My Lucky Hat

When I was a little girl...

2010-12-30T19:07:00.000-08:00

I was Sailor Moon!

Oh yeah~ This brings any Asian girl back to the little trip down memory lane~

My name is Saluna: I am Ai, only when I simply fly.

2010-12-16T21:11:00.000-08:00

Yu...

The leaves are falling.

Stay warm with me

You're the apple of my eye.

My name is Saluna.

2010-12-13T22:36:00.000-08:00

Dis-interested. Apathetic. Just personably bias.

Means to an ending

2010-12-10T22:53:00.000-08:00

After studying the “Symbolism in Revelation” on Biblical Literacy: The Essential Bible Stories Everyone Needs to Know by Timothy Beal, I see what he writes: "One thing is clear here: the end is not absolute, that is beyond even John’s imagination. This ending is also a new beginning. It’s the edge of the world as we know it.”

As I am flipping through the Book of Revelations, I see it:

Then I saw…
Then I saw…
Then I saw…

John simply has a vision, based on his faith and support from the inside and the Outside.

OVERCONSUMPTION - As our culture has evolved towards developing ourselves into the habits of taking, taking, and taking, and when the markets keep on growing, growing, and growing, whereas media keeps on giving, giving, and giving, we are naturally inclined to take whatever’s right in front of our eyes. Visual cue is an innate powerful tool that nature has built into our systems.

Which is why we’re meant to visualize, not stealing visions of others.

It has been revealed that I would symbolize Butterfly 3.0.

I shall dis-cover forevermore...

Humans are amazing. We can move.

2010-12-08T13:07:00.000-08:00

I know I'm not a boy, but I like to study weird stuff. I am a Student after all.

Plus, I do like boys. That's why I go to AskMen.com, and found this cool video featuring some indescribable movements I cannot say to you with text alone.

My particular favorite is the man running on water. Literally.

Check it out: World's Most Incredible Stunts

I'm-Patient.

2010-12-07T13:25:00.000-08:00

STACIA: Can I run my marathon today?
SALUNA: No.
STACIA: Can I run my marathon today?
SALUNA: No.
STACIA: Can I run my marathon today?
SALUNA: No.
STACIA: Can I run my marathon today?
SALUNA: No.
STACIA: Can I run my marathon today?
SALUNA: No.
[Sixteen weeks later...]
STACIA: Can I run my marathon today? Please?
SALUNA: [long, dramatic pause] …Sure.

That which is why she died from taking the redpill (Refer to my English journal).

I, as her resurrector, am training her dead body to live again by hosting me in her show. She ordered her bib with my name on the tag ('SALUNA'). That's when I'll appear, in the coming year on July 31, 2011, in her running performance. I shall be at the legal age of 21, officially, finally.

*Stacia's Note: I'm posting this particular video only because I want you, my reader, to better understand my context in the fictional case of Saluna's story I am developing (with Ai).

All We Need Is Just a Little Patience.

2011 movies, and beyond

2010-12-06T20:15:00.000-08:00

OK Took the time to let the intelligent idea seep in, made the decision on taking the MENSA test on:

Saturday, Jan. 08, 2011

Berkeley - Newman Hall, Gallery Room
09:30 AM: standard test

That will be next year, which is not that far away, along with the annual 2011 San Francisco Marathon, which scarily seems so close to me.

ANYWAY As I was planning my year to come, mapping out what I plan to do, what classes I'm going to take, what extracurricular activities I'm going to take outside school, and et cetera, I made a list of upcoming movies in the year to come that made me get so sexcited about 2011, despite the fact that I'm turning 21 and officially older.

On the bright side, I'm finally able to get in to the club without a fake ID and then report about my favorite DJs, their music, and their performances! YEAH.

SO Here are the following list for kiddy, geeky, comedic superhero-inspired movies to come:

January 14, 2011 The Green Hornet

...featuring Jay Chou, baby! Not only my long-time husband (in my dreams) is coming to the Bay Area for his second World Tour this December, he will make his Hollywood debut in this superhero movie! Man, after fantasizing him, memorizing his lyrics, admiring his talents and dreaming about his smile since I was 14, my gut is about to burst any minute now as his career success is blooming forevermore...

Watch him in his new MV, Dragon Rider. If you must, learn Chinese.

Bad photoshopping when I just started learning editing softwares, 4 years ago.

