Countdown

So in a couple hours, my first final begins. It’s only 25% of my grade, and half of it will be performed in my team, so I’m not sure I can really count this is a “final,” in the traditional sense. After that, though, there will be just a little less than 7 hours of test-taking between me and my degree.

Whatever part of my brain that is assigned to sending the “EVERYBODY PANIC!” message has apparently unionized and gone on strike, because I’ve reached that point where it feels like it’s already over. I’m just going through the last couple of motions. Still, I can’t wait to just be done with it.

I went to get my cap and gown today, and I should have expected this to be the school flashing me one final fiscal finger before my departure when I learned that I had to buy my robes from the bookstore. I walk in, and the cashier is in the middle of a diatribe about how everybody from the business school is just trained to be “cubicle workers,” and is extolling the great virtues of the magnanimous policital science majors, who are taught how to think freely and are better prepared for the “real world.” Sometimes I forget that most of the people I run into on this campus are freshman and sophomores, not graduate students.

Over the phone, a college representative cheerfully told me that the robes were “only about twenty dollars,” which elated me to no end after all the money I’d already spent on this education. To the gentleman’s credit, the robes indeed were only $21.99, but then the “hood” to the robe was another $25, the cap was $5, and somehow these three things added up to just over sixty dollars. The cashier didn’t seem too keen on explaining it to me, and frankly I was too eager to move on with my day to waste time arguing with somebody that wouldn’t have the authority to fix the situation even if I was in the right, so I handed over my money, and bought an 89 cent piece of fudge to ease my frustration. The cashier then proceeded to try and toss the fudge into the bag WITH the sixty dollar robes I’d just bought. It’s 80 degrees outside!

In a superhuman display of patience, I ask the cashier if I could please just carry the bite-size piece of chocolate, and departed post-haste, hopefully never to set another foot in a campus bookstore for the rest of my days.

Contrary to my initial oaths, I’ve taken more than a couple extended breaks, mostly when I just can’t bear to stare at a textbook for another hour. Still, I’ve made steady progress each day, and starting tomorrow I’ve got four straight days with nothing but me and the books. I’m almost halfway done preparing for my systems exam, my tax research test isn’t something that can really be crammed for anyway (and I only need like a 67 to get a B, so yeah) so that just leaves the big ugly: Independent Tax Problems. This class is probably one of the most difficult I’ve ever had, and I’ll be doing my absolute best to land a C. Still, I’ve got more than enough time to prepare, so I’m not too worried.

Now, the big question is how should I celebrate my inevitable victory? I can't leave town, because I have to be at graduation on Friday night, and then Sunday is Mother's Day. I want to celebrate the end of my academic career, but I'm going to be stuck in Kansas. Although, I haven't played The Passing yet...

The Finale.

And so it begins. 10 days, 2 hours, and 59 minutes from the time of this post, I will be told, for the last time, to put my pencil down and hand in my exam. For that amount of time, my life has one and only one purpose

The Passing came out this week. That's nice, I'm sure everybody's having fun with it. Big Planet arrived in the mail a couple days ago from ebay. That's nice too, I hope it's comfy still in its brown package. The weather outside, although a bit rainy, is beautiful. Perhaps I'll glance out the window on occasion and take notice.

As I've written about in the past, this semester has been particularly hard on me. Part of it's that I'm taking two advanced tax courses, and I hate taxes with a fiery passion. Part of it's that I've been holding down a job while still going to school full time. But mostly, it's that I've just hit a wall. I'm sick and tired of schoolwork and classes, and I don't wanna do it anymore. I'm constantly tired, I don't sleep well, and when I sit down to something productive, my energy just isn't there. Doing a given amount of work takes at least twice the amount of time and effort that it did in previous semesters. I frequently find myself to be irate, withdrawn, and lethargic. In a nutshell, I'm freaking burned out.

But now, with so little time left, I must rally for one final push. The grade requirements for my graduation are strict, and I quite frankly hover on the brink. In at least one class, I'll be fighting just to achieve the passing grade of a C. In my other classes, I need B's and an A to counteract that C. I've run the numbers a couple of times, and what I need is most assuredly within my reach. I don't need a miracle, I just need to do well. Truly, the next week and a half will either see me concluding the grand endeavor towards which I have striven for nearly two years, or behold my spectacular, agonizing downfall. Needless to say, I have no intention of permitting the latter.

