It's a scary world out here

And yet I do it every single day

My brain never seems to stop working. It's constantly thinking about problems in the world, musing about it and wondering what could be done to make things better. Which is kinda annoying sometimes, because it would just go on and on, not wanting to stop and eventually you'll see me becoming something like the owl up there. The worse part is that although my brain thinks a lot, it never gets translated into action. I have a lot of brilliant ideas in my mind but most of the time it would just end up forgotten sooner or later. The few luckier ones get to make it to a blog post but that's only one or two. Rarely there's any concrete action coming out of it.

Just this evening I was thinking about how unfair the entire blogosphere is. There was the competition organized by Nuffnang and Cathay Cineleisure, which I'm dying to join, but judging on how past events have gone, I think the chances of me being selected is very near zero.

For starters, my blog ain't those type of blogs that companies like. I rarely do advertorials, I rarely attend events and I rarely have loads of readers on my blog, which is bane to advertisers and competitions organizers because they want as much publicity as possible and most of the time, they do not care about the quality of your posts as long as you have thousands of people landing on your blog. That is what marketing is about anyway when it comes to social media. Just take the Steven Lim and BigFish.sg case for example.

The promo video done by Steven Lim

My friend, Darryl Kang, once mentioned that if you want to be a famous blogger, there's a few paths that one can follow. One is to post sexy pictures of yourself to the blog, the other is to be as controversial as possible and the last option is to write good content to engage your readers, which is by far the most difficult because while sexy and controversial can be easily defined, good content is not. What may be good for you may not be necessarily good for me and different people have their own interpretations of good content. Besides, you also need a vocabulary that is decent enough to be considered as having a good content. Guys like me who always make grammatical error here and there can never expect my blog to make it to the good content category.

Not only that, I think another point he forgot to mention is something regarding sponsorships and advertorials too. I don't know if anyone thinks the same, but for me, the blogosphere is really much like the real world or sports arena where sponsorship matters a lot. If you are someone who is willing to sell your soul out just to have companies sponsor you (eg: writing a very good review about a product that you received free from a company even though you hated it), naturally you will have a lot of opportunities coming your way. Because for most companies, they do not care about what you really feel about their product, their only concern is to get as many good reviews as possible on the web and if you're known to be critical, it wouldn't be surprising for companies to shun your blog.

I guess when it comes to marketing, profits matter more than anything.


Oh well, I guess I shouldn't be complaining. If they want me, they'll choose me. If they don't, that's their lost. I'm not really that kind of person who will chase after people begging them to give me an opportunity. I'll do my best if you give me a chance to prove myself but if you don't, I just hope those other bloggers would be worth it.

*****

Later at night, I had one sort of chatting session with the old birds at EusoffWorks, the committee that I really identified with when I first entered Eusoff. Somehow, for some reasons that I've forgotten, I seemed to have drifted apart from the comm that I liked very much during my first year (I practically spend every night there) to someone who is close to being a phantom member.

Chatting with a few of the seniors tonight reminded me of the times when the seniors of my time used to have serious discussion in the room while I listened attentively. I miss those days, if you ask, where there is just no holds barred when we're talking. I never knew how effective it was, but it certainly made me think more and made me wanted to do so much more things.

Perhaps it's time for me to start spending more time in the room again.

*****

I guess that's roughly all what my brain thought of today, there's a religion thing surrounding immigrant Laos people in the United States, but I've ranted about it yesterday so I think I'm just gonna go sleep.

Religious Food for Thought

Sometimes, all that is needed to tear down the barriers between people is just a simple interaction, that I realized during one of my Religion and Society tutorials today. We talked about the recent controversy surrounding NUS Campus Crusade (where they posted "offensive" remarks about other religion on posters) and the FHM's latest article about equating celebrities like Justin Bieber and Tom Cruise to Jesus Christ (the issue was pulled off the shelves just a few days ago). While I did not speak much (which what I usually do in classes, which is keeping my mouth shut so I would not end up looking like an idiot), I did find that the points raised by my fellow classmates were quite interesting.

Somehow for some strange reason I find that I am particularly attuned to the topic of religion. Growing up as a Christian, I regularly tried to convince my friends that Christianity is the only ticket to heaven for them and fervently believed that myself. I would spend loads of time on the internet, reading arguments on why Christianity is real and prepared myself with the ammunition needed should I be involved in any religious debate with friends. I was considered to be a very religious person among my school friends and I wore that recognition with pride.

