The Brain in a Vat

My LJ has lain fallow for some time now, though certainly not for lack of things to write about. I've formed a nasty habit of starting but not finishing entries lately, for one reason or another. Perhaps this will break the mold.

Most of you know me from college, and if so chances are good that you've have heard my rant about the woes and problems with Los Angeles and how I'd never ever live there if I ever had the choice. If you want to feel really surreal, try to picture me making this rant as you read on.


( A tale of rather unimpressive proportions )

...while being driven through Seattle:

"Whoa, that place totally isn't like it is in Shadowrun!"

After spending some time studying both mandarin and cantonese concurrently (well not quite, rather I'll take a class or study one for a couple of months, and then focus on another for another couple of months), I have come to the conclusion that I am confused.

That is to say, if I were to try and read a bunch of characters on a page, assuming I pass the first hurdle of being able to recognize the characters in the first place (a rather difficult hurdle at this point) I will blurt out a strange combination of cantonese and mandarin words. This is because by studying both at the same time not only do I have to remember the character and its english translation, but also associate a distinct mandarin and cantonese pronunciation with each character. I often mix up these pronunciations, with the result being that if I were to read something aloud I would only succeed in confusing a listener.

This sadly defeats the purpose of learning a language in the first place.

When I'm trying to speak, I can still shift between "mandarin" and "cantonese" modes, so that is something. Maybe I can eventually be an illiterate but vocal chinese speaker? Or maybe I should just accept the fact that I'm a twinkie.

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With the widely heralded and championed "digital revolution" in photography, the world has been inundated with a deluge of high quality digital photos which are high quality and efficiently produced.

However, at the same time, the number of photographic prints have dropped significantly. Even with photo printers, it's rare to be have physical objects one can hold in their own hand as keepsakes, short of always carrying a laptop around and flipping it open when appropriate.

A word of advice to my readership. If any of you ever find yourself somehow transplanted into the plot of a Hollywood action movie, remember the following two laws:


The law of the female sidekick (also known as the "Bond Girl Law"): If you are in a movie with a male protagonist, always make sure you sleep with him, and that you are the last female to do so before the conclusion of the movie. That way you ensure you are the lead female love interest, and as such survive the movie. If you fail to sleep with the hero, or sleep with him too early on, you will probably end up brutally killed in a manner worthy of the Women in Refrigerators.

The law of the male sidekick (also known as the "Kyle Reese Law"): If you are in a movie with a female protagonist, never ever sleep with her. Once you do you will almost certainly be killed off once you accomplish your main goal of impregnating said female protagonist.


Note that following these two laws does not guarantee that you won't be randomly killed off at the start of a sequel to allow the hero to "go it alone".


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I'm going to be in Seattle from March 13th to 16th, and really astute people may know why. I don't remember who is still there (I think most people have scattered), and I may be packed with stuff to do, but if you're in the area let me know and we'll (hopefully) hang out!

If two guys greet each other with anything stronger than a handshake, they're clearly gay!

If a girl greets anyone with anything weaker than a hug, she's clearly a lesbian!

(sarcasm tag is on full)

I don't normally do these, but this one was actually pretty interesting. It's the social privilege/class meme that has been circling the web, with comments of mine added.

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( Read more... )

Please stop installing such good stereos in your car. I was listening to an Itzhak Perlman CD from a friend, and the quality was so good that I think I freaked out some people by driving in circles around the parking lot a couple dozen times while waiting for the current song to finish. Also your stereos indirectly release a lot more fossil fuels for this reason.

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( The Beer Song )

I've almost exclusively held jobs where the standard dress code is "jeans and t-shirts", which is pretty fortunate, I suppose. I've met only a few people who actually enjoy dressing up and wearing suits and ties. However, this leaves me somewhat screwed when encountering situations where the expected attire is somewhat stricter. I have two thoughts about this:

1. OMGWTF who gives a shit about expected attire and fancy clothing! Think of how much resources our society sinks into superficial things like fashion and clothing which could be better spent somewhere else! I bet we could feed and clothe every poverty-stricken child in third world countries with the amount of time and money we spend tailoring fine suits! Of course this isn't anything unique to clothing and fashion; I'm reminded of one of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books where a society sent the one-third of their population which holds entirely useless occupations and those who remained formed a happier productive fulfilling society.

