Good friends

I am a person with neither lots of friends nor to many, but just enough. Although many would say that having a moderate amount of friends means that you have more true friends it isn't quite like that.
I am someone that does as best as he can to be as true a friend as possible and I am disappointed when people use one another for whatever reasons, or when they say that they are good friends and when you need them most, they just go have fun and don't give the slightest fuck about you.
I don't mean to say that you need to be held by my hand while you go through bad stuff, but at least they should ask you about your well being.
There are others to whom I try to be close to, beacause they are people that really can be good friends, to whom I try to be as good a friend as possible, and yet they still can't even be bothered to ask you from time to time something as simple as "How are you?".
And then there are those that are really good friends, in whom you can put your trust, and who in turn, put their trust in you, treat you as an equal and that are true to you. Sadly they are as rare as unicorns and other fictional creatures, myths. But once in a while you can improvize, and put an icecream cone on a horse and pretend it is an unicorn, as well as you can come across a friend that is't perfect (like everyone else), but who comes just that close to being a true friend. And when you come across such a person, try not to let them down, until then, be on the lookout...

What if...

Have you ever just stopped and wondered what would have happened if you would have done things differently, what if you would have done all the things that you have wanted to, but never got the chance or the encouragement that you needed in order to do those things, or the things that you just can't muster the courage to do?
What if you would have chosen a different profession or a different school or even other friends to hang out with? What would happen if you suddenly decided to go on a vacation, in the middle of the school year, just because you needed to or just because you felt like it? What if you would tell the girl that you like, what you feel about her, how she makes you feel? What if you would just tell her this right now?
Who knows? That is why you humanity has evolved so much and so fast in the last century. Because we didn't just stood around, asking ourselves "What if?", but also because we went out there and found out what would happen if we just took a chance.
That's why nobody should just contemplate the "what if", but we should simply go and find out "what if".

Which came first?

Today, I had a revelation, in the shower of all places, and you might laugh at me, either because of the place or the revelation in its self.
So, I didn't have anything else to think about, therefore my mind just wondered off and suddenly a question popped out of nowhere, a question everybody knows but probably few of us have really considered and that question is "What came first, the chicken or the egg?".
No, I have not miraculously come with an answer out of thin air, because this is a question that has a realtive answer and the relativity behind it is that you can consider it from either a theological point of view and say, as it's said in the bible and that all animals (of course, thos includes the chicken as well) have been created by some deity, and thus you can say that the chicken came first.
But you can also look at the matter from a scientifical point of view and say that the chicken came into existence, not out of the blue, but after millions of years of evolution from single cell organisms, therefore, in this case your answer is that the egg came first.
In conclusion, it is not about whether the egg or the chicken came first but wether where have we all come from, has a god created all of us, or are we the result of the Big Bang and the continual evolution that came after? Are we going to let faith happen as it might have been written or are we going to take charge of our destiny and build something extraordinary?

Globus(WIP)

Globus has been the pride and joy of the ancient civilization, like a rare jewel at the neck of a beautiful woman. In the beginning it served the role of a temple, this when the people of the world thought that they could reach the gods if they raised a tower higher than the sky, because at that time, the sky was considered merely a border between earth and heaven, that nothing could lie waiting behind the veil of white clouds. As the civilizations progressed and evolved it bared the role of an embassy, a pillar that the world could use to rise to the next level, without the need to shed blood, like their predecessors had done before them. 

 Though, all of this had happened in the times when Globus was an archipelago of wild, green islands, when it was buzzing full of life, separated from the filthiness of the outside world. Although the first phases of the construction of the tower of Globus had been lost to the passing time, one thing is certain, the tower has been and still is a wonder of the old architecture. It had been raised in the middle of the sea, at the middle of the distance between two islands. The way they had constructed this colossus from the seabed upwards still remains a mystery today, as nobody ever succeeded in replicating this extraordinary construct.

