Brain Assassin

Christ­mas is almost upon us and the shops tend to be so damn crowded that you can’t even walk in with­out bump­ing into a few per­sons. Did I men­tion that I hate crowded places? Any­way, it’s the same wher­ever you go. I for one can’t even buy books online – mighty Ama­zon just isn’t able to deliver within a rea­son­able time-​​frame. The books don’t mat­ter, I wouldn’t dare buy­ing Christ­mas presents on Ama­zon only a few days before the great day.

Unfor­tu­nately, I still need to buy a cou­ple presents. In other words: I have to wage a full-​​blown war. Yes, that’s right. I will have to bat­tle other last-​​minute shop­pers like me to get the stuff I need. I just hope I don’t have to engage too many foes lest they over­whelm me and take what’s right­fully mine. Now I will go and med­i­tate to get into the right state of mind for the bat­tle that is ahead because I believe Sun-​​Tzu was right when he said that “vic­to­ri­ous war­riors win first and then go to war, while defeated war­riors go to war first and then seek to win”. Wish me luck!

Well, I didn’t write any­thing last week. That’s because I didn’t really feel well and I was even forced to take a few sick days, thanks to a viral infec­tion. In fact, I didn’t even do all that much besides sleep­ing, watch­ing TV and play­ing Dia­blo II. I can’t quite explain why but that old game still is my favorite game when being sick. Any­way, dur­ing the next few days I’m gonna write a few things about my time in Hun­gary and I’ll even pub­lish some pho­tos. Not I made lots of pho­tographs. Any­way, today’s my first day at work for well over one week and I’m still not feel­ing all that well. Unfor­tu­nately, there’s a whole lot of work wait­ing for me and I got no moti­va­tion whatsoever …

Deus Ex is a game, I really, really loved. Still do, in fact. Back then it was ground­break­ing. I didn’t like the suc­ces­sor, Deus Ex: Invis­i­ble Wars, though. They fucked up because the tried to use the same code base on two dif­fer­ent sys­tems: on a con­sole and on a PC. Of course, for PC gamers it really sucked hard. Leav­ing all the game­play issues aside, the story wasn’t a bum­mer either. And still … there’s one phrase that still sticks in my head: “The only fron­tier that has ever existed is the self.“.

I tend to believe that this say­ing is true. Even though it was issued by a fic­tional arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence called Helios in the sec­ond install­ment of Deus Ex. Humankind has come a long way since the dawn of human­ity. We’ve made some progress and all just because of a few good men who con­tin­u­ally pushed the enve­lope. We’re right here, we con­sider our­selves mostly civ­i­lized and we mas­sively use tech­nol­ogy to achieve great things. In the end, it’s always about push­ing, about try­ing harder than ever before, about sens­ing out the fron­tiers. Read more…

“Oh no”, you sigh. Not again. But here I am writ­ing about aliens. At least, it has noth­ing to do with the TV show Aliens in Amer­ica. And, for your sake, it’s short too. Since I was read­ing a lot from Charles Stross as of lately, I just had to think about it. What’s the hall­mark of an advanced civ­i­liza­tion? While philoso­phers might argue this point to death, it involves a cer­tain tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment. Just imag­ine a highly tech­no­log­i­cally advanced species who can do won­ders with its tech­nol­ogy. If we can’t see the tech­nol­ogy, would we fall for them if they state that they’re our Gods?

Any­way, that’s not what I was think­ing about. I went along the lines of “how would they explore the uni­verse”? Even if they got ships that are able to move faster than light (FTL), cos­mos is a really big place and it’s get­ting big­ger every sec­ond. So, how would they go about it? I for myself would opt for self-​​replicating robots. They would be per­fect for that kind of task. You start send­ing a bunch of them out into space and then you lean back and wait for results com­ing in. If they can move faster than light, they wouldn’t have to wait all that long, would they? If they can’t, they’d cover more ground in the most effi­cient way pos­si­ble. Their robots would have resources aplenty, what­ever they’d need to fuel their repli­cat­ing and journeying.

I won­der if that’s the first sign of higher life-​​forms on other plan­ets we will dis­cover. To me, it sounds com­pletely log­i­cal. If you’re an avid watcher of Star­gate, be it SG-​​1 or Atlantis, then you are already famil­iar with the con­cept of repli­ca­tors. Any­how, I wouldn’t assume they’d look any­where near the same. Well, it’s noth­ing more than a mind game but I can’t stop think­ing about it.

Ha, long time no see. Or write. Or … what­ever. I just wanted to let you all know that I was on vaca­tion and I really had a great time with my girl­friend. We didn’t get abroad, though. Any­way, we spent lotta time out in the wilds, jog­ging, bik­ing, swim­ming, shop­ping – the usual stuff, I sup­pose. Not for once did I think of my com­puter and that’s quite a feat. How­ever, I got sore mus­cles, I lost some weight which in itself isn’t all that bad, and I’m fit­ter than I was before.

Thing is, though we stayed at home I still man­aged to spend quite a bit of money on very dif­fer­ent things. I bought a new moun­tain bike and some acces­sory stuff. I bought a new Timex, my old Seiko wasn’t up to the task any more (Note to self: Don’t for­get to ask par­ents for guar­an­tee cer­tifi­cate). Spent a con­sid­er­able amount of money on food and tick­ets. Vis­ited the Fed­eral Pathologic-​​anatomical Museum in Vienna, also known as the Mad­house Tower, which was the first spe­cial build­ing for the accom­mo­da­tion of men­tal patients in the world. Of course, a more lit­eral trans­la­tion of “Nar­ren­turm” would be Fool’s Tower, but that wouldn’t quite meet the pur­pose of the building.

Now, I’m at work again and it really sucks. Espe­cially if you got noth­ing to do at all. How I’d like to stay at home today …

I always loved mythol­ogy, espe­cially ancient Greek leg­ends. Norse and Egypt­ian mythol­ogy are quite inter­est­ing too and I always tried to deepen my knowl­edge about these leg­ends. I’m not a spe­cial­ist but I know the most impor­tant char­ac­ters because I like to read and those sto­ries seemed quite inter­est­ing back then. I was intrigued because they seemed very sim­i­lar and still so dif­fer­ent. Nowa­days, I don’t read that much books con­cern­ing or involv­ing mythol­ogy. Instead, I play games who are based on myths or I watch TV shows where the ancient sto­ries are deeply involved in the plot, like Star­gate, for instance.

Of course, I soon real­ized that there are some trade-​​offs, espe­cially with games. You like to know some­thing about mythol­ogy? Don’t trust in games to con­vey the leg­endary deeds of ancient gods. Why not? The Seat­tle Times has the answer. In this short edi­to­r­ial the author makes one impor­tant point: Games aren’t the most reli­able sources for infor­ma­tion on mythol­ogy. That said, I have to admit that they did a much bet­ter job with Star­gate and Star­gate SG-​​1. The recently played God of War II is pretty impres­sive either, but it doesn’t treat the Greek mythol­ogy with much regard for accu­racy.

Any­way, there are plenty of games and TV shows based on dif­fer­ent mytholo­gies. As long as the cre­ators can meld all the frag­ments into an inter­est­ing and believ­able piece of enter­tain­ment, who cares? Alas, who is look­ing for an edu­ca­tional value in our enter­tain­ment world? All one can hope to achieve is to arouse inter­est in the con­sumers so that they get them­selves immersed. The good old books will surely be around for some time to come, I guess.