March 25, 2011 Sucker Punch

First off, this is following the trend of all-female cast superhero team, like in Final Fantasy X-2, D.O.A, and et cetera. But what made me curious was that screenwriter Gary Snyder mentioned it was going to be "Alice in Wonderland with machine guns", which is totally awesome. So the character Baby Doll, a young girl stuck in an asylum, has vivid imaginations that takes her away from the dark reality, and that aids her and her Mentally Insane friends escape. What struck me most with the character was her lasting will to survive, and her courageous fight for freedom, even if she's told to be crazy.

May 6, 2011 Thor

As if Marvel would never have enough iconic characters, superhero Thor is turning into the Hollywood screens featuring Academy Award-winning Anthony Hopkins, Academy Award nominee Natalie Portman (the talented, the beautiful black swan Princess Leia...), and Chris Hemsworth portraying Thor. Thor was also rumored that it will be a prequel of the third Iron Man installation, along with the 2012 release of The Avengers. I guess the superheroes are lining up for the years to come, as the real world we are living in needs them more than anything else.

Watch Thor Teaser:

Watch The Avengers Teaser:

May 20, 2011 Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides

Gemma Ward

Captain Jack Sparrow is back again, searching for the Fountain of Youth, as portrayed by Johnny Depp. He'll meet his long-lost love Angelica, played by Penelope Cruz. Also, model Gemma Ward will play a small role in this film. What's with all the models appearing in Hollywood these days? Not to mention Lily Cole playing Valentina in Heath Ledger's last movie, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and all the hype about Megan Fox replaced by VS model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in the installment of Transformers 3... Anyways, Orlando Bloom will not appear in this movie. Guess he's settling down with Miranda Kerr and their baby.

Orlando Bloom with wife Miranda Kerr

Lily Cole

Watch the movie's behind-the-scenes on ET:

May 27, 2011 Kung Fu Panda 2

Our hero who can't see his toes will be back. I enjoy watching him kicking a peacock's ass.

Watch the teaser:

June 3, 2011 X-Men: First Class

I love reruns of the three X-Men movies, and I guess it was my luck to have my favorite character, Wolverine made into fame in its independent film, X-Men Origins: Wolverine (and the movie has TONS of hot dudes by the way: Korean bombshell Daniel Henney, Ryan Reynolds, sigh). This shall be the prequel of all X-Men movies. Director Bryan Singer came up with the idea of chronicling the history of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., whilst portraying the series of events that led Professor X and Magneto to become the archenemies that they are. (Find out more at Wiki)

June 17, 2011 Green Lantern

Oh, Ryan Reynolds, and his hot stuff. Nominated as the sexiest man alive on People magazine, he's sure to show more of his stuff in this superhero role (yet again, by Marvel) alongside Gossip Girl Blake Lively.

Watch the movie trailer:

July 22, 2011 Cars 2

Yay! Lightning McQueen is back! Here's the official sypnosis:

Star racecar Lightning McQueen and the incomparable tow truck Mater take their friendship to exciting new places in Cars 2 when they head overseas to compete in the first-ever World Grand Prix to determine the world’s fastest car. But the road to the championship is filled with plenty of potholes, detours and hilarious surprises when Mater gets caught up in an intriguing adventure of his own: international espionage.
Torn between assisting Lightning McQueen in the high-profile race and towing the line in a top-secret spy mission, Mater's action-packed journey leads him on an explosive chase through the streets of Japan and Europe, trailed by his friends and watched by the whole world. Adding to the fast-paced fun is a colorful new all-car cast that includes secret agents, menacing villains and international racing competitors.

July 1, 2011 Transformers: Dark of the Moon

After watching tons of Shia LeBouf's appearances since his first debut on the first Transformers movie, I find him and his hotness rising in my veins. Guys, you can watch a preview of the VS model and not Megan Fox in the following preview.

July 15, 2011 Winnie the Pooh

Despite the end of 2-D animation love stories as of Tangled, Disney's really embracing the handdrawn cartoons all over again! It delights me, since it reminds me and you and the rest of the world just how magical 2-D stories alone can tell, without all the hype with 3-D animation.

Watch Pooh trailer:

THAT'S The nerdy list so far. Here I shall take note of some womanly, dramatic, romantic movies I am anticipating to entertain my girly self, and hopefully, I shall be able to watch them together with a boyish man ~~and doing PG stuff for 21 and above~~. The following trailers speak for themselves.

January 21, 2011 No Strings Attached

February 11, 2011 Just Go With It

March 11, 2011 Jane Eyre

(Read: my personal statement to Purdue University when I was 16, and how I have a deep connection with the strength of this fictional character, who has lasted in the classical history of English literature)

July 22, 2011 Friends with Benefits

MOVING ALONG AS I THINK AHEAD Without further ado, along with my lucky hat - 2011... Here I come!

