Category Archives: Thoughts

What’s the most important thing you’re putting off?

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This is part of a series of post in the Post A Week challenge by WordPress.com.

Right now? This week’s post.

Each day, I find a new excuse for myself as to why today’s topic isn’t good enough, or that, in the case of two of this week’s topic dealing with reason and hope, they’re too cliché and have been touched on and argued over umpteen times in history already for me to be able to add value to it, especially the whole deterministic vs. free will argument. I feel that my writing won’t be “good enough” compared to the literature that’s already out there.

However, if you do want my view, I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason. I don’t believe in karma. It is our own need for some semblance of order in our lives that we connect events which have no correlation to each other together. It gives us the illusion that we’re in control even though events are in reality governed by nothing by a dice roll. Yes, there are certain things we can do to influence the outcome with an event, to weigh probability in our favor, but at the end of the day, the roll of a dice decides.

Regarding hope, I’ve always found it hard to maintain hope. There’s the conventional saying that can be roughly paraphrased as: as long as one never gives up hope, there’s still a chance. That, to me, is wishful thinking. I prefer to take a more pragmatic approach by looking a situation or problem and making a realistic assessment of the possible outcome. A lot of hope revolves around telling one that the impossible or unlikely could happen, and I don’t believe one should give himself, or another person what I believe will ultimately turn out to be false-hope. By doing so, one is only setting a stage for a greater fall.

Remember the scene towards the end of The Dark Knight, where Two-Face points a gun at Gordon’s son and wants Gordon to tell his son that “everything is going to be alright”, before killing his son? That’s exactly what I’m talking about when we tell comforting but improbable words to people and give them a sense of false hope.

Oh look, I’ve actually covered 3 different topics in one post. Important or not, I find myself putting off things because I can’t find confidence in saying what I have on my mind for fear of sounding silly or being ridiculed. However, without taking that leap forward, one might never know the outcome. If there’s one thing I want to change about myself this year, it’s saying what’s on my mind with confidence.

Why did I start blogging?

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This is part of a series of post in the Post A Week challenge by WordPress.com.

The first post on this blog, A Routine World, dates back to 26 August 2006. The post was initially written on blogspot, and although I have maintained a blog at various points before on the same service prior to being acquired by Google, the 2006 post would be the earliest record of my foray into blogging.

On occasions, during the lull in our otherwise hectic lives, some of us have a tendency to ask ourselves why we do what we do. Well, so why did I start blogging?

I’ve never been a good conversationalist. In the face of an impromptu conversation, I forget what I initially wanted to say and my ideas are derailed. It is when I am alone that my thought process functions best. Unfortunately, at the same time, when the eureka moment comes, I have no outlet to share that ingenious to me, but just plain silly to others (who are probably right) idea with. Blogging, then, provides an alternative medium to express my thoughts – a way for me to communicate with the world in a comfortable and asynchronous fashion.

Over time, through blogging, I discovered the joys of writing, and most importantly, it fulfilled the innate need in each and everyone one of us as human beings – to share. Although there’s no guarantee that anyone is listening, it still feels good to have my voice out there.

Reading too much into symbolism

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Over the course of the weekend, the media was in a frenzy over the Arizona shootings. Unfortunately, instead of waiting to build a coherent profile of the shooter, Jared Loughner, some news outlets delved into hasty conclusions based on what little information they had at hand and were quick to assign blame.

Although some would like to think so, doodling on a day planner and video-taping a trip to Disneyland does not automatically make one a terrorist. Similarly, reading “Animal Farm” and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, as Loughner mentioned on his YouTube profile, are probably not very good indicators that he was slipping into a fantasy world.

Just as despite of the millions of people who watched graphically intensive and action-packed movies filled with gunfights, only a rare few attempt to re-enact a scene, it would be quite silly to suggest that Sarah Palin’s simple two dimensional map with crosshairs were a significant trigger and incited the shootings in any way. The map, together with the language of asking supporters to “reload” and “get on target” for the campaign are mere metaphors which were taken way out of context, and politicalized for the benefit of certain groups of people. It is no different from how video-games and were blamed by parental lobby groups for the Columbine shootings, or how 9/11 became the stepping board for the neo-conservatives to push their agenda and clamp down on individual liberty.

It is a marvel that in a world populated by billions, many with competing interests, most of us can get along well with each other. That such an incident can happen is rare, but unavoidable and will probably happen again. But it is isolated. It is no one’s fault but the shooter’s. The blame game is nothing but a witch hunt and reading too much into symbolism.

Those were the days

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Ariel Sharon, George Bush, the Iraqi Information Minister, Saddam Hussein, Yassir Arafat. Whether it’s them flaunting their oratory prowess with their brash rhetorics, their comedic value, or the pure absurdity of their statements, they gave reason to one following the news closely. Getting up at 6am to watch the news was worth it.

The world just isn’t the same without them. The rhetorics coming out from the current batch of world leaders are just bland. You could argue that the state media of China and N. Korea still occasionally make some bizarre statements, but they pale in comparison the stuff we were hearing in 2004.

