Sarah Palin

I was looking at random Youtube videos today and it struck me again how ridiculous Sarah Palin is. She is unbelievably incompetent and it is amazing how she managed to even run for US Vice President in 2008.

Example of Sarah Palin being Sarah Palin:



The point of this post however, was not to point out how stupid Sarah Palin is but to share this hilarious video of Matt Damon voicing serious concerns about her in an interview.



And another opinion about her by John Cleese (former Monty Python member and the guy in Fawlty Towers). He nicely sums up her entire political career about 3 seconds into the video.

Some flash games

There are some seriously good flash games on Kongregate right now.

Elephant Quest
From the people who made 'Achievement Unlocked' and 'This is the Only Level'. Both really great flash games, though this one is even better.

Upgrade Complete 2
Like Upgrade Complete 1, but with more upgrades. Pretty cool.

Minecraft

Minecraft is ruining my life. I can't sleep properly because I keep thinking about it. I had a dream about Minecraft last night. It's 1AM right now because I stayed up playing Minecraft, even though I was planning on doing something else tonight. On the plus side, my cavehouse is now amazingly cool. I spent the past hour channeling water from the nearby lake into little pools in my cave so I could grow sugar cane and wheat. Amazing. I also built a secret underwater entrance to my house, which was pretty cool as well.

I only started playing Minecraft on Thursday, so I managed to do some other things before that. In no particular order I watched:
- Where the Wild Things Are
- The Social Network
- Black Swan
- American History X

I thought these were all great movies and it'd be difficult for me to say straight off which one I liked the most. I'd recommend Where the Wild Things Are the most out of all of them because I'm guessing most people have seen the second and third movies and American History X is already on the imdb 250.

Also, I rewatched Vertigo and Citizen Kane (mostly because people talking about it on Facebook made me feel like watching it). I had an audio commentary by Roger Ebert on Citizen Kane that I was going to watch but I got pretty bored halfway. If anyone's doing it for English though, I'd say it's one of the most useful resources you could get on the movie.

I also read Maus, which I borrowed from our school library. I mention this a lot, but I have to mention it again: our school has an amazing graphic novel collection.

The Dictionary

Lately, I've been finding the dictionary a very interesting and informative experience. So was Fruit Ninja with the Fruit Facts. But back to dictionaries.

I think dictionaries are probably underrated as books because people find them boring. False. There are many endlessly fascinating words which can be found within the confines of the dictionary. I think what people lack is a really comprehensive dictionary. The "My First Dictionary for Children" isn't going to cut it. I use the Concise Oxford Dictionary and it's really fun just to flick to a random page and look for an overwhelmingly complex word and find out its meaning and then use it in a sentence so that you look and sound like a genius.
Example: "Walter is nuciverous" which really just means "Walter is nut-eating". But it sounds so much better. Also, "Walter is non-nuciferous", which means "Walter is non-nut bearing".
There are also many archaic insults in the dictionary which can be used to confound your verbal opponents e.g. "You're such a ninny" with ninny meaning a foolish or simple-minded person.

Here are some words which I would like to use in these sentences more often. Look them up for yourself (but please don't use dictionary.com, it is the destroyer of the procurement of words):

Wilson has prognathous.
Some people have very obscure sobriquets.
Meet at the top right socle of the library.
Please pass the fondant.
I admire the craquelure that is prevalent within Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

That is all.

Some movie trailers.

Decided to watch upcoming movie trailers for a while today. A lot of them looked pretty crap but here's a few I thought seemed promising.

Gary Moore - The Loner (guitar cover)

Here's some more guitar recordings that Edwin sent me. He hasn't bothered filming himself while playing so these are audio only.

First, a cover of Gary Moore - The Loner



And an impro recording with no real name.



Also, I was looking through my album of images that I save so I can upload onto this blog and I found this:

I must have forgotten to upload it.

Some thoughts about language

This blog post follows a chain of thought I had which went through the course of an entire week.

It began after I read The Catcher in the Rye. It was the first time in a while that I voluntarily read a book in my spare time and I thought it was great. There is richness in reading that you can't get out of a film or TV show or whatever. I also read Jane Eyre for English in the holidays and I really enjoyed that too. So I developed a renewed appreciation of reading and I started thinking about how Stephen King wrote that literature is 'refined thought'. When we read we hear the words on the page being spoken aloud. Unlike a film, we don't hear it with our ears because the voice is coming from inside our head. That's a very powerful thing.

Anyway, after a while my thoughts branched off and it occured to me that if literature is 'refined thought' then thoughts are based on spoken language. You may be thinking: "Well no shit dude, we think in words. What kind of epiphany is that?" My point is that when I thought hard about this I realised how important language is, not only for communicating with others but to grasp abstract ideas such as our own emotions. Of course even in prehistoric times, humans probably could understand simple emotions like 'happy' and 'sad' without using words. But I doubt they could easily understand emotions like guilt or pity. So language allows us to label otherwise intangible abstract ideas and form complex chains of thought.

My next thought was to wonder if this made things hard for people born deaf. I wondered what ran through their minds as they read books. An internal voice cannot exist for them because they have no idea what spoken language sounds like. Perhaps to them the words existed only as symbols which held sublime, indescribable meanings. Maybe because of this, reading is a more acute experience to the deaf. Or maybe it just sucks because the pleasure of reading is perhaps dependant on spoken language. This is definitely true for a lot of poetry which relies on rhythm and sounds. It was pretty late at night when I was thinking about this stuff and I was getting pretty tired so I went to sleep.