State of the Internet interactive and the diminished reality within its artificial space

2010-11-29T15:56:00.000-08:00

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

We now have the convenience of so many screenings to keep up with our stance on this world - the mobile phone screen, the TV screen, the PC screen, and yes, even the air conditioner remote screen counts too. With every layer we add onto our daily screens, we augment another alternate world.
Hybrid Reality bloggers Parag and Ayesha Khanna, contributors of Big Think, reported that our daily usage of augmented "apps" we wish to reflect back onto our screens speeds up the transparency processing - the glass that mediate you as the reader of the screen, and what you chose to reflect back towards you. This is called the "image recognition software" application that you've become acquainted with as a learned mental processing everytime you search for information through a particular screen. This processing is the usual "recognize, search, add" clicks on the virtual button as you chose the desired information from that restaurant listings you browsed on Yelp.

Through your speedier "software", you can choose to "see" anything you wish. Given that an architect has chosen to, say, "see" no homeless people on the streets before he builds his site, through that line of vision he shall instantaneously remove all contents related to homelessness. That includes both innocent and hazardous people, places, and things that are starving for other human charity as they beg for fortune.

This sharp example, given in The Pleasure and Danger of Augmented Reality article, led me to think back about the time I did my editorial, Language: The edge of cognitive power, where I found that The PEW Internet & American Life Project predicted the augmented and virtual realities shall no longer be more different with each other at about year 2020, scarily 10 years from now. Scientists working on contact lenses based on this "image recognition software" are helping visionaries put on these transparencies to choose selected realities they do and do not wish to see, which only locks the user into his or her own perception without the line of vision in relation to the unseen, as with the popular case of un-friending on Facebook in the context of virtual realities. (See: Facebook Friendonomics)

Studies of Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) dates back to less than a century ago, nonetheless during the mid-20th century, when engineers gave birth to the first computer ever. HCI researchers include all sectors within the working industry, both the public and private sectors working together with fundings from the government, for the purposes of improving direct manipulation of virtual artifacts, and that which is studied in university settings and corporate institutions for product-design enhancements, and also for marketers to drive commercial products that we all reckon as the screens we all stare at everyday.

Approximate time lines showing where work was performed on some major technologies enlisted in the paper "A Brief History of Human Computer Interaction Technology" at Carnegie Mellon University, by Brad A. Meyers, in December 1996.

To that study, I came to remind myself about an iTunes U segment I downloaded quite a while ago, a Stanford University HCI Seminar featuring guest speaker John Zimmerman, an assistant professor from Human Interaction Institute and School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, where the seminar was taken place at the Stanford campus on November 3, 2006.

His slideshow, "Designing for the Self", explains how his role as a designer have spotted a disconnect the between consumer behavior researchers and the product feasibility that designers learn out of their engagement in HCI studies. His first example was in a very normal setting of scanning barcodes at the check-out counter. His sense of awareness in this mundane setting stresses the point where there's this job transition from the checker to the "barcode orientor", limiting human customer experience at that point of checking-out, taking away the intended use of the scanner as a tool and instead, becoming an experience where the buyer stares at the checker working for the machine.

Early this summer, I took a class with Paul Colardo, an award-winning executive producer who directed our short-form production class, and said very clearly, "You have to be smarter than the camera." Duh, you may think. As users of these increasingly cheap external devices, some of us has taken it to the next level by extending our selves onto the medium as manipulators of our contents, but others shy away from the augmented transparencies reflected on the screen, choosing to diminish a layer or two without accepting the livestream film of the natural experience, preferring to stay within the heavily-controlled alternative reality of the artificial space.

In the aspect of human experience, i.e. using technology as a tool not only for its function, Zimmerman went on exploring the designer's perspective on their loss of control to a desired consumer behavior, despite extensive HCI studies that aims to predict particular designs of the ideal products other than, obviously, its usability and practicality. This extends to the psychological school of thought on the pleasure principle, a well-known study Sigmund Freud coined within the human psychoanalytic study without that human element in HCI studies. In the case for computer-generative human behaviors, Zimmerman introduced a number of Maslowian-like models such as the Norman's model of product emotions, Jordan's four pleasures, and his favorite, the Forlizzi and Ford on user-product experience, which concludes to a point where the human-computer interaction is a principal mediator with their extended selves within those respective products they owned (they've established those possessions as "props in their lives") to the outer world in the social, cultural, and economic contexts that act as feedbacks for the user experience, such that the entire picture of alternate realities looks like a virtual body of co-experience sharing information in real-time, going "live".

