Photography

EDIT: Okay, ignore all the nonsense below. Much like oil and water, rants and photography simply do not mix. If you want to get a fix of my photos, head on over to my brand-spanking new photoblog, Espressotime.

Hello, fellow humans! Those of you who know me in other mediums (Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, deviantART, Flickr, real life, etc.) are probably aware that I’m an avid amateur photographer. I’m still pretty noobish at this point, but I’m constantly either taking or composing pictures. (I really should just keep my camera out, so that I can take take a shot whenever I see one, even if its just a fleeting instant of time.) So, because I’m not exactly doing a whole lot else with my little corner of the web over here, I might as well turn this into a bit of a photoblog. Why, you ask? I can respond in just two words: MASS REDUNDANCY. That which we despise in our daily lives can easily make sense once we’re the ones orchestrating it. I might not get a lot of traffic over here, but much to my surprise, I do get some. And a little self-advertisement and ego-patting can never hurt, right? It’s only when it becomes an addiction that it starts to be a problem.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ll still post some rants every now and again. As you may have noticed, however, they are few and far between. I’m just not in a ranting mood all that often. So! Since I really want to express myself in forms greater than 140 characters sometimes, here seems to be the perfect place to do it.

Now, I realize that posting a couple dozen posts with everything I’ve taken so far doesn’t make much sense. So, for the sake of efficiency, I’ll just include everything in this one post here! But first! I’ll provide some info about my camera. I have a Canon PowerShot SX20 IS, and I LOVE IT TO DEATH. Love. Granted, it’s not a monster DSLR with all sorts of cool features, but it does have one important thing that has helped me learn like nothing else: manual mode. Being able to adjust the aperture and shutter speed manually, and then looking up why it behaves as it does in different conditions (thanks in huge part to this brilliant website) has taught me more than I ever could have known using a lame automatic point-and-shoot. They have their situations where they can be nice, but anyone vaguely serious about photography should venture out of auto, as scary as it might be. That way, you can advance to heights you never even knew were possible before. (And if you’re sad afterwards because you just bought a $400 camera and then didn’t like manual mode, then it has a host of auto settings as well. ^_^ )

Now that that’s out of the way, onto the photos! All of my stuff is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 licence. In a nutshell, it means that you can share my photos anywhere you want and even mash them up and turn them into something else, so long as you fulfil three conditions: 1. You attribute me as the original creator of the work. 2. You don’t use my stuff for profit. 3. You share anything you make with my photos under the same exact licence. Any and all of this can be circumvented, of course, if you contact me and ask for my permission. I’ll go ahead and put some contact info on the sidebar, and of course you can send an @reply on Twitter to @achrity. (Me, in case you didn’t know.)

Now, really onto the photos! (Gosh, that took a long time.) I won’t provide a lot of boring commentary on these ones, because I don’t want to take up too much more of your valuable lives. Now’s the point, then, where I stop talking and you start looking!

Meaning

Meaning is a sticky subject, one which has been debated by philosophers and theologians for millennia. It is defined on Wiktionary as the following:

meaning (plural meanings)

1. The symbolic value of something.
2. The significance of a thing, as “the meaning of life”
3. (semantics) The objects or concept that a word or phrase denotes, or that which a sentence says.

I’m not going to pretend that the following is anything other than an opinion. An educated opinion, maybe, but an opinion nonetheless. Anyone is free to disagree with it. Philosophy is, after all, a highly subjective thing. Nevertheless, I intend this to be a brief summarization of my own personal philosophy on meaning within our universe.

We start out from a somewhat nihilistic viewpoint, saying that nothing – no object that exists outside of a person’s mind, at least – has any inherent meaning whatsoever. In and of itself, no object has any “purpose” for which it exists other than mere accident. To me, this includes life. We have no inherent purpose for existing. It was just a random series of events which eventually led to the occurrence of the structure of genes, which, through Darwin’s principle of evolution through natural selection, eventually led to us.

Based upon what I know, genes fit into this idea quite nicely. Similar to computers, one could say that they follow simple instructions, carrying out actions based only upon what will allow them to reproduce. It gets more complicated, however, when you introduce brains and abstract thought into the equation. As the saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum, and this vacuum of meaning was a detriment to early H. sapiens. To survive, we needed to understand the world and how it worked. Because scientific observation was not so nearly as far along as it is today, it made sense to anthropomorphize the universe and create deities who control its workings. What’s more, it worked. Religion provided a viable way to survive in the environment. All of these things which used to be completely devoid of a “why” could now be explained by saying “Because so-and-so wants it to be that way.”

