I Know How You Feel, Hitler

Standard Of Beauty

Deep down, I think everyone in the world has what could be described as their own personal "standard of beauty." A sort of baseline they use to judge what fits their concept of what is aesthetically pleasing.

Not in any deeper sense than what the senses can pick up, naturally. Skin-deep, if you will. I'm really not that different from most assuming my thoughts are accurate. There is something --- or rather, someone --- I hold up as the standard by which I judge whether or not something has a beautiful appearance.

See, I've met my fair share of beauties in my life. I confess I've never been that close to most of them, and in some cases the whole thing was just me being a cold acquaintance, but it was never one of hostility. I guess, deep down, I've always adhered to the simple philosophy I formulated late in high school: be nice to the girls and girls will be nice to you.

There is one, however, who has managed to stick in my mind. A girl of such beauty that it is, frankly, hard not to use her as a benchmark for judging the appearances of everyone and everything else.

From what I recall, she's not just physically beautiful either. I remember her being generally friendly and personable, if not quite the type to associate with just anyone. She was also very smart --- not a genius, but she had a good grasp of academics between her shoulders. She was, overall, a very nice person. Likable, even lovable. But we were never close. Which makes it rather odd for me to realize just how much she's lingering in my thoughts lately.

I haven't seen her in years, not since high school graduation. I've never heard from here either, and it is really unlikely I will ever hear from her when once considers my relatively isolationist tendencies. Yet she lingers in my mind.

Lately, her visage has been more prominently manifesting in my mind. I swear I can hear her voice every so often, saying things I heard her say years before. I can't figure out why I'm remembering her now, though. I can't think of anything that might trigger such recurring, rather prominent thoughts.

The thoughts are not romantic or intimate, either. Platonic, essentially. I'm not sure why I'm thinking of her, of finding some way to contact her, even if it means violating my own principles and signing up for some soul-sucking social network.

I must ponder this a bit, and try not to let my thinking of her distract me.

Coin Say What?

So Monday is a regular working holiday. That legally means there should be an increase of about 30% in the pay for the day. Yet, we have been deprived of such by the arbitrary decision of the company lawyer.

With that in mind, how did he come to such a decision?

Damn thing came up heads. No 30%.

So, Quarter Life Crisis, Is It?

A very nice piece, I think. Standing ready, and the only direction is down. Oddly, the metaphorical feeling of standing on a roof with no other way to go but straight down is familiar, and it is almost unwelcome.

Things don't feel like they used to. Work is no longer as empty. Sleep is no longer as relaxing. Games are no longer as enjoyable. Food no longer tastes as good. Pain no longer hurts as much.

Maybe I've just started to grow number as time goes on, losing touch with everything around me. May, I believe, called this a "quarter life crisis," or something along those lines. It is an interesting means of categorizing this. The feeling that you've achieved nothing, that you are never going to achieve anything, and the odd, disturbing realization that you're more mortified by the notion of succeeding than you are at the prospect of impending failure.

I suppose, in a way, I can blame this on the fact that I feel older than I should. I don't seem to have the energy or the euphoria that people my age should. This insane, almost instinctive drive to prove ourselves masters of the universe, that we --- and we alone --- have glimpsed the fine threads that bely reality's fundamental mechanisms. Yeah, I have none of that perceived invincibility and supremacy. Instead, I have a crushing acceptance of the futility of human pursuit.

About nine years ago, the original Starcraft came out. I was among the first players here to see it was a good game. In some ways, I think I even predicted it would become the hit it is today. I had long forgotten how to play it by the time it became popular. Now, Starcraft II is looming over the horizon. Unlike most, who have become excited by the prospect of the sequel hitting the markets very soon, the impending release just reminds me it has been so very, very long.

Several years older, but not several years wiser.

Every day, I wake up with just a little less energy. Just a little less desire to actually wake up. Just a little more disappointment that I actually woke up in the first place. I guess you could say I'm dying inside in a more obvious manner than usual. Or, as others I know might theorize, I am adrift and badly in need of a new direction.