The idea of that extended self in each of these products - manipulated, personalized, and customized by the user - comes from Zimmerman's referential basis on Jean-Paul Sartre's states of existence: having, doing, being.

What that turns into, if we "see" through the layers of transparency from a standpoint that witnesses these co-experiences, becomes a thriving setting like the speech Joey planned to give in Monica and Chandler's wedding ceremony:

Joey: Hey, I started working on what I'm going to say at  the ceremony.  Wanna hear it? 

 Monica, Chandler: Yeah! 

 Joey: We are gathered here today on this joyous occasion  to celebrate the  special love that Monica and Chandler share. 

          [Monica and Chandler look impressed]

Joey: It is a love based on giving and receiving as well as having and  sharing. And the love that they give and have is shared and received. And  through this having and giving and sharing and receiving, we too can share  and love and have... and receive. 

         [later]

Chandler: Yeah, yeah. Okay. 

Joey: When I think of the love that these two givers and receivers  share,  I cannot help but envy the lifetime ahead of having and loving and  giving... and then I can't think of a good word for right here. 

Monica: How about receiving? 

Joey: Yes!      

"Why continue to “live” this way, a mere shadow of one’s former self?" a dubious question Scott Brown asked at the end of his Wired column Managing Your Digital Remains, a possibly recurring awareness by the year 2020 for those victims of diminished reality.

As in social media, a popularized interactive virtual space, the presence of pleasure is therefore a high determinant for HCI studies as it gives the opportunistic roles for the product user, or in this case the account user, to express the self ("I am..."), switching their roles (Who am I: Now? Here? To you?), enhancement of their roles (for product designers to make consumers feel better), and being in transition, a favorite study for Zimmerman himself, and a practicality for myself in the context of my role and Saluna's role.

It's a no-brainer to mark the most important life events, such as coming-of-age, and that in Saluna's case entering Assaliuna, in the linear narrative, a real-time timeline of our lives, with purposes of "creating the digital self to discover who it is they want to be," Zimmerman explains.

His experiment on Carnegie Mellon freshman students has surprising results. I'll just point out a couple of things that are relevant here: There is a faster movement towards the ideal self in the context of using digital image as an insight, whereas desire moves "from sports car to umbrella", as in the case for entry-level college students submitting pictures of desirable things on a weekly basis, and then put together by the end of the study for HCI researchers to confirm that practicality is the acceptance of the new, natural space of college reality.

I am just curious: Can the controlled environment of the virtual reality foster a deeper connection of an ideal image between the real and the digital selves, by using the "image recognition software" as an evangelistic tool to discover an insight for the user, rather than a hindsight for that image reflective on our screens? Can it turn the activity of imagining into imaging?

Only time will tell how Saluna can enter Assaliuna. What matters is, we are both positively very, very curious.

First blog post

2010-11-27T15:55:00.001-08:00

FIRST post as myself, not Saluna. Yay!

I'm accepting myself to write in any way I want again, after 10 years or so, now.

Yes, I've been blogging for more than half of my life, now (Well, you do the math:

It's 2010. I'm 1990-born. 20 years old.

Half x quarter of ave. life-span = more or less 10.)

IN A NUTSHELL: Used to be about a tool for publicizing real-life teenage drama series, truths in-between high-school hearsays and gossip W-O-Ms, and my opinions. Ever since I was 10, or so. Used to blog on GeoCities (which is now down), then moved to Blogger (where I posted artsy-fartsy stuff and general, nonsensical ramblings during my first move to San Francisco), then moved to VOX (which recently went down), then invested on my own domain that now ties my lifetime commitment to blogging, thus branding myself: The Blue Boots, The Pink Sleeves, and, here, The Lucky Hat.

NOW I only have to find my life's purpose, using the things I already have, and state the important things the general public needs to know in order to make a difference in this world.

It's cool growing up freewriting for a time, since I get to time-travel using the English language (and other languages that I'm literate in, too).

But, alas! Life is not that simple.

I'm 20 now, and there are enough differences between the melodramas we all get between age 20-something and the 16-going-17 times. Imagine the number of voices you hear in your mind when you were given the freedom to write so many words, in so many languages, driven by high rushes of adrenaline that travels through your body in a matter of nanoseconds. Every friggin tick of the clock, something new always comes up.

COMING-OF-AGE stories are always a favorite genre among readers, just because it is meant to stay long enough for as long as we all live. It's a period of those changing times that later on significantly changes who we shall become.

Right now I'm standing in the middle of that story. In Public Relations speak, I'm struggling with crisis management, stuck in my quarter-life, totally sucking at it, just right before the legal age of 21 here in the first-world party, Democratized-territory United States (The legal drinking age in my country, Indonesia, is 18. Fact: I first social-drank when I was 16-going-17).

