Everything you want is not everything you need

I rediscovered Vertical Horizon's Everything You Want again after looking up some word concepts. I like the music video. Such combinations of visuals and text are always very appealing to me. They remind me of Serial Experiments Lain (although Lain's texts are of course much less straightforward).

Also came across a nice quote:
"Man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
("You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.")

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Something from my thesis got me thinking...
Fairies might come from the Persian peris (it's a minority theory, as most researcher believe the Grimms' theory). That made me read up a bit on Persia. I've always had troubles with grasping that Persia and Iran are the same countries. I connect Persia with a rich culture, traditions and exotic tales; something out of a book rather than reality, and fully positive. Iran, on the other hand, is to me related to war, rural and poor areas and nuclear weapons. It's interesting how two words can refer to the same thing, but create completely different concepts in one's head. I bet the advertisement industry works a lot with that, just in reversal. Take something negative, give it a new name and image and turn it into something positive.
(I don't see the point in renaming geography, though. Persia turned into Iran, Edo became Tokyo, Lentos was renamed first Lentia and then Linz, etc. I mean, alright, I can understand the reasoning behind the renaming of Edo, but for the most part, there are no reasons given for renaming geographic points, and it's just immensely confusing when you find out after years that two names that you always treated as being separate from each other are actually one and the same thing).

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I used the ending of last year and beginning of the new one for another cooking feast (because when there are so many people in the house who will possibly eat what you cook without running away in panic, you need to seize the opportunity). Unlike the Paella cooking in February, though, it was not one big thing but many little ones - sauces, desserts, etc. After not having been able to try out some new recipes in the last weeks, I had lots of fun with this.

Grapefruit-shrimps-salad:



Attempting to make sushi for the first time. I need to try this more often. Haven't quite figured out how to roll it in a nice way. I still have two other types of sushi to try out anyway. Here, Nigiri-sushi and Maki-sushi:



Finally, Dim Sum and Onigiri:



At some point I managed to leave the kitchen and joined the group. We spent a fun game evening playing Uno and Kragmortha (cool game - not quite as good as real roleplaying, but it really got me into the mood again) and following some superstitions and rites. Then the new year began with snowfall, and everything was perfect. I really like this year so far.

Slaughtering Stories

If one-and-a-half chicken produce one-and-a-half eggs in one-and-a-half days, how many eggs do nine chicken produce in nine days?

Many months ago I saw I, Robot on TV and liked it enough to eventually buy the book, which I finished reading yesterday. Plot-wise, it was probably the most surprising book I have ever read. If you have a film fashioned after a book, you expect them to have roughly the same plot (with many cuts and edits, granted, but essentially similar). This is not the case here. What I, Robot the film and I, Robot the book have in common are an Earth that has managed to manufacture robots and the three Laws of Robotics - nothing else. My distant memory of the film tells me its plot was altogether different to what I have just finished reading.
Which is unexpected, surprising, but not necessarily bad. (It means you definitely get more plot than you could ever have expected.)
Isaac Asimov's novel is different to the books I usually read, because it does not build up suspense through character interaction and character development, which are my main interests. I normally find it hard to enjoy a novel if it has no appealing characters. That's probably why I don't read so much Hard Science Fiction - it often evolves more about the future scenario than about single people (here is, to my understanding, the essential difference between Fantasy and SciFi; Fantasy uses a world's destiny and future to build up a story around people, and SciFi uses people to visualise a possible future of our world). Surprisingly enough, I enjoyed I, Robot nevertheless and read through it quite quickly. It's a bit like a short story collection on a common theme and tells about the different stages of robot "evolution" on Asimov's Earth. It's interesting to read about these Laws of Robotics that Asimov invented and at the same time (/in the same book) he pointed out the mistakes and possible fallacies in them; an exemplary thought experiment.

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Plot discrepancies till the end weren't the only surprise yesterday. I read that Hayao Miyazaki is a feminist, which is a term I'd never have associated with him. I guess it makes sense - the strong female characters are distinctive for his films. Still, I wouldn't have classfied the working women in Mononoke Hime as a sign for feminism; rather as an analogy to the women who had to work during war times - that's probably part of what you miss out on when you watch films from a different culture; you tend to put the situations in them into your own mindframe. Makes me wonder how many more layers foreign films have that I have no access to.

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Lastly, I came across a great song by the comedy act Tripod. Both their song and their website make my geek heart beat a bit louder.
(Ghost Ship is quite good, too.)

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Sketches for poses, movements, (weird) anatomy, etc.: