Chrysalis

We make secrets and keep them
Unspeakable, like a pleasurable pain,
Because picking out the weakest,
The part we feel most vulnerable,
And hiding it like a bruise from our most beloved
Gives us the comfort of telling ourselves
We have become stronger than
That part of us we have bullied into silence : ( never realizing that
The stronghold of smiles we surrounds ourselves with
Betrays the exact shape of that which we have built our fortress around - )
Until one day we suddenly realize
That in the dimensions of time we are all fragile -
Free to be broken
Like the cocoon of an emerging butterfly
Broken to be free.

WAKE UP PPL!

WAKE UP PPL!
1. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's for you.
2. Just because it's illegal doesn't your children aren't already doing it.

If we were a society of superheroes we would not build public infrastructure that only the able bodied can use, build economic systems that profit only the affluent and intelligent, and slap the word "disabled" on people and tell them how they should live. With more power comes more responsibility - but more power does not equate more privilege, and more responsibility does not mean more rights.

Isn't it strange that we feel comfortable and even positive about dressing children up in clothes worn by people from a different culture or religion, but clothes from a different gender is taboo?

IMAGINE: What if there were something as the "freedom of censorship" where you have a legal right realized through laws and technology to at a personal level completely remove all news and speech surrounding an individual, organization, or government?

What I learnt from Second Son

Just completed my first ever console game, and thought I feel uniquely qualified to write something about it, having 3 decades - including 1 year in the games industry -  successfully avoiding seriously playing any game. I used to dismiss the whole gaming thing on two reasons - 1) you will never get anything useful out of it 2) it's a waste of time.

What made me change this was that I decided I wanted to try something I have never done in my life. Sure there are things like bungie jumping and stuff, but playing a game seemed something very accessible that weekend. Plus, I could do with better hand-eye coordination. So without second-guessing my decision, I went out and bought myself a PS4.

Did some rudimentary googling and decided to buy Second Son from the InFamous series. It's "action adventure" - action, meaning you fight people, adventure, meaning there's a storyline. Action would not have been the genre I'd enjoy ten years ago, but hey people do change. Since my ex-colleagues used to say games are like movies, I decided to go with the genre I have come to enjoy.

To cut the story short, let me spend the rest of this piece simply listing down what I have taken away from the game - and why it's not been a waste of time:

(1) I didn't know how bad my hand-eye coordination was
I use the computer extensively and my hands always get the work done more quickly than people can understand what I am doing on the computer. But I realized that what I had was not hand-eye coordination, but hand-mind coordination. I had a mental image of what reality was, and my hands responded very rapidly to what my mind was simulating. But the problem was, my visual feedback was kind of disconnected from the system. I processed visual stimulus more consciously than I needed to, and I found myself hitting all the wrong buttons. Not to mention, PS4 comes with the "DualShock 4" game controller which has two joysticks, one arrow pad for the 4 directions, four thumb-controlled action buttons, and four index-finger-controlled action buttons - on top of the non-gaming buttons which you don't want to accidentally press. It was kind of confusing in the beginning, but the controller itself was like another keyboard so my hand-mind coordination helped there, but it was the game itself - I saw the guy coming at me, but by the time I responded, I was dead.

(2) Motion Sickness
As mentioned earlier, the DualShock 4 has two joysticks. For some games you won't need both, but in 3D worlds, you'd use one to move your character around, and the other to move the perspective (ie, camera) around. Having to move the camera around was really new to me - I had dabbled in some 3D design moving viewports around, but not at this speed. Not at the speed where you needed to look up and down and behind you while at the same time running to stay alive. The first day on the game I felt a tad like vomiting - and realized it was motion sickness. My mind was not adjusted enough to handle such fast changes in visual input.

(3) Flexible two-way thinking
At some point I came to this stage I couldn't pass. It was here that instead of asking myself "how do I kill all these people?", I asked "what did the game designer put in here that would make my next task easy?". And after some time, instead of thinking "I'm gonna go all out and kill all these people" I started thinking "what is the most effective way out?"

