blog :: IO Life → [String] | living with side effects

Great lyrics against surveillance, in particular against the British national identity card plans:

Everyone has
their own number
in the system that
we operate under
We’re moving to
a situation
where your lives exist
as information
[..]
If you’ve done nothing wrong
you’ve got nothing to fear
If you’ve something to hide
you shouldn’t even be here
You’ve had your chance
now we’ve got the mandate
If you’ve changed your mind
I’m afraid it’s too late
We’re concerned
you’re a threat
You’re not integral
to the project

• Pennywise @ Fri, 29 Aug 2008, Backstage Werk
• Feuerschwanz, Nachgeschrei @ Sat, 4 Oct 2008, Backstage Werk
• Unheilig @ Sat, 11 Oct 2008, Backstage Werk
• Týr, Alestorm, Hollenthon and Svartsot @ Thu, 16 Oct 2008, Backstage Werk
• In Flames, Sonic Syndicate, Gojira @ Sun, 19 Oct 2008, Backstage Werk
• Haggard @ Tue, 21 Oct 2008, Backstage Werk
• Amy Macdonald @ Sat, 25 Oct 2008, Tonhalle
• Primordial, Finntroll, Eluveitie, Equilibrium, Catamenia, Månegarm @ Sat, 1 Nov 2008, Backstage Werk
• Schandmaul @ Fri, 14 Nov 2008, Zenith
• Sonata Arctica @ Sun, 16 Nov 2008, Backstage Werk
• Flogging Molly, Skindred, Street Dogs, Time Again @ Fri, 21 Nov 2008, Tonhalle
• Opeth, Cynic, The Ocean @ Sat, 6 Dec 2008, Backstage Werk

Lately, I have come to love the songs of the swedish metal band In Flames and especially their lyrics. While a few years back, their melodic death metal was too hard for my taste, I can now appreciate their true awesomeness.

The dissection and interpretion of one song called Free Fall, whose lyrics touched me quite strongly and to which I can relate in strange kind of way, is the theme this entry. I will present the lyrics for this song verse by verse and will share my thoughts and feelings with you.

Mirror mirror, how far will I go?
Despite the foundation I am falling.
Sweet reflection will you save a place for me?

The author is looking into a mirror and, seeing himself, asking himself questions and trying to reflect about his life. The “foundation” refers to the structure in his life with which he’s apparently struggling. Though being content with what he sees (“sweet reflection”), he seems to fear that in the future there might be no place left for him in this world.

Where am I heading?
Could you grant me a haven?
For what?
I am punished could I ever repent?

The composer’s life doesn’t seem to have any direction or certainty for him. The second line indicates insecureness and the need for shelter. “For what?” This might be the question for what reason he needs shelter or, by reading the next line, why he was punished. By asking the consecutive question if he could ever repent, the author expresses his clear understanding of doing something wrong in the eyes of someone else, maybe everybody, but also his insecurity if the should feel remorse.

Was what he has done the right choice for him after all?

Mother Nature, I’m wide open
Waiting for you to move me

These lines fortell the the author’s anticipation for some kind of sign or enlightenment from somewhere (“Mother Nature”) because he is failing to find this truth and clarity by himself.

Don’t keep it from me
This is a free fall
This is a free fall

Someone or something is shielding the truth from him, probably his own mind. He’s basically lying to himself. But subcontiously, he is quite aware of this fact, hence the “free fall”. Also, this might show the author’s wish to commit suicide by jumping from a bridge or building if his issues can’t be resolved.

[Chorus]
I never seem to understand
The time, the place and who I am
Define a way to stay alive
It’s like I’m living a lie

The chorus sums up the whole song. He’s unable to grasp his identity, his place in this world and the rushing of the little time he has. He suggests defining a reason for which to live or else life is worthless for him. But his whole life he was lying to himself to stay alive.

Though waiting for “Mother Nature” to move him, he doesn’t realize that he is the only one who can do so and helf himself in return. He’s not going anywhere by lying to himself.

Father time every time I stop and feel
You’re there to tell me I’m already late

When trying to reflect about his own life, he feels being “already late” thus with too little time to think about it. By combining this with his “sweet reflection”, it becomes clear that he doesn’t want to think about the problems in his life and prefers to lie to himself by blandishing himself. He believes that, having this little time for reflection, he can’t do anything about his coming demise, so the basically ignores it.

This is a kind of procrastination, though not for every-day tasks, but for the very cornerstones of his live.

After getting some very interesting comments on my last post, I decided to answer some of the questions raised and share further thoughts with you.

Foosel and Martl, I must agree that sometimes women don’t necessarily have an agenda when it comes to friendships with men. However, did you ever pose yourself the question why you consider them friends in the friends on the first place? Maybe because they are so nice? Due to your profession in the IT sector you have many male friends of which at least 66% are probably too shy to make the first move to transform the friendship into a possible romance.

Now, not wanting to argue that you are willingly taking advantage of such relations, I just wanted to raise your and everyone’s awareness of this fact. If you are suspecting a close friend has a crush on you, would you accept his advice on, let’s say, your new boyfriend? Probably not, so in my opinion there’s a great deal of trust lacking in your friendship.

