A couple of months ago, i read a hilarious spoof about what a time-travel society would be like, so i decided to create one. unfortunately, given that we don't have any time-travelling gear available (damn you, relativity!) we're going to have to settle for talking about what it would be like, with the hope that, one day, it could come in handy.
just post any odd stories, pictures or random tidbits you want, i'll select a couple and then will post them with any details about you or the stuff you want me to post made part of it (this doesn't include sexually charged details such as "i like to cum on random people's faces", i'm afraid. i won't post that in my blog, but i'll send it to 4chan /b/ for their general entertainment, since they are more likely to appreciate it than i am).
If you're not selected, it's not necessarily because your story sucked (though it could be), but because of other stuff. please make this stuff yourself; i don't particularly want to have my ass dragged to court, thank you very much.
just post anything you want me to look at to the following adress:
darklooshkin@hotmail.com
with the header "time travel society" followed by the name of the thing you want to have posted. Any illegal porn stuff will be forwarded to the loveable folks at interpol who, i bet, will gladly ask the idiot doing it a couple of embarrassing questions before throwing said idiot to the wolves. happy posting to all of you!
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Sunday, May 25, 2008
ACTA, why i am overreacting and the IP singularity
this is my overreaction to the ACTA white paper produced by the US government.
Link: http://ipjustice.org/wp/2008/05/22/leaked-us-govt-discussion-paper-on-proposed-anti-counterfeiting-trade-agreement-acta-from-wikileaks/
God help us all.
IF YOU SUPPORT ACTA, YOU SUPPORT CORPORATE COMMUNISM.
this document could signify the death of everything the internet is, was and could become. it could also mean the premature end of my future career. why? read the damn thing. the first page is frightening enough. wait until you've read the rest.
if this comes into effect, any business that holds intellectual property can, under the guise of protecting their IP, shut down competitors simply by lodging insubstantiated complaints against their key staff and departments. they can also find that company's customers and threaten them with "IP scans" unless the customers pay them indemnity fees. think that affects whoever is supposed to be targeted? think again: they will be clever enough to either exploit or circumvent the situation, just like before. this IP protection program just means more work and more return for them if they DO break the system and sell the way they did it to others. what it will lead to is consumers paying because they cannot to defend themselves in court against whatever may have been found on their hard drives or browser histories (remember we are talking IP here, not specific products, and a line of text can be seen as IP. combine that with prosecution that can occur without the right-holder initiating it, and it's a fucking free-for-all) and companies having new ways of competing against each other outside of actually servicing customers (remember that w are talking about the entertainment industry here, the corporate equivalent of communism; they will do anything bar actually rewarding the people who produce their IP in the first place, the people who consume the IP and rewarding original thought. instead, they decide to ruin the lives of producers and consumers alike; corporate communism. give it a round of applause).
the next problem is that with this legislation, companies wanting to snoop on any improvements to a competitors' EDI or ERP systems no longer have to engage in active corporate espionage; they just have to "inquire with" (read; bribery using higher allowable prices and contract durations. untraceable, unprosecutable for both parties if done right) their ISP for covert scanning of the competitors' online data packages (for traces of data indicating certain programs and processes are being used, with the implication of violated IP), which can then give a general idea of a competitors' systems, what programs they are running and how they are running them. god help them if they use external providers for their servers and data centres; if a consultant provides electronic network hardware and services and they get classed as an ISP, they would be required by law to divulge their clients' entire network infrastructure, which competitors can acquire if they push a bogus complaint far enough for their lawyers to get their hands on it and to leave it lying on the clients' desk "by accident" long enough for a higher-up to make a few photocopies.
you think i'm being dramatic?
well, i am. why? well, i am about to graduate in an area where sophisticated electronic networks and their applications, trust and cooperation/collaboration methodologies and policies are still being developed. the whole area relies on two things; competitive advantage and the trust on a business's corporate suppliers and organisational customers.