The day (or two) after, I had another thought about the topic. What language do deaf people think in, if they can think at all? This fascinated me enough to do a Google search about it. I found this page, which provided a more scientific perspective on the whole thing. Those who are born deaf (or profoundly deaf) and do not receive proper treatment can develop problems with cognitive function. If they are not diagnosed during the critical age of 21-36 months, they can suffer severe learning problems despite the fact their intelligence is otherwise normal.

So what's the 'proper treatment' for the profoundly deaf? They are taught sign language, which replaces spoken language with a gestural one. Sign language isn't like Morse code or anything, where English words are changed into gestures letter by letter. It's more like Chinese, where each word is represented by a different gesture.

I'm getting lazy now so I'll just copy paste a paragraph from the above link to conclude.

The answer to your question is now obvious. In what language do the profoundly deaf think? Why, in Sign (or the local equivalent), assuming they were fortunate enough to have learned it in infancy. The hearing can have only a general idea what this is like--the gulf between spoken and visual language is far greater than that between, say, English and Russian. Research suggests that the brain of a native deaf signer is organized differently from that of a hearing person. Still, sometimes we can get a glimpse. Sacks writes of a visit to the island of Martha's Vineyard, where hereditary deafness was endemic for more than 250 years and a community of signers, most of whom hear normally, still flourishes. He met a woman in her 90s who would sometimes slip into a reverie, her hands moving constantly. According to her daughter, she was thinking in Sign. "Even in sleep, I was further informed, the old lady might sketch fragmentary signs on the counterpane," Sacks writes. "She was dreaming in Sign." 

And that was the end of my week-long chain of thought.

So you know...

...how I said Multitask 2 was the best flash game ever. I take that back. This is.

Multitask 2

BEST FLASH GAME EVER!


Some other things I want to share, while I've already started a post:
-I'm kinda disappointed Sucker Punch got such crappy reviews. I really thought it had potential to be a great movie (like, actually a really good movie). Of course, its still possible I'll like it because I haven't watched it yet. Anyway, let's hope Zack Snyder gets more success with his upcoming Superman movie.
-Finally watched some movies last weekend after about four movie-free weeks! I watched Dr. Strangelove and Raging Bull.
-Borrowed Maus from the school library, which was a pleasant surprise when I found it. I really think our library has the most amazing graphic novel collection. So many quality works like Sandman and stuff by Alan Moore. I borrowed Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud last year, which is essentially an essay about comics written in graphic novel form. I'm not even exaggerating when I say that it changed the way I thought about not just comics but art in general.

Okay, that turned out longer than I thought it would. There was something else I wanted to blog about too but I think I'll do that tomorrow/the day after/later when I feel like it.

127 Hours

Today I watched 127 Hours. Holy crap. I'm sure everybody's heard the true story so I think everyone can safely read on but if you haven't and you don't want to know the ending then SPOILER ALERT!!!

OK when I first heard how the guy had to cut his arm off (before the movie, this was probably ages ago) I thought wow, that guys got guts what would I do in his situation? and thought nothing more of it. And then I watched the movie and it really makes you think about what that guy had to go through.

First of all, how did he manage to survive on 1L of water for like 5 days? That's crazy. Ok he cheated a little bit by drinking his own urine but that also came from that 1L and plus it's not like the urine tasted all that great.
Second, I think the movie really gets to how boring it must have been for him. Five days hugging a rock with nothing to do except chip away at it is pretty boring.
The third and most impressive thing I that made me go WOW was the last bit of the movie, the part where he chops his arm off. That in itself would've been so painful I think that guy deserves a medal or something. Not only that but he also had to do it with a tiny crappy knife AND break his arm as well. And then there are all the other things you don't usually consider when you have to cut off your arm, like how you have to cut your tendons, and because your probably tensing really really hard the pain would have multiplied. And how did those make-up/special effects people get the actor's arm to look like it was actually being cut. I'm pretty sure there were trick angles being used somewhere but it was pretty realistic.
Ok so he's cut off his arm. Then he has to walk for like a few hours to get to his bike. And his bike is four hours away from his car...by bike. Which would mean that he would have to walk (I think it would be too much to ask for him to ride his bike with one arm) probably like 8 hours. That alone would have probably been able to make me give up.

This movie made me really think hard about the value of my arms and really puts a movie about a guy who gets over a speech impediment into perspective.

Also looking forward to watching Source Code

That is all.

April Fools

Firstly, someone called 'John Smith' just wrote the most amazing comment ever on my previous post. You gotta read it. I don't think the guy realises that Louie wrote the post about English but whatever. It blew my mind.

Anyway, today is April Fool's day. I spent a considerable amount of time (ie. the half minute I waited while the Crysis 2 campaign was loading) to think about something witty and ironic I could do on this blog, like I tried to do last year. Unfortunately, I couldn't think of anything genuinely funny.

Then again, the whole idea of April Fool's day is pretty unfunny. It's like a day where companies are meant to start hoaxes to show how creative they are. The artificiality of the process makes it hard to be funny. I doubt many people found these fake Artline ads very funny.


Perhaps the real purpose of April Fools day is to get people to play dumb tricks to look clever but ironically make a fool of themselves. Or perhaps I'm just miffed because I couldn't think of anything clever to do.

Also I finished the Crysis 2 campaign. Pretty cool. The main theme of the Crysis 2 soundtrack reminds me of the sound of a GPU under maximum stress. I see what they did there.