Archive for the ‘Diary’ Category
Musical considerations
I’m not, and haven’t been for a long time, very good at listening to music. By this I mean that I have a very specific problem: at any one time I listen to a small selection of tracks over and over again and then feel very dissapointed that they no longer sound as good after I’ve heard them a ridiculous number of times over a few weeks. And then thereafter they are never really as good at they first were. This is not something I myself have really identified; my family have been telling me for years. I seem to do this in many areas of life: I get very very into certain things for short periods of time and then move on. It’s not something that I consider a positive trait in any way and I would much rather develop interests into deeper understanding but as per usual as soon as something becomes any real challenge I lose most of my interest in it. I’m not convinced that there is a lot I can do about this because if I am no longer interested in something then I’m not going to pursue it very successfully as I’ll be going against what I actually want to do. I don’t know if this is, though, me just holding my behaviour up to ridiculously high standards which I then inevitably fail to meet – something else I do very often. Friends tell me they have short attention spans and can’t believe how long I can spend on particular pieces of work, or certain specific interests which I do maintain. So maybe this is not too much of a concern.
To return to the originally intended subject matter of this post, I thought it might be nice to write a little about my music library. Since I got my iPhone, despite this forcing me to use iTunes which is possibly the worse piece of software ever, I have listened to a lot more music (although in the mornings on the way to school I usually listen to good old fashioned Radio 4 FM for the Today Programme) on my frequent and long bus journeys to and from school. This has meant that my library of music has tended to become a bit repetitive since it’s not really very big and it doesn’t get added to very often. Until a few months ago, my music consisted of soundtracks and computer game music with very few exceptions. While I still have all this music, it is a pretty static set. Unless I play a new game that I think has really good music, or see a good film that releases its soundtrack (my favourite music remains the Lord of the Rings film scores by Howard Shore, truly fantastic), it won’t expand, and I end up stuck with a small selection of tracks that means that they lose their appeal for the above described reasons. So I’ve since added to the collection a bit from old CDs in my parents’ collections, things that I can remember growing up hearing and liking: the likes of U2, Savage Garden, Gretchen Peters and the Lighthouse Family. I’ve also got a few other things like a couple of Brent Simon songs, and most of Jonathan Coulton’s lyrically powerful music. But this leaves me without a source of good music that I can draw from to keep a good flow of new material.
This has changed recently. On one boring Friday afternoon in Physics, my friend Tom and I exchanged lists of music to lookup and play. I suggested various tracks that can be found on YouTube for him to listen to, and he gave me some things to look up from his personal area of interest, Drum and Bass music. A complete departure from my usual content, I was told repeatedly that I wouldn’t at all like it and I didn’t really expect to, but was interested in taking a look. At first, the various computer generated tunes failed to appeal as anything more than background sound while working which I could definitely appreciate. But now, after listening to more ‘chaones’ (== tunes) and mixes, I think I should probably admit to the world, however much it pains me to do so, that I’ve become quite the Drum and Bass nerd. I’m not bothered about the clubbing (obviously, I don’t see why anyone would want to go to such places) and insufficiently restrained volume controls that tend to come with such music, but simply the actual creativity that goes into tracks. Finally I have something that I can add to and collect and enjoy. My vocabulary and knowledge of the big players and classic tracks is very much lacking at this point, but I seem to be leaning more towards the liquid subgenre which is melodic, tuneful work that is very much reminiscent of the soundtracks in my collection already. My two current favourite tracks that I would be happy to include in a classics playlist are Hurt You by Chase & Status and Beautiful Lies by B-complex, an unreleased track from an unknown artist that has really set off some shockwaves.
I’m not entirely sure what it is about DnB that appeals to me, but I have been known to laugh at those who attempt to pin down, particularly in classical music, any kind of specific meaning in work. Uncharacteristically, I shall simply state that I like certain bits, certain notes of songs and leave it there. With few lyrics in this genre and with track and artist names that are essentially whatever sounds vaguely memorable, there is very little else to go on. So I’m trying to add some more variety to what I listen to, and I think I’m succeeding, aside from finding myself playing certain favourites over and over as before. And I very much enjoy laughing at the culture and vocabulary: ‘massive’ and ’shout’ and other such nonsense that I’m not convinced anyone actually buys into. I would also like to add some more classical music to my library, so I need to find a friend to feed me suggestions. Maybe instead of getting better at listening to the music I already have, I’ll just get as much as possible and feed the roaring furnace of consumption of it in my mind. Excellent.
