Dazed and Confused|Macadamia nut cookies are amazing!

So my Facebook page got hacked today. No real damage was done, some offensive messages were sent out, but I deleted them in a timely manner, changed my email and facebook password soon after and contacted facebook staff, I await their reply.

It’s a disturbing feeling, something you thought was a safe place, such as a Facebook or your email account is easily hacked. My only fear is that it will happen again. So I’m a bit shooken up, but it isn’t like anything really happened. The people that had messages sent to them know I’d never say such things, so I don’t think it really matters. If it happens again I’ll likely delete my entire account. I don’t need to deal with this.

Greetings. It has been quite some time since our last visit. Please reread the previous post in order to figure out why I’ve been unable to write for so long.

One of my teachers made a comment before the year’s end about the human mentality of seperating things into groups, the most prominent being good and bad. I thought about this and quickly came to the conclusion that there are only a few things that can be completely considered good or bad. Some of these things are considered by some to be man-made thoughts, such as God, the idea of perfection.

Some might say an item like murder is evil. But what if it is in self defence? What if it is in defence of another person, or for a country? This is known as the gray area. Some may go so far to say everything has a ‘gray’ aspect. Like donating to charity. This is almost a purely good act, but you are showing favoritism by donating to a specific group. Of course it isn’t humanly possible to donate to every existing charity, but does that diminish the fact that only one group benefited while others did not?

Some debate that is the intention that truly speaks whether the act is good or not. By donating to a charity you show that you do indeed care for the less fortunate, permitting it is genuine care. This is where my belief lies and it is where the afoementioned ‘gray area’ vanishes. If the person’s intention was good then the act was good, if not then the act is bad. This could be further broken down and analyzed, but I believe it suits well for a general rule of thumb.

My apologies with my lack of posting lately. It has been a busy few weeks (and more to come). I’ve been trying to hunt down a job for the summer, and possibly until I leave for college. Finals until Friday. I had to go up to a college graduation for the weekend (which is when I usually write my posts).

So I’m not dead yet and will write a lengthier post in the next few days.

When you read this title you probably instantly thought of Nazi Germany. “tis unfortunate. The swastika is often associated with this evil group of people, and for good reasons.

But this symbol has been around for millennia. Why does the events of approximately 10 years cause this symbol to become such a negative item? Probably because the events only occured 60 or so years ago. But will the true meaning of the swastika ever be restored?

Probably not. Just imagine if you went out on the street with say a swastika necklace or a swastika-embroidered hat. You’d probably get a lot of dirty looks. The truth is, as long as we remember the horrors of Nazi Germany then we will also remember that their symbol was the swastika. And in most people’s minds the swastika becomes a symbol of evil, even if worn as a symbol of good.

The swastika is found in several religions as a symbol of prosperity, but only if its top points to the right (as seen in the Nazi flag, ironically). If the image of the swastika is flipped it is a symbol of ‘opression and terror’. The former brings about total victory, the latter total annihilation. The Nazis knew this, that is why the ‘good’ version can be seen, slightly tilted, on their flag.

Some might debate that the swastika should be considered symbolic for the horrors the Nazi Party brought upon their victims. I believe this to be foolish. Why would you ever feel the need to assign a design to represent something horrifying? The swastika is a very powerful, clear cut picture. So I suppose it is easily remembered as such a bad piece.

Maybe we’ll see the renewing of the meaning of the swastika sometime in the future. But for now I’d just spread the word on it’s true meaning (don’t go around wearing one).

Source:

http://reclaimtheswastika.com/

So in English today my teacher asked us to write our opinions on banned and censored books. I figured it would make a blog-worthy post, so I decided to type it up here. A little background: this is just a free writing excercise, not an essay. Each paragraph is the answer to a set of questions. The first paragraph is basically defining the difference between banning and censoring books, the second is asking if books should be banned or censored, why or why not, the third asks if schools are responsible for protecting or exposing students to the ‘real’ world.

Enjoi.

Banning a book requires that the entire book should be removed from the school curriculum. From this point it is not allowed to be taught in a public school environment. Similarly, censoring a book requires that only certain words or phrases are removed from the book, as opposed to the entire removal of the book as mentioned earlier. Public schools most likely ban and censor books in order to ‘protect’ students from ‘unfavorable content’ (i.e. racial slurs, racist ideals, sexist ideals, etc). The question arises, which of the two forms of censorship is worse, banning or selective editing? To be honest, I believe the choice is quite obvious. Banning a book is far worse than selectively editing it in that the ideals and lessons to be learned from the book are completely eliminated. As opposed to censoring which only removes the ‘unfavorable content’ from the novel. Most of the same literary ideals and purposes of the book remain when this form of censorship is used.

