Not Feeling Very Proactive Today

April 1, 2008

Blogging and Online

I should probably start here for today. In the past 2 weeks my proactivity online has really dwindled. Usually when I get the free time online I’ll be running around contributing on forums, networking with other bloggers and doing a whole bunch of that stuff. But lately I have felt a lack of motivation for participating in these areas. I’ve been preferring to sit back, unnoticed and just read and investigate issues instead of participating in discussion. I’ve also realized that my posting frequency over at my Gamer blog has been pretty solid, I have some how got into a rhythm for posting up an article once every two days. Also I feel that my writing style is shifting as well, less software driven and more industry and issues driven.

Chinese Exchange

This is in converse to my regular life which has been bouncing along at a fruitful pace. I have been feeling exceedingly pressured lately by the prospect of this Chinese exchange in September. My problem is that I am running out of time and I keep on hitting dead ends.

You see my original plan and it’s back up plan have been thrown out of the window. Fortunately I have secured a second back up plan which should guarantee me a spot in China this September. You see my original plan was to go on an exchange through a program set up with my home University. Unfortunately I have not heard astounding (but still okay) things about the only University in which I can study at through my home Uni. But even worse I cannot go on an exchange this year as I missed the cut off back in November which is ridiculously early. Of course I could just go next year but unfortunately it doesn’t work in well as the Chinese institutions start school in September (hence a year abroad doesn’t work when I only have ½ a year).

So my second option was to check out what my second University offers (I only study Chinese there). They have a fantastic selection of Universities, unfortunately as I am not a full time student I cannot participate in any of these. Now just yesterday my Chinese tutor told me that it is possible or at least it has been done before with other cross-institutional students. So I still have to check out that.

Finally my last option was recommended to me by some one in one of my linguistics classes. They have a son which undertook this program with great success. Essentially I can go to China and teach oral english, I get accommodation, fantastic support (like a dedicated person in Australia who I can contact 24/7 for help) and a lot of help with the whole process (flight, visa etc.). One of my Chinese friends also knows someone whom successfully par took in one of these exchanges. I teach for 15+ hrs a week and get my own pay. This is only for 5/6 months.

So, I am unsure about what to choose be it this or next year. Essentially I can’t do an exchange with my home University this or next year. I already missed this year and otherwise it doesn’t match up. Also judging from the listings of previous exchanges no one at my University has done an exchange to China for some time. Hmmmm

I don’t want to pay my own way either so just forget that. This leaves me with two choices either teach over in China this September or see if my secondary University will allow me to do an exchange. I’ve been stuck on the idea of the teaching program as I out of all the options it gives me the best support and a lot of free time to explore, make and spend time with friends, do some photography. Where as studying over there either binds me to:

a pre-planned language course
a full on regular course

One runs the risk of being a waste of time and too easy, the other I guess would be suited well to my level.

The Long Haul

In the past year I have had this constant idea ringing in my head and it continually frustrates me beyond belief. You know, this year is the seventh year of me studying Chinese? This fact frustrates me exceedingly because I am currently an average student in a class of students whom this year is their third. I feel as though the 5 years of study at school almost counts for nought. I feel very frustrated about this because I feel that I am continually being overtaken.

The majority of my Chinese study has been in the past 2 years which I have soley focused on the study. Before that my study involved 4hrs a week of classes at school for several years. I guess if I look at it like that then I should not feel as bad as the majority of that time has not consisted of concentrated study and infact is quite forgettable.

Theres two other things that I want to factor in; firstly my progress over the past ummm 8 months which has been huge, seriously leaps and bounds. Secondly is the prospect of over seas study, I think that this will help me continue on the trend of leaps and bounds and will help me make the next leap to fluency. I can feel myself slowly closing in on this goal, so it shouldn’t be too long before I get there. Probably less than 2 years I suspect.

Still, having this weight of 7 years around is just so infuriating.

Well thats what I’ve been doing over the past week. Well not really, but its what has been on my mind lately.

Posted in Life | Comments (0)

Doobie Doobie Do

March 21, 2008

Written on Thursday 20th March 2008

Just want to disperse a few ideas that have been on my mind in the past two weeks.

Lately

Lately my studies and life have been traveling at a manageable pace. Thanks to the Easter holiday weekend I have already completed my 3rd week of Univeristy. I used the word manageable as I can feel the presence of strain from many out of study pressures slowly mounting. I hope that I will be able to continue to keep them at bay at least for a while longer.

I am not sure but I am continually finding that I have less time on my hands to meet my own personal demands. Some of which I will talk about later. I am trying to balance University studies with additional language study with my Chinese friends, marketing and writing for my Gamer Blog as well as par taking in other social activities in and around Uni. Maybe I have alterered my perception of the time it takes to do things but it seems that everything that I work on requires a dedicated chunk of time.

For example, some of the blog articles (lets say the 3-4 page articles) that I write can take about 2-3hrs to write, another hour to proof read and then another 2 hours to gather any additional media or links and finally post on the site with a bit more uploading. It is a challenging task.