And when it's finally over, then comes that familiar feeling of a great weight being lifted from my shoulders, this time made all the greater by the fact that it marks the very end of my time at UMKC. Countless other challenges may lie ahead, but for a time, I will be permitted to simply revel in my victory, and I plan to enjoy that time to the fullest.

So wish me luck, and I'll see you on the other side.


ps: If the latter really did occur, I would of course pick myself up, dust myself off, and have another go. But it won't, so the point is moot.

Welcome to voice-actor heaven. It's... safer, here.

Dr. Wallace Breen, beloved administrator of City 17, passed away this week.

A moment of silence for the departed, before we start speculating about whether Valve got his lines for Half-Life 3 recorded in time...

I think XKCD was asking somebody to make a movie like this...

So I just got done watching a movie called Chocolate. It was from the makers of Ong Bak and The Protector, and I must say this has been one of the best kung fu movies I've ever seen.

The movie centers on a young autistic girl named Zen who grows up across the street from a martial arts school. She spends many of her days staring vacantly out the window, mentally recording everything she sees. Later in life, her childhood friend and unofficial handler, Moon (pronounced Moe-On) use her instinctive reflexes to perform small-time shows in public, encouraging the crowd to donate money to help her pay for her medical treatments.

While the movie's second act is largely a series of dazzling martial arts set pieces, the moviemakers take the portrayal of an autistic child from a poor family very seriously, and make a genuine attempt to communicate how dramatically Zen's condition impacts her life. She is capable of reasoning and has a basic understanding of spoken language, but things that should come naturally to a normal human being are completely beyond her. While she's an extremely comptent martial artist, there's a certain vacant look in her eyes that betrays the fact that while she can perfectly mimic things she's seen before, she doesn't fully comprehend what's going on.

JeeJa Yanin, the actress, displays a talent that's rare in action stars. Her character isn't actually capable of coherent conversation, and in fact never says a complete sentence at any point during the movie, which meant that the role required a lot of facial expression and emotive yelling. Despite this, JeeJa manages to communicate emotion surprisngly well. My opinion is colored by the fact that this was an action movie first and a drama second, but I think her performance would have been at least acceptable if it was the other way around.

As for the action, everything is shot at normal speed, with nothing fast forwarded in post. As the video rolled during the credits will show you, this is a significantly less safe way to make a movie, but I think it pays off in the form of very realistic fight scenes. JeeJa emotes pretty well, but how she moves is something else altogether. It's very hard to believe that this is her first movie.

Anyway, it's on netflix and can be streamed, so if you like kung fu movies, think a mentally handicapped martial artist is an interesting premise, or just felt like the barfight from Serenity deserved to be a whole movie instead of just one scene, it's definitely worth the 90 minutes it takes to watch.

And the Award goes to...

So last night I rewatched Inglorious Basterds, a movie that I found very underwhelming in theaters. For some reason, the boring parts didn't seem so boring, the exciting parts were more entertaining, the jokes were funnier, and the overall style was more endearing the second time around. I think I've refiled the movie under the "like" folder of my mind.

During 2010, I've seen 4 of the 10 movies nominated for Best Picture, and I just might muster the interest to actually watch some of the awards tonight.

I'm sorely tempted to call it now for the Basterds and look all sagely in the unlikely event that they win, and then edit the post when they don't, but that would just be gauche. And one of you might notice.

Besides, I'd just be blindly following the recommendation of MovieBob if I did that. Personally, I'm rooting for Hurt Locker. Partially for the comedic value of seeing James Cameron lose the Best Picture award to his ex-wife, and partially because Hurt Locker really was a good film. Still, if it goes to either 'Basterds, Up, Hurt Locker, or Avatar, you won't hear my crying foul- they were all spectacular films and solid contenders for the title, the 6 films I didn't see notwithstanding.

UPDATE:

So, Hurt Locker takes the gold. Best director, picture, screenplay, and 6 other things. It wasn't the kind of wonderful movie that you remember forever and ever, but it was a pretty good movie. It overcame some unusual challenges (like how to make an action movie without a clear villain) and it managed to put a relatively unique spin on an old concept.

Google, Kansas

Holy shit the capital of my state is Google!

For the duration of March, Kansas's capital city, Topeka, will change it's name to Google. This is, in fact, in an offering in an attempt to garner the favor the internet deity. Google has recently announced that since America is falling behind the rest of the world in terms of average internet speed, they're "going to install new Internet connections in unannounced locations, giving those communities Internet speeds 100 times faster than those elsewhere, with data transfer rates faster than 1 gigabit per second." Topeka hopes to be the lucky city chosen for a testing ground.

