Yesterday, a friend of mine pulled me away from my oh-so-urgent reading of Pride and Prejudice (*cough* *cough*) for AP English. He’d been having some relationship issues, and needed someone to talk to (who’d have thought anyone would ever come to me for advice on girls?!?!). Listening to him talk was a little hard for me, given my recent romantic situation, but it really got me wondering about the relative importance of various things in our lives. I proceeded to stare blankly into the distance for about twenty minutes in the Black Box, just contemplating. Things we think about, care about, obsess over… I hate to sound melodramatic (no wait, that’s a lie…), but just wondering about the microcosms and macrocosms of our lives crossing over one another. What might really be a trivial event in our lifetime can become the object of our obsession and contemplation for months. You might realize this and tell yourself not to worry, not to care so much — but you can’t. A breakup, an awkward moment, a first kiss can consume your imagination and make you forget the existence of the rest of the world.

Let’s use auditions as an example. This week, I’ve had auditions for my Senior Year Musical (a big deal among us Theatre CHS dorks). With all of the dance combinations to worry about and vocal auditions to practice, it’s been easy to forget about the other important things in my life. This one event - getting a good role in the musical - becomes what is most important to you. Your dream, your soul food, your life. And it shouldn’t. Because, in the end, the musical (even high school theatre as a whole) is such a small part of your existence. No one will care twenty years from now what part you got in your high school musical. Few will even care what college you get into.

I’ve been a big proponent lately of living in the moment - forgetting all the planning and worrying about the future, and simply living for what makes you happy: right here, right now. And since I’ve started using this philosophy, I’ve been a much happier person. But I think somewhere in that transition from worrying too much about the future to playing your entire hand up front, I’ve become far too worried about the past and present instead. This is no better.

I had a bit of trouble getting to sleep last night. I’d had a wonderful time at my vocal audition (actually rocked it, if I may be so bold), seen a great movie with an amazing friend, and drove home feeling more happy than I have in a very long time. But one thing troubled me - a halfhearted smile, or a laugh that didn’t seem genuine… I don’t know what it was. Just a feeling. And that made me worried. Worried that something was wrong, that I’d done something bad - and I became obsessed with it. I tried not to - tried to get on with my night and fall asleep. But I just couldn’t. There was nothing I could do about it that night, and it could end up being nothing - but I couldn’t stop worrying about it.

We all have our obsessions - you get too focused on college, work, your appearance, an audition. We become so obsessed that we forget about what’s really important to us. It’s hopeless for me to expect an absence of obsession - it’s part of who we are as human beings, what makes us excited, interested. But maybe, some day, we all can learn to become obsessed with something less trivial: learn to be obsessed with life.

There’s been a lot of complaints over the past few days from gamers and bloggers alike over the Church of England criticizing Sony for using Manchester Cathedral as a backdrop in the video game “Resistance: Fall of Man.” A gun fight takes place in the cathedral, prompting the church to threaten legal action against Sony if they do not meet some or all of their demands, which include a “substantial donation,” removal of the game, and reworking of the portion of the game which includes the cathedral.

The central legal  issue of the case is, of course, that of copyright, and whether Sony had the right to use potentially private architectural designs in the game without the Church’s permission. The case has largely been moved to deal with the moral issue of the case, however, about the responsibility of Sony in promoting a game which could easily been seen as offensive to members of an essentially private institution. [An example of this responsibility was seen in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, where the creators of a Command & Conquer game reworked the package design, which originally included a picture of the World Trade Center in a war zone]

What are your thoughts?

I feel as though both of these issues could have been resolved fairly easily with one minor change to the game’s design. Had the developers created a generic cathedral in which the given level were to take place, the publishers could have avoided the legal issues of the case, which is truly the only basis on which the Church is resting their case. Otherwise, they have no basis in charging Sony with promoting gun violence or otherwise intentionally harming the moral values of a religious group. If we were to follow what the Church is advocating here, there’s nothing stopping us from taking Ayn Rand and Michael Crichton’s books off the shelves for promoting hateful an prejudicial thoughts. I consider Sony to have violated copyright in this instance, and should have been more sensitive to what is literally sacred ground to some. But at the same time, the Church is taking this opportunity to exploit the freedom of exchange of ideas; another example of a conservative power resisting the transfer of untraditional ideas.

That’s just pitiful. A new game was recently announced: Fracture. The premise of the game goes like this - it’s far in the future, and the melting of the polar ice caps has caused the Mississippi to flood, dividing the United States into two. Hold it… The melting of the ice caps rose sea levels so much that Memphis and St. Louis are suddenly underwater? Sea levels would have to rise over 100 meters to reach Memphis - and that’s just a third of the way up the Mississippi. Then there’s the little detail that, even if both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets melted, global water levels would rise only 70 meters. To reach St. Louis (140 meters above sea level), we would have to melt an amount of ice on the scale of how much has melted since the peak of the last ice age (130 meters). Let’s face it - if global warming split the United States in half (impossible, as far as my understanding of basic physics tells me), there would literally be no United States.

I don’t ask for perfection in violent third-person shooters. But all good science fiction is based on possible futures in store for humanity - not on random politically-charged issues that provide an excuse for kids to shoot at their computer-generated friends.

Virtual online worlds have been around for a good chunk of years now, the most famous of which currently is Second Life. Essentially, these are online communities where you can literally, “live a second life.” But, like those obsessed with EverQuest in the previous decade, these Second Lifers will sometimes take their new world more seriously than the real one. In the past year, currency in Second Life has essentially become a tradeable commodity, with islands going for sale on eBay and users straight-up trading cash for online credits.

In the coming months, people may be able to pay hundreds of dollars just to pick out their last name. Cause after all, having your last name be “Strickland” instead of “Ogawii” is worth enough to feed a family of four for a month… Plus, it’s looking like they’ll need to verify that your “vanity name” is truly your own name. What’s the point in spending $150 dollars on a name when it has to be your own? You can’t even be creative with it! True, I can’t complain about people wasting their time in front of a computer (I’m the one that’s blogging right now, after all). But really, find something else to do.

Second order of business: The strange similarities between the Second Life logo and a promotional design used for the online version of Myst - Uru. The thing about the computer game Myst is that people have become really obsessed over it as well. An extremely cryptic website, PreAfter.com, sprung up about archaeological digs in Nevada for the lost civilization of the D’ni (the mythical peoples from the Myst legend). I was never sure, but I assumed this had something to do with the online version of Myst that was being talked about all over the web. I was even lucky enough to be invited to beta test it - of course, my computer sucked in those days, and my specs couldn’t handle it.

Anyway, to make a long story short: Both Second Life and Myst Online were originally created to be exploratory worlds people could “live” in. Now lets look at some graphics:

It’s a hand, kind of made out of a spiral, wouldn’t you say? Now, look at the promotional image that was spread all over the PreAfter website (right). Personally, I think it’s fair to call that a hand made out of a spiral. Too much of a coincidence for my taste…

And that was another segment of Eerie Similarities. For more, see another one of my other segments.

Second Life to charge for names - Yahoo