Friday, August 29, 2008

Kotaku dan Rihanna



Besok tepat tanggal 31 agustus. Kenapa? Besok adalah hari terakhir di bulan perjuangan. Itu kata orang. Itu kata media. Merah putih di mana-mana. Bahkan sampai ada warnet yang memutarkan lagu-lagu perjuangan sebagai backsound selama bulan agustus ini. Niat banget yah!
Sebagai music addict yang sudah termasuk dalam kategori parah, sikap apatis saya sudah berkembang ke segala lini kehidupan. Kecuali perkembangan track-track lagu dashsyat yang dirilis setiap hari tentu saja. Apatis, kenapa? Karena saya selalu berpikir emang ngaruh kalo saya ikut berpikir? Emang ada yang berubah ketika saya ikut peduli? Selama ini yang menjadi jawaban atas semua pertanyaan itu adalah TIDAK! Tidak akan ada yang berubah. Jadinya pusat dunia saya sedari dulu adalah track-track lagu yang membius yang masuk ke dalam kepalaku dan membuatku berhalusinasi plus mengalami degradasi kenyataan yang terkadang tidak bisa dibedakan dengan drama yang berjalan di dalam kepala.
Saya yang lebih menghapal review lagu Avril lavigne dari album pertama sampai album girfriend yang so-bitchy, saya yang mengetahui fakta bahwa ketika umbrella milik rihanna dirilis, saya adalah orang yang tergila-gila padanya. Saya yang lebih mengetahui track umbrella dirilis dan diremix oleh 11 orang yang tidak bertanggung jawab, mulai dari mandy moore, marie digbie, vanilla sky, swivel, eminem, dan masih banyak lagi. Saya yang dengan lugas berteriak dan menulis mengenai album minutes to midnight-nya linkin park dan cerita mereka tentang global warming. Saya mengetahui semuanya. Sedangkan sejarah?
Terus terang saya adalah orang yang paling tidak senang dengan pelajaran sejarah. Mulai dari jamannya pelajaran PSPB (hahahaha, bahkan saya sudah lupa kepanjangannya!) sampai pelajaran sejarah di SMA. Semuanya menimbulkan trauma tersendiri. Bagaimana kita harus menghapal tahun, tanggal, tempat, nama, dan masih banyak peristiwa penting lainnya. Mungkin bukan sejarahnya yang harus dipermasalahkan, tetapi bagaimana sejarah itu disajikan. Muak! Itulah perasaan yang saya dapatkan ketika harus membaca banyak sekali buku teks dan menghapal nama-nama pahlawan (halah!, bilang aja kalo gak mampu), ditambah lagi guru yang tidak mampu menjabarkan dengan gamblang dan nyaman mengenai peristiwa di negeri kita sendiri.
”baca saja di buku terbitan ini, bla bla bla...”
So last year honey! Coba saja ketika pelajaran sejarah dibuat semenarik mungkin dengan film dokumenter ataupun dengan cara-cara yang lebih bisa menarik perhatian. Dijamin, kita sendiri akan concern dan mau tahu apa sih yang terjadi pada bangsa kita pada waktu yang lalu.
Saya menjadi miris sendiri, ketika melihat keadaan dari museum kota makassar. Bukannya sekedar membandingkan dengan museum yang ada di film national treasure. Gak mungkin lah. Cuman kok rasanya mengenaskan banget yah? Melihat peninggalan catatan kota kita dalam keadaan yang tidak terawat. Bahkan ada ruangan yang sebagian koleksinya harus dipindahkan karena atapnya bocor! Ataukah memang itu yang menjadi gambaran perjalanan kota kita? Banyak tempat-tempat bersejarah yang hilang dan kita tidak pernah mengetahui lagi bagaimana rupa aslinya.

