| The Potion Maker |
|---|
| Wendelinium is a milky, pasty lavender gel pulled from the flesh of a golem. |
| Yet another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern |
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Meme
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Price Fighting
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Madness. Utter MADNESS.
Madness in my head, madness all around me, and most of all, madness in the bookstores.
It's 18 days to go till HBP comes out (pant). I've waited far too long for it (pant). I am irritated by the dearth of meaty updates on JKRowling.com. I feel like ranting along with Fernwithy on the insane levels of secrecy surrounding the contents of the book. Saurabh's tendency to refer to the book as "Fresh Blood Price" has ceased to be cute. I feel like tearing into the computer screen when I see the Leaky Cauldron post images of 400 million pounds of HBPs being packed, I don't want to write, or read, any more speculative fan fiction, and may I PLEASE JUST HAVE THE REAL THING ALREADY?!
To add to my woes, Amazon.co.uk has gone and lowered the price of HBP from £9.99 to £8.99. Which makes it cheaper than the Amazon.ca book that I have pre-ordered. NO FAIR! It will take even longer for the book to be shipped to me all the way from UK instead of Canada, but on the other hand, £1 saved is nearly $2 earned.
I think I'm just going to sit and wait for Canada to join in what is apparently shaping up to be a rather juicy price war. Fingers crossed.
Madness. Utter MADNESS.
Madness in my head, madness all around me, and most of all, madness in the bookstores.
It's 18 days to go till HBP comes out (pant). I've waited far too long for it (pant). I am irritated by the dearth of meaty updates on JKRowling.com. I feel like ranting along with Fernwithy on the insane levels of secrecy surrounding the contents of the book. Saurabh's tendency to refer to the book as "Fresh Blood Price" has ceased to be cute. I feel like tearing into the computer screen when I see the Leaky Cauldron post images of 400 million pounds of HBPs being packed, I don't want to write, or read, any more speculative fan fiction, and may I PLEASE JUST HAVE THE REAL THING ALREADY?!
To add to my woes, Amazon.co.uk has gone and lowered the price of HBP from £9.99 to £8.99. Which makes it cheaper than the Amazon.ca book that I have pre-ordered. NO FAIR! It will take even longer for the book to be shipped to me all the way from UK instead of Canada, but on the other hand, £1 saved is nearly $2 earned.
I think I'm just going to sit and wait for Canada to join in what is apparently shaping up to be a rather juicy price war. Fingers crossed.
Survey + Random Quote I Didn't Know I Had In My Collection + A Fic Rec For Artanis
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"Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first." (heh) - Anon
And for Artanis: Fernwithy's The Whole Bloody Pack.
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"Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first." (heh) - Anon
And for Artanis: Fernwithy's The Whole Bloody Pack.
Friday, June 24, 2005
Landmark - or - I, Too, Have An Opinion
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Everyone seems to be talking about the Landmark Forum, and it's time I added my $0.02. It's a topic I've wanted to talk about ever since I first heard of it from nimbupani a couple of months back.
A couple of caveats: I'm not going to recap the discussion so far over here, it would take too long. Click on the links above, and prepare for a lengthy read. Sorry. Second, I only heard of something called the Landmark Forum a couple of months back from my dear nimbu, and have no first hand knowledge of it. I did, however, form an instant opinion, as I often do, and I find that it hasn't changed even as I learn more about the whole outfit.
That opinion is just this: I think it's a harmless self-help group, better than most others in its league, but of no particular use or significance.
1. Harmless, because
(a) The Landmark Forum does not pretend. Their website clearly states that theirs is a profit-making business: no mumbo-jumbo about how the organisation's founders are doing this as a selfless service for the salvation of Mankind, yadda yadda yadda. Good for them.
(b) Nimbupani says that there are no unreasonable restrictions placed on participants. I've seen several websites allege that toilet breaks are "strongly discouraged", that the whole environment is one conducive to intensive brain-washing etc.. but I had my doubts as to the authenticity of these allegations (my innate faith in the smartness of people tells me that nobody would agree to such a ridiculous proposition), and now my doubts have been confirmed by someone well acquainted with the Forum. If anybody is free to get up and leave whenever they wish to stretch their legs, and nobody is pressuring them to do otherwise, what's the harm?
