A better Life : First 5 Steps.

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The first 5 steps to a better life.

Memorize something everyday.

  • Not only will this leave your brain sharp and your memory functioning, you will also have a huge library of quotes to bust out at any moment. Poetry, sayings and philosophies are your best options.

Constantly try to reduce your attachment to possessions. 

  • Those who are heavy-set with material desires will have a lot of trouble when their things are taken away from them or lost. Possessions do end up owning you, not the other way around. Become a person of minimal needs and you will be much more content.

Remember people’s names

  • so that they feel appreciated and for your own future benefit when you want something from that person. To do this, say their name back to them when they introduce themselves. Then repeat the name in your head a number of times until you are sure you have it. Continue to use their name in conversation as much as possible to remove any chance of forgetting it. If you’re still having trouble, make up a rhyme about their name: “Dan the Man” or “Natalie flatters me.”

Smile more often.

  • Whenever you get a grin on your face, your brain is releasing serotonin, the happy hormone. Smiling is the natural way to force yourself to be happy. Many people even smile for five minutes straight in the morning to get themselves in a great mood for the day. It is a very powerful tool that is utilized less and less as we grow older and need happiness more than ever. Just remember that while happiness leads to smiles, smiles also lead to happiness.

Love.

  • If you truly want to be a master of life, let love be in your every action. Love your friends, family and enemies alike. This is the most difficult thing to do out of this entire list, which is why it is listed last. But if you accomplish this, you will be seen as a leader among everyone that allows hate, envy, disgust and all other negative emotions into their lives.  Love is so rare in this world when compared to the massive presence of hate that by exuding love, you will immediately see yourself and the people around you change.

Love. Love. Love.

Handwritting

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Technology has gone through a lot a changes and evolved in the way I write, from quality to quantity. In my eyes, writing is something more comparable to cleaning dishes than an enjoyable activity such as going out with friends. To tell the truth, I despise writing essays, doing assignments and even having to write a long text message or email gets on my nerves. When I have done everything possible before having to sit down with my laptop to write an essay I still manage to keep focusing on how much I have left to write, how much black there is on my word processing tool and the task just becomes more and more draining and frustrating. I really feel like writing a text on a computer is just writing to fill up the blank space on a page. Handwriting however, in my opinion provides an escape from the endless word counts and page numbers.

But then you encounter a different problem when writing on paper. The use of wrong grammar or misspelt words, there is no tool to point out your mistakes. If I start handwriting I have to constantly work and think a lot more about how to spell some words and if at the end of the day my sentences make sense. This, in some way, is making us become dependent of a certain standard of word processing.

Another distraction when writing essays on my laptop is all the entertainment that is in reach, I can access anything from music, movies, games, shows and even simplest thing such as going through my emails. And all of this will have an impact on the quality of my text. Suddenly my essay becomes far to easy to ignore and the flow of fresh words for my text slows down.  . The screen also is tiring to look at and gives me a headache after a while.

Even after all of this the benefits, writing on a computer are not to be left behind. The writing process is much faster than hand writing, correcting and editing is much easier and the spelling correction is always there. The simple fact that MS Word automatically corrects some words and frequent spelling mistakes speeds up the writing process immensely. Typing all of your ideas without being distracted by grammar and punctuation keeps a fast paced and steady evolution in your essay. Some of these thing must be said and is what keeps us from going back to pen and paper.

The downside to becoming so used to the computer working for you is when the computer misses your mistakes. The word processing software is not perfect and often misses mistakes that we over look and assume have been corrected. Personally, I struggle with this and tend not to proof read as carefully as I should. Because of technology my writing has gotten more informal and it’s easier to write in a personal or informal tone. Because I use technology so much to communicate to friends and family it is sometimes difficult to transition to scholarly and formal writing styles. Because English was my second language, I must admit that the auto correct function is just perfect for me to peruse my studies without having to invest in extra English classes, but not for me to improve my English skills and vocabulary.

Handwriting would be the best option for me to improve my language skills however using a word processing tool is what I need to keep on track with my studies and is the reason I use and will continue using it.

Writing Space/ Reading week #4

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This week reading is about Writing as technology by Jay David Bolter. As the Author has assumed: ” Writing is a technology for collective memory, for preserving and passing on human experience”. it is and always been a sophisticated technology.

The mechanisation of writing began with the printing press in the fifteenth century and over several generations, printing did change the visual character of the written page, make the writing space technically cleaner and clearer. However, the computer in turn changes the technology of writing by adding new flexibility to the rapidly and efficiency of printing.

Writing as a state of mind

There is a good etymological reason to broaden our definition of technology to include skills as well as machines. Writing with quill and parchment is a different skill from writing with a printing press, which in turn differs from writing with a computer. However, all writing demands method, the intention of the writer to arrange ideas systematically in a space for later examination by a reader.Literacy is the realisation that language can have a visual as well as an aural dimension, that one’s words can be recorded and shown to others who  are not present, perhaps not even alive, at the time of recording..Moreover, writing can be taken in and become a habit of mind.

