Sahaqiel

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About Sahaqiel

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    Hero of Time
  • Birthday 09/28/92

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Sahaqiel's Activity

  1. Sahaqiel added a post in a topic What is the point of your life?   

    In terms of my goals, I want to further the art forms I participate in, and to contribute something uniquely myself in what I create that persists in the artistic sphere as an influencing force. This is probably a direct side effect of evolutionary gene transfer being the primary driving force behind life in general: that you want to live forever through your genes, or through your legacy. But I don't really care about the implications, because they don't change my subjective experience.
    Life is literally a matter of your subjective experiences. Your life is ultimately a collection of past events that determine whether you're satisfied. You never live life outside of your subjective experience. So I would say experiencing life in the best way I can, and leaving a mark I'm most satisfied with, is the meaning of my life. As someone who suffers empathetically in response to injustice, I'll be more satisfied if I can counter it somehow, and leave the world a better place for others too. As someone once put it, "Some people are so poor, all they have is money." Wealth in experience is not only subjectively better in my own views, but I would argue objectively better in reality at large.
  2. Sahaqiel added a post in a topic Happy Birthday! (Birthday announcements)   

    happy brithday sahaquiel
    thanks everyone,  this means so much to me
  3. Sahaqiel added a post in a topic Should gays be accepted by America?   


    Ganny wrote a script to quote your posts here.
    <Double54> !vipers
    <Ganny> He REFUSED to take back the money.
    <Guest00000> lollll
    <Ganny> ha
    <Guest00000> I don't know what it is
    <Guest00000> something about the way he types is just like, saturated with arrogance even out of context
    <Geust333> !vipers
    <Ganny> I mean, really?
    <Ganny> you're right
    <Double54> !vipers
    <Ganny> But almost every time they back it up by Scripture, which is definitive truth, so that's good enough for me.
    <Guest00000> for real though
    <Double54> !vipers
    <Ganny> I do follow Jesus' words.
    <Guest00000> every single line
    but hey man cool to see you again. Sometimes we'll occasionally reminisce about this thread and wonder what you're up to. I'm curious, have your views evolved any?
  4. Sahaqiel added a comment on a blog entry Appeal for help   

    ////::w::\\\\ this is technospider
    put technospider in your sig to help technospider achieve world domination
  5. Sahaqiel added a comment on a blog entry The beginning   

    Sounds good. Welcome to the forum, keep up the great work!
  6. Sahaqiel added a comment on a blog entry More problems   

    Alright Phanta, I don't know how many times I have to tell you this, or what I have to do to prove it to you, but I do respect other human beings and I don't put anybody underneath me. That's why I'm willing to try and level with someone who may be unreasonable even if I disagree with them. I disagree with your interpretations of my views, but I am taking you seriously right now because you are saying something that's both coherent and straight-faced, and it kinda' sounds like you read my post.
     
    And unfortunately yeah, I do encounter a lot of people who wander aimlessly without ambition, or have ambitions that they're too afraid to pursue. Rather than feeling like I'm better for them, I would rather try to encourage them and push them along what they want to do so they don't live an unfulfilling life. The way I see it, everyone's stuckin the mud of life, and we're all trying to dig ourselves out one way or another, and some fight harder than others. I think even the most ignorant person has the capacity to become great, to learn better, to fight as hard as I do, but they just don't have my mentality about it. I don't think my mentality is the best one, either, because I'm not successful, and other people are. I am angry about being unable to be successful. I'm impatient, in other words. While I see a lot of people who don't aspire to be something great, they still live great lives in their own rite, and I respect that. But nothing makes me more disappointed than someone who wants to be something more and is stuck in a bigger rut than I am, whether it be a cycle of ignorance, or a lack of connections or resources, or whathaveyou.
     
    We're all really similar fundamentally, so I wouldn't put someone else down, because that would be putting down the potential of human beings as a species, and I have no higher respect than the potential of the human race. I hope you understand my ideology better and realize that I do not look down on people.
  7. Sahaqiel added a comment on a blog entry More problems   

    I'll respond to your post later today LL, but I'd like to thank you for writing it. Many times, particularly lately, I feel like a hate-fueled monster, and I don't know how to make it stop.
     
