Posted July 2, 2011 at 1:44 pm by Severed Head
Not sure when I finished this, but I think I have. Either way, I feel competent enough to do my own cooking and baking!
Past progress on this lifelist item: 1
Politics and Individualism and Paranoia and Narcissism
Awesome thing of the week, Conspiracies, Life, Limb, Philosophy, Pissed off rants
Posted April 1, 2011 at 3:27 pm by Severed Head
I am so goddamn sick of politics and people going nuts over it. It’s all just theater. Almost none of it will affect your day-to-day lives. There are certainly changes and your bank accounts will increase and decrease, but who the fuck cares? You should live your life with the ability to roll with the punches, no matter what happens in the economy or politics.
If your bank account isn’t as high as what it used to be, you’ll buy a bit less groceries. You might stop going out to eat or might have to cancel cable, but really, how much does it affect your day-to-day lives? Not a whole fucking lot.
For those of you who want to blame politicians, you are stupid. Our government is an extremely flawed democratic republic, but it is a democratic republic nonetheless. People are elected and have to fight their way to the top. Whether they are representing republics or democrats, they are still representing this point in time in some way. What I am saying is that these people are just icons for movements. Do you think Rosa Parks was the only black woman standing up for her rights? No, she was better of something bigger. She was a newspaper article story that represents the time. If she didn’t exist, don’t you think someone else would have done something, or do you think we would still have the civil liberties we did 100 years ago? Do you think Bush or Obama are really changing/have really changed that much? If there was some other person in their place, do you really think that, 20 years down the road, it’s going to matter? They are part of movements and they are a result of the current world state and how people move and think and evolve as a mass. The idea that one individual can make a difference is ridiculous. Most of the time, the only way this can happen is by generating some sort of strong movement. If Martin Luther King was talking to an empty field, he wouldn’t be who he is. All the people who watched or listened to his speech are part of this movement. Sure, every now and then one person assassinates someone or whatever, but again, it’s more the reaction to this that is important. John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln, but he was just a Southerner. If he didn’t exist, the world wouldn’t have changed that much. Lincoln might still be alive, but do you really think that would have made this country much different in the presence?
In terms of current politics, there’s an ebb and flow of conservatism and liberalism that you are just going to have to accept. And really, none of this ever gets to extreme levels. A lot of people accuse Obama of being super far leftist, but this demand for public health care has been growing for the last 50+ years. A lot of people accuse him of wanting to get rid of guns. This is completely untrue, and this is an exaggeration of the ebb and flow. Things are going to stay fairly reasonable. You might have to pay a few bucks more for health care, and doctors might get paid a few bucks less.
Gas might be more expensive, and you’ll have to pay $40 to fill up instead of $30. If it made that much of a difference, you wouldn’t be buying shitty cards or you’d learn to drive more efficiently or you would stop driving so fucking much. You might have to spend a few more nights a week staying inside, but you should be able to do that. If worse comes to worst, you could sell some of the stuff that you don’t desperately need. The poor are going to remain as poor and won’t be affected as largely by stupid mid-upper class problems like gas prices. They either: made bad decisions to get poor, and continue to make them by spending poorly, or they’ve made bad decisions and they’re going to make good ones and pull themselves out of being poor.
But:
Fuck money. It is way too large a part of this society. I am taking economics right now and my teacher’s right-wing agenda is driving me insane. His foundation for free market societies are based on the following: If you can get more money, you will be happier (not just better, mind you, HAPPIER), and, the more people on Earth, the better. We watched this huge stupid bullshit paranoia documentary about population decline, and not once in the documentary did they explain why less people on Earth would be a bad thing. It didn’t have to do with people dying, it just had to do with people making less children and producing less. I would be happy with this. Seriously. We focus too much on individuals in this society, much more so than any other society or creature. And it creates a sort of narcissism.
Look at the paranoid conspiracists, for example. First of all, their lives MUST be so much harder than everyone else’s life. Imagine if the whole world didn’t believe you, and you KNEW (or, really, just believing in something strongly and blindly enough to convince yourself you know) that the government was out to suppress the masses for the stupidly simplistic motive of greed. It would be the worst world to live in. YOU can decide which world you live in by believing in this bullshit. The people who believe in one conspiracy that is weakly-founded believe in MANY conspiracies generally. It would be a sad and lonely life, I must imagine.
