It's been almost 2 weeks.
Then again you lot see me on AIM or whatnot almost everyday, so I feel justified. ;P

What's been happening here?

Well, for one thing, I kicked the damn aliens off my planet today in Xcom. Hehehe.... The proper strat is to fire a couple of blaster bombs up the elevator to kill the final guards then storm in and take out the trash.... I just wandered my troopers in and started with the automatic plasma fire. And the alien bastards panicked! Ran screaming dropping their weapons... You can tell a lot about me by the type of games I like and why... ;)

The flamewar below is over. I ran off a couple of long and pendantic emails, as I am wont to and that was the end of it. Funny thing is we shifted off the main mailing list and without more people contributing, I guess the topic died off. What I think in the end is that people are cruel, minorities suffer, and there isn't much you can do about it short of brainwashing the population. Or killing everyone. But that's even more drastic...

Current reading is Jonathan Franzen's How to be Alone which is really very good. He's an excellent essayist. And I guess the point about being an essayist is to make personal experience universal. To write something that resonates with all readers. To use specifics to say something general about being human. I don't know if I'll read his fiction, because I rarely read non-sci-fi/fantasy/non-fiction, but iI very well might in the future.

Am also reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, and he's as good as always. *grinz*

I have found religion. Or refound it. Or whatever. The point is that I'm going to Church again. It's not that I've finally found God, it's that I've finally agreed to participate in organised religion. Okay, let me preface with my beliefs when it comes to the divine: I believe in an all-powerful, omniscient and loving deity. What that meant till recently was that I figured that dieties of the above sort didn't require worship, but essentially just wanted to watch his creation do it's thing, preferably in a moral way. I don't think that organisied religion has much of a point - after all, your relationship with your creator is a personal, private thing. And someone telling you x, y and z are the Will of God could well be lying. I certainly wouldn't believe it. If God has something to say, He'll tell me personally. Why? Because He can, because it isn't a bother to Him, and because He loves us as individuals and deals with us as individuals. Essentially, it's a "speak, lord, your servant is listening" "shut up you bastards, I'm trying to commune!" sort of situation.

But then I eventually got guilted into going for Ash Wednesday Mass. (Thanks to a bizzarre number of people around me turning out to be Catholic and Nessa...) So there I was and I decided to start being a regular churchgoer again. Thing is, now that I'm back into religion, and now that, for the first time in my life I am actively deciding to go to Church rather than being dragged along, Church is a let down. It's slow, it lacks energy. In years not going to Church I somehow built up an expectation of Mass as something more than just coming in and going through the motions. I think I believe in God more strongly now than ever before, and the way the Church conducts itself.... Well, it almost seems dissapointing. I'm almost wishing I run into some bizzarre fervent dudes (they always make me feel uncomfortable, because there's this feeling I'm not going to measure up to their ideals of saintlihood. But now I figure that I obviously don't, but God must have put me here for another reason. He can have as many Saints as he wants, but only one me, so there has to be some point) to make me feel like the Church's faith is alive, and not something people come to Mass on Sundays for. Then again, it's not like I know what's going on in their minds so maybe they are pious but just internalise it.

Kissing Jessica Stein. The two of you who haven't watched it yet (and you know who you are!) are in deep, deep trouble. =P

Also, in the meantime (and it seems so minor at the end, doesn't it?) I've taken 2 midterms received the results, submitted a paper and got that back as well. All good. Can't really complain.

I will complain about the way some of my classes are run, though. One of my profs is patronising and assigns sai kang all the time. He's so enthused about his field that he expects his students to share that enthusiasm. I like the subject, and I love engineering, but this guy's putting me off. I initially liked it when he came to recognise me in class (I usually like it. Fact is that in only one of my 6 classes am I "unknown" to the TA/Prof and that subject has no discussions, so it's not like there's an opportunity to get noticed) but I really don't like it now. I don't like being compared to other people, I don't like being a standard for everyone to be compared against. I don't like standing out from the crowd unless I do something really noteworthy, and wasting time doing worthless assignments isn't all that impressive. The grader for the class is an ass who doesn't give partial credit and can't be bothered to read the question or the answer. I expect more from a highly recommended "Harvard grad." Then again, Harvard's engineering programs aren't that hot, so maybe this is just an example. (Ironic point: my math GSI's from Caltech and he always has trouble adding/multiplying and consistently uses non-standard notation. Looks like the image of the school really doesn't always match with its students) Why am I so pissed at the grader? He's stiffed a lot of marks to people for silly things. For example, 0 points for a whole homework problem if calculator values are punched in wrong at the last step. As for his grading in the midterm, I find it questionable when some can get the exact answer in the answer scheme and still get a question wrong.

Other subject I want to bitch about is another engineering course, where the homework is so heavily based on the lecture notes that I might as well photocopy the lecture notes and submit that as my homework. In fact, if I had a good OCR software, that's precisely what I would do. How do you learn anything with work like this? Is somehow copying from lecture notes going to impart strange engineering skills? Weird indeed. It's really silly.

Okay, that's about it for tonight. There's a midterm next week. Wondering how the essay I submitted today will turn out too...