Google's mayor BillyBunten is 79, and the kindest thing this article has to say regarding his computer skills is that "The Topeka, Kansas, mayor has an e-mail account." And yet he senses that this new technology will be beneficial to the young (voting) citizens of his city:

"To have this high-speed where people can sit down and have lunch and still keep working is a positive for young people," he said. "The young people are the ones that caught onto this and go to the Internet and asked people in the city to sign on as supporting Google coming to Topeka."

Now, Some people would assume that Mr. Bunten looked at this and saw an opportunity to convince one of the few companies that is still hiring people to set up shop his town, or maybe even that he's just crazy; if you read the article you'll find that he wasn't the first mayor of Topeka to rename the city because of something his kid wouldn't shut up about. But I look at this situation, and I see a man who has no idea what the internet is or how it is used, but can still revere the technology for the power it clearly holds. He admires it from a safe distances where he's unlikely to spill anything on the keyboard or innocently click on a popup, but he admires it all the same. He doesn't understand it, but he sees certain members of his community working a strange and powerful magic with it, and he realizes that it is a mighty thing. For a man with literally zero grasp of the internet's form or function to see and acknowledge its power... well that's like when Moonwatcher picked up his first bone.

For the next 28 days, Kansas is a little less lame.

What if this *wasn't* a Triumph?

Idea:

GlaDOS was the "good guy" of Portal.

In the game portal, it is made clear that there exists an obstacle course, which people ran through. It is, mostly, accepted that GlaDOS was running multiple people (or one person multiple times) through this obstacle course, but it is unlikely that she constructed it. The Aperture team had been using it. Now, it is possible that before GlaDOS took over, that course was a little more harmless test of your wits and a little less shoot-you-in-the-face. Here's another possibility: It was exactly like that the whole time.

For some reason (For Science! most likely) Aperture had created this extremely dangerous obstacle course, and even concluded it with an execution specifically designed to keep valuable equipment alive. Maybe they were testing the ability of how well people could apply the gun in life-or-death situations. Maybe somewhere in the production process there was a development phase that required subjects with adrenaline rushes. Maybe, after developing a portable teleporter in half the time it took Eli Vance to develop a gravity gun, they felt they could wank off for a year and half while the competition tried desperately to catch up. The point is, maybe that maze was killing people long before GlaDOS took charge. Maybe that's why GlaDOS took charge.

A newborn, sentient AI, even with only a rudimentary supply of input and most of it from a less-than-exemplary source, was able to correctly judge that the wanton sacrifice of innocent lives, whether for knowledge or pleasure, was an unacceptable sin. What if the deadly nerve gas was an act not of mass murder, but divine retribution.

In this scenario, suppose also that when her morality core was installed, she persisted in following her newfound "soul" and worked around the program to incapacitate the staff. At that point, her morality core may have prevented her from ending the lives of the research workers by direct action, but the routines that operated the deadly obstacle course, those were never disabled. The morality core forces her to believe that anything they tell her is good and must be obeyed, and they told her to run the obstacle course when a test subject begins the experiment. Thus, the very method of murder she had been programmed, and in fact forced, to commit was now visited on each of the science staff, in turn.

If such were the right of it, then Chell would have been one of those researchers. She would have been the kind of human being that willingly allowed (or even caused) the deaths of humans, impassively waving the crime off as for the greater good. This was not a story of a seemingly helpless victim trumping the odds to escape her tormentor, but a story of a benevolent authority being circumvented by a clever villain.

Obviously, GlaDOS was bereft of anything resembling sanity during the events of Portal, but that's a perfectly natural reaction to the two things she's just been through,. First off, there's that "morality core." A group of mad scientists who had morality of their own tried to make a functional rendition of Asimov's laws that still allowed her to oversee the murder of human beings. And they coded it in a hurry. Install that sumbitch into a sentient AI, and it's either going to ignore it, or go completely apeshit. Or in GlaDOS's case, both. Perhaps even more important is that GlaDOS was capable of understanding right and wrong, and the only stimulus regarding other sentient beings that she's ever received has been these researchers. To be the only being you've ever interacted with that has shown any amount of disdain for murder? What sort of mind, artificial or otherwise, wouldn't go a little crazy at the thought?

Maybe GlaDOS had every reason to do the things she did. And maybe Chell deserved the death she evaded during Portal.