And then you get to the paranoid end-of-worlders. These people are even worse. Their basic fundamental premise is that the world is going to end, in one way or another. They’ve been talking about this for the last 2000 years AT LEAST, constantly saying it’s right around the corner, but I have this to ask you: Who. The Fuck. Cares. These people can be broken down into a number of categories and I’ll explain why all of them suck:
Survivalists: These people know that the world is going to end, and want to be one of the few that survive. This is basic narcissism. They want to prove how much better they are than everyone else by studying impending doom, and by ultimately, winning at living. If most of the world is going to die from food shortages or zombies or nuclear war, why is it so important that you have to stay alive? If everyone I know and love is dead, I don’t feel the need to go on living, personally. I’d literally rather die than live with these survivalists.
Religious: Similarly, these people think they are better than everyone else, and want everyone else to know it. By converting people to their side, they can confirm that they are right, whether or not the coming apocalypse does come. If they KNEW in their hearts that it would be the coming apocalypse and that when judgement day comes, they’ll go to heaven, why share it with the rest of the world? Because they know deep down that they’re wrong, and they need some sort of evidence (in this case, large numbers of people) to confirm that they are not crazy/stupid/depressed and looking for answers.
General 2012 Mayan calendar nuts: These people are stupid. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and where there’s paranoia, there’s a lack of higher thinking going on and a tremendously inflated ego that says that the world at large is anything but indifferent to your existence and your welfare.
And anyway, back to the money. Money does, to an extent, cause happiness, and the lack of happiness does result from a lack of money a fair amount of the time. But this is much closer to a feeling of accomplishment than actual day-to-day happiness. Other cultures across the globe don’t have as much money, and while they don’t have as much happiness in the same way we do, they find it in other ways. You know why? Because there are so many things that are way more important than happiness… Or for that matter, accomplishment. People here like accomplishment because they’re so goddamn afraid of death. They want to be remembered after they’re dead. They want statues erected in their honor. But this is such a shitty goal.
A lot of people think it’d be depressing or scary to be an atheist (I’m an agnostic, but I don’t care enough about an afterlife that I might as well be considered an atheist), but here, it really frees me up. I believe that there will be nothing when I die, and I’m perfectly fine with that. This gives me the goal to make something of myself while I’m alive. It doesn’t mean that I have to accomplish a lot, it means that I should live my life as it is right now, not worrying about the future because of its inevitable end. If, after I’m dead, people look back and somehow wildly misinterpret the facts and think I’m a child molester, do you think I care? No. Because I’ll be dead and completely gone and my existence will have only lasted for a few short years in the history of the universe.
This is not to say that life is completely meaningless. We all should find our own meanings.
That said, don’t chose the following meanings to live your life for because it’s going to suck for you and everyone in your life: yourself (whether it be accomplishment or money), God (whether it be spreading the word or wasting your life to a fictional character made up 2000 years ago), destruction (This includes anti-social bullshit, anarchy and any fight club/project mayhem type of bullshit)
Family’s okay, but if the deeper meaning and the motivation is population, fuck you.
Posted March 3, 2011 at 6:13 pm by Severed Head
I have deleted the following from my lifelist:
Learn the entire catalog of Nirvana
Learn the entire catalog of Neutral Milk Hotel
I guess I just don’t much care for Nirvana as much as I once did. And for Neutral Milk Hotel, I don’t care for their first album. On the Aeroplane Over the Sea is amazing, but the other one is just… You know. Whatever
Posted March 3, 2011 at 10:29 am by Severed Head
I ended up caving in and just buying an Apple TV. Jailbroke it and added XBMC! Now I have streaming through some of the add-ons (see: Hulu, Daily Show, Adultswim, etc.)
This is pretty much as good as it gets (at least until I get an HDMI to component converter to hook up to my big TV)!
Past progress on this lifelist item: 1
Nobody reads this site anymore
Awesome thing of the week, Conspiracies
Posted February 21, 2011 at 11:41 pm by Severed Head
Or writes this site anymore
Posted February 17, 2011 at 4:13 pm by Severed Head
This guy/place is a genius. He creates his own industry, makes a bunch of super-vague forecasts, and he gets them right. Look at that list!
