"It’s always interesting to ask people how important they think they are to you, because usually it’s actually very difficult to get a good sense of how much you mean to someone. Different people care about others in different amounts and different ways, and you don’t really know the details of their interactions with others, so it’s difficult to get a good sense of things."

From my Xanga (now "Love Everlasting" on Wordpress), January 27, 2010

To my fellow snail-mail writers:
Taking photos is so easy and convenient nowadays now that most of us have smartphones in our pockets!  We should try and make it a best practice to snap a quick photo of our letters before tucking them in the envelope; things happen every once in a blue moon, as some of us know all too well.

Even as the world changes around me, I find myself unwanting, unwilling, unable to move.  And I long to forever stay in the same place, surrounded by change.  And, in that same place, I too, change.  But still I would not move.

Short post today.

#1, Your friends might really be perfect, but...really not in the way you think they are.

#2, I opened what is probably the worst pack of magic origins EVER to add to my sealed pool:

foundry of the consuls
titanic growth
might of the masses
deadbridge shaman
runed servitor
cobblebrute
screeching skaab
returned centaur
ringwarden owl
nivix barrier
nightsnare
aven battle priest
orbs of warding
prism ring

Yeah, good luck picking something out of that crap.  I'd probably first pick either foundry or might of the masses.  My deck happens to be GW and the only thing I'm getting out of that pack is might of the masses.  Yeech.  My previous pack was pretty jank too...I am now 8 packs in and have 0 supression bonds and 0 wild instincts, also 0 grasp of the hieromancer.  What is this madness?

#3, I am starting to get slightly frustrated when I lose in sf3, ugh.  It's not that I hate losing, it's just losing to people whom I don't respect.  I think I need to give them a little more credit, and not get so hung up on it and just focus on getting better.  I noticed that I do definitely need to work on my offensive pressure and mixups--I need to vary my pressure more (not just cr lp cr lp cr fp) and also know that sometimes you need to back off and play safe rather than get too greedy esp when they have reversal shoryu or reversal super to keep you honest.  I also need to get my dash->karakusa inputs clean.  On the plus side karakusa->fp->hayate is working just fine, and karakusa->fp->SA1 hasn't actually been bad either!

#4, Leigh Nash is apparently on tour and is in LA next month!!  Man, I totally want to go!  We'll see, haha.

What is it called?  When you find yourself unable to surrender an ideal that you know doesn't exist?  Is that a sort of religious faith?

I am enough.

Also, Sixpence None the Richer and Leigh Nash, you are wonderful...how have I lived without you recently?  Music for my soul...

"Being an ally is like being a friend. You listen to your friends when they are sad. You give them support when they need it. You stand up for them when they are bullied. You give them a safe space in your home when they need shelter, if you can afford it.

Being a friend doesn't mean that you agree with everything your friend does. You will come into conflict--often. You may fight. You may have misunderstandings. But because you love each other, you don't go out and disown your friend. You try not to hurt your friend. And when things have settled, you talk it out together, and listen deeply to each other's perspectives, eventually working out a solution.

And, if your friend's is fighting for their life, you fight with them. You can shelter them from danger for a while, but you know that you cannot keep them under your wing forever. You are their friend, not their parent. You respect their choices and their autonomy...but you also cannot bear to see them face the danger alone. So you fight with them. And if you are not able to, for whatever reason, you do what you can, and then let them go.

Being a friend doesn't mean you cannot be friends with someone else. You can love other people. But you cannot love everyone; that is the truth, for love is built on recognition of uniqueness, of individuality, of difference. This is why, being a friend means recognizing that your friend has an identity that is different from everyone else, including yourself. No matter how long you have known your friend, your experience is not the same. The struggles that your friend go through is not the same struggles you, or anyone else, goes through. There may be similarities, but they are not the same.

Now, extrapolate all that I have said into a political context. The comparison is imperfect; individual identity is different from group identity. But most of my main points about what it takes to be a good ally is the same. It is more difficult to be able to relate to a group as a whole; I know, because I've struggled with it throughout this year. But if you make the mind to do it, it is possible. Reach out to those you don't understand. Listen to their perspectives and withhold judgment until you have deeply considered all they have said. It will be uncomfortable. It will be challenging. But it is worth it, for at the end of the process, you will have broadened your view of the world. You will find things that the world is filled with amazingly diverse experiences. And you will have made a friend."

--Christina Chen, August 2015

Do you believe

in Love Everlasting?

RIP Formspring (Spring.me), which now redirects you to OKCupid.  Can't really find my profile on archive.org either, which is a shame.  Would have liked some way to export my answers or something; I had a lot of writings on there that were essentially prompted blog posts.  The site went wayyyyyy downhill so I'm not surprised that it's gone for good, but still, sad that my stuff is gone.  Sigh.

School, Learning from the Internet

https://www.facebook.com/DarioGiuseppePolito/videos/854291001268189

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0

(links courtesy of A-zu-ra)

I guess as a member of the internet generation I've been recently feeling a sense of pretty great gratitude at the fact that I can learn so many useful things from the web.  You know, things like cooking, living skills, how to clean xyz, how to charge sales tax, etc. (in addition to more "niche" things like how to work CSS and jquery).  The idea of learning these sorts of things in school really does make you contemplate things, I think.  If anything, many of the things that are taught throughout all levels of education are things that you should be able to just reference online/via wikipedia now.  I think there is very little value in learning something that is not a "foundation skill" (reading comprehension, multiplication, something that other things depend on) and can just be referenced very easily later on, so I think for those topics to have worth they need to be framed in the context of other things that are more globally applicable.