 Now, Globus has turned into a desert wasteland, surrounded by high mountains, which only keep the tremendous heat inside, which in turn is tirelessly fueled by the two suns of the planet. Since the old days, lots of things have changed, the tower at one point had been expanded so much that it had turned into a city of its own. But right now even these days are long gone, as Globus is nothing more than a lonely shadow or a mirage, if you might, in the endless desert. It is a prison, home to the most fearsome criminals of the world and this is where my journey will come to an end, but until then, it is just a distant reminder of the past and a painful scar of the violent days that we live in.

I am not a criminal, a murderer, a rapist, a psychopath or any such tormented soul, but I am just a traveler, looking to get to his final destination, the peak of his journey. Some might go looking for lost treasures such as sunken cities or temples from above the sky or from the deepest corners of the earth, but I am looking for a more enigmatic treasure, one that has stood proudly through the test of time, as a witness to the ever changing story of life, and which wouldn’t go, just wither from the minds of the ones which remained but never from the face of the earth, like a restless witness which has been with us from the beginning of it all and which wouldn’t go until it all would eventually die out… and maybe not even then would he give up on the hope that it would all someday grow back even better and prouder than before.

The prisoners are still free people, as free as a person would be in a city in the middle of nowhere, severed from the real world. They are dropped off at a random spot in the desert, without food, but just a flask of water, a pair of grappling hooks and two choices, to die of dehydration or use the resources that he has been given and search for the city of Globus so he might get a tiny chance at survival. Although, the heat of the two suns is not the sole danger of the desert which is full of parasitic organisms using hosts to survive and gigantic wurms, which live in enormous underground tunnels.

 My journey through Globus started from the only place that you wouldn’t need to climb the mountains to get into the desert they surrounded. The passageway was a valley that cut through the entire mountain, as if it had been made by the sword of a god of some sort.

It took me an entire day to get to the other end of the valley and by then the sky had already filled with bright stars that lighted my way.

 That is how I have always traveled, in the dark of night, through the shadows. I have been a mere shadow in the minds of men, a Watcher since the creation, recording everything without interfering, or at least not directly, but from the same place that I have been watching. We know everybody’s history, but nobody knows ours and that is the way that it must be.

 The moons were above my head, three of them this night. I looked at them as I walked a path that I had walked already thousands of times. I couldn’t feel the cold that was now settling for the night nor did I even felt the heat from during the day. You might call it a perk of being a Watcher, but you would be so wrong. I have come to envy the persons who could feel the heat and the cold of the world around them...and I do not know why it is so.

 Then, when I looked down it was too late. Oh, not for me, but for the sand worm that even dared to think to attack me.

The creature sprung from underneath the dunes, looking for some prey, but instead it found me. Clouds of sand hovered around the great beast, as it rose from the ground. I didn’t need to see it though; I had already felt it from miles away.

The worm didn’t stand a chance against the tremendous power that a Watcher posseses. If we wouldn't be so powerful, how could we have survived for so long during the years that have passed after our creation, how could we have traveled to so many worlds so far apart from each other?

     *******

In the beginning myself and my whole race have been inhabiting a world called Phraxis, in a far off part of the Universe. We were separated from the outside world by a veil that not even us in our immense power could get through. I remember even now how we had been liberated from this weird prison. I was only a child, not even half a millennia old. Once, while I was scribbling, a brilliant light came from the sky, and a hooded man descended from it. He had presented himself to our leader as Thrax, The Traveler. He then told us that our destiny was to watch over all sentient life forms, record their history, their decisions, their greatest deeds as well as their most despicable deeds. We were not to use our powers to influence history unless the life forms were worthy of salvation. And how could have we denied the wishes of our liberator.

 That is what we have been doing for such a long time, which, from the point of view of someone who is not immortal would translate in thousands of millennia.

*******

 The wurm stopped in mid-air and started expanded and started to sizzle and then it burst in a splash of all sorts of fluids and some kind of jelly that turned the sand to glass on touch.