Coming to university sort of changed all that though. I guess my curious nature was to be blamed. Instead of staying in my comfort zone and staying ignorant, I chose to step out and to go even further. And that lead me to cross paths with a legendary atheist named Kok Sen Wai. Though I still do not agree with him on some points (internally), the way he argued sort of changed the way I think. Coupled with my classes in Psychology, slowly my thinking began to change too.

Instead of sticking to the belief that Christianity is the only true faith, I began to grow more tolerant of other religion and start to question the degree of how real is Christianity anyway because honestly, if you put your mind to it, there's a lot of Christian denominations, each with their own interpretations of the Bible and Christianity. Not only that, Christianity has undergone a drastic change from the early days of the apostles, to being Rome's official religion, to Catholicism, to what it is today. How much of the core teachings of the early days remain? How sure are you that what your priest/pastor is telling you today is what the apostles said more than two thousand years ago?

If you think about the possibilities, is actually quite scary.

 And this semester, that curious nature of mine pushed me even further by taking a Sociology module called Religion and Society, which aims to examine the phenomena of religion through a Sociological standpoint and hopefully a scientific standpoint too. Not only that, another module that I'm taking, Darwin and Evolution (which some Christians might consider as a heresy), also helped a lot in putting more questions into my head.

While my mum would definitely be freaked out by now, still I find all these new knowledge refreshing and intriguing. Going to a Hindu temple, speaking with the people there and learning about their religion, added with learning the beauty of the evolution theory, which is viewed in such a fearful light by some religious people, helped to open my mind to view things in a totally different way.

It's not to say I've become a complete atheist who hates religion now, because still no one is able to prove that God does not exist, I just find myself thinking in a completely different way now than the religious Luke back in Form 6. There's still a long way to go though and I'll never know where I will end up. Besides, religion and spirituality is a question that only can be answered when you die.

Besides, I'm really writing this for the sake of having a post for today.

Newsflash

Lukey has not been updating his blog regularly as he used to, and this has sparked concern all over the web as he is known to have this "One day, one post" policy when it comes to blogging and it has already been more than three days since his last post. Some netizens are fearing the worst for the self-proclaimed handsome blogger as Lukey has been known to court troubles with the narcissistic personality. Just a week ago, his Facebook profile was hacked into with offensive pictures and posts uploaded to his wall by an unknown hater of his.

According to several sources, they anticipate that should Lukey stop blogging, it would create a massive power vacuum in the blogosphere as there are not many handsome and yet thoughtful bloggers like Lukey out there. A royal inquiry panel has been set up by the Singapore Handsome Internet wriTers, also known as SHIT, to look into the reasons behind Lukey's lack of updates recently. The lead researcher of the team, Albird Einstain, when interviewed, speculates that there might be several reasons as of why Lukey has been updating his blog for the past few days.

Reason 1: Assignments and homework

The most unlikely reason at all, because Lukey would prefer to do almost anything aside from his homework, even including cleaning his own room, Einstain thinks that there exists a possibility in which Lukey is too busy with finishing all those god-damned assignments that his lecturers have thrown unto him til he has not enough time to even type a sentence into his blog, given that Lukey is now in his final year and he doesn't want to be kicked out of university.

Reason 2: Zombies

Given the imminent threat of zombie apocalypse sooner or later, Einstain theorizes that Lukey might be too caught up fighting zombies in some remote research facilities to save the world. The more likely scenario is that he's most probably turned into a zombie by now.

Lukey: Now a handsome zombie

Reason 3: Too busy gaming

Where else could Lukey be besides sitting in front of his computer, caught up in some make believe universe where he thinks he's the chosen one to save the world? Einstain thinks that Lukey is probably so caught up in gaming that he forgot about something which is known as real life already

Reason 4: No life

Every blog needs content and when there's not much happening in your life, there's nothing much to write in your blog except something like the "clouds look white today" and "the sun came out as usual", which could be another explanation of why the blog was abandoned, according to Einstain.

When your life is as interesting as watching the paint dry

Reason 5: Lazy

The most likely reason of all, Einstain surmised that Lukey is probably too lazy to update this blog of his, given that lazy nature of his. Heck, he wouldn't even change his underwear if he's given a choice (don't tell him I told you that) so what more a blog. He's probably sitting in a corner, lazing around while procrastinating when it comes to blogging, which is quite sad, to be honest, because one can really gain nothing just by lazing around (except to look fabulous of course, which might be in Lukey's case).

