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Do make yourself at home; here you will find out a bit more about myself through my digital art pieces and my posts alike; do enjoy your stay and sign my guestbook while you are at it if it suits your fancy.

Rant - Inverse Proportionalities: Courage And Warfare

Today's rant is comprised of a constant thought that I have - courage and the manner of warfare changed drastically throughout time: specifically how wars became massified, banalized and riddled with acts of cowardice.
I'm not favorable to wars in general, but some hold meaning and those only are justifiable. None of today's established conflicts has truly ideological meaning; the curtain of economics is always behind the bloodshed to some level.
True wars of freedom lay engraved in silent monoliths...men like William Wallace were true freedom fighters, that was a real warrior; sadly they don't belong in our time anymore, as wars are resolved by triggers and buttons for superficial reasons at best, not to mention the concept of freedom has lost its purity and became a tool of political propaganda to justify crucible, inhuman acts behind the scenes that take part in no report and are hardly ever unearthed.
Modern humanity suffers from a disease called cowardice - in medieval Japan men rose their swords and surrendered their lives to their opponents in a duel of heart and skill, it was a forge for the spirit, even for the one to fall, it was no vain death.
The number of casualities in conflicts were nowere as massive as today - no atom bombs, no ICBMs, no jammers; just a man, his sword and his courage and for the one that rose as victor, it was a deserved triumph, not a given one.
The conditions warriors endured and the causes for which they fought and shed blood, that makes them vastly superior to any modern soldier.
You can't anihilate your opponent hundreds of meters away with a blade, your foes weren't nameless back then, you knew their names, you looked into their eyes and from that you knew them, you knew their souls, even if it contained nothing but killing intent, those men communed with their foes as sparks flew; if it is indeed of the human nature to wage wars, that they would at least be waged like in the old days, wars with meaning, wars with strong hearted humans, true warfare begins and ends at a blade's length.

Rant - The Inactive Action

Life is full of strange contradictions. In today's rant I bring forth yet another:
Inactive action. What do I mean you might ask? its rather simple after you try to catch on; an easy way to begin pondering on the subject is considering how limited human beings are. The number of things one can actually act upon and change is grossly outnumbered by the things one cannot do a thing about, in a wide bird's eye view of things.
In trying to change things one cannot, precious energy, time, and otherwisely important resources are consumed to no justifiable avail - the end result is the distance towards the current situation and the ambitioned change just becomes a larger chasm.
To avoid this cycle of wastefulness, one must learn to be able to simply not act upon what one cannot, or rather, act by waiting, observing, and peering one's senses into perceiving the most exactly favorable opportunity to take a given action; even if you know why and how, when you do something (or not) is just as critical and the Inactive Action philosophy can be of great aid to refrain the instinct of intervening that humans can display, especially under emotional influence.
In short, learn when not to do, and you'll be doing more than you believe.

Rant - Need and purpose

This is yet another contradicition that comes to my mind often, by personal experience, and somehow its likely others may have the same kind of self inquisition.
Its my personal opinion that everything has a purpose and the fact we may not understand that purpose doesn't change the fact that there is a reason for that given thing to exist - by extension its not farfected to give the same kind of pattern to human beings; there must be a purpose for us all - I don't mean something as obvious as having a job or such - role and purpose are not exactly the same (except maybe if any of you readers is a workaholic).
Purpose tends to hold a wider spectrum of meaning and it is not too difficult to realize that (even though it can take as many shapes and reaches as there are differences in each person).
The questioning though is in truth if purpose is a need or need is a purpose, in other words if people need a given task, position or function (again not limited to any formal work field) to feel they actually exist or if their purpose, or sense of self is simply that of feeling he/she is necessary or important to someone else.
My impression is that I belong to the latter side of this pendular movement - to me it is a (albeit strange to some) form of reassurance to know I am needed and that some sort of support is expected from me.
Others may feel more comfortable with a more self restrained, painstakingly defined function but that would most likely made me feel like Charles Chaplin in his ingenius "Modern Times" motion picture - workers were given greatly specific tasks and could do nothing more; its obvious that would have nefarious consequences to anyone's mental equilibrium, or at the very least lead into a towering wave of boredom.
I have full awareness that this may have been my strangest rant yet, but I felt I had to post something so I dug it all out from my head and put it here.
In closing,to me (and others I'm sure) its necessary to be necessary.

Rant - Life's blurry lines

Life has several of those; blurry lines are, metaphorically, sides or limits of any given situation that cannot be clearly distunguished or told apart (and hence cannot be morally weighted decisively either).
In today's rant I bring you a very common blurry line:
Vice vs. habit.
Now let's try to understand what is going on here.
A vice is often defined as something that is either morally degrading to an individual or harmful in any given way; a very prohibitive and restraining connotation as you can easily infer. Habit on the other hand is something commonly defined simply as something executed with a degree of constancy.
Now out of those two, it would normally be said that vices are "bsd" and habits are "normal". That's exactly where the blurry line is, and its blurry exactly because its distance to either side will vary to accomodate one's needs.
A simple example should suffice.
Coffee is commonly seen as a habit and its socially accepted as such far and wide, but a more careful inspection of such matter could also describte it as a vice - caffeine is a neuro stymulant that will speed up synaptic interactions for a given period, to do so it alters the brain chemstry to make use of it, in essence it acts no different than a drug on a purely chemical level, and despite that no one will accuse you of being a junkie or send you to a rehab because of coffee.
It should be important to note that I am not partial to the use of drugs or anything like that; to whoever uses them, it is both a vice and a habit - or better yet, its a vice because it became a habit, and its habitual because of addiction, so its a complementary contradiction at best, and that is the point I'm trying to get across, and just that, what others do with their bodies and lives is not my responsability.
Lastly as I stated above, the linear distances depend on the person, and so does the judgement made by each, which brings the final point of this rant to light - anthropologists say humans are a social race, that's naivette at best - life will be always be weighted, measured, seen and lived inside each of our own carcasses, whether we like it or not, each human's life is essentially individual as coexistence will force all sorts of concessions. which in turn makes each of us become more and more unnatural to their essences; as a result, society is artificial and inauthentic at best.

No Rants today

I bet all of you avid visitors (as if I gotten a whole lot of them to begin with, ha) were expecting a rant today (realistically, I know you weren't).
But today it won't be so, happens that I'm so utterly happy that I cannot even think of a rant to make, so I'm leaving it at that; bet I caught you all by surprise eh?