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| This land grows barren behind us.
(Edit from December 29, 2007 22:37)
For reasons unknown, I've moved to a new blog. I'm sure it has nothing to do with Blogspot being owned and kept up by Google, a company which continues to impress me.
In any case! I shall continue to post there. | | |
| Probably exposure and lack of discipline and good role models. I'm not talking about forcing them to think of sex as "evil", or regimental military training. I just mean kids these days are rebellious, and because of what they've been exposed to they have a lot of curiosities.
I just answered this Featured Question; you can answer it too! | | |
| As if you could see it.
I saw I am Legend the other night with Stephanie, and contrary to the views of some, I thought it was a pretty good movie. Granted, there were some dumb parts, but I didn't say the movie was excellent; I spent my money on tickets, and I don't really regret it.
Possible Spoiler!
The opening scene was probably my favorite part. I loved the way they turned the city into a forest. Most post-apocalyptic settings are dark, dusty, and largely dead. In this movie, however, the city was merely overgrown into a forest. In the first part, you see Will Smith (lead actor) hunting deer in a car with a gun. It's a very interesting contrast. I also thought it was really neat how they introduced what actually happened to the majority of the people living there. Rather than just spelling out their fate, they were introduced in a situation that painted them as one of the primary sources of conflict. I thought the main character's personality and goals were introduced clearly and effectively as well, so that the whole story actually seemed very plausible. There were several scenes that were tense and scary, too, which helped alleviate the un-eventful introduction of the setting/characters.
My first complaint with the movie was product placement. I personally understand that it is necessary (funding), and having real products does make the world seem more real. At the same time, it just struck me as sort of obnoxious. My first real complaint with the movie didn't really come into play until Anna and Robert have an argument about God. It was poorly worded and disappointingly cliche. I thought Robert's line, "God didn't do this, Anna; we did." worked perfectly; it introduced God and made a point to shift blame towards humanity (where it should be). It's a powerful statement, and it should have been left alone. But, not but a few scenes later, Anna tells Robert that God has been talking to her, telling her to do stuff, blah blah blah; standard crazy religious person talk. I'm a Christian, but I have no idea what it means to have God talk to you, and I certainly don't claim to hear him, at the very least not in that way. It made Christians look even more nuts than they already do, and I didn't really appreciate it. The way she introduced her religious motive was so anti-intellectual it really killed me on the last 1/4 of the movie. And then, out of nowhere, the "butterfly" thing, which was mentioned like once before is suddenly introduced as a major plot element, but was so sudden it was more stupid. It wasn't done elegantly like in the movie Signs, where small, seemingly insignificant elements suddenly come together to become a major climax; one thing, mentioned once flies out of nowhere and ends the movie. The end was dumb, too.
I'm not going to say my idea for an ending is amazing, but it beats what they had: I thought it would've been interesting if the screen blacked out after he exploded, just like it does. But, instead of cutting away to a couple of days later, it cuts to decades later; Humanity has rebuilt itself, and we can clearly see the effects of the plague and it's vaccine. The camera cuts to a history class where a professor concludes his lesson on the doctor Robert Neville; it goes to a close-up on the teacher to show it to be Anna's son. Fin.
Spoiler Warning Over
In any case, I liked the movie overall, but they fumbled some stuff, which kept what was otherwise a really cool idea/movie from being a favorite.
I have a Facebook application that displays verses from the Bible, and I really enjoyed today's:
What causes fights
and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle
within you? You want something but don't get it. You kill and covet,
but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not
have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive,
because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on
your pleasures.
James 4:1-3
I like it because it answers one of the major questions I've had about Christianity: "Ask and ye shall receive." This is a huge issue, and I'm sure several non-Christians will tell you they've left the religion because this statement, in and of itself, proved false. Although Christianity holds for me on more grounds than this alone (and because I feel more deistic anyway), it wasn't enough to push me away from the religion. I was very curious about it, though. I mean, the verse is always quoted as, "Ask whatever the eff you want, and God gives it to ya." I mean, I don't really have anything I've ever prayed for save for good health, which I would have had anyway. So I tried to analyze the verse from a metaphoric stand-point, but that doesn't work because the verse is very literal. It doesn't say, "Ask for spiritual things and I'll give them to you, but only spiritual things!" But, this verse, the one above, really helped me on this subject. It pretty much confirms why 90% (<- some arbitrary, large %) of prayers aren't answered, and why some previously-thought-to-be random 10% of prayers are.