2. I of course have the casual thing down, and I've had to wear suits and ties enough times for job interviews and fancy stuff. I even somehow survived the one time in my life where I had to wear a tux. Thus, I think I've gotten the "business" attire and the "casual" attire down. No, what gets me is the nebulous area in between, this "business-casual." I mean, WTF? The organizers of a function couldn't decide which one is best and so they compromise? Thus we're left with this amorphous poorly-defined region which is just formal enough to leave everybody uncomfortable, but not formal enough for us to resign ourselves and say "all right, guess we're suiting up for this. I'll tie my noose tie and get this over with." I have a hazy idea at best of what this entails. Button-up shirt and a casual jacket? That may be a bit on the high end. Jeans and sneakers, but with a polo-shirt? Perhaps on the low-end. Slacks or Khakis and a button-up shirt but no jacket? That seems average, but is still laaaaame!


Yeah, as you may have figured it out by now, I'll need a "business casual" attire soon. I can't seem to find anything fancier than say jeans, so as I'm a cheap bastard I wonder if I can get away with not having to go shopping.

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For the past two days my right shoulder and right buttock have both been sore (though it's finally going away, I think). I know the reason, it was from playing badminton, and I'm not surprised that I'm sore as one can pretty much expect it anytime they suddenly vigorously use muscles which they haven't used before. I am surprised that butt muscles are that heavily used in this game, though now that I think about it I do recall constantly stretching my right side, including my right buttock, to hit a high-flying birdie.

It's pretty widely accepted that professional tennis/badminton/squash/other racket sports players usually have one arm stronger than another. I now wonder if they also have one bun of steel and one normal bun. I don't know how to ask one this question, though.

I was watching Collateral the other day (Tom Cruise did a good acting job as the villain, too bad he's also batshit insane). I must have been living in LA long enough, because throughout the movie I kept on going, "wait a moment, I've been there!"

I wonder if knowledge of the setting of the movies makes a significant difference in one's enjoyment of it. I never really seemed to bat an eye at all of the movies set in NYC.



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Also, public service announcement! The new Indiana Jones 4 trailer (more like a teaser, to be honest), is available. Go find it here, courtesy of trailer_spot

Let's see what happens if I just start typing....

I'm finding it difficult to really focus at work, and I suspect it's due to certain developments in my life (I'll talk about that later). It's annoying to say the least, because this is work, not school letting out in the summer. I've also been finding it difficult to write up about a dozen or so posts I've been making to make, if you haven't all noticed already.

The little plastic "cups" that come with rice cookers aren't actual cups. After noticing a strange discrepancy between rice volumes when I cook rice on a stovetop and from when I cook rice in a rice cooker, I measured it, and as it happens those little plastics cups only hold 2/3rds of a cup of rice. However, I found that those "1 cup rice, 2 cups water" per person recipes call for 1 "plastic cup" of rice and 2 "British-Empire volume unit cups" of water, which would explain why my rice has been getting burned. It's okay, though, as I forgive my rice cooker, as said appliance has kept me from starving to death on more nights than I can count.

Also, I periodically get strange unexplained urges for a very specific food type. When I went home last December, it was for an authentic New York City bagel, the likes of which you cannot find on this coast. A week ago, I had a strange compulsion for clam chowder. More specifically, I had a burning desire for warm, thick, steaming New England Clam Chowder that coats your throat and warms your stomach like nothing else. Although still completely inexplicable, the pattern does seem to suggest that my body hasn't rid itself of all traces of the east coast, for I did not have any corresponding desire for San Francisco sourdough at the same time. In fact, right now I have an inexplicable desire for something from Pepe's pizza.

Huh. It's Valentines Day. Should I make a grumpy singles post about how this holiday sucks, or a nostalgic sentimental post reminiscing about past romantic encounters? In previous years I haven't quite settled on one or the other so there's no clear precedent.

The people who are hunting me do not want you to read this, but I don't care. The world deserves to know, and if my body turns up in a ditch tomorrow know that I'll have died knowing that all of their efforts were in vain.

( Through the Looking Glass )

Why is it that whenever you write an important email, you always catch the embarrassing typos the second after you click "send"?

I used to have a really good memory, especially when it came to numbers. It didn't matter if it was license plates, phone numbers, or credit cards, but it would usually take me no more than several attempts to memorize it, and sometimes I'd get it after my first try.

I noticed today that I had to pull out my credit card in order to purchase something online, and that I have been doing so ever since I got my current credit card about two years ago. My previous credit card I had the number and pin completely committed to memory, and I never had to refer to it. While thinking about this, I realized that I had no idea what the license plate number of my car is, either, something that would have been shocking five years ago. Moreover, I can't really recall any phone numbers other than my cellphone and the phone number of my parent's house, though I hoped this was due to the convenience of my cellphone's address book and not due to any failing of my own.

I wonder if deteriorating memory is yet another sign of this "getting old" thing.