The Anti-Americanism trend? Internet TV? In 2005? I was downloading TV shows that year. WTF
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a perfect album
Posted February 12, 2011 at 3:21 pm by Severed Head
Two-headed boy, she is all you could need; she will feed you tomatoes and radio wires and retire to sheets safe and clean, but don’t hate her when she gets up to leave
Even if you don’t like the songs, it’s really difficult to argue that it isn’t a perfect album: the recurring themes, a wide variety of instruments, and just a general good up and down. It’s almost like a concept album, but not quite.
Posted February 3, 2011 at 10:09 am by Severed Head
I love how 90% of the mac haters are gamers. So you’re saying that I can’t waste all of my money and free time on obscure shitty games? That I can only sit in the dark by myself with games that aren’t popular or good enough to have the budget for programmers to make the game multi-platform? GOOD ARGUMENT
PC gamers are just the dumbest people in the world I feel. So you want to pay $1000 for your platform and upgrade it every few years? WHAT?! How is this even economically feasible? I make around $10 an hour, and a decent gaming computer would cost somewhere around $1000 (this is not including any subscription fees or software). This would take 100 hours, or TWO AND A HALF WEEKS OF WORK.
Maybe I’m missing something
Posted January 25, 2011 at 10:25 am by Severed Head
Here are some lifelist items that have been scrapped over the last few months:
Heavy metal monopoly-Too much for a mediocre board game
Beat Disgaea-It is just too long and too hard to pick back up
Live in the subway for 3 days-Too pointless
Living on a boat for a week-I figure this is too redundant since I have “go on a cruise” on my list.
Living underground-Dumb
Epic, autobiographical movie-Dumb
Visit/tour/play a show in Antartica-Already covered
Start a sitcom-Never going to work
Color my hair an unnatural color-Ugly, and this would take forever to get back to my natural color
Learn to talk backwards-Pretty cool, but it’d take way too long
Master Super Smash Brothers-I’m pretty happy with my skills right now.
Posted January 9, 2011 at 9:14 am by Severed Head
A lot of websites and bloggers like to review the best albums of 2010, or the best movies, or what the hell ever, but I aim to evaluate the year itself. In this article I will look at the best days/worst days/weeks/etc.
As you may or may not know, I keep a journal-type of file that evaluates every one of my days out of 5 stars. Using some spreadsheet software, I will evaluate the best and worst times of 2010:
Bottom 5 Days!
5. October 2nd (1.5)
4. September 24 (1.5)
3. April 22nd (1.5)
2. July 14th (1)
1. February 4th (1)
Most of these days, nothing particularly bad happened, it was more about dealing with constant frustrations and overall mood. Some of the days, I just felt like crap.
Top 5 Days!
5. February 14th (5)
4. January 2nd (5)
3. January 3rd (5)
2. August 20th (5)
1. July 12th (5)
As you can see, most of the best days of the year were concentrated at the beginning. It is no coincidence that the new year was brought in in the Emerald City, where we did tons of shit. Valentine’s Day was good because we made all kinds of sushi, and the 20th of August was great because it was Julia’s birthday dinner with friends at Pizzeria Bianco. Ultimately though, July 12th wins for best day of the year because of the fucking awesome jam session I had with our very own Crumb Bandit. It was really the best music I’ve ever played, and I still can’t get over it. I need to get back down to Tucson…
Bottom 3 Weeks
3. January 31st – February 6th (3.10)
2. September 12th – 20th (3.10)
1. October 3rd – 9th (2.60)
Most of these weeks were brought down by a day or two of being sick, but the October 3rd week particularly sucked because of all of the ridiculous car problems! BOO
Top 3 Weeks
3. April 11th – 17th (4.10)
2. January 10th – 16th (4.10)
1. January 3rd – 9th (4.40)
It’s hard to account for any of this, though the first 2 weeks of the year, it was probably partly due to the high of going to Seattle and having time off from school. April is just cool I guess haha.
Overall, it is pretty lame that the beginning of the year had the best days, and the rest after the first 6 months were mostly just “meh”. As far as years go though, this didn’t have any of the highs or lows that I had during other years, which is, you know, kind of cool, I guess. I hope to make this next year awesome all year long though, which is certainly helped by the prospect of regularly playing in a band and graduating. I have to go back to Seattle at some point though this year, since I’ve gone every year for the last 4 years. I’m sure my return will, again, become a high point in my life.