Today I was ensured even more thoroughly than before that people are dumb. I was reading through a discussion board over the topic of abortion, with the topic-starter's position as this:- Abortion is wrong
- It should still be legal, because a woman should be free to do with her own body as she pleases
Now, I'm not about to say women are second-class citizens, because that's not what I believe. If a woman wants to cut off her own arm, I think she should be allowed to; I honestly think that if a girl is anorexic and wants to starve herself to death, then she should go for it. That really and truly is just the business of her and those close to her, which will hopefully try and inform her that there are better ways of losing weight. But back to the point: No one (hopefully) is trying to say women should have less control of themselves because they carry babies. The idea is that the baby is not a part of the woman's body; being dependent doesn't mean it's solely an element of the system. A great example is in an Operating System: one program may be dependent on another, but it's still a separate program; it's not like it's just a large hunk of code from the original, and that's an amazingly important distinction. In fact, that's the distinction that makes the whole argument: the fetus is a human being, separate but dependent, and the woman should not be able to kill it legally.
There was a fellow on the board who was doing an excellent job of debating his pro-life stance, and I was impressed. I was not so impressed with those who represented "pro-choice", but that's not their fault: it's hard to effectively debate an inherently illogical position. One of the pro-choice people asserted that preventing conception was just the same as abortion, in that they were both birth-control. I think he failed to understand that there's a difference between not building a house, and building a house and then burning it down. In one of these instances, the egg is not fertilized; a plot of land upon which no house is built will never magically spawn a house. An egg left alone is no more than a finger, an arm, a skin cell; left to itself, it will become nothing. Now, a fertilized egg, an embryo is a much different thing; it not only is genetically identical to a human being, but with time will become a human. The pro-life fellow argued against him that preventing conception is much different; an example he gave was that becoming a plumber may prevent women from getting pregnant, because you could be smelly--but it's not immoral to become a plumber (maybe to price gouge, but that's another discussion!). There are things we do all the time that don't get women pregnant. However, once a woman is pregnant, the only way to make the woman not pregnant, and that is to dispose of the fetus (which we have previously defined as a human -9 months), which is legally defined as murder. In fact, if you killed a pregnant woman you will be charged with two counts of murder, one for the woman herself and one for the human inside her.
I can understand that having babies isn't fun. Nevermind that it hurts initially, but they're also expensive and take a lot of time (several years). But it's not tough to not get pregnant, and if you do, adoption is a perfectly reasonable solution. The baby is born to a couple who wants a child but for whatever reason can't have one (infertility, or perhaps they want to adopt a child because they don't want you to mistreat/kill it).
It really just escapes me how people reach these conclusions. I really don't like to just accept that "people are dumb", because the average human sports a lot of brain cells to just label as stupid. However, they really don't give much of an argument for themselves. David was on a discussion board once and claimed that America wasn't a country; one girl's response was, "I'm surprised by the ignorance of that statement." I just couldn't believe it. | | |
| To fuel the economy.
MERRY CHRISTMAS! | | |
| Oh, what a beautiful oblivion.
I have lots to do, of course.... That really is quite the list. Me and Alyssa are heading into town today to pick up said gift.
My gifts so far have been pretty cool: I got dice from Stephanie and Nevin (which is awesome, because now I have my very own massive pile o' dice), and some snow-gear from my grandmother (I'm going on a snowboarding trip in a few weeks). I've gotten a few gifts for myself, namely: a box disguised as a book for holding my dice, and Starships of the Galaxy, the new sourcebook for Saga Edition which covers not only ~100 starships, but also gives detailed instructions on how to create your own. I got it for on the cheap; thanks, Ebay. Some plain cash would be great, too; I could use it to fund my edumahcation this coming semester.
I played some games of Warcraft III the other day, and I was doing so well... so well my internet just couldn't handle it. I lagged out of three games, all three of which I could have won. Agh! One of them was 50 minutes long, and I was literally one building away from winning.
I've still got a lot of work ahead of me on those new rules. I hope Eli has made some progress with the Bard class, otherwise we decided just to cut it indefinitely. Converting everything to condition track has been quite interesting, though. | | |
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