(4) Fear is irrelevant most of the time
We are programmed to be afraid of being hurt, even when the possibility of getting hurt is tiny. This kind of took hold of me in the beginning - until I drilled it into myself that I can always try again. And trying again and again was in fact more efficient than being too careful in every try. Fear is useful in real-life life-and-death situations, but more often than not, it overpowers and hinders performance.

(5) Deteremination isn't half as good as enjoyment
At some point, even when you apply all the above, there's still some level that you can't seem to pass, because the enemy is just so powerful. You die again and again, and you play through the exact same scenes again and again, to the point when you realize you can make the character do exactly what he did the last time round. This gets interesting because on one hand, the game starts looking boring because you can't win - you can either choose to be determined, or, you can see it as you are learning the game so well you can practise it again and again - and enjoy while you get better at it. The determination approach would sounds like what parents want their kids to learn, but what's the point of buying a game at all, if not to enjoy?

And there you go. 5 key take-aways that helped me discover myself from something that happened in a virtual world, disconnected from even the internet. They say "disconnect to connect". In this case, it is strangely true.

Can't wait to go shopping for my next game!

Random thought: what if we abolished standardized testing and instead have education and learning psychology experts regularly observe every class (via drones) to check on how teachers teach and assess teaching methodology instead?

There's no such word as a teachee, because learning doesn't automatically happen in the presence of teaching. Physical training is a different story. That's why the word trainee exists.

It takes 2 hands to clap and 1 to slap. Thanking people around you doesn't mean you stop thanking yourself for being awesome.

There is no display of power more arrogant than beauty. Thats why nature just has to sit there and we get overpowered by her time and again, like ants getting crushed under the feet of dinosaurs.

If the Roman alphabet were not made to be pronounced in so many ways, if English could not be spoken with so many different accents, if Chinese characters were not modified to be written in so many different versions, if religion were not twisted to mean so many things, if the early days of HTML were not so non-compliant, maybe none of them would have survived. #diversity #trp2015

It's a long night

It's a long night
It's a long day
It's a short life
But it's a long way
There ain't no ghosts but the nights still haunt the same
Suddenly morning comes like zombies we rise again
Into the day we go
Make money spend money repeat
The jobs a sucker
But not bad enough to quit
This is not what I dreamt my life to be about
But I'm lost in orbit and time is running out
I pour my life into everything I write
But I'm an odd beat
The world doesn't need my vibe
So I hide from myself writing code for a living
But regret comes visiting me at night on a time machine
I know the day I'm told I get just one year to live
I'd be writing like my life depended on it
It's be epic it'd be my whole life in print
But deep down I know it's not something you'd pay to read.
It's a long night
It's a long day
It's a short life
But it's a long way
There ain't no ghosts but the nights still haunt the same
Suddenly morning comes and I wished I could have caught some sleep.
It's a long night
It's a long day
It's a short life
But it's a long way
There ain't no ghosts but the nights still haunt the same
Suddenly morning comes.

I miss the sound of USRobotics modems, volume turned down in the middle of the night, rustling ferociously to that satisfying click, like you have finally made that connection back to yourself in a world that's already asleep, released from having to feel how long the night can be.

No family is perfect, but some know how to handle brokenness while others hold on to the belief that it doesn't exist.

TNBT : imagine extra sensory perception

TNBT : imagine extra sensory perception

Next-gen wearables that get implanted into you body and interfaces directly with your brain.

Imagine - Just think about something you want to know and you instantly know it. No longer is there a differentiation between learning and knowing.

Imagine - seeing infrared and electromagnetism, and being able to have extended sight at night.

Imagine - seeing nutritious food getting colored to look more appealing in real time, while junk food getting photoshopped instantaneously to look less delicious.

