I’ve become even more of a cinephile lately and I thought it wise to make a list of my favorite movies for archival purposes. I like a lot more movies than this but these are the cream of the crop. I’ll be updating this as I discover new favorites!
The Struggle to Feel Unique in a World of Uniformity
If you had asked me five years ago who I was, what I thought my life would be, and how I would do it I probably would have had an answer better than almost anyone else my age you could have asked. In that time my concerns were few. I was worried about my social situation and my simple grades that I only had to worry about simply taking the time to do. In the past year a lot has changed for me. More than ever I feel an unstoppable force of reckoning to determine what I am, who I am, and what I wish to be. The certainties I once held are gone and replaced by the anxieties of amounting to something I can be proud of. More than anything I crave with every fiber of my being a sense of self actualization. I want to wake up in the morning and not instantly be reminded of the problems in my life because they either don’t exist or I have a ready method to fix them. What I want is to feel a sense of absolute clarity. I simply wish for the freedom to do whatever I wish and it seems that is only available through stability (something that my life seems to lose a little more of all the time). I need to regain this sense of stability I felt living under my parents and I don’t feel I’ll at least be able to wake up happily every day until that happens.
Unfortunately, however, it seems that this will be something I’ll spend quite a while waiting for now as I won’t be making enough money to live this lifestyle (at least until I complete college). Right now I need to pick a method that is going to allow me to get there. Namely, a career. The issue is that I want to be paid to do something I love. Unfortunately many other have that dream just as I do and it makes for heated competition. Truthfully though, there are a lot of things I love about life and probably if I set forth in any one direction I’ll probably make it there somehow. The problem is I’m afraid to commit and decide on one and to make it worse I’m afraid if I choose one and then change my mind I’ll end up with nothing. Its kind of like when there are multiple lines to wait in so you pick one but then the other one goes faster so you switch to it and as soon as you do the line you moved from moves ahead. If this keeps happening you’ll never get anywhere. Luckily however, most people eventually get to the front right? Sooner or later. The next real issue is that the longer it takes the worse of you are for a lot of reasons.
The Implications of Treating Humans Like Ants
Today 20 US elementary school children lost their lives to the hands of a man with a gun. Gun control advocates are up in arms claiming that we need stricter gun control and more availability of help for the mentally “unstable”. Sure, taking guns away from the citizens would stop gun violence (not including the fact that history has shown time and time again making something illegal doesn’t make it unobtainable) but then how can we explain and prevent what also happened in China today?
While the mentally deranged may be the only ones that will act upon their frustrations they’re certainly not alone in their grief. I’m referring to people who have been chewed up and spit out by society. Humans are wildly diverse and the truth is that not everyone fits into the idealized capitalist lifestyle. It can leave one feeling like a puzzle piece that’s a part of the wrong puzzle, you feel this sense that you fit somewhere but you know its not here. The problem is there are no other puzzles, this is it. So instead, society pushes on you like a toddler trying to make you fit anyway. Society doesn’t understand that you aren’t meant to fit here. After enough pushing two things can happen: the person either bends and sort of fits anyway (Its never a perfect fit, but enough to survive. These people rarely prosper however.) or they break. Breaking is different for everyone who experiences it, but its seldom pretty. Dealing with the fact that everything you’ve ever understood about your life is a lie and the feeling that you literally have no solution is overwhelming and can very often lead to mental health issues. Now for most that’s not shooting up elementary school kids but it only takes one, doesn’t it?
My Life in a Blog Post
It seems that society has put me in quite the interesting dilemma. Well, maybe interesting for everyone else. It’s distressing for me. My life situation is coming to a culmination point. I have gone through my childhood schooling and have moved on to college, where society dictates that we must “sink or swim”. All my life I looked forward to this time, I couldn’t wait to grow up and start working on things I care about. Then I turned 18 and I began to enter a sort of existential crisis. This crisis is still one that is very much ongoing, and I’m not sure if it will ever end. I have to come to understand that this depression and misunderstanding of my purpose may not be a singular crisis, but is instead the result of the death of my childhood and the acceptance of the responsibilities of adulthood. My parents made me understand that I am now expected to be much more self sufficient and while I have accepted this fact it is a cause of great anxiety in my life. The “safety net” has been removed. I now have many “adult” responsibilities that have much more gravity than before, and my decisions make much more of a difference.
Normally, however, I would expect that this thrust into “real life” would be exciting, its a chance for opportunity and discovery. This is what I anticipated. I anticipated an opportunity for self-discovery, to learn and mature, grasp an understanding of life and ultimately reach something similar to the mental state of Nirvana, an “ultimate happiness” if you will. This Nirvana like state is accompanied by true self-actualization, and Nirvana idea of being free of all types of suffering. Now obviously life isn’t this perfect, but you can get close. Life can be so grand that all the accompanying hardships seem entirely worth it. That’s literally all I desire from my life. I expected college to be my first step on my journey of life long self discovery.
Raspberry Pi Dorm Room Media Server
Earlier this year I purchased a Raspberry Pi. I had it around in my house in South Carolina but it didn’t really do much. I had it running, but due to a known power adapter issue causing a voltage drop I couldn’t use my Pi for very long without the kernel crashing. I purchased a different power supply (the one mentioned in the video) that would supply a consistent rate of power to the device, unlike phone chargers which is what I was using previously.
I now have all the required parts to put my Raspberry Pi into operation in my dorm room at the U of U. The device will be plugged into a split ethernet port using a cat5 splitter from Newegg. The other port goes to my desktop computer. The device will be powered by the power adapter and will be connected to a 1TB external drive for media storage.
The most difficult part of this setup was not hardware however but software. Due to the fact that I have almost completely restricted rights on my University’s network I can’t port forward to the Pi to allow for external ssh connections. I want to be able to automate transactions of media data from an external VPS to my Pi, so this is a bit of an issue. The solution I’m going to have to go with is an autossh reverse tunnel from my Pi to my VPS. I run the following command on the Pi to initiate the reverse tunnel:
ssh -R 19999:localhost:22 ben@vps.kulbertis.org |
Here, “19999″ is the port that will be used as the reverse tunnel port on the VPS. We’re reverse tunneling from the ssh target, so we’ll use “localhost”, and then your ssh port, which is 22 by default. Follow this with the standard address you use to ssh to the VPS. Now, from the VPS, the command:
ssh localhost -p 19999 |
From this command, an ssh tunnel can be opened to the Pi behind the firewall. I will use this for sftp transfers of media files to the 1TB storage device. Then the media data can be streamed from anywhere on the University network on my laptop, or potentially even my phone.
I intend to write bash scripts and use cron to automatically transfer media files using rsync and the reverse ssh tunnel. This will allow for streamlining the transfer of data from my remote machines to my local ones.