#--no outcome would satisfy the ABSURD expectations he would have for an encounter like that

[beeapocalypse]

really want to play him in a dnd game at some point so im holding myself back from exploring too much of the idea of lorimyras brothers but GOD. thinks abt them and gets sick

[thetrashbang]

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Needs A God

No multiplayer game gets to live in a void for long. No matter how hard you may try to bleed yourself of troublesome concepts like context, or backstory, the reality is that people like to speculate. People like to tell stories. Doesn’t matter how goofy or outlandish; the creeping tendrils of narrative eventually wrap around the foundations of even the purest, most context-free experiences. Why are we bombing these crates? Why are we stealing that flag? Why are we fighting? Why are we here?

Somebody will come up with an answer. It’s the human thing to do.

But for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, it feels like that answer has yet to come. One hundred players parachute onto a deserted island, where the average density of firearms per square meter exceeds even the most deranged fanatical NRA wet dream, and a slowly constricting hemisphere of crackling blue energy forces them to mercilessly gun each other down until only one is left standing. It’s an absurd, nightmarish premise; a theoretical scenario seemingly engineered to turn people into rabid beasts, fighting tooth and nail merely for the privilege of living a few minutes longer. Who would orchestrate such a competition, and for what purpose? Is it an experiment? A ritual? A blood sport? Is some Silicon Valley bazillionaire sitting in a darkened room somewhere, surrounded by monitors, cranking his sad rubbery hog to every rifle crack and arterial splatter? Nobody seems to know, or care.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t either; PUBG is fun enough without framing. And yet, tonight’s winds bring an uneasy chill, carrying whispers of restlessness, indignance and fury. You feel it, don’t you? There’s a philosophical schism in how we approach Pubguh—the very concept of ‘battle royale’, even—and the hairline fractures are beginning to show. Players whine and gnash their teeth at the red zone, esports organisers desperately attempt to harness the format for views, and the proverbial chicken dinner seems to attain a more and more mythical, trophy-like status by the day; a reference to back-alley gambling now ironically viewed as a badge of ultimate prowess. This isn’t a healthy relationship. This isn’t a healthy attitude.

What Plunkbat needs, friends, is a god.

Well, okay, not necessarily a god god. Divine power is optional. I’m not asking Brendan Greene to start wearing a white toga and chiselling his patch notes into stone tablets, as much as it would set an entertaining precedent. The job requirements are flexible: I’m simply asking for someone vengeful and capricious, with unfathomable intentions, inscrutable thoughts, and—at least within the bounds of the playable space—immense, unassailable power. Like any god, you need not supply scientific proof of their presence; you merely have to attribute sufficient existing phenomena to them, and change people’s collective perception of the world. Ooh, got’em.

See, battle royale games represent an important shift to me. I’m a competitive person by nature. It’s etched into my mind, irreversibly chiseled by years of test scores and parental praise and all the other ego-stroking bullshit that you were subjected to if you were a certain kind of ‘gifted’ child. “You’re the best. You should be the best. You should be winning. Why aren’t you winning, what the heck is wrong with you?” So it bleeds over, into hobbies, work, and of course, online shooters, in which I regularly demonstrate that I have an innate… whatever the opposite of aptitude is. I react slowly, I zone out, I bean myself on the head with my own grenades, and if you exert the slightest bit of pressure, I’ll empty half the magazine into a wall and drop my weapon through a gap in the floorboards. I’m not good, and yet some unreachable, fundamental part of my conscious will never be satisfied with that knowledge.

You would think, then, that Pubby-G would only serve to exacerbate this mindset. And yet, in a world of delicately tuned esports that are built from the ground up to be pure, unfiltered tests of skill, it feels like the only game to grant a genuine absolution of responsibility; a kind of freeing fatalism. There’s a sense in a lot of classic multiplayer experiences—like, say, Counter-Strike—that every outcome is more or less deterministic; a product of a series of controlled variables and actions. With every failure comes the overwhelming impression that it could have been averted, given enough competence, foresight, and concentrated guarana. By contrast, a porridgey cocktail of chaos flows through the veins of battle royales, surrounding you with factors that are not only impossible to influence, but—in many cases—impossible to know at all. You are swept up by the gusts of a hundred butterflies’ wings, tossed to and fro by the whims of the random number generator, bombarded with unavoidable risks and squeezed into unmanageable situations. It’s easier to go with the flow, accept that at any given moment you may have your head unceremoniously taken off—by somebody lying flat on a distant hill, or hiding behind one of the game’s ten thousand trees, or concealed in a shrub on the far side of the Moon—and concentrate on all the minute actions you can make to ever-so-slightly nudge the odds in your favour.

