Kataplex

That landmine has exploded, now to get out the first aid kit, patch myself up and see how much impact it had.

The initial shock is gone, everything is numb.

Yep, it’s another day where I do a double post – if it’s any consolation the previous post is from November. I just didn’t backdate.

Tell me once again
What’s beneath the pain you’re feeling
Don’t abandon me
Or think you can’t be saved ~Dream Theater – I Walk Beside You

It may have been a while since I last thought to post, mainly because I had a draft hanging over my head. But that’s done with. I’m still doing a lot of stuff for JN – it’s become a lot more deadlines (soft and hard), and this is a busy quarter for me with respect to JN work. It’s good though. I’ve had some time lately to think more about my feelings towards Jellyneo. I don’t think I’d given it too much thought, but like I said when I applied, I’m interested in improving JN. I don’t work for anyone in particular – Dave of course is the head at the moment and tends to come up with what I do, but even if that someday changed (please keep in mind I’m not saying it will), I would stay dedicated. I think for a while I slipped into a sort of zombie state – requirements in, Kata code out. Mechanical and clean, but not at all inspiring. But I’m in a bright mood again about JN, and I hope to stay committed for a long time to come. After all, who needs other hobbies?

The last month or so, I’ve had some drastic shifts in communication methods. This has let me interact with people online in capacities I hadn’t really before. Every once in a while, someone says something so special that you feel warm inside and want to write it down. I can’t write it here, since it’s confidential, and I won’t name names, but today someone said something that was that special. It’s a ray of light in what has been an otherwise gloomy time of my life.

It seems like I’ve been quoting Dream Theater’s lyrics more often lately. With ~103 songs in my library by them it’s hard not to. I guess you could say I’m a fan, though I don’t know lots about their history or anything. Just a little observation I figured I’d make since once again there are lyrics by them in this post.

Long ago, Sophistrata mentioned that something might be coming up on Mudbunny that wasn’t just my ramblings. That time is near, pending some rebranding and alternate graphics. Look forward to it!

A steady stream of madness rises to a flood
The clock is ticking for bad blood ~Ministry – Bad Blood

A while ago, I thought I was on a landmine. I thought snowballs were coming at me. I thought I was climbing a treacherous mountain. Then I thought it all went away. Now I’m not so sure. Even now at 3am, I sit in bed awake and writing. Deep down in me there’s a shred of fear that makes itself known despite its small size. Someday, perhaps that snowball will hit me. Perhaps that landmine will explode. Perhaps the dream of safety will be shattered and I’ll wake as the ground falls from beneath me and I land in the world of the real. I’m not sure I want to be there, I’m scared on some level, but at the same time, it’s my rightful place. If I wake up, I’ll roll with the punches. I’ll grow up.

The boy is simply crazy:
Suffering from delusions.
We honestly think that maybe,
He might need an institution.
He lives in a world of fiction
And really could use some help.
We have just the place to fix him -
To save him from himself. ~Dream Theater – Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence: IV. The Test That Stumped Them All

Lately, Jellyneo’s been suffering from various problems with their webhost. These problems have been out of Jellyneo’s control, and for the most part out of their webhost’s control too. Nonetheless, it’s rather demotivating not being able to do work for Jellyneo. It’s particularly obnoxious where there are little “around the house fixes” to do and I can’t do them. I can only hope that soon things come back up, before I start allocating too much attention to other things and lose too much familiarity with JN things.

The demotivation has spilled over onto another front. I haven’t done nearly as much research as I should be doing, in part because I just don’t feel like doing it. I know I need to, and I know I’ll become motivated again soon, but it’s been two weeks since my last meeting, and due to some creative “juggling” of time, I have much less than I should to show. It’s not until 1pm tomorrow, so perhaps I’ll be able to do some hardcore research prior. Either way, it feels icky having to drag my feet like that – the only person I’m hurting is myself.