I am aware of what I have: Above-average intelligence (Well, at least I think so, I'll clarify that in a moment). However, I do not know what to do about it, and therefore not knowing the ultimate purpose of my life - What's to say when there are so many global issues to tackle today?

Genius: one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. - Thomas Edison

It takes huge efforts to make a difference. It takes a nanosecond get my endorphin-running adrenalines to jump-start creating mental ideas, stating my objectives that are in line with my passions, most of which are ideas encompassing my dedication to humanistic values.

IN OTHER WORDS, I care a lot. Sometimes too much. To the point of not doing anything about it and forgetting to take good care of myself, maintain my well-being, and take a second look at what are the things within reach in the meantime.

Whatever life holds in store for me, I will never forget these words: 'With great power, comes great responsibility.' This is my gift. My curse. Who am I? I'm Spider-Man!

Which is why I'm hoping that venting my young-adult fumes on this blog would serve as a means to that end: Realizing that there are little things around me that I can jump-start my adrenal engines with, and hopefully yours too.

Before I go on about the darkest details of my crisis, let's take a look back at the bright side on intelligence.

SO FAR, I have never taken an IQ test. So I Googled up local areas in San Francisco that offers the test, and I came upon MENSA, a high-IQ organization of intelligent people "for intellectual exchange among its members", or what I would say, whoa. If you have a higher-than-average IQ, then you are eligible to join the clever club. Not geeky like me, but clever. The official site says that there are a number of other qualified tests they can accept for membership eligibility, including above-average scores from college-entry tests such as LSAT, GMAT, GRE, ACT, and SAT.

Now, I should tell you that I took the SATs twice when I was 15, back when I was still in Indonesia graduating from secondary school, dreaming about my future, yearning to get out of the country, suffocating from the heavily-polluted air we have back in our islands.

That made me log in to my dusty CollegeBoard account to see my past test scores.

This was back in January 2006, when I was 15-going-16:

Critical Reading: 470

Math: 570

Writing: 500 | Multiple Choice: 48 Essay: 8


Critical Reading: SCORE RANGE Your performance is best represented by the score range. PERCENTILE AND AVERAGE SCORE National: 39 The national percentile for your critical reading score indicates that you did better than 39% of the national group of college-bound seniors. Average Score: 501 This is the average score for college-bound seniors in the class of 2007. Math: SCORE RANGE Your performance is best represented by the score range. PERCENTILE AND AVERAGE SCORE National: 66 The national percentile for your math score indicates that you did better than 66% of the national group of college-bound seniors. Average Score: 516 This is the average score for college-bound seniors in the class of 2007.

Writing:

SCORE RANGE

Your performance is best represented by the score range.

PERCENTILE AND AVERAGE SCORE

National: 53
The national percentile for your writing score indicates that you did better than 53% of the national group of college-bound seniors.

Average Score: 492
This is the average score for college-bound seniors in the class of 2007.

ESSAY PROMPT

Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below:

I do not feel terrible about my mistakes, though I grieve the pain they have sometimes caused others. Our lives are "experiments with truth," and in an experiment negative results are at least as important as successes. I have no idea how I would have learned the truth about myself and my calling without the mistakes I have made.

Adapted from Parker Palmer, Let your Life Speak

Assignment: Is it necessary to make mistakes, even when doing so has negative consequences for other people? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.

ESSAY IMAGE

This was back in October 2005, when I was 15:

Critical Reading: 440	Math: 530	Writing: 510 \| Multiple Choice: 52 Essay: 7


Critical Reading: SCORE RANGE Your performance is best represented by the score range. PERCENTILE AND AVERAGE SCORE National: 29 The national percentile for your critical reading score indicates that you did better than 29% of the national group of college-bound seniors. Average Score: 501 This is the average score for college-bound seniors in the class of 2007. Math: SCORE RANGE Your performance is best represented by the score range. PERCENTILE AND AVERAGE SCORE National: 54 The national percentile for your math score indicates that you did better than 54% of the national group of college-bound seniors. Average Score: 516 Writing: SCORE RANGE Your performance is best represented by the score range. PERCENTILE AND AVERAGE SCORE National: 57 The national percentile for your writing score indicates that you did better than 57% of the national group of college-bound seniors. Average Score: 492 This is the average score for college-bound seniors in the class of 2007. ESSAY PROMPT Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below: Nowadays nothing is private: our culture has become too confessional and self-expressive. People think that to hide one's thoughts or feelings is to pretend not to have those thoughts or feelings. They assume that honesty requires one to express every inclination and impulse. Adapted from J. David Velleman, "The Genesis of Shame" Assignment: Should people make more of an effort to keep some things private? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations. ESSAY IMAGE

Judging from those scores, at those times, I was just an average joe.

