My contemporary fairy tale.

Once upon a time, there was a young man who left home and travel around the world looking for a better life. He ended up in a strange land where people spoke and sung differently, they were bigger and looked different them people from home. He found a job as a miner, mining for a dark-blue metal the people there called “Dlog”. People in this new land use this metal to remember if someone did a service to them, and they will worship the one that had the most metal. The young man didn’t understand why people here like those blue rocks so much, as they smell bad and once he almost fell down the tunnel when mining the Dlog. Mining Dlog was a hard and dangerous, but the young man work very hard every day.

Everything in the new land was different and magical to him even as he didn’t understand the language and symbols they used. He sometime saw people looking at him strongly or with a funny face. As he is the only stranger here, he also got pushed around during work with other miners, and made fun of because he didn’t understand how to use those strange tools or read the instructions. He had no friend and no one would help him on anything…he started to regret coming to this strange land.

One day when he was mining in the tunnel as always there is an elder worker hiding behind the entrance looking at him. This elder worker disliked the young man ever since he came, he thought that stranger looks funny and must be a demon sent by the devil. The worker secretly planned a mining explosive near the entrance hoping to trap the stranger so he couldn’t bring his evil power to this land. The young man was working really hard while he heard an explosion near the entrance. He ran as fast as he could, but it was too late the explosion had already block the only way in or out of the tunnel.

With the entrance blocked, the young man started to explore the mining tunnel. As he walked, he got deeper and deeper in to the inner core of the mine, where he had never been before. Suddenly he heard a strange noise and the ground he was standing broken in to two. The young man fell, and passed out from the impact. When he came to it, he was in a large cave full of Dlog and the emissive blue light from those Dlogs almost blind him. He wasn’t happy about all those Dlog, because he knew he will soon be dead if he can’t find a way out. He kept walking and walking for hours but there seems to be no end to this Dlog cave.

Two days passed away, and all he could see was cave after cave of Dlog. He drank the water in the cave, but there isn’t anything to eat, and the young man can’t walk anymore due to the hunger and tired from two days’ of walking. He laid down near a giant Dlog, giving up all hope of ever escaping the place.

When he was about to fall asleep he heard a small strange sound coming from behind him. The young man pushed the giant Dlog that he was laying on, and there was a large tunnel of river going down. He fallowed the path of the water for almost a day and finally a light coming from the other side of the tunnel, He was saved.

With the discovery of the Dlog cave the young man become the most respectful man in the land, and he use those Dlogs to buy the mine from the people there. He also got himself a nice house and got married with three wives. He also used those Dlog to bring more people from his homeland, and soon there are more of people from his home than people who originally lived there. He gave those native people some Dlog and allowed them to live happily elsewhere. In the end he and his people built a peaceful city there call Anilorak, and they lived happily ever after.

Dialogue

I am not sure if this is the right way to do it, but I am doing the dialogue on the topic of the online media (in this case online gaming) and the affect toward our interaction with people. I setup the stage, and create a situation for the following dialogue, and it may contain some use of bad languages due to the topic and the setup where this dialogue is happening:


In the Lost City of the Tol’vir, there are two dead bodies lying on the ground after an expecting wipe. The on laying the corner near the market street is Shadowz, the high undead shadow priest of the Under City, and the one laying near the stair is Dacoon, the mighty goblin shaman of Kezan.


