THIS IS AWESOME

http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/

Holy shit it stinks on New Year’s Eve, outside. What the hell?

ANYWAY THE ABOVE VIDEO IS STILL AWESOME.

The answer was

A polymath. What do you want to be when you grow up?

It’s probably impossible, with the amount of stuff we already know out there, but it’s a goal nonetheless. Slightly unattainable, considering my habits, but then such a question doesn’t demand realism.

Well, this post was impulsively made upon a cringey recollection of Vicki Loh asking the question. A lot of memories make me cringe nowadays, including a fake toy I bought when I was ten, most everything I’ve ever written (including my very first story about Power Rangers in K1 [In booklet form, no less!]{Oh yes, it was written during a TV airing of Free Willy, I remember, at sunset}), up to  random conversations and short moments where I figure I said or did wrong stuffs.

I don’t think any of us live in the real world. Occasionally I look at the world I live in and consider that it’s not something that many people I know live in, at least not entirely – then again, there may be at least one person who does, and maybe does so at a far higher level while still being socially coherent.

…

No, HE reads Doctorow.

And he does have a much better shot at becoming one, I guess. The question is whether I understand fully what would be required, what sacrifices would be made, what being a polymath actually means…so whether becoming a polymath would be desirable in terms of happiness and fulfillment remains to be seen. And frankly I’m not sure. It would be easier to pick one field and specialize. It might be that I overestimate myself and I can’t even do that and I wind up in some old typical job without any outstanding things differentiating me from the rest of the workforce, fighting divorce cases in court, writing twenty lines of code a day, or just becoming an academic – which wouldn’t be too bad, admittedly, for me. I mean, I get to have time to read anything related to my field, sit on a research grant, stay in school…Obviously, I mean a very specific type of academic.

Currently, a polymath’s definition is: To be interested in multiple fields, and to make advances in them.

The latter implies a certain degree of mastery, which I don’t have yet in any field. But that’s a given.

Leibniz never married – too caught up in his work. Must be lonely. Then maybe not.

Cringeworthy

My script has become. Argh. Happens to everything I cobble together after I sober up (read: Muck around with other stuff for a few days, then take another unfiltered look at the script.) That’s why I had rather write a completely new one. It was too painful, some of the speech.

I don’t know whether it’s possible for me to write dialogue that I won’t some day cringe at. I’m too close to the characters, in the wrong way. Every story with dialogue – is it something wrong with the dialogue or with me?

On to other gamey matters.

Fed very badly today, which probably caused a loss despite a record of 16 assists. Looks like I’ve hit the nadir of my DotA cycle. Got to cool off for quite a long while before I can play well enough again.

My friend’s nagging me to run for level 70 on the private WoW server. I don’t feel like it. Still stuck at 46.

Idling on LambdaMOO. It’ll be a long while before I get around to learning the language.

I just get so tired of everything that I can’t stay on. So many things…my interest just drops because it feels like I’ve done everything novel, the rest is just fine-tuning. Or irrelevant. So I do things in long, broken, intermittent pulses. I’ve went to and left Achaea five times and counting. I’ve lost my Assassin on Discworld – only the wizard remains, though he’s significantly matured.

It might be the age old afraid of commitment thing, which is not really, I’m perfectly fine with commitment, just that if I do feel committed for long periods of time then I somehow start to regard it as an artificial restraint, self-imposed or not, and subconsciously retaliate by ignoring it, doing shoddy work, or losing creativity. That should account for why the things I used to read and think about independently get worse for me when they become school subjects and I’m supposed to do well. So I could say lucky I don’t take KI. Then again, it might simply be that I have only artificial layers of aptitude and when they become school subjects they strip those layers away. I don’t know right now how to solve this. But if I don’t, I think I’ll be doomed in the future.

Hickey-dickey. Right.

Some holidays ideas went unfulfilled, like the design of a towel with useful tools hidden in its fabrics like lockpicks, internal Kevlar, and waterproof electric heating. Less fanciful unfinished ones include making a non-disposable lightning-proof tinfoil hat.

Where the hell was I going to get really really flexible Kevlar anyway?

I am a lazy, lazy man.

Bookski

Nothing much to write.

I’m missing the Day Watch book, but borrowed Twilight Watch and Night Watch. I haven’t even started on them…

Attempts to study have resulted in reading the first seven pages of an organic chemistry textbook that tells me about happy duets. the aufbau principle, and stuff I should have known since two years ago.

DotA now!

Innovative way of salvaging the game – a unique form of PP for Garena.

Huh.

Dream twitter

This one featured Tennant’s Doctor, a guest appearance at the end by the Valeyard, Orlando the face-snatcher from Invisibles, the US Air Force VS Formula 1 racing cars [Air Force won], the second dream library (Kind of a hodgepodge of HC’s high school library with the sparseness of the former Jurong East Library), and sketching someone.

As the first comment on http://community.livejournal.com/splodefromcute/1044820.html#cutid1
said:

SOOOOO CUUUUUUTE

FDFASKLDJASDKLAD

Aaaaaaaaaaaargh the uncertainty is killing meeeeeeeeeeeee

Dark screens and bright sunlight

For some reason my family has decided to take a walk from Mount Faber to Kent Ridge Park. So I won’t be in for the morning or afternoon. Then again, everyone who needs to know this already kind of knows it, so I’m just writing it here because I want something to write.

I’m on Aardwolf again, for some reason. ‘Tis the black hole of nostalgia, the black void of the screen…Levelled five times. The MUD seems to be going through one of the superhero phases with double exp.

Can’t stop being intensely amused every time I remember one part from the Doc Who season 3 finale. “Here come the drums here come the drums…”

Off!

One sentence

The Doctor Who episode Midnight is marvellous and everyone should feel a mixture of pissed off and terrified after watching it.

Hunting for

A belated present.
I have a lot of library books to get around to reading. Also, an entire last season of Doctor Who awaits. DIsregarding the fact that some videos are corrupted.
Also, OpenSUSE 11.1, whose main lot is to be excitedly installed on the tablet and then forgotten about because I’ve got so much else.
I’m still stuck on the first 40 pages of Objective C. Curse you, DotA.
Homework is a spectre of the future, to be dealt with slothily and reservedly.