It is a similar case with Chinese, although I am continuously improving, I don’t find that I have enough time to fit everything that I want to in. Even though I practice with my friends for 8+ hrs a week I still find that we don’t manage to plough through all of the pre-prepared material. It is not a case of inefficiency but rather time not matching with demand.

Maybe this is all a sign that I am doing too much which is probably true. In anycase I have to figure out a way of managing myself under these circumstances.

Beyond my daily pressures life really has been fine. I am enjoying my classes and am continually finding myself surrounded by more people I know which as I mentioned previously is very pleasing. I enjoy good conversation and for most people I feel that it is what is taking place.

A Demand For Better Writing

I feel somewhat enlightened and inspired by some of what is going around me. In the past 3 weeks I have felt a move in me to push for a high quality of writing within my Gamer Blog. I have been enlightened of course by some of my fellow bloggers whom are constantly raising the bar in terms of writing quality. But it hasn’t just been these guys that have shifted my perception on video game writing.

In one of my courses at University we study language, technology and the relationship between the two. The whole vibe around this courses has encouraged me personally to think about how I can improve my own level of english when sharing ideas under these fields, one pre-existing outlet of this is obviously my gaming blog. As our course director puts it this course is really our own, we navigate the ship in terms of what we want to cover in some areas. An example of such is our major assignment where we choose an a topic of interests, we study and research this ourselves and provide a report on our findings. Our tutor even talked about the University possibly publishing these as journals if the quality was there. I find this so whole course so exciting because the study of language and technology, conversational analysis and technology, language as a second language tool all of these things are something which I am familiar with as a student of language and an enthusiast of tech and yet the research into these areas is lacking. I feel somewhat motivated into contributing into this area of writing despite being only a lowly blogger.

From this idea I have been thinking about what I can do to make my gaming blog much more intelligent. I want to raise the profile of writing but ensure that my writing is still accessible to the masses. Under my niche of video games I feel as though there is a divide among smaller video game blogging niches. There are enthusiasts blogs like myself, from there the next level comes in talking about game design and philosophies etc. So in following the previous model I would have to move my focus to a more philosophical way of talking about video games. Which is fine, unfortunately this is not exactly what I want to do.

With exclusions in mind I find that most video game blogs of this, high profile nature are simply unaccessible. I have read through hundreds of video game blogs dedicated to game design, creation and the like and they all have one thing in common. They all speak of a foreign language of which I am unfamiliar with. I find this deeply offensive as someone whom has been gaming for his whole life why is it that these game design blogs are simply nonsensical to me? Maybe I am too stupid for my own good but what is the point of having a niche of blogs of this nature if they are inaccessible to others wanting to pick up and read about this topic.

(Stay with me on this one) I have recently been thinking a lot about game design and soon enough I will post up numerous posts on DP’s Gamer Blog about this. Something which I find so fascinating is casual gaming and how I believe all games can benefit from taking the soul of the casual gaming design principles; that is accessibility. I think that a game like Super Mario Galaxy represents this mantra perfectly; the casual player can pick this game up and feels welcomed, they can understand the fundamentals of this game and enjoy it yet someone like me a ‘core’ gamer can pick this game up and play it and also feel completely satisfied but on a different level.

I wish to adopt this scheme to DP’s Gamer Blog. For as many articles as possible I want people that don’t play games to be able to read my blog, understand it and feel satisfied. I also wish that more thoughtful gamers can read my blog and also feel satisfied.

Talking about video games requires at least some background knowledge of software in order to understand which will be my biggest issue. But with this in mind I want to talk more on game design and industry issues as well as my usual observations and thoughts of new and old gaming software. My main goal is to ease people in, to draw them in with writing that makes sense and keeping them in all the while not only speeding up the linguistic rhythm but also increasing the depth of industry and software relevance.

It is all a focus on understanding which I see as crucial. The more people understand the reasoning behind why we play video games the better our industry will be. I think that the rise of bloggers like News Week’s N’gai Croal are pushing video game journalism into new, more intelligent areas. I want to be a part of that but I also want to ensure that this type of writing can still be accessible for everyone. To greater improve understanding among classes of readers.

I want the enthusiasts, the casual players, the non players and of course the people that write for these game design blogs to all be able to get something out of my writing. Such a movement obviously is a difficult task and something that I honestly wish to pursue. It is something that will take me a long time to think about and understand what is required to write in such a way. But it is something which I find is improve and will drive our medium forward.

BTW I have also found the work of MIT’s Henry Jenkins to help push me towards this idea.

Study Abroad

Well I am glad to get all of that off my chest, now I just need the time to be able to write those types of articles. The other thing which has constantly been on my mind is studying abroad. After much though I have realized that my time has come for me to finally study abroad in China.

I am planning on enrolling into a Chinese University and hence obviously living in China tarting this September. Clearly it is a while off which is why I am trying to get ideas of where I will study. I have 3 main opportunities, I can apply for a University in ShanHai with my main University, I have applied for a scholarship for a second year University or I can find my own University and enrol hopefully grabbing a grant in the process to save me some coinage.

