Life Challenges #3: Bookworm Challenge | Part 1: Challenge Rules

Works of the written or spoken word are unidirectional time machines, mind readers and windows to imaginary worlds. There are countless ideas we can gain and apply to our daily lives by interacting with the people of the past through words in various mediums. These mediums can be books, newspapers, journals, magazines, documentaries and many more. Going through any of the words left by people who have walked down the paths of their choice can be immensely meaningful. They allow us to understand how we come to be, and where we will be heading.

It is in such a magical world that the third in my series of Life Challenges will be founded on. This challenge is called the Bookworm Challenge, and this post is about its rules.

1. The challenge is to happen over a duration of 4 weeks, from 1 August 2020 to 30 August 2020. If you are wondering why the math involving the 28 days (4 weeks) does not add up, it is because 2 more days are added at the end (29 and 30 August 2020) as a contingency plan against any incomplete tasks.

2. A daily reading routine lasting 15 minutes will be implemented. What is to be done in this duration is up to me.

3. I am to finish reading a book during the challenge duration. For now, I am planning to read a Chinese book. It is a translated version of the biography of Elon Musk, "Silicon Valley Iron Man".

4. I am also to catch up with the news for at least two days per week. The news is an important source of information on current affairs which will be helpful in drafting future Kaleidoscope posts and help me understand more of what I am reading. I have freedom in choosing what kind of news to read and the method of consumption. It can be videos, online articles or infographics. As long as I learn of something, anything is good.

5. Finally, I will submit at least one reading note every fortnight. Submissions will appear on the Vincent Academy website. This component is expected to be the hardest as it requires the most commitment. However, I believe this can be done with consistent effort in trying to read.

I hope to be able to cultivate the good habit of reading widely through this challenge. This can also help me improve on my vocabulary and knowledge which is necessary for writing better blog posts. In addition, the various writing styles I get exposed to through reading can help me to come up with higher quality work for future Story Creation Challenges!

My Blockheads #1 | New series, new world

Welcome to a new series of blog posts dedicated to gaming! The game that I will write about is the Blockheads, a (mostly) 2-dimensional virtual world that is built by, unsurprisingly, blocks. It has much resemblance to Minecraft, an immersive sandbox game where players can craft their own world in the game's servers. In fact, I started out playing this game around 5 years ago as I wanted to feel how building my own world is like but could not afford to get Minecraft.

But why focus on a game that many consider as dying? Well, my most important reasons for playing this are its accessibility and freedom - it is free for all to play (unless you are into Time Crystals which can help you save time crafting, though I personally think this takes away the fun from the game) and I can do anything I imagine inside, bound only by whatever the game has to offer. In a sense, this game is like a canvas where I could express myself through whatever I do with it.

Here is a quick look at what I have done in the past 5 years:

Most of what I have done is exploration of my world, so there is not a lot of crafting going on. This explains why buildings are so sparse in this world.

Towards the left of the Portal, there is a tower with rooms on top of it shaped like a honeycomb (and called "The Honeycomb"). It was intended as a mixed-use space where my blockheads could live and do crafting in. But without enough materials to start with, it would be hard to do anything inside there, so my blockheads spend most of the time outside.

The caves and sky islands underneath and above the Portal respectively are part of a mega-project that was years in-the-making. It was an exploration project to find shorter pathways to the various places in this world and to discover new materials for use in crafting.

I started with underground exploration first. When I came up with this a few years ago, I named the project "Search for Underground Objects" (SUGO). 

• The first phase was just digging around in a systematic manner, and lighting up underground spaces using stick torchlights. The result was a gigantic grid that showed the composition of the rocks underground - limestones, marbles and stones were the most common ones. It looked cool but it was very time consuming, taking me a year before I decided to move on with something easier.
• The second phase was cave exploration, and some mining of the ores to craft out my first few metal objects, such as bronze pickaxes, tin buckets and iron cages. As the network of explored caves expanded, and as I connected and enlarged some caves by digging around, I began to run into a few problems: 
• How to move my blockheads through these maze of caves efficiently?
• What do I do with the stones I dug up?
• How do I avoid losing my way?
• Thereafter, I embarked on my third phase of SUGO, which was to make underground pathways donkey-accessible. This would address the first question. 
• The most difficult part about this was to domesticate enough donkeys by feeding them carrots to serve as means of transport. 
• And for the rest of this phase, it involves enlarging narrow spaces so that they are at least two blocks tall, enough for a blockhead on a donkey to move through. Also, to prevent donkeys from becoming injured and enabling them to move around, large cave networks are connected via pathways to make transport quicker, and the cave structure is modified so that the donkeys can jump their way through them. 
• As a vertical path through the underground space cannot be accessed by a donkey, I made a stairwell connecting the ground to the magma (the diagonal path slashing through the underground space). I named that stairwell "The Syringe" based on its appearance. For those wondering why its top part was larger, it was a remnant of some horticultural experiment to grow plants underground. The experiment ended up in failure since the trees died off quickly and required a lot of maintenance to produce much food, but the concept of riding donkeys downstairs and collecting fruit from the trees at the same time was attractively convenient.
• And for the fourth and final phase of SUGO, it was to make finding my way around these caves easier. This included making a lot of signs to direct the blockheads on the donkeys, and makeshift maps using stone and sand (the blocks of stone were to mark out other positions while the blocks of sand were to highlight the current position. Naturally, the signs would be placed on these blocks). In addition, riding the caves more frequently should help me familiarise myself with the environment.
• Note: I still have not figured out how to mark out where the ores and trade portal are with something prominent instead of relying on wooden signs which can be hard to read if you are moving around on a donkey.
• As SUGO comes to a close, there were some gaps left to close, that being what I should do with all the extra stone. That is when the second mega-project came in.