THINGS CHANGE. New ways of expressions have emerged, especially in the blurry lines between journalism, public relations, and marketing.

Depending on an individual's stand-alone opinion, which then should be exhibiting his or her creativity, promotes innovative ideas for the general public, and is subjected to the brighter side of life, preferably for the Greater Good, a highly-intelligent person can make a difference.

It's all a fairplay.

My to-do list: I want to know whether I have the capabilities to become that kind of person or not.

Or whether I'm just a geeky, girly nerdy, Literary Spy, acting as Saluna the Student.

I'm giving myself 2 months to pick a date:

Saturday, Dec. 11, 2010		Benicia Lutheran Church, 1:00 PM: standard test
Saturday, Dec. 11, 2010		Berkeley - Newman Hall, Gallery Room 09:30 AM: culture fair test
Saturday, Jan. 08, 2011		Redwood City Public Library, Small Meeting Room, 2nd Floor 1:00 PM: standard test
Saturday, Jan. 08, 2011		Berkeley - Newman Hall, Gallery Room 09:30 AM: standard test
Saturday, Jan. 22, 2011		Benicia Lutheran Church, 1:00 PM: standard test

For more information about MENSA, what they do, how to join, and more test dates, click me.

9 Questions, answered

2010-11-23T20:21:00.000-08:00

Here’s an interview transcript of my dead body, Stacia, with me, the resurrected. Because I am a Student, I recorded the conversation to preserve such valued and abled information. Who knows that it might turn out useful in the near future, for my espionage ventures or something.

STACIA HO: How do you learn best? Observation? Participation? Trial and error? Rumination and cogitation? Consulting experts? Writing?

Agent SALUNA, Spy-wannabe: Uhm, studying?

SH: How open are you to new ideas and information? Do you change your mind frequently, based on what people have told you? Are you a traditionalist, deciding on the basis of what’s always been?

Agt. S.: I am always open. However, I filter a lot of information using my bias too. So I will always maintain my objectivity in all subjects I immerse myself into. Therefore, I am a biased, yet open-minded Student. That which is why I am not easily influenced by external forces on other opinionator’s convicted truths. I believe there is only one truth ultimately, that “universal truth” we are all always seeking after. Such thought has been passed down for generations, so yes, I live by examples. Stacia has always been strong as a human, and I’ve got the privilege from somewhere up there to rise again and live up to become this much stronger version of herself.

SH: When you walk into a party, what do you notice first? The mood? The people? The decorations? The things that need to be fixed? The background music? The food on the buffet table? Whether or not you fit in?

Agt. S.: The main stage. Then the music. And then the people. That’s how I know whether I fit in the environment or not: Whether I should stay to study, or bail out, moving on to the next subject. However, I would probably be coming into any party with Cassie and Andrea anyway. They’re probably get their hair and makeup done before the party with me at my place.

SH: Is one sense more highly developed than another? For instance, do you tend to take in the world primarily through vision? (“I’ll believe that when I see it!”) Or are you more auditory? Do you determine if a person is lying by the tone of voice? What about the sixth sense—intuition? How often do you rely on your “gut” and then have your feelings confirmed?

Agt. S.: My sense of hearing is the strongest of all, and my sixth sense. Blame it over my dead body. Stacia has gone through months without the pleasures that come in senses of touch, smell, and taste. In hindsight, she should’ve fed more to those senses so as to remain alert (and get away without her death in the first place), but ever since she’s dead, she’s coming more into terms with listening to the dead and hearing deep voices. Right now she’s an empty vessel, sure, but what’s really for sure is that I as the resurrected am not a ghost. Just, a better version, with a clearer vision. That’s when my job kicked in – My sense of sight has turned into the visionary Ai, seeing the whole world with a great eye with Ai.

SH: Do you usually notice problems around you? What is your response? Do you write an angry letter to the editor? Shrug and move on? Analyze what’s wrong and how to fix it? Take it as evidence that the world is falling apart? What about problems within yourself?

Agt. S.: There are problems, everywhere! Everybody has their problems. In my point of view, out of all the problems out there our responsibility as an individual is to be picky at problem-solving. Pick one problem, personalize the problem, and work at your pace, with your own ways. That’s how I always generate creativity as I go along, because it’s a problem for myself and also for others. You know, “I”, in plural, is “we”. So it’s all the same problems, it’s just that I break it down into little means of these ends. It’s a matter of picking the right problem for myself in order to serve others.

