Less can be more

This may be cliche, but if it is, it needs to be reiterated. When you have less things, you make more out of each of them. I’ve observed this specifically in video games. Those with 20+ games only play each game a few hours, while those with a few games play the games they have for hundreds of hours. Playing a game for only a few hours probably will not allow you to complete it or get the full potential enjoyment out of it. Playing a game for hundreds of hours will make you bored of it, but you will get the full potential enjoyment out of it and you may get very good at it.  An ideal amount of games could be less than 20. I have 11 games on my PC, but I only really need 3 of them. This doesn’t just apply to videogames. This can apply to how many friends you have, how much food you have, how much time you have, etc.. I’m not saying that 1 minute on a test is better than 1 hour; less is more only to a certain extent.

The Disregard for Copyright

I know the whole SOPA thing was a while ago but I remember how everyone was opposing it because it would block access to certain sites, limiting freedom of speech. It’s definitely important to protect the freedom of speech, but it’s too bad no one cares about respecting copyright. Imagine you are a composer. You work 18 hours a day for 6 months writing a song. At the end you are exhausted and almost broke. You release your song and it becomes a hit. You expect money to come flowing in, but you receive very little. Apparently websites were providing free downloads of your song. You only sold one set of sheet music for it because someone copied it and uploaded it for download. You continue writing awesome songs and making very little money. You die broke living in a cheap one-room apartment. So maybe SOPA’s violation of liberty outweighs its potential suppression of piracy. But regardless, artists should be respected and given credit for the things they produce.

Mainstream culture

Everywhere on youtube and other places on the internet I hear people criticizing mainstream culture. For example, one youtube comment on a classical music video read “This is real music, not like the crap you hear today.” In this post I will discuss mainstream culture, specifically video games, music, and literature because those are the categories I know the best. I am not necesarily criticizing it. I will try to figure out why it is popular yet hated by so many other people.

Videogames: CoD

The most mainstream videogame is obviously CoD. I recently played MW3 on my PC during a steam free trial. What struck me about it was how simple it was. I was playing Team Deathmatch, and it was basically 2 teams running around a tiny map shooting each other with machine gun variants. It was also really laggy. MW3 on lowest settings was laggier than Red Orchestra 2 on highest settings on my PC, which has a 2.1 GHz processor.

Anyway, MW3 is easy to learn and play. Despite its popularity, especially for Xbox live, I’ve heard many other people say that it’s highly overrated. Some have even compared it to Half Life, which I think is unfair because Half Life is a single player linear FPS while CoD is multiplayer based. The concept of it is definitely really simple, especially compared to other competitive multiplayer FPS like Team Fortress 2 and RO2. TF2 is one of my favorite games. In TF2, you have to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your class and the class of your enemy. Combat is rather chaotic, with soldiers rocket-jumping and inflicting wide-radius splash damage. It also requires skill and practice. In MW3, oftentimes the deciding factor between who dies is who starts shooting first. In RO2, maps are much larger, and combat is primarily long range sniping with rifles. RO2 is so much more interesting and realistic than CoD. If you expose yourself, you will get sniped. It’s like being in a real WWII battle. In summary, TF2 and RO2 are a lot more complex and more fun than CoD.

So why is CoD so popular then? 1) Because it’s so simple; running around firing a machine gun. 2) It’s well-suited to Xbox, which is the most popular console. TF2 is also on Xbox, but it’s more popular on PC.

Music: Pop

Pop music, like other types of music, is the combination of melodies and voice. It’s hard to describe pop music, so I’ll compare it to other forms of music. It is more musical than rap, less manly than rock, and is fast-paced. As a result, it is more enticing to the majority of people than rap and rock. The lyrics tend to focus on love. Pop music is also a lot more attractive than classical music because it takes less effort to understand and enjoy. Its melodies are more distinct and repetitive.  Technically I can’t say it’s more fast-paced but it feels that way. It’s hard to explain in words why pop music is initially more attractive than classical, but I hope you understand the feeling. Pop music is designed to be catchy but not necessarily good. Nowadays, music needs to be catchy to be popular in mainstream culture. Classical music takes more attention span and patience to listen to. Orchestral classical music is also more complex, with different instruments playing harmonies to complement the melody. Pop music is also popular because it has lyrics. This makes it easy to sing with friends or by yourself. You can hum classical music to yourself, but I don’t see people humming classical music together. Pop music also emphasizes the lyrics over the background music. Especially in this section, I must reiterate that I am not necesarily criticizing mainstream culture. Personally, I like pop music.

Literature: The Hunger Games

Mainstream literature appeals to two topics: romance and violence. And if you’ve read The Hunger Games or seen the movie, you’ll know that both of these are prevalent in it. The romance is Peeta and Katniss falling in love, and the violence is the Hunger Games. Everyone has a natural tendency to read something easy and fun like the The Hunger Games rather than something harder and more boring like 1984, another dystopian novel. But you would get a lot more out of 1984 than you would out of The Hunger Games.

As I mentioned at the beginning, there is an increasing backlash against mainstream culture. Rarely do I hear people praising CoD. It’s very popular, but few of its players attempt to share how good it may be with others (maybe because almost everyone plays it). Pop music is used primarily for parties and videos. It isn’t actually listened to that much by choice, even though it is broadcasted on radios.

Basically mainstream culture takes little effort to understand/enjoy. It delivers instant-gratification and does not require a long attention span. But the things that take more effort to enjoy are ultimately more satisfying.

