I'd just like to point out that American classes seem to be BS

So I was talking to Dan today and he says his next English/Writing class requires him to read up on Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and superheroes. What the hell?

Sad.

Granted, you can have lots of courses about Middle Earth, but I doubt it's going to be that in depth.

By the way, forever etched into time...

(19:23:51) HeionSatsuKenshi: such a cruel girl.
(19:23:58) ch624: it's true

No, there be no Thanksgiving Break

(19:34:32) Ragnaroch: what are you doing for thanksgiving break?

Surprisingly (not really), I have no Thanksgiving Break. We'll make that clear.

Because, you see, over here, those people you're theoretically giving thanks to are simply freaky feather-wearing savages with tanned skin, often called "Indians" and "those people that couldn't take out the damn colonists when we needed them to."

Yeah.

Maybe Thanksgiving Week could be called "Those Damn Colonists Week" in Great Britain, because, you know, American sort of split off. Make sense?

Silly Jon.

Nanotechnology and biomolecular engineering in the future

So Alex brought up how, I believe it was Star Ocean 3, people use nanotechnology as an excuse for magic and said phenomena. I'm going to say it's quite possible.

Nano and Bio-engineering are still in the infant stages of research (largely due to technological backward-ness), but people are quite aware that said things could produce wonders. "Prey" by Michael Creichton sort of hits the nail on this topic, as such things could become quite feasible.

But I don't think it'll be nearly as one-sided as SO3 depicted.

For all the capabilities that nanotechnology and biomolecular engineering have in causing harm and screwing around with the world, the possibilities of protecting lives is also unquestionable. Nanomachines could, possibly, be used to shield against bullets. People could have nanomachines coursing through their bodies, ready to pounce at any wound and patch it up in moments.

Heck, even phenomena such as ESP could become possible, as people communicate through networks that are hooked up into by the brain, and electrical impulses are sent through this wireless network and interpretted directly by other brains.

Fun thing, speculating about the future.

The Starcraft Pros

So Chai was wondering how much money those SC pros make.

Apparently like 500+K (USD) a year.

Boxer, at his peak, reportedly made 300K in prize money per year, how much of that goes to his sponsorship is up for grabs, but probably most. But since they get complete star treatment, he was making 500K+ due to computer contracts and potato chip contracts and that sort of stuff. Amazing.

And then I started wondering what these guys I use to read about and watch replays of are up to.

Still playing StarCraft, it seems. Boxer's ranked #8 now, apparently. Jeez.

The Star Wars world, its feasibility and my thoughts

I haven't read Robert Heilein's novels in a whole, so I'll leave my statement as, "To my knowledge, Star Wars is the only story that bothered to craft an entire society, complete with structures from space to the surface."

When people think of Star Wars (particularly the movies) they only think about those X-Wing fights and the Ewoks (and wookies, to a lesser extent). There're ships, droids, all that fun stuff, lots of lasers. But it's easy to overlook how every planet in Star Wars has its own distinct society, and it's not some makeshift world, either. Let's take a look at Cloud City, for instance.

For some reason or other, society is based on an airborne locale. The surface doesn't seem to have any inhabitants. Vehicles are primarily full-fledged aerocraft. Buildings are these giant floating infrastructures. One would imagine the ships land on top, a collection of gigantic harbours and the likes. Could be wrong. The inside is a bustling metropolis, akin to a giant supermarket of sorts, except some of the buildings are residences.

You can get a similar taste of Coruscant as well as other planets. Coruscant during the reign of the Emperor would be a planet that has half of the surface entirely colonized into a city. The air seems heavy with pollution, there're hovercrafts whizzing everywhere, with cities grasping high into the air. Plenty of slum areas, lots of illegal activity (enforcement isn't very solid) and an overall dark environment, such as one would expect from an extremely high-tech and yet loosely-enforced capital city.

There're small details. Buildings are made of some advanced form of concrete. Doors are generally sensor-based, either through motion or through a touch-pad to the side. People still perform maintenance tasks themselves, while artificial intelligence does manual labor (those droids that were driving Solo nuts on Hoth), tasks involving a requirement of memory (translation, as in the case of 3PO) or zero-gravity work requiring dozens of tools and quick reflexes (R-class droids). Bacta is the handy new form of medical treatment, a miracle fix-almost-all, of sorts. Diseases seem to be generally contained, as a supply of bacta would perform miracles.

