How to Diet Effectively (a quick post)

Dieting is not difficult. Trust me.

The easiest way to think about dieting (and health in general) is to think about man in its primal state. Consider something that is the staple of the modern diet, found nowhere in primal man

Bread.

Bread sucks, and the reason it tastes so damn good is because it makes no sense from a natural standpoint. But we’ll get back to this in a minute.

Generally, you can think about food in this way:

• Every bite of food has calories, which are just energy food gives you.
• Food can generally be broken down into three categories:
  • Carbohydrates
  • Proteins
  • Fats

Now you might be surprised, but fats are not the enemy here. You, as a human being, were made to eat fat. Think about it. We were originally a hunter-gatherer species. The concept of agriculture and society makes less sense from a biological standpoint, and the fact that we can actually master the Earth like that is fascinating, but it also causes problems like this.

This is probably not the most scientifically sound way to think about it, but here’s how I think of it. Imagine a caveman type of guy. Imagine how he eats. Fruit, dead animals, vegetables, water. That’s really it. Carbs came from fruits and vegetables, fats and proteins came mostly from meat. This is how we evolved to eat.

Then, with the introduction of the millstone, we became able to harness the power of Grain to get more Carbohydrates. And something about grains: They have a LOT of carbohydrates, moreso than can really be found in nature alone. This, naturally, led to people ravenously eating bread to fulfill their needs for carbs, and it becoming a dietary staple. Now, where nearly everything has bread in it, we’ve reached a bit of a problematic situation.

So the simple solution is to manage our intake of Carbohydrates.

Why?

• A: Its healthier! Too many carbs is essentially a dietary overdose, which is never good.
• B: Its easy and leaves us room to eat basically as much as we want
• C: It burns fat naturally because of something called Ketosis

Ketosis is the big five-dollar word that was on Jeopardy a little while ago (You bet I got that one right). It’s the big principle behind the rather extreme Keto diet. Basically, it goes like this:

Your body burns Carbohydrates for energy. Fat is not, in fact, what the body uses primarily for energy. This is why exercise is basically not good for losing weight. Exercise uses energy to strain the muscles, which burns carbs, which get replenished later when you eat carbohydrate-dense food. Don’t get me wrong, Exercise is important for building muscle and getting stronger, but as they say, “six-packs are made in the kitchen, not the gym.”

When you go on a diet like this, you eat less carbs or carbs that don’t absorb as quickly (think Beans). Your body thinks “Oh Jesus Christ where are the carbs what do we do” until it realizes “Oh man look at all this fat we have, sweet!” Your brain basically sends your body into starvation-mode and burns fat for energy instead of carbs, and you lose weight. Or rather, maybe you lose weight. But you definitely lose fat, that’s for sure.

Something I should say right now is that calorie counting doesn’t work, man. The reason is as easy to understand as it is scientific. Calories are your amount of energy. You eat fewer calories, you get tired, it sucks, you quit. You eat the same calories better? Your biochemistry fixes itself. If you tell me that eating 100 calories of grass-fed meat vs. eating 100 calories of Oreos are the same, you’re fooling yourself.

Also, by eating better, it’s harder to eat more calories and still be hungry (meat takes longer to eat than, say, Oreos)

Okay so basic ideas.

1. If its white, or could be white, don’t eat it (In terms of carbs, at least)
2. Drink lots of water and nothing else (don’t drink calories)
3. Select one day a week (usually Friday or a weekend day) and don’t follow this diet. In fact, eat terribly, make yourself sick of snickers bars or whatever it is your vices are
4. You don’t really have to avoid it, but don’t eat as much fruit. Mostly carbs and sugar, so they’re not really the best thing for this diet.

That’ll do it, really. To be more specific, here’s some food you can eat basically whenever you want.

• Eggs (I hope you like these because you’ll be eating them)
• Chicken breast / thigh
• Beef (Go for Grass-Fed, but it’s hard to find so whatever)
• Pork
• Lentils
• Beans that aren’t Jelly
• Spinach
• Asparagus
• Peas
• Basically all vegetables

I’d recommend you stick to this list for most of your meals. You can throw in stuff like Salsa or Guacamole, but that’s probably just my Spanish side speaking.

Basic Ideas:

Breakfast: Two eggs, Salsa, and beans / lentils

Lunch: Salad with as much chicken as you can throw in, stuff with meat in it, just follow your rules

Dinner: Steak and vegetables, maybe with mushrooms

And yes, every Friday (or whichever day), eat like crap. It’ll let you prevent cheating (make a list of crappy stuff you crave during the week and eat ALL OF IT on Friday. There’s science behind this, I promise.

