Jou, 216 (Blog Entry 5 - MLG Ohio 2012)

This past weekend has been a bit of a blur. After finishing up in Ohio, I spent the entirety of Monday traveling to San Francisco.  This will end up being a bit more of a placeholder until I am able to get some legitimate sleep, since it is now 3 AM for my natural circadian rhythm.

 This event featured multiple games, including fighter games Tekken, Soul Calibur, King of Fighters, Mortal Kombat, first person shooter Halo and real time strategy game Starcraft.  Players came in force, fighting for the top slot, honour, and prize money.  I was mostly in the Starcraft area of the venue, which ultimately focuses on the comparison between the Korean players, who hold the highest place among competitors, and "Team USA" as the foreign hope for everyone from the rest of the world.

Many of the players travel to the same tournaments to compete, which has generated a pretty tight knit community of friends and rivals.  Often friends and teammates will play their all against each other, even to the point of elimination in bracket.  Two of my friends, who are also teammates, had this situation in Winners Round 5, neither wanting to be defeated nor to be the one to send the other to the Loser's bracket.  The matches were intense, they know each others' strategies well from often practising together.

 As the match completed, the men had a moment of being awkward, then both smiled and shook hands while critiquing the matches the just completed.

Obviously, the matches are an important aspect of a tournament, but another side of it is a chance for fans to interact with their favourite players.  As competitive gaming is a sport which can be played and viewed from any location, large tournaments like Major League Gaming draw in massive amounts of spectators who wish to cheer on and meet the players they idolise daily through streams, online tournaments and match replays. 

Jou, 216 (Blog Entry 4 - Requiescant in Pace)

Any time I am free of obligations, I tend to adhere to the adage "sleep when you're dead".  This definitely rang true over the past week, sadly being coupled with the mortal sin of sloth.  To absolve myself of my sins, I decided to photograph a few local cemeteries in penance.  I personally prefer architectural or natural pictures, and graveyards are one of my favourite places of that variety.

"My Lord hath need of these flowerets gay," The Reaper said, and smiled. 

To say I enjoy graveyards sounds morbid and disturbed at first listening, but let me clarify.  They are very peaceful places, filled with interesting tidbits of history and a very real feeling glance into the past.  It really gives you a frame of reference for how much times have changed, yet have stayed the same, as time has progressed.  It can also be very humbling as well as occasionally entertaining to read the lasting vestige left behind by those before us.

"A precious one from us has gone. A voice we loved is stilled."

Familial pride and respect resonates strong in these old cemeteries, some graves dating as far back as 1801.  Plots are arranged by family; husbands and wives, sons and daughters at rest together often with joined headstones.

Glancing at the ages, one finds a pattern of child and infant deaths.  The more sobering coupling of a mother with "an infant at her side" which shares a deathdate.  Such reminders bring an appreciation for modern medical technology, and leave a momentary hollow feeling of guilt in your stomach.

At the same time, solace can be found in the heartfelt decorations and notes adorning the graves.  There is something sweet about the messages engraved for those who have passed on to the next adventure.

Some are simple, a verse from the Bible being the most common sentiment.  Others are a description of the person's life and legacy, giving you a peek into the window of their soul.

Then there are the truly deep ones that make you stop and inch closer to interpret the decaying stone.  The ones that even a complete stranger feels a tug on their heartstrings over the unadulterated emotion on display for the dearly loved departed.  Those are the intimate notes you almost feel like an intruder upon, the kind which invoke an appreciation and respect for the love you happened to experience from across history.

Some may claim graveyards to be a depressing place, but when truly explored, hope and inspiration can be cultivated.  It is a final chance to leave an impact on the world, where many go with a positive option versus a negative.

When it is my time to rest, I hope that I will have left an impact which deserves the kind of love I've found in these epitaphs.

"Alas how changed that lovely flower
Which bloomed and cheered our heart
Fair fleeting comfort of an hour
How soon we are called to part
Hope looks beyond the bounds of time
When what we now deplore
Shall rise full immortal prime
And bloom to fade no more." 




Click HERE for the rest of the set.

Jou, 216 (Radio Lab)

Under 60 seconds.

Negotiations between the U.S. and North Korea for nuclear disarmament are underway in Beijing. Talks originally began in 2006 for North Korea to forfeit their nuclear weapons programme in exhcange for food aid for their starving natin. South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia are also involved in the treaty to help unite the area. Since the death of Kim Jong Il, his successor Kim Jong Un has been more open to international relations. U.S. envoy Glyn Davie said "The talks today were substantive and serious and we covered quite a number of issues." Discussions will reconvene tomorrow.