Before getting to the really crazy stuff, I figured it’s worth doing a bit of “look into the Kata”. Depending on how little information is needed to satisfy that, perhaps you’ve already ticked the little check mark next to this section and are fed up with my ramblings about myself. Feel free to skip ahead. I think I’m happiest when I get a lot of feedback. If a conversation gets quiet or one-sided, I get a bit nervous about continuing. I don’t find myself particularly extroverted – prolonged interaction with individuals in real life can get quite tiresome. However, having a partner (not in the “significant other” sense) that compliments my behavior and skillset well, and provides adequate communication can be an incredible help to my productivity and mood. Of course that’s an ideal case, but the communication in general can help things, even if we don’t get along peachy-keen. It’s not a case of liking (or even noticing) every joke I put out, or every action I take, but a healthy (or perhaps slightly unhealthy) level of interactivity is something I find a big plus. I don’t want something sycophantic – the interaction should be two ways, and I should be reacting as much as “leading” during an exchange. A bit poorly explained perhaps, but it’s 3:20 am and I kind of want to sleep at some point.

Sometimes I think what I need in life is something stable, like a religion. I’m not particularly sold on any religion. My mom made me go to a lot of different flavors of Christian churches, and my dad was a reform Jew. I went through the barmitzvah process, but I don’t really practice anymore, or hold any of the beliefs. I guess if either religion turns out to be “right” I’ll be in a heap of trouble. Sometimes I think I should just develop an arbitrary personal religion. I think it’s terrible to use something someone else made, but I’m more than a little interested in Neopets I would say. Besides, with the amount of holes and dubious explanations that Neopets offers as lore, it’s not too hard for me to discard Neopets as “just a site, presenting a take on Neopia” and leave my own interpretations equally valid. I bring this up since when I think about being morose or repentant and wish I could just kneel and pray, it’s often to Sophie the Swamp Witch. No I haven’t developed a religion, and no I don’t kneel or pray, but the thought is there. It’s probably a bad sign. Maybe I’ll follow through – it could be an interesting exercise.

I originally wrote this post draft in November. I never did get around to posting it, and it only seems proper to do so before I make a new post. I only left myself brief one liners at the time, so I’m doing a bit of guesswork here to figure out what I might have wanted to say. I’m sure I lost some gems to the sands of time.

I remember my childhood in Brighton
When dear ol’ dad would bounce me on his knee
He’d say “Son there ain’t nothing as excitin’
As exposing beasts to inhumanity.” ~Conroy Bumpus, Sam and Max Hit the Road

I recently looked back on some of my posts and I was none too pleased. A lot of what one might call “bogging” instead of blogging.  A lot of posts I’m not happy with or proud of. A tweet I happened to make about a month later summarizes things quite succinctly: “My shame knows no bounds.” Sometimes I hate what I’ve done, hate myself, and hate reading back. Those sorts of things are bad to wallow in, but it’s nice to be able to have a little perspective and tolerate more than internal patting-on-one’s-back. At any rate, for both time and creative reasons I’m killing the idea of continuing stories. In particular while I might try to come up with really what my Neopets are about, my desire to have things explained is just… not worthwhile. It might even be nice to have a roleplay with someone, but I’m not an established roleplayer in the sense many online communities define, and I don’t have friends who really do that sort of roleplaying. No big loss. After visiting Los Angeles in the summer in fact, I realized that some of the way I wanted to look at things is wrong or doesn’t matter, so I shouldn’t over complicate things. Maybe someday I’ll start writing again. Maybe not.