the competitive advantage stems from being able to create efficiencies and optimise the business system in a way your competitors cannot copy effecively and being able to trust partners and contractors to help you achieve this. with this law, these areas are blown wide open; you can't trust external contractors and suppliers, because they would be legally obliged to hand over any information regarding your processes and activities to the anti-IP infringement police or anybody that is licensed to snoop it or just curious to find out how you do stuff. all those lovely competitively advantageous processes you built will be safe up until a competitor gets one of his lawyers to get a legal copy of you systems to ensure that no IP infringement has taken place which will, of course, have to be evaluated by the competitors' management and IT/operations staff to ensure none of their processes have been pirated. so why build new competitive systems when you can just as easily replicate it via lawyer and photocopying machine?
and lo and behold, the areas of logistics and supply chain management get a brand new asshole ripped open, simply because this law will give any IP holder access to any other IP holders' secrets under the guise of making sure that noone was being ripped off. if you think i'm kidding, think about what the RIAA does now. now, take off any restrictions and you get what it will become.
just wait until the first corporate versions of the pirate bay turn up, listing complete specifications of wal-mart's transportation/VMI operating system, the EDI/ERP systems used by NASA or BAE systems, Microsoft's entire operations and release schedules for the next x amount of months. if every individual, company and/or organisation can be scanned for IP violations, then all the confidential information is not confidential anymore. For the ISP's, collecting customer information is a huge cost, since they need to keep the information readily accessible for long periods of time to governments.keeping the information available without being able to sell it on (if you were a criminal, how much would you value being able to use somebody else's bank accounts to launder drug money without being detected? the valuation you just put on that is the cost that an ISP will face for every single piece of information. it's not the cost of storage, it's the opportunity cost of what you'd be able to make in revenue with all that information to sell). all you need is one corrupt ISP official and a bunch of mafiosi operating out of Budapest will be able to use the credit cards and business accounts details for all the inhabitants of the entire eastern seaboard of the US. hello, the world's first financial botnet farm.
couple of things we can do:
-build data havens, where all your data is untraceable.
-establish black ISPs and phantom servers that give anonymous access to the internet.
-bypass the internet entirely.
-crash ISP data farms.
alternatively, let's try and stop this damn law.
one good thing about this is this; China won't sign this. Why? because China's main advantageous manufacturing position comes from being able to copy, reverse-engineer and plagiarise every piece of IP they come across. this is not a cold move of communists against the western democracies; no, China uses its position to improve its infrastructure and consolidate its economic growth by incorporating proprietary IP into the economy. it this agreement comes into effect, China's plans for consolidating itself dissolve into a series of international lawsuits by companies and countries with processes copied by china.
this entry focuses on the effect of ACTA on the internet, but what happens when you create new IP using old IP? with these new restrictions, what happens if you have to pay royalties to 10 other companies and individuals for a new innovation? what if you had to pay the US government money for every time you accessed the internet because they hold the IP rights to the original computer network, the DARPANET? with these new restrictions, this becomes possible. if this does happen, the cost of innovation and new ideas is not lowered, but increases with every new layer of ideas that are piled on top of it. which means that any new IP is either too expensive to develop and manufacture or does not have enough consumers capable of buying it due to the high licensing prices incurred by the IP. this will lead to the IP singularity, where the cost of committing plagiarism is greater than the cost of acknowledging the original source work. see you on the other side.
PS.: With this, Windows can go back to its old tricks of suing Linux developers for IP violations. but, instead of doing it for its own products, it can do it for IP violations of other products from other companies, creating a de facto class-action lawsuit for itself where finding IP violations for one product could mean everybody else gets compensation as well. from linux users or people posessing live CDs. Think about it.
Link: http://ipjustice.org/wp/2008/05/22/leaked-us-govt-discussion-paper-on-proposed-anti-counterfeiting-trade-agreement-acta-from-wikileaks/
God help us all.
