Terrabyte again.

I found Terrabyte's website. I wish I hadn't.

I'm not going to be so cruel to provide a link to it (mostly because it also contains his real name), but upon reading it, I got this strangely rewarding yet infuriating feeling that you get when you realise that all your prejudices and stereotypical assumptions turn out to be true.

Here is an excerpt from his "About Me" section (his website is in German and English):

"My main interests are physics, chemistry, minerals and China. I have got also other interests: history, geography, philosophy, airplanes, weapons. Concerning China and East Asia I am interested in its history, in its culture, in its art and in its philosophy. I like Chinese buildings and objects. My favorite food is from East Asia. I like very much fried noodles with chicken meat. I collect minerals. My most favorite mineral is rock crystal with its nice symmetric crystals. I like to work and play video games on my PC and I do many daily tasks with my PC. Programming is interesting, too. I like to read books. Most of the books are specialized books, but as entertainment I also read novels (thriller). For example I like the book "The Lord of the Rings" and also the movie. Another entertainment for me is to play video games and to watch movies. My favorite video game is "Deus Ex" and my favorite movies are "The godfather" (all parts) and "Star Wars" (all parts). "

He doesn't study computer sciences, but I was absolutely fucking right about everything else. He has a lot of small, useless programs for download that he programmed himself. They are mostly physics and mathematics related. He also made a few Java Applets, but on those pages, his English is so terrible that I have no idea what they're supposed to be doing.

My curry.

You've all been waiting for it all year long, now here it is: The ultimate FIGHT OF THE YEAR!!! It's been a long and hard wait, but it was worth it, for the two adversaries have been training hard for this encounter. Now the time has come to choose your favourites and take your bets. Who is going to win? Who is going to become Master of the Universe?

THE AYATOLLAH... or... THE GORILLA?

There.

Nope, nothing good to say about the week. If going to the cinema was the highlight, you know the rest of the week was worthless. Full stop.

Monday's coming up...

Oh fuck it. Monday's coming up. There are times I feel that Mondays aren't all that bad, and I ask myself what all the fuss is actually about. But this term, Mondays are absolutely atrocious. All day, I'm stuck in lectures I don't have the slightest interest in, and somehow, the prospect of yet another work-filled autumn week isn't appealing to the slightest.
No, there isn't anything to look forward to next week. For a while, it seemed that at least I would make it to the Slayer gig on Wednesday, but my wallet just laughed at me.
I'm really trying to find something positive about next week, but the only thing that at least gives me a hint of comfort is the thought of getting pissed on Friday night to forget about the ordeal of the past five days.
To give you, dear reader (if you even exist) an example, tomorrow is that awful lecture I share with Terrabyte, whom I have spoken of a few posts ago. Last week, I watched him open his briefcase -indeed, he does not carry his stuff in a bag like everybody else, but a fucking briefcase!- to take out his pens, and I saw that it was full of plastic bags and -catch this!- underwear. Indeed, last week I was the third person to join the exclusive club of people who saw Terrabyte's underwear (the other two being Terrabyte himself and his mother). I fucking hate my life.

I'm going to write a retrospect of the coming week on Friday. If I have anything positive to report about it, please post a comment (you don't have to write more than just an asterisk or anything like that), and I'll have a pint (or shot) on each of you. Yes, you got that right: I'm already planning my Friday night breakdown one week in advance.

Marx is dead.

The other day, I was making my way through campus, when I saw some of those hopeless, self-styled Trotzkyists passing out leaflets to everyone who could not run away fast enough.
Of course, I got one as well, but this once, I stopped and checked out the other leaflets and books they had lying around on their stand. As was to be expected, everything was about Marx, Lenin, Trotzky, Rosa Luxemburg and all those other people who have been dead for half a century or -sometimes much- more. As dead as Communism should be.
I really felt like arguing with those people, especially because their claims actually insulted my intelligence, but alas, I was already late for class. Specifically, they were claiming that the United States of America are responsible for the recent war between Russia and Georgia, and that it is only the latest coup in American imperialism
Seriously, I'm certainly not an advocate of W's foreign policy, but there' already so much shit you can attribute to it that you don't need to make up shit like that. Some of the arguments these would-be revolutionaries made are so ludicrous that I really can't find any words for them: For example, they justified Russia's invasion of South Ossetia and Georgia by claiming that these territories had been under Russian control for centuries.