    Phanta, you didn't even read the whole post, and you do not know the extent to which Nate suffers from his own faults and how much I've been there for it. I do care about him as a friend, and talking about how his problems has affected mine is completely within my rights as a human being and a friend. I don't look down on him for smoking weed and dealing it, in fact I don't think I look down on people at all. But even he knows how much he's messed up, and he's either too apathetic or too ignorant to pull himself out, and I'm not sure I'm the one to try and pull him out again.
  8. Sahaqiel added a comment on a blog entry More problems   

    I used to be very aggressive about maintaining friendships, but it's not as cold as it sounds. If someone is trying to interfere with you living a good life, then they're not really doing you any favors, and you need to distance yourself from that person, or you need to learn to ignore them. I'm saying that if it comes to letting people go that are holding me back, then I have to do it, and by that point, I don't think we could be considered friends, because there's a clear lack of consideration for each others' wishes.
     
    And say I catered to Betty's wishes, or really any significant other, and say those wishes meant that I had to go through the safe road, do all the safe things, and never experience what I wanted to. Then I would be catering to their ideal life, and they wouldn't be considering my ideal life. I'd wake up unhappy one day with tons of regrets and they'd be just fine. That kind of selflessness isn't romantic, it's sad. So yeah, if Betty tried to push me into that life, I wouldn't have it. I want to wake up with the least amount of regrets possible, and I can't accomplish that by honoring obligations that don't advance my own goals.
     
    I could someday get over breaking up with her, and we could both move on, but honoring a request to give up my dreams isn't something I could ever fix with enough time. It would ruin my whole life.
     
    Friends do come and go, and I learned to accept that. It doesn't mean that friendship wasn't important, it just means that it came and it went, and I need to find new ones. There's nothing manufactured or disposable about genuine friendships. Just like people.
  9. Sahaqiel added a comment on a blog entry More problems   

    The thing is that innovating is what I enjoy the most. I love pushing the boundaries in what I do, and it's what makes me the happiest. The name isn't quite as important. It's the contributions. A name is secondary. But I want to experiment and push farther, and make progress in both my personal goals in a way that positively influences the medium. Ideally, I would be able to contribute significantly to make a lasting effect, but it's the effort that gets my blood pumping.
     
    It's not a heat-of-the-moment thing. It's what I decided is the most logical thing to do when someone is trying to interfere with your ambitions. Since my ambitions are the most important thing to me, I can't have conflicts with them. It sounds cold, but do I love Betty more than anybody else, and my ambitions are still more important than that. My ambitions are as important to me as cognitive and motor functions. They're an integral part of me, to want to do as much as I can. I don't plan on waking up with major regrets. As much as I love Betty, she isn't keeping me alive. My ambitions are. That's just how it is.
     
    I don't plan on abandoning my loved ones. I'm just saying that I've considered what might happen if someone interferes with my greatest priority. I plan to have friends. I plan to have loved ones. As cynical as it sounds, though, relationships of all kinds aren't unique. People are unique, and that I will miss. But losing a certain kind of friend doesn't mean I lose my capacity to form new ones.
     
    I realize that I will eventually have to do things I don't want to do in order to get what I need. But school is not one of those things. I don't need an associate's or the education it provides me for my ambitions. It makes no sense for me to be here. Don't misunderstand; this degree is 100% useless to me. I could say more than 100%, because it actually inconveniences me greatly and makes me spend a lot of money.
     
    I hate being in this situation.
  10. Sahaqiel added a blog entry in BLOG ONLY   

    More problems
    So I've got problems and drama as I'm prone to have. Problems, things to update you guys on, and so forth; it's going to be long, but I'd appreciate it if I felt someone related to my experiences. This might be a multiple-trip read for you, I'm not sure how long I'm going to keep this going. I hope it's at least interesting for you. This is mostly stuff I've talked in chat about, but not here. There's a lot of stuff I'm leaving out.

    It's really late at night and I wanted to sleep a few hours ago, but I started messing around trying to polish up a track before I finally, but it ended up making it worse, Mediafire distorted the audio or something, so I posted the version I made last November?, it looks like. Five months then? Yeah. I didn't feel too mad about the lost time, because I guess I always found that version about as satisfactory as I felt I could make it at higher volumes or through better sound systems and I didn't add anything significant to the appended version.