But it’s not always clear that this is the reality of Puhburger. With its vast scale and often languid pacing, encounters can feel like isolated incidents, detached from the cascading series of events that led up to them, despite being anything but. Anyone can parse the map for circles of safety and non-safety, and understand that their arbitrary placement gives certain players an advantage; it’s less apparent that the figure in that upstairs window might have had their sights trained on the area, or seen you first, shot first, picked up a better weapon, obtained a better vantage point, or some other action, because of a dizzying permutation of astral alignments that neither of you could even begin to grasp. So we get futile attempts to establish a level playing field, find meaning in accomplishment, divine fair elements from unfair, and generally make things needlessly stressful for everybody involved. Except the infuriatingly smug yours truly, of course.

How do you make that clear, though? How do you concisely impress upon people that their fate is almost entirely out of their hands, in such a way that they adopt an attitude of acceptance? Blaming the roll of the dice doesn’t come to mind as swiftly when you never see them rattling around, nor the way their innumerable ripples propagate across the map. Furthermore, as current events have taught us all too well, it’s a lot easier to ascribe fault to individuals than to an invisible, fundamentally hostile system. So what do you do?

You give the system a name. And, if you can, a face.

Allow me to momentarily slam us into reverse. When Valve released Left 4 Dead way back in 2008 (oh god, it’s going to be ten years old this year?) they made quite a song and dance about the game’s AI Director; an invisible, unknowable entity that would dynamically dole out items and zombies in a manner consistent with the tenets of dramatic tension, ensuring players were subjected to a “fast-paced, but not overwhelming, Hollywood horror movie”. While the opacity of the AI Director’s machinations always made me a tad sceptical of its mechanical effectiveness, giving people a name to pin the blame for all their earthly woes on was a masterstroke. Notorious video game jokesman Yahtzee Croshaw—the one with the hat and that trendy 00s cynicism, remember?—reported that he once witnessed someone praying to the AI Director, and I bet you all the pipe bombs in the world that players’ personification of it didn’t stop there. Short of making a catastrophic error, I never saw anyone get chewed out for not pulling their weight, and when tones got heated—as they inevitably do, when you’re throwing yourself against the frigid slopes of the higher difficulties—they were directed in the vague direction of the director: for its expectations, for its lack of pity, for being unfair. Awareness of our lurking orchestrator changed our perception of the experience, even though we couldn’t entirely prove it wasn’t just somebody sitting in a black box, disinterestedly flipping a coin over and over.

So, why not do the same for a game that does? Put a face on the system that holds a fundamental grip on who lives and who dies. You don’t need to change a thing under the hood; you need only introduce the vague implication that the evolving state of the battlefield is a consequence of a thinking, feeling, mysterious overseer. A bloodthirsty oligarch watching from their lavish observation zeppelin, a dystopian TV network broadcasting a deadly future sport, an amoral team of government agents sealed away in a bunker control room, an inexplicably sapient Shiba playing with a selection of levers, or indeed, a literal deity. People will take the faintest contextual cues and run amok with them, ascribing everything they can to the will of the one who set this conflict in motion: item drops, circle position, all the way down to the subtle spread of their bullets as they sail through the air. Yeah, maybe it’ll start off as a running joke; an ironic indulgence, the “thanks Obama” of Puddlebounds. But that’s the thing about ironic behaviour: get enough people doing it at once, and you’ll cultivate sincere participants without even realising it. We will learn to absolve ourselves of responsibility, and engage in the unhinged pandemonium of battle royale with the mentality that befits it.

There’s just one problem: you need to be able to keep a secret.

I’m still working on that part.

[scheherazadean]

IT (2017) forecasts a hopeful future for Hollywood remakes and the horror genre

A critical review with mild spoilers

(Photo: IGN.com)

The day after it opened in local theatres, I went to a showing of Andy Muschietti’s long-awaited summer horror, It. I will not pretend that I am familiar with the original novel, nor will I pretend that I have seen the TV mini-series from the 90s in its entirety, starring Tim Curry and inspiring childhood nightmares aplenty for my peers. I can, however, say this much: it must not have been easy to reintroduce canon in a cultural landscape where clown horror has become about as saturated as your average demonic possession waiting to be exorcised.