Whatever the case I feel as though this is the necessary step. I have built up a clear foundation of Chinese grammar, you know I am just ready. I have the language skills, enthusiasm and money in the bank to do this. I know that it is my time to take this challenge which I have been supported by friends whom agree that it is my time.

I am always pushing for new frontiers in my life. Co-developing and selling my first video game with my twin brother, building a series of websites, most notably a video game blog in which I have had to learn the ways this medium works and have adapted to it and come to a point in which I am thriving off this type of culture. In year 12 I proved that I can actually hold my own in a series of subjects which had indeed been taunting me for some 9 years (long story that one). Then finally crawling my way back to where I wanted to be with my Chinese study.

I don’t like to wank over myself or proclaim that I am better than anyone else because I am not, I am actually extremely modest in real life. What I have found though is that all of the aforementioned examples are all milestones. Are all instances in which I never thought that I could amount to. Returning to Chinese classes this year has starkly reminded me of my efforts(studying Chinese) over the past 8 months. Its alerted me of my progress but much more importantly it has set in stone and made perfectly clear what is required of me to continue down this path. I feel that this trip to China, which will be at least a year of study abroad (from there it depends) is the next logical step.

Posted in Life | Comments (1)

Updates and Chinese New Year

February 21, 2008

Originally Written on Saturday the 16th 0f Feb, 2007

Ah, Saturday morning and I don’t have to go to work. I love life. ^_^

This week I made a (very) little bit of money from my gaming blog which has given me a solid perspective at what numbers I need to aim for to make a solid, weekend job filling pay packet. I have a long way to go, thats for sure. But I know that I can make it.

It also makes me more excited about this upcoming site that I have in the works much more exciting. Unfortunately It looks like it will take a bit longer to be released yet. I need my brother to adapt a new custom coded backend to it. He should finish all current projects in 2 weeks or so and from there it will take maybe 2 months. I dunno.

Anyways, I feel as though I have been neglecting DP.com for the past week (date today being the 16th). I’ve been out almost every day this week and I was busy near the end of last week as well. When I have been at home though I’ve been writing and editing a new guest post for RacketBoy’s Retro Gaming blog. I haven’t felt like writing anything else really and have been doing that as well as plenty of Chinese study.

I’m moving into some much more interesting study mediums in Chinese. I’ve wanted to quickly improve my listening ability so I have been listening to more chinese podcasts and I’ve starting learning from a few movies as well as well as the usual articles. Oh, this week I also started reading news from Xin Hua Net as well.

Over the holidays I started by reviewing the past years work, so I did a lot of focused writing using important grammar, then I moved onto applying that into essays which I wrote about 4/5 of. From 500-2000 characters each. This finished up sometime in December, when I started going thru all of the texts in last years text book as well as some news articles. From it building lists of vocab, grammar and general language quirks that I didn’t understand and now I’m working on full news articles, podcasts and movies. Oh, I’m also onto the stage where I am looking into problems with my own translation techniques because sometimes I feel restricted during conversation; its not that I don’t know how to say the sentence in Chinese but rather it is something in english which is upsetting the translation. They are really simple problems that really are doing me up the arse. So I want to iron those out this week. And then before you know it it will be a new year of Chinese at Uni. I won’t be able to complete all of last years additional texts which is a little is disheartening but it is not too bad.

The reason why I have quickly decided to start focusing on my listening is because of two reasons, my speaking does not match my listening skills which is murdering my conversations skills and secondly back when I decided this it was Chinese new year. Well just about Chinese new year.

As you’d expect Chinese New Year is the biggest celebration on the Lunar calender. That week I was invited to two new year celebrations. You know, I’ve lost contact with one of my good Chinese mates and I don’t know if he has had to return back to China or not. Argh this is terrible.

Anyways I was invited to two different dinners, unfortunately I could only go to one because I don’t think that my friend really thought about it when she asked me if I wanted to come along as it was a part of a community group thing and I was out booked. But that was fine. That weekend she did a cool little celebration dance in China town which was great.

Also today is her 22nd birthday party (and I am the only non Asian person attending, so yeah plenty of practice). So there has been numerous opportunities in which I would need to utilize my listening skills, so I figured that it’d be worth catching up.

What else has been going down. Umm been practicing my driving skills. Playing some Sonic Gems Collection which I might post impressions of on DP.com. I recorded an advertisement with Matty Jay to feature in a podcast. We’ve also been tossing up other ideas. I’ve got a list of articles and ideas that I am looking to put into action for DP.com as well. They’ll just take a lot of work..

Can’t really think of anything else that has been going down. Went on a short photography trip the other weekend, networking with more bloggers, working thru DKC 2 with my brother on co-op. Oh and slowly working on this new site and promotion Daniel Primed.com. I’m looking forward to getting back on track with the quality of articles as well. So sorry for the recent, slight dip.

Anyways thats it, you probably won’t read this until at least a week for now as I normally forget about updating this blog. Thanks for reading if you got this far.

Posted in Life | Comments (0)