I’ve spent the past month or so working on a paper that’s due in December. It’s a lot of work, and some of it is definitely work I could have done earlier. In part though, it’s rough not really understanding how much time things will take in advance, and having to scramble to get new results near constantly. Really makes me wonder what I spent the first 12 months of my PhD career doing. Sometimes I lose a lot of confidence when I read things from other people in the field who are “better”. Maybe they’re smarter, maybe they have better results, maybe they’re just good at presenting papers and have a lot of experience. Whatever the case, it makes me doubt that I’ll ever be any good, or that I’ll be worthy of having the degree and having to claim an area of research. I know that it’s all just temporary inferiority, and that since I really want to teach it doesn’t matter much (if at all) what I do for my research or how “cutting edge” I am. It’s still quite disheartening though.

Never been much of a doubting Thomas
but nothing breaks like a broken promise
You tell me ’bout your two more coming
but once is just enough for me ~Dream Theater – Lie

A couple weeks ago, I experienced the closest thing to a “real loss” I’ve had in years. I didn’t feel much at the time one way or another. I wouldn’t say I was “numb”, I just thought “oh, a bit sad but no big deal.” People asked me if I was okay, as though they expected me to be more affected than I was. I did my best to politely offer to sever ties or keep things open depending on what was desired. But it’s not so easy. The cut was just deeper than expected and it didn’t hurt until the shock went away. It’ll heal of course, but in the mean time it’s still there. It doesn’t hurt an awful lot, but it keeps throbbing to remind me it’s there.

To make matters worse, I recently went through some very old pictures I had. Screenshots mainly – not so many real life photos. Still, the images brought back many ghosts of the past. Clanmates from Earth: 2025. High school friends. Old online acquaintances. Haunted by ghosts of the past once again. I should have just deleted all the pictures; gone tabula rasa. Instead they’re still sitting on my hard drive, waiting to be dug up again when I least suspect it. I really miss some of those people, but I’m not going back. I sever my ties when they get old and neglected, and no amount of ethereal visages will make me go back.

Rise and shine get a glow
Cause you know you’re gonna shine
Like the star you are (you are) ~John Sebastian – Rise and Shine

For the record, the lyrics above are from the opening song in The Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland (which in my memory is the third Care Bears movie). I politely extracted Mr. Sebastian’s name from the opening credits, so if that’s a problem, you should take it up with Nelvana and let me know how it works out for you. ;) Okay, in honesty I’m just being a jerk and sticking to that despite the fact sources say he wasn’t responsible for Rise and Shine and it was performed by Natalie Cole. Enough smarm though, let’s blog!

Geez, it’s already been at least 2 weeks since my last post. Feels like I just posted a couple days ago, but that’s obviously not the case.

I’ve been trying to get myself to be in the lab more often, but it’s hard when I have to juggle it with school work and JN work. Mainly the classes get me down, because since I need the A (or I’m done with school) it’s a lot of pressure, which means a lot of time. Time spent outside of research and time I’d rather not spend. So as a result I’m less motivated to do as much research, which is bad because that just leaves me “piled higher and deeper” to turn a phrase.

I know a lot of people commit to things and then find they don’t have time. It’s always worse switching from high school to college, and switching from being an undergraduate/masters student to a PhD student is almost as bad a shift. The only difference is you’re older and a bit more able to make your own decisions instead of following someone else’s structure. I also know that November (at least for us Northern Hemisphere denizens) is when crunches start happening – the academic year has had time to pick up and let any potential snowballs grow, and term projects and exams start to float about. Group project? Check. Paper deadline? Check. Preparing for a talk? Check.

I’m aware of what’s going on, and while it might be fine to let some squirming happen, I have no intent of dropping any commitments. I certainly wish that when people realized deep down that they weren’t going to be able to keep on keeping on, they’d just gracefully admit it and drop the commitment, perhaps only pausing to make sure someone else could pick up the slack. Otherwise it’s just a world of hurt for everyone involved. Why leave with a carton of eggs all over your face – yolks dripping where you planted them one by one slowly over the months – and stepping over the field of broken eggshells so large only a full dozen eggs could provide it when you could just leave with everyone (relatively) happy and your carton of eggs intact? Those eggs might someday hatch into chickens, Cluckens, or Egg Monsters From Mars. I’m not really trying to lash out or call anyone out, it just amuses and/or confuses me. Not to mention at this point I’m just writing what I’m thinking because I just read a scary story and have found myself awake. “Strike while the inspiration is hot” I say, and in this case that means keep spewing words!