            But the creative team behind the film has taken measures navigating said cultural landscape, and it shows in the marketing alone. The theatrical trailers1 did not bother hiding the jump-scares, probably relying on Pennywise’s split-second appearances to drive the hype, even. Likewise, the film wastes no time on building up the premise of the evil clown. The extent of this exposition is confined to the lulling dialogue in Georgie's encounter with It, which in itself marks a stark departure in tone from its predecessor in the 90s classic: Skarsgård’s voice-acting is an excellent balance between the whimsical and the sinister, and the exchange ends on a gory crescendo promising fatalities to follow. With Pennywise thus characterised, the rest of the film’s treatment of the monster mostly focuses on amplifying the sense of dread accompanying every instance of Its arrival rather than the uncanniness of Its makeup. (Although there is plenty of that, too, in the camera’s attention to too-long claws extending out of a gloved hand, or the dissonance between Its dance-like gait and its grinning maw.)

The new Pennywise retains a sense of uncanniness in the camera’s attention to too-long claws, extending out of a gloved hand. (Photo: comicbook.com)

            Indeed, Skargård’s Pennywise is a different animal from Tim Curry’s iconic rendition, and for all the uncertain initial reactions towards the first look of the character’s design, its vintage costume and visibly deranged facial expressions never become overbearing within the context of the film. But the entity’s flair for the dramatic and its twisted brand of humour do at times veer into the territory of the absurd, which may not be for everyone. Even now, I still hold a degree of apprehension towards the convulsive movements Pennywise makes whenever it pounces on its preys, as they somewhat shatter the audience's immersion in such scenes. (The same can be said about the little dance sequence it does towards the end of the film – which has been generally received as too absurd to be taken as part of an integrated scene designed to scare, if the flood of memes is anything to go by.)

            But to return to the topic of Pennywise's aura, one undeniably commendable feature of the film lies in its use of setting to characterise the sense of neglect and danger befalling the children of Derry. The devil is in the detail: in Georgie’s death scene, two shots of a lady neighbour bracketing Georgie's disappearance from his spot by the storm drain already highlight an indifference towards missing children. This indifference is mirrored to different degrees in some of the Losers’ parents’ dialogue later on in the film, as well as in the overall lack of adult supervision for the children of Derry despite all the disappearances in the neighbourhood. All of this hint at the adults’ collective complicity in Its malignant activity, thus when Ben Hanscom shows up to deliver his expository monologue about the statistics of missing persons versus that of missing children in Derry, it doesn't come as a heavily expository moment meant to incite cheap surprise. Instead, this piece of information comes as another addition to the steady build-up of a pervading feeling of one too many skeletons in the closet.

One of the many missing children in Derry. (Photo: IGN.com)

            Another commendable aspect that sets It apart from other modern horror films is that it actually crafts individual emotional journeys for each of the main characters, so much so that one could argue that Pennywise is an add-on feature in a Coming of Age story. (Of course, that would be an unfair assessment of the film, which really presents an inseparable correlation between the activities of It and the ill-fated occurrences in the children's lives.) Most notable is Bill, whose story is as much of a monster slayer’s journey as it is an allegory for overcoming grief, denial and loss. Here, there is a delicate balance between the terror-inducing and the touching whenever Bill stars in a scene with the ghost of Georgie, which is in large part thanks to Jaeden Lieberher’s ability to tug at the heartstrings with micro-expressions and tremors in his voice. Hence, the film draws Bill’s arc to a satisfying conclusion once he is able to accept that Georgie is dead in the final scene in the sewers.

