Moving This Blog - To WordPress

Image via Wikipedia

After much consideration, I've decided to move this blog over to WordPress. I've had this blog on Blogger for 4 years now, but after having used WordPress for the last two years to manage my Asian music sites, I've grown to appreciate its ease of use and its simplicity, especially compared to some of the more confusing/awkward aspects of Blogger.

Also, WordPress' community continually updates WordPress - while Blogger does update their feature set, it's been comparatively slow and the interface is quite lacking in extensibility. Sigh, it's been fun!

New Site: Muses, Written - http://qinzhi.wordpress.com/

Apparently, This is My Style of Writing

So, I sat down for five minutes to write down an off-the-cuff ethos for Thoughts, Erased - and I didn't intend it to be much, just a few sentences of nonsense. 10 minutes later and one quick revision, this is what I got - I'm wondering if this is really indicative of my style of writing? We'll see.

It starts out with "It was a dark and stormy day" because I was trying to be facetious and start with "It was a dark and stormy night..."

It was a dark and stormy day. People were tired, muscles were aching, and minds were wondering what the next serving for lunch would be.. A particularly inane thought at that, but one which was invariably on people’s minds. Though the more aspirational among us seek to claim that the esoteric question “Who am I and why am I here?” is endemic to the greater minds of us all, but in truth, the mere thought that provides fodder for the incessant craving of mortal men can be summarized in “Is it time to eat?” “Might I be able to ask out that cute waiter at the local diner?” “What if she slaps me?” And so on. With each idiotic thought that drifts in like waves crashing on a beach, drivel such as this clogs the mental tubes that power our day-to-day doings. As such, how can we seek to attain a love, a passion that transcends our mere mundanity as a species of semi-intelligent hairless apes that lucked out somehow in evolution?

This dilemma is one that each and every one of us unconsciously attempts to overcome. This is a story of two individuals in search of love and mystique, and finally finding both in one another.

Origami Insanity

For CTY Valentine's Day - this is what I made to give to people: 70 pink hearts, 10 blue hearts, and 8 lotuses. Time elapsed: Three+ hours.

μsicsearch

Image by matt_in_a_field via Flickr

Working on a custom Google search engine to look for music - it's currently working pretty well! It's oddly a lot of work for just a custom engine - there's a lot of tweaking involved, but I'm reasonably satisfied now with the quality of the results, and I hope people enjoy using it!

http://bit.ly/musicsearch

Names

Hahaa, for some reason I was thinking names today - if I had kids, what kind of names would I give them?

One thing is clear - I don't really like typical American/Western/Christian names, for my own reasons. I mean, look, I've gone 19 years without getting an "American" name, and I've gone through alright. (or sorta.) At the same time, I shudder to give a Chinese name for kids who would be born in the U.S., it just seems odd, and though I am immensely proud of my heritage, I just don't wish hard-to-pronounce names on anyone. My name is my identity, for what it is I am thankful.

I just had the idea today, that I really like the names of Greek goddesses for girls and Sanskrit names for guys. To me, it fulfills my hope of uniqueness without being hard to pronounce, yes still possessing meaning. Obviously, this is just me randomly musing here, but I'm totally serious.

Writing "Thoughts, Erased"

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I realized last semester that I really haven't written enough fiction in the last few years - the essays that I write in my own free time tend to gravitate towards politics and societal issues - not that that is bad, but rather, I recall a time when I loved writing fiction. Granted, my early styles tended to be overtly sarcastic and satirical of many current issues, but recently I've found that I've liked to try out different styles of writing - and some time in April, I decided I'd embark on a project to write a novella/short novel. I don't know when it will be finished, but I have a pretty big commitment to finishing this, especially when I'm in Malaysia and have nothing to do.

The inspiration for this novella came oddly enough, from my job at Firestone Library, where us circulation staffers had to erase the penciled notes that numerous students over the years have written in the margins of the books. While the vast majority of these notes were purely academic and dealt with the issues at hand, a small portion of them were genuine off-the-cuff thoughts, well-phrased and well-written. They usually compared what they were going through with their lives with the text at hand - a poignant handwritten snapshot of a person's feelings, emotions, and insights as seen through the literary piece they were reading.

Juxtaposed with that was the plain fact of reality - these were thoughts destined to be erased by the simple stroke of a $2 pink eraser, after which no one would ever know the contents that had once been therein. Sadness. It was an energy of impermanence - of while living the moment, one had to be cognizant of the fact that everything would eventually end.

And this formed the basic driving point of what I'm about to write. I've tentatively titled it Thoughts, Erased and it's a bit... unconventional in the way it's written. It's not a particularly cheerful book (don't get me wrong, I'm hardly the one to write emo books), a fact that will be pretty clear early on. Further themes I hope to be able to explore are the nature of religion in one's aspirations, differences in race, approaches to social endeavors, and our understanding of each other.

If the last paragraph didn't make sense, don't worry. I'm still figuring it out and trying to piece together something coherent from my hand-written notes. Wish me luck.

CTY is Awesome!

So, usually I tend to use the word "brilliant" instead of "awesome," but truly RA-ing at CTY has really gotten me saying awesome to it. It's been not even a week of being an RA, and yet it feels like I've known my fellow RAs for forever (in a good way) and I'm really loving this place, though its temperature is so much more weirder than LMU.
Today Jake and I duked it out with Robot Wars - an activity originally started by my RA Geoff and Tom in 2004 at LA. Basically, the kids get to suit up the respective RAs, and the RAs just pretty much clobber each other in true gladiator style. And so, in the end, even though Jake won, everyone won - every kid got to enjoy it, and quite honestly, it's all about the kids, right?

And I got a nice bruise from that - totally worth it man.

Whahaha - Thug Story?!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

LOLs.... This is so hilarious. Esp. since it features both T-Pain (of comedic I'm On a Boat fame) and Taylor Swift (whose music I guiltily like). The beeping part is the best.