Writing — essays & other yapping
I was watching a tiktok on rules/ formulas you can follow to make sure an outfit looks good every time and I hated the premise. I was inflamed. What do you mean formulas to make an outfit look good? It's about trying on lots of things and building an intuition for what combinations are ugly, meh, good and brilliant.
listen-ableI think the answer is moralising yourself. we can absolutely judge our behaviour and our actions, but the pitfall I always fall for is to then judge myself. And tell myself I'm a bad, stupid, mean person for what I did, then I obsess over what I could've done differently to not be this bad, stupid and mean person.
Here are my old notes on writing a personal statement for computer science at cambridge. I thought they might be more useful here. Don't take it as gospel, and you don't have to follow the advice! It's just what I found useful, so pick and choose any useful bits.
Technically I'm “working hard”, long hours learning lots of complex content, busy sleepless days organising and running events, going outside and talking to people. But I have this sneaking suspicion that I haven't been working hard, and I've been making myself so busy I haven't noticed. I'm trying to think back to when I felt like I worked hard, I haven't worked hard in years … I don't think I've ever worked hard actually. That sounds so absurd! Didn't I define what working hard is?
Have you ever cried whilst experiencing art? Be it painting, song, performance or prose. I tried thinking back to the last time I cried to art and gave a null until I remembered art encompasses much more than traditional fine paintings.
listen-ableThe development of mobile phones has been marked by a general trend of becoming more portable and offering more functionality. In the first wave of HCI, mobile phones were very new and were used exclusively for calling.
Building what a community should look like has been a question for all of human civilisation and has morphed into many forms, with different levels of success for the overall happiness of the people.
I wrote this as part of a creative writing workshop, where every so often the facilitator interjected with an addition we had to add to the story. A lot of it was adding unexpected events, or twists.