The Unmistakable Cone of Ignorance

Just got back from seeing Hot Fuzz. It’s pretty damn funny and certainly worth watching. I’m feeling lazy so I’m not going to write a lengthy review. I’ve got a bunch of books I’d like to toss up reviews for sometime and a few other movies but it’ll have to wait for later cause I don’t have the motivation right now.

edit: I’ve now seen this movie 3 times.  Go see it!!!

alright it’s official. I’m sick of seeing coverage about the V.Tech shootings. Nutter butter went off and killed people cause they dropped the ball on the whole mental case factor on the background check and no one did enough to get him help. He released a manifesto to the media.. woohoo. just print the manifesto don’t show the videos and call it a night. fucking media circus.  Imma gonna go read the Atheist Manifesto till it’s time for Richard Stallman’s talk.

So as a follow up to that previous rant of mine… The shooter at V.Tech was an insane maladjusted loner type who had been to a psych ward and who scared the professors and students around him.  Gee who’d a thought….

The caught the kids who dowsed the slide in bleach and acid too.  Turns out they just wanted to see if the slide would melt.  Fucking genius.  Alright I’m ending this post here and I’ll write up some book reviews for some books I’ve read recently and my Philly trip in a bit.  Need to do some work though or at least stare at code for a few hours.

So I’ve been watching the news today and the big story is the Virginia Tech shootings.

So far all the talking heads have had to say is

1) 33 dead counting the gunman. Over 15 wounded.

2) The shootings took place at two different places 2 hours apart.

3) The shooter was armed with 2 hand guns, 9mm and .22 and had a Bullet Proof Vest.

Those have been the only solid facts released that I have seen. There has been some conjecture and of course the expectant media circus revolving around the usual

“How could this happen?” “Why didn’t the authorities stop this?” “Oh, god how could anyone do this?” “Our prayers are with the victims.” etc. Followed by the usual… “Guns are bad, they should be banned!!!” “If only the students were allowed to be armed he could’ve been stopped!!!!” “Video games caused this to happen!!!” … wait what? video games? seriously? you want to harp about video games being the cause when no one even knows who the shooter is or if he played them? Alright I suppose….
Now that I’ve briefly synopsisified the story, I’m gonna voice my own opinions. These shootings don’t even phase me anymore. To be honest I’m surprised we haven’t had a set of shootings more recently than this one. Our society creates these events through a combination of pack mentality, shunning outsiders and a poor attitude towards mental health issues. Judging from the media reports on the victims it would appear to be conjectured that victims 1 and 2 were an ex girlfriend and the RA(who is an authority figure) . The next victim was a professor and then the students. It sounds like someone who was under a ton of pressure, who didn’t have any real social outlets or a good social support base of friends and who was probably already showing cracks. The shooter probably showed signs of the end well before this but our society seems focused on not noticing and/or not caring till it’s too late. I mean hell I’ve personally had it in my head that I’d like to maim/kill/destroy several people in life. I never have through a combination of me valuing my own life and freedom over the satisfaction harming the object of my irritation would bring and a good group of people I call friends I can bitch to. I’ve always been a social outsider and I’ve never felt particularly comfortable with the banality of most social interaction. I just think differently than most of the people I meet in life and I don’t often share the same interests as others. I’m social enough but now I’m veering from the point. I understand where most of these shooters are coming from. They’re not evil, they’re desperate, they’re pissed, they’re sick of it all and they’re done being pushed. Then they lash out like an injured animal. If my life were slightly less charmed I could see how I might have turned out that way so I get it.

All that being said…

GROW A FUCKING PAIR OF BALLS AND DON’T KILL THE FUCKING BYSTANDERS, YOU TWATS! BETTER YET DON’T KILL ANYONE OTHER THAN YOURSELF.

I suppose if there is a specific MALICIOUS being who torments you then he’s made himself a target, but even if people were thoughtless and ignored you it wasn’t malicious so leave them the hell alone.