Sedikit ironis memang, ketika mendengar slogan salah satu kandidat walikota disebut oleh bapak pemandu di museum kota. Sebegitu berharapkah pada janji-janji yang mungkin tidak akan ditepati? Padahal balaikota yang baru dibangun menghabiskan banyak sekali dana untuk dipugar dan dengan alasan untuk memudahkan pelayanan. Mestinya bisa sebanding dengan beberapa rupiah yang dikeluarkan, minimal untuk memugar tempat ini. Hmm, bukankah museum juga berguna agar kita mengetahui bagaimana asal usul kita?
Selama ini saya mengetahui benteng somba opu hanya sebagai tempat bermain saja. Ya, tempat bermain yang besar. Mengingat masa kecil ketika menyusuri tanggul, mencari ikan, sampai berenang di pinggir sungai jeneberang di dekat jembatan. Itu hanyalah sekeping memori tentang benteng itu. Tahu apa saya bahwa ternyata tempat itu adalah pusat kota makassar dulunya? Tahu apa saya bahwa benteng somba opu jatuh ketika peta rahasia kemudian dibocorkan dan belanda mengetahui isi benteng somba opu? Tidak ada. Saya mengenal somba opu sebagai tempat bermain saya dengan teman-teman masa kecil. Ketika jiwa petualang kami lebih besar, kami akan menyusuri setiap jalan di benteng somba opu, naik perahu menyeberang ke gontang, sampai tersesat di tanjung merdeka. Itulah perasaan kami dulu ketika menyusuri setiap bagian dari benteng somba opu. Sekarang? Sepi. Hanya ketika 17 agustusan saja tempat ini ramai seminggu. Ramai dengan stand-stand pameran. Ramai dengan pengunjung, dan ramai dengan sampah. Apakah ada yang tahu, bagaimana cerita benteng somba opu itu?
Apakah perkataan saya sudah terdengar begitu sinis? Saya tentu saja tidak akan membuat pembelaan mengenai tempat-tempat yang kami kunjungi pada blogger peduli sejarah kemarin. Saya tidak akan membuat pembelaan bahwa saya pun kurang mengetahui sejarah kota saya sendiri. Miris memang, ketika sesuatu yang sudah lalu akan dilupakan begitu saja, dan besok tidak akan ada yang mengetahui bentuk kota makassar zaman dahulu.
Semoga rasa nasionalisme dan rasa percaya bahwa kita sadar dan mau melihat budaya kita dahulu tidak akan berakhir di penghujung bulan agustus ini. Bukan hanya euforia sesaat saja. Meneriakkan sejarah, mengibarkan bendera. Tetapi yang lebih penting bagaimana kita menjaga dan mengenang perkembangan kota makassar kita tercinta, agar kelak kita bisa meneruskan kepada anak cucu kita bagaimana hebatnya benteng somba opu. Betapa besarnya karebosi dahulu. Betapa mengerikannya menyeberang di jembatan kayu ke benteng soma opu dulu. Betapa banyak cerita mistis di benteng rotterdam. Dan betapa enak batagor dan es kelapa yang ada di samping benteng rotterdam.
Toh, dikemudian hari saya juga tidak akan bercerita mengenai rihanna, mengenai avril lavigne, dan mengenai linkinpark kepada generasi berikutnya, tetapi cerita mengenai kota makassar kita yang tercinta.

--------
Soundtrack for this memory,,

Love can fade, can break away,
can be forgotten, but not replaced
You might lose hope, you might lose faith
but don't throw it all away, cause your afraid

Jamestown Story – Forgotten

Spesial untuk bangsaku, dan lebih special lagi untuk kotaku. You are not forgotten. Believe me.

Apocalypse Then



Wowsers. File this under "shouldn't we talk about the weather," but we got hammered with a ridiculous thunder / rain / lightning storm. The sky was exploding, grape-sizes ice pellets falling from the sky, the celestial works. Here's a sad attempt at capturing the majesty on digital film (a little less shaky than above):


Cool stuff. I took a little video, and while I recognize that watching a rainstorm on the internet is not exactly, you know, the evolution of dance, it will give you a flavor of the show:


So that was the day AZ flooded. As you can no doubt imagine, the weathermen's heads were exploding. "This is not my beautiful happy sunny face! This is not my beautiful exploding red thermometer! How did I get here?"

