Week 19 - Nov 6 to Nov 12

2024-11-12

• 🧋 One of my favourite dessert places closed down last week, so I ordered some of my favourite food from them (croffles and bubble tea!) before they shut down. Bubble tea is everywhere but I've never seen croffles as good anywhere else so they will be sorely missed.
• 🗳️ I'm not from the States, nor living in the States, so feel free to disregard this opinion but my hot take after the election is that the results of the U.S. election affects the entire world. U.S. culture and political discourse is one the states biggest exports. They are a world power with significant influence on global politics. 95% of my online friends are living in the U.S. Not all of them may be directly affected by any future policies but I do feel worried for them. It was a bit of a harrowing moment and still is.
• 🎓 I learned about the concept of an argument map. It's exactly what it sounds, but maybe for the more mathematically inclined folks, it's more like an argument node graph. Basically it lays out arguments and indicates relationships between them and the statement they are trying to prove. Very interesting, and I kinda want to read a paper and draw out an argument map for it.

🎵 I am not okay

• 🥀 My Chemical Romance announce a North American tour and I am 111% going even though I just saw them two days in a row not even just a month ago (and if I can compete with all of Canada for tickets). From the teaser trailer and some comments from the band members, this could potentially be larger than a tour and maybe even new material. I'm not holding my breath for new material, as I think they should only release new music if they are confident in it. Still, I'm excited and I'm hoping to either bring my brother with me or go with some friends in Toronto.
• 💿 I've been listening to XG's Howling and SHINee Minho's new album on repeat this month. Some really good K-pop releases recently!
• 📊 My top artists of this week have been Green Day, The Used, Minho, XG, Queens of the Stone Age, L.S. Dunes, Leathermouth, and At the Drive-In.

Intelligence, or lack of it

2024-11-11

I don't feel like I'm a particularly smart person. Of course, "being smart" can mean a myriad of things. Some people might look at me and say that I'm smart because I got good grades in school or because I finished a university degree.

However, the reason why I got good grades in school is because I relied on rote memorization. Great for maths and getting a computer science degree. Not so great if you want to be able to solve complex problems that aren't from a textbook, or if you want to discuss abstract concepts in depth. I can parrot definitions and pull out common proofs but outside of that... Nada.

Looking back on my education, I wonder if I ever really understood any of what I learned, or if I ever "learned" anything at all. It's strange for me to say this as someone who proclaims to "love learning." Maybe I just like listening to smart people talk about things they actually know about.

For example, if you were to take a look at Bloom's taxonomy, I just clear the first level of learning: knowledge. This is simply remembering, identifying, or listing things. There are several levels of learning above that: understanding, applying,analyzing, evaluating, and creating, in that order. Depending on the subject, I can probably engage in high levels of learning, but I would safely say that most of my time spent learning is in the knowledge level.

Knowing this, you would think my work is cut out for me. I genuinely struggle to engage with concepts on a deeper level. Maybe it's because of the English courses I've been taking, but I consistently feel like there is something always out of reach for me to understand something. It frustrates me when I think about it.

I've read a few resources on this and really, and one way to remedy this is time and good instruction. Both of which I feel like I'm lacking right now and lacked in the past. In the condensed courses I'm taking, there is very little time to pause and really think.

This is really a sore spot for me because I can so clearly see my deficits but trying to fix them feels impossible. A part of me thinks that, maybe, I'm just a simpleton who is not made for critical thinking. It feels like I'm trying to cultivate an property that is innate in some people but not in others. Like I'm trying to be someone that I'm not. This is all very self-defeating thinking but it comes across my mind often.

Anyway, no real answers here. I'm about to go and continue to contemplate my life and what I'm doing with it, for the nth time.

I'm not going to meet the challenge

2024-11-07

I've resigned myself to the fact that I am not going to finish 100 Days to Offload this year. I don't know why every year I give it a try and then never finish it. Of course, the "goal" is to just start posting more and I think this challenge did help me with that. I managed to post around 50 posts this year, which I think is actually pretty good. That's like a little less than one post per week. So to say that I managed to do that, I'm quite pleased.

I was posting pretty well until the summer months. I had a routine going. But then June came around. I talked about before how I become pretty useless during the summer. One thing that I didn't talk about in that post is how once my routine changes, it's incredibly hard for me to bounce back from it.

Honestly, I'd say I'm still suffering the consequences from it, even a week into November. No matter how much I may "want" to get back to my regular schedule, I'm complacent. Sleeping in later than usual is one of the things I've been slacking on. Lately I've been waking up just on time to run to my laptop and start my work day. It's not been good. I miss having some time before work, because if I don't have the free time before work, I'm now stressing out and doing things after work all the way up to and past midnight. "After work" enables my procrastination brain and even when procrastinating, I never feel good about it. It's like a nagging feel in the back of my mind. "I should be doing this thing but it's okay, I'll wait until 18:25 to get started on it. Okay it's now 18:27 let's extend that to 18:30." And so on, and so on.