Engaging the collective knowledge of the masses

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Having started school again, the chore of writing term papers have followed. I have one huge gripe that I want to make. In these papers, one is cripplingly limited to using sources from academia. Online sources, such as blogs and Wikipedia articles, are explicitly forbidden.

I am aware of the argument that the web is an open bulletin board that anyone can publish on, and that information maybe at times, unreliable. However, I feel that institutions are living in the past and removed from the modern developments of the information age, refusing to acknowledge the changes that have been taking place. Knowledge and ideas are no longer distributed in the form of a pyramid, with the institutions at the top, and the people at the bottom, but rather, the pyramid has been flatted down to a plateau, where everyone, and anyone, can make an equally useful contribution. Ideas originate less from national research labs and more from the entrepreneur spirit of individuals in their basements, with the web acting as a platform for the exchange of these ideas. In 2006, Time magazine recognized this paradigm shift, acknowledging the contributions of the masses by naming the person of the year, “You”. Refusing to accept the open web as a source is tantamount to alienating a large source of information.

It is precisely the openness of the web itself that makes it such a valuable source. Ideas are published without being held back by funding, and are exposed to an even larger “peer review” process. If you ventured a look at the one of the ‘talk’ pages for a particular Wikipedia article, you’ll realize that there is a lot of meaningful discussion that goes on behind it.

There is nothing that makes Wikipedia less reliable than Encyclopedia Britannica, for example. On the contrary, Encyclopedia Britannica positions itself as an authoritative source on a subject, a bible of information which one has to accept as being ‘true’, when often, there’s room for debate.

As for the matter that only sources from academic papers are considered reliable and accepted, I have this to say. The very idea that knowledge has to come from a certain source, accessible through expensive publications and where opinions are limited only to an exclusive group of people, is repressive.

Then again, quoting Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.

Institutionalized?

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“These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ‘em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.”

– Red, from the movie ‘The Shawshank Redemption’

Suddenly, it seems that there’s a white and empty boulevard ahead of me, and every tick of the clock resonates loudly.

I’ll be disrupting from my national service the week after, and starting school another week past that. From now until next Thursday, I’m clearing what leave and off I have accumulated over the course of this year.

It’s a strange feeling having so much free time all of a sudden. There’s no one to yell at you about where you’re supposed to be, what is it you’re supposed to do, and what is it you’ve supposedly done wrong. It is as if I’ve been kept in cold store for the past two years, and now I’ve been violently ejected out of it.

I’ve made myself adequately clear in the past how I disliked my period of military service, and the negativity of the experiences I had. Now that I’m outside, or almost outside of the system, I miss it. It is a routine that I’ve initially hated, but gradually grown accustomized to it, to the point where it becomes the norm.

It’s a strange world, isn’t it?

Conscription

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In the past year, three countries have done away with conscription, or announced their intentions to. Taiwan will be reducing their intake of conscripts until 2014, when it will be completely abolished. Poland ceased their conscription early this year, and Sweden just a couple days ago.

No such luck for the country I live in. On the contrary, our conscript army is getting larger simply because of more foreign nationalities who come here seeking citizenship. Even after two years being in the service, one is still eligible to be called up for reservist duties. This is the only country under no imminent threat of war that has such a long period of military service.

How can I be patriotic towards a country which does not honour articles 4, 20, and 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights, which respectively states that one should not be held in slavery or servitude, that no one maybe compelled to belong to an association and that everyone has the right to free choice of employment?

The disassociation of levels in MMOs

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In most of the recent MMOs that I have played or come across, the saying that “the game begins at <level cap>” holds true. The level cap is something easily reachable, and in the case of Sentinel’s Fate, can be obtained within the first couple of days. Hitting the level cap is essential and vital to the game experience, because, unless you are sitting at max level, much of the newer content isn’t accessible. Leveling becomes an affair that you want to get over and done with. Essentially, the concept of levels becomes anti-game – something that gets in the way of being able to truly experience the game. Since everyone eventually hits max level, the level of a character becomes just another insignificant statistic that takes the backseat until the cap gets raised in subsequent expansions, which maybe as far as a year away.

Contrast it to some of the previous games that I’ve played. Leveling in Lineage 2 is a constant, on-going affair. Your level is noteworthy, and if you’re sitting on the level cap, it is a bragging right. Most people don’t hit the level cap, yet they are able to participate in the game just as much, going through more or less the same content that the players who are closer to level cap does. In L2 raids and PvPs, you have players spread over a span of levels. Having a character that is higher level than the mean brings bonuses to the table, but if levels aren’t on your side, you can compensate for it in other ways.  In EQ2, you won’t even considering bringing someone 5 levels below cap to a raid. Having the level cap be illusive also acts as a safe-guard against boredom. Even if game content has been exhausted, you can always fall back on leveling.

Having levels and leveling disassociated from the game is a trap that most modern MMOs fall into. After awhile, there’s nothing to but create alts after alts. Soon enough, you have ten character all sitting at level cap, and you wonder what there is to do.