Imagine - being able to sense the earth's magnetic field and locate yourself like GPS and never getting lost again.

Imagine - being able to smell disease and keeping yourself safe.

Imagine - being able to hear thoughts through other peoples brainwaves.

Imagine - sensory overload, and a class division between those with the capacity to process the additional information, and those who are too stressed out by it.

Imagine - yet another class division between those who can afford implants and those who cannot - with those who can benefitting from being able to make instantaneously professional decisions and those who cannot getting left out.

And the imagine genetic level implants...

Welcome to the post-homosapien world.

Imagine Autism

Imagine that you suddenly had a superpower - one day you woke up and found that you could literally hear people's thoughts. Everywhere you go, you'd hear what people are thinking, like they are speaking it to you.

When you walk into a room full of people, you'd hear their thought all at once. Like they are all trying to talk to you at the same time.

Your brain tries to focus on a few people's thoughts, but you find yourself unable to filter out all the noise. You find big crowds incredibly tiring because you cannot focus in all that noise. It sucks the energy out of you, like you're perpetually in a dance club trying to do your math homework. You spend most of your time indoors, going out only where strictly needed.

But you keep on trying, because you understand that you need to control this "noise" in order to function in society. After a few years of trying, your brain finally manages to filter out most of the noise except those who are within a few meters of you.

But big crowds still tire the hell out of you. You wished you could hear the thoughts of exactly who you want to hear.

But it seems that the sensory perception of thought doesn't work like that. It seems that your brain needs to work very hard to do all that filtering work, to remove what you do not need to hear. It's not like your senses can "target" someone - it's more like your brain functions like a superhuman firewall that monitors and filters every single piece of information coming in to decide if it's better you hear something, or you do not. If your brain had been doing something other than filtering, you probably would have been pretty intelligent. It kinda sucks.

You fight so hard just to function normally. Until one morning.

One morning you woke up and found that all the voices were gone. Not one single voice.

It seems that your brain had found it impossible to filter out single thoughts, and that all this filtering was a waste of energy. It seems that your brain has decided that being unable to tap into this super-power was better for you - it seems like your brain has given up fighting. At least you could now function like an ordinary person.

You wished you could keep some of that super power, but it doesn't work that way. But you do feel very relieved that it's all over. It's something you spent a lot of your life fighting, but not something you want to talk about. It's like an experience that made you so much more, yet you would be deemed so much less if you even hinted at it.

But sometimes you wonder, if there is someone in the world out there, who could live with having such super powers, hearing every single person's thoughts and responding to all their voices where nobody else could, living such impossibly extraordinary lives that you know deep inside you have given up trying to achieve.

There is no equality, neither from birth nor into death - except in our capacity to desire happiness and release.

Eternal life is the single most terrifying, most crippling, and most abusable, and indeed most abused meme the human mind has ever conceived. I don't wanna live forever I wanna be free.

You are your own Master

Sometimes I think a life of knowledge can be like being in a sadomasochistic relationship with yourself, where you, instantly both the dominant and submissive, have decided to play by a pre-agreed set of rules to push through the pain to hit that orgasmic pleasure which simultaneously makes the world around you more real and completely unreal. That's why the knowledgable go around saying that the truth will set you free.

Music - another thought

Music is our most universal endeavor to consciously experience time.

Because music is made of vibrations.
And vibrations is made of rhythm.
Music is not in the pitch but in the beat.

The beat is always moving forward.
It does not stop, it does not wait.
But our experience of the beat is not mechanical.
Sometimes one whole sequence can feel like a split second.
Sometimes one beat can feel like forever.

But if we move with the beat, we become synchronized with it.
We don't feel its passing; we feel it dancing.
That's when we feel like the beat can last forever.

And in that moment, time stops, and we live in an eternity in the space-time of the song.
And we begin to think we understand,
for that moment,
how there can be a reality that continues in its motion
even when all time has ended for us.