(c) It does not teach bad shit. No kill-them-infidels, no let's-retire-to-the-mountains-and-meditate-our-lives-away, no Catholic-style guilt trips that would render self esteem non-existent. At least, not from what I've read about it. Straightforward, common sense philosophy.
The Caveat: I don't like the hours. 9 a.m. to 12 midnight, for three days in a row? This hints at an attempt to get the participants in a "zone" (which is a polite word for a trance)... I have no doubt that this makes people easy to convince and to break down. You might be able to get up and leave anytime you want, but to get the full experience of the Forum, you'd need to sit it through. A lot of the suspicion surrounding the Forum rightly stems from this, and I think Landmark's image would improve tremendously if the hours were a little less outlandish.
2. Self-Help Group, because
We need to forget the semantics of Landmark here, for a moment. Whatever the overanalytical justification anyone tries to come up with to say that Landmark isn't really a self-help group, you can't escape the fact that it is. Otherwise, what's it for? I've heard (read) many proponents say, "nobody NEEDS the Landmark Forum", but what they're really saying is, "nobody THINKS they need the Landmark Forum, but everybody ACTUALLY does." The inference you draw from any such program that claims to make your life better in some way is that there is something in your life that CAN be made better, i.e., your life isn't perfect, and the program will try to fix the imperfection. Ergo, it's a self-help program.
3. Better Than Most Others In Its League, because
... of item (1), mostly. It's harmless, for most part, and it doesn't teach a bad philosophy and it's a program based on reason and on using your mind rather than "transcending" the mind, also known as mouthing mantras and following the cult leader.
This is more than I can say for both the Chinmaya Mission and the Art of Living (and I can speak from first hand experience for these two cults). Cut a long story short, in Chinmaya they tried feed me a load of bull; in Art of living, they just told me the load of bull was divine and didn't I, deep inside, want to feel truly divine, as opposed to how doing Sudarshan Kriya made me feel?
So.
But there is also a However here. At its heart, Landmark is no different from any of these other cults because it tries to sell you the same thing: a wonderful philosophy that can address everything that's wrong with your life. No, don't jump on me for using these words... this is the promise of the whole program and the word of many proponents, that it wil radically transform your life. I don't think anything can do that. Call me a skeptic; I will take it as a compliment.
4. But Of No Particular Use Or Significance, because
There is no such thing as a cure-all. This is self-explanatory, but to avoid sounding simplistic, I will elaborate.
Let's say I put a bowl of fruit on the table. A couple of apples on one side of the bowl, a few pears, a bunch of grapes, a banana sticking out, in my opinion, quite artistically. Let's show this bowl of fruit to a bunch of people and ask: "What's wrong with this?"
The nutritionist will say: It's missing flavinoids or anti-oxidants or (insert scientific-sounding word of your choice).
The mom who is supporting an entire family will say: I'm not even looking at that, it's too expensive a snack to be feeding my kids.
The interior decorator will say: I'm all for using fresh fruit as decoration, but it's going to be a pain to change the fruits every few days as they rot. Plus, there's no blue here to match my drapes.
The artist will say: That banana sticking out is so wannabe artistic. Let's rearrage this bowl to be more balanced.
You get the point.
Now say that that bowl of fruit is your life, and the different people who're looking at it are the different philosophies with which you will try to deconstruct your life. (Nifty analogy, eh? Read on, it gets better.)
The Landmark Forum is just one such philosophy. You could use it and come out harping about how your bowl of fruit was so wannabe artistic all along, and you never knew, and you never even knew that you didn't know, and how your bowl of fruit is so much better balanced now.
Well, good for you. But stop and think: did you even need your bowl of fruit to be artistic in the first place? Sure, you thought it wasn't perfect, and you rearranged it yourself sometimes because it wasn't, but ... do you need it to be artistic? And furthurmore, would it be so bad to have that banana sticking out the way you originally liked it?
I don't want to belabour the point, but I want to say just one more thing: so now your bowl of fruit is perfectly artistic. But it turns out, artistic isn't all there is to it, because you're missing flavinoids, and you're expensive, and you have no blue. And your Artistic Rearrangement Class doesn't have a clue how to do this other stuff.