With the advent of modern science and applied reason, our species is once again beginning to recognize that maybe the universe is not controlled by divine beings, and is completely explainable through coincidence. Nevertheless, we still persist in our attempts to assign meaning to things which do not inherently have it. Our brains simply do not seem to be able to grasp the idea of a meaningless world, and with good reason. Meaning helped and perhaps still helps us survive.

So, based upon everything I have typed so far, one could conclude that meaning exists ony in a person’s mind. That is what I’m saying, but what I want to address is whether or not that is actually a bad thing. Our minds project meaning into the vacuum, giving us a way to describe it. After all, you cannot describe Nothing without giving a reference to Something. When we create something, such as a piece of art or a tool, we can say that it has meaning. But that meaning is only our meaning; it is only describing why we created it. We can say that a tree has meaning (to absorb CO2 and produce O2), but that only applies to us. When attempting to go outside of the certain mindset that created that meaning, we may encounter conflicts.

This does not just apply to humans, either. I keep talking about meaning created in our minds, but I have not provided a definition of a mind. To me, a mind is whatever it thinks it is. As Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” The wind might have meaning for a plant. Mortar might have meaning for a brick. Telephone wires might have meaning for birds. Humans are not inherently “above” other objects, as that requires some sort of meaning in order to explain what exactly that aboveness is. Everything and everyone has their own meaning for things, and to attempt to apply that same meaning to anything else is nonsense.

Now, here’s the point where I try to become practical. This particular mindset, I think, is most useful when dealing with interactions between multiple people or peoples. It is, in essence, a deeper and more complex viewpoint on seeing something from another person’s shoes. Assume that none of the things you hold meaning for applies to the individual you are interacting with, unless they indicate otherwise. So many wars and misunderstandings could have been avoided if people thought like this.

As always, I openly welcome constructive criticism. I’ve intentionally left some points a little vague in order to allow people to put their own meaning into it, as well as trying to spark some discussion. Thank you for taking the time to read my little rant, and I wish you all happy surfing.

Hello

Oh, hi everyone! Listen, I’m not entirely sure why, but my humble little blog that hasn’t updated in months has been getting quite a bit more traffic than usual lately. Oh, by the way, hello Reddditors. I appreciate being linked. ^_^

Yeah, I just wanted to assure you all that I’m not dead. I’m having a hard time thinking of anything decent to post. Plus, with school on again, I don’t have as much time to sit and think. If you have any suggestions or want my opinion, um, I guess you could contact me on Twitter. (@achrity, folks. Just look at the sidebar.) Who knows, that might just inspire me to post something one of these days.

The State of Entertainment

Recently, the game industry surpassed the movie industry, becoming a 9.5 billion dollar market. Entertainment in general is undergoing a fundamental change in the way it is delivered to its customers. Increasingly, it is shifting from a visual and auditory medium to an interactive medium, where the end users are no longer simply being spoon fed their entertainment while sitting on a couch. Instead, they are being forced to involve themselves in the outcome of the story, where a fantasy (not necessarily an ideal one) is created in which they need to accomplish goals and navigate through worlds to achieve the outcome. For once, they need to think.

Entertainment has a long and largely unknown history, dating back to well before the beginning of human civilization. Nevertheless, it can be classified into several distinct categories:

• Spoken entertainment. Quite probably the first form to arise, as language developed early in human history and was one of the first great booms in culture.
• Written entertainment, such as books. This allowed stories to persist over generations, and coincided with the beginnings of recorded history.
• Live entertainment, like theatre. The earliest known plays were the passion plays around 2000 BCE in ancient Egypt. Movies can apply here as well, though they would be a rather major sub-section.
• Visual entertainment. Think paintings and other art meant to have visual aesthetic appeal. You could also put the movie industry under this, especially with the recent history of the medium, with movies focusing more towards stunning visual effects than stunning stories.
• Audio entertainment. Music, essentially. This is another candidate for oldest form, though all of these are extremely difficult to pinpoint the beginnings of.
• Interactive entertainment. Games and such. While at first thought you would think this is the most recent, in actuality it is quite old. People have been playing games for millenia. Chess is a perfect example. It’s been around since at least the 6th century CE.

Games, especially video games, seem to have a bad reputation, the origin of which seeming to spring from their unusually addictive and immersive qualities. Yet they have contributed to society and technology in ways that people tend to take for granted. UNIX was developed, in part, so that programmers could play a space traveling game. Today, it has evolved into one of the most influential operating systems of all time, with several modern OS’s being based off of it. Personal computers in general, in fact, originally existed as nothing more than a means to play games. Today, humble game consoles have become one of the most powerful tools in history. Robots are another fine example. Remember Furby? (By jove, they were annoying.) They were the predecessors of most of today’s artificial intelligence and robotic assistance products.