Dacoon: WTF…
Shadowz: I can’t believe that just happened!  He purposely waited until we started the fight and left, so we will all die.
Dacoon: Yea, it’s crazy how people do that all the time.
Shadowz: Just because his didn’t get that chest, he was begging for that since the last boss.
Dacoon: ….
Shadowz: So he waited and left when we just started this boss…what a dick!
Dacoon: True true.
Shadowz: I bet he is someone that has no life and just sits in front of the screen every day, and gear is like more important to him than anything.  I bet he could level a toon from 80 to 85 in a day or something…
Dacoon: Yeap.  There are more and more people like this too, it happened to me twice last night.
There was one shammy who just kept calling everyone stupid and saying how he was better than everyone else because he knew everything..blablabla and in the end he just pulled some random mobs and got the whole group killed…
Shadowz: Name?
Dacoon: No idea, but he isn’t from our sever.
Shadowz: well that’s why he was doing that.
Dacoon: why?
Shadowz: I bet he would ever do something like that in real life, or even to the people on his same server.
Dacoon: Well, that depends on the people…
Shadowz: People are always trying to make themselves feel better.
Dacoon: So you mean by being stupid and calling other people names will make them feel better?
Shadowz: Partly, it’s a power thing, it’s because they can’t do that in real life.
Dacoon: what do you mean?
Shadowz: Like how we as human try to find ways to make ourselves feel stronger over others.  This just gives us a way we can do that without letting anyone know who we are.  It’s like getting to bully people without ever getting in trouble, or having them ever get revenge.
Dacoon: huh…
Shadowz: In the past we would swing swords to settle disputes. As we don’t swing swords anymore, our power is in the words we say.
Dacoon: well…we still use swords here.
Shadowz: so it’s even more metaphorical then, we can assume the role of these big hulking brutes with huge weapons.
Dacoon: huh…
Shadowz: and the only ‘pain’ we can cause through the online media is with words, and sometimes that’s almost worse…especially when there is nothing you can do to retaliate.
Dacoon: what pain are you referring to?
Shadowz: like emotional pain I guess, like telling someone they suck etc
Dacoon: so if you say certain words to people online, it will cause as much pain as in real life?
Shadowz:  People are likely to act meaner online than in the real world because we don’t know who they are. Like in here you can ninja items from people because you may not meet that person ever again. Obviously this is like blatantly stealing something while knowing the owner can never track you down to get it back.
Dacoon: but the acts you do online are like the acts you do in life, so this game sort of reflects your personality in the real world.  Do you think people are just being nice because they know they will see each other again?
Shadowz: not necessarily…that makes it sound like they are just naturally mean, which I’m sure some people are. I’d say it’s mostly that there are some situations where it is fun to be a dick to someone, but yes, like our situation in wow, it could be fun because of the knowledge of never seeing that person again, or having to pay for your actions in any way.
Dacoon: If there was a random man that was going to fall down a building or something, and there was a hard drive with the best ever gears in it, and you can only choose to save him, or let him die and get the hard drive. In the condition of no one will ever know what happened, what will you do?
Shadowz: how many items?
Dacoon: lol…full set
Shadowz: then the set, of course
Dacoon: cool cool…
Shadowz: bahahaha…it its BoE, it could potentially be sold on ebay for like a grand. He wouldn’t give me a grand for saving him, he’d just say thanks.  Nah I am just kidding lol, but see, that was a perfect example.
Dacoon: So do you think that sometime people do mean and stupid things online because they think it’s funny? Like that famous Youtube video about one guy that didn’t listen to the plan and let his whole team wipe?
Shadowz: dunnos…it may not be funny in the moment to some people who are serious about their gaming.  This is also a game you pay to play, so some people might take it more seriously, more like real life..  but I thought that video was hilarious…. Finally we got another healer!


The new healer revives the two, and they keep going on with their long journey to save the world of Warcraft.


FIN.

My Situation as a Reader

I am a senior college student, and due to the intensity of my school works and other random things I don’t have much time reading anything. Most of the time I read when I have to, and those are in the form of traditional books and papers. I enjoy reading only when it’s a really short paragraph, and I try to jump to the main point of the reading as fast as possible. I try to spend less time reading and learning the small details, and spent most of the time finding what the important things are.

Most of my readings are online, and most of the time takes place in blogs or news, as most of those are short and easy read. As my first language isn’t English, this makes reading and writing a little difficult for me. I do enjoy reading some classic novel from my own language sometime, as its easier and therefore I can totally relax and enjoy  the story without checking the meaning of the words every five minutes.

Phaedrus

Phaedrus, written by Plato, is a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus. The dialogue mainly covers the topics of love, soul and the art of rhetoric and dialectic. After reading the dialogue and a little research for further clarification those are the issues that Socrates discusses about:

1. The disadvantage of lover, and the advantage of non-lover (Phaedrus & Socrates)
2. “Divine” madness (Socrates)
3. Soul (Chariot Allegory) (Socrates)
4. Self-control and desire (Socrates)
5. Art of rhetoric and dialectic ( Phaedrus & Socrates)

The following are some main points that Socrates made during the dialogue:

• The advantage of non-lover over lover (ruled by judgment, and fair)
• Love lead to desire, selfishness and madness
• Love lead to madness but is a "divine" madness, Socrates listed four types of divine madness:

               From Apollo, the gift of prophecy (Mantic)

               From Dionysus, the mystic rites and relief from the present hardship (Telestic)

               From Muses, poetry (Poetic)

               From Aphrodite, Love (Erotic)

• Love is a gift from god, and therefore is a “divine” madness
• The story of Chariot Allegory, the two horses of rational and irrational
• The pursuit of pleasure, even manifested with love is not “divine’ madness
• The straggle between self-control and the desire of the pleasures of the body
• The non-lovers offer only cheap, human dividends
• The art of speech making cannot be art without a grasp of the truth
• One must use similarities to pursuits the audience
• One must construct the sentence, and clear the statement of the subject.
• One must understand whom he is speaking or writing to, before making a proper speech or writing
• Socrates stated that "In reality, our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, which indeed is a divine gift”