3rd Beloved

  About a year ago I was browsing through YouTube when I came across a video on my recommended titled “strangely familiar places with unnerving music.” I ended up clicking on it to be greeted with discordant chords of synth music alongside images of empty stairwells, airports, parking lots, and rooms full of toys and other trinkets of childhood. All the images a sense of familiarity as the title foresaw but also brought forth a sense of something being very off. It was not quite terrifying, but left me uneasy and questioning why these images provoked such a response.  I looked into it more, learning that such sites were called “liminal spaces.” A liminal space in an anthropological sense is a period of transition in a person’s life between one event and another. Think of it as almost a purgatory, ambiguous and disorienting. I think one liminal space in all of our lives was the period between March 2020 and August 2020 in early quarantine. It was by far the oddest transition al...

  I generally steer away from my own personal experiences in blogs. Something about people telling me that once I start on talking about my experiences I usually spiral into a rant about something entirely different. Though since this is the last blog post for this class, I might as well, right?  I always used to call nostalgia a useless emotion. But I ended up writing a blog last quarter on the psychological reasons as to why it exists. See, nostalgia makes you sad and makes you feel like there’s no time you’d rather be in but now. But I’d like to think that reminiscing is what gives things its meaning. If we go through life without reflecting on what happened, things seem to go by too fast and eventually become too blurry in our memories. Sometimes a little sadness is good for the mind. If you’ve ever watched the movie Inside Out you’d know what I mean. This last weekend, in a haze of nostalgic yearning, I looked through an app called Google Keep that I would write short...

Memories of the Fallen   They say that when you die, there actually are two deaths: "when [on]e is buried in the ground and the last time someone says [one's] name." How do you remember those that came before us or have fallen? With us moving into Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried  and how the legacies of the dead, both "enemy" and ally, live on in our minds, the memories of the fallen are as relevant as can be. How do you remember somebody that was killed in a foreign nation ? That was the question for the thousands of soldiers stationed in Vietnam, with their squadmates killed and their bodies lost. How does one truly immortalize  the dead, when all you have of them are memories and nothing else? People have their own methods, but all seem to fade with time. Stories are the most common, with a select few becoming as well-known as LT. Cross in The Things They Carried , but most are lost. Yet these legacies are the most important part of the war: tho...

Image Credits: https://francescolelli.info/tutorial/neural-networks-a-collection-of-youtube-videos-for-learning-the-basics/ Human beings learn from observations and our knowledge comes from our memory of past observations and experiences. As Ben Dickson explains, “Your biological neural network [reprocesses] your past experience to deal with a novel situation. For example, we know that an apple is an apple because of past experiences, where a similar-looking fruit was an apple.  In CSP, we recently learned about Neural Networks, which are a key aspect of Machine Learning. Neural Networks enable machines to learn and develop their own algorithms, rather than relying on a computer programmer. I found it fascinating that this relatively new, complex technology is largely inspired by the basic structure of the human brain and the biological concept of memory. Essentially, Neural Networks are used to train a computer using a large dataset of examples, so that they can recognize trends a...

      I recently came across a new creative idea widely followed in the fashion industry (commonly associated with Virgil Abloh); it is called the 3% rule. The concept of the 3% rule is that when creating something new, you only need to change the original product by 3%. This creates a common association behind all the pieces and removes the pressure to create something fully original immediately. Artists often feel a need to come up with big ideas quickly, but in reality what we call "big ideas" are just small ideas slowly building off of each other to the point wherein the end there are only very few similarities between the latter and the former. Even when you look at the evolution of humans, the earliest human beings are so much more different than us. However, when you look at the evolution of humans, you can see that the changes to their structure are little and subtle. Slowly, these subtle changes turn into something "distinct."     There is this saying t...

The B.C Rich Warlock This last blog post really stumped me. As usual I had no idea what to write nor did I have the motivation to unearth a memory based study from the depths of the internet. However, when it comes to memory, I have some significant memories from sitting at this desk in my room. Distance learning was quite a unique experience, and often times I find myself thinking it'd be so much easier to just have to be in Zoom calls all over again. I had time to do things and my memories of doing other things really revolved around one specific hobby: playing guitar.  I love music but probably not as much as one who practices it should, as I only manage to really get around to practicing every so often and for an hour or two at best. However, over the course of my many years playing the instrument I've had many memories revolving around it. It first started when I decided I was too bored of the piano and wanted to play guitar, a much more appealing instrument to me. I fiddl...