of dark, bug-ridden tunnels any day.

I got a job at the dining commons, something which I had previously thought to be no longer a real possibility. However, when I discovered that all I had to do was work mornings (I say this now, but I know in the back of my mind that it’s going to be rather…awful sometimes), I jumped at the possibility, and tomorrow is my first day working for $8.00/hour doing next to nothing. Sounds good to me.

I think I need to do some restructuring of this site; new layout, maybe a new direction? I don’t think I’d follow this blog if I were anyone else, I need some recurring content that perhaps my peers can relate to. I’ll see what I can do.

Also, please check out my friend Dan’s blog, located in the links to the right, “Full Combo.” He’s a good friend of mine writing about video games and his thoughts on them, and his stuff is well worth reading.
I’m out.

Later.

It’s not exactly a historical day in the time line of the band Boston, but I’ve listened to them enough lately that I think I should pay tribute to one of the greatest singers I’ve ever heard, Brad Delp. He killed himself a little more than a year ago in Atkinson, NH, and took with him an amazing voice. To quote the rest of Boston, “We just lost one of the nicest guys in Rock and Roll.”

Speaking of music, I thought my collection was big, until I came upon the library of one William Lande, shared over the FT wired connection. 24,000 songs. I kid you not. And then, as luck would have it, I found out that a guy I know in my German class has almost the same amount; looks like I’ll be getting a lot more music pretty soon.

Maybe I should just be a movie critic, I talk about enough movies in these updates. I had to head over to campus on Thursday night to watch a movie for German. It was called “Beyond Silence,” and it was a very interesting and heart-warming movie. In short, a girl named Lara is the daughter of two deaf parents. She herself is not deaf, and her aunt gives her a clarinet for Christmas one year, which Lara invests lots of time into. Her father doesn’t understand the appeal of music, never having heard it himself, so he gets angry that Lara is spending all her time playing the clarinet and not studying. Years pass, and her father still hasn’t come to terms with the direction her life is taking, and the movie turns into a struggle between Lara’s devotion to her father and mother (since they’re both deaf, she is extremely useful to them in translating between spoken word and sign language and so on; she has a younger sister who can eventually take on these tasks, but not right away), and the pursuit of her musical career. I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s heart-warming.

Academically, the next couple weeks are kind of like the eye of the storm, the first part (midterms) having passed, although there’s a Chemistry midterm Monday, and the second part of the storm (finals) approaching steadily. I’m taking this opportunity to recoup and assess which classes I’m going to have to study the most for and which classes I’m pretty much set in. So far Chemistry wins as being the most difficult class, yet again, but at least this quarter I haven’t gotten any awful midterms and I’m doing roughly the same in all of my classes.

That’s about it for today. I missed the lunar eclipse, unfortunately; oh well, I’ll catch it again in 2010. More tomorrow.

I’m out.

Later.

I’m not talking about actors. I’m talking about those dots up in the sky - you know the ones - and how lying on your back looking at them, however cliché it may be, is really a profound experience in the right setting. It’s enough to make me wonder why I didn’t choose astronomy instead of physics (lack of as many job opportunities notwithstanding).

That was the bulk of my night, a random trip to the beach and a bit of late-night stargazing while a couple friends of mine frolicked blindly (although Jordan maintains that his eyesight is just shy of superhuman because of all the carrots he eats) in the chilly Pacific waters. A satisfying end to my last stressful day for…a little while anyway.

Yeah, midterms are over. Imagine me pausing momentarily to do a bit of a jig. Physics was certainly my most stressful midterm. It’s one of those subjects where, no matter how much you think you know, invariably there’s some aspect of it you are just a little shaky on. The saving grace is that physics is mainly the science of relating one thing to another, and so said shaky aspect can usually be figured out by a little handiwork with a pencil and a formula sheet. I think the real skill in physics lies in one’s ability to make those connections and truly understand what you’re doing while you’re doing it. My professor this quarter’s done a wonderful job of explaining this. He’ll do a long proof that takes the entire lecture, or some of it, and end with something as simple as “(torque) = I*(alpha),” and then go, “Look, it’s just like F = m*a.” And then everyone utters a big, collective (if tentative) “…ooooh” and things start to make a little more sense.

