Thursday, January 19, 2012

New Beat

     Let's set a quick scene: You're walking up a flight of white-carpeted stairs, the further up you get, the darker it becomes, the light covering the white-washed walls sinks behind you. A soft, soothing musical rhythm begins to fill your ears:


     Time slows with each step as you get closer to the top of the stairs. The lights are gone, left behind on the level below. You turn right, intersecting with a short hallway, each ended by a bedroom. The bedroom on the left, lit up by a lamp next to the gray-sheeted bed. The room is empty. To the right, a closed door, bathed in darkness, the source of the oddly calming music laying in wait. You venture towards it, so spectacularly like, and yet unlike, a moth, both driven by your curiosity. What manner of creature lurks in this darkness, in a place that is more likely to be deserted than the room that is actually empty. The music draws you into the darkness. You twist the door knob and slowly take a step inside. The room is a dark place, but there is no menace to behold. Rather, there are tiny multi-colored christmas lights wrapping around the window straight ahead, extending leftwards behind a clock that tells no time and onward to another window. To the left, a bed with green silk sheets, a khaki comforter twisted and contorted from when I had woken up earlier that morning. Under the clock, my desk sits, with my computer's screen lit up, a white sun in the vast darkness of space, surrounded by the lights of distant stars. The music emanates from this bright white star. And sitting at the desk, is me, typing away, describing on my blog what it's like when you walk into my room. 


     I gotta say, after writing that, I really appreciate the way I set this up. I subconsciously set up my own private solar system! Perhaps now I have an actual reason to add some more christmas lights. Either way, that was enjoyable to write, I don't do that often enough. Now, we have our scene. Let's catch ourselves up from last week.

     My last blog was the final part of my Halo story, which has now caught up to the present, but I left it with a brief announcement about how I was going to be the guest on The Running Riot Podcast about my massive Halo collection. Everything went very nicely. You can go watch/listen to it on http://therunningriot.com/. Warning: there MAY be an echo during it at certain points, but don't quote me on there. Evidently, there were audio problems, but TRRPodcast tweeted that it was being edited.

     The next day I packed up the car, picked up Matt, and together we headed for St. Louis. Matt is moving in with Mike and Steph, since Matt has just graduated from college. He convinced me to drive him down and I would spend the night there and drive the remaining two hours the next day. It was a pleasant drive filled with some wonderful new music for my earholes, provided, as always, by Matt and his wonderful music tastes. A list of the bands that we heard were:

-Toro Y Moi, which is disco-funk dance music- very fun to dance to.
-Girls
-St. Vincent
-Real Estate
-Destroyer
-Youth Lagoon
-and a couple other I don't remember the names to...

     I already had Toro Y Moi's new album, "Underneath the Pine," so while it is still new to me, I had already heard his stuff. The other two that I got really into are Destroyer and Youth Lagoon. Both artists' music is very relaxing, and hypnotic, but so good. Certain songs have awesome crescendos, while other put you in this state and eventually you space out to the point where it almost feels like you're floating around in outer space. I know that sounds crazy, but you'll know what I'm talking about if you just lose yourself in the music. It just takes you out of where you are and puts you in a calm and focused state. I fell right asleep just the day before yesterday while listening to it. I'll throw up a couple examples, instead of rambling on.

This is "Kaputt," by Destroyer. I know the video begins somewhat oddly, trust me, the feeling is not lost on me, oh but the song is wondiferous. And the song above is "Montana," by Youth Lagoon.

     So now Matt is in St. Louis with Mike, just a mere 2 1/2 hours away, just another reason that this semester at school will be pretty stupendous. Except that there is still more story to tell before I get into the next few months of my time, but just a couple smaller items, I promise...

     I can honestly say that I have not been following SOPA or PIPA at all really, all I know is that SOPA wants to blacklist certain websites like TheCHIVE and Reddit, and even youtube if I understood it correctly, pretty much any website that somehow has to do with pirating or something...like I said, I haven't been following it. I had never even heard of PIPA until tomorrow and I know people seem to hate it just as much as they hate SOPA. I sort of have to side with the rest of the internet, and by extension, Humanity, because banning websites because of some other people is a bit harsh, don't you think? I'm on the internet, of course you think so. But in either case, it not like that's going to stop people from continuing what we've been doing. I mean, you're dealing with the internet community, there's no stopping them even if you wanted to. I don't think I've ever seen a more intuitive crowd, more fearless and  willing than any other group of people I know. But I digress, after all, I may be blacklisted for this hahaha.

