You can only listen to Big Sky so much before getting totally fuckinng sick of it Friday, Jul 18 2008 

Dexter and books and cracked and observation and otaku , , , , , , reuche 7:52 am

Although I would have to say that in general you can only listen to trance and house and techno music so much before you want to smash whatever the sound of it is coming from. Ah 230 minutes of Armin van Buuren and Minesweeper is a dastardly combination.

Well I was thinking of something that I forgot about Dearly Devoted Dexter. I think this happened the other day with Darkly Dreaming Dexter as well. In any case during the course of this book when Dexter starts to ponder whether or not he will end out living a normal life without killing people anymore while he’s under surveillance and going over to Rita’s house almost every day I was reminded of Koroshiya Ichi. 殺し屋1 (ichi means 1 in japanese) Koroshiya approximately means assassin but “professional killer” is a bit closer to it, literally the kanji mean “killer store” if I’m not mistaken. I’ve seen it used just to refer to killers, aside from the likes of “satsujinsha” and “satsujinki” and “hitogoroshi” hmm… Well that’s unimportant. But the plot of “Ichi” is pretty bizarre with the premise being that this crazy guy perverse guy who is retardedly strong gets hired to kill a bunch of yakuza. He accomplishes this mostly using karate kicks that make use of the blades he has built into special shoes he made himself. When fighting he gets an erection and if he doesn’t orgasm while killing someone he always masturbates and leaves semen at the scenes of his crimes. So yeah it’s pretty fucked up. Comparatively I’d say that Koroshiya Ichi is a lot more fucked up than Dexter because Dexter doesn’t really have the same sexual angle. Speaking of which it is relatively rare for a serial killer to not have some sort of sexual motivation, to get at least that kind of thrill from their acts.

The thing in Dexter that reminded me of Ichi was this aspect of immersion into normal life almost washing the killer out of someone. In the Ichi manga series (there was a film directed by Takashi Miike which might be more famous among non-otaku) that was pretty much the ending. Ichi got swallowed up by the city. There was a certain question as to whether the whole thing might not have been the delusion of an old man but that doesn’t matter. One can not see this kind of end for Dexter, instead one must see a violent end for him but whether or not Jeff Lindsay will have those kinds of guts is unknown.

Another similarity between Dexter and Ichi would be the vigilante angle. The difference is that Dexter “makes sure” that his victims are guilty where as Ichi is merely manipulated to believe that his targets are the same sort of people as the kids who bullied him (some of whom he killed anyway) growing up. Although almost all of the people Ichi was paid to kill (eventually he escalates and kills other people as well) were hardened Yakuza that had committed all sorts of crimes anyway, few of them had killed. Part of that I would say is the difference between Japan (Ichi) and Miami (Dexter). I wouldn’t be surprised if more people are killed in Miami every year than the entire country of japan. Hell I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in Miami gets killed every day.

Also of note is that both Ichi and Dexter were made into the sort of killers they are. Dexter was probably encouraged and instructed more than actually made into a killer though, as a sociopath we are to believe he would have killed eventually even without encouragement, he just might not have been as successful. Ichi on the other hand was an incidental killer (I think he killed a kid with a chunk of concrete or something like that) that got molded into the type of killer he was by this older guy.

Hmm on the whole I thought Ichi was more interesting but Dexter is ongoing so who knows. As to which is actually better I can not say since it has been many years now since I read Ichi and as a manga series rather than a novel series like Dexter it has different strengths and weaknesses. It probably makes even less sense than Dexter though. Ichi as I already said is a lot more fucked up, however there isn’t a lot about the work that I would say is particularly frightening or cause for despair. You have strange people living in their own little strange world killing each other off. On the other hand you have Dexter out in our world among us making plans to create another of himself in Cody. Which is another thing that seemed extremely unlikely to me but that doesn’t really matter that much at all. At. All.

So in the end, if you like one would you like the other? Who the fuck knows? If you’re interested in one you’d probably be interested in the other though, that’s a safe bet. Which is just the kind of bet I like, though I am not a betting person of course. Maybe that’s why it takes me so fucking long when I play Minesweeper?

 

At the moment my time would probably be better spent learning how to fish successfully than understand what NPC is Friday, Jul 18 2008 

Dexter and Jeff Lindsay and book reviews and math and minesweeper and observation and opinion and reading , , , , , , , , , reuche 4:39 am

As promised I read the second Dexter novel Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay and it was a big pile of addictive crap just like the first book. On the whole there seemed to be less tension in this book, probably because of all the mundane (typical, regular, average, normal, Dexter not killing or stalking people, etc.) scenes involving Dexter and other people that seemed to fill the book. And of course like in any shitty book series there was recap information interspersed which is nice when you haven’t read the last book for two years but really annoying when it hasn’t even been a week since you read the previous book. So I was once again unable to suspend my disbelief but I found this book to be more amusing in many ways than the first. I suppose it was also more disturbing in some of its implications but books like this don’t really bother me. I am not a sociopath like Dexter, it has been certifiably checked that I am not in fact, but I am a similarly broken person from a combination of trauma, poisoning, and genetics. And so when Dexter laughs and his sister is losing it I find myself at least smirking. The most hilarious part to me was when Dexter was ready to move on from the case even though it wasn’t solved because as far as he was concerned his part was done and no one could believe that he thought this way. Really it was perfectly logical, which also means totally inhuman. It took me a long time to understand that logic and humanity go against each other but I did get it, which apparently is part of what makes me not a sociopath.

