Monday 1 December 2008

freudian slip-slops and flip-flops

sigmund freud is actually one of my least favourite people. ever. not that i know him personally, but when someone channels their failure of finding eel testicles into theories of humanity revolving around sex (citation needed!), you tend to question why people are so obsessed with his theories in the first place. i mean if you're going to attribute everything (especially dreams) to sexual frustration and deprivation. well. i'm not going to say even i can do that, because that would be lowering my own standards.

i don't have anything against him, i'm sure he's well educated and formed his theories based on long hours of research and thinking, followed by various enlightenments and dead ends *cough* cocaine *cough*. and surely his line of thoughts were well structured, unlike mine. although, i guess, having oral cancer (from smoking cigars?) + controversial relationships with your own family members + having the Nazis ban your books and work = fame in the future. if only Hitler came back from the dead and started banning my blogs. maybe i'd be a someone in 2097! i'd probably be even more of a someone considering i was suppressed by zombie hitler. adolf freaking zombie hitler. can't get any more awesome than that. especially if he decides to shoot himself with a gun at the end of his tenure on earth. again! :o

but, again, i digress. as per the end of my previous post, i was going to talk about freudian slips. nothing too elaborate, i was just reminded of this because i have a friend who would, on one occasion, type sex* instead of sec* 9 times in a row when trying to type 'going to answer the phone, brb sec' (as in second) over the internet. he would correct himself only to make the same mistake again. and again. this is highly uninteresting considering the c and x keys are right beside each other on the keyboard, and even 9 times in a row could easily be explained by a slip of the hand or not being attentive as one was answering the phone.

however, it's just one case in my point of saying that (a lot of) the people i know do in fact make sexually-related freudian slips. what's on your (wo)man's mind, eh? now how did flip-flops get into the title? just another incident of freudian slips where a Ms. F decided to say to us, one day, that we should probably bring our penises to the beach. we were in a total wtf?!? moment. later it was apparent she meant flip-flops but had no recollection of herself saying otherwise (yeah, i said flip-flops. wtf are you guys trying to pull on me?) albeit there being about 5 people there telling her otherwise. i think she still believes we were pulling a prank on her to this day.

Wednesday 26 November 2008

of passwords and e-mails

some of you may notice that my (previous) blog has now moved to this site, and for those new to the site, that all the previous posts are dated to the same date as this post. in addition to the one week stretch of no posting, and other events (you'd probably have to know me to have this all make sense, and if you don't / it doesn't make sense, feel free to omit this paragraph), the following story serves as a (weak) explanation.

i logged on the other day, to find that a particular friend, Mr. H, or as we shall henceforth refer to as H-dawg for his preposterous attempts at being black, had logged on to my computer and deleted all my saved e-mails to firefox. in addition to some modifications i may have made to my computer as well as some recent windows updates, this may have caused my e-mail address and password to be 'forgotten' by blogspot.

now introduce the fact that i have 37.96 e-mails and about 22/7 passwords, and i can not remember which of either i used to register for this blog. well. suffice to say the old one is inaccessible to me. to complicate things i may have used an e-mail address which i had made specifically for the purpose of registering this blog - i.e. i had no intention of remembering the e-mail nor the address. all in all i've just abandoned the idea of salvaging the old site (after various unfruitful attempts) and made this one. hopefully history does not repeat itself and i can actually post more than 5 times before running into a new problem.

on the subject of 22/7 passwords. we all know that cheesecake is delicious. even better than apple pie. hence cake > 3.142. hence, at least i don't have cake passwords. not to say i use cake in my passwords. but to be honest cake should be used in everything. cake bacon. cake steak. cake pie. and cake cake. although by definition, there cannot be cake cake, since it would be just cake. further fortifying the theory that cake is just so awesome, you cannot get any better than cake.

ok that was a bit too random. i was actually about to say something about my passwords, but since i had coincidentally said 22/7 passwords, the temptation to ease pi(e) into the entry was too strong. the pie is indeed strong. but still < cake. coincidence? or freudian slip?

so yes. we'll keep that for another entry, i guess. since this one is getting a bit long. something to look forward to, i'm sure!

el oh el

so after a few days of absence, another post. as i write, i'm simultaneously playing a game, watching tv, cooking dinner, reading a book and listening to music. hence, i would like to forewarn everyone of the quality of this post - be ready to, as my friend put so eloquently, 'raise the bar' (while gesturing the opposite).