SH: Would you say you are an optimist or a pessimist? Would your friends agree?

Agt. S.: Cassie would say I’m an optimist. Andrea would say I’m pessimistic. Go ask them. But in truth I always try to remain positive.

SH: Are you more interested in the past, the future or living in the now?Are you one to keep holiday traditions? If you had to move tomorrow, how long would it take you to make new friends?

Agt. S.: Like I said, I live by examples. What has been succeeded in history should work today too. How superheroes of the past have worked in their times, I tend to study them, and apply them to my present situations, see if they work. If they don’t, I’ll just tweak it for the sake of moving on. I don’t like to be stuck in a single stimulus. Hey! You and I and the rest of the world were programmed to become receptive from all of the stimuli out there that catches our human senses! If I were to move to another location, it doesn’t take a long time for me to find a circle of friends. However, I value friendship ties that are built on trust. I have one with Cassie. No matter what, whenever she needs me the most, I will be there for her on point, and I know she does the same for me. Well. It takes a while, a long, long while, to really get to know me. That, I know for sure.

SH: How do you decide if you can trust someone? By experience with this person? First impressions? Intuition? Do you test the person somehow? Or are you just generally disposed to trust or not to trust?

Agt. S.: In time. That’s all I can say.

SH: Are you a deliberate, careful speaker, or do you talk without thinking first? Do you use slang, or do you use diction your old English teacher would approve?

Agt. S.: Stacia has cost her life for always talking without thinking. She is the ultimate speaker of her mind. It wasn’t because she’s expressive – it’s just because she is responsive to the issues she’s aware of, and not exactly trying to say she’s absolutely confident in herself, because she is shy at heart. She just always speaks her mind so that the world won’t remain this silent. As for me, I am stronger than her because I can survive, as I can speak robot language, which is the inexpressive, inhumane, the most unnatural way that it all works these days.

_________

9 Questions to Ask Your Main Character on Writer’s Digest.

Literally literary

2010-11-16T20:19:00.000-08:00

Perhaps that is so, literally literature, or so-called narrative journalism, or whatever you wish to categorize me as a content. (See Mark Kramer on Narrative Journalism Comes of Age)

Perhaps my words, or in your words, Saluna's written literature, is purely, literally literary journalism.

I have recently been assigned to feature another subjective to fill in this virtual space in order for you visiting readers to become content with whatever content I wish to feature.

What I have learned, from one of my classes, is that, maybe, I am already a Spy, a Literary Spy.

As you may have all know by now, my dream job is to become a Spy. However, I am still a Student. My current position is, to-study, not yet to-spy-on.

How I thought that I might be a Literary Spy is that, after reading the following points, I found that my class syllabus reader resembles my content a lot:

Literary journalists immerse themselves in subjects’ worlds and in background research.

Literary journalists work out implicit covenants about accuracy and candor with readers and with sources.

Literary journalists write mostly about routine events.

Literary journalists write in an “intimate voice,” informal, frank, human, and ironic.

Style counts and tends to be plain and spare.

Literary journalists write from a disengaged and mobile stance, from which they tell stories and also turn and address readers directly.

Structure counts, mixing primary narrative with tales and digressions to amplify and reframe events.

Literary journalists develop meaning by building upon the readers’ sequential reactions.

This was an adapted foreword, yet again by Mark Kramer, from the book Literary Journalism.

My class syllabus reader explained that a new journalist’s style of writing is, just like my content, “first-person subjective instead of the usual objectivity of traditional journalism,” where I am actually ”taking a more subjective than objective perspective” when providing content for this virtual space you are in.

Then again, this is just a may-be. I don’t know. All I know is that I am no-body at any given moment.

I only have a creator.

Re-accessing uncertainty

2010-11-09T20:17:00.000-08:00

Upon my personal observation since I become aware of human behaviors and their habits when it comes to readership, readers now likes unpredictability for whatever reasons they don’t know themselves. But ever so often it’s because it’s for surprises that ignite either their natural senses to approve or decline for kinship with this fictious homeplace in this “global village” that the Inter-net, as how media critic Marshall McLuhan called it, as opposed to factious place that which is the real world out-side.

Early this Spring, when Stacia went to the San Francisco Chronicle building to clarify an idea she had, with little storms swirling about her mind during that time, she asked Steve Proctor, the newspaper’s Managing Deputy Editor, on the city’s behavior set against the backdrop of the news.

