Trying out Pilot’s Kakuno Fountain Pen
Tag Archives: Writing
Forty One
For the third year in a row, my birthday fell on a rainy day. It’s the middle of the monsoon season and there are, as I write this, three tropical storms barreling across the Pacific towards Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines one after another.
It didn’t stop us from going all the way out to Metro Manila to celebrate. First stop was the Gundam Base Pop Up Store in Shangri-La Plaza. We had higher expectations but we weren’t disappointed neither. It was the closest we could get to visiting Japan to experience the Gundam Base and the kids were delighted by the many Gunpla on display.
Next stop was at the IMAX theater to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. COVID kept me away from the movie house and I promised that when I do return, it would be to see a Christopher Nolan film. So after almost seven years, I did and while opinions are split, I thoroughly enjoyed Nolan’s take on the classic epic. It’s not the definitive nor the best one, but it’s something that anyone could see and still walk away with the feeling that they’d been on an adventure. I’ll leave the rest to the critics and scholars to argue about.
Overall, it was a great day. Looking back, I’m more than satisfied that we are in a much better place now. There are much more options or paths available for us to achieve our goals. Surely there storms and bad weather will never go away, but we are now more than capable to see things through and come out in a much better shape.
So cheers to a year and four decades!
Forty
As I write this, typhoon Emong (Co-May) is barreling through Northern Luzon bringing winds up to 184 km/h. It’s the second tropical storm to hit since last week, making the effects of the Southwest Monsoon more severe as today marks the 7th consecutive days of heavy rains.
As with every monsoon season that gets worse by accompanying typhoons, Metro Manila and surrounding provinces suffer from widespread flooding, disrupting school, businesses and making it harder and dangerous to come to work. Obviously, the government has failed to do its duty despite spending billions of public funds in numerous flood control projects throughout the country.
In the midst of it all, I mark four decades of walking this earth. Celebrations have been kept simple and muted, as we all try to shelter in place and ride out the storm. Literally. Since last year, there have been some progress on the ‘goals’ I’ve laid down. It’s not on the blogging, podcasting or pushing out a newsletter side, but getting a better sense of the overall direction I want to go on now that I’ve reached this milestone. There’s a great level of confidence that come next year, we would in a better place. It all sounds a bit exciting, to say the least.
Another milestone that makes this year a little bit more special is it coincides with the 30th anniversary of my favorite Gundam series – Mobile Suit Gundam Wing which first aired in Japan in 1995. It was the first Gundam series to be aired on US television, introducing many young boys and girls of the 2000s to the world of Gundam. It wasn’t the best series in the franchise but the Gundam franchise wouldn’t be as big and popular as it is today if it weren’t for Gundam Wing.
As part of the 30th anniversary celebrations, Bandai has released a ‘clean’ (no opening credits) version of Gundam Wing’s opening theme – “Just Communication” for fans of the series to enjoy:
A place for your words, thoughts, and content
Eleven years since Jon Udell asked where have all the bloggers gone, I still find myself asking the same question from time to time. We all know the answer to this, the rise of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, the defunct Google+, TikTok, Instagram, etc has captured the online conversation. Google didn’t help when it killed off its Google Reader app.
But thanks to Scott Hanselman, the realization that one should continue to blog and do so on your own domain instead of putting it all in one or scattered across walled gardens would ensure that you have control of and ownership of your words.
Just look at the mess Twitter is now in. Musk rebranding it to ‘X’ is just but the latest evidence that social media platforms will come and go, and each time one goes under after going through ‘enshittification‘, what happens to all of your content?
With a blog, there will always be a place for your words, thoughts, and other content.
No AI was used in writing this blog
When the AI revolution broke out, my timeline was flooded with AI ‘gurus’ with all the praise, tutorials, and hacks to maximize it for work and in particular writing. Never mind that most of these ‘experts’ were once ‘crypto bros’ when cryptocurrencies were all the craze.
Anyway, I kept an open mind and even got excited about AI because for a moment I was hyped with the prospects of how beneficial these neural networks would be for me, thinking at long last, this could help me get back to regularly publishing content again.
When I finally got the chance to try out ChatGPT and Google Bard to write a draft blog post, the thrill quickly evaporated. It’s not that the results were bad, heck I said to myself “I finally found myself an editor”. It’s just that the reading of the output felt like it was no longer my work. I could not find my voice in it, immediately I knew it wasn’t my work anymore. It felt unauthentic.
So that was how I quickly reverted back to my own words and writing process. Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t turn me into an AI naysayer as there’s genuinely some value in using it. Maybe I just used the wrong prompts and need to learn more about how to better use it, and I will. Just not for my writing.
Instead, AI has helped me with ‘spit-balling’ ideas and supplementing online searches, which pretty much suits my needs. As for my writing, it’s still just me, my notes, and a blank screen or piece of paper.