Caffeine and Television

For the first time in my life, I feel sympathetic to smokers. Not really, but I realise how hard it must be for them to quit. The only thing that got me through my exam period is caffeine, and now - as I try to get myself off the stuff - I realise how addicted I am. Yesterday and this morning I was a zombie, entirely incapable of paying attention. It felt like I'd just woken up, except all day. So I realise the challenges that smokers must be going through. (I don't, however, understand why they got themselves addicted to the stuff in the first place.)

And another thing; there seems to be a sort of snobbiness when it comes to the form of caffeine you drink. Because coffee and tea are bitter and unappealing, it takes some getting used to before you like it. I haven't acclimatised myself to either of them, so I drink energy drinks - mainly Mother. If I were to tell someone that, they'd usually huff at me, in a way they wouldn't if I said I drunk a equivalent amount of coffee or tea. One person in the boarding school has taken up the burden of pointing out to me my love of energy drinks as a character flaw, saying that it'll stunt my growth. When I point out that a) I've more or less stopped growing, b) I haven't seen any evidence of the link between caffeine usage (on a minor scale - equivalent of 2 cups of coffee a day) and growth stuntage, and c) you're a smoker, don't talk to me about growth stunting, he repeats his initial claim as if repetition makes fact.

So, for the rest of these holidays, I need to be a zombie, so I'm not a zombie when I go back to school, thus saving myself a fortune in energy drinks.

Here onwards, I shift topic too often to rely on paragraphs, so you get more dot-points than the Senior Science Syllabus.

• To reblog from Tim, this is the most awesome I've seen in days. It's a examination of scale, in flash form. It goes from the Planck limit of the tiniest thing possible, to human scale, to galactic scale and beyond. As the French would say, tres awesome.

• If you would like to read Dinosaur Comics, but it isn't enough like xkcd, then now Ryan North has you covered. He has a series of masks of such disparate webcomics such as Penny Arcade, Achewood, xkcd, and a whole heap of others I haven't heard of that are applied over the top of his never-changing image to make infinite numbers of webcomics! All with the same writing! And composition! Et cetera!

• I've been writing fiction, because it doesn't take as much brain power as school work (which I haven't done.) I thought I could write until I tried writing fiction; it is many magnitudes of difficulty higher. To get dialogue and pacing right in a single, straight-forward scene is a nightmare, let alone threading together countless such scenes in a way that makes each of them relevant and interesting, let alone having these scenes make up a coherent plot. So I'm not bothering with scenes that make up a beginning, middle or end - just middle. I'm doing in medias res chapters of a variety of genres. I figure I shouldn't let my schooling get too far in the way of my education.

• One of the problems with holidays is that I can't bear reading online papers because of all the flashy distractions in the sidebars - many are simply links to other areas of the site, so even if I were to have an Ad-blocker, it wouldn't stop them. So I fall behind on current affairs and the news. Its quite depressing. Last holidays, Haiti was flooded and destroyed and I didn't find out for a week.

• The alternative to reading newspapers is watching the News, and that means watching television. I have spent so long not watching network television that returning to it, I notice all the little tricks: all the lowest-common-denominator pandering; all the badly constructed, painfully manipulative ads that the stations use.

• You see (and here I go into a conspiracy-theorist rant) it is foolish to complain about TV, because TV doesn't care about you at all. You are not the consumer. Television shows are not the product. Advertisers are the consumer; views are the product. So of course they pander to the common denominators. Of course they manipulate and trick, because no matter how many intelligent people they alienate, there are a million people who either don't notice or choose to ignore them and just relax. This is why the History channel exclusively shows historical mysteries and dodgy new-age science. This is why the Discovery Channel is clogged with shows about rebuilding cars and motorbikes. This is why they cancelled Firefly. And because my computer is at school, I use a laptop on a stable-table in the lounge room - right in front of the idiot-box. It is sad. (And no, I haven't seen Network. I want to though.)

• I need to find a way to balance the break time I need after the horrors of studying for exams and the studying I need to go better next time. How long do I rest for? How much do I study? When do I get up in the morning? (When answering this, remember the whole caffeine-withdrawal zombie-ism and accompanying lack of alertness and attention.)

• Mr Purves wants us to read two textbooks. On what he admits is the most boring subject in the Year 12 syllabus: the memorisation of the details and layout of an entire buried town.

EDIT:
I really like this photo. I know its a scene from the old days of Doctor Who, done in Lego, but for some reason it strikes me as being beautifully nostalgic.