Economies of writing

Each culture and each age has its own economy of writing. The earliest economies flourish in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, where picture writing was gradually replaced by phonetic systems, in which written symbols were associated directly and consistently with sounds in the language. Both the Sumerians and the Egyptians developed complicated word-syllable scripts, whose symbols sometimes stood for wholes words, sometimes more abstractly for combinations of consonants and vowels. The Sumerians and their successors wrote principally on stone and clay, the Egyptians on stone and papyrus, a paper like surface made from a reedy plant that grew along the Nile. Each new technology must find its place  in the current economy of writing, and in doing so it may supplement or replace older technologies. For example: papyrus was replaced in the Middle Ages by  parchment and paper and in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the typewriter replaced handwriting for business communications.

Unlecture #4

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I was glad to see the first symposium had turned out successful this week. Some questions have been framed from the design fiction reading last week and now we all have a chance to discuss these questions as a group with all the tutors and other students.

I had assumed that “Design Fiction” is a contemporary form of forward-thinking intervention that has been enabled by the current networked media environment.- Bruce Sterling.  However, this unlecture has given me much more understand about this topic.

One of the clear example that you can put yourself in to understand the concept of this topic, which is the question that Adrian addressed: “What do you think your job will look like in 2020? If you study media now are you sure you gonna be a journalist in 2020? Or you will be a filmmaker? Yeah everything change day by day and we don’t know what will happen next. Look at the present and think of possibilities for the future and ask question: “ How will I make money?” or “ who will pay me?” Imagined future for those answer that is design fiction.

Imagined future or we call design fiction is one of the way to produce a creative ideas for the better or dreamed future. As Adrian informed us that Google gives its employees a day off per week to do whatever they like, yeah they were paid to play. Play what they are interested in and motivate them, without controlling and just simple being themselves. And of course the products of those fun and design fiction times belong to Google. That is such unbeatable way to collect the most creative idea of your employees and no wonder why Google is so successful and get stronger everyday.

I think I would love to work for them not just because they pay good but also the way they create the environment for your  thinking freely to fly.

 

Google office
http://youtu.be/TaGO7XlP2EU

Unlock your body.

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Image

A Human is capable of far more than most people know, here is a few simple examples yet life changing steps.

 

Lucid Dreaming,

Lucid dreaming is unleashing your mind and being able to control your dreams, especially if you think a day is just too short. Imagine having the possibility to control your dreams, in any way. Think about your dreams, what is happening in them, now add the part where you get to do whatever you want in those dreams and are conscious. This consists in letting your body fall asleep but your mind is still awake. This means your dreaming time is time you can spend to think, fly or just make your wildest wishes come true.

The Rubber Band.

The rubber band technique is a perfect method to rid yourself of negative thoughts. It’s simple, put a rubber band around your wrist and snap it against yourself every time negative thoughts come to your mind.

This will eliminate negative thoughts from passing through your mind, without you realizing it!

Sleep Less!

Look at it this way, you have 3 stages of sleep, Transition to sleep, Light sleep and Deep sleep. Transition to sleep and light sleep are a waste of time. I am not saying sleep 3 hours a night, but your body had a biological clock and if you work out in between which hours you are in deep sleep then that is all you will need. To master this you must remove 20 minutes off your sleep cycle every night, the experience will be terrible until you find your perfect sleep time. However, when you do find this time, you will be able to sleep a lot less.

Unlecture/ week3

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This weeks Un lecture talk a lot around what was the feedback from last weeks un-lecture.

“Why should we come to the lecture if the content of the lectures is completely irrelevant?”- The
 question, which stuck in Adrian ‘s head for whole week, it got him thinking and as well got me thinking. The answer for myself  is this un-lecture is really  an interesting way of teaching as teacher always be there as an expert in this field to answer to your entire question, yeah all.  These lectures motivated and inspire our study and reply all of possible question we may have. It’s a chance to talk creatively and listen to others’ ideas.

The special thing about this weeks lecture however, would be the way two other tutors of the course got up and spoke about the readings. This is quite new for me, however I love it to be continue like that, because it’s always a nice thing to get a guidance and opinion from professor.

 

Science Fiction

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Science fiction is probably the most versatile genre in films, even though science it’s most often seen as movies like “Alien vs Predator” or “The Wolverine”. Alien vs Predator is a great example of direct and strait forward science fiction. Space miners are awakened from their cryogenic sleep-state much earlier than was originally planned. A ship that was taken over by the Aliens and the Earthlings’ ship was soon to be infested. This is without doubt, Science fiction. Other less distinct examples could be movies like “The change up” or even “Tarzan”. Everyone knows the story of the baby abandoned in the jungle and raised by apes.

What is the difference between sci-fi and fantasy? Often the genres cross over. Rod Sterling, who was an American screenwriter, novelist, television producer, and narrator, best known for his live television dramas of the 1950s and his science fiction anthology TV series, ” The Twilight Zone“, said that “fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science fiction is the improbable made possible.” In my view, science fiction is more plausible than pure fantasy–which is like a cartoon, purely made up from imagination.

What makes sci-fi an important genre— whether a short story, novel, television show, or movie? Science fiction provides possible answers to so many unanswerable questions about the universe or cosmos. For instance: Does alien life exist elsewhere in the universe? If so, what does it resemble? Are we being watched by intelligent life that inhabits a far off planet? Are there UFO? What does the universe look like? How does it feel to travel at the speed of light? Does a higher power exist in the universe?

Science fiction comes with limitless possibilities where the only barrier is your imagination!