Then again, there’s the simple fact that knowing something deep down doesn’t mean acknowledging it or being at terms with it. Worse yet, sometimes things aren’t that simple. I once heard about “escalation of commitment” and I’m a big believer. The deeper you dig yourself, the harder it is to justify climbing out of the hole. Looking back it always sucks, but that doesn’t change the reality of the present when you’re still debating whether you want to climb the ladder out now, or sink a little deeper first. In the end things sort themselves out, or end in a spectacular display of self-destructive pyrotechnics, so there’s really no harm no foul. Oops, too simple again – that’s how it would work if it was just one person involved. Instead it’s a complex network of people impacted (positively or negatively) and people who give a rat’s ass (or fetid dingo’s kidney if you wish) or wouldn’t know the difference if it wasn’t delivered to them via flashing screens with blaring klaxons. And being that complex, every time is a little different and picking things apart just isn’t worthwhile.

That aside, I’m set on sticking with JN (I’m still taking projects and working on existing projects), research (I wish I was a bit more into what I do), and of course this miserable blog. It’s not that I mind writing things down, it’s that some posts like this one are a bit dangerous, though if people are offended that’s their own affair. It’s more that I look back at old posts, and wonder if I should delete scraps or unfinished products. But that wouldn’t be learning from experiences, and that certainly would be admitting unnecessary defeat.

I’m standing on a mountain destined to turn into a hill, looking at snowballs looming over me destined to be nothing more than dust bunnies, and standing on a landmine that I can only hope is a dud. If not, well I guess my cautious optimism won’t matter because I’ll be splattered across the web and then everything else is a bit more manageable. Or irrelevant. Or both.

Yeah, so I haven’t touched this in a while. Honestly I wanted to wait until the “secret project” is over, but that could be a bit longer so I’m not going to hold myself to that. I could have an “updates” post, but I’ll save that for sometime in the future.

Tonight I went to a concert – it was Periphery who I’ve never heard of before, and Dream Theater which was the point of going. We went to a Thai/Japanese/Korean restaurant that had a spicy icon by Tteokbokki. I thought about getting it just to see how it would taste – I’ve never had it/seen it spicy before. But I wasn’t in the mood for soup. We parked close to the concert venue which is a big theater, so it was a long walk. By the time we finished eating and walked back we were about 25 minutes late. We sat in the balcony (pretty far back this time, row T :\ ) but only had to listen to about 4 minutes of Periphery as a result. 30 minutes is a pretty short set (and that’s assuming they were on time). I can’t say I’m disappointed based on what I heard though – it wasn’t garbage but it wasn’t at all inspiring and the band had like no stage presence.

Dream Theater had these three cubes up for projection – the live feed was up on them sometimes and each face of the cubes (they were cut and angled so there were 3 usable surfaces for the audience on each cube) had stuff on it most of the time. Apparently Mangini is a genie according to the opening video. The lights were pretty well done – I didn’t get bored or notice excessive repetition. I wasn’t entertained by the drum solo, but most of the show was good. It unfortunately was definitely a promo tour – half of the songs in the set were off the new album (definitely with an emphasis on heavy). The levels were… not optimal in my opinion – the drums and bass were beating out the keys and vocals. For those who are curious, the set was:

