I know that the Deep Thoughts section has been growing a bit stagnant, and for this, I apologize. So I present to you this somewhat random one, which is a composite of some of the more interesting thoughts that have come across my mind so, I hope it makes up for the wait.
I was just reading Newsweek and in a recent issue, it talks about America's rich. And the usual folks are lavishly residing on the cover, starting from Mr. William Henry Gates the Third and proceeding downward. I mean, do we need to be glorifying them more than we need to?
And that got me thinking. Is wealth and Christianity mutually exclusive? Does wealth ultimately corrupt? Look at Disney, who most people equate with wholesome family fun - one example of how that's changed is how Disney threatened to sue a day care center that had painted Disney characters. Basically, money becomes a driving force. So, another scneario is that a rich person receives Christ in their lives, and then. So far, I've not heard of such an incident. What I do remember, even back in when I was the kiddie Sunday school stage, was Jim Baker - not George Bush's Secretary of State, but the television evalgelist who was caught using the proceedings from his ministry to build up a life of glutonnous excess and luxury for himself and his wife. Among the more shocking bits of opulence was an air conditioned doghouse!!
I remember back in my freshman year when I was still in IV, how during their frosh conference, the speaker, Steve Panetta (?), was talking about how one cannot serve two masters. The master that we should all be serving is God Himself - but he touch upon how other masters could take forms, even those as seemingly innocuous as friends, academics, and even that's right - money! And money, it seems pretty apparent, has been the master of a lot of people and organizations, for the worse.
Well, this doesn't mean that I'm going to sell all my posessions and be some monk in some far off land. In my work, and those of my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, it's all for His glory after all. For instance, we certainly could start a Christian video game company, and make money that way. But we should be as concious of giving money as we are spending it, and how we have been accordingly blessed.
(Anyway, an very random addendum, this week, they have a cover article on Mary. No, not the alto in Testimony who smiles so much that you wonder if you have a booger or something (cf. Scott Dollar's homepage), but her namesake, Jesus Christ's mother. Perhaps this was to atone for that un-Biblical story on wealth. Hmmm...)
And lest you think that wealth is something that neither I nor my friends have come in contact with, well... you would have actually been right until very recently. Let me relate to you.
Well, I was at Atlanta, GA to visit my Stanford friends, Leo and Joyce (who number among the approximately 5 Stanford people I know without home pages) and also stopping at E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, checking out all the latest that the gaming industry had to offer, and letting my primest childhood interests once again take over and invigorate myself.
Well,besides being a digital bazaar for the world's artisans of the video game craft to hawk their latest marvels of software and hardware, E3 was also the venue of the final round in the Intergraph Red Annilhilation Quake Tournament. And guess who I saw: one of my friends from high school. (I am keeping him nameless, but if you really want to find out, give your mouse-clicking finger a bit of a workout and do some research on the net, and you should be able to find out his identity pretty quickly.)
Well, I sort of imagined that he might be there, him having won the world DOOM championship a year ago, and also very highly placed in a Warcraft II compeition, but still, it gave me a big surprise, to say the least.
So everyone is cheering him on, including me, lucky enough to get front row seats. And LGD Thresh (his character name) wins it with a final score of 14 frags to -1 (the -1 was due to his opponent fragging himself, ie, committing suicide. I wonder if it was accidental or intentional?)
So, Thresh, is now the world's number one Quake player, and most likely, the most famous person to graduate from Monta Vista High School thus far. Pretty sad, eh? And he's dropped out of school too. Of course, it's only Cal, but still! (Hey, stop the mailbombing already, Cal folks, I was only kidding ) In other words, he's kind of like Tiger Woods in this regard, except the sport is Quake. Supposedly he's slated to make an appearance at SIGGRAPH. The world's most respected academic computer graphics conference isn't immune to this encroaching commercialism. And with him having dropped out of school, the intellectual honor, and the subsequent future rewards of staying in academia for a few more years is once again crushed by the tidal wave of instant and ephermal financial gratification. In this case, said gratification comes in the form of a 1987 Ferarri, $10,000, and endorsing joysticks and other video gaming products (this is especially ironic as Quake is a game played better using a mouse, by far). In all, about what someone holding a BS in computer science could make on the average nowdays at a good paying job.
