Sometimes when I close my eyes...

Sometimes when I close my eyes...

....I drift off into dreamless slumber.

....I drift off into chaotic dreamscapes.

....I think about the things I'm grateful for.

....I think about nothing.

....I think about how can I make the world a better place.

....I feel the pulses beat.

....I open them again and see the world around me.

Life is good

Life is great. Life is grand. Life is awesome. Life kicks ass. Life is the best. Life forever!

Would you make the world a worse place for a billion dollars?

What if you could make a billion dollars right now, but in exchange you had to do something which made the world a worse place for everyone else living here? Would you do it?

The Fear of the Dream

One of my fears is that one night I'll close my eyes and when I open them up the next morning, all I've accomplished will have been a dream, and I'll find myself in some other life, maybe a life of mediocrity, a "good enough" life where I have no push to improve myself. A life without all my wonderful friends...

Feeling the pain body

Somehow, I'm really feeling a little melancholic. I can't put my finger on it. There's certainly no reason for it. Maybe I should stop listening to these sappy 70s songs.

Newer calculators aren't always better

I still use the old TI-30Xa. It doesn't graph functions, and it lacks a lot of fancy features which, frankly, people don't actually use. On the other hand, with much fewer keys, it's much easier to do the basics really fast. I can crunch numbers fast as hell on this old retro calculator. Damn, now I sound like a nerd, don't I.

Going back in time with music

This is interesting. I've always been interested in 80s music, but somehow in the past few days I've been listening to a lot of 70s music. I never identified as a 70s music guy. What'll be next, 60s?

The smallest snowflake

Today I happened to be out when it was just starting to snow. The snow "flakes" were more like tiny balls of snow, not much larger than a plant seed. Now, the snow flakes are much bigger and I can see them swirling around outside my office window. If the flakes start small and get bigger, then does that mean there's some theoretical "smallest snowflake", if you take the limit as time goes toward some initial snow-starting point? Maybe it's more of a continuum, with snowflakes getting arbitrarily small the closer you go to this point, until there are snowflakes as big as a single atom, a single quantum, or even smaller.

Here's a challenge for all those FF7 players

Ok, so FF7 was famous for being way too easy. My friend and I beat it without equipping any freakin materia, and it wasn't even tough. Then on the internet I read about all kinds of crazy challenges people do, like beating the game with barely even any experience AND no materia AND no changing equipemt etc. etc. etc...

So here's a new challenge. Beat Emerald weapon with just a lowest-possible-level character, with the FROG status on throughout the fight.

It's already been done to Shinryuu and Omega from FF5, and it's pretty badass. Here's the Shinryuu video:

Dominos aren't as cool in practice as they are in video games

When I was young I was really into the character Magus from the video game Chrono Trigger. In part of the game, he appears as a mysterious "prophet" wearing a cool-ass cloak called a "domino". It's basically what the Grim Reaper always wears. So, somehow this lead to me saying I wished I had a domino within earshot of my parents. And that led to me getting a freakin domino for my birthday one year. (No, my parents aren't rich. Rather, it's just that I almost never used to let them know what I wanted, in part because I was a child who had very few material wants, which isn't to say I was spoiled, quite to the contrary. I was just a very "spartan" child.)

Domino's aren't nearly as cool in real life. Ugh. I felt really bad about that because I imagine it cost my parents a fortune.

The person who invented Mario Brothers

Assignment: discuss the following question. Who has the most influence on the world, all things added up. An average U.S. Congressman? Or the person who invented the Mario Brothers? This is a question which mankind might never unravel.

Things which rhyme with "purple"

So allegedly, nothing rhymes with "purple". But that's a load of crap. Just take any noun which rhymes with "purp", and follow it with "will". Then contract the "will" into "'ll". Some examples are burp'll, slurp'll, ... well, ok, I can't think of any other examples. So I guess there aren't many things which rhyme with purple, but there are some. I think I'm pretty sure I saw the "burp'll" example used in a rhyme in a book as a joke, so I can't claim full credit.

Cutting through lines of fate

Fate exists, but it's not as inevitable as people think. It'll only come to pass if people complacently allow it. A highly conscious individual can "cut" the lines of fate and alter fate. For example, if you're passing someone on the street, there are certain "lines" of fate saying you'll never meet them. But you can "cut" that fate by deliberately stopping them and making their acquaintance.