IF YOU SUPPORT ACTA, YOU SUPPORT CORPORATE COMMUNISM.
this document could signify the death of everything the internet is, was and could become. it could also mean the premature end of my future career. why? read the damn thing. the first page is frightening enough. wait until you've read the rest.
if this comes into effect, any business that holds intellectual property can, under the guise of protecting their IP, shut down competitors simply by lodging insubstantiated complaints against their key staff and departments. they can also find that company's customers and threaten them with "IP scans" unless the customers pay them indemnity fees. think that affects whoever is supposed to be targeted? think again: they will be clever enough to either exploit or circumvent the situation, just like before. this IP protection program just means more work and more return for them if they DO break the system and sell the way they did it to others. what it will lead to is consumers paying because they cannot to defend themselves in court against whatever may have been found on their hard drives or browser histories (remember we are talking IP here, not specific products, and a line of text can be seen as IP. combine that with prosecution that can occur without the right-holder initiating it, and it's a fucking free-for-all) and companies having new ways of competing against each other outside of actually servicing customers (remember that w are talking about the entertainment industry here, the corporate equivalent of communism; they will do anything bar actually rewarding the people who produce their IP in the first place, the people who consume the IP and rewarding original thought. instead, they decide to ruin the lives of producers and consumers alike; corporate communism. give it a round of applause).
the next problem is that with this legislation, companies wanting to snoop on any improvements to a competitors' EDI or ERP systems no longer have to engage in active corporate espionage; they just have to "inquire with" (read; bribery using higher allowable prices and contract durations. untraceable, unprosecutable for both parties if done right) their ISP for covert scanning of the competitors' online data packages (for traces of data indicating certain programs and processes are being used, with the implication of violated IP), which can then give a general idea of a competitors' systems, what programs they are running and how they are running them. god help them if they use external providers for their servers and data centres; if a consultant provides electronic network hardware and services and they get classed as an ISP, they would be required by law to divulge their clients' entire network infrastructure, which competitors can acquire if they push a bogus complaint far enough for their lawyers to get their hands on it and to leave it lying on the clients' desk "by accident" long enough for a higher-up to make a few photocopies.
you think i'm being dramatic?
well, i am. why? well, i am about to graduate in an area where sophisticated electronic networks and their applications, trust and cooperation/collaboration methodologies and policies are still being developed. the whole area relies on two things; competitive advantage and the trust on a business's corporate suppliers and organisational customers.
the competitive advantage stems from being able to create efficiencies and optimise the business system in a way your competitors cannot copy effecively and being able to trust partners and contractors to help you achieve this. with this law, these areas are blown wide open; you can't trust external contractors and suppliers, because they would be legally obliged to hand over any information regarding your processes and activities to the anti-IP infringement police or anybody that is licensed to snoop it or just curious to find out how you do stuff. all those lovely competitively advantageous processes you built will be safe up until a competitor gets one of his lawyers to get a legal copy of you systems to ensure that no IP infringement has taken place which will, of course, have to be evaluated by the competitors' management and IT/operations staff to ensure none of their processes have been pirated. so why build new competitive systems when you can just as easily replicate it via lawyer and photocopying machine?
and lo and behold, the areas of logistics and supply chain management get a brand new asshole ripped open, simply because this law will give any IP holder access to any other IP holders' secrets under the guise of making sure that noone was being ripped off. if you think i'm kidding, think about what the RIAA does now. now, take off any restrictions and you get what it will become.
just wait until the first corporate versions of the pirate bay turn up, listing complete specifications of wal-mart's transportation/VMI operating system, the EDI/ERP systems used by NASA or BAE systems, Microsoft's entire operations and release schedules for the next x amount of months. if every individual, company and/or organisation can be scanned for IP violations, then all the confidential information is not confidential anymore. For the ISP's, collecting customer information is a huge cost, since they need to keep the information readily accessible for long periods of time to governments.keeping the information available without being able to sell it on (if you were a criminal, how much would you value being able to use somebody else's bank accounts to launder drug money without being detected? the valuation you just put on that is the cost that an ISP will face for every single piece of information. it's not the cost of storage, it's the opportunity cost of what you'd be able to make in revenue with all that information to sell). all you need is one corrupt ISP official and a bunch of mafiosi operating out of Budapest will be able to use the credit cards and business accounts details for all the inhabitants of the entire eastern seaboard of the US. hello, the world's first financial botnet farm.
couple of things we can do:
-build data havens, where all your data is untraceable.
