Personal Reflections – Page 15

The ultimate stay-awake playlist

My sleep cycle has been massively screwed for the past few days. I sleep after having breakfast in the morning at 7am, then wake up around 4pm-ish…and eat an early dinner at 7pm. It doesn’t help that both my roommates – who are on exchange here from Scotland – are also locked on to British Standard Time for their daily routines. (One of them is ‘legally’ squatting in our room. There’s even an official application form here, in case you want to squat in a friend’s room.)

This screwed up schedule started off when I started on a project right now, on research into speech recognition technologies. I have a germ of an idea right now that I’m working on but I need to research deeper into speech recognition and linguistics. It will definitely need time to work on – probably many months.

Anyway, staying awake when everything else is so quiet is quite a task! I can’t get any coffee so I need to keep myself awake with music. And no band is better at stay-awake music than Linkin Park. When you’re dropping dead out of exhaustion at 3.38am nothing perks up your concentration as listening to Faint does. (You need to watch the music video than just listen to the song for full effect.) Seriously, the energy in that song is insane.

I also discovered recently that for reasons yet unknown the copy of Meteora that I had on my hard disk was missing two of the best tracks in the album – Figure.09 and Nobody’s Listening.

A lot of mockery directed at Linkin Park for their first few albums has hinged around their ‘screamo rock’ style. And yet I see a number of friends who turned up their noses earlier at Linkin Park now “wishing for the old Linkin Park back” after Minutes To Midnight and A Thousand Suns. Much like the backlash Inception is facing after it became a blockbuster, Linkin Park became a ‘guilty pleasure’ for the same people who enjoyed their initial style.

Ironically now that Linkin Park has, you could say in a sense, heard the feedback and branched into a new direction making politically-loaded albums like A Thousand Suns you see more clamouring for them to go back to what they were! Unlike their albums so far that contained hit singles that could stand alone, A Thousand Suns works best when you here it in its entirety. In world where single-track downloads through iTunes is shaping the future of the music industry, it’s not hard to understand why many people “don’t like how LP sounds now”. It’s no longer about ‘the sound’, it’s about ‘the experience’.

I confess that when I first heard The Catalyst – premiering in the Medal of Honor trailer – I hated it. Over a period of replays and finally getting to hear the album in its entirety after it was released, I can say that as an album this is the best work Linkin Park has ever done. Vivek has written a better review of A Thousand Suns than I could ever have written, so if you fancy a review then check out his review.

And when I was watching the Faint music video for the n-th time tonight (tomorning?) trying to stay awake, it struck me how different it was from the music video for, say, The Catalyst.

Will a Linkin Park concert with their new songs be as frenetic? I’d sure love to attend one to find out! If only they go on tour and include Singapore as a leg – like Iron Maiden is, in the coming months.

What’s your favourite ‘stay-awake’ song / playlist?

Catching The Dragon

I have been blogging for little over six years now. In those six years, I have known (mostly online) and followed a host of school and college based bloggers. You could say I’m a lurker on most blogs, as I don’t usually leave comments until I feel I have at least a modicum of understanding who the person writing is – at least their online persona. I say online persona because I know that even after reading hundreds of pages written by a blogger over many years, it’s still not enough to know who that person is until the time you meet that person and have an actual, real conversation. Bloggers write about what they want to say and not who they are. (That is certainly true for me. There are huge chunks of my life I don’t talk about or ever will on my blog; this is not the place for it.)

But I digress. Having followed a considerable number of school and college bloggers, I can’t help but notice how…inconsistent, shall we say, most of them are in posting new content. I often get the feeling that I don’t know enough about the person to engage in conversation through comments simply because I haven’t got much content to go on. This is inevitable at some level; after all, many who take up blogging are often only experimenting with the medium. There’s a vast sea of ‘dead’ blogs in the blogosphere at all age levels, and since youngsters are more willing to experiment with digital mediums it’s no surprise that a there’s a larger number of dead blogs started by school / college kids.

(On a side note: the number of blogs with ‘thoughts’, ‘ramblings’, ‘musings’, ‘random’ is quite astonishing. Practically all of them, come to think of it.)

No, what I’m referring to the sharp nosedives in posting frequency of hitherto active blogs when school students join college. I’ve seen this happen year after year with near infallible inevitability. I would attribute this to the transition from school-life, where many hours are dictated by school schedule, to college life where there’s relatively complete freedom. The number of hours in a day suddenly seem to shrink and there just doesn’t seem to enough ‘free time’. You never get to catch the dragon.

I’m making this blog post after a gap of three weeks. The irony. But I realize how this situation sets in, having faced it myself. Even when you put thought to planning your day, procrastination is easy in university / college life. Unless you’re facing coursework deadlines, nothing seems truly earth-shattering that it can’t be de-prioritized. The crucial tipping point comes when you put off a blog post you meant to write for too long – by then, too much time may have passed for the post to be relevant, or more importantly feel relevant to the writer – and yet it remains as a niggle in the back of your mind. You don’t want to start another blog post until this one in your head is finished. And thus, you never really catch the dragon.

I’ve a simple way of dealing with this – cut your ‘losses’, and move on. Don’t guilt-trip yourself on overshooting deadlines; if you’ve missed window of opportunity to make a post, then forget it. There are countless posts that even I have stashed away as drafts that are long past their expiry date, but I don’t let that impede me from working on newer content. For me, this feeling is strongest when I’m trying to write a ‘daunting’ blog post – one that I really want to get ‘right’. Editing rough drafts is good. Editing half-finished rough drafts while time just slips by, on the other hand, leads to a story that is doomed to live in your drafts folder. More importantly, if you haven’t written anything for a long while, you must not suppress the urge when you do feel like writing. It helps overcoming the dread of sitting down write that one blog post you really want to work on if you’ve written something else recently.

And if you have stuck with me this far, surely you realize now that this has been nothing but a ruse for me keep the juices flowing while I form the structure of my next blog post?