To touch on that for a moment, sociopaths that is, apparently the key is that sociopaths are egotistical and anti-social with an utter lack of empathy. You do not necessarily have to be a sociopath to be a serial killer nor does being a sociopath mean you are or will be a serial killer. But it is alleged that the two frequently coincide. I would posit that the reason that a lot of sociopaths give the impression of being more clever at least if not necessarily smarter or better problem solvers is that their brain doesn’t waste space on social understanding similar to people with autism (this is not to say that people with autism are sociopaths or serial killers either, as far as I know almost no autistic people end out as murderers in spite of being outsiders). A lot of sociopaths are good at blending in, charming, and charismatic, but this is because they do not feel shame and annoyance the same way that normal people do, if at all. hm mhm well I would say that in general from the sociopaths that I’ve known they generally aren’t good for anything in general although they usually are quite skilled at their jobs There’s a place for everybody you know.

Well back to the book, the big “there’s no fucking way” moment for me was when Dexter left his clothes sitting on the toilet seat at Rita’s house about halfway through. Although Dexter is not shown to be obsessive about germs in spite of his desire for neatness and distaste for blood, you would think that from his attention to detail and fastidiousness he would have set the clothes somewhere that they were unlikely to be disturbed. Even on top of the toilet tank would be a much more likely area for him to place them. This ended out being used as a plot device, and the method of that implementation was also a bit skewed, but I could easily imagine other more likely ways for the clothes to be disturbed thus triggering the plot device.

And for that matter I don’t think anyone named Rita who also has a son named Cody would have a daughter named Astor. Then again I’m not familiar with the US south east (lots of cubans and rednecks) so perhaps it is a more common name in that region.

So in the end the book was just a way to pass the time in between math and Minesweeper. I seem to have become obsessed with Minesweeper but I am unable to achieve victory on the largest board. So I finally resorted to reading about the game, which only offered one insight and a couple of ideas for me to try. However I did find out that Minesweeper is NP-complete which is sometimes written as NPC. The only NPC I’m familiar with is “non-player character” which is a term that I believe originated in role-playing games and should be familiar to anyone that’s played a console RPG (Final Fantasy XII) or MMORPG (Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft, Maple Story, Ragnarok, etc.) which will usually feature a variety of NPCs. Anyway I’ve already forgotten what the NP stands for in NP-complete but the idea is that an NPC is something that you can’t create an efficient algorithm to solve. Or perhaps put another way, it is something that is harder to prove you can solve it than it is to solve it. I am not qualified to give an example of this in Minesweeper but if I understand correctly part of this has to do with the fact that you don’t know what the first tile in a game will be before you click on it. You can guess that it will be one of 9 things: a mineor a tile numbered 1-8, at least I assume there is an 8 tile though I have personally only seen 1-7, but until you click on it you do not know. And further in the game (versions that have patterns that make you guess, like the ones on most standard editions of windows) you will also reach points where you have to guess whether or not any number of tiles may or may not be mines, notably early and late in games. And there is just no apparent way to verify what these tiles are until you click on them. And at that rate when you click on a mine it shows you where all of the other mines are so the fastest way to find all the mines is to lose!

I wonder to myself at this moment whether it is Minesweeper or Tetris that is the most evil game of all time. In theory Minesweeper is solvable and Tetris is infinite so that should count for something. There must be a game of tetris that hasn’t stopped running for some time out there somewhere, people trading off and keeping the game alive. At least as far as I know Tetris blocks can only fall so fast… I don’t really want to think too deeply about that.

Anyway if you have any interest in Minesweeper and NP-complete you can check out this page by the guy who came up with the proof of Minesweeper being NPC over here. It is a bit illuminating, and put in a pretty simple manner which I think even people that are not familiar with the fields involved, but have played Minesweeper (which has got to be the majority of people in industrialized nations) will be able to understand. The most interesting thing he said was that if a person could solve P=NP then it might be more beneficial to them to keep the information to themselves than to collect the million dollar prize for doing so as they could break any code out there. Or perhaps that was if you could prove NP, I am not sure if there is a difference there or not. I can say that if anyone ever solves it, that person will not be me. My mind doesn’t work in the right way for that kind of thing. My mind is much better at picking out fault. Which does make me wonder, if I could learn enough advanced math properly I might be good at being a math critic. Who knows, maybe that’s what it would take. It has been said that at times the fool knows more than the wise man.