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About a year ago I decided to become vegetarian. Well, not quite vegetarian. Pescetarian. I still haven’t given up eating fish (or dairy). I decided to become pescetarian one night when I was out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant with some friends. One of those friends is vegan, and was the only non-omnivore in the group. Once this was realised, people started asking questions about his reasons for being vegan and jokingly criticising his choice of diet. For whatever reason, I found this incredibly rude - I’ve never heard people ask or jokingly criticise Jews about their reasons for not eating pig, I didn’t see how there was a difference in this case. So for that evening I decided to be vegan in sympathy with my friend. Talking with my vegan friend during dinner and afterwards, I came to understand a little of his reasons for being vegan. Part of it was because he had recently read Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation. Looking into reasons for vegetarianism/veganism for myself, I realised it was a good thing and not something I could happily ignore after finding out about it. That was why I stopped eating the meat of land animals - I’m not as strong-willed as my friend - I still eat fish and eggs, cheese.

I’m going to list the reasons I’m a pescetarian. This isn’t going to be a self-righteous rant. The reason I’m writing this is so I can summarise it for myself and others when I’m asked about it (as I often am by my friends :P ). In no particular order, the reasons why I don’t eat meat:

1. Meat production is bad for the environment. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation published a report in 2006, that went into some depth about the affect of meat production on the environment. I haven’t read the whole report, just snippets of it, but it was enough to convince me that eating meat is not always a good thing, no matter how delicious. Clearly others agree.
2. Most animals bred for their meat are fed grain which is much better served feeding people. This gets a bit complicated. Basically, 7kg of grain produces 1kg of beef, with similar conversion factors for other types of meat (including fish). Huge numbers of people around the world go hungry  everyday, it doesn’t make sense to use grain to feed livestock so rich people can eat meat. There’s a report here which goes into the specifics of the impact of meat production on grain and water supplies around the world. The article is a little old, but the situation remains the same (or worse) as when it was written.
3. To eat meat (and indeed to subject animals to any treatment to which we would not subject humans) is speciesist. This is the primary focus of Animal Liberation. Peter Singer has written a short essay on this and animal liberation, which you may read if you don’t feel like reading the entire book. After reading the Wikipedia article on speciesism while writing this post, I realised that the Orson Scott Card book Speaker for the Dead touches on this a little.

I’ve always regarded pescetarianism as a stepping stone to eventually being vegan. After re-reading some of these articles while writing this post I’ve realised how bad it is to still be eating fish, and now I feel the day I become vegan (or atleast give up eating fish) will be sooner rather than later.

The title of this post is a quote from a friend of mine who once joked that my being vegetarian explained everything I did. Even though I’ve been pescetarian for a year now, I’m still often quizzed about it by friends. Now I’ll be able to point them to this post to explain the details :)

This post will touch on themes I covered in my earlier post gaming - do not want! In that post I expressed how I felt that current games and gaming are essentially time wasters. Adding to this, I believe that gaming doesn’t benefit players in a meaningful way, ie. more than just as entertainment. I say ‘current’ because I believe games could be of meaningful benefit people but aren’t at the moment.

However, recently I’ve begun to think that this time wasting applies to other media as well - namely film and television. People have different tastes but most film and tv shows seem so devoid of any meaning. Sure they’re good for entertainment purposes, for a light laugh, but it pretty much stops there. There are films and possibly some tv shows which break this mold but generally it seems that you spend some time watching a film/show but you are no different for having watched it. It hasn’t enriched your life in any way.

Good films/tv should be thought provoking and you should be different for having experienced them. They should make you question things you’ve taken for granted or give you some insight into life and the way you live and the things you do in ways that you hadn’t previously considered. Films (I don’t really watch tv) that have had this ‘enriching’ experience for me are 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Dark Knight. 2001 really makes me think about what it means to be human, and the possibilities and challenges that humanity will face in the future. The Dark Knight really makes me wonder about corruption in society, and how much of a difference one person can make, and the power of symbols.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but yesterday the LA Times featured a story with a quote by Alan Moore which really hit on what I’m trying to say:

“I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying,” Moore told me during an hourlong phone call from his home in England. “It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The ‘Watchmen’ film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I, for one, am sick of worms. Can’t we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change.”

Alan Moore expresses well what I’m trying to explain (even if the metaphor gets a bit convoluted towards the end of that quote) and also alludes to another aspect of it: Repetition and lack of originality. Not only does most film/tv lack any meaning or value beyond pure entertainment but there’s so little original thought in most of the movies I’ve seen recently (beyond The Dark Knight). Speed Racer, a film I really enjoyed and found to be superbly entertaining, suffers from this badly. It was novel in terms of the art direction and extensive use of green screen special effects for pretty much everything, but in terms of plot or themes it’s nothing we haven’t seen before thousands of times.