Fun times in the valley of the Airborne Thunderstorm Event.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Everything In Its Right Place

Let the record show that on August 27th, 2008, at approximately 7:13 AST (Azzy Standard Time), one Beck aka The Beck aka Fisto Ferro said, "You have to write on your blog."

Um, okay. The record, as it were, now shows that. Imperative and response, accomplished simultaneously! Ha ha, Beck, I just doubled my productivity!

So yep, the first three official on the clock days of Nyetian grad school time have passed me by, so I now feel somewhat comfortable in making some kind of cohesive statement on the experience. The time itself has been dominated by reading a variety of articles, ranging from semi-dense analytic stuff (Causal Decision Theory, essentially a logic-coded evaluation of how rational decisions are made, involving sentences like V(A) = P (C|A) * V (C & A) and the like (rough translation: the value of an action equals the probability of a particular outcome C given that action multiplied by the value of both the outcome C and the action A) ) to USA Today articles on how many scientists are selling their souls to become patent lawyers. Cool stuff, and at this point in the game I have a lot of freedom as to what to pursue, so I finished a book that I had been reading anyways (The Mind's I, a collection of essays / fiction pieces on the brain, mind, self and artificial intelligence, edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennet). I've also been quickly accumulating a list of "Oh crap, I need to read that" articles and books, and in a very short time I think I've scheduled the remainder of my time on earth. What is excellent about this is that while it is difficult / challenging and all that, I would be hard-pressed to call it work. Which I think is like, the meaning of life or something. (Licks finger, touches self on shoulder, makes sizzling sound to signify own hotness). So that's sweet. I'm sure things will shift gears a bit as my time becomes more structured and papers need to be written and such, but for now, I'm in a la-la land of "pursue what you will").

As a consequence, though, I'm having a little bit of what I'll go ahead and dub "The Tetris Effect." If you've ever played Tetris, or Rattler Race, or any game that involves pattern recognition for hours on end, you start to see the patterns outside the context of the game. The walls start crawling, and every set of bricks turns into a Tetris block or a maze. This weird-ass phenomenon also happens with games like Grand Theft Auto, incidentally, where you don't exactly see blocks in groups of four, but you do have a creepy desire in the real world to steal cars and murder prostitutes. I may have mentioned a similar academic phenomenon with chemistry - I specifically remember driving around Jamaica Plain during our intensive summer of chemistry up at Tufts, seeing a sign that said "NO PARKING" and thinking "Nitric Monoxide Parking? What the Hell?" It's happening again here, only the consequence is that after reading in a very critically intense fashion for hours on end, you start to pick up on all the little logical flaws and lack of rigor in people's everyday speech. For example, when one of the many scantily clad fleshbots* that ASU seems to celebrate walked by and said, "I don't know if she's like literally a bitch," I immediately start questioning whether it is even logically coherent to be literally like something, like some kind of literal simile.

Ha, ha, "like" some kind of literal simile. That was cheesy, I know. But it kinda wrecks your every day and/or academic experience - a more realistic example is when listening to a law lecture, I can't help but notice all the biases and assumptions going into every claim - for example, while we were talking about fundamental aspects of science, the professor stated that "Sometimes when a scientist encounters data that challenges their hypothesis, they'll just change the hypothesis. That can be a pretty slippery move. Of course, sometimes that's legitimate." The problem there is that we're talking about science, a process wholly geared towards proving what's legitimate and what isn't, and we're more precisely determining how exactly that process makes claims toward being legitimate - so you're invoking a kind of mysterious, external legitimation process when you claim that an act is sometimes okay and sometimes not. At the very least you need to define criteria for that. On some common sensical level, it's clear when a scientist is changing their hypothesis within bounds that seem "legitimate," but science is not supposed to be rooted in common sense - in fact, much of the business is challenging common sense. Anyways, this stuff gets particular and maybe boring really quick, but it's a pretty solid demonstration of how I'm starting to hear ideas right now.