Let that sink in for a moment.

What they are, quite literally, saying is that Russian imperialism is OK, American imperialism isn't. A territory having been under foreign control for centuries, its political opposition deported to prison camps in Siberia, its resources exploited with no revenue and its cultural life quite simply killed is OK if the foreign power is Russian and therefore any Communist's darling, but if a nation so much as attempts to ally itself with the democratic and free powers of the west, it's not OK because... it's just so fucking popular to be anti-American?

You would think that Germans, of all people, and Berliners, of all Germans, would know the difference between Democracy and Communism, which is essentially the difference between freedom and slavery.
I don't want to claim that what Marx thought up is what Communism eventually turned out to be. That would be injustice towards one of the world's greatest and most important philosophers. But history proved that Marx, like all good things, should be consumed in little doses. A little bit of Socialism is an enrichment for any democratic society. But whenever anybody tried to install Communism as a form of government, it failed bitterly, becoming an oppressive, inhumane dictature. I probably wouldn't even attribute it to the system and its ideology if it only happened once or twice- but it happened every single fucking time somebody tried it, essentially proving that it does not work.
It certainly was worth a shot, but now that we have seen how dramatically it failed, let's try something else, or let's just stick with what we have. Seriously, democracy isn't all that bad if it allows me to waste my Sundays writing my worthless ideas on an even more worthless online blog...

Students suck.

I hate it when new terms begin. For the first two weeks, all students flock into the lectures, disciplined and highly-motivated only to drop out one by one until only a hard core of regulars is left by mid-term. And at the exams, you meet people you literally haven't seen in half a year.
I don't even mind it so much in the lectures themselves, but I get stressed out with everything surrounding it. It takes you half an hour to get your half-arsed parody of a meal in the cafeteria because the first-terms did not inform themselves how to pay properly, or they never heard anything of etiquette and just stand still in the middle of an aisle, effectively blocking it. And that's not even mentioning the mile-long queues that make it look like you'd actually get something decent to eat (but it's the same old shit as always).
Then there are those bicycle-Hitlers who have nothing better to do than insist to shove their bike in an overloaded tube at half nine in the morning, when catching a breath of air is already a challenge.

So, I was sitting in this lecture entitled "basics of marketing" that the BA system forces me to endure when I noticed this loser who is most likely studying computer science -for now, I will call him Terrabyte, due to his rather enormous body size- incessantly turning his head to my direction. Obviously, he kept staring at the girl sitting next to me, who was actually quite pretty, but unbearable for the thick cloud of cheap perfume she had floating around her.
So Terrabyte kept turning round to her, though pretending to "just look around the room" after having his eyes feast on her for an extra second or five. I'm not going to go into detail of how obnoxiously ugly Terrabyte was, but I got a kick out of imagining the conversation ensuing had he actually had the courage to chat her up after the lesson (I love unrealistic scenarios). It probably would have gone something like this:

Terrabyte: "H-h-h-h-h-hi. A-a-a-a-are y-y-y-y-you i-i-i-i-in th-th-th-this c-c-c-course as w-w-w-ell?"
Chick: "You saw me. Go figure, freak."
Terrabyte: "I'm... n-n-n-n-n-not a f-f-f-freak. I'm a l-l-l-level four d-d-d-d-dragon w-w-w-wizard."
Chick leaves.

Later on, the lecturer later passed the word to a colleague of his, who was also a rather attractive woman. Needless to say, Terrabyte did not turn around anymore from this point on.
I did not have the misfortune of hearing his voice until yesterday, when the next lesson took place. The female lecturer I mentioned was holding this one by herself, and it was obvious that Terrabyte did his utmost to impress her, miserably failing on the way and making a complete arse of himself instead, trying to discuss a quick example she had used to illustrate a point. Instead of the ten seconds it took to name the example and go on, Terrabyte forced her to justify her choice of words for five minutes.

I'm aware of the irony of using an online blog to vent my anger over such pathetic losers as Terrabyte, but quite honestly, I don't care.