I don't know about you, but I sure as hell don't want to fork out $750 - or even $50 - to have someone convince me to arrange my bowl of fruit another way. Especially not if I don't have problems with the way it is right now. And I would worry about anyone who was willing to spend that kind of money fixing what simply ain't broke.
(If I did have problems in life, I'd try the free solutions first - like a marathon bull session with my significant other, or renting a self-help book from the library.)
Philosophic crazes have been a big part of my life... anyone who knew me a couple of years back will tell you what a nutjob I was over Objectivism. I read all I could about it, I tried to convert everyone I knew, I argued and rationalised and blogged about it.
And then I did a marvellous thing: I took a break from it. My fanaticism wore off, my books stopped falling apart and my friends started drifting back to me. It turns out, there are other philosophies that will resonate just as strongly with you; it just depends on what you need most in life when you're reading a particular thing.
I still believe in Objectivism just as much as I believed before. It's just that I see a larger picture now. Objectivism taught me to think in terms of right and wrong, that's it's 'speciality', it's 'occupation' with respect to my bowl of fruit. From other people and places and books, I've looked at my life from the viewpoint of someone interested in, say, optimising my potential, living my life efficiently, appreciating beauty, etc.
The Landmark Forum might teach you a couple of things, sure, but I'm betting it's nothing you couldn't live without or could get from anywhere else... and it's nothing anyone should be forking out big money for. That's the only reason I don't like it. Otherwise, I think it's a harmless self-help group, better than most others in its league, but of no particular use or significance.
Everyone seems to be talking about the Landmark Forum, and it's time I added my $0.02. It's a topic I've wanted to talk about ever since I first heard of it from nimbupani a couple of months back.
A couple of caveats: I'm not going to recap the discussion so far over here, it would take too long. Click on the links above, and prepare for a lengthy read. Sorry. Second, I only heard of something called the Landmark Forum a couple of months back from my dear nimbu, and have no first hand knowledge of it. I did, however, form an instant opinion, as I often do, and I find that it hasn't changed even as I learn more about the whole outfit.
That opinion is just this: I think it's a harmless self-help group, better than most others in its league, but of no particular use or significance.
1. Harmless, because
(a) The Landmark Forum does not pretend. Their website clearly states that theirs is a profit-making business: no mumbo-jumbo about how the organisation's founders are doing this as a selfless service for the salvation of Mankind, yadda yadda yadda. Good for them.
(b) Nimbupani says that there are no unreasonable restrictions placed on participants. I've seen several websites allege that toilet breaks are "strongly discouraged", that the whole environment is one conducive to intensive brain-washing etc.. but I had my doubts as to the authenticity of these allegations (my innate faith in the smartness of people tells me that nobody would agree to such a ridiculous proposition), and now my doubts have been confirmed by someone well acquainted with the Forum. If anybody is free to get up and leave whenever they wish to stretch their legs, and nobody is pressuring them to do otherwise, what's the harm?
(c) It does not teach bad shit. No kill-them-infidels, no let's-retire-to-the-mountains-and-meditate-our-lives-away, no Catholic-style guilt trips that would render self esteem non-existent. At least, not from what I've read about it. Straightforward, common sense philosophy.
The Caveat: I don't like the hours. 9 a.m. to 12 midnight, for three days in a row? This hints at an attempt to get the participants in a "zone" (which is a polite word for a trance)... I have no doubt that this makes people easy to convince and to break down. You might be able to get up and leave anytime you want, but to get the full experience of the Forum, you'd need to sit it through. A lot of the suspicion surrounding the Forum rightly stems from this, and I think Landmark's image would improve tremendously if the hours were a little less outlandish.
2. Self-Help Group, because
We need to forget the semantics of Landmark here, for a moment. Whatever the overanalytical justification anyone tries to come up with to say that Landmark isn't really a self-help group, you can't escape the fact that it is. Otherwise, what's it for? I've heard (read) many proponents say, "nobody NEEDS the Landmark Forum", but what they're really saying is, "nobody THINKS they need the Landmark Forum, but everybody ACTUALLY does." The inference you draw from any such program that claims to make your life better in some way is that there is something in your life that CAN be made better, i.e., your life isn't perfect, and the program will try to fix the imperfection. Ergo, it's a self-help program.