Refreshing an old idea
I have long been a fan of the saying to the effect that it is entirely fruitless to cry over spilt milk, meaning that if one has no control over something then there is no point in worrying about it. This seems at first thought entirely obvious and I imagine most try to follow it, but very often fail: psychologically it is very easy to worry or to fool oneself into thinking that one has some modicum of control over something enough to justify said worrying, or maybe that by worrying one creates some kind of control. I don’t know, I’m not a psychologist, but the saying in itself seems to hold a fair amount of merit. This week I’ve decided to try to make a renewed push in my own life to follow it. While this is all too easy to say and far more difficult to follow, I think I’ve been succeeding in it lately. This half term holiday has not been brilliant in several ways so far, and yet I have managed to remain very positive and rational. Firstly, it is already Thursday and the amount of work I have got done is not fantastic. More importantly, I have completed a large integration exercise over several days and yet did not achieve a fantastic score (since improved upon by fixing silly mistakes). Crucially, I found myself starting at certain problems for an hour, requiring help from a friend for one and being forced to work backwards from a computer-generated answer for another, and also being unable to see how my numerically identical answer can be rearranged into the form in the answers in the back of the textbook for another of the seventy-eight questions. So I’ve been dissapointed: I imagine others in the class will not have spent so many hours (I reckon about fifteen but several of those were with heavy IM distractions. Still far too long) on it and will not have found certain ones so hard, and may have even done the one I had to work backwards on. However, I am not letting this bother me. As I have written about many times before, I have a constant tendency to be unhappy with my academic performance unless everyone else is doing far worse than me, something I am ashamed of. But this is just an irrational circular argument. So I intend to ignore it, for there is no use metaphorically crying over it. So far I am succeeding. Now I merely have to reconcile my usual cynicism with such a policy.
Another multiply dissapointing thing that has occured this holiday is repeated crashes from various causes of Warcraft III roleplaying games, run over a VPN with a few friends. Warcraft III, as many will know, is a strategy game at heart involving various traditional fantasy races battling it out. It’s an old game but is still incredibly popular despite there now being many more fantasy games out there without the limitations of the engine. This is primarily because of the huge number of custom Warcraft III maps/levels available, since the game’s included world editor is supremely flexible; these then get distributed through playing online. There is Defence of the Ancients or DotA, with a massive cult following, that is used in international tournaments. One struggles to find a game of DotA where you don’t find yourself being automatically kicked for not being on their list of safe players (these are people who won’t disconnect and ruin a game since there is no way for players to take the slots of those who leave). There are various other quick-fire games of some skill: in Sheep Tag, some players as sheep construct farms with narrow passages between them that the other players, the wolves, attempt to destroy in order to catch the sheep. If the sheep survive for a certain length of time (as long as they are not all captured, captured sheep can be released by teammates) then they win.
Then there are the roleplaying maps, my favourites. There are some fixed maps with clever methods for saving heroes so that games can be continued, featuring the usual simple quests and collectable equipment and skills. But it is the entirely flexible RP maps that I most enjoy. These have gone through several generations of names and improvements but the most commonly played at the moment seems to be Secrets of the Depths RP, or SotDRP, though they all work pretty much the same and in fact use much the same terrain or actual playing environment. In an RP game, the player uses various commands to create cities, towns, camps, armies, navies and heroic adventurers with no limits on resources. The game then has two clear aspects. The first, which is probably the one I prefer, is constructing bases and camps and other such niceties to set a backdrop for the story. By rotating, resizing and making invisible structures, intricate and attractive creations can be wrought. Then the actual roleplaying begins, which is effectively like DnD or Exalted with props and effects. The system allows you to name and speak as characters, and while it may seem like an odd way of telling a story it actually turns out to be a great deal of fun, especially when it is with people you couldn’t conveniently meet up with otherwise. The crashes, then, stem from the limitations of Warcraft III as a game. Because RP maps are such a massive hack, Warcraft III’s saving of multiplayer games (a feature absent from many other games which is a shame) doesn’t work fantastically well. And if someone disconnects, that is it: there is no way to get them back in. So the dissapointment stems from losing all the building done, which can take several hours. But I intend to push on with the recurring plot a friend and I have established.
Turnings on the path of life
I’ve been meaning to blog about a few things that have happened lately but I don’t seem to be able to settle to do anything that requires some expenditure of effort at the moment. Even simple e-mail replies to friends are taking days because I just don’t seem to be able to get them done. My posting frequency on here has returned to the pathetic once a month on average. It’s rather rubbish, but I suppose given that it’s now the holidays it’s alright and I hope to be back to my usual form by the time 2008 draws to a close. I’ll have to as of course the usual January exams loom and I shall be revising hard for those. For the past year my school has had a building site on the field as a new school is constructed as the current one really is falling apart. We’re finally moving into it after this Christmas holiday, but said exams are due to take place in the mobile buildings that form part of the old site. According to a charismatic religious education teacher I know, the one that my maths exams are to take place in has been recently nicknamed ‘the fridge’ so we’re going to have an interesting time with that.
