We live in a Beautiful World

...yeah, we do
yeah, we do

The Coldplay video 'Don't Panic'. Also the inspiration for the title of this blog post.

I've been panicking recently. Thinking about my life, and my future, and where I'd like both to go.

There is the commonly accepted view, that I'll get a degree, do research further on, and settle as a professor. That is the science-related profession that is least loathsome, or most enjoyable, to me. I'm not quite sure which. At the moment, I do enjoy the subjects I'm taught, except when I'm to actually study them. Perhaps that is just my natural tendency to laziness and under-utilization of my brain.

There is another, that wants me to take a year off, concentrate on my writing, and try to get published. This has a lot more uncertainty in it than anything else: whether I'll achieve fulfillment in doing something I've always wanted to do; whether I'll be good enough to live on my writing alone, a rare enough return on the dream that I, like a lot of people before me have possessed.

Not writing for weeks and weeks together, not expanding my mind through wide reading, is putting me back three and a half weeks for every month of progress I make in my writing. It's simple, really. Writing is a profession like any other. No one simply sits down to be a writer. It needs practice, and learning, and reading and then some more practice, and so on. If I have to be a writer I need to work on it 24x7 for three or four years or 20 minutes a day for 20 years.

Being a good scientist will require me to give up my voracious reading and focus on my studies, and external science-related stuff, work in a lab, perhaps, with lesser free time to write as I please. Or else I'll mess up like I have so far, with my CPI, not getting a good project: no one wants a half-hearted student. I will not learn what I need to, to be successful in the future. Everything I've worked on until now will be a waste if I don't avail myself of the opportunities I've been given by putting my soul into science.

There are no shortcuts in life.

Katze.

P.S. Still panicking. This didn't help at all.

Deadhouse Gates

...Because some book titles are just too cool to believe.

Life is cruel, they say. That's why George R.R. Martin, while writing Game of Thrones, maimed an 8-year-old within the first few chapters.

Of course I hated it when that happened, because I like life to be sunny and happy and joyful and all that jazz. Not that it is, ever. But it's nice to pretend--and even believe--that it is. And that is the kind of feeling I get from the Malazan Book of the Fallen. There's a lot of sadness and bitterness in it, and a lot of death. But at the end, I kind of feel like the people in the story changed lives, their own or those of others, in some way. Mostly for the better. And, possibly, that's all one could ever want in life.

Basically I liked Coltaine. I really liked him. He had a useful way of dealing with people--ignore their whining and then enforce martial law to make sure they toe the line. Yup, something special, all right. Highlight for spoilers: And he's dead, nothing can change that, really. But his sacrifice wasn't in vain, and that's what matters in the end. 

End spoiler. Something I learnt from TV tropes and idioms, a rather useful if slightly flame-y site.

Go on: Linky, linky

Hum. Anyway, Coltaine. Here's the most romanticised version of him I've seen so far:

.

.

And here is a book cover with him on it:

Yeah. Sliight difference. As a matter of fact, that cover is more art than cover, almost. It depicts the feeling so well, you feel like crying when you see it. (*sniff* No, that is not a tear there in my eye.) Beautiful, wonderful special edition. Now, why can't more people gift me stuff like this?? People in my life, take heed.

Signing off, and wondering why life, while alright in the theoretical, is such a pain to actually live.

Katze.

P.S. Is a bit mortified, because just realised have been pronouncing it wrong myself, and have recently corrected someone else's(correct) pronunciation. Sorry. >.<

Bibliophilia

Hi,

It's been so long since I last wrote a blog post that I've almost forgotten how.

This one is, as ever, for myself.

I've been reading like a maniac, and I've come to several conclusions:

1. I don't like Raymond E. Feist, though his name is rather ...inspiring. Just the right amount of mysteriousness with the 'E' and a hint of magic with the last name. But I was un-awed by his first book, Magician, in spite of which I ended up reading the whole thing(Thank you, Mr. Feist, for giving me Arutha conDoin, though. He was the first--and possibly only--character I really, really loved in Magician.) Silverthorn, his second offering, hurt my brain, and not in the o-m-g-this-is-fantastic kind of way. I left it halfway. I-I!  had to leave a book halfway. Imagine my pain.(Though I'm yet to complete A Tale of Two Cities, I'm afraid.)

2. I am still in love with Terry Pratchett, and the girl who is Aching all over. ;) I recently came across this amazing book:

And, once again, I am in love. It's a fantastic book, going far beyond the usual funny, witty fare, with loveable characters and strange, yet oddly familiar devices and settings. No, this one has got an amazing sort-of whodunit and whathehellisgoingon vibe that really just kills it, you know, no disrespect to the surfer dudes or whoever that I've stolen that phrase from. I can't wait to read the sequel, Making Money.

-No really. Let me leave this blog post to go read it right this instant.-

3. I also am awed and amazed by the master storyteller who is Neil Gaiman. Respect. Nothing else can be said. I read Coraline recently, and I wonder how something about a child's seemingly perfectly harmless imaginary adventures could be made to be so creepy. But I think that might be it: what is harmless for a child, in its dreams, can inspire much more creeping-up-your-spine terror than anything an adult can ever come up with. Coraline is one of the few books whose movie I've seen before I read the book, but I loved the movie(Henry Selick classic that it is :D) and so I was enthusiastic about picking up the book.

This is the scariest thing. Ever:

And now I really think I should finish up this post, since I have places to be and things to do, and one absent team member, and one pissed-off one. Cheerio!

Zeus: Master of Olympus

<3 p="p">City-building games.

And stuffs.

I officially have stopped caring about what people think about my writing. I swear.
*Deep breath*
Ah, that feels much better.

