09.06.2003 - 9:46 a.m.

I spent the weekend at a friends house, mostly working on my reality perception techniques, and as such spent most of saturday watching dvd's / video gaming / and smoking on the local common while talking rubbish. The experience proved to be very refreshing and as such, I plan to do it again this weekend but with more live music and a different crowd. Two things have lodged themselves in my brain as a result, the first is a track by Pete Wardmann called "the yin, the yang, the young" which is looping round in my mind almost continuously as a pleasant background to work, and the other is scenes from the "animatrix" dvd.

I've always liked anime, it's so much more evocative and the production is much much slicker than western stuff ( have you *seen* Dogtanian and the Three Muskahounds ?? ), but there's precious little good stuff on UK tv, the more common stuff, like pokemon, may draw me snotty looks from diehard anime / manga fans but I don't care, it has great comic timing and character driven humour, and for 8am on a saturday morning it takes very little processing power to watch. Animatrix on the other hand is full on, high end adult animation, I have seen a fair amount of this kinda thing ( Akira and suchlike ) and I'm always amazed at the level of violence and graphic destruction presented which is equal to anything churned out by Hollywood, maybe I just *really* get into it but a few scenes left me cold and uncomfortably shifting about in my seat.

I can see that this is no way more scary than what's happening out there in the *real* world ( have a look at any african inter-tribal/despotic/land war for details of true life horror ) but since humans have a tendancy to unknowingly predict their own future, mostly through SF in this century ( although it could easily be a chicken and egg situation ) I'm not sure that it's beyond comprehension that we'll eventualy be the cause of our own destruction ( after all humans as a race have three driving motivations - greed, laziness and selfishness, a cry will go up "well *I'm* certainly not like that" but we are, otherwise all people on the planet would be now be living in an egalitarian heaven with equal distribution and oppotunities for all.

But we're not are we ? the top 5% of wealthy people get wealthier while everyone else works it as best they can, huge engineering projects redirect water halfway around a continent while the dam floods 2 million people out of their homes ( the yangtze gorge project ), the Aral sea was destroyed by russia so they could irrigate their crops and has in 40 years created a wasteland.

The greatest impediments to human evolution at the moment ( that I can think of at this time, I may amend this later ) are :

1) Religion

2) Capitalism

3) Communism

4) Humans

Religion is not the opiate of the masses, it may have been once, but now it's the quickest way to war. ( for that matter it was the quickest way to war 1000 years ago as well )

Capitalism seemed like a good idea, everyone gets a chance to be the factory owner if they just work hard enough. Capitalism is the easiest way to form giant companies and then do what you like until the regulators finally catch up and ask you nicely, if you wouldn't mind stopping, just whatever the hell you are doing. In your own time of course, and if you could clean up these peoples water table / land / fishing areas while you're doing it that would be good too.

Communism was a great idea in principle, except it was directed and organised by humans and so fell under the "greed, laziness and selfishness" clause, as a result the Party members become very powerful, everyone else lives in poverty and hunger while entire crops rotted in the farms because no-one put any infrastructure in to move it to the cities ( most communist infrastructures are created by the lunatic in charge around the defense of the land and ideology with huge armies )

Humans, well, I think the machines' view of us probably isn't far from the truth, I'm sure the world is full of deserving, good-hearted and kind individuals, it's just that collectively these people are drowned out by the short-sighted idiots determined to make their life that much easier at everyone else's expense.

After all that I only got halfway through the dvd before my attention wavered and I lost interest ( too much focus required ) but since I plan to get the matrix box set next year I'm sure I'll get a copy of this thrown in too.

disclaimer - I'm not really a manic depressive with anti-humanistic tendancies but similarly I'm too aware not to get bogged down in my own little world, ( which would be pleasant and simple ) I'm even cheery most of the time, but I try not to think too hard or I'd be overcome with aggressive "lets change the world" thoughts which usually subside into "what's the point of anything" thoughts and then suicide, I'm happy to let the world get on with it, after all, it's human nature !

ps. come the end though, I'll sat on my cloud in the 11th dimension saying " I told you so " and laughing, so don't say I didn't warn you.