Video games didn’t cause this, gun control laws didn’t prevent this(as it seems he had guns without serial numbers) so all of the talking heads can just shut the hell up. The media never just shuts up… they keep talking over and over the same shit over and over again. The media also only cares about magnitude. If this guy had only killed the first two people this would never had made the national news. I mean hell I’ve got a far sicker and far more gutwrenching crime for the media. A 3 year old has been badly burned by acid and will require multiple surgeries over the next several months. How did it happen? Someone broke into a schools maintenance shed and splashed bleach and chemicas all over the schools playground. These people are far more disturbed than the man who shot 33 people ever could be. But this is just local news. Fuck… that’s just cruel.

So I’ll finish this ranting up by saying a few last things. I don’t feel any emotional response to these shootings though I can imagine several people are suffering great emotional pain right now. I just don’t seem to respond to these things. Maybe I’m a sociopath but I also don’t believe the shows of sympathy the media display about these events. Every time I hear the phrase ” Our/My prayers are with you” I want to punch the people saying it in the face cause it’s the most useless thing in the world(this could be the fact that I consider praying to be begging but meh…) though I do understand the sentiment is a good one at heart. I do think gun control laws are wrong in their approach and that rather than banning guns we should be training people in their use and care and should be requiring training for them just as we do with cars. That said I don’t think there should be any restrictions on what you can own as long as you are properly trained to use the item and get the right licenses. If you do commit a violent crime with a weapon then obviously you’ve forfeited your right to have one but that goes without saying. And that’s all I have to say at the moment on the subject. Course I’m writing this stream of consciousness so I may have to do some editing when I reread the post but this is it for now.

I’ll put up a post about my weekend Phily trip tomorrow but this was just on my mind tonight.

edit: Ok I just got a campus wide email talking about how the President of Hopkins is horrified just like the rest of us and how we will never forget our own local losses.  This shit is obnoxious.   In 3 or 4 years no one who was connected to these people  will be at VTech or in the local sense at Hopkins.  Most of us didn’t know these people and our horror is academic at best.  Unless you are currently sobbing in empathy for these people(unlikely since with all the various horrors in the world you’d never stop crying) you’re probably not going to care about this beyond the history of the event much past next month.  Well that presumes not being directly connected to the people involved or being involved then you’ll certainly have a higher level of caring… but this sappy dishonesty gets to me.  It really really bugs me cause it makes others pain less.  We don’t share it and to claim we do lessens it for those who are feeling it.  It’s especially pathetic to try and liken one groups losses to your own.  Just   aoeuaoaetnhtntnaueonssssssssshteauns …. fucking words fail me.

So Amanda and I went to see And One and VNV tonight at the 9:30 club in DC. And One was awesome and frankly should have been the headliners. Of course, I also feel they outdid Covenant the first time I saw And One back in Chicago. Then VNV played…. Now to put this in perspective I’ve seen VNV 3 times now. The first time I went cause Amanda likes/liked them and Icon of Coil was playing with them. The second time it was VNV and Haujobb. Both of these previous times I enjoyed VNV but they’re not really my thing. They were still playing stuff off their first couple albums which didn’t/don’t suck. However, the last 3 albums have been airy trancy shit. Future pop my ass… VNV makes pussy trance.  After seeing VNV tonight I felt as if I had been aurally assaulted by an insistent throbbing cunt. Now I’m hesitant to compare VNV to vaginae given that I’m a heterosexual male and I’m a pretty big fan of vaginae, but in the metaphorical sense VNV make pussy chick music that is enjoyed by VNV cultists, women, and romantic soppy hearted guys who have poor taste in music. Now that may have sounded pretty misogynistic and to a degree it was, but seriously ,VNV makes boring airy music that women(aka chicks) seem to dig for some ungodly reason. On that note we’re probably going to try to go to the Philadelphia show tomorrow(since we’re heading there for the weekend) but I’m gonna have to remember to bring earplugs for VNV and find a nice place to sit the VNV out while Amanda enjoys herself dancing to their shitty new music(which she thinks sucks too for the record but still seems to perversely enjoy dancing to).

RAWR I’m going to get some sleep or at least try.

ahem…. FUCK YOU GRIP and your little id3 tag checkbox too.

