So, The International 3 has just ended, and boy it was a hell of an event.

Biggest e-sports event, ever.

 

For those who are not familiar with the term e-sports, it means electronic sports, and it is literally what it is; sports played on electronic devices. We’re talking about famous games like Counter Strike, Battlefield, League of Legends, Dota and many more being played competitively for prize money. Ten years ago e-sports would have been a waste of time. Your parents would probably kill you if you mention about a career playing games competitively. But today, e-sports is actually quite a big thing, the community is growing rapidly, and you can actually earn BIG money pursuing a career in e-sports.

Take The International 3 for example, it is the biggest e-sports event around. It is held yearly, and its prize pool is HUGE. This year’s prize pool featured 2.6million USD. Top teams from all around the world came to compete to get their hands on the money, and to some of the teams it was more than just the money, it was about making their efforts known.

It was like the World Cup for Dota 2.

I mean, check this team out. Neolution Orange E-sports is a Dota 2 team from Malaysia that snatched the 3rd place in TI3. Immediately their status in their home country was cemented, and they gained massive recognition for their efforts in the tournament. Hell, even the Sports Ministry of Malaysia is starting to back the country’s e-sports scene after Orange’s performance. 

Just so that you get a better picture of how huge this event was, here’s an article of it being covered by BBC News.

And here’s a video of it being covered by Q13 Fox’s morning report, who cannot believe “what a big deal this is worldwide”, and calling it an “amazing sub-culture that no one knew”.

During the grand finals of the event, it gathered a combined total of more than one million concurrent viewers online for its live stream. Yes, watching live streams of e-sports is totally a culture among e-sports enthusiast today. We’re not just talking about Dota, people are flooding stream sites for games like League of Legends or Battlefield as well. Everyday there are more than a million unique viewers tuning in to watch their favourite streamers play their favourite games.

Sponsors that are making this kind of e-sports event happen are attracting more and more players to commit their lives and compete. This has really improved the e-sports scene of late and its current stature is definitely looking healthy right now.

Who knows, five to ten years from now, this may even be a thing as big as the NBA, or the BPL. Perhaps, e-sports in Olympics?!

Essay, ese.

August 29, 2013 | Uncategorized  |  Leave a Comment

I bumped into a couple of interesting points while reading through “The Age of the Essay”.

In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you’re writing for yourself. You’re thinking out loud. But not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. 

Are the essays that the University are making us students write essays that make us explain ourselves to the marker, or essays that challenges us to think out loud? I think it’s both. In a way, the questions raised make us think deeper in theory and express them out loud in our essays but at the same time, we HAVE to explain ourselves to the marker as well. It’s sort of like selling our ideas for marks, the way we write our essays in Uni. So based on the writer’s view on real essays, should the University really challenge their students with REAL essays, or academic essay is still the way to go? If real essays are all about us thinking out loud, I guess this blog post CAN be considered as a “real essay” as well?

So what’s interesting? For me, interesting means surprise. Interfaces, as Geoffrey James has said, should follow the principle of least astonishment. A button that looks like it will make a machine stop should make it stop, not speed up. Essays should do the opposite. Essays should aim for maximum surprise.

According to the writer, and I kinda agree, the most valuable ingredient in your essay is its surprise element. All of the essays that I did in Uni, I shamefully admit, have been written on subjects that I am most comfortable with. I have never went beyond the familiar zone of my subject to find a surprise factor that even I myself never knew. I am a very curious person, I like to find out about stuffs, but when it comes to assessments, I am more of a “just get it done with” kinda person.

Perhaps I should venture more into my chosen subject for my next academic essay.

Speaking of uni, the people from my class were responsible for coming up with symposium questions for this set of reading. One of the questions raised by a fellow student tingled my curiosity and I decided to research more about it.

Has modern technology made writing better, or worse?

This article about social media and writing surprisingly relates back to this reading. The writer stated that social media makes for better student writing. All the reasons behind why it is so all goes back to the first quote that I posted on earlier on. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well, and write better.

So yay, more reasons to spend time on the social media.

Reading on Bush’s article, it really amazes me how accurately Bush speculated the future of technology. Things that people have said was impossible several years ago are made possible several years later with the right resources.

Everything that can be invented has been invented.

Today, if you hear somebody say something like this, you’ll probably laugh that person off as an idiot. But this quote was said by Charles Holland Duell I, who was the commissioner of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It has been regarded as one of the biggest misquotes of all time.

Doesn’t look like an idiot to me.

 

Bush’s stated that we humans have a limit in transmitting and reviewing the results of research during our time, but that limit is continuously expanding as time goes by. Whatever that we’d think is impossible, may not be the case 20 years down the road.

This has got me really thinking, will technology ever stop improving?

This article by The Economist believes otherwise. The writer argued that the economy has been “slackening the rate of innovation for decades” and suggested a few more arguments about why he thought that technology is getting stagnant, which kinda makes sense.

I mean, I cannot imagine how the smartphone can be as efficient as it is today. Yes, there may be slight improvements here and there for smartphones but I cannot imagine that there will ever be another day where something as ground-breaking as the first iPhone will come by.

But then again, I may be wrong. Ten years ago when Harry Potter fans wanted the “Invisibility Cloak” to be real, professional minds laughed it off as impossible. Today, there IS a working invisibility cloak.

There may not be any more ground to break in the smartphone industry, but there is certainly many other things for technology to grow on.

And I still believe in the possibility of TELEPORTATION.

SPOILER ALERT: I am going to discuss about the final episode of “Six Feet Under” in this post and the series in general. So if you’ve only started watching the series or you’re halfway through it. STAY AWAY FROM THIS POST. I’ve just finished watching the final episode of “Six Feet Under” and wow, just…WOW. The final six minutes of the episode blew me away. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a greater moment in television. Kudos to Alan Ball (Oscar-winning writer for American Beauty for his works throughout the series and closing it in such a grand fashion. The thing about television series is, while books and films possess the capacity to provide a deliberate closure, television series struggle to do so because of long-form storytelling. When a series ends, viewers might feel that there are plotlines unfinished and suffer from the undetermined and ambiguous fates of the characters. There was no such thing with Six Feet Under. In the final six minutes of the finale, Alan Ball showed the viewers every death of the show’s regular character and it was effective in providing a sense of closure.

“Everybody’s waiting.”

Moreover, throughout the series every episode of Six Feet Under opens with a death, of which the body of the deceased will then be delivered to the Fisher & Sons (Fisher & Diaz later in the series) funeral home. These deaths make their way into the narration of the episode and carries death as the main theme that runs throughout the series. The fact that the show started with deaths (first death being the show’s patriarch Nathaniel Samuel Fisher Sr. played by Richard Jenkins) and ended with the deaths of every characters that the viewers have journeyed with and learned to love since brought me to awe of how the finale have succeeded where many have failed; closure.

This ARTICLE basically sums up how I feel for this magnificent piece of art.

Omg omg omg

July 22, 2013 | Uncategorized  |  Leave a Comment

Okay…

This is my first time handling a blog, ever.

Let’s hope everything turns out just fine.

Kidding, I’ve had blogS over the few years of my life. None lasted more than three months. So I’m kind of hoping that this whole blogging-assessment thing will work out for me. *gulps*

Ryan

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