Dieting really isn’t as hard as everyone makes it out to be. I was of average weight, and I lost 9 pounds and two inches off my weight by doing basically zero exercise. And I didn’t really follow this diet religiously, either. The best part is that the weight kept off. I lost nine pounds, stopped the diet, and didn’t gain much more than a pound. Pretty sweet.

Go for it.

How To Own a Kindle and Not Be a Pretentious Moneywaster

Pictured: Probably not saving money

Monetary issues

• 1 Kindle costs $139 dollars plus shipping. Lets round this to 140 for simplicity’s sake.
• Kindle books cost around 10 dollars (Assuming you buy them from amazon), plus you can virtually any classic for free
• Your average paperback book goes for around 15 to 20 dollars, your average hardcover going for around 25 – 30 dollars

So it follows that if you only buy paperbacks that each purchase saves around 5 dollars.
Simple math would tell you that in order for the Kindle to break even you would have to read 28 books. It doesn’t seem like much, but this gets a bit complicated when you factor in that the cost of 28 paperback books (or a kindle with 28 books) is $420. However, if you read that many books it may be profitable for you to get a hold of a kindle.

You can, however get a huge number of classics for free. This is easily accomplished due to the fact that the kindle actually supports .txt files! And thanks to the existence of Project Gutenberg, Classics in .txt format are not difficult to come by.
Take, for example, Stoker’s Dracula. Because Dracula’s copyright has expired, Gutenberg can distribute a digitized version of it. Upon searching their website, I found that they not only had a .txt version, but a kindle ebook as well!
However certain books are not available in Gutenberg’s website. As an alternative, their branch located in Australia has many books that their US branch does not (e.g. Animal Farm, The Great Gatsby, 1984, etc.)

There’s no real way to get around the fact that the Kindle is pretty useless unless you read quite a bit. However, it can be useful and convenient for those who read a great deal.

How Manga Can Help You Learn a Language

I am a huge language learning fanatic. I’ve dabbled in Linguistics, and I’ve learned a bit of Spanish and Japanese. Perhaps the most important tool I’ve used in learning them has been the Spaced Repetition System, using Anki. Those of you who follow my blog may know that I’ve written about Anki before, but I’ve used it for learning a wide variety of skills, one of the most notable being foreign language.

I was introduced to Anki through All Japanese All The Time, which anyone interested in foreign language should check out. In his blog, Kazhumoto uses a number of ideas circulating in the language community. A key concept he details is the reaching of 10,000 sentences in spaced repetition. This, coupled with the spending of 10,000 hours of “doing stuff” in the target language should provide a reasonable depth in the language.

This is where manga comes in.

Manga, for those who do not know, is the Japanese form of comic books, which has a reasonably large following around the world. It goes hand in hand with anime, light novels, and visual novel games, and there is a sizable part of the world who consume translated forms of these.

It is not uncommon for fans of these mediums to take it upon themselves to translate manga, often scanning and replacing the Japanese text with their own, ergo “scanlations.”

While usually in English, there exists a sizable community for translations into other languages, for example Spanish. One of my favorite places to find manga in Spanish is animextremist (which, as a warning, is completely in Spanish.)

In addition to be a lot of fun to read, these translated comic books are an absolute gold mine for sentences to place in an SRS. If you know enough of a language to read basic phrases, its an incredibly great way to learn. Its like having a textbook that teaches you common speech and phrases, is fun to read, and learns at a pace optimal for you.

My personal strategy for using manga to learn languages is to simply read until I come across a phrase I am unfamiliar with. When I find one, I write it in a notebook, along with a translation (I like doing this in Cornell format so that I can use them as quick flashcards in case my laptop battery dies or my hard drive corrupts.) When I reach the end of a chapter (usually around 16 or so pages), I enter the phrases into Anki and learn from there.

If you can find a group that translates manga into another language, it can be an easy and amusing way to inch closer to fluency, and aside that a fun way to spend a few minutes.

 

How Manga Can Help You Learn a Language

I am a huge language learning fanatic. I’ve dabbled in Linguistics, and I’ve learned a bit of Spanish and Japanese. Perhaps the most important tool I’ve used in learning them has been the Spaced Repetition System, using Anki. Those of you who follow my blog may know that I’ve written about Anki before, but I’ve used it for learning a wide variety of skills, one of the most notable being foreign language.

