Life Used to be Better

This is inspired by Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. I know this is an old game, I know it has been available since 2002, I know you played it and I know I should have played it years back, but I did not. So enough of the smirking already...

This is inspired by the unappreciated peasants, peons, wisps and acolytes in the game. I remember a time when peasants stand idle after they have finished their deforestation, construction, mining, repairs or other duties which peasants do. I remember a time when a peasant can be left standing nearby, doing nothing, or sit around and watch as the critters crawl by, or maybe screw a passing sheep or two when the player is not watching...

But happy days are now over...

With the new improved system, no idle peasant or peon will escaped unnoticed. Whenever a peasant or peon is left idle, the bottom left corner will show a small icon with a number to tell the player how many units are actually just standing around getting a free suntan, taking up the RAM in your computer. Click on it and it will bring the player to the location of the peasants' and peons' inactivity.

Before long, these cogs that are not turning will find unwarranted attention being showered upon them, with instructions from higher powers demanding that new tasks be completed. A finger of light will point the way. Apparently, there is no free lunch in the world, not even for pixelated existences. There will be no one left without work, no one standing around doing nothing, no one not working to justify their continued wellbeing.

In the game, this feature has been used for resource maximization.

From the frequency of the shining fingers I have been seeing, my boss probably has the same thing similar installed on her computer, the only exception is that she is using all ten of her fingers (including thumbs) instead of just one.

Life used to be better...

 
Unlearning

This word usually occurs only in movies or maybe religious texts... and no one really knows what it means. I think we have to differentiate it from amnesia or forgetting what we have learnt. Perhaps it is to be understood as a characteristic of our minds or of the nature of truth. Truth is supposed to describe reality, and as we grow, often we have to refine our description or understanding to better fit the picture we see. And until the day we arrive at the ultimate truth, if the day ever comes, we will always be learning, unlearning and refining our realities.

An example would be newtonian physics that is replaced theories of relativity, which is later to be complimented with quantum mechanics. In science and in life, our own rules neither apply to the very large or the very small...

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. "
Henry David Thoreau

Growth boils down to learning that truths are often temporary and sometimes necessary so. It is to impose order on our universes, to stablize the grounds beneath our feet before leaping into the next unknown. I have described it as akin to moths flitting between lamp posts, pausing at the light long enough to recover one's breath before heading out through the large expanse of darkness for the next light.

It is like living your entire life believing that the total of the internal angles of a triangle will always add up to a hundred and eighty degrees... and having your world turned upside down when you learnt about non-Euclidean geometry.

It is always a tiring journey.

And some will never leave their comfort zones... but many will. Growing up sometimes is not a choice, although we wonder if it should ever be. Of late, due to certain unsolicited comments, I have been asking if I have grown too arrogant, so much so that I am not able to see with the clarity that people appreciated me for, whether I have failed to move on to the next plane of understanding....

And the answer is that I do not know.

What am I supposed to say to whether my mind is open, or whether I can see things which in my arrogance, I may not be able to see? What can anyone say?

People see me as a person full of paradoxes, someone with unyielding principles; yet someone flexible enough to accomodate deviant ideas, someone with uncompromising standards; yet someone who does not care enough, someone who lashes out with vicious ferocity; yet someone who is quite often forgiving.

Yes, I am an existentialist. I am supposed to be full of paradoxes.

And yes, they do not know me enough.

So is my vision still clear? Is my sight still untainted? Is my mind still unclouded?

Of these, I cannot be sure and I am not sure if many know me well enough to comment with any conviction. I cannot be sure, and I am not sure if I can ever be, but I shall live, breathe, die by the following words.

"Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you. Never excuse yourself."
Henry Ward Beecher

 
Yet He Remembered

I took quite a while to come up with the title of this post, because I am not sure of how I feel or how I should feel...

After months of planning and having plans destroyed by the interruptions of work and sheer laziness, I finally dropped by campus on Saturday, and quite a bit has changed, some portions are almost beyond recognition.

It is really the same with the rest of this country. No one can really drive for 15 minutes without seeing some construction, renovation or replacement taking place. It is always in some process of renewal; trapped and trapping ourselves in a flux, washing us along, struggling to keep itself abreast of the times...

Here, there is nothing to really remind us that this place is home or that it is really alive except for the constant change around us; faceless people are always playing musical chairs in different lives, leaving little for the mind to cling onto, somewhat resembling background static, incoherent and droning monotonously on...

I guess this is a place that we can regularly get lost and feel lost... and there is really little that we can hold on to except for this strange sense of loss and a subtle longing for some things that we cannot really remember.

It is a profound experience actually, feeling a sense of loss for something you constantly wonder if you ever really had experienced... akin to gradual amnesia, perhaps reminisent of Parkinson's. I returned as I had in the past five years, hoping to find a friend there, but he had left. And with his leaving, most memories of me that resides in the campus should be swept away as well.

At least that is what I thought, until the drinks seller remarked that it has been a long time since I visited.

He went on to ask if I am still involved in logistics. I remembered him, but it was a shock that he remembered me, despite serving hundreds of new faces everyday and thousands of new faces every year. My visits to the campus were always to look for another, and when I did speak to this store holder, it was never more than the usual polite chat... yet he remembered.

What can I say?

I spoke little to him because he is often critical and cynical about the campus management, but are we all not equally frustrated? And what we spoke about, does not differ much from year after year. And I should be nothing more than the person that appears once in a long while for a quick chat about nothing much... nothing more.

Yet, he remembered.

Often as we drift through our lives, we may desire anonymity, sometimes a silent passing, or perhaps, solitude... but I guess we can never be sure in whose hearts we leave our footsteps. So while progress beckons, it may not a bad idea to retrace one's steps once in a while to find out if there are memories waiting to be revisited.