Video games are special, indeed. They are the most rapidly growing and improving industry in entertainment. We can all agree that the number of really good movies and television shows being produced is decreasing. They are being driven out by quick, punch line, slapstick style works. Books and theatre both seem to have stagnated. Indeed, many great works are being produced, but an improvement to the medium is rare, if present at all. Games, in stark contrast, are rapidly improving. Just think, within our lifetimes, the gaming industry has gone from a niche market generally considered a curiosity to one of the most powerful influences on modern culture and technology in the industrialized countries.

But really, society is conservative when adopting new forms of anything. Video games are just so radically different from most other things out there that it is inevitable there will be a backlash at first. China, for example, is sending people to boot camp who are determined to be ‘addicted’ to video games. And of course, there is the almost prerequisite selection of ‘low quality’ works that come along with any media. As video games grow, the market will become increasingly diluted with bad games. However, when one looks at some really good titles that have appeared in recent years, one is surprised at how profound some of the messages are and how good the storytelling and immersive qualities are. Players become so involved in these games that they really care about characters who appear in the game and will fight for freedom with all their heart, even if it is just a fantasy. And so, I end with this, an absolutely incredible video put together by a student, who talks about his experience with games. (I would recommend watching the TED cut. It’s about 12 minutes long.)

Us

It bugs me when people talk about nature. They always speak as if we weren’t part of it. This has so permeated our society’s thought that the very definition given by Dictionary.com is exclusive of humans.

na⋅ture

–noun

1.	the material world, esp. as surrounding humankind and existing independently of human activities.

2.	the natural world as it exists without human beings or civilization.

Many, if not most people would accept this definition without a second thought. We view ourselves as somehow separate from the world around us, as if we are not natural. As if we don’t affect what’s going on. It is that mentality that has gotten us into this environmental mess in the first place.

Now, if we are to specify ourselves as being part of nature, then we must classify ourselves. Obviously, we are animals. We belong to the phylum chordata, as we have a backbone. Our class is mammalia, for we have hair, give birth to live young, and posses mammary glands to feed our children (or at least half of us do). Furthermore, we are in the order of the Primates. That term is a bit humanocentric in and of itself, as it it Latin for “prime” or “first rank.” Finally, our genus is Homo and our species is Homo sapiens.

That’s all well and good, but where does that leave us in regard to our interactions with other species? Well, we’re omnivores, because we can eat both meat and plants. Yet in the past few thousand years, most of our species has given up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for that of an agricultural society. In other words, not content with our situation, (and so far as is known, we are the only species to have done this) we went from being at the complete mercy of what is happening around us to creating our own sub-ecosystem which we could more or less control. So we subjugated other species to gain the necessity of food. Could this be why we view ourselves as separate? Because we have other species in our servitude, and are thus exempt from the laws of nature?

In the movie The Matrix, one of the robots is talking to Keanu Reeves about classifying humanity. The robot claims that because other mammals develop an equilibrium with their environment, we do not, in fact, belong to the class we think we do. He goes on to say that only viruses show similar trends to our species, and thus we are in fact a virus. While the movie is not literally correct on this, they do bring up a good point. They are defiantly wrong about one thing, however: there is in fact a set of species that does not develop an equilibrium. We call them invasive species. Many of you are familiar with the traditional examples of Kudzu, Scotch Broom, Zebra Mussels and the like, but have you ever considered humans? Let’s look at a definition from Wiktionary.

invasive species (both singular and plural)

1. (biology): Any species that has been introduced to an environment where it is not native, and that has since become a nuisance through rapid spread and increase in numbers, often to the detriment of native species.

Do we not fit this almost perfectly? H. sapiens are indigenous to Africa, yet we now occupy literally every continent of the globe. Invasive species must, by definition, decrease the amount of biodiversity in their area. Haven’t we done that? And for rapid spread and increase in numbers, well, let me just say that 50 years ago, our population was around 2.8 billion. Today, we are approaching 6.8 billion.

We are an invasive species. And there’s no denying it. We are destroying the world ecosystem alarmingly quickly. Yet we still have the opportunity to reduce our impact. We need only come to the realization that we are not separate from nature; we are part of it, and it is part of us.

Reboot

Hello everyone. I’ve been publishing rants to Facebook for quite a while now, yet I’ve felt that they aren’t reaching a wide enough audience to get the kind of discussions going that I’m trying to start. Thus, I’m migrating to my old blog. I’ve taken down all the old posts pending review; don’t worry, I may put them back up after editing them a bit. So stick around for a while, as I may have my first post from Abbreviated 2.0 as early as sometime tonight.