-establish black ISPs and phantom servers that give anonymous access to the internet.
-bypass the internet entirely.
-crash ISP data farms.
alternatively, let's try and stop this damn law.
one good thing about this is this; China won't sign this. Why? because China's main advantageous manufacturing position comes from being able to copy, reverse-engineer and plagiarise every piece of IP they come across. this is not a cold move of communists against the western democracies; no, China uses its position to improve its infrastructure and consolidate its economic growth by incorporating proprietary IP into the economy. it this agreement comes into effect, China's plans for consolidating itself dissolve into a series of international lawsuits by companies and countries with processes copied by china.
this entry focuses on the effect of ACTA on the internet, but what happens when you create new IP using old IP? with these new restrictions, what happens if you have to pay royalties to 10 other companies and individuals for a new innovation? what if you had to pay the US government money for every time you accessed the internet because they hold the IP rights to the original computer network, the DARPANET? with these new restrictions, this becomes possible. if this does happen, the cost of innovation and new ideas is not lowered, but increases with every new layer of ideas that are piled on top of it. which means that any new IP is either too expensive to develop and manufacture or does not have enough consumers capable of buying it due to the high licensing prices incurred by the IP. this will lead to the IP singularity, where the cost of committing plagiarism is greater than the cost of acknowledging the original source work. see you on the other side.
PS.: With this, Windows can go back to its old tricks of suing Linux developers for IP violations. but, instead of doing it for its own products, it can do it for IP violations of other products from other companies, creating a de facto class-action lawsuit for itself where finding IP violations for one product could mean everybody else gets compensation as well. from linux users or people posessing live CDs. Think about it.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
on updates and webcomic review Ethos
okay, so when it comes to blogging, i rarely post anything at all. This has got a bit to do with the fact that i actually care about what i talk, ramble on or rant about and a lot to do with my laziness. so i care, don't you? oh well, who cares anyway?
now, the reason i have updated here is because i have a confession to make: i am a webcomics fan. now before you go rolling on the floor laughing so hard your lungs collapse, hear me out. i only discovered webcomics around my 18th birthday when i was looking for some stuff on google. at the time, it was not realy that interesting to me, so i stopped looking and read some books instead. well, two years passed and then i rediscovered webcomics while i was living in a boondocksy suburb in australia. this was the gap time between me leaving melbourne , heading north and going to university in new south wales (advice to people who don't know about either place in australia, use google or your local brain transplant service for further information), so i had plenty of spare time on my hands. two months, to be precise.
and that's when i rediscovered webcomics...
long story short, at the end of the two months, i'd managed to plough through about twenty webcomics in full. these included el goonish shive, sluggy freelance, falcon twin, earthsong, inverloch, the wotch, etc...
now, why would i do that? well, i was in a country town in transit for two months, the most interesting thing you could do was walk for 10 kilometres, get pissed or surf the internet and i had no money, so...
the next reason is probably going to come as a surprise to free stuff skeptics: it may all have been free, but oh! some of the comics would have made a killing if printed outright! sure, a lot of them are drawn and/or written like crap, but some of them are masterpieces in the pantheon of storytelling. if you put some of those comics into sitcom format, you could kiss reality tv goodbye... and that is saying something. seriously, in terms of beauty, storyline, character development and the universe built around the story, some of the best stuff available is in webcomic format. needless to say, my internet quota at the university was dealt a severe blow due to my webcomic addiction in my first semester, before rediscovering manga (but that's another story i won't tell you haha!). then, i packed it in for a while... until now.