            The film also does a good job of providing visual markers for other such developments in the characters’ respective arcs. Henry Bowers aiming the bolt gun between Mike’s eyes in the basement of Pennywise’s Neibolt Street lair impressed me in its clever echo of a much earlier scene regarding Mike’s hesitance in shooting the sheep at the barn, and Eddie’s first step out of his hypochondriac comfort zone, underlined by his rejection of his mother’s placebo pills, is symbolic of his and the children's rejection of the adults' willful ignorance towards the existence of Pennywise and other more apparent social horrors. Director of photography Chung-Hoon Chung’s work is praiseworthy as well, from the placement of an aerial shot of Georgie running down the street with paper-boat SS Georgie just to show how small and vulnerability he is, to the corresponding transition from Beverly’s bloodied bathroom to the water dripping onto Bill’s coloured drawing of Beverly, smearing the red on her hair in such a way that it resembles blood dripping onto the page. There is also a fantastic use of diegetic elements to engage the audience in a specific character’s point of view, such as adorning the opening scene with creaks and other sound effects to show Georgie’s childish and irrational fear of the basement, only to subvert it in the next immediate scene with the clown in the gutter. Interestingly, the atmosphere of the basement as a falsely-scary location is also quite neatly paralleled and subverted in Bill’s first encounter with It. Such bookends gave the film a touch of masterful storytelling that would not normally be expected from a summer horror flick.

            Where the film really hits it out the ballpark in terms of genre expectations and subversions of them, however, lies in its characterisation of Beverly Marsh. Despite being the only girl in the group, she is never rendered an empty token girl, nor does she become a Manic Pixie Dream Girl after the film makes clear of both Ben and Bill’s attraction to her. She is never mystified, a welcomed departure from her characterisation in the controversial orgy scene in the novel, where she is delegated the role of utilizing her sexuality to light the group’s way out of the disorienting sewers. The film also spares significant screen-time on the boys showing solidarity towards her gendered troubles via a relaxed bathroom-cleaning montage. (There, the blood is not only visually symbolic of the onset of womanhood, but also shares contextual connections to the gaslighting she suffers under her abusive father.)

There is a precarious balance between occupying the diegetic standpoint of the boys, and the accidental objectification of Beverly as an underage character. (Photo: IGN.com)

            Unfortunately, there is a precarious balance between occupying the diegetic standpoint of the boys and the accidental objectification of her, Beverly, as an underage girl. The camera does not offer voyeuristic shots of Beverly’s body – one can see in the few shots that do take the stand point of the boys admiring Beverly’s beauty that they always focus on more romantic aspects, like her eyes, or her hair, as if testament to Ben’s poetry. However, the idea of a lipstick-wearing, sunglasses-clad young girl has become so synonymous with the image of the Lolita that the scene of Beverly sunbathing in what might as well be a bikini could contradict the message the film is trying to send about her abusive and implied-paedophilic father. Also, one might argue that the very existence of a love triangle in the plot puts an unnecessary focus on heteronormative teenage drama rather than the bond of friendship between the seven Losers. The idea that a kiss would break her out of a cosmic trance is certainly a bit too Disneyesque for a film whose core demons are about murder, neglect and abuse. Thankfully, Beverly’s fleshed-out storyline revolving around her fear of her father keeps her character from being relegated to a mere object of desire in the film.

             However, the level of detail in Bill and Beverly’s respective character arcs does highlight the lack of character development in some of the other Losers’ character arcs, namely that of Stanley, Ben, and Mike. (Mike may have been given symbolic visuals, but no real character development can be seen in the storytelling for any of these three boys.) Stanley, in particular, is exposited to have been preparing for a bar mitzvah at the start of the film, but we never witness nor hear of the outcome of the ceremony that should have been most symbolic of his coming of age, and the only sort of emotional development one can conclude from Wyatt Oleff’s appearances is but a mere escalation of fear and hysteria, which doesn’t say much about Stanley as a character. There is also a technical error in the film’s editing regarding Stanley’s character in the final sewers sequence, where one second he is waiting with the rest of the gang for Mike’s descent down the well, and in the next breath of the same line he is wandering all alone in a completely secluded part of the sewers system. Although, such flaws can be overlooked, seeing as the film is an adaptation of a thousand-page novel, and must undoubtedly have been pressed for time.

             In any case, the film is good at balancing moments of heart-racing terror and emotional revelations, and it has comedic moments aplenty, too. (Finn Wolfhard’s performance as the loudmouthed Richie won rounds of hearty laughter in the theatre.) 

            Verdict: worth buying tickets for theatrical screenings for sure.

(Article last updated on 1 Oct 2017.)

Notes:

The linked trailer is not a local one but the UK one, but it is the first theatrical trailer I ever saw for the film, and it’s made the most impression on me.