I also think the fantasy genre (books/films/whatever) suffers from this as well. I don’t claim to be an expert on fantasy but I have read/watched quite a few fantasy series, and the genre seems for the most part to just recycle the same  basic plots/ideas/characters that were established years ago. One notable exception I’ve read recently is the Temeraire series.

Of course it isn’t surprising that there’s a large number of books/films (particularly in the fantasy genre) that are very similar to each other in terms of plot/characters - these are obviously quite popular and sell quite well. But in that respect they are close to most films/tv: entertaining but ultimately meaningless.

I think “regurgitated worms” is a good metaphor for many films/tv. Hollywood/whoever feeds us more and more unoriginal, visually pretty, entertaining, ultimately meaningless crap which we watch and consume without thinking. It entertains us, keeps us happy and distracted from real issues. Meanwhile, other things are happening in the world, interesting things, important things, things which people don’t hear about or let slide if they spend too much time just watching unenriching films/tv. This may sound very cynical, but it really does seem at times like some forms of media have the effect (whether it’s being used deliberately or innocently) of a drug - it’s nice to watch it, consume it but it’s ultimately distracting us from things that are more important and worthwhile of our attention.

I’ve always played computer games. My first interaction with computers was playing the original Prince of Persia on a computer running DOS when I was 5 or 6. I have now decided that I will stop playing computer games except for very rare LAN sessions, where it is more about the socialising than the gaming.

Over the years I’ve spent a large amount of time gaming. Too much time. Instead of gaming my time on computers will now be spent doing productive things, hacky things, fun things, open source things, things that I could have been doing and learning so much from doing if I hadn’t been gaming.

Gaming is great, but it’s such a waste of time. I used to equate the amount of time I spent gaming to how other people spend time watching tv, almost as a means of justifying it. When you’re on a computer it’s already so easy to waste a lot of time not doing anything productive. Gaming, for me, just compounds that scenario.

A recent post on /. featured a review of a graphic novel called Hackerteen. Hackerteen, it is explained, is not just a graphic novel but “an edutainment program created by the Brazilian company 4Linux”. The reviewer goes on to state that:

“The curriculum… arose out of a desire to deal with three problems.

1. Excessive time spent by young people playing computer games on the internet.
2. Young people committing digital crimes on the internet.
3. A lack of professionals who work with networks and computer security.”

Obviously I’m not alone in the amount of time I (used to) spend playing computer games. There’s so much other cool stuff you can be doing using computers instead.

To spend time playing with computers and learning about the cool stuff they can do and how they work,  instead of playing computer games is my belated new year’s resolution.

Oh and Cory Doctorow’s novels are awesome :)

I would’ve been blissfully unaware if it hadn’t been for Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It seems someone leaked some details about Wrath of the Lich King from the “Friends and Family” alpha testing. So of course I went to the site. So of course I read all the juicy details. Ugh. Tycho from Penny Arcade coined the term “brain hunger” in relation to WoW once, and it definitely applies to me. I don’t really know what it is about it. I start trying to imagine what it would be like to play with all the exciting new abilities, start to imagine how the gameplay will have changed. It’s like I’m trying to run a simulation of it in my head or something, it’s terrible. But I won’t play it again, not matter how cool the druid changes sound.

What I hate though is that more games, or just more games that I actually enjoy playing, have started to head in a “grind->reward” direction. I’m mostly thinking of TF2 here, the only other game that I actually play regularly (except Audiosurf :D ). It’s almost as though the most profound effect WoW has had on gaming is to make other developers realise that introducing a bit of a grind into the game is a surefire way to keep people playing longer (aside from making them realise just how much cash you can make from MMOs). This frustrates me. Multiplayer pvp should be about skill, not how much time you’ve invested. TF2 isn’t on the same scale in the time-sink scheme of things as WoW, but it stills takes a heap of time to complete the new medic achievements and unlock the new guns. I gave up after farming the first gun late one night on a server with a friend. I hate the direction Valve has gone with this. It’s a cop out for the studio too. Instead of making the gameplay itself appealing enough to keep people playing for the gameplay’s sake alone, instead they opt for the cheap and easy route of making a bit of a grind. Blizzard and Valve - the creators of StarCraft and Counter-Strike (respectively), games with the longest lasting appeal of pretty much any game (not counting sequels). It’s disappointing.

In other news: I’ve decided to make a rule for myself: If I become involved enough with a game that I start to get angry (rage :P ) over the game then it’s time to stop. When I write it down it sounds like an obvious thing to do. I don’t like that I become involved enough with games to start getting angry about them. Gaming should be about having fun, if I’m not having fun I shouldn’t play. Sounds simple and a bit “no duh, retard” but I get carried away with it easily and I think other people do too.

I think gaming is probably too big a part of my life. I should really get some other interests. I have other interests (reading, listening to music, talking with friends) but they’re kind of passive things, not interactive. The thing with many of my friends is that they’re also gamers. I need to take up something that doesn’t involve using a computer. All my uni work requires the use of one and most of my leisure time I’m on it too. I need to get out more :S