anyways, as promised, webcomics. as mentioned in my pervious post, i enjoy xkcd. it's a somewhat nerdy webcomic, and i can't describe it better than the author has already put it; a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language. it's a fairly simply illustrated comic strip, mostly of stickmen (or stick people for those pedantic about political correctness). a lot of the jokes are based on popular memes, physics and computer science, and for those uninitiated to their ways, some comics may seem less funny than others (personally, quite a few have gone over my head, but i am no comsci nor am i an internet troll). generally witty, sometimes bizzare, i give it a rating of 9 / 10.

dr. mcninja. this is one of those comics that i like purely for the fact that it's random. i think to some extent my thought process is similar to the author's - some of the referrences to zombie ninjas and robot killer bears are just hillarious to me, yet some of my friends just go 'wtf, this is funny?'. note that unlike my other, usual taste in webcomics, dr. mcninja is a series as opposed to stand alone strips. some may find this annoying to have to read from the start (which may seem not as good as the latter comics, but people only get better at what they do over time amirite?). an acquired taste, perhaps, i rate it as 6 /10 (by virtue of it having stopped :/ )

next up, is wondermark. another acquired taste, this time more extreme than dr. mcninja. initially i had wrote that dr. mcninja is totally random but i changed that to reflect that it is nowhere near as random as wondermark. it ranges from the most bizarre things that don't make sense at all, to those thoughts you have when you're alone thinking about how the world works. sometimes insightful, always witty, and more often than not funny (at least to me). i warn you, though, many, if not all, of the friends i have shown this webcomic to find it distasteful and are quick to give me the /facepalm :(. personally graded as a 9 / 10 but i wouldn't be surprised if people rated it as low as 2. additionally, note how in wondermark, the pictures are seemingly unrelated and out of context compared to the text - in my opinion it just adds to how hillarious it is. at times the author plays on this for added effect and sometimes i wonder where he gets the pictures and illustrations from in the first place.

last but most definitely not least, smbc (saturday morning breakfast cereal). again some of my friends find this not funny (what's wrong with my taste :( am i really that off). one-panel comics are always fun. i remember reading the newspapers as a teen and always looking forward to the bizzarro (spelling?) single-panel comics in the comic section. now that i think of it, i should go search for the possibility of that comic being a webcomic now! that would be like. bacon. childhood bacon. on the internet. mmmm. but yeah. smbc. it's concise for the most of the time, and i don't really have to think to get the jokes. it's relatively simple compared to some of the other webcomics i read, and is usually the first one i open after coming home from a long day. updates every day, which is a perk. all in all, 8 /10.

i guess by now you can kind of figure out something about me, from the things that i find 'funny' or at least entertaining. also, these aren't the only comics i read. far from that, i have a whole tab in favourites of the various webcomics i follow. some of them are a bit niche in nature and others are not so easygoing as to warrant a good rating in this post. in any case, i might write about them in the future, who knows. but till then i think these will keep you busy should you decide to check them out.

Growing

it's pretty amazing how, no matter what sophisticated, cutting-edge, high-requirement, explosion-laden, blood'n'gore-filled game you get, i still end up spending hours in front of the screen spamming one key or mouse button to that annoyingly addictive flash game. way back when, it used to be solitaire (i swear the cards are the devil's work) then it was some random game on newgrounds, then it was those flashportal games i'd get in my e-mail. the games themselves change, but the concept is pretty much constant.

as to why this happens? who can really say. i like to think of it (as i do with most things) in a sense that to make the great seem great, you have to know what the epic fails are like. that and sometimes your brain just doesn't want to deal with all the complexities of the high-end games and just wants to chillax with simple things. conceptually it's like pinball, all you have to do is control those two flicky things at the bottom of the screen (or if you're old skool enough, at the bottom of the table) and the (only?) working variable is the rng or gravity. yet, i do recall spending a significant amount of my childhood wasting away, pressing the <- and -> keys trying to beat that high score (which obviously was always held by my elder brother). srs bznz.

in any case, i had long forgotten all these simple pleasures, being drowned in a world of work, studies, and designer games; only to be reminded by a group of games called 'grow' series.

http://jayisgames.com/tag/grow

i warn you, if you click the link you might end up missing several hours of your (equally unproductive, if it is anything like mine is) life, and cursing the gaming gods for still not being able to solve some of the puzzles. don't spoil the fun by grabbing the walkthrough before you've even attempted the game, you're definitely missing out on some good times (wasting).

