Transience

I really wanted to like this movie, but there were some aspects that left me troubled. What caught my interest was this all-Japanese cast in all-Japanese medium movie was directed by an Iranian. I was not familiar with any of his previous works. So, without delving into the synopsis or any review beforehand, I just went ahead with the movie. The whole movie involves a lot of still camera, no soundtrack, a lot of ambient sounds, characters sitting around and talking, a kind of minimalism reminiscent of movies like Before Sunrise and Before Sunset that I really adore. The first scene was interesting because you hear someone talking but the person wasn't on screen, and the whole frame was just a slew of people minding their own business in a bar. It's as if the camera was shot from a person's point of view sitting at one of the tables in the bar and you're tuned in to someone's phone conversation. Much of the other shots were also composed of "close"...

Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative Book Reflection Nurul Matkamil 1160337 At the beginning of every chapter, Thomas King would start off with a story of the earth riding on a turtle’s back. The point he wanted to drive home with this is that when circumstances deny you of having even the right of identity, all you really have are your stories that you must tell to assert your individuality. It just goes to show that sometimes circumstances have not been kind to certain parties and some voices will go unheard if no one spares a thought to consider all interests equally. In the last chapter, he talked about the story of the wolf taking away the ducks’ feather after promising them “protection”. He relates this with the behaviour of the government making treaties with the native people to “protect” them, but in reality, the legislations were there to monitor them, strip them of their land and erase their race by setting regulations to define who is or not an India...

Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress Book Reflection Nurul Matkamil 1160337 Ronald Wright poses three of Gauguin’s questions: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? He then proceeds to answer them by telling society to learn from past civilisations that fall victim to “progress traps”. These progress traps are a product of the obsession for the advancement of technology which in the end, caused the very down fall of the civilisation as these advancements proceed with little to no consideration on the impact it has on nature and society. One such example of a progress trap is the Mesopotamian civilisation that improves its crop production and soil fertility by using the advancement of irrigation technology that diverts the river flow of the Tigris and Euphrates to water other barren parts. So, due to more coverage of area that they can water, the civilisation grew. However, because of the design of the irrigation went against the natural flow of water, this r...

December 31, 2013 Dear Joel, Before I tell you why I got an A in your class, I’d like to reminisce the first day of class. It’s always good to see where you began to appreciate how you got to where you are now. I came to the first day of class, expecting what would be a typical ethics course. Supposedly it should add value to my personal conduct as an engineer and make me a responsible future engineer who is in tune with societal issues and one who designs for sustainability. I’ve had other ethics courses before, but memorizing a list from a textbook wasn’t really all that memorable. However, your mouse trap fetish on the first day did make an indelible impression on me, and as I had hoped, you didn’t let my expectations down for the whole term in terms of serving up new perspectives and interesting lessons. My experience in your class was indeed a memorable one, if not, a personally life changing one. It certainly made me think about a lot more issues that didn’t occur to me to th...

Reflection: I have honestly never done an ecological footprint of my lifestyle, neither considered doing it. I have vaguely heard of the idea, but I didn’t see any importance or urgency to do it. So, as I was doing the assignment, I was actually forced to consider every little thing I do in my daily life which I never really thought of before. Even small things like recycling, or the amount of meat you eat, and turning off the lights could contribute so much to your ecological footprint. I feel that if I had known everything in detail, it would have been more accurate. Based on the quiz results, my first reaction was well, “it could have been worse”, but it’s not exactly great either. Since we only really have resources from one earth, and already, my daily lifestyle is doing harm to the world, if everyone on earth decided to adopt it. That’s not even considering other people’s lifestyles that might be more exhaustive than mine. I guess it’s due to the fact that we live in a consumeris...

Introduction: I decided to go for this challenge because my friends and I agree that I am a social media addict. I post at least 10 status updates on my Facebook and Twitter every day, and I never logout from both accounts. My mornings are spent checking Facebook at the waking hour. I’ve also had multiple social media accounts. I was hoping that going 7 days without social media would help cure me of this addiction and hopefully teach me how to use social media in moderation, as well as gain some form of insight. Report and reflection: 7 days of going without social media for me drove me into an existential crisis. Well, no, that’s exaggerating it a little bit, but the impact was felt because I was so used of having social media being an integral part of my daily routines as well as my interaction with people. It gets kind of frustrating when I can’t get the updates I want really fast and when I watch a funny video, or thought up of something interesting and I couldn’t share it with pe...