I've just finished going through a few new ones that weren't on the topwebcomics list last time i checked six months ago or more (can't remember) and i came across a beautiful webcomic called Ethos.
This webcomic is beautiful in terms of graphical magnificence (apart from the last few chapters; the detail and the spectacular drawing is still there, but no colouring!) and has a storyline that sounds like the author/drawer is on to a winner. i won't summarize the plot for you, because it is still in development and the full contingent of characters hasn't been introduced yet (according to a post by the author on the home site), so find out for yourself. the only thing i can say about it is that it deals with some pretty heavy issues. war, cultural and racial genocide, slavery, torture, murder, losing children, racism... the list goes on, and the story gets better despite the depressing reading material. this may seem counterintuitive, but the way the author writes about how the characters seem to cope with the issues is enjoyable since it is a bit realistic despite some minor set-backs (to be honest, the character development vehicles can be a bit simplistic and obvious at times, especially when the main characters constantly second-guess each other's emotions. they don't occur often, though, so don't pay too much attention to them) and at least the suspense and tension that is starting to build suggests that it's going to get a whole lot darker and more enjoyable as this saga gets into gear.
in conclusion, despite some minor flaws that will only annoy you as a function to how much you pay attention to them, Ethos is off to a good start (having made number 54 on the topwebcomics list and number 85 on the buzzcomix list as of me writing this) thanks to its extremely solid-looking and realistic drawing, dialogue, characters and world (all yet to reach maturity, already kicking ass). i believe this webcomic could go farther than others, already earning its place in my top 20 favorites list of comics in general. as far as i can tell, it sure has the potential to make number one in my webcomics preferences alongside falcon twin (i live in hope...).
now, the reason i have updated here is because i have a confession to make: i am a webcomics fan. now before you go rolling on the floor laughing so hard your lungs collapse, hear me out. i only discovered webcomics around my 18th birthday when i was looking for some stuff on google. at the time, it was not realy that interesting to me, so i stopped looking and read some books instead. well, two years passed and then i rediscovered webcomics while i was living in a boondocksy suburb in australia. this was the gap time between me leaving melbourne , heading north and going to university in new south wales (advice to people who don't know about either place in australia, use google or your local brain transplant service for further information), so i had plenty of spare time on my hands. two months, to be precise.
and that's when i rediscovered webcomics...
long story short, at the end of the two months, i'd managed to plough through about twenty webcomics in full. these included el goonish shive, sluggy freelance, falcon twin, earthsong, inverloch, the wotch, etc...
now, why would i do that? well, i was in a country town in transit for two months, the most interesting thing you could do was walk for 10 kilometres, get pissed or surf the internet and i had no money, so...
the next reason is probably going to come as a surprise to free stuff skeptics: it may all have been free, but oh! some of the comics would have made a killing if printed outright! sure, a lot of them are drawn and/or written like crap, but some of them are masterpieces in the pantheon of storytelling. if you put some of those comics into sitcom format, you could kiss reality tv goodbye... and that is saying something. seriously, in terms of beauty, storyline, character development and the universe built around the story, some of the best stuff available is in webcomic format. needless to say, my internet quota at the university was dealt a severe blow due to my webcomic addiction in my first semester, before rediscovering manga (but that's another story i won't tell you haha!). then, i packed it in for a while... until now.
I've just finished going through a few new ones that weren't on the topwebcomics list last time i checked six months ago or more (can't remember) and i came across a beautiful webcomic called Ethos.