Gene Golub passed away this past November? How did this happen?

Safari's best new feature: Anybody who knows my internet surfing habits knows that I'm hopelessly addicted to tabs, and it's not uncommon for me to have anywhere in the dozens of tabs open at any point in time. Well, in some recent update (or at least, I've only noticed it since the latest update), they've implemented a feature where you can click and drag individual tabs. For example, have you ever wished a single tab out of a dozen was in a different window? Well, now you can click on a tab and drag it off to a part of your screen, and Safari will pull that page out and display it in a new window. If, instead, you've ever had a tab in one window which you'd like in another window's tab bar, you just click on it, drag it off the first window, and drop it onto the second. Besides being surprisingly useful, I'm also way too amused by the animation, so I've actually sat in front of my computer dragging tabs from one window to the other window just for kicks.


Safari's worst new feature: Well, this isn't a feature, so to speak, but I've noticed that lately Safari's gotten significantly more bloated. I'm aware that this seems to be the eventual fate of all browsers (not Camino though! I'm hoping that it'll always be "the little browser that could." Please don't change, Camino, don't change...), but Safari's always had something of an over-reliance on caching compounding the problem. In the past, this hasn't been too bad, but I've noticed lately it gets pretty bloated after excessive use. I once pulled up the activity monitor after leaving it open for a day, and I noticed Safari was using something like half a gigabyte of memory. Even after closing all the windows, Safari was using a good chunk of memory, so I suspect it may have something to do with a memory leak? I'm sure people more computer savvy than I can comment about this.


My embarrassing secret #37: If I'm ever working late, and I think everyone else has gone home, I'll go over to youtube, pull up a random Elvis song like this one, and start singing along. I have a secret fear that one of my coworkers will come back late and catch me in the act, but apparently not enough to stop.

We decided to go into the city and have dinner at this really awesome restaurant and then I realized that along with our meal they offered all sorts of complimentary specialized tea/coffee drinks like the famous Boba cha (a.k.a. Bubble tea), but also so much more, including all sorts of obscure exotic variants I had never heard of before, and the kicker is that they offered FREE UNLIMITED REFILLS and I asked and they were even more awesome because apparently your refills didn't all have to be the same thing and they offered about 35 different options total, so I decided to see how free and unlimited these refills were, and started going up and down their drink menu sampling different items, and all I can say is that they were true to their word, though sometime around my third drink I thought "maybe I should slow down", but the rest of me in unison cried out "nonsense!" so I kept going and sometime around my fifth drink I had this weird urge to run in circles and scream "Yipee!", so all in all I guess I should be happy there weren't any Episode I haters around me because if there were one of them might have shot me.

The good news is that my internal organs haven't shut down yet from the massive doses of caffeine and sugar I subjected them to, but the bad news is that I don't think I'll be able to sleep tonight.

I've visited said lead, and it checks out. In fact, the bakery in question is really nothing short of amazing; the dan tats they made are probably one of the best, if not the best, I've ever had. I was there for the dan tat, naturally, but the other customers there generally agreed that pretty much everything they make was awesome. Unfortunately word of it has spread, so when I was there, there was actually a line stretching out the door and down the sidewalk. The total wait was about 30 minutes, but it was worth it, for the chance to plug ones arteries with delicious steaming cholesterol-laden pastries.

In any case, if people are interested in seeing what I'm talking about, it's at:
37° 47' 46.75'' N, 122° 24' 24.26'' W.



...or if you want to be boring and use a street address, it's 1029 Grant Ave., San Francisco, CA. The place is called "Golden Gate Bakery".

Girl: Wow, you know, your English is really good! I can't hear any accent at all.

me: But...I just told you that I was born and grew up in the United States.

Girl: Well, I don't know, your parents could have taught you or something like that?

me: *facepalms*

- an actual conversation from a week or two ago

There will be advanced screenings of the Golden Compass in about 800 theaters nationwide, this Saturday at 7 pm. I was able to find tickets on Fandango for the place closest to me (a 40 minute driving, and I'm hauling my ass there even though I have like a million other things to do), for what it's worth.

In other news, I still haven't seen Beowulf yet. I am sad.

(lolpanserbjorne icon shamelessly stolen from cleolinda)

I'm in the area until Sunday evening when I can no longer ignore the pile of work that is building up. So, what's happening? I demand games! Or not-gaming activities may suffice too.*

I do intend to go to the city sometime to go on a dan tat hunt. It's part of my hunt for the perfect dan tat, and my network of sources has provided me with a lead in San Francisco.


* preferably ones which don't coincide with tomorrow 7 pm or later