Beyond First World Problems

Hopefully everyone is already familiar with the concept of first world problems.  If not, here's my post on the concept from last year.

After the absolutely fantastic Centennial, Rice students are running into a whole new line of difficult challenges to face every day: Centennial Problems.
These are issues like-

"What, I have to go to class, and it's not in a giant magical tent?!"

"What, projectors are now used for powerpoint slides, not for epic light shows?!"

"What, we have to go to the servery to eat food that someone else prepared for us, rather than just being provided with giant towers of cupcakes wherever we go?!"

It is with great difficulty that students across campus this week undergo this paralyzing suffering and hardship.  But Rice students are known for thriving even under the heaviest of burdens.  How else did we learn to deal with the other challenges we face on a regular basis.  Without this resilience, we might never have survived having to walk all the way to Tudor Fieldhouse to eat on Sammy's picnic.  Or having to slave away at putting all our recycling into bins for H&D to pick up.  Or even sitting through lectures in Herzstein, on hard, wooden chairs.  With *really cold* air conditioning!!!  

Yes, we suffer greatly here at Rice.  But we have what it takes to carry on.  Somehow.

On a similar topic, I happened upon a wonderful video this afternoon.  Saturday Night Live did a fantastic job at picking up on a similar problem plaguing our nation, through the form of the new iPhone 5.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/412897

Truth

Yes I do, Facebook.  Yes I do...

One year and counting!

Holy cow!  I've had this blog for over a year, and just realized it now!

Silly me for not realizing this.  Taking a look at the statistics, it's fun to see what topics and audiences I've gotten to play with this past year.
I've had over 2,500 views from 9 different countries.  Not too bad, considering I do very little to advertise it.  It also speaks considerably to the larger range of people that I have contact with now, considering that this is more views than my youtube channel got in 3 years of steadily advertising it in high school.  Of course, being in a K-12 school with just 200 students total, it's kind of a limited viewership.  I think the most views for a video I made during high school was me being a goof off with too much caffeine and Shakespeare, which got a little over 200 views.
Getting to Rice, I had a change in audience, with suddenly so many more people around me who were of similar interests.  This naturally produced a lot more views from people who wanted to watch things I made, and even better added a lot of highly talented people willing to film with me.  This resulted in quite a few fun videos, ranging from trying to give myself food poisoning to the Party in the Library Incident.
Now, this last video was great, not only because it guaranteed I would have far more fun trying to run for public office with that online, but because it showed that with a few posts and tweets, Rice University could get more views on one video in a week than I could in years of working by myself.

And now this blog is moving up into the top spot of viewership of media that I'm producing.  I'm quite a fan of this.  Hopefully, this means people are even more interested in reading in what I have to say than simply viewing my work for comic relief.  I'm sure many people still do read this just because they like seeing me be ridiculous, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that my top viewed post this past year was First World Problems, which got even more views than my backflipping escapade. 
So maybe I can have some sort of impact with my message.
Before I leave- an interesting note on technology-
I read a rather ridiculous article on super expensive computer chipped socks.  Seeing things like this always frustrates me, because sure, while I'd love to have my socks match themselves, I'd rather see brilliant scientists putting work into researching ways to treat neglected diseases that kill hundreds of thousands of people.  And $200 for a pair of socks is disturbing when 50 cents can give someone immunization against many of those diseases for an entire year.
Not that I'm against the development of pricy technology as a whole.  There's this awesome device, the Vscan, which is like a stethoscope that costs $8000.  The cool thing though, is that it also can analyze the heart well enough to prevent the need of a potential follow up echocardiogram that costs $1,500 to run.  Plus, this thing can be carried in a backpack, and could be used to scan hearts basically anywhere in the world.

So that's my rather lengthy post for the day.  Yes, there's a bucketload of hyperlinks, and probably too much text for more than a few people to actually read all the way through.  But I've done some self assessment, and seen that pulling random ideas together from different fields to form an argument or conclusion is something I'm good at.  So I'm going to keep doing it, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop me. :)

More words, more words, more words?

