Keeping the log book up to date is an infinitely recursive process

I’m currently doing my mandatory internship period that is part of my course curriculum. During this period, I’ve to, ideally, keep a detailed account of the things I do daily in a log book. The problem is that, however, once I start writing my first entry, keeping the log book up to date turns into an infinitely recursive process that consumes the place of all other activities for every subsequent day after.

Day 1
Do something.

Day 2
Write about what I've done on day 1.

Day 3
I'm supposed to write about what I've done, but since what I did in day 2 is writing my log book entry for day 1, that's what I'll have to write if I want to be completely honest
.

Day 4
Now I've done nothing but keeping my log book up to date for two days. I suppose I could actually do some real work, but if I didn't have an entry for yesterday, it'd seem like I was slacking off. Hmm, I'll write about what I did yesterday, which was writing the log entry for the day before.

Day n
I've now written n entries, with n - 1 of them being meta-entries. I've done one real day of honest work.

See the problem?

End of an era

I'm not going to be able to see him go down


I’ve been playing MMORPGs since Secondary 3, and if my feeble memory still serves me, that was in 2003. It is 2012 now. So I’ve been playing MMORPGs for somewhere in the area of close to 10 years.

I’m no casual player. When I embark on a new game, I sink my hours into it, and strive to be the best at what I do. Perhaps I’ve not always achieved that, but I’ve tried at the very least, and I daresay I’ve been better than the average player.

At some point during my haze of virtual world activities, I must have grown up. I’m now a second year university student (also known as college, for you yanks and rebels). I realized that I haven’t done quite as well as I ought to have. I’ve internship coming up soon, which means I’ve to buck the hell up and get myself together. Neither have I achieved what I wanted to do in life.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m going to take a hiatus from MMORPGs, and to refocus on the more immediate stuff in life that I have to tend to. I’m not quitting gaming, and in fact, I’m going to play Alan Wake this weekend when it gets released for the PC. Gaming is a huge part of me, and that’s never going away. I’m just going to spend less time of it, and make it less of a priority. Unfortunately, that means strict raiding schedules are out.

In a sentence, I’m relegating myself to the seats of casuals.

Stuff like this keep me up at night

 

When I have trouble sleeping at night, I often put on an old show, preferably one that’s dialog heavy, and leave it running in the background. I find that it helps me sleep, and more importantly, it satisfies my OCD need to know exactly how long it took me to fall asleep. I’d usually wake up the next day and roughly remember what were the last few lines I heard, and that’d give me a good estimate.

In S01E10 of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon retrieves his lunch back from the trash after Leonard binned it in an attempt to make his deception to Penny more believable. When I first watched it years ago, no red flags were raised.

However, after watching five seasons of the show and getting to know Sheldon’s character intimately well, Sheldon’s obsession with cleanliness, especially when it comes to food, the scene seems wrong. The Sheldon we know wouldn’t have even reached into the bin without screaming for disinfectants, much less retrieve his lunch from it. Sheldon freaked out in S02E07, when Penny touched one of his onion rings, and threw away the rest as a result.

In S03E04, Sheldon came into contact a little ink from a whiteboard marker and ran for the nearest baby wipes. Then, in S05E02, Sheldon reacted strongly on hygiene grounds when he discovered Penny had retrieved a chair that was originally discarded. This all reinforces that point that Sheldon’s actions in S01E10 seems completely contrary to his character.

Of course, none of this any fault of the authors. In any long running series, be it a book, game, or television, there are bound to inconsistencies that only arise when you look at the whole thing in retrospect. The authors, while writing for season 1, probably didn’t have all the episodes for season 5 planned out, and it would be silly to considering how TV shows might get axed any time.

Much like history, we often look back and blame individuals or groups of people for failing to see what to us now, in retrospect, feels incredibly obvious. The truth is, in prospect, none of them could have possibly have conceived the every possible chain of results from their action, or inaction.

I need a vacation

Karagga, with a hat that was probably stolen from Otto von Bismarck.