She told him this: “I recently read the March 2010 issue of The Atlantic magazine, where under the words that are most searched by readers include big words like Christianity, God, prosperity, (and other words that may spurt controversial arguments among people, both for educated ones and especially the uneducated) and so on. I wonder, do you think that the prosperity of the city is affected by the news they read from the city’s paper?" Given that he used to work for The Baltimore Sun in the East, where it’s known for high criminal rates, and that he moved to the West here in the safer Bay Area, she thought he might have a good say about the news.

Proctor reversed her order of words in his reply, saying that the paper reflects the people of the city instead of the other way around as she wondered. Having a background in History, she trusted him on informing her about the nature of readership.

From this perspective she chose to consult, she could see that History is a wide scope of old traditions cut down into summaries, that is, the gist of eventful stories, giving only factual accounts, while its significance is only justified according to different individuals and their background information.

She learned to see from that standpoint, and applied that to how modern people are behaving themselves, and their causes they may or may not have been impacted by their daily feeds from news stories.

_________

THE
FUTURE:
IS NOW!

The above word art is my little side-note on my notebook

_________

Entrepreneur magazine released their last issue in the previous year, telling readers that this Recession is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to venture their own fictious homelands, with the use of technology in order to access all of our global, virtual village. At least, that’s what I get from reading the issue and using it as my guide to lead my heart's wishes, Ai's own directions, to enliven my spirits.

As all entrepreneurs are social people, they see unpredictability as shining, white light. Middle-class men, or women for that matter, see it as gray areas, much like the shapes and sizes of their gray matter inside their brains, which, by the way, is constantly processing information. White matter is also always nervous. But white matter always control how nervous it is. (See White matter)

When I led myself to this article on how unpredictable it is this year’s La Nina’s impacts on San Francisco, along with its informative reports for my spatial awareness by reminding me about the nature of the Bay Area’s geographical location, I had a momentary flashback of how it used to be – in Stacia’s history – the setting of her Geography classroom back in high school, when she wasn’t listening to class lecturer Mr. Peh, and was doodling him at the back of the classroom and writing down notes back and forth to her best friend, Cattalina Tantri. “You giggly girls back there! Tell the class what is El Nino.”

It’s simply an ocean pattern, a phenomenon. Yes, it’s simply nature’s phenomenon that human beings have taken for granted as they bred themselves to read patterns, up to the point where the thought of artful and therefore meaning-full literature has been dismissed in their minds, when the word “phenomenon” is reduced to nothing. George Orwell had a good say about trying to sound scientific through bad writing and using un-meaningful words like “phenomenon”. Read his essay on Bad Writing, available in the Arts & Letters issue of Lapham’s Quarterly that was published early this Spring.

_________

Mother Nature has her own ways to tell us where to go next. We can perceive it either as a positive say, or in a negative way, which breaks us down into meaningless stones on the path we’re walking, beating about our own bushes without any awareness, taking no consideration for things surrounding us.

Funny how we study too much about the human nature, as opposed to appreciating it, then accept things that come from it, and then appreciating each of those little moments. We live for our own reasons, am I right? But what is living without leaving our footprints on the crossroads in this global village we are living in? We meet others through the paths we’re walking, yet we are not saying more “Hello”s, are we?

Are we corresponding to nature’s phenomena, or are we expecting nature to respond to us, which is impossible?
What if impossible is spelled as I’m possible?

_________

A PLACE CALLED HOME

There is a reason why ancient writers refer cities as female, writing about her volatility as of beautiful waters that shapes its citizens, making history every moment passed into timely events. Read up the latest issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, featuring issues circulating about The City.

Check-out counter

2010-11-02T20:16:00.000-07:00

Human: Hi, how are you.

NO EYE CONTACT.

Swipes card. No response, because no real question mark.

NO EYE CONTACT.

Human: Thank you-. next . in . line . please . . .

Looks at company brand name.

Below, written:

For more info, check-out double-u double-u double-u dot information dot-com boom.

For further info, send an e-mail to bla bla bla at whatever is wrong with humanity dot computer.

_________

As a Student, I keep this scenario into my notebook to study it. I simply translate this scenario into an easy dialogue:

You’re a computer.

No I’m not.

You’re a computer.

No, I’m not.

You’re a computer.

NO I’M NOT, I’m not you.

My life-long job is to say NO I’M NOT – I’m JUST BEING HUMAN. I used to be ONLY HUMAN.

Show and tell

2010-10-27T20:15:00.000-07:00

Look, and see.
Read, and get to know.
Be patient, and you’ll understand.
Make observations. Draw inferences.

So, I try it all. Being the story, and show the performance.

You can tell your own by showing the things you do.

So this is what I do: Writing letters.

_________