I was introduced to Anki through All Japanese All The Time, which anyone interested in foreign language should check out. In his blog, Kazhumoto uses a number of ideas circulating in the language community. A key concept he details is the reaching of 10,000 sentences in spaced repetition. This, coupled with the spending of 10,000 hours of “doing stuff” in the target language should provide a reasonable depth in the language.

This is where manga comes in.

Manga, for those who do not know, is the Japanese form of comic books, which has a reasonably large following around the world. It goes hand in hand with anime, light novels, and visual novel games, and there is a sizable part of the world who consume translated forms of these.

It is not uncommon for fans of these mediums to take it upon themselves to translate manga, often scanning and replacing the Japanese text with their own, ergo “scanlations.”

While usually in English, there exists a sizable community for translations into other languages, for example Spanish. One of my favorite places to find manga in Spanish is animextremist (which, as a warning, is completely in Spanish.)

In addition to be a lot of fun to read, these translated comic books are an absolute gold mine for sentences to place in an SRS. If you know enough of a language to read basic phrases, its an incredibly great way to learn. Its like having a textbook that teaches you common speech and phrases, is fun to read, and learns at a pace optimal for you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My personal strategy for using manga to learn languages is to simply read until I come across a phrase I am unfamiliar with. When I find one, I write it in a notebook, along with a translation (I like doing this in Cornell format so that I can use them as quick flashcards in case my laptop battery dies or my hard drive corrupts.) When I reach the end of a chapter (usually around 16 or so pages), I enter the phrases into Anki and learn from there.

If you can find a group that translates manga into another language, it can be an easy and amusing way to inch closer to fluency, and aside that a fun way to spend a few minutes.

The M-Net Study Plan

I developed this academic study plan over the course of three months in 2010, intending it to be used for myself and a friend. I developed this program by combining what I knew about learning foreign languages, productivity, and time management. Using this system, I raised my grade-point average from 4.1 to 4.3 in just a few months.

The way that this system works is by having multiple units which co-exist optimally, acting like a sort of butterfly net or mosquito net for information. If there is a small hole in the net, the net does not unravel due to the connections between the units. Hence, M-net.

The main ideas behind this system is as follows.

• Balancing understanding with memorization
• Using updated and more efficient tools and methods than is the current standard
• Using an efficient system that “auto-optimizes” for each individual
• Retaining academic knowledge in the long-term for exams, instead of re-learning it
• Organization and forward planning
• Using a system that naturally progress to a tool to review for midterms or finals
• Using a system that allows much more free time than one based on learning by rote

Ideally, this system takes around 25 minutes per day, although oftentimes the system takes up even less time than that.

The first and most effective unit in this system is a spaced repetition flashcard system. I can’t say I have much experience on which is best, but I’ve used anki for quite a long time.

Anki is a flashcard program which puts paper flashcards to shame. Instead of using a traditional learn-by-rote flashcard system to commit to short term memory for tests, it spaces each card out in order to commit the majority of the information to long term memory. This is incredibly invaluable.

The best part about this is that it spaces out the information in the most optimal way for you, the user, to learn. It doesn’t simply space everything until the end of time, assuming you will remember in a perfect manner. It lets you rank your success on each card, reviewing more difficult material before the easier material. This ensures that you will not waste any time learning.

Using this for school is relatively simple. You’ll want to enter your notes in as questions (which I will elaborate on further), enter your homework questions and enter your test questions into the subject deck. It can get a bit tedious to enter in everything, but even just a few a week becomes an incredible amount upon midterms and finals. Try thinking of 1000 questions on a given topic in a few days before the test, and then try thinking of 10 questions a day.

Most students should be familiar with the feeling of the day before a big test. Most students spend the days before a test essentially re-learning everything they need. This is an enormous waste of time. Using this system removes that phase altogether, thus turning your time spent studying actually studying instead of relearning.

Anki, however, requires a few minutes each day. Many people simply don’t have the drive to do something every single day. This is the single greatest roadblock in terms of studying. It is important to form a habit of reviewing these cards each day. Once a habit is formed, it greatly reduces the stress of pre-test cramming and makes studying almost eerily addicting.

The next object in this system is the use of mindmaps. Mindmaps are an extremely valuable tool for presenting a large amount of information in a visual format. These are excellent for summing up a chapter to study for a test, or taking general notes during “review days”. They are also very useful for taking notes using a teacher who doesn’t teach in a linear order (i.e. the teacher everyone had in high-school that nobody could understand.)



