A gramme is better than a damn?

Just finished reading Brave New World. I know that it's compared a lot to 1984, seeing as both are dystopian futures which heavily feature brainwashing, but I find that while 1984 tries to scare the reader with the horror of the totalitarian state's thought police, Brave New World is unsettling in a much more subtle, perhaps more deep-seated way. The only thing worse than losing your freedom is not wanting it to begin with.

Reading this book has been the most intellectual stimulation I've had in recent memory, perhaps all the way from before NS.

Ideas are bulletproof

Just finished reading V for Vendetta. It's not as mind-blowing as Watchmen was for me, or maybe that's because I didn't get the shock factor of reading an Alan Moore comic for the first time. Still, it was a very good read and really caused me to think about the distinction between chaos and anarchy; are they the same thing, or is there a subtle and yet important distinction between having no order and having no imposed order? Did V really help an oppressed nation rise against its overlords like he claims, or did he just decapitate an already ailing country and leave them to deal with a different brand of misery? Perhaps he only represents one of anarchy's two faces; V's destruction to Evey's creation. Perhaps he recognised himself to be only half the man that anarchy was meant to be, and so forcibly transferred his mask to Evey.

"There, did you think to kill me? There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof. Farewell."

Now that I managed to check another book off my to-read list, I decided to take on something else: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World has been borrowed from the library and now sits in my bag, waiting to be brought back to camp to read. I seem to have a taste for these kinds of totalitarian dystopia satires...

I used to want you dead, but now I only want you gone

Sometimes, I like to hunker down for a heavy dose of introspection and retrospection, examining what went right or wrong with my life and myself, and figuring out how I can make myself a better person from those experiences. Other times, I like to watch stupid videos on the Internet while chuckling to myself while family members scramble to find the IMH hotline. Right now, it's the latter.

This first video has a deceptively tame title. Seriously, you need to watch this, even if you don't play the game (fyi I've only ever played MvC 1 on the original PS)





I've always wondered how I can stare at nyancat for what seems like several eternities without being able to turn away. The answer, of course, is awesome subconscious hallucinations. And did I mention that I LOVE this new nyancat song?




Yup, a ten-minute loop of the song. But you probably already guessed that it was coming.



This last video is the ending credits of Portal 2, coupled with yet another great theme song from Jonathan Coulton, Want You Gone. It's weird how I've fallen in love with the ending credit songs of both Portal and Portal 2 while having never played either of those games before. I know I'm missing out on a lot, but in case you didn't know, I only trust my laptop to run games with Plants vs Zombies-like graphics intensity, so I'll grab a copy of Portal 2 as and when I feel like my laptop would be more awesome with a self-destruct function.

Mental drought

I think my brain is trying to rebel against a mental drought. These few days it's like I will instinctively seek out intellectual stimulation when previously I was perfectly content sitting around doing nothing. Unfortunately, actually finding and partaking in such activities has so far only reminded me of how long it's been since I last really cranked my brain up to 11. While trying to teach my bunkmates what I learned during H3 maths, I realised I could barely remember half of what I learned, and it only becomes more true for H3 physics. I feel like I wasted my time to spend a whole year taking extra lessons (including half a year of pure insanity when physics clashed with maths) and then forget everything in the same amount of time. As nerdy as it may sound, I may start bringing H3 math questions into camp to do, if only to protect my one-year investment.

While on the subject of intellectual stimuli, I realise that as a person born in the 90s, I've already missed so many amazing movies which engage on an intellectual and artistic level, rather than on the "boobs and explosions" level which basically describes 70% of all current movies. Perhaps one of these days I'll make a list of all the movies I want to watch, and slowly hunt them down. I already have a few potential candidates for my list: Citizen Kane, Soylent Green, Rashomon, and The Room (because I've heard about how it's so legendarily bad that it's gained cult status). And while I'm at it, I might as well make a list for books as well: Metamorphosis, Brave New World, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, A Brief History of the Universe, and V for Vendetta (I know the last one is a graphic novel, but I'm making the rules here).

Fun fact of my life: I have the habit of occasionally reading up on modern physics on Wikipedia. It all started when I asked my H3 physics lecturer what would be good reading for beginner's quantum physics, and he replied "Wikipedia". Ever since then, whenever I get the sudden thirst for random physics-related knowledge, I'll go to the relevant Wikipedia page and just plunge right in without any prior contextual knowledge. Heck, I just spent the last hour reading up on string theory on Wikipedia, and I barely understood half of it.

The journey of a thousand miles has started

Chalk one up for the therapeutic effects of blogging.

Last Thursday in camp, I opened my SAT book for literally the first time in months, and through sheer force of will, I did an entire paper at one go.

Except the essay.

Oh come on, I'm not a miracle worker, you can't expect me to go from nothing to full papers overnight.

For those of you who care, I assumed an essay score of 8/12 (is that a reasonable assumption? I have no idea), and with help from the nifty magical raw score-scaled score conversion table included in the book, I arrived at a score of *drumroll*... 2260, which is very... kind of... something? Honestly I have no idea what's the market rate for SAT scores, or barely anything about the SATs in general. Gotta make a mental note to research further.

ANYWAY, the point of this post is to commemorate that I've finally gotten off my ass and started some actual work, so yay me :D