Through all this, I hear the voices in my head. For the first time I can remember, I can hear them clearly.

Perhaps, just perhaps, I will listen.

Duly Noted.

The new Evangelion girl, from Evangelion 2.0 or something like that. Have to hand it to Gainax. They may be milking this series for more than what it's worth, but their character designs are still pretty decent. Cute, even.

On Mortality.

On average, 146,357 die every day.

It can be considered a sizable, staggering number. Until one considers that there are literally a few billion people on the planet. Living, breathing, surviving. And in the end, all those billions of drops in the overall sea of humanity have but one common trait in common. Sooner or later, we're all going to die.

Billions of people, all waiting in line for their turn to die.

I've found myself thinking about it fairly recently. I think I'm thinking about death in the usual manner that people do, assuming they think about it. That is, are they afraid of it, wondering how and when it will happen, and things they'd like to do before time runs out.

I suppose I'm like everyone else in having a list of things I'd want to do before I die, if at all possible. Just that is a long list of things that I can't do, no matter how many improbable events occur in my favor. Some of these items aren't so much things I'd want to do before impending death as they are goals, tasks I'd like to accomplish at some point. Though, I suppose, there are a few items that are the sort of thing only someone with the assurance that he's dying soon (and thus be relatively safe from the consequences) would do.

Timing doesn't seem to be much of an issue for me, either. I could probably die now and not particularly mind. I guess this comes from the grim acceptance that I'm going to die sometime, and have no say in that matter. Neither do I have any real say in when I'm going to die, so no point really bickering about that, either. Death is the great inevitable, and pondering about when the inevitable happens is kind of pointless to me. Certainly, I'd prefer it be not quite as painful as it could be, but when the end comes, I think we all have to accept it with the stoic dignity that comes with knowing you won't have another chance to be dignified.

What I'm not so sure of, though, is whether or not I actually feel anything concerning death. I'm sure I'm going to die, and I'm sure I'll have next to no control over it. But what do I feel about the fact that I, like everyone else, am mortal? Strangely, all indications point to me not really caring. Perhaps I've come to terms with death even though, statistically speaking, I'm not exactly going to keel over and die the next day. It will happen when it does and how it does, and I find it difficult to muster the will to care about it. Granted, I probably will care when its happening, but now? Not so much.

Death is inevitable, and I accept that. I don't embrace it, but I'm not going to fight it. Not that I believe in much of an afterlife, either. I'm not entirely sure what prompted me to start considering, pondering mortality and the prospect of death, but I've come to find it rather fascinating.

Is it strange, I wonder, to enjoy thinking about death, yet not entirely care about the death itself? Still, many would consider this acceptance to be an alien concept, something that goes against the natural preservation instinct of the human animal. I'm not sure why I've come to accept it, maybe even embrace the idea of dying. Perhaps I'll figure this oddity out, perhaps not.

Tempus mortis.

From Crime Library: Deborah Gardner

The Case.

I occasionally browse through the Crime Library, read up on some articles and cases. It helps me put things in perspective somehow, and reminds me that the world isn't as pretty as tourist ads would like to present them to be. There are some ugly things out there, but reading through it, this one case struck me the most.

Not because it was the most heinous. Not because it was the most compelling mystery. Not because it remains unsolved -- though, technically, it does. I find it compelling because the Peace Corp and the US government let a man get away with murder, all because of the potential damage to the organization's reputation.

This is a clear and present travesty of justice, but I guess I should expect nothing less of the US. Her killer deserves to be punished, and justice needs to be done. This whole thing is just...there's no real way to describe it. I mean...all the evidence points at him, the victim even managed to mention him by name before dying, and the Peace Corp and the US government orchestrates his being allowed to get away scot-free?

If I were in charge, that man would be hanged by the neck until dead.