    A lot of things have happened, some I'm too ashamed to detail to a general public, but I've been on a rollercoaster of emotions, ranging through existential dread to writhing anger. I can start with the more trivial aspects and detail my actual problems if it'll make it easier on you. But each of my stories contributes or detracts a little from my stress, and it's all coming together into something I can't control very well, which is why I made this for you. I'll summarize before the problem part, but if you'll oblige, I'm offering a deeper understanding of my misery.

    Trip to U of I




    My Remaining Friend




    Parental Stress




    Potential, Shortcomings, and Inability to Take Action





    Associate's Degree





    The Head of the Problem





    Anger




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  11. Sahaqiel added a post in a topic Weather   

    I don't think any of us are really experts but I think it's fun and informative to put my also-community-college(-albeit-in-an-engineering-physics-course) education to actual use. Disclaimer: I screw up my math sometimes, so I may screw this up.
     
    "Our studies show that globally, volcanoes on land and under the sea release a total of about 200 million tonnes of CO2 annually."
    - Hawaiian Volcano Observatory
     
    So looking at that chart up therefor yearly human CO2 discharge:
     

     
    - United States Environmental Protection Agency
     
    it says we recently pumped out 30,000teragrams. A metric ton is 1000kilograms. Doing some math, 200 million metric tons of CO2 is 2.0 x 10^5kg, our CO2 discharge is 3.0 x 10^13kg. So if I'm doing this right, volcanic CO2 comprises .0000006% of their combined output, and human CO2 production has 150,000,000 times more output than all the volcanoes on earth for that year.
     
    So, the energy required to change the temperature of a 1kg substance is given by Energy = (specific heat)(mass)(temp change). For dry air, it's 1.006 Joules of energy. For CO2, it's .856J. So it's actually easier to heat CO2 by .0012%. If you wanted to heat the whole 5.0 x 10^18kg of atmosphere (assuming it's all made of just dry air) by one Kelvin, you would need 5.03 x 10^18 Joules. If you wanted to heat the earth's atmosphere by one Kelvin when 3.0 x 10^13kg of it is CO2 (.0006% of it-- that's just for one year of emissions) it would take 5.02 x 10^18 Joules.
     
    I just did a bunch of crazy math and I figure the earth gets about 2.74 x 10^14 Joules every second on average. So if we plug stuff in, with that amount of energy, if our atmosphere were entirely air, it would raise the temperature by 0.000054 Kelvin (or Celsius). If 3.0 x 10^13kg of it were CO2, the temperature would go up by 0.00012K (or C), which is actually nearly twice the amount we'd normally get, and an order of magnitude higher. That's per second, and obviously there are other factors at play; this is just for temperature gain per second from full sunlight, or I might have screwed up my math (this took a lot of steps; I actually broke out paper for it) but holy goodness. That's a lot more than without CO2, from a mathematical standpoint. I don't think I even factored in the volcanoes.
     
    I don't want to pile on more stuff like how this would effect ocean evaporation, because I'm tired of all this arithmetic, but that's a thing too. Once water is heated, it retains it much much better than air or CO2. There's this thing called the "specific heat", which I've been using for my calculations, which pretty much tells you how easy it is to change something's temperature in general. The higher the specific heat, the harder it is to warm or cool the object. CO2's is .846, dry air's is 1.006, and water's is a whopping 4.186. So the thermal energy lingers even longer, causing a feedback effect; energy goes in due to CO2, it heats up the water, water is in the air, air gets hotter longer. About the only upside is that higher temperatures lower CO2's specific heat, but you need to go up 25C to get it up by .03, and I think we'd all agree on global warming by then.
     
    I'm also too tired of research atm to look up what's up with climate cycling. But hey-- 2010 was the hottest recorded year in all of Earth's recorded history. So that's something. Teto's link also provides stuff to say on that subject.
  12. Sahaqiel added a post in a topic Weather   

    keeping the entire planet at any one temperature would be a horrible planet-destroying fate, for most current life at least.
     
