Alongside our administration, we also had the privilege of working alongside Kabir Sarjan and Karin Honavar, who with their expertise in business and art has been able to boost the standards of our work substantially.

We are currently awaiting the results of the competition, but regardless of whether we win or not, this year’s competition has been exciting and fruitful, and will undoubtedly help us move forward in our future works.

Since everybody is still quite busy with exams and life, I’ve decided not to restore the sites for public viewing just yet. It would also give us the opportunity to rethink how we do things, consider any redesigns/restructuring and get everything back up to speed. If all goes well, everything should be back up and running by the end of June, and we can see a conclusion to KJC5 sometime in July or August.

Once again, I am sincerely sorry for the downtime, and I hope you will bear with us for just a little bit longer.

~ Bioran23

To explain what is going on – we moved servers last month. However, it turns out our new server was missing a function which allowed the proper operation of the WordPress Multisite system. The issue was with wildcard domains, which means we can no longer set up the URLs to actually display the sites.

This is an intriguing problem in the fact that the sites are still here – they’re just not showing. It’s like placing an invisibility cloak over something, know that something is still there, but can’t find it to take off the cloak.

The issue was also not helped by the fact that I, along with Shadow Kurahk, have been tremendously busy over the past few weeks and therefore haven’t had the time to put in maximum effort into the recovery procedures. This would also explain why updates on the issue have been so slow. I want to take this opportunity to offer my most sincere apologies to everyone, especially to those who have submitted entries to KJC5 – Lesovikk’s Hiatus.

As of now, I can do nothing regarding the contest except announce that it has been suspended indefinitely. However, I have found a new method of recovery which I shall attempt as should as my time allows me to. Unfortunately, until then, the sites will have to remain offline and once again I’m incredibly sorry for the inconveniences caused as a result.

If you have any questions or just wants to fire some criticisms (I perfectly understand), please contact me directly at chun.yin[@]madebyplast.com (Remove the ‘[' and ']‘ around the ‘@’)

~ Bioran23

Unfortunately, the technical issues from our move has persisted. As you would note, the three KJ project sites are offline and inaccessible. There has been some unforeseen technical issues and we are doing our best efforts to resolve them. At this point, we cannot give a definitive timespan on how long this problem will last for, but we hope to resolve it by the week’s end.

Please accept our most sincere apologies, and know that we are doing whatever we can do to get the sites and services up as soon as possible.

It’s great seeing everything working nicely again.

A week ago, my father commented that an individual’s morals and virtues are largely derived from social conventions and therefore, owing to widely varying societies with their own moral codes, we should not take excessive pride in our own brand of morality, which might in fact be immorality in a different social environment. Examples are the variations in traditions of the final rites for the dead.

This led me to begin to mentally debate about practices condemned in society. So, I began honestly wondering about cannibalism, or the practice of consuming the corpse of a member of one’s own species (sounds psychotic, right?) and soon talked about it to Bioran (about the person I know who would actually debate it seriously and without shocked incredulity). This is what we came up with.

The practice of consuming something that was once part of a living being is by no means socially condemned on every front. Pretty much everything we eat is organic, with the exception of minerals. (I happen to use the logic that plants are as much alive as animals as a counter-argument to a vegetarian friend’s protest against my consuming meat and thereby harming animals.) This is perfectly natural in the food chain, which acts as a system of checks and balances in the natural world. Population of a species is dependent on the population of both predator and prey species and the availability of resources. This generally avoids the overuse of resources and maintains a balanced population growth rate. (Except in humans, but that’s separate. *cuts off rant*)

Dead organisms are always broken down into their components, nutrients and minerals, in one form or another. Consumption by another organism, decomposition, etc. As such, the consumption of a dead organism is perfectly natural, yielding resources to the consumer. This is hardly condemned in most societies, at least where non-vegetarians exist. Killing for the purpose of obtaining food is also not condemned. (Do we not rear chickens for the very purpose of obtaining edible eggs, i.e. unborn young, or killing them for their meat?) By this reasoning, there is nothing wrong with killing another living creature for food, even another of one’s own species. (No, I am not about to launch into rhetoric about the ethics of murder, Bioran and I still have to discuss that. )