Beer ice cubes

Following up on my post about filling a humidifier with something besides water, how come noone's come up with the idea of beer ice cubes? It seems so obvious, and yet noone's done it! I mean, what better way to get more beer in a cup, than to make the "ice" cubes be beer themselves?

Things to try: filling a humidifier with things other than water

Ok, here's something I just thought about. What if you took a humidifier, but instead of filling it with water, you filled it with (insert blank here).

Could you fill a bunch of humidifiers with beer and revolutionize the whole idea of partying?

Etymology of the word, "Aghast"

Today, eating dinner with my girlfriend, I used the word "aghast" in conversation. I quickly saw she didn't know it (her first language is Japanese), so rephrased the sentence with an easier word. But then I explained the word "aghast" to her. And then, we talked about the general pattern.

In English, certain words are formed by taking a verb and adding "a" at the front to get a poetic sounding adjective. Some examples:

blaze --> ablaze
float --> afloat
sleep --> asleep
drift --> adrift
wake --> awake
live --> alive

And so on. I theorized that aghast was originally one of these adjectives, and that there must have originally been a word "ghast". This is an example where a word drops out of the language, but its derivative stays. Take for example the phrase "Merry Christmas". The word "Merry" is all but gone from the English language, and yet "Merry Christmas" will stay, probably for a long time.

It turned out I was basically correct about my theory (we looked it up in her dictionary later).

Coughing effectively

When you're recovering from a cold, you'll suffer a cough. The body is coughing for a reason. There's a shitload of phlegm (nasty green stuff) backed up in your throat and you need to get it the heck out of your system. Coughing is your body's way of doing that. A good cough is a cough which expels phlegm from your throat into your mouth. Now, if you do what most people do, and swallow the phlegm back down, then duhh, you're gonna have that cough for weeks. Instead, try your hardest to spit out that phlegm when you have a "good" cough. Probe your mouth with your tongue to get it all out. Oh and... if you take medicine to suppress the coughing, I'll leave it to you to deduce how that will effect the body's phlegm-cleaning process.

When you learn to read, you can't go back

Learning to read is like losing your virginity. You can't take it back. Since you're reading this blog, I assume you know how to read, unless you're one of my blind "readers" using a voice program. Assuming you're a sighted reader, here's something to try. Try looking at a street sign (in your native language, of course), without reading it. You can't do it. As soon as you glimpse the sign, you read it. In some sense, learning a language is like tying yourself up inescapably. When you can't read, you always have the choice, of either not reading the sign (easy), or reading the sign (hard, since it requires you learn how to read). Once you make the latter choice once (and learn to read in the process), you can never make the former choice again.

The Passage of Time is Surjective

Have you ever heard the saying, "Time flies when you're having fun"? It's pretty true. But there are other things which seem to influence the passage of time. I've noticed that when I was a kid, time passed very slowly. When my parents sent me to my room for "an hour", that hour seemed like sooooo long! An hour would never end! But now, an hour is not so long at all. Now that I'm 24 years old, I can almost just close my eyes and open them and it's an hour later. I wonder whether time will continue to speed up as I grow. Maybe, the last half of life is like a brief fifteen minute rush. Then it hardly matters about growing to an old age, and one should focus all one's energy on making the present time as fun and adventurous as possible. Making an hour fun today is worth a lot more than making an hour fun fifty years from now, if the latter hour passes so much faster.


TIME TRAVEL

As a kid, I was at a slumber party with a friend, staying up late into the morning hours. His dog was asleep. My friend pointed out that, to the dog, it was already tomorrow morning. Since, time passes so fast in sleep. In some sense, the dog (or at least the dog's consciousness), time travelled ahead of us.


AFTERLIFE?

Here's a crazy theory about what the "afterlife" might be. Maybe the final moments of life pass slower and slower, slowing down in such a way that they last "forever". And during those moments, we experience a hallucination. And that hallucination, eternal-seeming, explains how the soul can be "immortal", and yet still be linked to the physical body which decays into dust. Various cultures call this hallucination "Heaven", "Velhalla", "Hell", etc, and it might depend on how morally one lived one's life.

Launch of Delta Lion

I'm starting this blog to have a place to unleash my stream-of-consciousness on the world. I already have a blog, the famous Glowing Face Man, but the focus there is on articles. Originally GFM had a certain stream-of-consciousness aspect to it, but over time I became more concerned with providing some coherent, consistent value through that blog. This blog, on the other hand, I'll just write whatever comes to mind. It's basically automatic writing.