useless?

recently, i attended a history seminar in a local university, wherein they decided unitarily that terms were meaningless and conceptual frameworks entirely useless. i applaud their bravery in standing up to what they believed in and having the brains to do so, but in the back of my mind i was thinking, “sad postmodern saps, they must be miserable!”

i do believe that concepts exist for a reason. they are there to help us think about the world we live in. i don’t think they are entirely useless. yes, some theories and concepts are a bit restrictive and there are tons of exceptions which make us think these terms are utterly meaningless. but it is there to help us catogerise and organise the world and their idiosyncracies, and to have some semblance of control. i suppose it is a way to make us feel a bit better about our finite brains.

xx b

The Big Blackout

when i was much younger, i used to experience a blackout where i lived. i only found out later that it was an island-wide blackout and everyone was out of power for a couple of hours. as children, we were thrilled by this unexpected turn of events in that mundane week day. instead of our usual routine of having to complete a copious and inhumane amount of homework that evening, we were given permission to shine our torches across to the next building. now, on a normal day, this act would warrant a police complaint and possible verbal abuse from our neighbours, but on that day, it was classified as a gallant (albeit pathetic) attempt at providing light for our neighbours across the street. we had fun shouting across to the neighbourhood kids. i can’t remember what we shouted but it was possibly along the lines of how dark it was and how we couldn’t watch tv. it was an unusual event, that blackout. after all, our country prided ourselves as being fiercely luminous whatever time of the day.

we are experiencing another virtual blackout today. one that is led by wikipedia this time. apparently, wordpress got the memo and decided to do something similar with their freshly pressed blogs. i had logged on this morning hoping to garner some intellectual stimulation from the blogs when i found out all of them were censored. my first thought was, “knarts, what is wordpress coming to? why are graphic content becoming freshly pressed?”  and then i remembered the wikipedia blackout and i nodded my head in comprehension.

i understand where the protests are going with this. but if one were to be brutally honest, what are the chances that this mere 24 hours blackout by wikipedia would reap anything else other than inconvenience for and complaints from people (me) who are too lazy to do real research on their own? it seems a bit superfluous as well. it’s like having anti-animal abuse activists abusing animals to prove their cause. plus i heard we can still access wikipedia on our phones. nonetheless, i do support and appreciate the free internet and i am against anything that goes against that. laws and legislations that go against the free internet illustrates egocentricity at its finest. i do not believe in keeping content only eligible to a certain group of people. there must be a culture of sharing and learning from one another. and the internet is one of the best places to do so.

i wouldn’t do my protest in the form of blackouts though. maybe i should place a mat in front of the congress.

xx b

a brilliant first entry.

‘ello. i have recently realised that i am losing all my creativity to something call academia. in the past, i used to be able to conjure up several highly original plots for fiction writing just in a day. i was also able to come up with lyrics to sappy love songs without taking much of an effort. call me an egomaniac, but i was a rising creative genius. all in the past, however. just today, i took a couple of hours just to come up with a name for my blog. possibly a completely misuse of the time.

as such, in a bid to save and revive my once imaginative and highly developed right brain, i shall attempt to start a blog. i haven’t been doing a lot of this lately. again, i blame the academia. but i shall push forward and try to write something decent in regular intervals. of course, this blog will be entirely narcissistic and self-indulgent. i’d like to think i have the liberty to do so on the free internet.

xx b