It’s been a hectic week for me since the last weekend, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been able to get any gaming done. I did manage to log into SWTOR once and completed the Karagga’s Palace raid instance. I’ve mentioned before that BioWare loves puzzles, and KP is no exception. In one of the fights, you have to constantly solve a puzzle which fires an incinerator positioned above the boss, removing it’s damage reduction buff. Fellow computer science students would be pleased to know that the puzzle is a classic problem taught in class — it’s a three piece Tower of Hanoi problem.

Other than that one SWTOR raid, and my raid obligations in Rift, which I’ve ended up being late for on a number of occasions, I hadn’t had a chance to play anything on my own free will. Now is the time where I’m gravitating towards the middle of my semester and my workload is piling up. I find myself wanting to put Rift raiding on a hiatus, and just using the free time to relax, or play a game that isn’t an MMORPG. I’ve having no fun rushing from one thing to another, and raiding has become a chore in itself.

I need a vacation.

I need a vacation.

Rant: The above screenshot took way too much effort and too long to capture. Curse you Hollywood, and your draconian DRM on blu-ray discs.

It’s about to get busy

Last night, I was made aware that I had to take part in the Imagine Cup as part of my Software Engineering coursework this semester. I’ve talked about wanting to cut back on gaming and refocusing my time in an earlier post, but rather than being an option, it looks like my hands are being forced to do just that. Not anticipating this, I had previously planned on taking more modules this semester to make up for my lackluster performance.

Looks like it’s going to be hell in here.

I don’t want to sell you death sticks

I want to go home and rethink my life.

I didn’t do as well in 2011 as I had hoped to. My performance in school was, to be put it bluntly, rather abysmal. General Patton once wrote after failing his first year at West Point, “You must do your damnedest and win. By perseverance and eternal desire any man can be great.”. That shall be my mantra for 2012.

I hope so for my own sake.

I wouldn’t be so bold as to declare “no games for 2012″, because I know I’ll still be raiding in Rift, still be playing SWTOR, and will definitely play Mass Effect 3 when it gets released. As for a certain game involving Deckard Cain, that I don’t know. I was never a huge fan of the previous two games in the series., and neither do I like the auction house idea.

Time to get serious.

This Christmas

The most authentic looking self-destruct sign I've ever seen. From Alien (1979).

The most authentic looking self-destruct sign I’ve ever seen. From Alien (1979).

When I was a kid, Christmas and the week leading up to it would be spent watching the holiday programming on free-to-air television. The same holiday programming was mostly repeated every year. My family doesn’t celebrate Christmas, so the holidays usually default to me playing a ton of games. This year however, it was back to a ton of movies.

I started by watching Alien (1979). This is the original Alien, before any of the Alien versus Predator crap, and it’s considered more of a space horror film than space action, which is typical of most sci-fi movies these days. It’s really good. Unlike most horror movies of today, which seems to rely on orgies of sound and visual effects, Alien doesn’t. It is the setting, the isolation and quietness of being on the frontier of unexplored space and the scenes of absolute nothingness that brings about an air of creepiness and unease. This is also the movie that showed that a strong female protagonist could work in sci-fi films. I’m not a fan of the horror genre, but I was willing to revisit it after watching Alien.

Reaching out on Facebook, I was encouraged to watch The Thing (1982), which falls more into sci-fi horror than space horror since the event took place on Earth. After watching it, I can understand why this movie has a cult following. When I read that there was a recent remake of it, I was rather hesitant. Most remakes have been lackluster, and a number downright bad.

The Thing (2011) was less of a remake, but rather a prequel to the original movie, and it’s extremely well done. This is perhaps the best re-make, or re-imagine, or prequel, or sequel to a movie I’ve ever seen. It’s not a remake in the traditional sense in that it has a whole new set of characters that has nothing to do with the previous movie, yet the story differs while remaining faithfully similar enough that it is like watching the previous movie all over again. The ending of the 2011 movie ties in seamlessly to that of the 1982 version that I thought the 1982 movie was going to start playing.

I thought maybe I’m starting to like the horror series, and tried watching some generic horror shows. 1408 (2007) was downright ridiculous and Insidious (2010) kinda meh. There are some really good horror movies other there, but most of them feel like B-movies, the really bad sort, but not bad enough that it becomes good. Just plain, downright bad.

I went back to the sci-fi genre with The Island (2005) and Cowboys and Aliens (2011).