1. Bridges in the Sky (A Dramatic Turn of Events)
2. These Walls (Octavarium)
3. Build Me Up, Break Me Down (A Dramatic Turn of Events) (Right before this LaBrie finally said opening stuff)
4. Endless Sacrifice (Train of Thought) (I hadn’t finished this album before the concert, so I’m going off what a fellow attendee said. Teehee keytar.)
5. Mangini drum solo / instrumental bit
6. Wait for Sleep (Images and Words)
7. Far From Heaven (A Dramatic Turn of Events)
8. Outcry (A Dramatic Turn of Events)
9. On the Backs of Angels (A Dramatic Turn of Events)
10. ? (It sounded familiar, but I’m not sure which song it was, and I didn’t manage to pick out a phrase to go search lyrics for)
11. Metropolis Act I. Scene Three: I. Though My Words / II. Fatal Tragedy (Metropolis Part 2: Scenes From a Memory)
12. Caught in a Web (Awake)
13. Pull Me Under (Images and Words)

Certainly not quite my ideal setlist but it wasn’t bad. Maybe I put too much weight on vocals, but it drove me nuts knowing how the keyboard parts should sound and not quite being able to pick some of them out. I certainly wouldn’t ask for my $40 back though – it was a worthwhile show. (Yeah, says the guy who couldn’t name one of the tracks.)

Hindsight’s always 20/20 but looking back it’s still a bit fuzzy ~Megadeth – Sweating Bullets

In a society where mobile or “portable” electronic devices (laptops typically don’t fall under mobile devices) are becoming more and more ubiquitous it’s not surprising that the list of places and times they can be used has grown. What does this mean at a school where laptops are mandatory? It means you can see the “wall of laptops” effect in some courses – entire rows of students using their laptops during lecture regardless of whether or not the laptop serves the lecture in any way. Typically as the level of the course increases (e.g. being a special topics junior and senior course versus a freshman level introductory course) laptops become more infrequent.

However, I’ve been one to use my laptop haphazardly in many classes over the years – I typically don’t do it if I have to spend at least 80% of the time writing notes during a lecture. In some classes I’ve definitely noticed it be detrimental to my learning, for example in classes where I don’t care about the material in the least and only have minimal interest in how I perform (they say D is for “diploma”, but if you ask me B is for “Below-this-is-bad” and C is for “Cared-less-than-I-should-have). However, there are many classes where I’ve used my laptop and received a good grade and/or feel I gleaned what there was to get out of lecture. In retrospect though, maybe I didn’t learn as much as I could have. After all it’s rather difficult to have a comprehensive and thorough examination of a student’s understanding of all the material in a course, so maybe I just got lucky and was only assessed on topics I had a firm grasp on.

This semester I haven’t used a laptop in any of my courses. While this sometimes leads to me being rather bored and chewing more gum than normal, it has forced me to pay attention for the most part. On Monday I decided to do some JN work in Programming Languages. I can safely say that despite having a rather good grade in that course presently, good class participation, and an in-depth understanding of the material so far, I got a lot less out of Monday’s lecture. Reviewing the material, and from what was discussed in lecture today, I can be quite certain it wasn’t the quality of the lecture that changed. Monday’s laptop use was definitely a one-time-only (OTO) thing  but it really leaves me to wonder if I cheated myself out of a lot of my education just to stalk JNF, do crosswords, and play games in class. At least I haven’t failed anything because of it, so that’s something…

Wow, those weeks fly by fast. A good deal of my time has recently been allocated to research – there was a conference / government review thing last week and a paper deadline coming up. I’m feeling less and less confident that our paper is of submitting quality, but hey, maybe I’m just overly negative.

School’s been school – I botched a question on my algorithms midterm, really a choke since I have no idea why I wrote what I did – but long story short, it’s no longer particularly beneficial for me to be taking the course but I can’t drop it due to credit constraints so it’s just eating time.

I have a Playstation 3 now, I guess that’s March news. I rearranged my room – a lot more space now. Maybe it’s worth a photo, maybe not.

The next big Jellyneo deadline is sometime in April for me, so I have to start pushing myself to work on that… as soon as this paper goes away. Yep, that should do it for EDL stuff – another post coming up momentarily.