In any case, that was that. German was today, which I felt pretty good about, but that class never seems to be too much of a challenge anyway. Languages, or at least German, are so incredibly logical at their core. I mean, so is pretty much everything (excluding quantum physics), but if you can see the likenesses between your standard high school-taught languages (German, French, Spanish, even Latin) and English, you’ll be fine.

Math and Chemistry went fine, I won’t waste space by writing about them here. Everything is pretty good in my little 70-degree bubble land of beach life. Now I finally have some time to devote to drawing. I’m possessed by some incredible urge to draw at all hours of the day, something I won’t ruin by actually following through with it.

This seems to be enough for now.

I’m out.

Later.

Bad habits like staying up too late, napping during the day and further perpetuating the cycle - that’s what I’m on about. It can happen to you.

I’ve got a Physics midterm tomorrow. I’m not particularly worried - in studying, I’ve more or less gone from unsure to positive that physics, on a purely mathematical scale, is nothing more than drawing connections between things. Oh, “a” is a change in “v”? Well by gum, “alpha” is a change in “omega” by that same token! So on and so forth. Naturally I’m not sitting here talking aloud to myself while I’m doing physics homework, drawing happy conclusions and verbalizing them so that others might partake in the same revelry, but I’m not just jotting down a lot of circles and letters and lines and dots on paper, either.

This comic’s getting underway. I even have the first one drawn up, believe that if you will - it just needs to be re-drawn. It didn’t come out bad, but I’ve been trying out different ways of inking, and I think the next step are those super fine pens, which I thought I had some of but apparently don’t. I’ll look again. In any case, the comic’s pretty darn funny (credit for the script goes to my friend Jared), but might be lost on some of the older, non-video-game-savvy crowd, unfortunately. I’ll get it up sometime this week.

Time for sleep now, I think.

I’m out.

Later.

I was in some kind of shock after the Super Bowl, otherwise I would’ve written something then. I’m not going to write about what I thought of the Super Bowl, but I will accept the defeat with grace, and give Eli Manning and the Giants a big congratulations. Very happy that Eli got a ring.

Ok, that’s enough of that. It’s almost time to pick classes for next semester - always seem to forget how quickly that time of the year comes up. Thinking of a tentative schedule now…I’m guessing German 3, Math 3C, Physics 22, and maybe another class I’m actually interested in instead of Chemistry. Thank goodness I no longer have to take Chem. I’m not sure how much more I could handle.

A big happy birthday to my dad and uncle Andy, both of whom turned one year older on February 2nd. Coming soon - Max’s birthday!

There was a bit of a fiasco yesterday in trying to get our first month’s rent in the mail on time, which ultimately didn’t happen. Luckily, we were allowed to express ship it tonight, but I’ve come to the conclusion that getting a house is not as simple as it sounds. We’ve had a couple close calls already. As it stands right now, however, 6643A Trigo, Isla Vista, CA is still ours for the moment, and hopefully that will last through the summer.

Half of my laundry’s been in the laundry for almost an hour and a half…come on, dry already.

More soon, not much else to talk about right now.

I’m out.

Later.

-Sam

I’ve turned 19, people. Stop the presses.

My friends took me out for a wonderful dinner at Chili’s, and I was able to relax and enjoy the day off from school on my birthday. Couldn’t ask for anything better.

I’ve started reading Spin. It’s an altogether enticing read: basically, one day, three young teens are stargazing when they notice that all of a sudden, the stars have disappeared, along with the moon. Although the sun rises, people realize that something is encompassing Earth that is only simulating the sun, and no stars or the moon are visible. Satellite reception is cut off, and it’s a miracle that the world doesn’t destroy itself from talks of a coming apocalypse or anything of that nature. Where I’m at in the story, which is relatively early on, people are returning to their normal lives after the initial shock of being encompassed by what comes to be known as The Spin. I won’t spoil it all right now, so I’ll stop here, but it’s incredibly well-written, as far as I’ve read, anyway.