 The threat dealt with, I continued on my path to the Tower of the Lost Souls. As I said, the tower turned town had been a diplomatic center and its original name during those time has been lost to the passing of time, but I still remember that in the last couple of millennia it has usually been called Globus, for reasons I can't remember. It was the only communication center between this world's colonies on planets and in dimensions that they had conquered.

 I have never understood and will never understand the things that make this people just take worlds and worlds for themselves, maybe it is that they just like going to war, sacrificing themselves, killing others in the process, others who just want to protect their world, just as the invaders would do if they were in their place.

 It has been long since I last visited the Tower, but I could still remember its obsidian walls and high ceilings, depicting scenes from far away colonies, hold in place by great sculpted marble pillars. I could never forget the labyrinth-like nature of the place, which I spent countless hours trying to map it.

 As I neared the Tower, the sky began to light up as the sun started to peek over the mountain top. So deepened was I in my train of thoughts that I didn’t even realize how much time had passed. 

School is like an earthly hell

 So...we all started school and on my behalf I would really like tell a student's view of the high school so far. The colleagues are the best thing at my school because they are really cool...ok, the most of them at least.They are all very different, there are fat ones, wired ones, there is one which has so much dandruff that it would make everyone look the other way and my advice to him is... have a shower, please...for god's sake, there are smart ones, there are tall ones, there also is a skater in this hole bundle...and I think that I have included everyone in this. 

 Returning to my point, almost all of them are really great and this is one of the things that doesn't make me regret getting in this school. Almost all of the girls here are pretty, which is as well another pro of entering here. 

The teachers are also really cool, like the maths teacher or the history teacher, which are both funny and know how to make their classes enjoyable. Oh...and finally I get to say something about the  english teacher, which is awful and doesn't even know how to teach or how to make herself pleasant to her students.   

All in all, I have some awesome colleagues, whit which I get along very well and I hope that everything will go as good from now on.

Remembering Facts: Using Mental Associative Chains

An image can help your memory... 
For how long?

This is a method I use to complement the memory palace technique to remember facts, either historical, about people or any other subject. It is pretty simple and follows the same principles as the memory palace: you need to make up bizarre images. To memorise facts we just need to attach keys to each fact, and link them to the subject or person we are considering. Forming a chain of images. Simple, huh? Let's try!

As an example in this post we will work with a person facts. Consider the bio snippet of Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness from Wikipedia:

Halldór Kiljan Laxness [ˈhaltour ˈcʰɪljan ˈlaxsnɛs] (born Halldór Guðjónsson) (April 23, 1902 – February 8, 1998) was a twentieth-century Icelandic novelist, poet, and essayist; author of Independent People, The Atom Station, and Iceland's Bell. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955.

We have a few numbers and books to relate with him. I assume implicitly that I will always remember his nationality (something which may not be true in all cases) but you can treat nationality in the same way that we will treat book names. First, we need some kind of placeholder. If you have read some of his books you could use some place or city appearing in them. As I know (and even saw) he had a white '69 vintage Jaguar, this will be my placeholder. Let's start with the dates.

REMEMBERING NUMBERS

There are several techniques you can use to remember numbers and years. Usually, in the hard-core memorisation books it is suggested to use something called the major system, where you assign to each number a letter or a few letters, and then you form words with them. This word will be the key to decode the numbers. It is comprised of the following number-sound combinations:

Number	Sounds	Memory tip
0	s, z, soft c	z is the first letter of zero
1	d, t, th	d and t have one downstroke
2	n	two downstrokes
3	m	3 downstrokes
4	r	last letter of four
5	l	L is the roman 50
6	j, sh, soft ch..	script j looks like upside 6
7	k, hard c, hard g, q	capital script K looks like a pair of 7's
8	v, f	think of a script f (which has two loops)
9	b, p	p is the mirror image of a 9, b is a rotation of 9
-	vowels, w, h, y	WHY+vocals: use them anywhere to fill the gaps and form words

Based on the description from Your Memory : How It Works and How to Improve It(Amazon link, Bookdepository link)

For a while I had tried using another system: mobile phones assign to each number any of 3 letters, except for 0, 1, 7 and 9. The first two are for special signs, the two last have 4 letters. What I did was moving s to 1 and z to 0. To further simplify, I used only consonants and left away the vocals in this. But the major system is in some sense simpler, as it assigns sounds and not only letters. Let's try to use it here.

