And again...

God, grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.

-- adapted from Reinhold Niebuhr

One thing I have advocated, without much success, is that children be taught social rules (when they are ready) in exactly the same way they are taught and teach each other games. The point is not whether the rules are right or wrong. Are the rules of 5-card stud poker or hopscotch right or wrong? It's that we're playing a certain game here, and there are rules to this game just as in any other game. If you want to be in the game, then you have to learn how to play it. Different groups of people play different games (different rules = different game), so if you want to play in different groups, you have to learn the games they play. When you develop the levels of understanding above the rule level, you'll be able to understand all games, and be able to join in anywhere. You won't be stuck knowing how to play only one game.

My problem with selling this idea is that people tend to think that their game is the only right one. In fact, being told that they are playing a game with arbitrary rules is insulting or frightening. They want to believe that the rules they know are the ones that everyone ought to play by; they even set up systems of punishment and reward to make sure that nobody tries to play a different game. They turn the game into something that is deadly serious, and so my idea simply seems frivolous instead of liberating.

--William T. Powers

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

-- Bertrand Russell

What is required is less advice and more information.

-– Gerald M. Reaven

Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.

-- Rene Descartes.

If you state any two propositions abstractly enough, they will appear to be the same because you subsume them under the same generalization. But this does not mean they have anything to do with each other; it means only that you prefer not to see the differences.

-- William T. Powers

Everything has been said, yet few have taken notice of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not

-- Raoul Vaneigem

might as well all this Got Quotes now.

When people ask me what philosophy is, I say philosophy is what you do when you don't know what the right questions are yet. Once you get the questions right, then you go answer them, and that's typically not philosophy, that's one science or another. Anywhere in life will you find that people aren't quite sure what the right questions to ask are. What they're doing, then, is philosophy.

-- Daniel Dennett

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

-- Bertrand Russell

Like all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth.

-- Jean-Paul Sartre

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

-- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.

-- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

-- Mark Twain

Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.

-- St. Thomas Aquinas

So apparently all I'm good for are quotes now:

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.

-- Christopher Morley

"Someday I want to be so powerful that I can defeat myself in a single blow."

-- Silence

My hotel doesn't have a 13th floor because of superstition, but people on the 14th floor, you should know what floor you're really on. If you jump out the window, you will die sooner than you expect.

-- Mitch Hedberg

... the history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible.

-- Freeman Dyson, "Birds and Frogs"

The fact that you are giving money to charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not.

-- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

-- William James

Your imaginings can have as much power over you as your reality, or even more.

-- Charles T. Tart

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

-- H.P. Lovecraft

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

-- C.S. Peirce

Ch-ch-ch check it out.

shanankan.com

Finally got my arse into gear, bought the domain and configured a site. I've decided that I'm gonna use that domain as my main portfolio for my writing aspirations. Well, technically it's not just writing, it's all forms of storytelling, living up to my self-professed raconteurism. I intend to keep a record of articles, essays, humour pieces, short stories, poetry, lyrics, plays, screenplays, games and whatever else I can create in that portfolio.

There's also gonna be a blog section, which will *not* be replacing this, as this and that will serve a very different person. This one is, more than anything, a playground for my thoughts, ideas, concepts, and writing styles/techniques. That one is the "professional" (yes, I know I've argued ad nauseum that professionalism doesn't exist) one where I keep people updated on actual projects. Most of the stuff there will be edited and well-thought out, not the higgledy-piggledy, stream of consciousness approach I take here.

If you go there right now you'll note it's pretty much just all fluff content right now. I've got the template and layout all figured out. I've yet to actually make some actual social media'esque things, like Tweet buttons and sharing widgets and Facebook things. That'll come in due time.

There's a few blog posts on here I want to use. And that's not that surprising, as there are 600+ of them :P They'll be edited down and made more coherent.

A limitation of NameCheap, the platform I'm using, is that I can't change the A Record *and* give a redirect for the same domain, chiefly the main one, @. I'm not sure if other providers use it, but frankly  I'm not too fussed about it. I've made it so www.shanankan.com takes you to a landing page where it'll be mostly attractive to potential employers and shanankan.com takes you directly to the blog. There's not much I could actually do about it :P Outside of building like 2 Tumblr accounts that look identical, I don't see it working.

*gets busy populating it with content*

I have no idea ...

I have no idea what is happening with this blog anymore. I tried my darndest to revitalise it after The Incident, but I swear that entire debacle just ruined it for me. I'm not ready to call it quits yet and quite frankly, the blog never enters into my mind anymore. As a consequence of this, the mindfulness that I had developed over the past few years and the vigilant theorising and contemplative outlook seems to have vanished.

I seem quite content to sit back and just watch the world go by, neither content nor bothered with  whether I throw a boulder into the stream or not. I suppose that's not that surprising, I seem to be right on schedule. I turn 21 in a bit over a month. In most parts of the world I'd be considered an adult.

Perhaps that Incident has pushed me out of being the beautiful thing that is a teenager into being a cynical, uninspired, boring and wholly predictable adult.

FML.



That said, I think I may have just discovered the best course in the entire world. Well AJ did and then he recommended it to me. And I took it. I've not even had my first class yet, but just based on the frenetic messages the course convener has been sending out as well as the absolutely brilliant course guide, I'm excited. I will have a judgement on Thursday. Perhaps I will tell you, but seriously in all likelihood I won't update this for another month.

Oh look, I truly have just become a cynic.

Quotes for y'all

Some quotes for you all since apparently I can't be arsed to write here anymore :( There are a few really good ones here. Sourced from here.

And this guy knew that he wasn't accepted by the staff, didn't even try. He didn't dress well. He didn't pretend to be one of them. People around that place didn't think he had anything they wanted, except when they needed him - because he was right, which meant that nothing else mattered. And they had to listen to him.

-- Greg House

Doubt, n. The philosophical device Descartes so cleverly used to prove everything he previously believed.

-- L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon

Man, n. An irrational animal whose irrationality is best demonstrated by his irrational belief in his rationality.

-- L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon

"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."

-- Robert A. Heinlein

Menahem sighed. 'How can one explain colours to a blind man?'

'One says', snapped Rek, 'that red is like silk, blue is like cool water, and yellow is like sunshine on the face.'

-- David Gemmell, "Legend"

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

-- Mark Twain, "Old Times on the Mississippi"

"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Nature draws no line between living and nonliving.

-- K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation

A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than yesterday.

-- Jonathan Swift (also attributed to Pope)

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

-- Abraham Lincoln

Hunches are not bad, they just need to be allowed to die a natural death when evidence proves them wrong.

-- Steve Moore, former FBI agent

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."

-- Isaac Asimov

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

-- Plutarch

A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.

-- George Iles

Human stupidity is formidable but not invincible.

-- Robert C. W. Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality

Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.

-- Friedrich Schiller

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

-- Often attributed to Pablo Picasso

"Uproot your questions from their ground and the dangling roots will be seen. More questions!"

--'Mentat Zensufi admonition', Chapterhouse Dune; Frank Herbert