Villanelle (3)

Very substandard villanelle that I randomly made up. This is complete crap, but it IS still a villanelle.

When the sun goes up and the moon comes down
It would be a new day, a new beginning
As office workers dress in grey and brown

People would travel across town
To get to their workplace
When the sun goes up and the moon comes down

Because of this, some people might frown
Because they don’t wish to waste their time
As office workers dress in grey and brown

They decide to go downtown
Party through the night, till
The sun comes up and the moon comes down

But as they wander around
Aimlessly, they’d realize they remain
As office workers dress in grey and brown

For if not, they’d drown
In debt that’d been piling up
When the sun goes up and the moon comes down
As office workers dress in grey and brown

Villainelle (2)

I would not be the sun to end your night
Nor would I be the wall to turn your tears
But I will watch with you until it's light

Because there are no words to set things right
Nor hopes that one immersed in mourning hears
I would not be the sun to end your night

Offering a wisdom far too bright
To soothe your pain or put to rest your fears
But I will watch with you until it's light

There must be time to grieve that sorrow might
Be equal to the love of days and years
I would not be the sun to end your night

For grief, before it breaks, must reach its height
And tides must turn before one homeward steers
But I will watch with you until it's light

There are agonies no friendship can requite
A bitterness unstained till dawn appears
I would not be the sun to end your night
But I will watch with you until it's light

Villainelle

The truth is like a sea with no shore
Raging emotions within your mind
What there was once, there is no more.

Sometimes it might be too hard to endure
The pain of embracing change
The truth is like a sea with no shore

To me, you’re still as lovely as before,
But time will pass, things will go,
What there was once, there is no more

High and mighty as you stood on the marble floor,
Vestiges of something once glorious
The truth is like a sea with no shore

But that was from eons before,
Memories of a time long past
What there was once, there is no more

To death you abhor
But now it’s all gone
The truth is like a sea with no shore
What there was once, there is no more

NIL

2+2=5 is a very interesting thought.

We think that we know everything, yet we know so little.
We think that we are the best, yet we aren't.
We think, therefore we are, but this isn't true.
We think, therefore we aren't.

Of Dystopia

Literature and video games might seem to be from different ends of a spectrum, but both have one thing in common - dystopian societies. Dystopian societies are often futuristic societies that has degraded into a repressive or controlled state, often under the guise of being Utopian. Whereas literature works use dystopian societies in order to warn others of authoritarian control, video games use the exact same things as settings for the games.

One can easily imagine the horrors of a dystopian society: A world filled coloured in black and white, military police patrolling the streets, ready to shoot anyone, anything, ruined houses and buildings and security cameras all around, at any corner, any turn, there's always someone watching your every move. This is where people are led to believe that they actually live in absolute comfort, through propaganda and fear. We would never want such a thing to happen to our world, or our countries, right?

But what most people don't get is that a dystopian society is more subtle than they think. If we already live in a dystopian society, how are we to tell if it is a dystopian society? To us, we might think our living standards are high, but how are we truly to know, when there is noone else to compare to?

Of course, there has been the existences of what we call 'true' dystopian societies such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. But from all those countries we can see how the people actually responded to their authoritarian governance - obedience. They have been brainwashed into believing that their own societies was the pinnacle of Utopia; nothing could be better than that. But of course, when compared to other countries such as the USA, it is easy to see how Nazi Germany/Soviet Russia has fallen into a dystopian society with authoritarian governance.

Therefore, the question I would leave you with, is how, if ever, are we able to tell if any of our current societies are dystopian societies? A coutnry might by democratic or Communist, but either way, the people of that country are constantly subjected to daily propaganda promoting their own country in order to garner control over the population. Being born and bred in Singapore, of course I'd think Singapore was the pinnacle of economical success, but that is also due to the very fact that all the newspapers ever print and everything on the Wikipedia site on Singapore is beneficial to Singapore's image.

Know that Singapore has itself been called a hybrid-regime. But we don't know that. And we don't want to know.

Because the government doesn't want us to know.

Of Procrastination - Good and Bad

When we think of procrastination, we often associate the word with laziness and to the weak-willed. To many, procrastination is a vice; it prevents people from doing things on schedule, and finishing them on time.