Conclusion:

With the five possible theories in hand, the royal inquiry panel would hope to create a cure that would kickstart Lukey's motivation to blog again and hopefully to be even more handsomer than he is now. Until then, netizens are advised to remain calm and to stare at the wall to keep themselves occupied before Lukey comes online. This newsflash is once again brought to you by SHIT.

A post about Sun Xu

I've been reading about the case of a PRC scholar dude named Sun Xu with interest lately. If you have no idea of what's going on, lets just say that there's this incident where PRC scholar posted offensive remarks about Singaporeans on the web a few weeks ago, which subsequently resulted in hordes of Singaporeans baying for his blood in the internet and questioning once again the liberal immigration policy of Singapore. 

But in contrary to the angry Singaporeans there were also Singaporeans who supported the government's immigration policy, saying that it is a necessary evil for a small country like Singapore to remain competitive in the international arena. You can say that while there are a lot of Singaporeans who are using this incident as an example of how the immigration policy is discriminating against Singaporeans itself, there's also another group who says that the immigration policy itself is not to be blamed for such incidents (and they're not from PAP, mind you).

The latest celebrity in Singapore

 Being a foreign student in Singapore myself, it was natural for be to be drawn to this whole saga. After all, the outcome of this incident may affect me either directly or indirectly. Perhaps the government would come up with tighter policies like deporting all foreign students with a CAP of 4.0 below in response (and that's it for me) or perhaps my fellow university mates would see me in a more negative light, nobody knows. Which is why I have to be prepared.

And seeing how many articles were written in response to this incident, I decided to write one myself too, to give a viewpoint from a foreign student's point of view, and hopefully dispel the stereotype of how all of us are here to snatch away opportunities from locals.

Looking at the Sun Xu saga, I can't help but draw similarities from it to what is currently happening in Malaysia. Like Singapore, we Malaysians must also face with cases of people complaining about opportunities getting snatched away. However, instead of PRCs and angry Singaporeans, we have the minority races (Chinese and Indians) and the Malay majority respectively in the Malaysia case.

While the circumstances may differ a bit, the general claim is still the same. The majority group (the Singaporeans in the Sun Xu case and the Malays in Malaysia) is upset and afraid of a minority group, whom according to them are here to take away their opportunities in life, destroy their culture and invade their homes. The sentiments are the same. There is generally a besieged mentality where the majority feels threatened and as a result there's a general distrust of the minorities by the majority. In fact, if you look around the world, you can see the same thing happening almost everywhere, for example the Germans distrust for the Jews (which lead to the holocaust), white Americans distrust of the blacks and so on. It's part of human psychology, after all.

A newspaper article showing how Jews were dehumanized through Nazi propaganda. "Die Juden sind unser Ungluck" roughly means that "the Jews are our misfortune" in German

Something similar in the modern day, regarding the reaction of Singaporeans towards foreign scholars, where they are equated to being locusts (dehumanization, Psychology majors?)

Now while the general sentiments are roughly the same, the actions undertaken by the two countries are vastly different. In contrary to Singapore, who still maintains a liberal immigration policy despite protests from Singaporeans, Malaysia on the other had choose to go in direct opposite of Singapore. Malaysia's immigration policy is one of the world's tightest, just waiting for your PR application to be approved can take more than 10 years, and it goes to great lengths to preserve the privileges of the majority. For example, for admission to matriculation, a pre-university programme that guarantees you a place in local university, has a 90% quota for Malays while the remaining 10% is for others.

In essence, affirmative actions is the way of life in Malaysia. And I'm sure some Singaporeans would want something like this to be implemented here too. For example, 90% of admission to NUS must comprise of of local Singaporeans. Or something like that.

While affirmative actions may be preferred by many, in my opinion the cons far outweighs the pros. Just take a look a Malaysia now, where does it stand globally in terms of economics and development? Merely accepting people into universities just to satisfy the quota has resulted in a lot of under-qualified university graduates who cannot even speak English. The majority knows that even if they perform badly in exams, they would still get a place in the university thanks to the quota while more bright people are denied the chance of pursuing their tertiary education. When you don't have to work hard to achieve success, you won't.

The brain drain issue, where talented Malaysians are leaving the country by droves, remains one of the largest problem in hindering the country's development. For example, back in 2010, Tan Zhong Shan, who is from Malaysia, emerged as the top law student in Cambridge, a feat that not many of us could accomplished. The only sad news for Malaysia, was that he's under MOE scholarship from Singapore and was expected to return to Singapore to serve in Singapore's Legal service. And he's not the only one.