Extremism

I’ve heard many people blaming religion for causing wars and terrorism. You can’t blame religion as a whole for the actions of religious extremists. Anything in extreme can be as bad as religious extremism. For example, socialism in extreme is communism, which is just as destructive as religious extremism; it caused the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Cold War. You can’t blame socialism for these wars the same way you can’t blame religion for violence.

Procastination: Stress vs. Logic

I find myself putting off daily assignments I need to do. If I have more time than I need to do something, I usually fool around for a few hours on Youtube until I  until I have barely enough time to do the work. The simple explanation is I’m really lazy. Because of my laziness, I put things off until I really need to do them. I’m only driven by stress, not will power, to do work. Procastination is yet another example of the conflict between logic and emotion.

Here’s an example. Let’s pretend it is Tuesday and I have a project that takes 8 hours to do due next Monday. Right now, Monday seems a long way off, so I don’t feel stressed out about doing the project. I know that it would be easier to work on the project a little each day rather than do all of it on Sunday. However, I lack the discipline and will power to force myself to do this. The week goes by, and the deadline for the project approaches closer and closer. On Saturday, I decide to work on the project a little, but lose focus after working on it for an hour. After all, I still have tomorrow to work on it. Then Sunday morning comes and I realize that the project is due tomorrow. I begin working on it, only to realize that it actually takes 10 hours to do. I work on it frantically all day, finally finishing it at 2 am on Monday morning. At the end, I breathe a sigh of relief and wish I had worked on it earlier.

In summary, procastination is the result of being controlled by stress, rather than logic.

Maximizing the potential of our resources

The U.S. middle class is too wealthy. For the past years of my life, I have been mindlessly disposing of extra food/resources that I could not consume. For example, ordering large portions at restaurants and not finishing them. I remember eating half a sandwich at school lunch, running out of time, and then throwing away the rest. The owners of restaurants prefer to sell large portions probably to make more money. They are unconcerned about wasting food. We take it for granted that we have a steady food supply, and as a result, we are careless with it. It is ironic that we are wasting so many resources while people are starving all around us. I’ve heard many times that there is not enough farmland on the earth to support the earth’s growing population. This statement contradicts our use of resources in the U.S.. The food supply or money used to buy the food must be redistributed internationally to the people who are starving. With less food, we will be forced to utilize our remaining food more efficiently and to waste less. Restaurants will have to sell smaller portions to prevent wasting. This way we can maximize the potential of our resources. This also applies to the use of water, energy, etc.. It’s a repetitive trend in history for wealth to be concentrated in a minority, but that doesn’t mean we should waste our wealth.

Herobrine

Herobrine is a mythical NPC in Minecraft. His existence can be disproved by going into the minecraft.jar and looking in the folder with the mob skins. There is a skin for Steve, ghasts, cows, etc. but no Herobrine skin. Despite this clear proof that Herobrine does not exist, many players stubbornly continue to believe in him. There are numerous posts on the minecraft forums about Herobrine sightings. These players who believe in Herobrine are experiencing an irrational emotion – fear that overrides logic. This is the same emotion behind superstitions like black cats and broken mirrors causing bad luck. This emotion is mirrored by irrational hope in good luck. Basically, logic is not dominant in humans, but is in conflict with the powerful emotions of hope and fear.

Abolish ageism

Ageism has some basis. In general, 20 year olds are smarter than 10 year olds. But not necessarily. One specific example of ageism that is unacceptable and must stop is the discrimination of freshmen by the rest of the high school. I’m one to make big deals out of small things, but this is no small thing. Unless you consider it a small thing to be beaten to death by larger students upon your entrance into a completely foreign place. It’s true that hazing only occurs in extreme and rare circumstances. But hazing is based on the premise that upperclassmen are superior to freshmen, which is not necesarily true; there are many freshmen who are in trig while there are many sophmores who are in geometry. Even if the upperclassmen do not engage in hazing, they tend to look down on and make fun of freshmen. Several times, when my class had been sophmores for perhaps two or three months, I witnessed other sophmores saying “I hate freshmen,” even though they had been freshmen only a few months ago. One sophmore who was talking with a freshman called him “freshman” with a derogatory tone and asserted that he was superior just because he was a sophmore. Sophmores tend to immediately transfer the oppression they received as freshmen onto the new freshmen. They might be just going with the flow, or they might be trying to boost their egos. I don’t think that there is a low self-esteem, healthy self-esteem, and high self-esteem. I think it’s just unhealthy and healthy self-esteem. Those with unhealthy self-esteems are naturally drawn to ageism.

The measure of a person is how well they can control their irrational impulses

Anger is an emotion that everyone experiences. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with experiencing anger. To break it down, anger is when you don’t get something you believe you deserve. For example, a wolf would be angry if he caught a deer but another wolf stole the deer from him. The problem is when anger is expressed through violence, whether that be physically harming people or objects, or even just yelling or cussing. It would be appropriate for the wolf to go after the other wolf and forcibly take back his food, but it wouldn’t be alright to do something like that in our society. The impulse to express one’s anger through violence is just one example of an irrational impulse humans experience. More on violence in the next post. Freud was probably the first to notice this difference between animals and humans: that humans are expected to control their irrational impulses. This ability distinguishes barbarians from those who are civilized. Obviously, those who can remain calm even when they are enraged are considered “civilized.” Now, to end with a video by Uberhaxornova that illustrates how NOT to behave when you’re angry:

Hello!

Welcome to my blog. Here I will be posting my random thoughts. Thanks for reading.