This webcomic is beautiful in terms of graphical magnificence (apart from the last few chapters; the detail and the spectacular drawing is still there, but no colouring!) and has a storyline that sounds like the author/drawer is on to a winner. i won't summarize the plot for you, because it is still in development and the full contingent of characters hasn't been introduced yet (according to a post by the author on the home site), so find out for yourself. the only thing i can say about it is that it deals with some pretty heavy issues. war, cultural and racial genocide, slavery, torture, murder, losing children, racism... the list goes on, and the story gets better despite the depressing reading material. this may seem counterintuitive, but the way the author writes about how the characters seem to cope with the issues is enjoyable since it is a bit realistic despite some minor set-backs (to be honest, the character development vehicles can be a bit simplistic and obvious at times, especially when the main characters constantly second-guess each other's emotions. they don't occur often, though, so don't pay too much attention to them) and at least the suspense and tension that is starting to build suggests that it's going to get a whole lot darker and more enjoyable as this saga gets into gear.
in conclusion, despite some minor flaws that will only annoy you as a function to how much you pay attention to them, Ethos is off to a good start (having made number 54 on the topwebcomics list and number 85 on the buzzcomix list as of me writing this) thanks to its extremely solid-looking and realistic drawing, dialogue, characters and world (all yet to reach maturity, already kicking ass). i believe this webcomic could go farther than others, already earning its place in my top 20 favorites list of comics in general. as far as i can tell, it sure has the potential to make number one in my webcomics preferences alongside falcon twin (i live in hope...).
Saturday, July 21, 2007
the beginning of classes, professing my love for and disappointment in stumbleupon
my fellow aussie students, welcome to the university 2007 spring session. My, does time fly or what? It feels like a week ago that i finished my final exams. in practice, it's been four and i barely saw it pass by.
well, apart from that, you should know that i am an avid stumbler. it's not unusual for me to spend 3 hours just randomly going through websites using 2 firefox browser windows at once. and oh, the stuff that i've found out on there! for example, did you know that you can stop an atom from moving by freezing it? or that there are tons (figuratively, of course) of e-books you can read for free (i knew that before, thanks to cory doctorow, but still).
today, i've found two beautiful articles on there:
one about how former police officers, judges and other law enforcement personnel really feel about prohibition.
another about a guy who dodged taxes for TEN YEARS AND WON THE COURT CASE TRYING TO INDICT HIM (yes, it is true)! Consider the dictom that death and taxes will always catch up and tell me it wasn't worth the upper case "scream".
To be honest, stumbleupon has saved me from a pretty boring browsing experience over and over again, and i really like it. There are several things i wouldn't mind seeing, though:
true randomness: it's not uncommon for Stumbleupon to come up with the same website twice or even three times. it's happened to me more often recently. here's a tip, Stumbleupon; if you want more websites on stumble, try and include an "i feel like random" channel in your Toolbar.
that'd definitely be a favorite.
a zero-toolbar browsing option: sure, you can check out all the newly found websites on the Stumbleupon main website, but if you are marooned on someone else's computer, it'd be nice indeed to be able to stumble from the website itself.
a new front page: seriously guys, the front page hasn't changed in months. i should know, the SAME DAMN WEBSITES were up on the "welcome" page when i first downloaded the toolbar. What the hell would it take to bloody well get you to change the &#*%ers? it's not like they're even ^*&%ing interesting (seriously, i've checked them out. THEY ARE BORING)! so please, put some new websites up on the welcome page. it is seriously annoying the hell out of me.
So yes, i love stumbleupon, but it is not at its full potential yet. i hope that somebody reads this, says "i like it" and brings this fact to Stumbleupon's attention. to my fellow stumblers and students, i wish you goodbye and good luck. have fun!
update: stumbleupon HAS actually gone and done the browser-based stumbling, though it's still pretty limited (mostly demo site stuff). They still haven't changed the goddamn front page links, though... come on!
well, apart from that, you should know that i am an avid stumbler. it's not unusual for me to spend 3 hours just randomly going through websites using 2 firefox browser windows at once. and oh, the stuff that i've found out on there! for example, did you know that you can stop an atom from moving by freezing it? or that there are tons (figuratively, of course) of e-books you can read for free (i knew that before, thanks to cory doctorow, but still).
today, i've found two beautiful articles on there:
one about how former police officers, judges and other law enforcement personnel really feel about prohibition.
another about a guy who dodged taxes for TEN YEARS AND WON THE COURT CASE TRYING TO INDICT HIM (yes, it is true)! Consider the dictom that death and taxes will always catch up and tell me it wasn't worth the upper case "scream".