Frankly, such an outlook on the future is incredible plausible. Judging solely from the United States, technology is spreading at an incredible pace, and cities like New York will simply spread. Cities that look like present-day New York may become even taller (building-height), and it could in fact become difficult to see the surface of the Earth. I can see how environmentalism may get pushed aside, or at least very unimportant as synthesis of materials becomes possible. Trees may be allowed to grow like heck. It, really, isn't all that hard to imagine cities become taller, with interconnected roadways criss-crossing the skies.

Technology-wise, I think Star Wars didn't guess far enough. Things like Bacta may be engineered into every person. Complete DNA/RNA re-coding might become a possibility. The world would be far more compact than what SW guessed at... you'd probably see far, far smaller robotics (or not see, as they could be extremely small)... and such robotics could cause a downfall in range-based weaponry (a personal shield of sorts).

At the same time, I can see why people wouldn't want to write about such a plausible future. It's not the most dynamic of worlds. Quite static, actually. There's no real "frontier." The only frontier is other worlds. But what if you simply want to sit back against a tree? That's not a scenario that exists in the Star Wars world, unless you went out to some backward country like Kashyyk. I don't think law enforcement would be as bad as depicted, either. In fact, at the rate governments are going now, I'd imagine something like the Minority Report could be far more likely. It's not really a direction of society that causes much lip-smacking.

I also don't think it's how things will turn out.

If the world were filled with engineers and the likes, Star Wars is probable. Hell, it's an efficient world. Gritty, but efficient, and quite simple. I can't really tell you how I think the future'll turn out. Maybe I simply hope that the future won't be like that. It's something I'm struggling with right now. It seems like, in every depiction of the future, the word "beauty" is totally omitted. Why can't there be a future, with technology, with efficiency, but also with beauty and serenity? The future doesn't have to be a world with a New York pace and grittiness, does it?

Future-based settings

It struck me while my mind was wandering today that perceptions of what the future looks like tend to be either clean-cut mechanized worlds with gleaming, polished technology or desolate post-apocalyptic settings. And yet none of these really feel like that's what the future will be like... at all.

Particularly in the case of thinking about the future by comparing the 1970s or so to today. People in the 1970s couldn't have imagined people sitting at home with computers and the internet, capable of communicating at incredible speeds with an equally incredible wealth of information. They did imagine improvements in the line of mechanical technology, however. That is, indeed, a line of thought that people are still working on today, trying to perfect Artificial Intelligence while creating mechanized counterparts that can act "as human" as possible.

But it's the line of technology and ideas that stem from computing that was never expected. Ditto for the newfangled explosion of biotechnology, with biologically synthesized body parts and, as some researchers believe is possible, computers the size of a few cells, controlled and manipulated by genetic coding.

It sort of cheapens any science-fiction imagination of how the future may end up being. Things will happen that no one 20 years earlier could have imagined. Things are happening now that people couldn't imagine even five years ago.

Why's this relevant?

It's interesting to think about what goes on in the mind of 2005 contemporary science fiction writers. A post-apocalyptic setting just doesn't seem very feasible, not with the way society is heading in regards to nuclear missiles and the likes (I would assume some semblance of a counter is created before a nuclear war would arise). There are other factors that may lead to a desolate, barren world, such as global warming or the spread of the ozone layer, but I would guess that some sort of technology that we can't even imagine would arise by then and fix it: especially if such a thing were to become a global threat, I'd imagine every important and powerful country would ally themselves with each other in a scientific research endeavor to make Caesar proud. I just don't see it.

Clean-cut mechanized worlds don't seem possible, either.

Much of science fiction nowadays seems to be looking off into the future as a space era. Space travel. Space wars. New worlds. Technology that doesn't need to be described. That could be very true, in fact, it looks like it will be true. But that seems, to me, like copping out. What happened to the surface since then? Surely you can't imagine the world staying the same as it is now. Guns could become obsolete. Towering buildings may not be the norm. Heck, roads might even be so useless they'd be replaced by grass, as vehicles simply hover above the ground. What material would become the norm, as things changed from wood to bronze to, now, steel? What do people do as artificial intelligence and mechanized construction becomes the usual method of which people turn to? How will houses look? What will stores be stocked with? What kind of new technologies will people come up with that totally blow away the world we live in?

