Tag: english

Understanding

It’s said so much nowadays that we must understand other cultures and must not try to convert them to our way of thinking, which might be just as strange and/or revolting for them, as theirs is to us.

This occurred to me today while reading FTW on the train. It’s one thing that in that given culture what is accepted, and it’s pretty much the way of thinking of the parent that decides how the kid is raised. But. For me, it’s one thing to understand, that it’s normal in India (according to the book, correct me if wrong) that parents would beat their kid for disagreeing with them and saying so. It might be normal in certain families that instead of talking with the kid about what’s the problem, you just take them out from their school and send them off to a boarding school where he won’t play games that much… Okay, that’s their way.

And i disagree with that, and i say so.

It’s scary how this thought is similar to how America’s preaching equality and liberty and the spread of the global culture, while it doesn’t even try to understand other cultures. It can go either to war with countries that it doesn’t like (see middle eastern conflicts) or let the multicorporations do the job by slowly infecting the said culture with the “global greatness”.

Oh no. I wouldn’t bother trying to convince a traditionally thinking indian parent that his way of raising the kid is wrong. For the simple reason that the understanding i try to enforce on myself itself is a product of my culture, so i can’t really expect others to think the same. Even if i tried to convince someone their way is wrong, they would be right to ask what makes me think mine’s better.


Six digits

Finally, after three years, here’s the big day (or to be precise, here was the big night), that i passed 100000 (a hundred thousand) scrobbles on last.fm. Because the last.fm milestone gadgets all mysteriously disappeared from the net (or was i wrong in my impression that there was plenty of them?) so i couldn’t check in a sure automated way what was my 100000th, but just a few plays over the five zero i counted back manually and so it seems to be either Iron Maiden’s Out of the Shadows or Moongate by Samael. I wish i could know for sure…

Well anyway, considering how long it took to get this many posts, it’ll take a while until i can write such an anniversary post again. Looking forward to it tho.


The Graveyard Book, again

After two years, again i have listened to Neil Gaiman reading his Graveyard Book on tour. It’s just as i remembered it, and more. Gaiman’s works are just like Harry Potter books have always been for me: start reading it (or in this case listen to it), and i can’t stop for a while after. Remember how i couldn’t put down the Deathly Hallows the first time i went home? Much like that. No matter how i know the whole story, remember it to the last bit, it still makes me read it again. And again, and again.

This time, i recognized things i may have not recognized at first listening, clues and winks out at other works. After reading a bunch of Gaiman’s Lovecraftian stories, i have no doubt that Ghûlheim was earlier called R’lyeh…

I also have no doubt that this book will be fun no matter how many times i listen to Neil reading it or me myself reading it once i have the funds to buy and a place to put all the books i want (the number of which is insanely high).

I hope they’ll make a good movie out of it. Sure to watch it once it comes out (rumoured to hit the cinemas next year).


On the internet wars

I like that phrase. It sounds epic, when in reality it’s nothing so epic. I especially have fun when newspapers and online magazines refer to anonymous as a “hacker group”, occasionally even adding “that gathers on the meme-generating portal 4chan”. Seriously, why do people write about matters they don’t have the slightest idea about? I mean, it’s one thing if i’m blabbering nonsense on my blog, and another if it’s a (inter)national online news portal’s editor who does that.

It’s hilarious though, how easily anon can take down websites. With less than 500 ion cannons in the hive, the website of the swedish whatever office who charged Assange was taken and kept down for hours. Same goes for the swiss bank who froze the WikiLeaks account. With not a whole 1500 in the hive, Mastercard’s main website was down and it announced that even secure transactions were facing connection problems. And when i went to sleep, the hive was closing 2000 and more and more people were demanding an attack on PayPal. (If you wanted to know the hive size or any of the details on the topic, checking /b/ would’ve sufficed, with every third thread being related to Operation Payback.)


Anime awards, 2010

I felt like i have to write this down: the best anime in the season is definitely Panty and Stocking, being on a level of awesomeness comparable only to FLCL. The most fabulous anime is obviously Star Driver. The best drawing award is either for Ore no Imoto or Star Driver. The best opening song is Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai, that’s simply great—but the overall best soundtrack is Panty and Stocking. The cutest moeblob is everyone’s beloved Squid Girl でげそ. The best seriously serious anime is Shiki, which also has a good chance of winning the best story award (there’s not much competition in that area though, maybe only Digimon Xros Wars and (who knows?) Star Driver could stand a chance). Best kids’ anime is without question Xros Wars.