* - Quick aside for the Fleshbot Failures: Oh Toto, we are not at Rice any more. For one thing, Toto has a pink tote bag and Ralph Lauren sunglasses on. Damn. Rice was extraordinarily laid back w/r/t style and fashion, a phenomenon that I know aggravated the few on campus who preferred to primp for class. The basic "t-shirt and shorts" uniform was constant, boys did not gel their hair and girls did not where heels to class. Etc. Tufts (undergrad) was a bit of a change from that, as the look at me I'm pretty factor was slightly amped, but really, when a lot of the year is spent in freezing weather, there's still a fair amount of "screw this, I'm going hoodie today." Of course, when the sun came out in spring, the nice clothes (and, er, lack thereof) popped right back out. So imagine, if you will, what it's like to walk around in a place where it's 105 all the time. Where walking to your next class necessarily involves sweat. The strategy appears to be to wear as little as possible, presumably a complex social statement against Victorian norms and/or a sociopolitical effort to help factory workers in Malaysia work fewer hours (because they need to produce significantly less fabric).

I mean, egads, seriously people. And the girls are bad, but the boys are no better, as the posturing and incidental flexing and etc. goes on all day long. It's like a gigantic club scene for a large portion of the student body (I, incidentally, now finally understand where the expression "student body" comes from). I mean, to each his or her own, but given the sweat, the lack of clothing, the high fashion and the general air of asunder looks and howyoudoin, walking around campus is like macheting my way through a phermone jungle. It's intense.

This is all enhanced by the phenomenon of "ASU, brought to you by" that understandably goes on. It's a semi-captive audience with quite a bit of time and disposable income, and the hawks - be they the banks or the clubs or the Burger Kings - descend accordingly. You can't walk ten feet in the general vicinity of the Memorial Union without encountering some kind of corporate booth, free handout, game where you can win a car, and on. I was trying to just get a drink yesterday - a coke zero, you know, just for the taste of it - when a pretty aggressive fleshbot tried to get me to play Plinko to win a free mp3 player with a t-shirt and a bank account. Wha? Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives; I declined.

I've gotta get going here (this post bridged the night and it's now time to get going down to campus again), but this is just the start of the account. I'll write a bit more about the actual goings on of the last week tonight. So you have "Orientation: The Musical" to look forward to. Warning: as you may have guessed, grad students, particularly grad students with any kind of phil bent, can be a little weird. As a consequence, my musical is going to have a selection called "four hours and 33 minutes of awkward silence," which sums up at least the subjective experience of one of my first orientation meetings. Details later.

Have a groovy day, folks. I'm off... to the Ethics Lab!!!

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Lacking Content

Nothing to see here. Move along.

The original intent of ye olde Ballad was a rambling account of news and things going on, plus a way to update things on the blog proper. Like reviews I'm going to write and the like. (Note: E, E, and E; The King of Kong, and Drop City all on their respective ways). It just so happens that not a lot has occurred of note recently; I'm mainly counting the days until i get started philosciencing (sciosophing?) and spending quite a bit of time chilling with the dogs. So rather than enlighten you w/r/t today's poop count, or the disemboweled rabbit outside that has been attracting oh so much attention lately, I've neglected to post for the sake of posting. Things are going to change dramatically soon, so I'm sure you'll get plenty of whining, minor key ballads in the near future. Until then, I apologize for the dearth. maybe I'll must on something tomorrow. Maybe not.

I will throw out there that I played Ultimate on Wednesday morning and had a blast. A dad named Kevin brought his four kids, aged 14, 15, 16 and 17 (all blond, home-schooled, and the oldest is going to BYU in a couple of weeks. Name that religion!), out to play, and it was just awesome. They were all skilled, knew not just basics but some finer strategic points, and brought a lot of energy. Big fun, and at the end of the morning (we play from about 6:45-7:50 for work-related purposes), we had about seven "Last Point!"s. "No, this is the last one, we swear." "Okay, just one more, but THEN we really have to go." Felt like we were all twelve on a sandlot somewhere, in some made up golden era childhood that none of us had. FUN. Great to see younguns with throws and layouts and all that. And they were competitive, no goofy stuff. Perfecto. On that note, I'm going to go play a night game in a few hours which will hopefully match the experience. I doubt it, but we'll see.