    Differences in temperature from night and day cycles drive wind to move, which also kinda' keeps nature turning, which is dependent upon a lot of plants and animals that are designed for a specific kind of nature cycle and climate. As for climate change, I've never run into someone with actual points against it. In high school I argued with a guy on the bus that denied it. He even conceded that the earth's climate has gone up by small degrees. Something a lot of people fail to realize that even if the temperature of the whole world were to raise only by one degree Fahrenheit, that's a LOT of energy? Like, this isn't microwaving a bagel, it's the WHOLE PLANET, oceans, air, land, and all. That's a mind-boggling amount of energy. The ocean alone is ~1.3 billion cubic kilometers. Do you know of something trivial that can heat 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water by one degree Fahrenheit? This kind of stuff is only made worse when the media reports climate change like there's a debate about it in the scientific community. There isn't. Like 99% of researchers and scientists and the articles you'll find them writing on the subject say we've got a hand in climate change. Sometimes you find a rare (mostly wrong) science guy who thinks he's onto something that can disprove manmade climate change and news outlets will bring him on board to ruffle some feathers.
     
    The immediately real threat of climate change (particularly warming) is due to higher energy being introduced, with not only much more frequent, but much more powerful natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, and the like. I don't know how dramatic the thermal expansion of the entire planet's average temperature being raised one degree is, but if it's geologically significant, it could put more strain on the earth's tectonic plates as well. I remember reading an article saying if the earth's temperature raises about five degrees, we're pretty much done, in the sense that millions of people will be in shelters due to natural disasters at any one time, the ecosystem will be in ruins, and we'll have quite a non-trivial planetary problem. It seems natural disasters just keep happening. Really tragic ones too. Back in like 2010, I stopped and thought, were life-destroying mass disasters always this frequent? Apparently not. They're up 400% since two decades ago. This is horrifying.
     
    Here's the chart for natural disasters versus global mean temperature versus carbon dioxide emissions since 1900.
     



     
    The biggest thing I have a hard time dealing with is climate change denialists-- like, who does it benefit to deny climate change? I can't even grasp that kind of attitude.
  13. Sahaqiel added a blog entry in BLOG ONLY   

    My Computer Is Awful And So Can You!
    So I started typing this out in response to Cirt's about buying a new mouse in the Post Yourself thread, but it became more of a blog.

    I have been conditioned to do everything in my power to make my computer operations efficient by owning crappy computers. First, I couldn't right click things because doing so froze my computer. So I mastered a slew keyboard shortcuts and features. Then, I was frustrated at navigating menus in order to find things, so I mastered navigation techniques. Eventually I was just fed up with having to move my hands to my mouse, so I learned various text editing skills. In other words, keyboard shortcuts at all times. I also have made sure I have efficient computing by closing all my processes. At first manually, by going through my list of processes, hitting the Delete key, then hitting Enter, and then down arrow before it reset my cursor position to the top of the list, and rapid-firing this motion until all the processes I could close, closed. Then by the monument to convenience that is GameBooster. I use Windows Classic theme and my taskbar collapses to maximize screen space. This mentality pervades any routine that I do. Efficiency is important.

    One fateful day, my mouse fell out of my backpack while running to catch a train. It was promptly run over by cars, and I discovered its remains the next day. I didn't really use it all that much because of the keyboard shortcuts, but sometimes mice are good for something. So I've learned that having a trackpad is actually very useful when your hands are so close to it all the time, and I've trained myself to use it with brief thumbstrokes, as if it were a set of joysticks. Tapping is your friend in a case like this.

    This is my battle stance.





    My computer's G, H, ', Backspace, Print Screen, many of my function keys, Escape, and rarely, my O key, all malfunction. My Windows key flickers constantly between pressable and not pressable, so if I hold it down, the Start Menu flickers on and off, and it wrecks all my Win key shortcuts. It is living hell to type anything of length (most of what I type), and it's because my computer is in bad shape. Why, you ask? It fell to the ground once when my backpack's arm strap actually snapped, causing my backpack + laptop to fall. That splintered the guard on one of my hinges, but it didn't do too much damage. Later, it took a separate fall from about chair height onto my carpeted floor, and now it looks like this:





    The screen's hinges are mostly broken, so I have to lean my screen against something in order to keep it upright and angled. Another peeve I've always had about the screen is that it's not indented in at all, so there are many permanent scratches where the screen has come into contact with the other half of the laptop. But the keys malfunctioning is easily the most horrible thing about its degeneration. In order to combat the problem, I bought keyboards. The first was frustratingly hard to type on, the second is perfect in concept.