[ernestinemaloney-blog]

Outlander Filming Locations In Scotland

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A technique I have found out about some time ago usages imagination as well as positive thinking to urge obese kids to preserve a diet and also physical activity schedule. Produce a Wisconsin parenting strategy that satisfies your child's needs. Parents are actually the best important key towards youngster's intellect development. Could our globe innovators not utilize our love from our youngsters as the bottom amount similarity that brings us all with each other on at least one amount?

[shutupiambreathing-blog]

To Be an Absurd Person

"Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure.” This is the place I first knew about Albert Camus——the opening of a book he wrote named “The Stranger.” I still remembered a strange and almost startled feeling I got when I saw this line. With much curiosity in my heart, I started to read the book. The process of reading this book was not pleasurable at all probably because of unintelligible lines and seemingly unrelated descriptions of characters.

But it had a strong and strange attraction to me and drove me to finish reading the book in three hours.After closing the book, I was amazed by the protagonist’s attitude towards life and also wondered what kind of people could live his or her life with this attitude, which contradicted to mine.

In my opinion, he is indifferent to everything in his life. He doesn’t care about the promotion of his work or his relationship with other people. He doesn’t believe in god. His fun for life is sitting beside his window and watches people’s movements outside.Even when his mother died, he didn’t feel any sorrow but felt impatience and tediousness of the funeral brought to his life until he was involved in a murder. At the last trial scene, he seemed not to care at all. When he was asked his motivation for the killing, he said “It’s all because of the sun,” and expecting people’s curses for him when he was executed.

Honestly, I thought he was an absurd person, and this attitude that he carries for his life was not reasonable and feasible at all at that time. Until recently, I enter another phase of my life and read his another writing “The Myth of Sisyphus,” I changed my mind.

“Before encountering the absurd, the everyday man lives with aims, a concern for the future or just for justification ( with regard to whom or what is not the question). He weighs his chances, he counts on “someday,” his retirement or the labor of his sons. He still thinks that something in his life can be directed. In truth, he acts as if he were free, even if all the facts make a point of contradicting that liberty.” (19)

Reading this quote, I feel like this quote sees through my life wholly and entirely. After I enter my college life and about to step my feet into the society, a significant question that I cannot avoid is that what am I going to do in the future and what kind of person I want to be. I thought I had the bright answer to this question since I was in middle school. But now I am not sure anymore.

I want to be an extraordinary person, who will be well-known and remembered. “Life is short. You have to live a bright life.” The least life I want to live is the mediocre one. I disdained people who seemed to have no goals or directions for their survival. I looked upon on ones who only wanted to live a peaceful and pleasurable life. I felt sorry for people who can do fundamental works with low wages, and I accounts the reasons why they are not successful as they are lazy and they don’t fight for their lives.

My interest and love for film provide me a way to fulfill my aim for life. I always dream about to be a director for movies in the future. Not only because of my love and interests in a film but also it’s because of this grand title—a director, who will be remembered and get most of praises and attention from films. At the time, when my friends told me that they were forced to choose the major they didn’t want to learn, or they had no idea what to learn or be in the future, I thought I was way ahead of them. I had my own will, and I insisted on it. I could control things in my life, and I was free. With expectation and great wishes, I chose the film major for college, a major that I had longed to pursue for many years. At the first day of college life, I counted on someday that I will be a famous director who will win the Oscar or Golden Palm, someone who is not ordinary, someone to be remembered. During these first days, my mood was so passionate and hyper. My dream energized me every day. Everything in my life was bearable suddenly, being given a layer of light.

However, an old saying states “staring at the sun for too long will hurt your eyes.” I didn’t realize on the day when I had this wish that I wasn’t free anymore. I became a slave to my future. My sight was always on the things for tomorrow and “someday.” I saw everything in my life like I was enduring not enjoying or learning everything right now in my life and they were just hardships and difficulties that I had to go through to achieve the goals and build my better future. More and more restless I became because I always lived for the future. I cared loss and gain so much that I never cared about the present but the outcome. I worried about any influence they would bring to my life. Except for my grand dream, nothing should be on my mind now. My idea for film changed too. Before I learned films professionally, I were amazed and moved by films that were made by great directors and nothing else, just for appreciation for their arts. It was so ironic to think that after I began my way to become one of them, instead of thinking about how to make great films, all I thought about was how to copy their way of success. Just as what Camus said, “In truth, he acts as if he were free, even if all the facts make a point of contradicting that liberty.” I refused to try new things or learn something else, to test my limits. I was trapped in the circle I drew by myself. And I still thought I was free. I wasn’t the sheep of the everyday man. “Everything is for my grand future”——what a big and beautiful lie.