The story behind Cowboys and Aliens seemed lacking. We know that gold is precious to the aliens, although we’re never told why. We know the aliens are the conqueror sorts, yet they only seem to have one ship on Earth. There seem to be too many sidequests for Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford’s characters to embark on, and for a while, we seem to forget that the aliens even exist to begin with. It’s not a bad movie on the whole though, but it could be have been a lot tighter had there been some sort of concrete back story. Better yet, make it into a TV series, or at least a miniseries. The pace of the story was too fast, with too many characters telling too many stories at the same time. If it were a TV series, there’d be time enough to explore all that. Furthermore, looking at how well Firefly is doing even after the show was canceled, we know that there’s an audience for space westerns. This could really work if picked up by the right studio. Nonetheless, it’s a good action movie that satisfied this Firefly, X-Files and V fan.

The Island started out really well, and then rapidly drove off a steep cliff in the second half. I’m a great fan of dystopian stories. 1984, The Matrix and THX 1138 are among my favorite works. The Island seems to follow many tropes typical of such works initially. At the start, we might even be inclined to believe that the characters are actually living in a post-apocalyptic world, and the protagonist’s journey, from sensing that everything is not what it seems to discovery and realization is every bit as interesting. If the movie had ended there, it’d been outstanding. Instead, we get a chase scene which started out impressive, and then spirals down to wanton destruction of property that dragged on for way too long, and an ending of missed opportunities.

If there’s any other movies that you think I might like, drop a note in the comments and I’ll get on it. Otherwise, I wish all of you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. History buffs would also remember that Mikhail Gorbachev resigned twenty years ago on this same day, bringing about the end of the Soviet Union. Bless you, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Robocop: Childhood films take on a new meaning

It’s surprising how much more you discover a movie that you watched during your childhood when you watch them again. I probably watched Robocop a dozen times during my primary school era. Recently, with the Robocop series released on blu-ray, I gave it another go.

Back then, Robocop was about action, guns, and robots. Having grown up and understood more about the world, watching Robocop today means something completely different. Filmed in the 80s/90s, Robocop was sci-fiction then. Not so much today. OCP’s take over of Detroit city is no different from the dozens of multi-national corporations taking over of fertile farmland in Africa and the forced resettlement of natives. Having a police force run by private corporations who care nothing other than their own bottom lines? Check. We have private militias and private run prisons today.

Robocop might be just an action flick when I watched it in Primary school, but rewatching it now, there’s a whole new meaning to it.

Something completely different

There’s something to be said about waking up at 1230 when only the previous morning, I was struggling to kick myself out of bed at 0700. Now that the semester is finally over (minus project week next week, sigh), it’s time to play some serious catch up to real-life. By real-life, I really do mean e-life.

For some reason, game releases have a tendency to cluster around my examination dates. This has been the case since secondary school, and the result is always the wreckage of my GPA. But let’s not let that worry us for now. On to the important stuff!

For games:

  • Rift dailies (I hate them with a passion.)
  • Dragon Age 2
  • Witcher 2
  • GTA IV
  • Dead Space
  • Portal 2

In the TV shows department I have:

  • Vampire Diaries S01 and S02
  • Twilight Zone S02 and S03
  • True Blood S01 and S02
  • Stargate Universe at wherever I left off in S02
  • Twin Peaks S01 and S02
  • Walking Dead from the start.
  • The Prisoner (1967) all episodes

Looks like I’ll be glued to my screen a lot in the upcoming days.

I Walk Free

Also known in the local colloquial as “ORD loh! ((The term ORD refers to Operationally Ready Deployment, the local mil-speak for “completed mandatory military service and now a reservist”.))”

As of today, I’ve completed my mandatory two years of military service and now walk this earth as a free man. I still have obligations as a reserve in armed forces but I can only hope that I never get called upon.

It seems like a long time had passed since my initial post about being conscripted. While in service, it feels as though I were trapped in a gravity field with its own definition of time with no regard as to what happens in the outside world. In the service, everything is constant, no moment indistinguishable from the next. Once released, it feels as though I’ve been riding on a slingshot, propelled into a world of chaos.

Where do I go from here?