I don't think you can go and say that history is useless and should be an optional thing because there are things that have happened in the past that people should really learn about and think about critically.  Think about slavery, the holocaust, hiroshima, wars, even 9/11 should now be considered "history" despite the fact that many of you were around when it was happening.  It's difficult though, because I think at that age it's very hard to understand what exactly the ethical and moral implications of all of these things are.  For me personally, at least, we always had this idea implanted in our heads that "history is important because you need to avoid making the mistakes of the past", but I think that's a very cut-and-dry statement that doesn't really click.  We can learn things like "slavery is bad" and "we shouldn't kill people based on their race" but I think there's this big missing piece of how that actually fits into our social and ethical lives today.  I don't think many (any?) of us are going to have the opportunity to become a slaveowner even if you wanted to; how does this actually apply to us in the present day?  When I'm thinking about Hiroshima, am I understanding the ethical and moral implications of it?  Am I feeling how horrific it was, as an personal atrocity and not just as a set of numbers?  Or am I just thinking "omg, atom bombs!"

As an aside, nothing I ever did in school taught me how to write better or speak better, so I guess it's not really surprising at all that I see so many problems with communication happen in the workplace and in general.  I mean, I always just chalked it up to "communication is hard" and "people just suck at it inherently" but how should we expect anyone to know how to communicate properly and effectively when all we learn is how to write 5-paragraph essays and how to recite memorized speeches?  MaRo's article on writing articles is more applicable and important to my daily usage than even the best of what I learned in school.

Similarly for speaking--when you're at a large meeting in work and you need to make an argument or present information, do you really expect to have your 5 prepared notecards in front of you as you deliver your speech, remembering to make eye contact and use good body language?  What if something comes up in the middle of the meeting and you need to speak out about it?  Hold on guys--I'd like to use 5 minutes of my prep time before I speak next!  No...not quite how it works there.  In fact, I feel like there is an active stigma against people who deliver canned speeches.  If it feels like what you are saying is "practiced", people are going to pick up on it and feel that it's not genuine.

Perhaps the reason there is such a large fear of public speaking is exactly because of how it's presented in school.  We did all these presentations and speeches as we were growing up, and supposedly it's probably supposed to make you a better speaker, and more comfortable with public speaking.  But guess what?  Every time you do a speech or presentation for school, it's the worst possible situation because you are being GRADED for your performance.  The way you deliver your speech literally determines whether you are labeled as a success or a failure, and to make matters worse, all of your peers are watching you get judged.  Is that stressful?  Heck yes!  I better practice my butt off and memorize the entire thing because if I forget anything or get caught saying "hold on, let me think...", that's an instant deduction from my grade.  This whole process establishes this idea in my head that public speaking is a high-pressure situation where I'm being judged.  And you wonder why people get nervous when they need to speak in front of a group!!!

Back to the original point I was making on learning things from the intarwebs.  I think you could argue "but wait...cooking, cleaning, paying taxes....these are all things you should be learning from your parents!"  And to an extent, you'd be right.  There are a lot of things that are just easier or better learned from parents.  But there are a lot of problems with that, too.  For one thing, parents don't know everything.  Are your parents going to teach you what you need to host a website? (domain name, hosting, DNS records)  What if they never owned a business or sold anything; will they know how to deal with sales tax via Bandcamp or Etsy?  Have they advertised via craigslist or ebay?  Okay, so they know how to cook american or chinese food, but what about making cajun food?  Thai curries?  Fajitas?

The other thing is that sometimes the knowledge you get is just plain =wrong=.  This happens a lot in both healthcare (unfortunately) and cooking, among other things.  Cooking is the easiest to point to since there are all of these cooking myths like "searing locks in the meat juices by creating a hard crust on the outside" and "only flip your burger patty once" which have scientifically been disproven (flipping multiple times leads to more even cooking).  Even if the ideas =were= right 30 years ago, a lot of things change over the span of a generation. ("you should take CHEM230, back when =I= was in college it was a good course" doesn't really work out, particularly if that course number doesn't exist anymore)

I think the combination of being in a completely new situation and place (sometimes, growing up in America with split heritage identity vs immigrant parents) and the fact that the times have changed so much (in past times quitting your job to work at a new place was a sin, maybe kills your career...in present times if you've been at a job for more than 4 years, prospective employers will see it as a red flag, maybe kills your career...) means that it's vitally important for people to first question tradition and the status quo and try to learn about the world around them, and second to be able to know where to look to find the answers to the questions they have.  Perhaps that's the case with -every- generation, but the existence of google wikipedia and other key players means there has been a paradigm shift in how we can find the knowledge that is important to us.

But above all just watch Steven Universe b/c who could ask for a better representation of humanity, relationships, love, morality, and hamburger backpacks?  Also play Journey. :P

I could be a better friend.  Also things are weird.  I feel like I wanted to write something more but I totally forgot what it was...

Losing in MtG due to variance doesn't really bother me.  In fact I almost feel like it offers a shield under which to hide your losses sometimes (which you have to watch out for).  When you lose to variance it wasn't really your fault.  Sure, you "should have won" b/c you are the better player or have the better deck or whatever, but it wasn't your fault that you didn't.  It's a different situation than when you're playing some fighting game or RTS or something and you blow it because you did something stupid or choked or something.  In that situation I get the bad feels because damn, I lost to somebody I "shouldn't have" lost to, but there's nothing else to blame but myself really.  I dunno.