While not having a real solution for this problem, two possible ideas come to mind: talking about the issue and loosened friendships. I personally chose the latter because lying or the assumption of being lied at is inevitable while talking about such feelings. The only reason for me to advocate this is to save friendships and save youself the trouble of breaking up.

Michelle, surely sometimes men could behave in a smiliar way. See, in our society it’s still a man’s duty to conquer the woman. So the primary concern is the other way round as mentioned. Furthermore, I see a much greater tendency to intrigue and exploitation in women that in men. Girls tend to think more about the impacts of their actions to take advantage of them. The deceitful nature of women has been proven over the ages. My intention is not to generalize but to raise awareness.

Martl, a few words to your question of reversing my advice to women. Surely you could do that, but do you currently have serious problems with your male friends? My guess is, that you don’t and are quite happy the way things are progressing. Sometimes this is the real problem. While men tend to give, women tend to take. This has its roots deep in our past society as it were the men who were working and thus had money and were in control. But that has changed rapidly in the second half of the last century. In our now mostly emancipated society, women have on the one hand the same possibilities but on the other the same duties, too. Most feminists disregard this fact. I only mention this, because I tend to be an unconditional giver in (real!) friendships. Immediate return of favours is not needed. However, there comes a point where I consider myself exploited.

And I agree that a few close friends are much more satisfying than a few loose ones. Yet I made the experience that there are much less, if any, problems in my friendships to men than to women. This was the reason for the original post in the first place and led me to think about the cause for this, which I concluded and described as sexual tension.

Thank you very much for your comments. Hopefully, I explained myself and the point I tried to make more precisely to you.

What is friendship? I suppose everyone of you has other things that first come to mind when you think of close friends. In my opinion, the most important attributes of a friendship are mutual trust and mutual help. The goals of forming such a bond with another human being are purely egoistic, of course. You give and expect something in return, in whatever form possible, i.e. advice or moral support in difficult situations.

While this works pretty well on the same-sex front, intersexual friendships are sometimes doomed to fail. In some weeks of pondering, I came to the conclusion that this is probably due to sexual tensions in the friendship, which leads to irreparable misconceptions.

So why am I blogging about this? In the last few months, I had trouble with three of my female friends which led me to think about the issue. In all cases, there were seemingly misconceptions about my reason for forming and holding on to the relationship.

The first story shows this directly while the second is somewhat more twisted. Two months ago, two female friends of mine had an obvious crush on another friend. Though I consider him a good friend, I can’t agree with his opinion on women and relationships with them in general. So I tried to give both of them the adive to keep away from him if they seriously wanted to get into a intimate relationship with him as it would be doomed to fail. After speaking with them about the issue, they both ignored me for 5 weeks. Only a week ago they contacted me again and apologized for their behaviour.

So what has happend here? Obviously, they didn’t trust me. Why? I can’t be sure, but my best guess is that they thought I had a crush on one or both of them, so I didn’t want them to get into another relationship. I can’t think of another reason.

The other story happend last week. Having had a new boyfriend for about three weeks, my best friend decided that due to her constant low self-esteem and lack of self-confidence, she had to make him jealous to get confirmation of his love to her. Well, while I’m not happy with this, it happens to some kind of degree in every relationship. But she clearly overdid it. She decided that she had to make out with a friend of him in front of my(!) eyes. Of course, I would have intervened but she made sure I was too drunk. The next day she apologized to her boyfriend and got the desired reaction from him.

Having contact with me and knowing that she tolds me everything, her boyfriend talked with me about it. Due to the fact that she basically never listens to my advice, I decided to give him some hints about how to handle her so that the relationship would not fail. I know that he was important to her and that she didn’t want to lose him. The same day, she found out from him that we talked about her and asked me to send her the logs. I refused and we both got into an argument. We decided to stop having contact for the near future.

To be fair, I have to say, that recently we had some arguments about our friendship because I had the feeling that she is doing the same to me, only with other weapons of course. Although she tells me very much about her and her feelings, she doesn’t seem to fully trust me. I constantly feel like some kind of pet which is utilized when needed. Although I try to give her advice, as I also did in the case mentioned above, she almost every time does what she wants and gets into problems as a result.

So, I pondered why this has happened and why there was friendship in the first place. I think she held on to it because I was so silly and always tried to help every time she needed me. She knew she was important to me. But most of the time I wasn’t sure about the reversibility of this relation.

But why was the mentioned somewhat radical step taken? If you ask me, she thought I wanted to sabotage her relationship with her boyfriend. Why? Same reason as above.

So this is why intersexual friendships are doomed to fail in most cases: sexual tension. While this can be true, it mostly never is. I know some guys who have a crush on their best friends and only have a friendship with them because they want to get together but either they are shy or the girl "just wants to stay friends". Well, fuck off!

I’m not some fucking best friend who runs after girls I have a crush on for months! This isn’t healthy! When I know that she isn’t interested, I try do deal with it. Sometimes, we can be friends after that, sometimes I need some time without contact to her.