     I bought a grouping of computer programs recently, all connected to one goal. I bought Parallels for the Mac, after which I bought the Windows 7 OS disc, and finally, a wee little game by the name of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Oh, yes, that's right. In fact, this blog was going to be half-dedicated to my adventures thus far in the game, except that I've run into a bit of a snag that I have yet to figure out...

     You see, I installed Parallels, then Windows 7, and then finally SWTOR. When I started the game, I got a warning telling me that the game wouldn't be able to run properly because there were not enough CPUs dedicated to it. "Well, fuck," I said to myself, with just a hint on contempt. I was able to create my account, and even got as far as creating characters, but once I actually got to playing, it lagged so slowly that it actually took minutes to open the menu and quit back to the character screen... I searched through the Parallel settings, looking for some way to change it so that it worked, but to no avail. I tried the bootcamp route, but for some reason, it said that the bootcamp disc wasn't formatted correctly to install Windows 7. So now I'm stuck with like $300 worth of software that I am unable to use at the moment, and with time now-expiring on my SWTOR play-time... For the record, I made two characters, a Jedi Knight, who is the same race as Darth Maul, named Throne; and a Jedi Counselor, who is the human-like race that's blind, named Bornstellar, after the character from Halo Cryptum. When Tassi and Bob get started with this game in the summer, we're going to be playing as Sith.

     And last, but not least by any measure, with the winter break over, the school semester has started back up. This semester I am taking:

-Intro to Contemporary Math, which I just hadn't gotten around to yet, so close to being done with my GenEds.

-Ethics, a Philosophy course which is being taught by the same man who taught my Logic class last semester, Dr. Hahn. The course covers the nature of ethics and how we use them in our lives.

-Modern Philosophy, which details the Modern Philosophical period (1500-1699), which really emphasizes on how we came to use the ethics we have today. In short, the history of our ethics. I hadn't known about this bit, so when it came up, I was elated to notice the connection between the two Philosophy courses.

-And finally, Positive Psychology, which ALSO has a major emphasis on Ethics and Philosophy, as it deals with what makes people happy and the strengths of people. Yet again, the connection was not lost on me.

     So, besides my Math course, I had unintentionally created a theme for the semester- The nature of ethics and how we use them in society and where it's leading us. It was relatively easy to articulate the theme that I had subconsciously created for myself because, well, it's been the primary focus of my thoughts over the past few months. I always do manage to surprise myself like that, as if this was the movie "Paycheck" (With Ben Affleck), and I'm receiving guidance from a future version of me (which has been happening a lot to me lately). This was not my original plan when I signed up for these, they all just seemed interesting, but I guess that's it, isn't it? Last semester, I began working towards living a more positive life than I ever had done. So far, I think I've been pretty successful in that venture. This semester is going to be a good one. Besides Math, none of my classes are that uninteresting to me. Good things are coming.

UPDATE (1/20/12): I just went to my first Math lecture for the semester. My god, is it boring, I couldn't help but feel like I was stuck in a class full of 4th graders, or at least that's how the professor kept talking... This class is going to be quite awful, but hark! Hope yet remains. When I was sitting waiting for the class to end, I made eye contact with a girl sitting in the middle section of the lecture hall (I always sit on the right side, up against the wall). When the class ended, I began my walk out and she walked up towards the front of the hall, presumably to talk to the professor. That's when it hit me. She was wearing a short brown coat that had a fleece lining, a crimson skirt that reached down to her ankles, a string of some kind, with little coins hanging from it (imagine a gypsy dress), her wavy black hair lightly covering her eye. It was the girl from the gas station, the same girl I wrote about in my blog: http://oneoneseven-jakewhlr117.blogspot.com/2011/12/contact-high.html. There is hope yet. Like I said above, good things are coming.

     So that's what's going my way at the moment. I hope everyone is happy with where they are at right now, and if you're not, then change something. Create some new beats for yourself. Speaking of which, I leave you in the very-capable hands of Toro Y Moi's, "New Beat." Enjoy! :)


Until next time...

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