Literally, there is no other way for me to get back on the horse other than to just do it. But it's so hard to get past the sleep barrier. So odd of me to say but I want to wake up at 4AM every day like I used to.

Tonight will be my night, and I will good to bed at a reasonable time and wake up early (hopefully).

Week #18 - Oct 29 to Nov 5

2024-11-05

• 🗓️ Where did the weeks go? I was really busy this week and evey time Tuesday rolled around and I remembered about the weekly note I was like, ugh, I'm too tired. I don't know why I've been slacking so hard this semester but I'm over it.
• 📻 Tyler, the Creator came out with a new album and I really like it. However, I'm not so sure about the replayability of some of the tracks, even of the album is pretty good from start to finish. Other than that, I've been listening to a lot of mall emo like The Used, Pierce the Veil, Panic! At the Disco, etc. I'm still not coming down from the WWWYF hype. Also, I've been spinning 4 Walls by f(x) a whole lot, recently. It's just so good to my ears lately.
• 💿 I shamelessly ordered the 20th Anniversary box set of Green Day's American Idiot, and it arrived over the weekend! I can't believe it's been 20 years. I wasn't a fan right away, I think I became a fan in 2005/2006. Becoming a fan of theirs was such a big event in my life, that, for a long time, I split my life between "before Green Day and after Green Day."
• 📚 What is reading? No comics or novels in the last week. I've truly fallen off the wagon.
• 🇵🇭 My cousin left for the Philippines on Hallowe'en. The day before he left, a small gathering us cousins went to a pub for wings night to send him off. We played some billiards too, it was fun!
• 🎓 I posted about this on Mastodon, but one of my profs offered me a student position as a grader at my university. I was so flattered but my time management lately has not been great. I don't think I could juggle school, two jobs, and what ever else I do in my free time. I'll just concentrate on school and work (sad face).

Dilemma

2024-11-03

Note: No sponsoring here, I'm just really passionate about music.

If you can't tell already, I'm a huge My Chemical Romance fan. I've been thinking a lot about them recently, especially their legacy. In my opinion, they've never released a bad album, and they've never released a bad track either. Of course, it's highly subjective on whether or not you like their music to begin with, but I think it's hard to deny that their artistic vision from album to album is tight.

A lot of that is due to Gerard Way, MCR's vocalist. He is a creative force to reckon with. Besides singing, Way is also an artist. Before MCR, he interned at Cartoon Network. After MCR, he created the comic book series Umbrella Academy (which became a Netflix series) and just recently launched another comic book series, Paranoid Gardens. He's has several writing credits for DC and Marvel comics as well. His craft is not limited to just singing but also visual arts and story telling. This is highly evident in MCR's discography, as each one has some sort of story or visual palette.

In one interview, Gerard revealed that he had a long term plan for MCR. He was thinking several albums ahead and he had a message that he wanted to convey for each album. The Black Parade was the last album he planned for. The album after that, Danger Days was less about a message, and more about telling a story. Of course, the creativity of MCR is not just limited to Gerard. They are a group of people highly dedicated to their craft. Frank Iero, one of their guitarists, talked about how they would practice and write music while on tour, 4 to 5 hours a day.

What I find admirable about all of this, is that everything about MCR is deliberate. It can be argued that after The Black Parade, they had nothing to say. And after the less successful Danger Days, which did not have a specific message, they decided to call it quits. Of course, there were a lot of other variables contributing to the breakup, but I think this was the reason why MCR has a good legacy today: they didn't force themselves to create more than they had to.

This is something I think about in contrast to Green Day's legacy. Green Day's last successful mainstream album was American Idiot, twenty years ago in 2004. Since then, they haven't made anything as significant. I'm a big Green Day fan but as the years went by, I kept getting disappointed with every subsequent release after American Idiot. A big part of why I think post-American Idiot Green Day doesn't land with me as much anymore, is because it feels like they have anything new to say.

American Idiot, the album, while a little contrived at times, said a lot about living in post 9/11 America, living in a dysfunctional family, addiction issues, and heartbreak. After American Idiot, it felt like Green Day just kept trying to recapture that spark from the album, rehash the same topics without any fresh takes, or they would go the opposite direction and just release mindlessly fun tracks (not that there's anything wrong with it, but it's nothing innovative).

This is why I think Dilemma, a song released at the beginning of 2024, is the best single Green Day has released in years. The song is about frontman Billie Joe Armstrong relapsing back to drinking alcohol, and all the ups and downs that come with it. There is something incredibly heartfelt and genuine about the song. I'm sure their discography since 2004 included personally relevant songs as well, but this one is just somehow a cut above the others. Unfortunately, the rest of their 2024 album did not have the same quality, but I clung to this single so hard when it came out. It made me think, "they still got it."

A lot of My Chemical Romance fans have been clamoring for another album. With all of this in mind, I say, release an album, but only if they can guarantee the same quality, the same execution in creative vision, and the same depth. It's a lot to ask from a band, but I would like to think that they have the same standards for themselves.