3. Better Than Most Others In Its League, because
... of item (1), mostly. It's harmless, for most part, and it doesn't teach a bad philosophy and it's a program based on reason and on using your mind rather than "transcending" the mind, also known as mouthing mantras and following the cult leader.
This is more than I can say for both the Chinmaya Mission and the Art of Living (and I can speak from first hand experience for these two cults). Cut a long story short, in Chinmaya they tried feed me a load of bull; in Art of living, they just told me the load of bull was divine and didn't I, deep inside, want to feel truly divine, as opposed to how doing Sudarshan Kriya made me feel?
So.
But there is also a However here. At its heart, Landmark is no different from any of these other cults because it tries to sell you the same thing: a wonderful philosophy that can address everything that's wrong with your life. No, don't jump on me for using these words... this is the promise of the whole program and the word of many proponents, that it wil radically transform your life. I don't think anything can do that. Call me a skeptic; I will take it as a compliment.
4. But Of No Particular Use Or Significance, because
There is no such thing as a cure-all. This is self-explanatory, but to avoid sounding simplistic, I will elaborate.
Let's say I put a bowl of fruit on the table. A couple of apples on one side of the bowl, a few pears, a bunch of grapes, a banana sticking out, in my opinion, quite artistically. Let's show this bowl of fruit to a bunch of people and ask: "What's wrong with this?"
The nutritionist will say: It's missing flavinoids or anti-oxidants or (insert scientific-sounding word of your choice).
The mom who is supporting an entire family will say: I'm not even looking at that, it's too expensive a snack to be feeding my kids.
The interior decorator will say: I'm all for using fresh fruit as decoration, but it's going to be a pain to change the fruits every few days as they rot. Plus, there's no blue here to match my drapes.
The artist will say: That banana sticking out is so wannabe artistic. Let's rearrage this bowl to be more balanced.
You get the point.
Now say that that bowl of fruit is your life, and the different people who're looking at it are the different philosophies with which you will try to deconstruct your life. (Nifty analogy, eh? Read on, it gets better.)
The Landmark Forum is just one such philosophy. You could use it and come out harping about how your bowl of fruit was so wannabe artistic all along, and you never knew, and you never even knew that you didn't know, and how your bowl of fruit is so much better balanced now.
Well, good for you. But stop and think: did you even need your bowl of fruit to be artistic in the first place? Sure, you thought it wasn't perfect, and you rearranged it yourself sometimes because it wasn't, but ... do you need it to be artistic? And furthurmore, would it be so bad to have that banana sticking out the way you originally liked it?
I don't want to belabour the point, but I want to say just one more thing: so now your bowl of fruit is perfectly artistic. But it turns out, artistic isn't all there is to it, because you're missing flavinoids, and you're expensive, and you have no blue. And your Artistic Rearrangement Class doesn't have a clue how to do this other stuff.
I don't know about you, but I sure as hell don't want to fork out $750 - or even $50 - to have someone convince me to arrange my bowl of fruit another way. Especially not if I don't have problems with the way it is right now. And I would worry about anyone who was willing to spend that kind of money fixing what simply ain't broke.
(If I did have problems in life, I'd try the free solutions first - like a marathon bull session with my significant other, or renting a self-help book from the library.)
Philosophic crazes have been a big part of my life... anyone who knew me a couple of years back will tell you what a nutjob I was over Objectivism. I read all I could about it, I tried to convert everyone I knew, I argued and rationalised and blogged about it.
And then I did a marvellous thing: I took a break from it. My fanaticism wore off, my books stopped falling apart and my friends started drifting back to me. It turns out, there are other philosophies that will resonate just as strongly with you; it just depends on what you need most in life when you're reading a particular thing.
I still believe in Objectivism just as much as I believed before. It's just that I see a larger picture now. Objectivism taught me to think in terms of right and wrong, that's it's 'speciality', it's 'occupation' with respect to my bowl of fruit. From other people and places and books, I've looked at my life from the viewpoint of someone interested in, say, optimising my potential, living my life efficiently, appreciating beauty, etc.