And I mustn’t be the only one that thinks in this way. I put this kind of a point of view in this society that I currently live in. This kind of life philosophy for success is so common and even become a model in our community. As people entered the industrial and modern era, on the right side, people could live more convenient and peaceful life. On the other hand, the sense of nihilism is what most people felt about their lives. With the fast and massive development of technologies and the society nowadays, different from people were in the last few centuries, most people nowadays are forced to live a life at a fast pace. For the majority, they need some qualifications to prove their abilities like promotions, trophies, and diplomas, which are also most of the things that the society valued and live a so-called good life with lots of fortunes. High pressures and fast pace lives, I think, are the reasons why lots of people willing to believe in this kind of success philosophy. And whether you want to acknowledge or not, in this society, very few people can escape from the limits that the community put on them and ones they set on themselves. Therefore, the central question is “how can a person achieve a free status in such situation?” Absurd can give us a solution. Camus stated in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus:

“Absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future. Henceforth this is the reason for my inner freedom.” And “the absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of life without consolation.” (20)

 In my opinion, this “no hope” philosophy is what I pursue to believe. This sense of certainty could drag one person “flowing on the clouds” to the ground. People cannot live a life with unrealistic dreams or hyper emotions all day, which probably would lead to the result with a huge difference between reality and truth and lose for the desire to live. The best status I believe for a person is calm. No matter what kind of situations that you are currently in, you can always have this state of mind. Instead of happiness and success, absurd people acknowledge the bad sides and nature of our life and the universe. Just like “Cool Philosophy,” cool people embrace the suffering and strike straight to the pain. Seeing and accepting the certainty of a whole situation can ensure more freedom of a person. Because you have already received the fact that there is the only part that you can control of your life and for the rest of it, you can have a carefree attitude and decide to fight for it or not. This kind of attitude with an open mind for the future gives me choices instead of one way leading to success, which could achieve the inner freedom.

Another thought about life and absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus interests me as well.“Belief in absurd is tantamount to substituting the quality of experiences for the quality.” And “To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.” (20) In the belief of absurd, the meaning of life is to be conscious and revolt and struggle in the darkness. The First one is being conscious of what are you doing currently. A person could live a life with being conscious of his or her actions and follow others and repeating daily routines without any reflecting thoughts at the end of the day. In the end, people can’t get developments or memories for different days. They are just like same white paper stacking together. For the experiences, the success philosophy that I mentioned before cannot be applied here since the ultimate goal for life is not pursing for success but it’s gaining experience.We were told to live successful life since we were kids. Nobody told us it’s okay to live an ordinary life. And lots of people don’t consider and forget that the ordinary type of life is also an experience. Most of the young people include me want to live a wild and free life. We are always not satisfied to be “trapped” in the school and dreaming of traveling around the world. But another truth is that the distant place and the world are the places that people who live there also feel tired of too. If we only count the exciting and nice experiences as worthy ones, we will decrease the possibilities for making mistakes on the way to success indeed. But we will also lose lots of fun and meanings for life, which brings us back to the second point about absurd—it gives us more choices and more freedom. Above all, I think “absurd attitude” generated by Camus’s statement is a unique and also applicable way for a person can be and live his or her life.      

Absurd is the central theme for lots of Camus Albert’s literature. As most of the people think about this topic or the philosophers, they would think them as serious people like Nietzsche. But in one report described one of his experience in The New York Times, I can see he is more interesting than I think. “In one of his interviews, he was described by The New Yorker’s that he seemed to be “ “unduly cheerful” for a philosopher of the absurd, a notion Camus gently rejected.” “Just because you have pessimistic thoughts you don’t have to act pessimistic,” he explained. “One has to pass the time somehow. Look at Don Juan.”

Seeing from the cool perspective, Camus is a cool person. From my interpretation for his words, he could study and think of the topics with deep and ultimate meaning for life, but he could also alienate himself from them in some extent and have a different style to live his life, just like cool people flirting with death. I guess that’s why Nietzsche could never be a cool person. He was too serious.

For Camus, I think his background played a part in shaping his point of views for life. In his early life, he was born in a family with low income. After his father died in combat during World War I, he and his mother who was partially deaf lived in a poor district. I guess it was this harsh background history may shape his open attitude for life.