A nine-year-old girl was run to her death on Monday at her home in Etowah county, Alabama. Grandmother, Joyce Mae Hardin, punished the girl for sneaking a candy bar on the school bus that afternoon by running a marathon around the house for three hours until she collapsed. The girl was known to have a bladder condition which would be expedited by the consumption of chocolate. Officials ruled the death as a homicide citing severe dehydration as the cause. The girls' grandmother and stepmother have been charged for her murder.

Two young children were struck and killed Wednesday at the intersection of Shady Lane and west Tyvola Road. The intersection is known for being dangerous, officials are investigating preventative measures.

Psychology, 150 (Dream Interpretation)

As someone who generally cannot recall past a mild impression of an idea from their dreams, interpreting them is a rather difficult task to attend to. I've never held much stock in dream interpretation. The whole psychoanalytical scheme reminds me more of a soothsayer telling your your past, present and fortune based on a few generic inquiries, or a medium claiming to contact a dead relative of an audience member who has some connection to the letter “A”. It's an act of preaching to the choir, appealing to those who already follow the same school of thought and manipulating the details to force a meaning assigned to them.

That being said, I do acknowledge that dreams are obviously going to be affected by the individual's thoughts. The same could be said about writing a short story, or painting an abstract image. The raw materials must be in your head to be able to create the final product, but that doesn't necessarily mean that being able to conceive the idea correlates to one's want or ability to. In the same mechanic, the best sort of detective is one who can take the perspective of sort of character they are pursing while also not having the intention of following suit.

I like to apply waking psychological theories to dreams. There have been studies which show that your brain filters out irrelevant sounds and background noises. In these studies, they postulated that the brain may take these noises and try to sort sense out of them, giving the impression of disembodied voices or sounds that did not actually happen. It would not be far fetched, as supported by the biological view, that your brain could do this while also sleeping, taking queues from your surroundings and integrating them into the inner cinema evolving during REM sleep. So not only do you pull from your own past experiences, knowledge, creativity, but also from the world around you.

The cognitive view suggests that your brain uses REM sleep as a time to sort through the data of the day and file it away. It would therefore make sense for your experiences during the day to bleed into whatever absent minded thoughts you would fabricate while sleeping. A full REM sleep is the same concept as a daydream, it is up to your creativity and personal experiences as to what will fill these dreams. Any meaning you may wish to assign to it is up to you, but in the end, it's just an amalgamation of whatever stimuli you have interacted with and the correlations your thought patterns may related to those experiences.

In the end, as I stated at the beginning, I do not support the idea of dream interpretation. At this point, since dream interpretation is well known within out society, one could even argue that this has a placebo effect on those more liable to the idea, leading them to fabricate meaning from fragments. Dreams are a just an assessment of your day, a story your brain creates to amuse itself while doing some paperwork. Meaning, or lack thereof, is up to the dreamer to decide.

Jou, 216 (Blog Entry 3 - The Leche of Human Kindness)

The best way to get better at something is to practice it often.  I've taken to bringing my camera with me whenever I depart into the outside world, probably to the discomfort of my close acquaintances.  Luckily, they've been very supportive.

I recently photographed my friend's two-year-old daughter, getting her in focus proved to be quite the challenge.  The fun part of candid shots is that they don't have to be perfectly crisp, sometimes the imperfect ones lend to the subject, as more often than not, a toddler will be tapping into their wellspring of forever energy.

Heidi is a sweetheart.  The first time I met her, she looked at me like I was the devil.  Since then she's rather warmed up to me and has proceeded to turn on the doe eyes with abandon when her will is contested.  Not that I generally mind being manipulated by a small bundle of cunning, it's just so hard to deny her when she turns on the charm.

The entire time I was shooting, she shyly shuffled around with an occasional giggle bubbling past her lips.  Multiple times she would reach forward with her sticky fingers to fondle my lens, leading to some blurry "come hither"-esque photos and me neurotically dodging to avoid fingerprints smears.

As her mother was preparing their family dinner, I sat in the living room with Heidi to watch her favourite movie, Rio.  I'm a sucker for children's films and had yet to see it, so I was just as engrossed with the story as she was.  Luckily, I decided to pester her a little more with the camera and captured a sequence of emotion that only little kids seem to manage.  The film had reached a point of conflict in the plot, causing Heidi to go from blissful mumbling of song syllables she's retained on to fear, sadness, anger, surprise, happiness, then intent focus in the span of a few minutes.

That unguarded reaction and expression is something we eventually grow out of as adults, so it is refreshing when you get to see a child show their exact feelings so plainly.  It doesn't hurt to be damn cute while doing it, either.

Her favourite part was to look at the pictures of herself on the small display screen on the camera.  After a few minutes of posing for the camera, she would exclaim "baby?!" and clamour into my lap before any rebuttal could be issued to flip through the recent shots.  It was so much fun hanging out with my friend and her daughter, I can't wait to invade their home again soon.