Books should not be banned from public schools. The reasons are quite obvious. Any ideas that could be learned from a book are lost due to the ‘unfavorable content’. This content probably had little to do with the main ideals of the novel in the first place. The idea of censorship is a bit more complicated. Why are books censored? For the same reasons they are banned, to protect students from ‘unfavorable content’ and ideals. I find this idea to be old-fashioned at best. Times have changed since the idea of censoring a book was originated. Students today, especially in public schools, are exposed to more ‘unfavorable content’ (higher quantity as well as ‘quality’, if you will) than would ever be present in any sort of American classic, or otherwise, that would be proposed as reading material in a public school. Because of this, censorship would make little difference in terms of the effect on the student.

Schools are responsible for exposing students to ‘real’ world ideals. The whole purpose of school is to prepare us for life after school, should that not include education as well as ‘real’ world ideals? I believe so. It is foolish to ban or censor a book in order to protect students from life after high school because they are experiencing most the censored ideas during high school anyway. Drugs, sex, racial slurs and other aspects of life that may be deemd as ‘unfavorable’ by a school board is commonplace among teens. Censoring a few words here and there will do little to change a student’s behavior or change his or her mind about the lifestyle they’ve chosen.

If you’re like me and check up on the latest new stories at digg.com you may have noticed that what your reading is controlled by about 150 other people.

I feel like I should explain the concept of Digg to some of my non-Digg users. Basically someone submits a story, at this point it has 1 ‘digg’ or a sort of point for the story. Friends of the submitter may find it interesting, if so they digg it as well. At about 150 diggs the story finds its way to the main page (the page you see when you first access the website). From there it can receive more diggs and maybe hit the top 10, which refreshes about every 2 hours.

Now I’m not saying that what you read is controlled by the same group of 150 people (which is possible, but not likely). My point is other people besides you control what you read. Now this is fine if you’re like me and are just looking for the funny stuff (which is generally the most commonly submitted stories anyway). But if you’re interested in stories that actually matter…you know, news, then you should look elsewhere for such things.

There are several reasons for this. Most apparent is the fact that most digg users are 15-25 years of age. This is a very specific target audience. You can guess that most political topics are very slanted toward the liberal end of the scale. I have no problem with that, people can have their own opinions. The fact is you don’t always get both sides of the story. I realised this a few nights ago when Stephen Colbert was talking about the ‘08 democratic nominee. I came to the conclusion that I had no idea the differing points of views that Obama and Clinton have. Granted, I’m too young to vote. But I figured I’ll be coming to voting age right in the middle of whoever wins this election.

Since Digg is virtually my only source of news I found that I only know Obama’s views and not his opponent’s. This is due to the target audience of the website, as mentioned earlier.

Now I know what you’re thinking. All media is biased in some way, man. I know, and it is a sad truth. Fortunately there are other ways of getting news outside of TV and their websites. Will I actually do research on either candidate? Probably not. I have no way to vote, so I frankly don’t give a crap, at least not enough to spend time researching (even though it’d only take like 10 minutes). As far as I’m concerned the democratic nomination process is only beneficial to me in that it provides me with a good hour of entertainment at 8 PM PST on Comedy Central.

In addition to digging stories one can also comment (and similarly digg or bury each comment) on such stories. This leads to yet another form of ‘thought control’ (jeeze, now this is sounding like some sort of conspiracy theory). Favorable opinions, or those related closely to the target audience, are almost always dugg up. Those not are buried (once you go below -5 diggs they are, by default, hidden). Being exposed only to the popular opinions may cause the aforementioned ‘thought control’.

I find this a bit strange, a margin of 5 people determine what is a popular opinion and what is not. Scary considering that this website has about 10,000 active users.

Finally the new skin is up and running (correctly).

I like the look of this one a lot better. The old one seemed a bit outdated once I got a closer look at all of it’s components. Gradients are so 2004.

In other news, I have to go to the doctor to make sure I don’t have any life threatening diseases. Or cancer. Which would bite the big one. Expect a post if the latter occurs, expect a post on something random if not.