Like the rest of America, Beck and I have been plopping on the couch and watching Michael "Overrated" Phelps et al in China all week. Good times. I made some baked eggplant and French bread pizza last night to enhance the experience. Yum.

But really, that's about it. Oh, I'm listening to "The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified" right now, an all time album. Highly recommend it. Beck is obviously not home from work yet.

More coming, I swear. Entire posts on the joys of home ownership. It's gonna be SEXY.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Triforce!

First off, check this! Some profanity afterwards, but the first few minutes of this video contain blindfolded shreddage from famed Bonnie Situation lead guitarist Aaron Alonzo. Yeah, you can get this at Christastrophe, but I just wanted to have electric ambrosia dripping from my blog, too:



Morel links:

International Baseball is Not Actually Baseball.
The Complete Calvin & Hobbes! And you can search the text! (Please Note: That is obviously a severe violation of copyright, and could disappear at any moment. So, yeah: that'll teach you to type in 12 years of C&H strips by hand).
For iPJ, we have: Calvin & Jobs. And another!
Serious NerdFun: try to name the 100 most common words in the English language in five minutes.
This is simultaneously dumb and awesome:



Microbes 1, Humanity 0.
A pretty solid history of internet memes. (This just in: lists of memes is now a meme).
Pretty ridiculous account of plagiarism.
A reasonable attempt at humor with regard to our dying culture.
It was 20 years ago today a few days ago.
Beautiful pics of the Olympic CHINA IS A GREAT COUNTRY I LOVE IT Opening Ceremonies
Get yer SLIMEBALL on.
This is a headline.
Georgia's always on my mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mind.
ESPN went all crazy and actually analyzed something. And then used it!
Remember MLR's perfect 10? No? Well:



Some others can be found here, too.
Oz, Oz, Ozzy or Ozzie?

Monday, August 11, 2008

¡Hombres Enojados!

Beck and I started watching a new television series called ¡Hombres Enojados! And I'm having real trouble understanding it! It's a Spanish television series without subtitles, and man do they say some funny things. I mean, "hola" instead of "hello?" "Musical" instead of "musical?" "Las vidas del pendejos" instead of "American Consumer Culture?" Oh, that crazy moon language.

What's worse is that the show is all about Spanish conquistadors and their boats. And how they were constantly trying to make their Spanish items marketable to a mass audience, like, "Hey everybody, buy our armored breastplates and matching helmets, they're bueno!" And they constantly mistreat their ships - I mean, really, it's like they don't even know that the ships are what keeps them afloat! Crazy! Loco! Mad! I mean, Enojado!

Now, I took Spanish in high school, and a little in college, so that's not the problem. The problem is that I have never been a conquistador, and I didn't live in the 15th-17th centuries, so I have no hope of possibly comprehending anything that's going on. It's like there's a wildly different social dynamic than the limited one to which I have become accustomed, and as a consequence, their plot elements baffle me. I mean, take the pilot episode, for example. Ponce de Leon is all walkin' around, saying woah, I don't know if I should sleep on this ship or that! What's right, what's wrong? And I'm all, "Dude, why don't you just take an airplane?"

I will say that it seems that the show sometimes makes it point a little too overtly. Like, we all know nowadays that chewing gun powder is bad for you because it can blow your face off. But, in like every scene, all the conquistadores chew gun powder! Man, they were so stupid back then. The ships chew gun powder and drink arsenic, too, even when they are carrying smaller ships. Stupid ships.

Beck has a somewhat different viewpoint on all of this. Allow me to try to represent it pictorially:



I think she might be onto something there. Then again, I can't relate to or comprehend this show, so it would probably behoove me not to comment.

So, I guess I recommend checking out ¡Hombres Enojados! Maybe if you are a conquistador, or a ship, and you lived in the appropriate century, and you speak the language, you'll enjoy it.