Valentin

"Attack" by 30 Seconds to Mars Video Lyrics The first verse is what I would really consider my anthem.

Though Rise Against wouldn't be considered the flagship of Objectivist art (i.e. romantic realism), I would argue that their music is good. By "good" I mean that I enjoy them. With rock, and music in general, being in some kind of cry-baby-life-is-all-pain-and-futile funk, it's very uplifting to find a song that can make you smile and pump you up. Yes, Rise Against is left-leaning and not every song is amazing. I'm reminded of how Ayn Rand was able to enjoy the launching of Apollo, even though she argued against the creation of NASA in the first place. Though I know someone's going to argue otherwise, I still enjoy their music even though I don't agree with everything they believe. I'm a fan of all the songs you listed so I thought I would add one of my own from a different band, 30 Seconds to Mars: http://youtube.com/watch?v=l7wCdsnqhyQ The first verse (below) and the piano are my favorite parts of this song. It always pumps me up I won't suffer, be broken Get tired, or wasted Surrender to nothing or give up what I Started And stopped it From end to beginning A new day is coming And I am finally free If you ever have a question about whether something you enjoy is "Objectivist" or "rational" it's usually best to ask yourself: Why do I like this? Answers of "I don't know" or "just because" or "because everyone else does" say something. "It uplifts me" or "it represents an optimistic/benevolent view of the world" says something else. Hope I helped

Ham cannot be all green and all pink at once.

Of course, context is important. I tend to really "drift" when I daydream, so I can't do it while driving or I really will drift [into another lane]. But since this is obvious, I'll move on. I daydream quite often. I can't really put a number-of-times-per-day out there. Now that I think about it, I would consider daydreaming "analyzing how I feel about something" rather than active thinking (redundant term) which is based much more on reason. More often than not, when I daydream it's usually about what I want or what I want to do. For example, lately I've been thinking about asking this girl I like out on a date. So, some of my daydreams consist of imagining what our date would be like. Other things I daydream about are what I'll do and have when I'm finished with undergrad and grad school. I guess another way to look at daydreaming is a real passive form of thinking, mostly for emotional benefit; something like running a car on idle. Daydreaming about grad school doesn't get me there but it does make me feel better about staying up until 4 in the morning doing Laplace transforms of circuits. During a boring task, where a small portion of our focus has to be dedicated to the task, say 40% (this is just a general estimate for the sake of example), it would make sense to fill in the rest with light daydreaming which would only use 60%; whereas deeper thinking (90-100%) would interfere with your task at hand. With this in mind, it would seem more efficient to daydream (or just do some light thinking) while doing a mundane task.

The second pic posted reminds me of FFVIII too, a game I absolutely love! Was it your inspiration? Great job.

Who's John Galt?

John Galt with bling...didn't expect to get that image from this forum lol

Meditation, yoga, and prayer are a few examples of how some people deal with stress. More damaging alternatives (though "prayer" could be argued as such) are binge drinking, smoking (I've recently quit) and drugs. I'm 19, and all that goes with it (college, work, relationships, essentially life) can become very stressful at times. I'm wondering if there is a rational manner of meditating that anyone knows about. Something that would clear and focus the mind and body (while also holding that the two are not at odds with one another). I've stayed away from yoga and such because the concept of Qi doesn't agree with metaphysics. Any suggestions? (I have been reading more. It does a good job of relaxing me without numbing my mind like TV.)

This verse was nothing short of my anthem (no pun intended) for my first year of college.