One reasonably major change that happened recently is that I’ve stopped living at my father’s house during the week. Since my parents split up about ten years ago, my sister and I have switched between the houses with a very complex system that no-one else seems to understand, spending time at both during weekdays and then alternating over weekends – and carrying or sending piles of stuff (mainly school books) back and forth. For years I have got on poorly with my father and have tried to get away from living there whenever I can, and now that I’ve turned eighteen my mother says she isn’t going to stop me anymore and is happy for me to live more at her house during the week. So now I only go to my father’s alternate weekends. I’m obviously not entirely happy with this turn of events: it’s a bit rubbish that I dislike living with one of my parents and my sister thinks I’m being very selfish. I don’t think this is a very fair assessment. I’ve done it because the general atmosphere in the house is rarely pleasant as my father and I clash continuously over trivial things and this is especially true on week nights when I’m dashing off to ringing, coming home late due to after school activities and trying to get homework done. My sister and I have an even worse relationship (always have) so to me it makes sense to try and defuse this situation where I can by spending less time together. You may well disagree, and as I say I don’t think it’s ideal. But given that I think in the long run people will have a pleasanter time during the week, and it’s not as if I’m leaving entirely, it makes sense to me.
Something else that has happened is that I’ve been asked to leave freenode’s staff team because I clearly don’t have the time these days. I think I should have voluntarily given up the responsibility given that I knew this myself, but I just loved the place and the people too much to do that. So now I’ve been retired and told that if I do have more time in the future, I can always reapply. I’ve had a fantastic time with freenode. I’ve met some great and dedicated volunteers who I am definitely not going to lose touch with, and I’ve learnt a great deal about dealing with the more difficult users of the network. I do hope that I’ve been useful in the other direction and freenode has benefited somewhat. I will be sticking around the place and I am still on the network for SilentFlame and Wikimedia channels. I am going to try and focus more on my Wikimedia responsibilities with the extra time: I have jobs that are ideal for the amount of time I have and I shall very much try to do them effectively.
Far more exciting than the above notes is that I received a letter yesterday to inform me that I’ve got a place at Oxford at the college I wanted (Balliol) to study Maths and Philosophy for four years starting from October 2009. I just need, of course, to get the three As at A-level required but assuming I don’t do anything really stupid I think I’m on target to get this. This is fantastic news for me – I feel like I can do anything if I’ve managed this. After going down there to stay for three/four days to be interviewed about ten days ago, I really could imagine myself having a great time there. All the students looking after us were very nice, even if the sixth formers were loud and constantly trying to show off a lot of the time (I befriended two quieter Maths and Philosophy students and lo and behold all three of us got in!). The environment is of course very impressive in terms of the buildings, and the college library is such an amazing place to learn in. Accomodation is basic but fine and the food is okay but is served in a hall of epic proportions. The Balliol tutors who interviewed me were also lovely and I can imagine learning a great deal from them. And of course there are things such as the Oxford Union Debating Society, THE place for debating; all the usual university societies such as gaming and lots and lots of ringing; and it’s not at all a bad city to live in. After such a long time of waiting around and wanting to know I can finally imagine myself there with reasonable surety that it’ll happen.
The interview experience as a whole is a very convoluted affair. The amount of variation between Oxford and Cambridge and between the individual colleges is pretty astonishing at first. I stayed from Sunday evening until Wednesday evening and the vast majority of this consisted of sitting around and reading or revising material for interviews. Everyone gets an interview at the college of choice that they applied to and then at least one other at another college in order to try and give no disadvantage to applying to particular colleges which may, in any individual year, find themselves oversubscribed compared to others which may not have ‘enough’ applicants. The problem is that such extra interviews are arranged in a very haphazard way. When I arrived, the noticeboard holding interview details was about a metre wide and hadn’t extended too far with sheets of paper covered in names and times for various subjects. However, with people arriving and departing all the time and more and more interviews being arranged, the board spread out to the right rapidly, filling the common room’s noticeboard gradually across – including duplicates making it necessary to read everything to ensure you didn’t miss something aimed at you. I was also rung up when further interviews were arranged. By the end there was a dismissal notice up for all the maths and related courses but there was a special section at the bottom asking me to stay a bit longer to be interviewed again.
I ended up being interviewed by three colleges, but two of these had seperate interviews for maths and philosophy so I was interviewed five times in total which was rather a lot. Interviews themselves varied very widely. In maths, in one I was asked reasonably difficult but not exactly brain-mashing questions; in the second I merely chatted about recent topics studied and about the entrance test (which apparently I did pretty well on but I wasn’t told my percentage score); and in the third I was guided through a very hard problem (attempting to define a function of n that would tell you the number of zeroes on the end of n!; got there too). In philosophy, I was asked several technical questions relating to the problem of induction, and some interesting political and linguistic questions that I probably shouldn’t share on the web as they do like to reuse them.
