My Love/hate Relationship With Christmas

My love/hate relationship with Christmas

My hate towards Christmas begins annually around October when Starbucks replaces their standard white cups with their festive Christmas cups. The cups don’t explicitly celebrate Christmas, they celebrate the “winter holidays”, but in reality they use a red/green theme with drawings of snow flakes, evergreen conifers, and triangular hats with a pompom at the top. Of course, none of these is individually a Christmas thing, but no person with the slightest shred of critical thinking will doubt which holiday Starbucks really wants us to celebrate.

The white-orange traffic cone logo of VLC (a video player desktop application) dons a Santa hat throughout December. Some people complained on the support forum that they find the icon offensive. The lead developer at first defended his position saying that the Santa hat has nothing to do with Christmas (take a moment to let the irony of this statement sink in), completely dismissed the complaints as overly sensitive, and told people that if they don’t like it they can wait until the end of December or rewrite the app since it is open source. Later on they added a setting to disable “automatic icon changes”. The setting is hidden deep inside the advanced settings menu and is enabled by default. The developers assume that I want to celebrate Christmas, because they assume the only users that matter are Christians or have a Christian background.

Facebook added snow to the chat heads. Now I can’t chat with anyone without being reminded of Christmas. What if I don’t want to celebrate that holiday? What if I don’t live in the northern hemisphere, or a region where it snows at all?

Going outside is just as bad. Being surrounded constantly by Christmas trees and lights, hearing Christmas music being blasted from every speaker, reading the thinly veiled “holiday” greetings on shops, are all constant reminders that my religious beliefs (or lack thereof) are only secondary here. I’m being tolerated, not respected or celebrated.

People who celebrate Christmas always try to play down the Christian part of it (have you noticed the shared stem of those two words?) and insists that it’s a Canadian holiday (or American, or whichever country you’re from) — in effect this just ties Christianity to the entire country even more.

Of course, Christmas isn’t inherently bad. People celebrate it by being with their family and friends. They exchange gifts, they enjoy good food, they are having fun.

I celebrated Christmas this year with my boyfriend in Paris. Everything around me was pretty, the food was incredible, my boyfriend and his family were happy and I received more gifts than I could imagine. I was genuinely happy. How could I complain?

But still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’m celebrating someone else’s holiday.

Daybreakers

I recently watched a movie called Daybreakers, a complete spoiler of this movie follows: It's about our world, ten years after a virus started converting humans into vampires. By the start of the movie 95% of the world's population are vampires (the classic kind: immortal, no heart beat, burn in sunlight, addicted to blood, humans convert into vampires when bitten, starvation results in madness.)

The remaining human population is being hunted by the US military for food and put into blood farms that look like an exaggerated but not unrealistic version of dairy/meat farms, but supplies are running low and corporations are competing to find a blood substitute that doesn't rely on humans.

It's not a good movie. They created an elaborate and interesting world but the movie lacks suspense, action, drama, or convincing acting. The atmosphere is very realistic, with many vampires finding themselves in a reality which was forced upon them. They're incapable of living without betraying their ideals. Some vampires refuse to drink human blood, preferring animal blood, but these have all been extinct by the time the movie started.

The most interesting part is that two cures are found for vampirism; The first one, in which a vampire was almost burned to death by the sun but was saved by falling into a river, and was turned back into a human due to the UV radiation. The other cure, with more long term consequences, in which a vampire who drinks the blood of a vampire-turned-human, is converted immediately back as well.

The movie ends with the hint that the vampire population will soon perish, because the remaining vampires will try to drink the blood of the increasingly larger human population which will convert them into humans themselves, or die of starvation.

I'd like to see a movie that starts ten years after Daybreakers ends.

Think about it. A world war is inevitable because the entire world will undergo a shocking restructure. Entire infrastructures would be destroyed and rebuild. Years of starvation would follow until the pre-vampire era food industry would be reinstated, albeit now completely vegetarian due to the animal extinction. Those who controlled the human farms will be seen as ex-slavers. There will be two classes of humans: Those who were never turned into vampires and those who had. The humans that were hunted and farmed will be that world's holocaust survivors, but this time 95% of the world would be their Nazis. I feel like this would be a much more interesting movie! Would the never-turned population be treated as heroes? would the once-vampire humans feel remorse and shame?

Picking a lab desk

I started going to weekly research meetings in the Software Practices Lab (SPL), which is the lab that I intend on joining and doing my research in after I finish with my courses (maybe even before?)

There are twelve personal desks in this lab, numbered on top in the following diagram:

Given the choice, I would prefer a desk where I wouldn't have my back to the corridor, so either 3, 4, 7, 8, 11 or 12.

But, given that I'm me, I won't be satisfied with a finite set of six numbers. I need to math it.

Wolfram|Alpha to the rescue! The series we want is:

Because… you know… this is preferable to doing stuff I actually need to do.

“You should put punctuation marks, such as commas and periods, before the closing parenthesis or quotation mark,” said my supervisor (Ivan.)

Being an American, he is unaware that this rule does not apply for the language in which I am writing my thesis (Canadian English). In Canadian English the rule states that one should put punctuation marks after these “closing marks”, not before!

Awesome inventions in Antwerp

I visited jocmeh, who recently moved to Antwerp, for one day. Belgians have the best ideas, among the ones I saw were: — A pedestrian tunnel to cross a wide river (with pretty, old school wooden escalators) — Belgian fries cooked in animal fat (each bite tasted like an artisanal burger) — Lindemans Kriek, cherry beer (a.k.a. the first beer I genuinely liked) — A cocktail called Coconut Woman (practically a drinkable cake) — A laundromat that doubles as a bar (so you can socialize while you do the laundry) — Pay for the bus with a text message (failed to work for Jochem and me, but he says it worked every time before that) — An escalator that goes up, then continues forward flat, then goes up again (so you can lazy while you lazy) Keep at it Belgium. You have my approval.

I use yellow sticky notes as bookmarks for the books that I read.

You should try it, it’s easier when your bookmark doesn’t accidentally fall when you open your book on the bus and lose your place in the book!

This one no longer sticks after being used in 4 books. The black dots are ink stains on the glue strip.

Isn’t this awesome? 😊