Girls seem to think they can build up a circle of friends who have a crush on them to feed their self-esteem. I saw similar cases of some friends of mine. And even some girls told me openly that some of their friends had a crush on them. But this was no reason to do anything about it. It was the only reason to have contact with them! To torture them and to tell their friends about it!

To conclude this entry, my advice to any men out there is to be aware of this fact: Never ever try to be a woman’s best friend, because when they are important to you things get complicated. When you want to help them they consider it an elaborate plot to sabotage their relationships with other men or find even other, more intricate reasons you would’ve never thought of.

Have fun with girls but don’t keep them too close if you don’t want to get into a relationship with them in the near future!

I have to say, I have really been looking forward to this album. After reading some reviews, listened to previews, watched some trailers on youtube and, of course, heard one of the new songs "Blut im Auge" live at Paganfest here in Munich, I expected one hell of an album. Epic. Folky. Awesome!

I’m speaking of the album called Sagas released two days ago by Munich-based extreme folk metal band Equilibrium.

After listening to the album the first time, I wasn’t exactly blown away. It looked like a fairly decent album with very epic roots and quite diverse styles that fits nicely as a successor of the previous album Turis Fratyr. Now, listening to it some more times, I can see now the awesomeness of Sagas.

In contrast to the old album, the music feels more cinematic and full of rich and volumious arrangements, while retaining the basic Equilibrium melodic style and death metal growling vocals. From majestic choirs to acoustic instrumentals, with panpipes, percussion and even a violin solo at the end of the last track, this albums both rocks and sends shivers down my spine.

Delivering not only huge cinematic backgrounds, with drums that vary from a stately march to a suicide charge while roaming a battlefield beneath glowering thunderclouds of bassy guitar and gothic keyboards, Equilibrium also adds medieval and folky strings and pipes playing brightly without ruining their heroic tales of bloodshed, paganism and legendary stature.

If you like folk or viking metal, you won’t be disappointed. This album easily raises the bar for future albums from other bands in the genre. As written in every review I read, Equilibrium really should compose music for movies and video games.

My next Equilibrium concert will be Heidenfest at 1.11. here in Munich. They will be performing with Finntroll, Eluveitie, Primordial and others. This is going to be as dazzling as Paganfest, I’m sure.

Today, while browsing Jamendo out of boredom, I found an amazing one man band called Chronix that released one album called Without A Name. The kind of music is really hard to describe, but the mix works really well. It’s a composition of grunge, rock and metal, especially nu metal.

What stands out is the repetitive guitar and the cracked voice of the singer. But it’s this arrangement that makes its style so awesome to listen to. Some songs do remind me of a metal Nirvana, though the music really is unique. The sound quality is amazing, so are the lyrics. I want more!

The album cover, which can be admired on the right, is terrific. Though it lacks titles and eeverything, the picture itself is nicely composed and saying what needs to be said: this band needs attention!

My favourite songs are: Heaven’s Not Here (obviously), Sing Something, Rest In Peace, How It Ends, Without A Name

In this post, I want to clarify my switch to LMU (Ludwig Maximilians University Munich) starting with the coming winter term, if everything goes well. Some of you already know it, but I guess this will be new for the most. Studying computer science with electrical engineering as minor subject at TUM (Technical University of Munich) for four semesters led me to take this somewhat radical step. There are quite a few reasons for this, some of which I want to outline for you.

First, my switch to LMU also includes switching my minor subject to philosophy. This decision was the main reason for switching universities, because, though, being able to take courses at LMU for my studies at TUM, my advisor told me that philosophy would probably not be accepted as minor subject at TUM and the bureaucrazy (sic) involved in this was, quite frankly, pissing me off.

But why philosophy in the first place? Well, electrical engineering in particular led me to believe to mathematics was not the only thing I wanted to focus my studies on. You just can’t describe and explain everything with mathematics. The great questions, that intrigued thinkers and intellectuals for millenia and which in part can also be applied to computer science topics in my opinion, captivate me more right know than applying a fourier transformation to a signal. There is more out there than the pure technical side of life. And I’m out to discover it. In the context of computer science, this may be thinking about the sense of intellectual property (sic) or the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence.

While this is the strongest argument to swich to LMU, there is more…

The LMU is located in the center of Munich whereas the TUM is in Garching, a suburb of Munich. Every day, I need to commute about 40 mins to get to TUM, whereas the buildings of LMU, though scattered throughout Munich, are easily reachable by bike in just in a matter of minutes.

Though, there may be more chairs with different subjects for focussing one’s studies at TUM, the few excellent chairs at LMU are much more active in research. And as I’m still not sure yet if I should go into research, do my Ph.D. and so on or go into the industry, this may present a big chance for me.

Believe me that I have not taken this step lightly. Sadly, I won’t see some good friends I made anymore on a daily basis, but I hope we still stay in touch and do stuff together in the future. I’m not sure what the future holds for me, but it can only better that it is know.