Due to the vast amount of Malaysians leaving the country thanks to a policy that values your skin color over your talents, coupled with the extra tight immigration policy that prevents foreign students from studying in Malaysian local uni (there's no such thing as the ASEAN scholarship in Malaysia), it would undeniably lead to the shrinkage of Malaysia's talent pool. The shortage of talent is one of the factors that is frequently attributed in explaining the lack of growth in Malaysia, which used to be one of the five tigers of Southeast Asia.

Tan Zhong Shan, the top Cambridge law student Singapore

A country is really much like a business organization. To keep the country competitive, you must have talented people driving the economy. By attracting the creme de la creme from other countries to study here, Singapore is indirectly building up its human capital, which is essential to ensure that the country continues to grow economically. Not only that, as how one Singaporean put it, it also creates a network of scholars working all over the world. Imagine going to a foreign country looking for opportunities and finding out that your client is also educated at the same university as you, that would undeniably help to break down tons of barriers.

And I'm not saying this just because I'm a foreign student. I'm saying this because I have a direct comparison to make. Look at the sorry state of Malaysia now. Despite having more resources than Singapore, look at how it is progressing economically. Rather than worrying about growth, the leaders of the country is more interested in preserving the privileges of the majority and often use words like "defending Islam", "the Chinese are a threat" daily in their speeches. Look at what affirmative actions has done to the country itself. The communication minister, Rais, when interviewed by CNN regarding the Hindraf protest, couldn't even speak proper English.

And it's not that the Singapore government does not care about preserving the locals too. Foreigners are required to pay more for tuition fees in Singapore and Singaporeans get to enjoy a lot more benefits as compared to PRs or foreigners.

And as foreign student myself, I could say that not all foreign students share the same sentiments as Sun Xu (who had since apologized). Sure, there might be a few stereotypes here and there, but in the end, we have Singaporean friends too and we don;t see each other in such a negative light. Perhaps the government could do more to encourage people of different nationalities to mix together. It would help a lot to break down barriers and counter the distrust we have against each other.

My points might not be accurate, as it is merely from my perspective, but yep, there will always be two sides to a coin. Time to go back to my assignments then.

This is how my brain went today

A peek into the daily inner thoughts of Lukey:

8.40am: Oh gosh, it's morning already?

8.43am: Is there class today? Cause I sure don't feel like going to class. I hope there's no class... I think I'll message my friend to ask, just in case...

8.45am: There is class... and there goes my hopes of sleeping longer. Shucks

8.47am: I wonder if it'll be okay if I scrub my head less today?

9.20am: Oh man, not another assignment...

9.53am: Hey, I saw this post at trending already yesterday!

10.30am: Is this class gonna end soon?

12.01pm: I wished my room had a laser printer. So I don't have to line up like this everyday just to print my notes.

12.35pm: This Hougang mini wok noodle must be the best food in NUS ever.

2.00pm: I'm gonna play just one mission of STO and then nap before going to class. Just one.

2.30pm: This boss raid is like taking forever. Can they just please ban the noobs already? And why is my comp so lag? Ugh look! I died again. Stupid noobs and comp.

3.05pm: It's past 3 already? I think I'll just take a short nap and go class. A short one.

3.55pm: F*** this shit, I'm going back to sleep.

4.05pm: ZzzzzZZzz... yes I am the handsomest blogger ever... ZzzZ

5.30pm: Nope, I am so not eating hall dinner tonight. Nope.

7.00pm: Chuck Norris versus Angry Birds! And also Mario!

8.10pm: Pretending to be someone that I'm not at a meeting. So this is how being a spy feels like. Call me 00Lukey then.

8.55pm: I think I should study...

8.56pm: On second thought, maybe not...

11.20pm: Maybe I should have... That mission was a total waste of time. How could you just end the Undine story arc just like that? You guys suck at telling a good story. And making a good single player mission. The original Star Trek was SO much better.

12.00am: Supper!

1.00am: Singaporeans are sure making a fuss out of the Sun Xu scholar incident. I think I'll blog about it and add in my own views too.

2.05am: Nah, I'll blog about something else instead. I'll leave that til tomorrow

3.10am: F*** I think I have tutorials tomorrow. And where's the readings again?