The Landmark Forum might teach you a couple of things, sure, but I'm betting it's nothing you couldn't live without or could get from anywhere else... and it's nothing anyone should be forking out big money for. That's the only reason I don't like it. Otherwise, I think it's a harmless self-help group, better than most others in its league, but of no particular use or significance.
Monday, June 20, 2005
Why the new look?
I'm not changing my name because I got married. So I figured I'd at least change my blog to reflect my new status. Or else it'll be like Saurabh says: the only thing that's changed is that we'll be ticking the box that says "Married" on forms instead of the one that says "Single".
Thoughts on the Pace of the World
Take a 6 week break from the internet, and what happens? Earth-shaking changes, apparently.
First, NTU somehow decides to host the Asians this year (instead of MMU, as planned) and does a rip roaring success of it (which is not surprising, heh heh, collars up). This development is obviously not six weeks old, but just goes to show how out of the loop you get when you live thousands of miles away. Uh. Naturally. But I'm still peeved.
Then Sushil climbs to the top of the food chain in the NTU debating ecosystem and bags not only the Runner Up trophy for the tournament, but also Best Speaker at the Grand Finals. Howzzat for developments.. whew! (Congrats, dude.)
So here I am, happily watching my eyeballs ricochet off the walls after reading Sushil's blog. Am I left alone in my blissful, buzzed-up state? Noooooo. One of the wayward eyeballs catches sight of a new link on Sushil's blog-list: "NMK".
Note that this NMK is a very good friend of mine, a sweet and lovable person - who has been known to cause violent messes in my life, yes, but he does the mess-causing sweetly and lovably - and whose previous blogging attempts included Vedic-Existential musings on a blog quite aptly titled "Samshaptaka". (For those of you who get tripped up by long words, that's SAM - SHAP - TA - KA.)
What do you suppose is on his blog now? Pictures. Pictures of ducks and flowers, with captions. What's even more surprising: nice pictures of ducks and flowers with pretty darn decent captions to boot. NMK's gone and turned artsy on us without so much as a decent metamorphosis duration. Div, is this your doing??
Stepping away from the internet is like going away on a spaceship at the speed of light... Time on Earth passes faster, and it changes more quickly than you can keep up. I've hardly changed at all in the 6 weeks. All *I* did was get married.
First, NTU somehow decides to host the Asians this year (instead of MMU, as planned) and does a rip roaring success of it (which is not surprising, heh heh, collars up). This development is obviously not six weeks old, but just goes to show how out of the loop you get when you live thousands of miles away. Uh. Naturally. But I'm still peeved.
Then Sushil climbs to the top of the food chain in the NTU debating ecosystem and bags not only the Runner Up trophy for the tournament, but also Best Speaker at the Grand Finals. Howzzat for developments.. whew! (Congrats, dude.)
So here I am, happily watching my eyeballs ricochet off the walls after reading Sushil's blog. Am I left alone in my blissful, buzzed-up state? Noooooo. One of the wayward eyeballs catches sight of a new link on Sushil's blog-list: "NMK".
Note that this NMK is a very good friend of mine, a sweet and lovable person - who has been known to cause violent messes in my life, yes, but he does the mess-causing sweetly and lovably - and whose previous blogging attempts included Vedic-Existential musings on a blog quite aptly titled "Samshaptaka". (For those of you who get tripped up by long words, that's SAM - SHAP - TA - KA.)
What do you suppose is on his blog now? Pictures. Pictures of ducks and flowers, with captions. What's even more surprising: nice pictures of ducks and flowers with pretty darn decent captions to boot. NMK's gone and turned artsy on us without so much as a decent metamorphosis duration. Div, is this your doing??
Stepping away from the internet is like going away on a spaceship at the speed of light... Time on Earth passes faster, and it changes more quickly than you can keep up. I've hardly changed at all in the 6 weeks. All *I* did was get married.
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As I type up last Friday's blog inviting questions for the weekly "Ask Me Anything Day", Saurabh looks over my shoulder. Click...
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