Its important that these not be taken formally. The purpose of mindmaps is that they create visual connections, causing the one who takes them to see the general shape of the object. Doodling is not only allowed, but beneficial, so long as you can create visual connections between pictures and ideas.

In addition to mindmaps and flashcards, another important unit in this system is Cornell note-taking. Generally, you divide the page into four sections – The header, the cue column, the notes and the summary. The idea is that you create a sort of flashcards in your notes, which make them easy to place into Anki. At the end of each class, you write about a paragraph summarizing the notes. This system is more difficult to explain than to use, and to learn how it is simply best to look at an example or two.

Finally, the last step is to create a summary sheet. In order to do this, you take the summaries from all of the Cornell notes and place them into one document, shrinking the font size and abbreviating until everything can fit on one page. Its is helpful to keep explanations to the maximum and examples to the minimum. This helps to read the entire course at a quick glance, as well as review the course quickly before finals or midterms.

So in summary, the system is entirely connected in order to commit as much as possible to memory and to simplify the study process. Spaced Repetition is an effective way to memorize the necessary information, Cornell Notes simplify the process of turning notes into flashcards, The summary sheet is made easier by the summary section of the Cornell system, and mindmaps present everything in a unit in a powerful and visually impacting way. The system is better at keeping your mind focused than that last cup of coffee.

40 Skills in 40 Weeks – A Crash Course into Everything

These are the results of a lifestyle experiment. I tried to learn a new skill each week for forty weeks. Most people, when they learn a skill, try to perfect it far beyond everyone else, becoming among the best in their certain area. While that’s not in any way a bad thing, I wanted to know what it was like to generalize a lot of skills, learning enough to be more skilled than the average person, but not nearly an expert, in a large amount of skills. Thus, I started an experiment. Learn 40 skills in 40 weeks, for each skill not becoming an expert, and only learning in free moments in the course of a week.

This plan makes use of many of the Principles of Practical Education

• Learning a skill quickly requires the learning of the essential parts (Principle 1)
• Learning a skill in a limited timeframe makes it difficult to become bored. (Principle 2)
• Learning a skill instead of advancing another.  (principle 3)
• I doubt I can learn all 40, but trying to maximize the amount gained uses principle 4
• I don’t intend to take lessons on any of this, so it’s mostly self-taught (Principle 5)
• Keep yourself open to possibilities (Principle 6)
• I will be learning primarily alone or in a small group if the need arises (principle 7)
• Concentration is a must (Principle 8 )

The last two principles deal with others who would like to learn skills such as I did. Most lecture-style classes teach in that “Expertise” mindset. This isn’t a bad thing, however it is not effective with general learning of a large amount of skills, such as what I’ve done below. I’m sure I did not learn each skill in the most effective way, but I learned them. If I could go back, I’m sure I could’ve learned in a more effective way. This is why Practical Education is a Community effort.

Week 1 – Speed Reading

This was very easy. Almost Depressingly so. I was expecting a very high-effort high-reward thing that would be very difficult to reproduce by others. I did this in around 30 minutes and raised my reading speed from 462 Wpm to 924 WPM. Thanks to Tim Ferris for the Method I used. Success

Week 2 – Photoshop

This was also surprisingly easy, but much more difficult than Speed Reading. Assorted youtube tutorials taught me to extract objects, Whiten teeth, change hair, eye or skin color, and add or lose weight. Not a whole lot, but pretty good for a week. Success

Week 3 – Art

I really tried, but the farthest I ended up getting is copydrawing. Sure, its better than tracing, but it’s not drawing, so I’m saying this one is a failure

Week 4 – Astronomy

Refreshed my knowledge of the constellations. I also read “Pale Blue Dot”. Moderate Success.

Week 5 – Philosophy

I got a book on this and tried to read it, but it really wasn’t as interesting as I thought it would be. Read about the life of Descartes. Didn’t get much further than that. Mild failure.

Week 6 – Magic Tricks

Learned a few basic Magic tricks. Nothing spectacular. Success.

Week 7 – Medical Diagnosis

Learned the top ten most common diseases and their symptoms and somewhere around 25 mental disorders. Success.

Week 8 – C++ programming

I didn’t seem to have enough time to start this, but I am taking a class on Visual Basic, so this goes On Hold.

Week 9 – Investing

Read through part of “The Intelligent Investor”. Moderate Success

Week 10 – Paper Airplanes & Origami

Learned to make a few very interesting paper Airplane and Origami designs. Most of the planes worked rather well.