If anyone wants to see a modern Tower of Babel, then only have to turn to their video game system. Videogames are clearly a worldwide phonomenon with great potential (as you probably know if you've been reading my Thoughts lately.) Unfortuantely, the worldwide part is a bit of a misnomer because the video game companies have artificially made it so that games from one part of the world, say Japan, are incompatible with games from another part (like the US) The end result is gamers who like a bit of foreign flair ahave to go to great lengths, such as getting converters, adapters, or mod chips. What a shame. Bue the video game industry is hardly alone in this regard.
Well, I decided that I would take a step forward in the home video area, and I bought a Sony DVD-S7000 player which had been "modified". The spicy thing is that it can play movies from all over the world. In case you aren't into these things that much, each DVD is encoded for a particular region of the world - a US DVD player can't play Japanese DVDs, or vice versa. Anyways, DVD is to videotapes what CDs are to audio tapes - all the information is digital. They even have DVD-ROMs for your computer that can play movies right on your screen. This means that your options for procrastination are drastically augmented: not only can you peruse such trivia on the web like Mark Wang's Deep Thoughts, you can now watch the latest Hollywood pictures, right on your monitor!
But what is the point of all these region locks anyways? This means that someone into foreign cinema is probably out of luck, and would be stuck with the usual Hollywood trash. America caters to the lower denominator, which happens to be the highest denominator with money. I mean, we are in a global economy here. Can't we all get along?
And I realize how much this parallels history. The motivating factor is greed, after all. Yep, that recurring theme again. It's like an electronic version of the Middle East, or Bosnia-Herzegovina. Maybe we should have the US step in, like we do for all these regional disputes and conflicts.
Speaking of movies, I've been watching them a lot lately this summer, with the rest of the Stanford crew. Along with movies, one usually gets treated to a stream of movie preview trailers, shown before the "real" start of the movie, and also in the lobby of the theater.
Have you ever noticed that in all the movie previews, the guy (I do not ever recall a female in this role) doing the narration always sounds the same? For the action/sci-fi/suspense flicks, the voice is low, deep, imposing. For the romance movies, the voice is baritone, charged with emotion from the heart. And for the comedies, it's upbeat. In any case, the voice is always a male.
Could it be that the movie studios are colluding with each other? Is there a monopoly on movie-trailer narration? Perhaps these voices have unique psychoacoustic characteristics - maybe even having special harmonics which correspond to molecular resonance frequencies for the neurochemicals in your brain, causing you to eventually degenerate into a mindless money-spendin', moviegoin' zombie!
My advice to the Justice Department: Forget Microsoft investigate this!
Miscellaneous Complaint Corner: To Century Theatres: Bring back the clapping theme!
And finally, the Random Dream Department:
I dreamt this while sleeping in CooLeo's room in Mirrielees one time. Among the more coherent points to this dream:
Every week at 8:30 AM during the summer, FiCS would have a praise session in MemChu to start off the day. I specifically remember Dchai and Kris on the team, although there were more than that. The songs I specifically remember hearing in this dream was "There is Joy in the Lord", "Meet Us Here", and "Hail to the King". Of course, there was more.
David Say Kong Tay had an extended family, and I met them in Mirrielees. And they (the male members) all looked EXACTLY like him, with that distinctive haircut. And the Singaporean-British accent. So David Tay and three or four of his brothers/cousins/whatever start this new band, and basically become the next Beatles, with millions of adoring fans all over the world and appearances on all the major world news media, like Newsweek, Time, CNN, the London Post, the Economist, the Straits Times, Pravda, Transactions of the ACM, Nintendo Power, etc...
I was in my computer graphics class, and I asked a question about spectrally-varying BRDFs (bidirectional reflectance distribution functions). Anyways, I noticed Lorraine Shih was in that class, and I think I totally lost her. Hey, I'm just kidding about the whole EE/CS deal Lorraine, I'm not implying anything here ! =) I just dreamt it!
Anyways, so what the heck does this mean? At first glance, it seems like a sequence of disjoint events, unlike a continuous flow, driven by a single plot line like the one about my prom on the aircraft carrier. Unfortunately for me, on second, third, fourth, and Nth (where N tends towards positive infinity) glances, it still seems like a sequence of disjoint events!
Fortunately for you, I've been realizing that this section of my web page is been too much of a one-way medium. In one of the more well-known Macintosh magazines, in the back, they print a totally inscrutably random picture (the only constant being that it involves a Macintosh in some way or another) and ask the readers to write a caption for it, the winning reader getting his or her bit of prose printed in next month's issue.
So, I call upon thee, web surfer, to send in your thoughts as to what in the world this dream could possibly mean. The best interpretations will receive special mention on this site. Go for it! No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited.