There is no justice in the world. None at all.

Very Impressive.

The above is a cake, believe it or not. An actual cake.
These guys are amazing.

Grievances

The nature of the world is such that, one way or another, someone has to complain about their job. This is natural and to be expected. No matter how nice of an employer you are or how good you are as a manager, sooner or later, someone is going to complain about something. It could be something small and insignificant, a matter that will blow over given some time and maybe a nice paycheck. Others are more genuine and concrete, and will brew for prolonged periods under the surface, simmering until some undefined point when it becomes absolutely intolerable.

This post is dedicated to one particular aspect of the daily workload, known as blog commenting/research. Basically, it requires one shift to find 40 blogs a day that fit certain parameters, while the other shift takes those lists and finds 6 of them a day to place comments on. There are other aspects of the task, but these details are not required to know.

There are, naturally, a few guidelines. First, they have to be of a specific rank. This one is easy enough, just time-consuming because of the nature of the tool used to determine it. It takes so damn long, especially if the blog has a lot of javascript or flash running. The second is that it has to be open for comments. As of now, we are hidebound to the research half of the task, and we've been getting some annoying messages about it. The worst of which would be that there can be no duplications not only within the "40 per day" but from the very start. The second is that if the blog requires registration, then there should already be one. And finally, if links do end up duplicated, we have to provide replacements.

To an extent, I understand the insistence that no duplicates be made. This is perfectly understandable, as excessive duplication of the output just speaks volumes of laziness. However, given the nature of what needs to be done, I find it completely unreasonable to expect a complete lack of duplication entirely. We cannot be expected to have a master list of our output that we can all access for comparison to the output for the day. Do you have any idea how long it would take to countercheck all 40 of them with the hundreds that get compiled onto said master list idea? It'd take all day, so unless the boss wants us to sacrifice everything else for this specific task, then expect duplicates to crop up every so often.

Then there's the issue of active accounts on the sites we seek out. This one I have two issues with. First, we got a lot of those sites when we were on the receiving end, rather than the research end. I can personally say that at least half of the ones I got required a registered account to place comments. However, while we all got it, we didn't complain. We simply skipped over them and used the ones that didn't require registration. And he wants us to not only find these sites, determine if they need registration, then confirm said registration? Does he have any inkling, any concept at all of how long that would take? Waiting for a registration to be confirmed could take days, and we already do quite a bit of registration daily -- just not of this nature.

The second issue regarding registrations is this: we skipped past them during the last rotation, why can't the night shift people? It isn't like there aren't a whole of other options available on hand in case one is unusable, and it isn't as if everything we list down actually gets used. When the blogs are sent in at 40 a day from 4 different researchers and the comments required of the other shift comes down to only 6 per day per commenter, that's a lot of leftover stuff. Even if a few require registration and need to be skipped over, there's very little chance they'd actually run out of sites on any given day.

Finally, I absolutely refuse to provide replacements for duplicates. Duplicated links will be inevitable given this task, and we already do what we reasonably can to minimize them. The whole process is time-consuming, especially given the piece of shit Internet connection (my home wireless connection is faster, honestly) and the fact that my PC seems required to crash at least twice a day at the most inopportune times.

Thinking about it, I have another issue I need to let out. Whenever I meet with the night shift people, I don't hear any complaints. We send in our required number of blogs, and if there were any problems, I figure I'd hear about it from them on those instances when I arrive before they head home. It has happened a few times, and not one complaint. So why is it that the division head seems like he's got nothing better to do than to dig through our lists and look for duplicates or other things to complain about? If the people who use the lists don't see any problem with what we provide, then why should he?

We encountered these same problems in the last rotation, when we were doing the commenting and the night shift did the research. We certainly didn't make a big deal if one or two blogs were the same, or if some of them required us to have to sign up for an account on the site. We got the ones we could use, did our jobs, and paid the rest of them no mind. We'd appreciate it if the favor was returned.