I Only Want Sympathy In The Form Of You

[Dance Dance – Fall Out Boy]

This is from the life and laughs of this uni assignment

This really isn’t that fantastic a rant but I told myself to write at least 2 blog posts a week for CMEL.

I had this thought a few years ago:

I was walking home from school in Yr 8 I think it was, and it was around the time when Pokemon came out with FireRed and LeafGreen.

I remember that this caused my friend’s (apparently non-Pokemon literate) sister some confusion. We explained that FireRed and LeafGreen were revamps of the original Pokemon games for the GBA, so they’re essentially the same game but it looks better and a few more features, right?

Then she asked, “But weren’t the originals Red and Blue?”

I answered, “In Japan, when the games first came out, they had Red and Green. For some reason when the US picked it up, they changed Green to Blue. Obviously for the remake they decided to go back to green.”

She asked, “What difference does it make, apart from the fact that Blastoise got replaced with Venusaur?” (She didn’t actually say the names. She said “the big turtle thing with the water hose”, and “the big plant monster”.)

And at that point, the Yr 8 me started going off on a tangent about the meaning of words. My friend and his sister got very bored very quickly, but I think I’ll explain what I ranted about, to the extent that I remember:

There really isn’t that much of a difference aside from the fact that at the start you now get to choose Green as your name instead of Blue. Everything else is pretty much the same – the same Pokemon are available and inversely unavailable on LeafGreen as it was on Blue. So, really, it was just some stupid choice in words and colors.

I wondered (out loud), what got people to choose the words “blue” and “green”. My grandparents used to mix the words “blue” and “green” together (in Chinese) when describing something that is colored blue, and something that is colored green. Mostly, they use “green”. So for example, the grass is green, and my blue sweater is “green”. There probably is a historical/linguistic reason behind why older generation Chinese people do this, but I don’t know it.

Now, there is obviously a difference between “blue” and “green”. Blue is the color of the dashboard on this blog (unless of course you changed it) and green is what trees would look like if Melbourne left the drought. But why are there two different words (we say two, but let’s not argue over cerulean and celadon – yes, more Pokemon references) for these two different colors? Obviously my grandparents went through the better part of their lives differentiating between water and grass using the word “green”, so it’s not like the world will implode if we bunched those two together. And yet in school, Naiads, the blue house of water nymphs never cheered for Dryads, the green house of tree nymphs – or, for a much better metaphor, Ravenclaw never cheered for Slytherine. We would have been mortified if someone said that the blue house and the green house were “the green house” (especially the blue house).

We differentiate between these colors with our words because we want to, not because we need to. It makes life easier and more varied if we have two different words for what obviously can be a mixed concept. I know you’re probably thinking “yeah but if we say the ocean is green, we’re in for an environmental disaster and not doing anything about it” but that’s because you grew up being told the ocean is normal when it’s “blue”, and if it’s “green” it’s dirty. But we have words for “contaminated water” so it is feasible that we can go through life knowing the water is “green” but not to go in if it’s “contaminated”.

Anyway I want to get my 8 hours’ of sleep so I’m heading off. See how much thought Pokemon can provoke?

Alex.

P.S. Title has almost no relevance to the blog, which isn’t a great idea.

I will try my hardest to incorporate Pokemon into anything.

Alex.

Call This A Prelude To A Lifetime Of You

[Dismantle.Repair. – Anberlin]

My Semester 2 subject Culture, Media and Everyday Life requires me to keep this blog for a semester, where I write about my thoughts on the subject. It actually means I have to write there rather often. It’s like the Yr 11 English assignment all over again.

Basically, the blog is so fantastically named The Life And Laughs Of This Uni Assignment, and I have linked this blog to that blog. I will link that blog to this blog too, but I don’t think you can comment anonymously. Still, if you read something that got your interest, you can always just comment me here, or leave a comment on my Formspring, and I will answer it in that blog.

This juggle act wasn’t actually my choice, but hey.

Now, in the lecture today the teacher was trying to tell us about what to do, and in her curious haste, Mai posted a blog post titled “3:56PM on a lazy Monday afternoon“, which was during the lecture. Right after she posted it, the lecturer went on the homepage Dashboard where all the posts can be seen, and remarked “oh look we have the latest post here…which…was posted a few minutes ago. Huh, I wonder if someone was posting during this lecture.” At this point, Mai was cowering in embarrassment while the rest of us around her shook with silent laughter. I wish, oh I wished the lecturer would click into the post, where Mai wrote “I may or may not be blogging during a lecture”, but that didn’t happen.

As a result, though, Mai is getting insane blog hits and she hasn’t written anything. And the amount of interaction and hits we receive go towards how well our marks are at the end of the semester.

I’d like to think that I have an advantage in this, because I already am used to blogging, but hey, we’ll see.

So, by all means, help me and go to that blog often!

Alex.

P.S. Unfortunately the blog wouldn’t show my name as Alex…