Disagree? Feel free to. Suggest other anime as well if you wish.


Machine a-trollin

Out of curiosity, i watched the first Boxxy video, which is by chance up on youtube in the original version, not some music remix. And this video reminded me of Gaia online, a name i knew i knew, and indeed: i vaguely recall having registered there back in the “good old” AN days (around when this blog started, alongside MapleStory, which, unlike Gaia, i played for a nice while), and today during english class i confirmed it. The valerauko username was taken, and i’m positive that no one else uses that, so i checked and i was registered with my old freemail.hu email. Which is problematic, because i had a random password for that, and i didn’t know that even when i was using that mailbox. So i tried and tried and retried, and finally i hit the right password for the Gaia user. Lucky my set of passwords is a finite set…

I logged in, and after a few minutes (and changing my password) i ended up in the forums’ Panty and Stocking thread. After making a few posts, my computer turned off. Just like that. There was no burnt smell, it wouldn’t turn on again and electricity was on. After checking everything else i checked the most troublesome: i moved the desk to see that the power chord of the computer has somehow fallen out of the plug. Apparently my computer learnt some trolling lately.


Wikileaks

Now either there’s a website there, that mysteriously acquires secret documents an dumps them for the public. In this case, the chase after the site makes complete sense, considering how a canadian presidential advisor suggested Julian Assange (from now on, the Wikileaks guy) should be assassinated, considering how Wikileaks had to move to the Amazon cloud to handle the immense ddos attacks (and yet, it’s not accessible for me right now – either Japan’s censoring me, or the site’s down) and how some swedish court issued an Interpol arrest notice for the poor guy (on basis of some apparently made-up sexual harassment charges).

Or, the whole Wikileaks thing is created by CIA. This would explain how a website could so mysteriously obtain such documents. Also, in this case too, the persecution against Wikileaks would make sense, just that’d mean that the whole world is being trolled by the CIA.

Reading the articles (mostly at Ars Technica), i really laughed out loud at parts… like where american congressmen labeled Wikileaks terrorism in a white-hot rage. This just reinforces what Cory Doctorow writes in Little Brother.


The day of extremities

Today i wake up at the first alarm of my phone, then went back to bed as usual until the last one… And i found it strange that it was the next. Nevermind, i had breakfast, and headed for school. Of course i was late, but only by roughly ten minutes—or so i thought. As i arrived, in a few minutes the teacher ended the class, and i was totally dumbfounded. For a few seconds, then i looked at my watch and i realised that i wasn’t late by ten minutes but by an hour. Turns out i forgot to reset my alarm from the 9 am weekend setting…

But at least i slept well in class.

Then i came home and came another raging thirty minutes. The rice cooker didn’t turn itself off (lately this happens more often than convenient) so the bottom of the rice was burned, while the top wasn’t even cooked properly. In the meanwhile i turned the power on the stove too high so the topping got burnt too. Not to mention when i picked the rice cooker off the fridge to get the rice out, it slipped out of my hand covering half of my kitchen floor with rice.

Then english classes that i spent sleeping and having fun with puddi on /b/.

I went to buy coffee, then headed for the karaoke at the station, where i spent half an hour practicing the Slipknot songs (except Three Nil that they didn’t have). Even though the performance’s not going to happen…


Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 1

After a long time i went to watch a movie in cinema again. The long awaited seventh (but not final) Harry Potter movie was most definitely not bad, but i don’t know how good it was.


I feel like shit

Yesterday coming home from the station i realized that from now on i’ll have to practice the Slipknot songs like hell. And then i realized something else as well. Deadline for bands to sign up is next tuesday, and the audition is the 14th. That’s where i got suspicious–don’t tell me the live would be when i’ll be at home.

But of course it is. I’m soo totally fucked screwed… I don’t even have an idea how much i’ll have to apologize for this. I’ve got the first mail back from the others and sure it starts nice “well there’s no helping that” but then goes into insane rage mode blaming me for not paying attention when the date was announced (i would bet a finger it was not) nor did i ask about it earlier, going as far as to suggest that i did it on intention.

I guess no helping this.

Thanks for your kind understanding in case you wanted to say something that starts with “haha you’re…”