Introducing how I found all the sky islands: Sky Island Radar System (SIRS).

The concept of this project was simple, built stone pathways up into the sky and see what I would hit. Initially, I was skeptical that it would find anything, and would only be able to link up mountains at best, but the number of sky islands I found with this was astounding.

To start with, I built a vertical column of stone on top of the Honeycomb, then at intervals of around 30 blocks from each other, I built stone paths sideways. In this manner, I linked up many of the sky islands that could be found on top of the portal (there are more than 30 of them shown in this image alone). And the stone got to be put into good use!

This is my two grandest projects that made my current world look like this today. In future posts, I would zoom in to this world and introduce more of the projects I did in this world, as well as the names of my blockheads, the places and the animals.

Update: looks like this is not possible now, since I have switched phones and the world can no longer be played.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention the name of this world. I named it "Theodocosm", which means "the land willed by the gods". Of course, I am the god of this world. Asides from the blocks in this server, I made the rest. There is not much going on here, since I am a solo player, but whatever this world has in store will definitely be interesting, otherwise I would not have played this game for so long.

Story Creation Challenge Round 2 | Part 2 (End): Completion

This post is going to be a quick one. Basically, I have just concluded Round 2 of the challenge, and I will be sharing the flash fiction I wrote out. The story is based on true events, and is about over one thousand words long.

A Stressful Day at Home

What is home? For many, it is a restful place for people to recharge as they enjoy quality time with their families. But my experience of homecoming on a Thursday was one fraught with worries and frustrations.

After a long day at my army camp, I did some shopping at night to prepare for the next time I return there. Finding out the best deals and products I wanted gave me much satisfaction, but that feeling soon gave way to disappointment when I came home to the news of the Wi-fi being broken. Once I learnt of that, all I could think of was how to get enough data to get by the next day. None of my parents could offer their hotspot since it would be a Thursday and they had to be off at work, so I would be home alone with my sister to rely on mobile data to access the Internet.

Deep down, I felt like a bird who had lost its wings - grounded, helpless and anxious about what would become of itself. I had never realised how important Wi-fi would be until it was no longer there for me anymore. There were times that the connection was slow or disrupted, but that beats having no Wi-fi at all and having to go for the more expensive option of using mobile data. Meanwhile, my parents were relieved that they could count on me to look after the house and help them handle the technician who was scheduled to arrive on Thursday afternoon to exchange the modem. 

“What modem?” I asked. Thereafter, I had to sit through a lesson on some Wi-fi related technicalities by my father. By combining his explanations with some research I did online, I learned that a modem converts electrical signals into digital data which is understandable by a computer, while a router beams that data to a computer connected to the network and together with the modem, makes up what I know as the Wi-fi. 

I was also filled in the details of what went wrong with the Wi-fi. My father first suspected the software to be the root cause of the issue, and tried resetting the modem to no avail, so he wanted to try out replacing the modem first - that would be where the technician and I came in.

However, when the technician came in the afternoon and tried setting up the modem, the Wi-fi still did not work, leading him to conclude, “Your router is old, you should change it.” I was confused at first because the technician mentioned something about ten years old while the router was bought a few years ago. But, everything made sense when I interpreted his recommendations as my router system becoming out of date.

In spite of all my efforts in helping to fix the problem, I was disappointed to find out that there was no happy outcome and I could only wait for my father to replace the router. Still, the fixing of the Wi-fi was only one out of the many difficulties I had to deal with. More was to come, such as getting the mobile data to work and balancing between running errands for my parents and estate maintenance.

As the morning sunlight streamed into my bedroom, my sister was getting ready to report to her virtual classroom, since it would not be possible to hold classes physically amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. Concurrently, I was watching whether the sunlight would stay for the rest of the morning so that I could dry my clothes out in the sun. Various problems began to arise.

