Don't Think Again

As a huge fan of Blizzard - all of the fanboy-ness that should have gone to Apple, were I to get laid, was channeled into the Warcraft and Starcraft series. A cool new feature that was added in this version is a beginner's battle.net, so to speak. Before going into the actual gameplay and joining the ladder, you get the chance to play 50 games with no stats attached. What a great idea, isn' it? For us who aren't pro gamers, this is great, because it keeps us from having to die horrible deaths by the hands of much more skilled players. Now, from the point of view of a casual gamer, how does the ladder system factor in our enjoyment of the game and of life? Think about it: you got home from work on a Monday night and you want to play a couple of games before your girl gets home. Do you sit down at your computer and think: I must win this, no matter the cost? First, it's supposed to be fun, and the ladder system has a way to automatically finding other players th...

I had been at the cafeteria for 10 minutes or more, but I hadn't noticed him. I didn't see he coming in. I spotted him when I was about to start eating. He walked too slowly, and it was like in those music videos when the singer is moving around slower than everyone around him. He looked extremely pale, and had some sort of red blurry spots on the right side of his neck and chin. That was all I noticed at first, and just went back to the world of thoughts, dismissing him as just some other guy. He walked slowly to the free tea, and waited for three other people to help themselves. Then he grabbed a cup and was about to pour himself some tea. A youngster lined up behind him, but he just let the youngster pass ahead. He then proceeded to pour himself a cup and drink it all the way. He filled his cup again, and drank it. Then he got another cupful, sipped a little and just stood there. At this point he had my full attention. He walked slowly to the counter. He took short...

We have no place for what we call a human being in our contemporary world. For more on this, I strongly recommend this one film called Waking Life , directed by Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset). Me, I hardly think of myself as someone. I'm not my past, my mind, my emotions or feelings, even though all those things are real to some extent. I do have memories of past moments in my memory. There is this accumulation of ideas, thoughts, energy and momentum called mind. I lose a train because I was one second late and get pissed off. Emotions are real too. That's not my point here, if there's any. What I'm interested in is the perception that I am none of these things. I most certainly am not my body. If you can get past this process of removing "yourselfness" from all those things you were taught to believe were you, talking about personality becomes very simple. Personality is a bunch of labels used to categorize yo...

One can use only so many websites, right? Dead wrong. You might think that it's impossible to keep up with twitter, blogger, facebook, orkut, tumblr, youtube and so many others. Most of these services have built-in functionality that enables you to cross-post. For instance, YouTube offers to post a link to Twitter automatically, if you give it permission. As you might notice, I make a point of being available on a lot of these websites. The good side is that I can connect to friends that only use one of these services. There are many downsides to this, but the first one is keeping every one of those services up to date. Me, I currently have the following arrangement going: Whatever I post on Blogger gets posted to the Atom feed. Tumblr then reads that feed and posts it to both Twitter and Facebook. YouTube has a little box in the uploading screen that allows you to login to Twitter and Facebook (and Orkut too, but I don't see it working). Once you've granted permissio...

I'm not an activist, or at least that is not part of my personal version of that mind-construct people usually call identity . Even so, I feel there's a lot to be done and changed around the world. However, activism has grown beyond what one would think of as it's "original concept" into many directions, most which can't be really considered productive. The question then becomes: how to be an "activist" in the current times? I'm a mid-lower class Brazilian John Doe. Not one particular trace would single me out all that much. I grew up in a position that allowed me to observe real poverty and other social problems, but at a safe distance. There's no way a human being in his right mind would see that much misery and not feel the urge to do something. But I looked at the people that were "doing something" and couldn't really wrap my head around it. Public hospitals were a bunch of people with good intentions and messed up perso...