Dissect a trillion sighs away, will you get this letter?
…I write to remember, cause I’m a million miles away. ~At the Drive-In – One Armed Scissor

Warning: This post is long, clocking in at 3,302 words.

This post is in part just a personal favor, but I don’t post things just for me to read them. I may have once upon a time done that with a LiveJournal, but don’t bother trying to hunt it down – there’s no public or even friend-viewable posts anymore. This is a really tough post for me to write, not because it’s got deep dark secrets in it, but because when I woke up I was really impacted – vivid emotions that I can’t even begin to feel now. It’s really hard to write without the feeling there (like in the case of the fever / my shot night / etc.) but thankfully I took notes when I woke up. The blessing of laptops (the curse being the damage to my poor wrists). Dreams not really your thing? Feel free to skip this one, though I have some dithering once I’m done with the dream.

Click here for the rest of the Post

Caught here in a fiery blaze…
the heat stroke ridden weather, the barren empty sights
No oasis here to see…
Can’t you help me as I’m starting to burn? ~Avenged Sevenfold – Bat Country

Feb 23rd through Feb 28th I was out sick. The first three or four days were highlighted with quite a fever, though the actual value is unknown. The only thermometer available was a digital readout one made by Vicks that my housemate had. As a bonus she had the same sickness I did. At any rate, over the weekend the thermometer reported temperatures ranging from 93F-103F (33.9C-39.4C). I certainly didn’t feel like I was verging on dead from being too cold, but I did have chills and that lovely burning up feeling. It’s something I haven’t had in a while, I can’t remember the last time I had chills to tell me I had a fever honestly, hence my posting this.

Of course, I went a bit bonkers from the fever – no permanent brain damage or anything, but time was all distorted and I ended up sleeping a lot. I even skipped class for the first time this semester. There was one morning where I thought I was better and proved myself wrong when I used my head to push a cereal box which in turn was pushing a plate and was making “choo choo” vocalizations. All in all an unpleasant experience, but just like the time I had a 12(?) shot line and was throwing up the next day, I remember the events and symptoms, but not the displeasure. In fact at this point I can only with some certainty say that I was rather unhappy the day after the shots.

In the end I of course recovered since there’s an end date to when I was sick, but I will admit to taking a lot of Dayquil knockoff. The store was out of gel caps so I was stuck taking liquid. “Original” flavor the orange substance claimed to be, but it tasted like fake orange (and not the deliciously sweet kind) with a mint aftertaste. Foul would be only a bit of an exaggeration in describing the flavor. Oh well, at least I managed to get medication – it was really needed for the fever.

Um… yeah again I don’t really know how to end this so, blaaaat.

Once again, it’s been a while. No JNO from Twist still, and that Flash thing is still on a back burner. It’ll get addressed soon, or boil over. Anyway, first of three posts for tonight. I’m starting to sound more and more nuts.

A challenge I’ve had more the last couple months than before is striking a balance between groups in real life and online communities. It’s not that there are conflicts in ideology or whatever, for example it’s not like classmates look over my shoulder and see I’m on Jellyneo and give me flack. I suppose that could just be because I’m not using my laptop in classes this semester, but that’s not the point.

The challenge comes from allocating time which ultimately is a question of where do I prioritize everything. More often than not I end up allocating time to whichever party has requested it most recently and just grow increasingly agitated and misanthropic. I don’t know why it’s so hard to say “I’d like to do something for person/group X instead, so I have to go now / I can’t do Y.” For some reason it is, for all the bashing I do on people who can’t say no. When it’s not personal I can say no, but it’s hard when it comes to groups / persons that I want to accept me.

I guess acceptance is a high concern for me, despite all my manipulative abilities and ability to be harsh and caustic and aloof. Well, now I have no idea where I was going with this (concept was conceived some time in February) so I’m just going to hit Publish and get on with it.

Last thought: I guess it’s a balance between acceptance, saying no, and keeping things inside and being angrified.