It’s raining cats and dogs and other small household creatures as well. It has been raining since Monday night, and the forecast doesn’t show it letting up until possibly next Sunday. It’s quite dismal. I trudged through a foot and a half-deep puddle on my way home from campus the other day. Now imagine if this were all snow…

School life is pretty much the same. German is really an interesting language; surprisingly, while languages were never really my thing, it’s quickly becoming my favorite class. Physics is also a lot of fun too, as I’m understanding a lot more of it now (rather than being hopelessly confused, as happened on certain occasions last quarter), and math and even chem are pretty good. Midterms are coming up, and I need to get some studying in for next Wednesday’s chem quiz, but it’s a pretty care-free existence beyond that.

I’m downloading the History Channel’s “Life After People” documentary from iTunes at the moment. It showcases what the Earth would be like if humans were to leave the planet all at once, say, tomorrow. I envision it being similar to the world depicted in I Am Legend; I’ll be back with a thumbs up or down in my next update.

I’m out.

Later.

The title of this post is, of course, meant in the most figurative sense. Unless it’s The Jungle by Upton Sinclair; I’ll literally rip through that book.

I don’t know what’s possessed me recently, but I have been flying through books. Since my last update, I finished I Am Legend, started and finished Bladerunner (better known as Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”), and am currently about a third of the way through Ender’s Game. After that, I’ve got Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson, and The Penultimate Truth, also by Philip K. Dick.

I mentioned last time the correlation (or lack thereof) between I Am Legend’s book and movie counterparts. I went and watched the movie after I finished the book, and while the movie isn’t actually too bad by itself, as a counterpart to the book it falls pretty short. I was disappointed by a few main things [WARNING: spoilers]:

1) The monsters in the movie aren’t vampires, they’re your sort of run-of-the-mill, no-sunlight monsters with a loud obnoxious scream and a thirst for blood. This wouldn’t have been such a let-down if the book hadn’t made the scientific side of the vampires so darn cool; Richard Matheson did a brilliant job in the novel of thinking up a logical reason for why the vampires acted in the traditional way that they did (afraid of crosses, not cool with garlic, killed by stakes [a thought occurred to me here, wouldn’t it be amusing if they were killed by steaks?], etc.).

2) The ending was very much a Hollywood ending. By that, I mean perhaps the morose ending of the book was simply deemed too much for the general public. Granted, Robert Neville died in both the book and the movie, but in the book he died as the last human ever to live (hence the title, I Am Legend, as he, as the last human, falls into legend), while in the movie he dies sacrificing himself so his human counterparts can make it to the human colony in Vermont with the cure.

3) I wasn’t happy with the choice to have Robert Neville have a dog from the start. In the book, Neville’s isolation was a very strong theme, only twice (that I can call) interrupted by the discovery of a living creature. In the movie, he was isolated, but having a companion from the beginning didn’t do much to reinforce how his world has changed.

4) Lastly, I thought that having Neville coincidentally be a brilliant scientist in the movie was a little much. In the book, he did a lot of research to eat up the lonely hours of the days to see if he could find a cure, much of it to no avail, while in the movie he descends a staircase from the main floor of his more or less normal house to an elaborate laboratory, complete with a bullet-proof glass shell in which he stores captured infected people

Anyway, that aside, both the movie and book were good by themselves. Bladerunner was just awesome, and imagining Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard just added to the awesomeness. Highly recommended for anyone who wants a really far-out read; Philip K. Dick was definitely an imaginative individual, although interestingly enough his ideas, while not playing themselves out in the time line Dick envisioned, are becoming closer and closer to reality.

School’s still good, for those of you reading this for the California part. Classes so far have been entertaining; my new professor actually teaches things in Chemistry. The seminar I’m taking, called The Elegant Universe and discussing the book of the same name, is actually taught by one of the guys thanked in the preface of the book. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of the (admittedly more basic) concepts in the beginning few chapters are being lost on a number of people in the seminar, so most of last Tuesday’s class was spent trying to answer the same question. However, I’m sure I’ll end up learning a lot from the class.

On a closing note, I recommend all of you read this article, it’s interesting stuff: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/01/darpa-develops.html

I’m out.

Later.