My sister complained that she could not get the mobile data to work on her laptop. After I tried fumbling with the settings for her smartphone and laptop (which uses Windows 10, an operating system I am unfamiliar with since mine runs on Windows 8). I threw my hands up shortly after that and went to try on my own phone and laptop. The tethering method, which I found after some searching on Google, worked for me. Tethering is basically connecting my phone to my laptop using a cable and turning on the hotspot. My sister’s one got to work too after a few tries, albeit not being able to find out the cause of the issue. Initially, I planned to use the data to do some research and watch anime on my laptop, but with it guzzling up data so quickly, I had to ditch that plan and use my smartphone more instead.

Just as the data was working and I thought I could finally focus on writing awesome blog posts, a lady from the National Environmental Agency knocked to notify me of a fogging that will take place at 9 o’clock in the morning. Not only would the fogging take place along my block’s corridors, it would also happen downstairs. Given the rise of dengue cases, this could not be helped, but the fogging happened later than announced. By the time all the fogging stopped, it was nearly 11 o’clock, leaving me with little time to sun the laundry.

I would have liked to leave the laundry be until late in the afternoon, but the sky became overcast and threatened to rain cats and dogs, so I hurriedly kept the laundry a few hours after bringing them out. By then, I would have to get ready to open the door for the technician who would replace the modem to come in. Could my afternoon get any busier?

Yes! In the late afternoon, block washing happened and I had to rush to close the doors and windows before the water would spray everywhere. I was surprised because nobody told me that this was going to happen, unlike the fogging in the morning when I had time to prepare.

As the day drew to a close, I was tired from attending to so many things, including the chores that I would have to do in the evening. But in hindsight, there was something positive in all this trouble, as I learnt how much it took just to maintain our living quarters, from my parents who did the chores and ensured that the electrical appliances were working fine, to the essential workers who did estate maintenance like clockwork. It seems that I have to be grateful to these hardworking people for the comfort and rest I get at home.

Story Creation Challenge Round 2 | Part 1: Rules of the game

Round 1 took way too long, so I have decided to give myself less work for the second round. This time, instead of focusing on quantity, I would like to work on the quality of my stories instead - it can be having a better character and plot development, or write with more elegant expressions that will elevate the whole reading experience.

As such, I have settled upon flash fiction as the topic for Round 2.

A flash fiction is basically a story that has 1500 words or less. To learn more about flash fiction, visit this website: https://blog.reedsy.com/what-is-flash-fiction/

For this challenge, I will write a piece of flash fiction. There are no limits on the genre or the writing style. I am free to write whatever I want, but it must feel like a narrative and not some documentary script or news article.

I estimate that it will take me a month or less to complete this challenge. This is especially so since I have longer breaks from my work. I am so excited to take on this challenge and learn new things on the way!

Story Creation Challenge Round 1 | Part 3: Submission of entry

Round 1 | Part 3: Submission of Entry

It had been a long journey, spanning a few months, with this challenge that was going on. I am happy to announce just today, that I have finished completing a story that links 5 randomly generated keywords together: Fossil, Continuation, Performance, Pasture, Pardon

The completed story can be found in this document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQaqquDFrQzVXvUY0oG8k1_g1HfdKJNd0C1uDzH2CquHSJYbMtL2v3TWdbaGQCdHrFFI_vxSehcmBCU/pub 

The process

There were 3 stages that I devised to complete the challenge. 

The first was some brainstorming that I did by looking up the definitions of the keywords and their related images to find out what kind of ideas I could draw from them. This was shared in my very first story creation challenge post.

The second stage was to come up with a rough draft for whatever story I am planning in mind. It was then that I set the theme for the story to be based on a virtual reality online game in a futuristic, dystopian world. You can see the results of the draft of my first chapter here.

The third stage was to firm up the story as I create more chapters and narratives and connect the dots outlined in my story. For the later few chapters, I drew up an outline of how the stories would progress before starting on crafting the paragraphs for each chapter.

The difficulties

Most of the time, the actual story I am writing would turn out to be very different from my drafts. I found out that the more time I spend thinking about the story, the more new ideas I would churn out. These would add additional plot twists into my story, making it much longer than I had expected.

I realised I started with a cliffhanger, and ended this round of the challenge with a cliffhanger. I am not sure whether this would annoy the readers too much, but I just wanted to use this chance to try out new things.

The story might not be exactly coherent, grammatically sound or as excellent as writers who have more experience or are more professional than me. I tried to use a more personal writing style in order to make the story feel less dull and more relatable, but it could have been more consistent.

The decisions

As the story is taking longer than I had expected, I have decided to serialise the story that I am writing on. The series will be called "Free Frontiers", named after the game that was the focus of this story. Any updates, reflections, spin-offs and progress would still be notified to all interested readers via this blog, but the main story, together with future versions and chapters, will be found in the same document as the above link.

This also means that the nature of future story creation challenges will change. Instead of just coming out a story from a collection of keywords, I am thinking of venturing into different genres, or create something based on actual events!

Look forward to Round 2, which will stretch my creativity and writing skills even further!

Meanwhile, the Free Frontiers series will continue, but it may not necessarily be included in future story creation challenges, so I can spend more time thinking about how I want to develop this series.