Catface

Stop whatever you think it is you're doing and watch this.

True Selflessness

I've given this subject this subject some thought. I've always thought that there was no such thing as true selflessness.

Let's define a selfless act first: To do something without benefit for yourself.

I believe that benefit includes feelings. After all, you are not truly selfless if you feel that what you are doing is right and it makes you feel good. You have other motivations. Helping the other person is a side effect of making yourself feel good. People don't give money because they're selfless. People give money because they feel it is the right thing to do, and that satisfies their feeling of justice or whatever. Gandhi did what he did because he felt it was the right thing to do. Which must have given him pleasure. If he 'felt' it was wrong what he was doing, but knew it was the right thing to do, he wouldn't have done it, I think.

To give you an example: would you torture your sibling to save a million people? Would go at them with a knife and extend their suffering for as long as humanly possible, if it was the only way to save an entire continent? Would you murder hundreds and forsake yourself and your own self-respect if it meant saving a species? I know very few people who would say yes. And yet, I think that is selflessness. To forsake yourself, and your feeling of self, for the benefit of a thousand. This has come up loads of times in movies: sacrificing one for a million, or a hundred for a billion, is according to the movies, never right. Experimenting on the few for the benefit of the species is amoral and wrong. And yet, from the point of view of the species, is it really?

Is it not truly selfless to let this horror go on because you KNOW it will be for the benefit of the species? Ponder about this for a bit. I dare you. Could you do something you would never do if it meant the survival of everyone you know? That, I believe, is what it means to be selfless. Not giving a homeless man enough money to buy a differently faced coin of the same value.

Black Ops Multiplayer

Fun. :)

Black Ops and Modern Warfare are mutually exclusive

I know I talk about games a lot, but this is going to be a big rant. I know I also tell anyone I can get my hands on that games are the pinnacle of human storytelling. This has nothing to do with that. I am just going to bitch and whine about how one game is better than the other. But for good reason. But, you know, you've been warned. If this kind of thing doesn't interest you, I suggest you check out http://www.notquitewrong.com/rosscottinc/. It's awesome and a lot more funny than what comes after the jump.

Oh Dear

Here's a conversation that took place in my head last night that got me slightly worried about my own mental health.

"You really need to stop talking to yourself. He needs to sleep."

"Stop referring to yourself as he. You're going to think you're going insane."

"You mean you are. I mean... I am."

"Stop this, I want to sleep. Good.

The following line was also worrying, but slightly less so:

"I should blog about this."

The thinking about thinking about my own thoughts is happening enough to annoy me. Anyone know what I'm talking about? Thinking something, then having a thought about just because that's the kind of thought you expect you're going to have, only to contradict yourself until you drown in a sea of voices and thoughts AND CAN'T FIGURE OUT YOUR OWN OPINION!

Slow update

I've been busy with things like this

Obsession vs. Addiction

I know some people that are of the opinion that I have a gaming addiction AND a gaming obsession. After all, I spend a lot of my free time if not playing games, then at least reading about them, watching clips, thinking about them or blogging about them.

If someone were to say, right now, that I have played my last game and I will never again play a game, I would be more than a slight distressed. It is my most prevalent hobby. However, if I still get to watch the evolution of arguably the most interesting medium since the invention of the written word, I think I would manage. If someone were to say: you get to have time-travelling, but you lose gaming, I'd do it in a heartbeat, just to see where it would go in the future.

Because games are my obsession. Gaming isn't. I want to see what is going to happen next in the fastest-growing medium ever. Graphics, mo-cap, storytelling, gameplay. They're all improving! And I just want to be there to witness it. This is why I like games so much. They're a unique form of entertainment, and it's constantly changing.

I game a lot, too, for two reasons: first of all, it's just for fun. It's a fun hobby, which can be competitive or relaxing, aggravating or soothing. There aren't as many movies that piss me off as there are games, but there aren't as many that can captivate me as much either.

The reason I spend so much time with games is because it's both. An obsession and a hobby. But I'd give up the second for the first in a heartbeat.

I maded a song!

Update

Next one is coming as soon as youtube approves the vid.

Memetic mutation

I know my past few posts have been either depressing or just very serious, and I would like to apologize. Instead of apologizing, however, I am just going to make an entirely different post.

One on the subject of memes. Or, more specifically, webmemes (because internet memes sounds archaic, said by the kind of people who say “internet sites”). I consider myself to be a child of “the interwebz”, as us younguns like to call it. The internet is a strange thing. As Arthur C Clarke said in the sixties: “In the future, perhaps in 50 years’ time, the whole world will have shrunk to a point through social media”. Oh, how right he was. The internet is a place where everyone is in contact with anyone in an instant (or in about 10 minutes of excruciating loading time).