And now it’s Christmas day and thanks to the above I have the best present possible. It’s been a very eventful year and it’ll likely be an equally eventful January, but I’m enjoying the fact that I have an absurd amount of family members over for Christmas right now before I start thinking about such things. In our tiny little three bedroomed semi, we have fifteen people: two grandparents, three aunties, two uncles, five cousins, one father and one sister to give their relations to me. My father’s girlfriend’s house is being used to house some and others are staying in a local bed and breakfast. I went ringing this morning while they all strained at the leash of present opening (I pointed out upon entry that calling people to worship is the whole point of the day *nods*) and now I’m at home writing this and am going to put the turkey in the oven for the non-vegetarians (i.e. the other fourteen people) while they’re out for a walk, which after walking all the way up to and back from my mother’s (fifty minutes each way) to get my Oxford letter yesterday and walking all the way to the cathedral this morning (about an hour) I think I’ve done enough.
A farewell to nonage
I’m not quite sure what I want to write, but I feel I should make some sort of post this night before my eighteenth birthday. As I type this I have roughly five hours until this collection of cells other collections of cells like to refer to as Sean will have been around for eighteen years, the age at which this reasonably liberal society decides that one becomes responsible for oneself and one’s own life, when some rights end and others begin. What will I have achieved in that time? I’ve been fantastically lucky to have been born into the rich western world. I’ve had every opportunity slung at me by enthusiastic family members, I’ve had a pretty good education, and I’m supposed to be planning for a successful career in the eyes of this utilitarian society. I seem to have set myself up as someone who questions and questions and never stops, occasionally suggesting an answer to the mix, and I am proud of the fact that I don’t let myself be influenced quite so heavily as others can be by social tyranny and confirmity. I try to improve things around this plane of existence where I can. In the end I may only be another human and I may be immensely insignificant in the eyes of eternity, but at least I can pretend otherwise and write away on this blog as if I am penning an epic tale.
But this is the point. There have been a thousand eighteenth birthdays like mine, there have surely been equally as many who will have realised this and thought themselves to be philosophically superior. As Charlie says in my favourite passage of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, his friends sitting in a cafe arguing over some issue are merely replaying a conversation had a thousand times before by similar groups. There is precious little originality, and there is precious little variety left in our lives. We laugh at the same jokes and we slot ourselves into the moulds available in society: our education systems turn out doctors and lawyers and managers who then pick from a similar choice of family circumstances. And then we lose our fervour, and become dull and routine, never changing as we plod away at the lives we have chosen. It is oft said that the young are idealistic and unsettled, and that we have ridiculous, ignorant ideas of how we want to shape the world. But this is something we must keep. If everyone just does something that’s gone before and occasionally something new is thought up, why bother? If we settle for what is practical and easy and we don’t instead try our hardest to bring variety and difference and change then you might as well collapse all generations into one and stamp a historical label upon them all as a era of repitition.
The above is probably full of fallacies and I’m sure I’m a hypocrite in so many ways here. If what we have right now isn’t good enough, and never will be according to this model, what is it that we are trying to reach? Why have variety if actually it doesn’t turn out to be very much different for individuals? Maybe by sticking with a routine and what one has one has merely reached the ideal situation. And maybe it is all irrelevent anyway as we all die, and it all ends. Maybe instead of worrying about trying to strike out we should try to achieve that fabled balance between the extremes of progress and conservation, and be satisfied in the knowledge that we’re never likely to divine some sort of eternal meaning, but trying makes us understand things better.
The above is what goes round and round in my head on a day to day basis. When I see a tired looking worker on the bus or a bored school pupil, when I see a stereotypical student or teenager or toddler just going through their lives, I consider these issues. I’m not going to try to pick a side here on the question of what the answer is here. All I would like to hope and set as a goal is that I keep thinking. If we ever put aside questions as unanswerable, there isn’t much point in having the questions at all. And in this again I’m just another would-be philosopher who likes to play around with questions, just someone else who secretly thinks themselves better for doing so, but knows they’re really not. So I’ll keep trying to be original and new, and I know I’ll never likely be happy with how that comes out, and I’ll never be satisfied with the quest. But a life with no certainty and permenance and purpose is infinitely better than one of false surety and contentment. There has to be something more than mere happiness. I suspect I’ll always hold that belief.
I won’t be any different tomorrow morning, but this was worth saying, even if it was a bit garbled and unclear – but that’s sort of the point. Good night.