Jet fighter, Stunt Plane, Reeve’s Floater, Some random plane, Classic Glider (Not the classic dart), Backwards plane, Boxoid, Paper Boomerang

Definite Success

Week 10 Summary -

10 Weeks into starting this journey, I have had 7 Successes, two failures and put one skill on hold. The skill I’ve gotten the best in at this point is Photoshop. Surprisingly, Speed Reading isn’t as useful as I thought it’d be, but nevertheless I’ve used it in quite a few situations.

At this rate at the end of the 40 weeks I’ll have aquired 30 skills. Not bad, but I want to see if I can get even more than that overall.

I’m sure I’ll end up writing posts about a few of these as well, considering they’re ease and entertainment value.

Week 11 – Music Remixing

I was really looking forward to this week, but my hard drive that I got a copy of FL studio on crashed and I lost it. I did, however, make a few mashups using Audacity. One came out nicely, the other came out decently. It wasn’t what I was going for, and I hope to revisit this someday, but it would qualify as a Relative Success.

Week 12 – Spreadsheets and Excel

I really thought this was going to be much more difficult than it turned out to be. I got the hang of the =SUM, =AVERAGE, =MAX, =MIN, and =IF functions, as well as the general layout, graphing, etc. Success.

Week 13 – Law

Researched the requirements and process for proving someone liable or guilty for a number of civil and criminal offenses. Success.

Week 14 – Cooking

I simply cannot cook. Failure

Week 15 – Photography

Learned about the rule of thirds, ISO settings and Macro Mode. Working on a photography project at the moment. Success

Week 16 – First Aid

Learned how to properly treat Bleeding, Choking, Shock and Broken Bones. Success

Week 17 – Sushi and Bento Crafting

Happy new year. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to do this, given the festivities, but I did extensive research into the recipe/preparation and if given the ingredients I’m almost 100% certain I could do this successfully Moderate success

Week 18 – Trebuchets

I learned how they worked, but I couldn’t get a hold of a kit to make one. I was disappointed, I was looking forward to this. Moderate Failure

Week 19 – Survival

Learned how to make a fire, how to make a shelter, how to make a signal fire, survival fishing, and so on. Success

Week 20 – Romhacking

Learned about and how to use Lunar Magic, which is a Super Mario World level editor. Success

Week 20 Summary

Very successful period of 10 weeks, with 8 successes and only two failures. So far, I’ve learned 15 skills, failed 4 skills, and put one on hold. Currently, at the rate I am going, I will have learned 33 out of 40 skills. While I am learning a lot every day, I am also having a lot of fun learning all of these new skills.

Week 21 – Game Mapping and Level Design

I made a few levels in Lunar Magic, which were not very good but were interesting to make and play through. Success

Week 22 – Martial Arts

Read through a book on Akido, which was very interesting! It was something that seemed very useful to know. The concept of the “fence” was especially interesting. Success

Week 23 – Juggling

I can now juggle two balls in one hand. I can now be considered “average”.  Success

Week 24 – Neuro Linguistic Programming

Learned how to “Cure a phobia”. It had an air of psuedoscience about it, but it might come in handy one day. Relative Success.

Week 25 – Robotics

Absolute failure. I couldn’t get a hold of a kit, and I seriously doubt Lego MINDSTORMS counts as robotics. Failure.

Week 26 – Public Speaking

I couldn’t make heads or tails of this. Absolute Failure

Week 27 – Cup Stacking

Got the basic cycle down to about 25 seconds. Its a really terrible speed, but I learned how it works, and as such this one is a Moderate Success

Week 28 – Fighting Game Strategy

Did a bit of reading into the competitive scene of Super Smash Brothers. The relative lack of depth in Brawl meant that I was able to get pretty good at it relatively quickly, learning skills like Mortar Sliding as Snake. Melee, however, was a completely different game.  The amount of depth and skill required for it was surprising, and it took a far longer period of time to learn than Brawl did. I did, however, manage to learn some of the crucial skills such as wavedashing and L-canceling, in addition to character-specific skills and approaches. I learned the approaches and strategies of Peach, the basics and chaingrabs of Sheik, certain strategies of Ganondorf, and basic Marth combos such as the Ken combo. Not competitive level by a longshot, but enough at least to beat most people in a friendly match. Success

Week 29 – Electronics and Modding

As a long time lurker of the Benheck forums, I was looking forward to this week almost more than any other. Sadly, a financial issue meant I was not able to get a hold of any components, systems, batteries, or controllers. Mod-wise, I have experience with homebrew and software modifications, however that was not my goal for this week, and thus this is a Failure.