Yet, we must understand that procrastination is not really completely a vice. Sure, we should be on time in things we do, but instead of forcing ourselves to do things right, procrastination sometimes helps us to see the bigger picture.

Why is procrastination bad? The answer is simple to see. As students, handing up homework late is discouraged, slacking off at work would get you fired. If the entire world procrastinates, nothing would ever be done; humans would never had advanced beyond the Stone Age.

The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad?

Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.

There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination.

That's the "absent-minded professor," who forgets to shave, or eat, or even perhaps look where he's going while he's thinking about some interesting question. His mind is absent from the everyday world because it's hard at work in another.

That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They're type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.

What's "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary. It's hard to say at the time what will turn out to be your best work (will it be your magnum opus on Sumerian temple architecture, or the detective thriller you wrote under a pseudonym?), but there's a whole class of tasks you can safely rule out: shaving, doing your laundry, cleaning the house, writing thank-you notes—anything that might be called an errand.

Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.

Good in a sense, at least. The people who want you to do the errands won't think it's good. But you probably have to annoy them if you want to get anything done. The mildest seeming people, if they want to do real work, all have a certain degree of ruthlessness when it comes to avoiding errands.

Some errands, like replying to letters, go away if you ignore them (perhaps taking friends with them). Others, like mowing the lawn, or filing tax returns, only get worse if you put them off. In principle it shouldn't work to put off the second kind of errand. You're going to have to do whatever it is eventually. Why not (as past-due notices are always saying) do it now?

The reason it pays to put off even those errands is that real work needs two things errands don't: big chunks of time, and the right mood. If you get inspired by some project, it can be a net win to blow off everything you were supposed to do for the next few days to work on it. Yes, those errands may cost you more time when you finally get around to them. But if you get a lot done during those few days, you will be net more productive.

In fact, it may not be a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. There may be types of work that can only be done in long, uninterrupted stretches, when inspiration hits, rather than dutifully in scheduled little slices. Empirically it seems to be so. When I think of the people I know who've done great things, I don't imagine them dutifully crossing items off to-do lists. I imagine them sneaking off to work on some new idea.

Conversely, forcing someone to perform errands synchronously is bound to limit their productivity. The cost of an interruption is not just the time it takes, but that it breaks the time on either side in half. You probably only have to interrupt someone a couple times a day before they're unable to work on hard problems at all.

Of Ethics and Morality

We claim that humans are sapient, meaning that we are able to think for ourselves, to develop and improve on ourselves, and instead of acting on pure instinct, we act on our own judgement - that is, we are able to differentiate between right or wrong.

Right or wrong. What exactly is right or wrong? We cannot define 'right' as a simple term for the correct thing to do, or 'wrong' as a wrong decision to make, simply because we are sapient. We are sapient, therefore everyone of us thinks for ourselves, we might be influenced by external factors, but in the end, the decision is made by ourselves, through a calculated process of thinking the decision through. The most influential matter on the subject of decision is probably our own morality, which is yet even harder to define.

What exactly is a 'moral' decision? What is the difference between good and bad? Let's look at it this way. A burglar decides to rob a bank, and makes off with a million dollars, but is caught by the police on the way. Bad? Bad, you say.

But what if that particular burglar was seventy years old, was fired unjustly from his job six months ago (for simply being old) and was now down and out, and without any children to support him, has to eke out a living in order to support his sickly wife who's medical condition requires him to pay over ten thousand dollars per month? What if he was really forced to make such a decision?

And no, Social Services and charity don't count here, let's just assume they denied his request for financial aid.

Is he good or bad now?

We might never know for sure. For in this advanced age, the lines between 'good' and 'bad', 'moral' and 'immoral' often blur. One might say he/she was a moral person, but that exact same person might not hesitate to hurt others to obtain, say, a million dollars in currency.

In our modern world, it is very easy to see how technological advancement and money have blurred the lines of morality and ethics. This is simply due to how money and materialistic wealth has adversely affected our view of the world. Whereas in the past, there was always the omnipresence of religion to guide our perceptions of morality, nowadays more and more people are making their own Gods, that is, that humans control their own fate, and are not bound to any religion. Once upon a time, people were afraid of committing morally unjust actions such as murder or rape, but now, for the right price, anything is possible.