I am sometimes grateful for the moments of solitude in a life where there is a constant influx of deadlines and to-do lists, because that’s when I get to sit down and consolidate my own thoughts and experiences. Sometimes, you forget to “check” yourself once in a while, as you keep telling yourself to move on to the next thing. Having ambitions and chasing grades is not a bad thing, but that doesn’t mean your perspectives in life should remain stagnant just because you don’t have time to think about it. 4AO3 classes so far has given me that space to stop and think of other things in life. In engineering, we have a top-down and bottom-up approach. 4AO3 is sort of a bottom-up approach as you take a step back and see where the individual engineer as a module fit into the rest of the system, which is the society, or the rest of the world. I could suddenly see the bigger picture of my role in the society. How my slaving away in circuit analyses is not just for the sake of it, but it is to e...

Firstly, I should make my biases clear, but I'm pretty sure it's obvious. I've seen the Sam Raimi trilogy and of course, I will be comparing it to the reboot. After all, the reboot came a little bit too soon after the trilogy. Most of what follows will probably just be my personal preferences and gripes. Warning, spoilers abound. 1. Peter Parker I liked the doe-eyed Tobey Maguire more as the day-to-day Peter Parker. He's the nerdy, unsure of himself, normal guy. Andrew Garfield's cheeky boyish look doesn't make me buy the Peter Parker-ness. Andrew Garfield looks like he belongs to some teen series. 2. Mary Jane versus Gwen Stacy I hated Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane. She's completely helpless like the traditional damsel in distress and sometimes her whining about her relationship with Peter Parker, seems, idk, petty, and sometimes she seems to not understand his predicament of being Spider-man and not being able to be there for her all th...

December 22, 2013 at 1:15pm Public Friends Friends except Acquaintances Only Me Custom McMaster family Family See all lists... interview pals junior faris McMaster Faculty of Engineering girls Taylor's College Subang Jaya McMaster University ex-sklk mates AYTR SBP/ MARA acquaintances farisian 0509 Hamilton, Ontario Area AYTR 2010 (PKTR 2009) senior faris muslims Taylor's farisian 0408 farisian 0307 cikgu faris YTM Course Sekolah Menengah Sains Tengku Muhammad Faris Petra SMS Tengku Muhammad Faris Petra Taylor's Acquaintances Go Back Like the setting sun against the gilded hills Yellow, auburn, orange, My youth is in its autumn And with it, the waning of my heart’s eloquence Could I have been all these while Regretting every time unspent And delaying the days to repent?

Tracing phrases from the dying flame Stirring the ashes as the smoke wistfully retires There’s no salvaging the passionate burns Drawing quiet utterances with bowed eyelids Drowning incoherence in the midst of purpose There’s no salvaging bruised egos Oh I suppose I could walk away with my head still underwater Words are empty, but our bodies emptier still Vessels of fleeting existence Storm clouds of unmet intentions The fool I played takes the curtain call I will nurse my regrets silently As I watch you take leave Without my overdue apologies   

I just finished all my exams, I'm trying to get myself sorted. A trip to Vancouver happening soon in a few days woohoo. I'll try to find jobs after I get back from vacation, else, I'll probably think about what to do after that. So far, to sum up my academic year: First term left me battered, but I turned out fine in the end, and true to my track record, my second term is so much worse than my first term performance wise. I guess robotics and control systems is not my strongest suit. I should probably stick to programming and/or computer engineering courses. I had 5 in a row first term, second term, they decided to give me 4 in a row, and it still wasn't easier. I did badly for both exams that I had on the same day. I was actually kind of disappointed, no, actually, I'm pretty depressed, that I did badly because I had a lot of fun learning those two courses, but I guess I was really burnt out at that point. Anatomy wasn't as interesting as first term, but ...