Bai.

If you’re like me and you have a kajillion songs but only listen to a select few you find yourself neglecting the other 5 gigabytes of tunes you have stored on that harddrive/iPod (etc). I recently discovered…well, I didn’t discover it, but I actually used the shuffle function today. Its a bit comforting just listening to songs you haven’t heard in over a year.

Sometimes.

Other times songs from your stranger musical tastes come back to haunt you from your eclectic past. Last summer I was really into speed metal. I just realized how weird the singer from Stratovarius really is. Back in the day I only listened to the guitar shredding greatness, not the epic (in a bad way) lyrics. Granted, they’re still a great band, my tastes have just shifted a little.

Then you get some really boring crap mixed in. You know, the stuff you listen to when trying to sleep.

Sometimes you get the music you’ve been overlistening to lately.

I guess that’s what you get when you ask for complete randomosity.

Continuing in my series-rant of social networking, we find ourselves continuing in the realm of friends. Its common knowledge that the ‘friends’ aspect of any social networking site is the blood of the animal, the gasoline of the car, the money of the economy (insert more metaphors here). It enables the site to function. Without friends it would just be a network, and without social it would just be a heaping pile of useless code floating around on the Internet.

This has nothing to do with my point. But I figured a witty intro would add a nice touch to the post.

The real question is: how many of these so-called ‘friends’ are actually our friends? Do you really care about them as a person? Or do you just want their pending request approved in order to boost up your friend count for a higher, real life, popularity level?

For myself I consider every person I have ‘friended’ on facebook to be just that, a friend. Granted, there are a few that have friended me that I don’t consider as such, mostly because I hardly know who they are. Does that mean I’m a victim of the same disease that seems to plague my fellow teens? I don’t think so, I just don’t want to seem like a douche.

But would it really make me one? Refusing a friend request from a person you don’t really know (just by name is what I’m getting at) seems like a logical reaction to me. So why didn’t I do it?

Because in this world of social networking if you even remotely know someone, even friends of friends of friends are consider your friends. I suppose I have more of a problem with the sites calling this area of the network as such.

Perhaps the ‘friends’ section should be renamed ‘Accuaintences (and also Friends)’.

I guess that’s a tad too long of a title, however.

This whole post seems a tad superficial, and perhaps it is.

What really gets me is that even interacting with someone on the aforementioned sites really adds nothing to your personal relationship in the first place. I’ve even had some cases where people tend to shy away from me after requesting, where before they were quite friendly. ’tis a strange paradox.

I’ve also noticed that I hardly interact with my close, personal friends on the site, and moreso with those I consider to be more of an accuaintence than a friend. Perhaps that is because I see them on a daily basis anyway (a direct correlation: because I see them more often they become a closer friend?).

I found this whole realm of friends to be very deceiving in the first place. I’ve noted there are some people out there in my ‘network’ that I would consider an accuaintence, but have not friended them simply because I don’t really care. It would add nothing to the relationship in anyway, so why bother?

I realize this has all been one of my train-of-thought posts. But I just needed to think this through on ‘paper’.

With the recently released Nine Inch Nails album(s) Ghosts I-IV I discovered a new, interesting side of the vast enigma we call music. I’m not sure there’s a name for this genre of music, so I will attempt to describe it (or you can hit up YouTube or the NIN website for examples).

Let me clarify that this music is not limited to just those 4 albums released just months ago. I found a good example in Buckethead’s album Colma (which is my current favorite in his sea of albums). The song I find to be the strongest example of this form of music is similarly named Ghost (that’s not to say the whole album isn’t a perfect example, because it is). For lack of a better term it shall now be reffered to as experimental music.

The reason I bring this up is twofold. For one I believe this genre of music is highly underrated. Secondly I think it is very interesting and something worth sharing, and that is the purpose of this blog, is it not?

In this experimental music, if it shall be named as such, the composers emphasize highly on repeated rhthyms. This may make the song a bit repetitive sounding, but I think that is the whole point. I was reading some comments on NIN’s new albums and came across a line. The author stated “time stops when you’re listening to this music.” I don’t think there is a better way to put it than that. Granted, you probably shouldn’t be doing anything of importance while listening to this music, or the effect is lost.

Just thought I’d share to make up for my lack of recent posts. Ah, and here’s another example from the same album. Enjoy!