Wednesday, July 15, 2015

LENS and Life, week of 7/7

One site yet again.  The doctor commented that she's mapping my brain again, so I guess that's part of why we're doing so few sites at a time.  I should explain.  When we first started meddling with my brainwaves, a baseline of my brain was taken over the first few weeks.  As time has passed, the doctor can compare that baseline with current and past maps.  So this will be the latest map, and hopefully there'll be some interesting trends and patterns to see in comparison.  It's always interesting to learn a bit about the software and theory behind LENS, so maybe in the next couple weeks I'll get to learn a bit more. 

Life is being stressful.  Nothing new, really, but my leisure isn't making up for it anymore.  The computer game I've been using for enjoyment and a sense of getting things done is starting to let me down.  I've run out of easy to understand, "just work hard and you'll definitely get _____" type things in the game.  Or at least, I've run out of the ones I was interested in doing.  I've been collecting mounts in the game, things like horses and gryphons and dragons and such.  It's been fun, but at this point I'm down to spending dozens of hours trying to get a single thing, as opposed to spending an hour or two per day each week and getting a set of them. 

There's also the immense frustration factor of waiting carefully at just the right place for a specific monster to appear, and then having some random person with a better internet connection and better abilities swoop in and swipe it, thus ensuring I've just wasted at least an hour of my free time.  That's life, obviously, but it really puts a damper on my enjoyment of the game. 

I've been offsetting the time spent by reading books.  I recently recommended a book series (Foundation, by Isaac Asimov) to a friend, and then realized that A) I hadn't read it myself in some time, and B) I really wanted to.  So I've been reading it.  It's interesting how much you can forget or entirely miss in your first, second, third, and etc. readings.  As I age, I have to smile at Asimov's visions of the future.  They're both impressively forward-thinking and adorably backwards-thinking.  The Foundation series is set thousands of years in the future, but it still has references to video players with actual handheld videos, and things like people smoking.  Along with the spaceships and faster-than-light technology. 

I can't really blame the esteemed writer for his lack of future-predictive powers.  When he died, the Internet had just started getting to be a big public thing.  When he wrote these books, ARPANET didn't even exist.  Let alone DVD players, mp3s, iPods, and all that.  It just goes to show that even the most brilliant minds aren't perfect. Which is of some comfort to me, given that I too am going to foist my visions of the future upon people.  My visions involve less spaceships and more equality, but if people like Asimov and Tolkien can miss incredibly simple and obvious things (in retrospect), then certainly I'm allowed to do so. 

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