Week 30 – First Person Shooter General Strategy

I showed no improvement in anything. It was a rather silly goal, but a Failure nonetheless

Week 30 Summary

I just managed to pass this week, with six successes and four failures. At this point, I’ve learned 21 skills, failed 8, and put one on hold. I’m learning more every day and have already passed a 50% success rate.

Week 31 – Bar Tricks

Learned a variety of pen tricks as well as a small amount of cutlery magic. Thanks again to Tim Ferris. Success.

Week 32 – American Sign Language Alphabet

I now have the ability to fingerspell. Success

Week 33 – Knot tying

Learned how to tie a Bowline and a Trucker’s Hitch. Success

Week 34 – Lock Picking and Other Assorted Espionage Skills

Learned how to create a padlock shim out of a soda can. Hardly “Espionage”, and not at all effecient, but plausible. Moderate Success

Week 35 – NATO alphabet

Learned A-Z of the NATO alphabet. Success

Week 36 – MUGEN Development

Learned to import stages, characters and menus. It seemed a lot more complicated than it had to be. Success

Week 37 – Linux Development

Considering I wrote the list 37 weeks ago, I don’t really remember what I was supposed to DO for this week.  Java Compilers? Failure

Week 38 – Discerning Lies and Bias

Learned about Microexpressions, Distancing Language, and (My personal favorite from this week) “Eye movement”. Success.

Week 39 – Fung Shui

I had always thought that this was an interior design concept started in china (as in Reds go South, Blues go North, etc.)

It turns out its more like a spiritual concept. Who knew? Success.

Apparently there's more to it than this.

Week 40 – Computer Science (Networking, Hexidecimal, etc)

I didn’t forsee that the programming class I enrolled in was, in fact, a “Computer Science with Visual Basic” course. However, I learned what I wanted to learn, so I’d define this as a Success.

Final Summary and Results

After 40 weeks with admittedly very little effort invested in this experiment, I’ve become acquainted with 30 skills, failed 9 and placed one on hold due to other circumstances. Depending on how you view the “held” skill, my success rate was a comfortable 75% – 77%, very characteristic of the first principle of Practical Education.

Simply the action of wanting to learn skills or facts seemed to have manifested itself in a simple enough way, and as a result of this project I’ve gained valuable skills that I will no doubt continue to utilize.

I attended no private classes, spent no money, and hired no teacher. I simply went out and found information. It should not be difficult for others to replicate this experiment with similar results, as the goal is not mastery but familiarization with basics. If anything this was a jumping off point for mastering a wide number of the skills I am now familiar with.

And as such, overall, the 40 skills in 40 weeks experiment was a surefire Success

Writing is Not a Persuasive Essay

I like writing. But what’s really great about writing is making the setting. Sure, it sounds completely boring when you say it like they teach you in school. Setting – its like a word with no life, no influence, no creativity. Its one letter away from “sitting”, a form of idleness. I do not believe that this word does any justice to what it describes. I personally find all writing completely and utterly inferior in comparison to this phase, simply because of the amount of life involved, for lack of a better word.

What happens when you make a “setting”?

You can imagine entire worlds, worlds where anything can happen, where people do anything you want them to. You can breathe life into a character, you can give them friends, enemies. You can take life away. You can create friendship, companionship, loyalty. You can discover love. Don’t believe in love? You can invent it. It is the ultimate form of suspension of disbelief. Its like dreaming, only with full forced control. You can carve mountains, build cities, invent incredible machinery. You can discover that which no one else has found before. You can weave intricate character personalities. Give them talent. Give them likes, dislikes, favorite foods, inside jokes. Give them flaws. Give them imperfections that are so incredibly detailed that they will never be known by anyone else but themselves and you.

With a pen. With a notebook. With a laptop. With the margins on your history notes. You can feel power unlike anything else in the world. You can escape to a world that you have full control over. You can create your ideal world. You can create an imperfect world, but one that can capture the hearts and minds of yourself and others. You can recreate memories. You can pull at heartstrings. You can make the strongest cry, you can make the coldest blush, and you can give the ones in the most pain a way to smile.

This is what writing is. Writing is not a persuasive essay. Writing is not your college application. Writing is not a three-pronged thesis. Writing is the creation of a world.

And this world belongs to you.

Make a wish, Make a Hundred

Wish upon a shooting star

Wish upon a certain time

Make a thousand paper cranes

Whisk away an eyelash

Undress a daisy

Burn a letter

Say a prayer

Cast a Spell

Believe in Love

Be naïve, if just for a moment

Make a wish. Make a hundred.