Let's start then with the date of birth, 23rd of April, 1902. The day and month are trivial to remember: it is the international book day, linked to Cervantes and Shakespeare's death dates. It is also Saint George, a special day in Catalonia. For the year, we can assume we know it is in the 20th century and only encode 02 which result in s/z/soft c + n. Two-letter combination can be tricky to come up, but we can form a few words: son, zone, ozone, sin... If we needed also the century (setting aside the fact that we could create a fixed image for 10 up to 20 to use as century indicator), 1902 would give t/d+b/p+s/z/soft c+n. As you see, forming a word with 4 letters can be even trickier: you should split them in groups of two letters.

Now, add an image to Saint George fighting the dragon. Which word to use? I'll usezone. And what is the image? Saint George (wearing a bib) is playing 1-1 basketball inside the zone being heavily guarded by a big, green dragon. The bib part is to remind me this is birth.

Now, his death 8th February 1998. We can encode month-day combinations (which are not as easy as before: always use tricks if you can) as DMM (0802 or 82) or MMDD (0208 or 28). There is some ambiguity in both choices, and as such you have to play it safe and be consistent. As a Spanish speaker, the natural way of date sorting for me is DDMM, thus I'll use 82: v/f+n. Now 1998, 98 gets b/p+v/f. An anthropomorphic phone eating beef, using as a table a tombstone.

To remember when he was given the Nobel Prize, 55 is l+l, and our writer is named Halldór Kiljan Laxness. Which happens to have two L's in the name. Here I assume I will always remember this, too and create an image of him with his prize, as a reminder that the date is hidden in him.

Let's start to form the images: Laxness sitting in the driver's seat of a pearly white Jaguar, typing furiously in a typewriter, with a Nobel prize in his lap. Behind it Saint George wearing a bib is playing a 1-on-1 basketball game, fighting to get a good position inside the zone against the dragon. Behind the car a big, anthropomorphic phone is eatingbeef (picture the beef as you enjoy it, taste it mentally... medium, rare?) and using a tombstone as table.

REMEMBERING NAMES

Remembering names is far, far more specific than numbers. We want to remember the names of his most relevant novels (according to the Wikipedia snippet).Independent People, for me, makes me think of the painting La Liberté guidant le peuple. The Atom Station, a big red London-style bus stopping below the Atomium, in Belgium. Iceland's Bell is the Hallgrímskirkja bell swinging full force.

If there is some possibility of forgetting his nationality, use some strong related image to add to your mental placeholder. For Iceland, I could use any image of my road trip around Iceland, but a good one even if you've been there are the images of Eyjafjallajökull erupting just above the car.

We just need to place all these images around the pearly white Jaguar. We can place them in the car's back seats: the painting, a big reproduction of the church and a big red toy bus, each laying in one back seat. I'm counting here on remembering the atom part just from having the image of the Atomium and the bus implicitly. This can also lead to easier forgetting, but sometimes you have to trade off simpler images with perfect recall.

DEVELOP YOUR OWN KEYS

This can only get better with practice, and you can use it for people, history or whatever you come up with. Find your own imagery and fill your characters with expression and unforgettable facts. Use your life and previous knowledge as basis to form images (like I used Saint George) that are significant for your mind, don't rely on others for this. As with the memory palace technique, practice makes perfect, and I can assure you that you will be able to store a lot of facts about important people without problems.

Can you still recall the images we have used? And still remember the major system? Remembering the major system can be the tricky part, just keep trying! If you found this post useful, please spread the word!

Nightwish "Sleeping Sun" with lyrics, Tarja Turunen