One could argue that eating another of one’s kind is akin to eating oneself. (Which can be debatable logic. Some would say survival of the fittest but again, I’m not going to go there. Huge can of worms.) However, there’s an interesting example of eating oneself that I’d like to cite, which ensures individual survival in extreme situations. In cases where a person has been suffering from starvation for some time, the body automatically begins consuming its own organs for self-preservation, beginning with redundant organs such as the appendix. By this logic, cannibalism is perfectly natural, especially in cases where one’s survival unavoidably requires it, such as a plane crash in remote, harsh environs. (It’s happened. Look up cases where multiple people are lost in hostile conditions and some die before the others.)

Because of this, Bioran and I concluded that cannibalism had nothing fundamentally wrong with it, even though it was not socially accepted and we both agreed that the idea of eating a fellow human was distasteful.

However, before you call us psychopaths, I’d like to put an argument in justification of why cannibalism is deemed barbaric. This argument has been put forward by a number of people with whom I discussed the question and is IMO, perfectly valid.

Cannibalism is discouraged because of the ramifications on human life. For the survival of individuals and therefore preservation of the species which hence is not destroyed through self-consumption, it is not advisable to permit the idea of consumption of other members of one’s species. Even aside from the effects this would have on the balance of predator and prey, imagine the enormous loss of potentially advantageous genes that the widespread killing and consumption of other individuals would have, weakening the race as a whole. (True, the physically weaker and less cunning members would be killed off easier but familial bonds, formed, in evolutionary terms, to ensure preservation of individuals, especially young, would probably result in a hundred and one vendettas. Way too dangerous.) Cannibalism would also result in in-fighting and leave the species vulnerable to external rivals for resources and predators. In all honesty, strength lies in unity.

So, while we conclude cannibalism isn’t as shockingly wrong as generally deemed, it’s not advisable. With that said, hope you weren’t bored and, KH out.

For instance, the tagline for Plast! is now “Let’s experiment.” I think this better captures our organization as a whole than our previous tagline. After all, the purpose of Plast! is exactly that – a sandbox/playground/mess-about area where our staff can toy with new ideas, help out others and pursue any project of their liking, while being able to supplement their pursuits with professionalism and proper conduct.

The website itself has also been overhauled. There will now be a greater recognition of our projects and works, so that you can check out the stuff we do and pursue, and at the same time lighten up the atmosphere with a blog. The blog will now allow me and other staff to either 1) post updates about our projects and products, or 2) used as a soapbox where we can offer our own ideas on things (philosophy) or ways for us to show off some of the awesome stuff we found on the nets.

Alongside the main website, the management is also looking at streamlining our product offerings, condensing the KanohiJournal brand into one single service and also opening up new netizen-oriented websites and services. We have lots of ideas which we will certainly be going for over the next year or so, so keep an eye out for us!

Now, time to write up an article on whether murder is actually wrong…

It’s strange, really. On the surface it seems that cannibalism is wrong, wrong, wrong. After all, our subjective thinking and social conditions tell us that, well, eating another homo sapien isn’t ethically or morally correct.

But looking past subjectiveness and social influences – we return to the fun philosophical issue of what is true and what defines morality. Sure, for a society like ours, cannibalism is not accepted, but that does not mean the act is therefore wrong for other societies and species too. In terms of science, homo sapiens is merely a step in evolution. We are, after all, animals, and there are many animals out there which perform cannibalism.

Of course, one would argue that as a sentient species, cannibalism is unethical and immoral. But looking at it objectively…what is actually wrong with cannibalism? It’s just the consumption of another animal which may very well be dead already.

Random ramblings after a long day of boring “model united nations” conferences. Probs gonna expand on this sometime in the future.