Shorty #1: 25-Year Old Bicycle Scrub

I haven't ridden a bicycle in, as per recollection, 20 whole years. When I did back then, I recall having had little to no equilibrium, and thus an ability to balance myself on anything less than four wheels. I never really possessed the desire to try it again for a long time. And then I went to Sport Chek today for shoes, walking by the bike racks.

A Co-Ed Update; Priorities & Issues; Victim Of Love Logo

WordPress is a solid blogging service, but I refuse to pay the fee necessary to edit and save a CSS spreadsheet for styling. I need a distinctive style for my blog(s), so WordPress is not good enough for me. Mind you, I checked into this right after I made my previous submission to this here site, but I haven't bothered making any statements about it until tonight.

I'm still not impressed with Google signing a deal with Verizon, and their stealth processes that run on my computer (GoogleUpdateNotifier, anyone?) prove to be a nuisance, since they don't actually let me know if and when an update to any relevant application is available, and simply install in the background. It totally drove my copy of Kaspersky nuts when it was actually installing a setup executable for Google Earth without making me aware of it.

On another note, my desktop computer is not seeing good days. The two-gigabyte (DDR2) memory is roughly half-free when you subtract the resources that the running processes require, but that's not the biggest problem. My main concern is my PSU; when I compute with resource-intensive applications, it shuts off. I was sort of concerned earlier when it happened today because immediately afterward, a faint smell of melting plastic or what-have-you came about. Not a good sign. It's a 420W PSU that worked just fine for the past year and a half of use, but it's always been near its limits because my GPU uses up 350 W on a good day, and the average mainboard from my PC's time used up roughly 60-75W to run. So it's pretty much stretched thin at all times, moreso when I game.

Anywho, I haven't written much on Victim Of Love, lately. With school comes lots of things running through the mind, like studying, making sure I remember my schedule correctly, writing my own attempt at "The Aristocrats" routine which should surely offend, and other useless things. Aesthetics are another matter. To put that in more understandable terms, I've made some logos for this concept. I'll just show one version below. Note that my signature is in the bottom-right corner.

Made with the latest build of The GIMP (2.6.9, I think)

This is not a writer's block period

Things seem very slow 'round these parts because my focus is on other things, more pressing things. When circumstances work themselves out more in my favour, I'll pick the pace right back up. I didn't put up the lyrics yet because I want to get them copyrighted before putting them out there for everyone to see & possibly steal. So no, I'm not in a rut; this is not a writer's block period.

Passionate Monstrosities: A Human Thing?

The caption in the title, preceding the colon, could be worded in a different way as well: Violent Reaction.

What is the point of the title? What is the point of this journal entry to come forth? Well, I'll tell you right now, it is about my observation of how people react to negativity. To be more specific, negative things such as injustices done unto others, murder, and other such interpersonal or social wrongdoings. Common sense states that heinous acts such as murder, rape, & other violent or deviant behavior at the cost of one others well-being is frowned upon. Usually, what follows such acts are punishments. It's a "what goes around, comes around" sort of deal. It's like we are all judges. Well, since we have consciences & (a rather shaky) ability to determine what's right & what's wrong, we pretty much all are.

But where are our standards? What I mean by this is that, say a person, regardless of the gender or ethnicity, murders TWO people. Respected or not locally, globally, or universally, the act of murder itself that the perpetrator committed is deemed heinous and unjust. Rightfully so, he/she took not just one life, but two lives away and they'll never come back. However, people will also react to the crime, and thus the criminal. What follows, usually, is stuff that could only make you think, "what actually separates the criminal from the 'innocent'?" Well, from my own observations, just one thing; Action. I see so many reactionaries, so many people who either witness or come across the telling of the crime by happenstance or word of mouth, spout violent, sadistic, almost creatively brutal vitriol that would probably make the murderer piss his/her pants in fear. While these people are merely spouting such disturbingly gruesome language about, what's the only thing that is stopping them? Well, they aren't acting on their emotions.

After all, MOST murders have an emotional factor to them. I won't quote any statistics, but I won't ignore them either, so don't bother looking for that. Instead, from what I know of the USA, at least, is that the majority of murders are between lovers or family. Hell, most murderers kill someone they are already acquainted with, someone that they know to a degree that's a little more than casual (usually the case). So, there's an emotional link between the murderer and the victim in most murder cases. Hence, the emotional basis for MOST murders, but not all. The murderers in this sense felt something towards their victims, either love, kindness, respect, or whatnot before committing their acts. Some other emotional factor drove the murderer to killing their victim. So what's the point of all of this explanation? Well, it proves that not all murderers are "monsters." Indeed, they are truly human because they are acting on their emotions. They felt it, then they acted on it.

The reactionaries, the judges of our kin, are hardly different from the murderers themselves. All that separates the vindictive & prophets of vengeance (or, in short, the reacting judges that many of us are) is action. A murderer acted, but the prophet of violent reaction did not. One could say, "something that the innocent had that the murderer didn't have prevented the innocent from killing in the first place!" Well, consider this; many murderers have never committed a crime in their lifetimes. They're even, up to the time of the crime that is, seemingly docile and peaceful people, at least to the uninformed and untrained eye. Yet there is a trigger that makes them kill a person. Now, keep in mind, the tragedies of Columbine & Virginia Tech were not targeted towards a specific person, and thus don't support my argument, but let's steer clear of that.

So really, it is truly a human thing to react, to have passion, to feel & even act on emotion. So if someone condones (towards a murderer) something along the likes of, "castrate them, break their limbs, torture them for days, get them raped until they bleed, and then take their lives as penance", they're only acting on their innermost humanity. It's the nature of man to be monstrously gruesome, to be more attuned to barbarism & violence, to react to a situation doing pretty much anything possible, violent or not. We like to think of ourselves as reasonable, civil creatures. But we're not. We are still beasts, we are still in the harsh grasslands that our most distant ancestors toiled in to survive. We set up so many delusions & illusions in and around ourselves to think that we're above such primitive & barbaric ways, but there's no escaping the truth; we're beasts of nature. We don't think before we act, we do it the other way around. We don't use logic, we use emotion. We don't reason, we react. However, we are capable of reason, logic, and thinking. We are capable of stopping our overlaying, inherited traits of reaction & motives driven by fear. But we're nowhere near past any such laughable traits.

And that could be an evolutionary thing...