To be honest, stumbleupon has saved me from a pretty boring browsing experience over and over again, and i really like it. There are several things i wouldn't mind seeing, though:
true randomness: it's not uncommon for Stumbleupon to come up with the same website twice or even three times. it's happened to me more often recently. here's a tip, Stumbleupon; if you want more websites on stumble, try and include an "i feel like random" channel in your Toolbar.
that'd definitely be a favorite.
a zero-toolbar browsing option: sure, you can check out all the newly found websites on the Stumbleupon main website, but if you are marooned on someone else's computer, it'd be nice indeed to be able to stumble from the website itself.
a new front page: seriously guys, the front page hasn't changed in months. i should know, the SAME DAMN WEBSITES were up on the "welcome" page when i first downloaded the toolbar. What the hell would it take to bloody well get you to change the &#*%ers? it's not like they're even ^*&%ing interesting (seriously, i've checked them out. THEY ARE BORING)! so please, put some new websites up on the welcome page. it is seriously annoying the hell out of me.
So yes, i love stumbleupon, but it is not at its full potential yet. i hope that somebody reads this, says "i like it" and brings this fact to Stumbleupon's attention. to my fellow stumblers and students, i wish you goodbye and good luck. have fun!
update: stumbleupon HAS actually gone and done the browser-based stumbling, though it's still pretty limited (mostly demo site stuff). They still haven't changed the goddamn front page links, though... come on!
Thursday, July 12, 2007
things you should know about vacation
well, i know that a lot of people out there reckon that vacations are the best part of their life. But, really, who of us has ever had a vacation?
Ever really wondered what it would be like to have a TRUE vacation, where you can literally DO NOTHING AT ALL? No kids, relatives, nagging about how you should be doing something useful with your time, taking out your girlfriend/wife for dinner/dancing/excursions and then having to subject yourself to a post-mortem assessment of the whole thing just because some detail didn't go as planned? In a very real sense, it would be a vacation, a very real one. So would you do it?
I've had a few of those and, quite frankly, i'd be happier never to have them again.
It's great to have a few days or a week off and, in truth, a week's vacation is a lot more refreshing than a month.
why is this? because a week of relaxation gives you time to not stress about things, visit a few token relatives and enjoy yourself while you realise the value of what you have in terms of freedom and enjoyment. A week is just long enough for you to do nothing at all as an excuse of just relaxing and enjoying versus a month where people start nagging you to do something practically from day one. also, a true vacation can be a lot more boring over long periods of time where even you start nagging yourself into doing something after a while because you are...so...BORED!
A period longer than two weeks' vacation gives you no time at all to relax. the nag factor is part of it, your brain starts melting down for lack of anything interesting to do and after a few days you try to find something to do to occupy your time. most of the interesting things you can do during your vacation take some time to learn about, so if you're at university and you spend your time learning about more stuff, it does not fall into break-time category anymore.
that and, well, after a few weeks your brain will do ANYTHING to keep itself from becoming neural play-do. so it starts to focus on memories, starting with those that are the most intense. most of my intense memories fall into the 'bad trip' category. as a result, i become moody, irritable and a bit depressed, not exactly a picture of perfection incarnate. of course, I'm not alone in this. This, of course, does not help my thinking dark thoughts (most intentional man-made disasters occurs because some random guy/girl had too much time on their hands. look at Joan of arc and dare to disagree). Then your brain turns to current woes and boy, does the fun start then. The past has nothing on the future in terms of thoughts of impending doom. result: if you know you have a 2-week + vacation, you start stressing from day 3. and anything you want to do during your vacation, well, vacations are procrastination central, anything you REALLY have to get done during your vacation, you're likely to wait until the last day. such is the sad truth of vacations: they stress you out so badly you WANT to go back to work (at least in my case) just to relax again as you wanted to in the first place... i can't wait 'til the end of this break. I'm fed up and want to learn shit again, get in touch with my friends again, feel ALIVE again.