Now, onto what I really wanted to write about today.

There's this super-awesome, completely addictive online game called Rebuild 2:

Here it is: Linky

(btw, just in case you didn't notice, 'Linky' is blue, and that means it's hyperlinked, so CLICK ON IT.)

So it's your standard after-zombie-apocalypse city-building game. OR IS IT?

No, actually, it is just that. But it's a seriously great game, so much that I stayed up till 2 am last night staring my eyes out playing it. Aren't I just too darn awesome? :D

City building is absorbing like nothing else, ever. I loved all these games that my brother loved, too, and we would've had the best times playing them(if he wasn't so busy trying to take control of the mouse and I wasn't so busy trying to tell him what was best for our civilisation, that is ;) )

We played: (mini list follows)

1. Age of Empires
 My first love. *sentimental sigh* The first time I used cheats in a game, too.

2. Age of Empires 2
 But of course :P

3. Pharaoh
 This was a brilliant, brilliant game. You are an Egyptian leader, and you eventually(I assume, I never finished the game) become Pharaoh over all Egypt. There were actually two more in this pack, I can recall, and the one which I loved, even more than Pharoah, was

4. Zeus (and its expansion pack, Poseidon)
 I loved this soo much, I hate that it doesn't work on Mac. Hate it like Hades hated his brothers for giving him the underworld in that Disney movie. It was supersupersuper awesome and I loved it. I actually got the chills each time my city had a God rampage, or a natural disaster. There were earthquakes and floods, minotaurs and satyrs, and everything filled me with a dreadful uncertainty that my city was going to collapse.

The scary-looking covered things are actually statues for a Temple!

 There were these little delivery guys, and whenever the warehouses filled up too fast, they had to go from one to the other, trying to drop their goods. When you clicked on them, they went, "Who am I Odysseus? When is my journey going to end? And where's Calypso??" Lawl, good times, good times.

5. Caesar
 Though nothing could beat Zeus.

We played Football Manager, too, after that. He still does, though I don't have the patience for it. Suddenly I feel the nostalgia overcome me.

Excuse me while I go weep for my lost childhood.

Katze

On Arguments

Why do people argue? Why do they fight? I'm writing this, thinking about the dark, scary underbelly of life; which I would never normally go into here. This blog is for fantasy books and movies, Tokio Hotel and Anime. And for writing(turns out it's mostly for writing ;) )

But even someone like me--who goes on pretending there is no bad in people--has to come face-to-face with it sometime. The shades of grey people are born with that makes them antagonise each other.

((Argh. As I read back my words, I realise I've become stilted and unsure in my writing again. I can't really help it, though. Reality always takes a lot out of me to write about.))

And the basic fact is, while I would love to live in a world where good was good and evil was evil, it just isn't the case. There are no Sauron-like monsters out there; just (more or less) normal people with differing beliefs.

...

And this hurts me, because sometimes I end up hurting someone I really, genuinely like, because their points of view are different from mine. :(

...or something like that.

Katze.

No, I have not hurt someone recently. I'm just saying, that if I do, I have a feeling I won't be forgiven. Whoever it is will 100% not read this blog post, and so I feel safe saying this.

Plus, I changed the design of my blog again! I rather liked the previous font, but it made all the punctuation unreadable; and we couldn't have that happen to us, could we? Any inputs on it this time? ( I doubt I'll get an answer since I'm not posting this on facebook :P)

NaNoWriMo and Introspection

It's that time of the year again.

November, time for NaNoWriMo. And time to think.

Think about what, the stragglers in the back ask. Well, that's why you shouldn't go in late to lectures and sleep on the last bench. You miss all the important parts.(this coming from someone with quite some experience in the field :P)

I think about why I want to write, and what I want to write, and who I want to write it for. The answers come to me sometimes: I don't know, I really don't know, and no one.

Q: Why?
A: Because I. Don't. Stop. I think I can't. It must be some kind of hormonal disorder, I believe, which causes me to fan over books of all kinds, and to fill up ones which are empty on the inside.(The latter kind include journals, diaries, word documents, and Chetan Bhagat books.) Anyway, every year, I haven't thought about writing for a while, when boom! NaNo comes knocking around, filled with supportive forums, motivating pep talks: and that all-important goal. Write a novel. Sounding deceptively simple; so easy to achieve. After all, millions of people have done it. Millions more will do it again and again; as long as there are readers--and even if there aren't--people will write.

Q: What?
A: I have no idea. The last few things I decided to write involved: a 300-year-old demon,  a student blackmailing a teacher, the lead singer of a rock band; and a rich girl with too much time on her hands.

Q: Who?
A: That's actually the easiest question to answer. Myself. I write for myself and no one else. This blog is the best example of that, actually. When people started reading it, I stopped writing for myself and the blog posts became rushed and incoherent. I hated my writing then, as I never have before. This is true. I want to bring that feeling back, the feeling that no one else was interested- and therefore no one else's opinion of my writing counted. All my (short) online life I've wanted readers. Now I have a few, I wish they'd stop hovering around the back of my mind and let me write as freely as I used to.

Katze.

P.S. Please don't take this as me asking you, whoever you are, to stop reading my blog. That's why I do the facebook publi :P. I just had five million(read five) people ask me what I was going on about on the fanfic post I put up before. I then realised how difficult it is to please readers once you've gained them. :D

P.P.S. NaNoWriMo was the original subject: scroll up and you'll see that. It's National Novel Writing Month; a challenge you set yourself to write a novel in a month.

I will do it this year, damn it.

An Analysis of the Psychological Trends of Demon World

Or, why the Demon Tournament works.