i forwarded one of the games to a friend of mine some time ago:

me: hey, A why don't you check out this. pretty cool stuff.
A: wtf is this. grow up, you're not 11 anymore. get back to work and stop slacking your ass off.
me: good point :/ gah so many things to do. catch up with you later

(notice how the conversation could have at least had a hello/howareyou?/goodbye premise, but nope, such is the way of life). anyways, a few days later:

A: HAH i beat it. eat that sukka.
me: ?
A: the game you forwarded me.
me: oh. which one was that
A: you know the one where you build an island and research stuff to make the people happy (insert more generic game plots from this series)
me: oh yeah. hmm. grats? have you done the other one where you build a space ship?
A: f that. i just finished this and got sidetracked on work which i was supposed to have finished 2 days ago.
me: damn. well i guess that's what you get for being 11, huh?
A: f u. not sucking me into another one of your addictive games.
me: /shrug oh well get back to work, then. i won't keep you from it.
A: yeh, i'll catch up with you over the weekend.

come saturday...
A: bitchhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh finished that space ship. booyah.
me: ...
A: what?
me: i assume you did your work before trying that?
A: yes and no...
me: mhm.
A: anyways i can't meet up today gotta get... er. work done...
me: that's fine. just don't get addicted to the next addition to the series.
A: there's a new one?
me: oh yeah, this time you build a ...
A: @*(()()@!)&$). screw you and the series.
*A has gone offline*
me: :(

i wonder if she actually got back to work or if she ended up playing the whole series. another unsolved mystery worthy of the X-files. also, before i forget, here's a web comic which depicts my situation perfectly (albeit in my case i don't have the super-awesome-1337haxxorz game machine as portrayed):

http://xkcd.com/484/

which conveniently sets the stage for my next post - webcomics which i enjoy! for those uninitiated to xkcd - shame on you, and grats on finding out. for those all too familliar, i hoped it's given you the chuckles and sneers i've had over the years. mo powa to xkcd, uniting nerds of all race, religion and operating-system preferences.

Pilot

i suppose an appropriate way of starting a blog would be to address everyone who would be reading, and so to you i say 'hello!'. an introduction may be appropriate, but i guess i'll retain what internet anonymity i have for the time being.

i have never really intended to make a blog, and in making one now, i don't fully intend to continue with it for a long time. it's just something i was bugged into doing by a friend as i'm not really doing much these days. you can roughly recreate the conversation by imagining something like this:

friend: hey, sup
me: nothing much. what you up to these days?
f: nothing, really. just chilling doing the same stuff

(note that there is probably a thousand things going on in each of our lives but for some reason this is always how a conversation starts out [and probably ends]. i'll probably go over the reasons for this in some later post if i remember.)

f: you're not doing medicine anymore, i've heard. how's that treating you?
m: getting pretty bored, to be honest. nothing much to do and i've really run out of steam for doing the stuff i'd normally be doing on holidays.
f: you should start a blog
m: ...
f: seriously why not, it's not like you don't have the time
m: ...
f: it'll be fun
m: ...
f: just do it
m: ...
f: cool, i'll be looking forward to reading it sometime.
m: ...
m: ok

and so that's how epically persuasive he is. in any case, it seems like a good idea. although i can already see myself getting bored and running out of ideas on what to write. i guess that might be a good topic to address in this post. what am i going to write about? well, i'm not really a very opinionated person. so if i were to do something concrete on politics / economy/ random interesting fact, i'd probably last the most of 2 lines. my line of studies isn't interesting (or as you would have guessed, previous line of studies), so i'll probably not talk about that. so what's really left. hey! congratulations, you get to listen to random rants and stories of my life that would normally bore people to death in any social setting, but since this is a blog it'll sound like a superbly interesting life memoir.

in any case, any inspiration i have (or lack thereof) in making this blog comes from a blog that i used to read, detailing the times and trials of an american english teacher in japan (which i think a lot of you may be familiar with:

http://www.gaijinsmash.net/archives.phtml


so maybe i can try to do something similar. sans the references to mortal kombat, which i suck at and wouldn't stand a chance against a 3 year old girl who's at the same time trying to put the cube in the triangle-shaped slot. fun times, totally random.