i'm bored and ranting, if you haven't noticed. if you have read this far, thank you, for you are a better person than i'll maybe ever aspire to be.
p.s.: the sad truth is, i've spent most of my most relaxing vacation time in my university's library. That is the secret: you want to relax during your summer break, find a university library, sit down and don't get up until you have to go to work/lectures again. it will be, by far, more relaxing and free of consequence than anything you could ever do.
Ever really wondered what it would be like to have a TRUE vacation, where you can literally DO NOTHING AT ALL? No kids, relatives, nagging about how you should be doing something useful with your time, taking out your girlfriend/wife for dinner/dancing/excursions and then having to subject yourself to a post-mortem assessment of the whole thing just because some detail didn't go as planned? In a very real sense, it would be a vacation, a very real one. So would you do it?
I've had a few of those and, quite frankly, i'd be happier never to have them again.
It's great to have a few days or a week off and, in truth, a week's vacation is a lot more refreshing than a month.
why is this? because a week of relaxation gives you time to not stress about things, visit a few token relatives and enjoy yourself while you realise the value of what you have in terms of freedom and enjoyment. A week is just long enough for you to do nothing at all as an excuse of just relaxing and enjoying versus a month where people start nagging you to do something practically from day one. also, a true vacation can be a lot more boring over long periods of time where even you start nagging yourself into doing something after a while because you are...so...BORED!
A period longer than two weeks' vacation gives you no time at all to relax. the nag factor is part of it, your brain starts melting down for lack of anything interesting to do and after a few days you try to find something to do to occupy your time. most of the interesting things you can do during your vacation take some time to learn about, so if you're at university and you spend your time learning about more stuff, it does not fall into break-time category anymore.
that and, well, after a few weeks your brain will do ANYTHING to keep itself from becoming neural play-do. so it starts to focus on memories, starting with those that are the most intense. most of my intense memories fall into the 'bad trip' category. as a result, i become moody, irritable and a bit depressed, not exactly a picture of perfection incarnate. of course, I'm not alone in this. This, of course, does not help my thinking dark thoughts (most intentional man-made disasters occurs because some random guy/girl had too much time on their hands. look at Joan of arc and dare to disagree). Then your brain turns to current woes and boy, does the fun start then. The past has nothing on the future in terms of thoughts of impending doom. result: if you know you have a 2-week + vacation, you start stressing from day 3. and anything you want to do during your vacation, well, vacations are procrastination central, anything you REALLY have to get done during your vacation, you're likely to wait until the last day. such is the sad truth of vacations: they stress you out so badly you WANT to go back to work (at least in my case) just to relax again as you wanted to in the first place... i can't wait 'til the end of this break. I'm fed up and want to learn shit again, get in touch with my friends again, feel ALIVE again.
i'm bored and ranting, if you haven't noticed. if you have read this far, thank you, for you are a better person than i'll maybe ever aspire to be.
p.s.: the sad truth is, i've spent most of my most relaxing vacation time in my university's library. That is the secret: you want to relax during your summer break, find a university library, sit down and don't get up until you have to go to work/lectures again. it will be, by far, more relaxing and free of consequence than anything you could ever do.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
something to ponder...
as our life becomes more digital, and our communication involves less and less person-to-person contact and more and more storable dialogue (i.e. instant messenging, e-mails, voip, etc...), does this mean that we are now able to measure how social we are by adding up the total space occupied in our various e-mail archives?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