Last post was pretty non-representative of most of what I've randomly written these last few months.  Just for fun, I'm going to put up a smattering of random quotes or excerpts from things that I find mildly amusing or thought provoking.  These can be musings, class notes, or attempts at a novel this summer that I still deserve to be beaten to death with a fish for not completing...

"The material on the SmarterBoard was always formatted the same way and the walls were always that same color of puke beige.  Not that puke is a shade of beige, but that’s what Devon wanted to do every time he saw it." from Numberless, the book that I've needed to write ever since I had to go through AP testing...

Why Daniel is too ridiculous to be allowed to title chapters:
"Chapter 1: Night is dark.  And there’s no light too."

"HOW DO PEOPLE HAVE TIME FOR 151 HRS OF TV A MONTH?!" A completely valid reaction in notetaking to learning this country's average tv viewing habits.

On selecting character names:
"Other names come up off the top of the author’s head, or from random encounters with envelope labels, waitstaff, or other works of fiction that names are subsequently borrowed from.

These particular names come from popular names for pet slugs.  Thank you, yahoo answers.

As you can tell, I do not have the highest opinions of men, particularly ones I get to write about."

Aaand finally, the introduction to a book which rightfully was not followed through with, because writing books about my life tempts me to live a far too dramatic of a lifestyle.
"Fiction is the expression as life the way we wished it went, with less rules, physics, social norms, or any inconvenient, inglorious obstacles.  It minimizes the average in the human experience, and brings out our fantasies and heights of imagination.  It is a wonderful thing to live these out on paper, on television, in a perfectly simulated environment where we play the roles of that which we wish to be.  Yet by empowering the imagination artificially, one key factor is overlooked.  Man’s potential is not bounded to reality in the dull patterns that we see when comparing it to new unreal worlds.  It can become so if we siphon our creative efforts solely into worlds where we cannot be physically present and invested. 

We are all that stops us from entering a world as good as fiction.

Who says we cannot write our own story?  We’re already responsible for 50% of the dialogue, the actions of a main character, and some portion of the direction.  Authors can write a story without knowing the ending, if they know how to follow their instinct.  Life doesn’t have to be a set course.  Decisions can change its course, move us from one plotline to another.  Characters and subplots can be addressed or dismissed, and learning experiences can easily enable new adventures.

Open your eyes to the story around you.  This is your book.  You can be an author of a greater story, or merely a citation for dialogue."

Words, words, words...

So, considering the fact that I sometimes admit that I'm a writer, I don't post a lot of independent writing on this blog of mine.  Musings, yes.  Bullet-points, definitely.  Snarky commentary, ahhh, sometimes.  But not straight up writing.
Thing is, I do lots of it.  All the time.  Some of the time.  At sporadic intervals, that nonetheless lead me to believe that I enjoy writing when I take the time and focus to do so.  It happens a lot in the fall or after I've been in the mountains, not sure why.

Anyways, I'm just going to start randomly putting things that I write up here, and if anyone has thoughts about them, let me know.  Otherwise, words don't do all that much just sitting in a document on my computer.
I just listened to Ke$ha's new single, and this little bit of counter-pop poetryish sort of just happened.

I will not die young

Nor lead an unlived life

You only die once

You live as much as you let yourself

Your life is not one shot, one course, or one direction

But a myriad of ever-changing fluctuating choices

An exploration of the vastness of knowledge and experience

Partying like there’s no tomorrow is fine today

And sucks tomorrow

Partying like tomorrow will happen can be just as fun

Every day for the rest of your life

A one-night stand lasts…

Lets see…

One night.

But true love never dies.

Playing with fire is fun

But so is growing a redwood forest

And then playing in it for years on end

You can’t be both an arsonist and an arborist

And expect both careers to pan out