All these questions and yet very little in terms of trying to answer these questions. That's been the case for almost the entirity of Science Fiction, it seems. Oh, there are some examples, like 1984, but for the number of titles listed under "Science Fiction," the attempts at truly imagining what the world may seem like is a scant few, which is pretty sad, if you think about it.

EDIT:
Friggin, I meant 1984. I dunno why I said 1942 instead. Fixed it.

Starcraft

I'm half-asleep right now, but here goes.

I was randomly shuffling around Google Video to kill some time and maybe get some cheap laughs earlier today post-SocAnt-lecture and pre-dinner, around 1.5 hours of time that I wished to simply languish with. So there I am watching some really strange videos and I come upon this.

I was showing it to people who I know play or have played Starcraft, and lo and behold Chai and I get into a conversation about how there've been some mad-skilled players, I point out that the terran was SlayerS`Boxer, the top (or close to it) player in the world a couple years back. Long story short, I ended up digging up gosugamers, and to my surprise found it still quite active and alive, complete with update about this year's championships and interviews with the top SC players.

Amazing.

The game came out in 1998. I think I first played it around 2000 or so, when Taka and Adachi brought it up during Japanese School. I still find it one of the best RTS games around (die-hard Total Annihilation fan, SC will never beat out TA as it is right now). It's quick and simple, and yet so skill-driven and with plenty of possibilities that it can be rather complex. Good for some nice laughs, and Battle.net is a huge success for the game (I miss playing it, by the way :[).

Since then Blizzard's released Warcraft III. Not nearly as successful. I wonder, though, maybe they should work on another expansion for Starcraft. You know people would buy it. They'd have to do a very, very good job to not mess up the game, and maybe they just want to leave it as is in order to keep the success alive. Don't tarnish the legacy, I guess. It baffles my mind why they won't work on Starcraft 2. Even if it's nowhere near as successful as Starcraft, it's worth a shot, and who knows, maybe they come up with something that replaces Starcraft and maintains the fanbase.

About them essays...

I figured the next batch of essays were due in December. Plenty of time (three weeks+ is plenty of time to write three essays). So to make sure, I checked the due-dates this morning and, wow.

So the Social Anthro essay's due the 12th of December (my sister's birthday). Fine. That's like an entire month away to think of another 1200 words of total and utter BS.
Here're the kickers, though.
English is due the 28th of November.
Mediaeval History is due the 29th.

That gives me two weeks.

So I was figuring, alright, it'll take me about six hours to finish my English essay and about a week to finish History, so it's all good. And then I take a look at the English essay and... surprise, surprise, it involves thinking and analysis rather than just close reading. Now, I know they were saying they were going to do this, but I totally forgot.

Thankfully there's a rather simple question.

"Much recent literary theory has questioned the idea of 'selfhood': as Rice and Waugh put it, 'the Subject is split, unstable or fragmented'. (Modern Literary Theory, p.226). Discuss the representation of subjectivity in one text (or, in the case of Poetry of the First World War, a group of small texts)."

We just read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Hmmm.

I guess I'm writing about the Peace and Truce of God Movements for Mediaeval History. I can still pull this out...

Hard-Gay Ramen (LOL)

I forgot to mention this.

Oh my god it's hilarious. You don't have to understand Japanese, you'll get the gist of it.

Project Force (PS3)

Mm... so I was browsing around on Google Video when I saw some mixed trailer for the PS3. I wasn't really thinking of getting a nextgen console anytime soon (whatwith me being in two countries and all), particularly in its early stages, since the games tend to be bleh.

Well, Kill Zone 2 was looking awful beautiful. I was skeptical about the trailer for it being so movie-like, but since you can see your guy's gun and all that, I was just blown away.

And then I saw the trailer for Project Force. The mixed video trailer had more video material than the IGN trailer for Project Force, but I tell you, that thing looks sweet. Not surprisingly, it's from the makers of Armoured Core, but dang, if it lives up to expectations, that'll be like, my big reason for getting a PS3.

That being said, it is looking awful lot like another Armoured Core, which I thought was too slow-paced (as opposed to Zone of the Enders), so we'll see, but dang those graphics improved in a hurry.