200+ cd’s with no id3 tags cause you unchecked yourself and now I need to write a batch id3 tag adder.  thankfully my naming and organizing standards basically encode everything except the genre tag but even still.  FUCK YOU GRIP.  and yes I checked the box before I started ripping and when I checked it again it wasn’t checked anymore but that’s due to grip resetting itself and it had done before but since I’d rechecked the box after that I thought it was going to be fine.  *grumble*

So I don’t code openGL on linux with C/C++ and the standard headers for a few years. I’ve been coding it on my Mac and in D with the D headers(on windows and linux)for a few months off and on again as I’ve started getting back into it a bit. I copy over working code from my mac in c++ to my gentoo box. The result? A bunch of things aren’t defined/aren’t in scope. 4 hours of poking and prodding later… turns out you have to manually enable anything after OpenGL 1.1 with the nvidia drivers.

SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCK? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK? WHY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WOULD YOU DO THIS?

I seriously don’t see an advantage to doing it this way. There’s a project called GLEW that helps to work around that problem but I seriously don’t see why it’s a problem in the first place. If anyone who knows openGL happens to come past this post ever please leave a comment and explain it to me if you understand it. It makes me sad too cause it just seems like such a cheap hack to have to #define my way around the problem. Of course there’s now an additional problem of SDL deciding to lock the program and neither exit cleanly nor actually do anything. This really didn’t have anything to do with my research but I was just messing with it cause I wanted to start making a quick little fly through system cause I didn’t feel like coding matlab today. UGH!

Edit: I forgot to post the solution I found/am using.

put

#ifndef GL_GLEXT_PROTOTYPES
#define GL_GLEXT_PROTOTYPES 1
#define __DEFINED_GL_GLEXT_PROTOTYPES
#endif

before the calls to gl.h and glext.h or  just install and use glew

rawr

I’ve played video games for years. Ever since I can remember I’ve been playing them. On my dad’s old Zenith computer, a Nintendo when I turned 6, a 286 pc, Super Nintendo, Genesis, GameBoy, N64, GameCube, a Wii, a DS, a P90, a PIII 600, my first laptop, 2 more desktops both AMD, dreamcasts, my whole life. Hell I’d even go to arcades and play back when you could find arcades easily.  When I play a game I’ll play for hours.  I’ll forget to eat, hell I’ll even forget to stand up and walk around.  Since I spent a week playing Lineage 2 while lying on the floor my wrists have hurt me off and on when I use a computer and I’ll still play. I just wear wrist braces.  I played GuildWars for almost 36 hours straight when it released.  I have an addictive personality when it comes to my entertainment.  I’ll watch 13 to 20+ hours of a television series on DVD or fansub rips if it’s anime I can’t get otherwise that I’m into.  I read books in single sessions for the most part over the course of 9 to 12 hours.  I’m a completest.    The thing about it all is that I’ve been slowly realizing that for the most part games don’t relax me.  Games keep me on edge, but they make the time pass faster since I get focused and lose track of everything.  Games are easy for the most part with just the right level of frustration to keep you wanting to beat them.  To keep you buying them.  Games are the route of minimal energy for me.  I don’t want to think much? I don’t want to care? I play a video game.  Movies and books though… these relax me.  I can escape into them even if it requires more mental effort on my part to follow the stories, to envision the world or to care about the characters.  Even the emotional buy-in factor of a good movie or a book is relaxing.  But games… they don’t have emotional buy in. You just want to beat them . To defeat them. For the most part I understand how game developers think.  They mostly think the same and I find very little in the way of surprises.  Some games are truly special and they are the rare gems.  They have good stories. Good game play. But most games are playable as long as they just don’t suck.  The problem is most games build challenge by simply making the situations of the game ‘difficult’ and that difficulty can usually be overcome with simple dedication.  Multiplayer offers more challenges but then you have to deal with people… hell even multiplayer games aren’t that hard as long as you understand the game. There’s almost always a ‘best way’ to play though which makes it boring and easy and repetitive and more than anything else makes you want to beat the everliving shit out of the people who do it.  The point of all this ranting… I play video games but I have absolutely no goddamn clue why I keep doing it.  Yet I do.  I guess it’s just my vice when I want to hate the world and pass the time without effort or caring. Ultimately outside the waste of time it’s probably healthier than most other vices.  Though I could stand to workout more.  I’ve been trying to do that but I’ve slacked off this last week and since my life mostly involves sitting and typing or reading I’m no where near in the shape I’d like to be or really should be.  Oh well.  Back to my book.