A watched pot and all that jazz..

My download of the latest episode of Veronica Mars will be completed in about an hour and I need something to distract me from staring at the fluctuating download speed and willing it to go faster, which explains why this post came about. I can't actually think of anything to write about so as a time-wasting gimmick here are some pictures I've taken over the past month with colour commentary that will hopefully take about an hour to type out. Once the download is completed, I am gone, regardless if I'm mid-sentence. You have been warned.

Ready, set, go!



I've asked a lot of people from different religious backgrounds to explain it to me but countless hours of questions, confusion and "I don't know! What kind of a question is that anyway?!" endings later and I'm still not exactly sure what is so damn bad about the Falun Gong movement. Is it a cult? The Christians, Buddhists and Agnostics mostly answer with a resolute, "YES" while the Smart-Asses go, "aren't all religions a cult technically?". Five bucks says that these smart asses are the seminally smug, totally pretentious douchebaggy students in lectures who answers "it depends on what your definition of _______ is" to every question raised by the lecturers. You know the kind. They exist everywhere without geographical borders often occupying the left-mid-front seat in the lecture hall.



But back to my original point. Google led me to a bunch of news articles that were first hand reports of ex-Falun Gong followers who had quit the group after inflicting grevious body harm on themselves. Apparently third degree burns have the ability to make people come to their senses regarding dodgy 'spiritual' groups. A quick check revealed that the news articles were from the national Chinese media, so that was that.



Then finally I came across a journal article by a British scholar that I assumed was fairly unbias and it was a good read. Except I forgot most of it now, which is highly embarassing but in my defense the exam material had to take priority, right? Anyway, one point that stood out was that since the Chinese government was a strict Communist regime, the development of a group that would challenge it's ideals and core beliefs would pose as a threat to keeping the citizens under control. If that makes any sense.

Oh gosh, the download is done. Kthxbai!