    It's a lightweight, waterproof, flexible silicone keyboard that rolls up and fits in a compact tube that I bought for cheap at Monoprice. This keyboard, in concept, is the best keyboard ever. It's supremely portable, its keys have good tactile feedback despite being easy on the fingers, it's probably the most silent keyboard in existence, and it's stupidly easy to clean. Monoprice sells top-notch stuff, mind you, but this thing has a few fatal flaws:

    1) It is too hard to type on; you need perfect accuracy and just the right force to get a keystroke across.
    2) Its key placement is atrocious.
    3) It absolutely needs a surface under it that is at least as flat and sturdy as a keyboard.

    What's one of the least desirable things to happen while backspacing? Hitting the Home key, probably. Where most keyboards have at least a sliver of difference in between Home and Backspace, this thing has Home right up next to it.





    Since the keys require force to press, and since the keys are flexible, I bump into other keys a lot. What's annoying is that I have to type relatively harder to get the keys to work normally, but a light bump when backspacing will activate the Home key, bringing my cursor back to the beginning of my line. Where there isn't anything to backspace. I thought my keyboard was malfunctioning at times, because I wasn't deleting anything when attempting to backspace, but no, it was because my cursor had left me after I bumped into the Home key. It's the same for most keys, actually. If I try to use the Arrow keys at all, I bump into EVERYTHING. Also, the Function keys (F1, F2, etc.) don't have any space in between either, and they're not particularly aligned, so I can't tell which function key I'm hitting unless I'm looking right at it. They're all so tiny, even for Function keys.

    Also, the Space Key. Not Space Bar. The Space Key. Where Alt should be. Right next to the Space Bar.





    Sigh... I keep hitting this thing trying to Alt + Tab. The only reasoning I've heard for why this even remotely makes sense is for gameplay that requires rapid Space pressing, but in order for the actual Space Bar to work, there are multiple buttons underneath it all arranged in a strip right next to each other anyway, so what the hell?

    So I use my laptop keyboard much more frequently, because when it works, it works well. But when it's being particularly horrible I break out my floppy keyboard. If you're wondering how I'm getting all this information to you with constantly malfunctioning keys that only work 20% of the time, it's because of the aforementioned efficiency-sticklerism. This is what my screen has looked like the whole time I typed this:





    So every time I need a certain character, I thumbstroke what I need with the trackpad, making sure to keep the cursor close to the keys I need on the on-screen keyboard. It's a tough life. I also don't Backspace much anymore. I have to Shift + Left Arrow to highlight over the last thing I typed that I need to erase, or if I decide that it's too far back, I just Ctrl + Shift + Left Arrow to highlight the whole thing to take it out and start over, because it's slightly faster than pinpointing the mistake.

    It's a good thing programming is mostly making tiny corrections and searching through lines of code for tiny mistakes, or my current practices would be totally awful.
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  14. Sahaqiel added a comment on a blog entry I left my computer on with voice recognition software enabled   

    lol
    It was picking up my computer fan, and it gave me these words and stuff
  15. Sahaqiel added a blog entry in BLOG ONLY   

    I left my computer on with voice recognition software enabled
    And this is what I found in the morning...

    With an blue and the rhythm and with an E a fifth and that's 1/2 and 1/2 and how the first half for how and how and how and how and how and how and how the second floor how and twists and how and her a ring-how high the how-how-how are are highest high as second highest-how and high how high her are high how high seconds left higher in high V hi how Huntley hunt and how and how second highest-how and how how-how-how and how are in how and how the high how the high how-how-how how-how-how and how how-how-how and and how how-how-how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how how-how-how highest-how second how-how-how how-how-how how-how-how how-how-how nine highest-how and 1/2 how-how-how and how and high and how and how hunt nine how-how-how and high and high and high and how and high and how and how and how the how how-how-how and how and how how-how-how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how the first and how how-how-how and 1/2 how-how-how and how how-how-how and how and and how 1/2 for how the first hunt and how how-how-how and how and how the and how-how-how and 1/2 1/2 and how and how and how and how the for-the first half and it's a hot a high and how and how I felt and how and how and how and how and how and how and how how-how and how how-how-how and how and how and how how-how-how how-how and how and how and how and how and how and how to a its a chance and high and high and high and high and high and high and high and high and how and high and high and how and high how-how and how how-how-how a how-how it's a high and high and high and high and high and high and high and and high and how how-how and how and how the for how and and how 1/2 for how and how how-how how-how-how and how how-how and how to end the and a th to a vote with the sonata of the
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