a Pushka Blog

Wagnerlicht at vivid light festival Sydney in the conservatorium

Wagnerlicht at vivid light festival Sydney in the conservatorium

How lost faith

Seventh-day Adventist, had a series of conversations with an atheist friend at uni, he was asking for some evidence for God, Jesus’ divinity and truth of the bible, pointing out that all this ‘evidence’ doesn’t prove anything.. I’m gay, so he said “why you chose a philosophy that demands your death?” And I said “I don’t want to chose a philosophy that brings me the most pleasure, I just want to follow the truth” later we spoke again, and he said “of your beliefs are based on faith, with no real evidence you can give, how can you say you’re following the truth?” From that day, after messaging a church leader with the same Q and getting a terrible answer, I was honest with myself that I don’t know about God, state of the dead etc. 23 years old, Macquarie university, 5 June 2012

What I’d really love is to build my own business or be an artist, rather than working as a tool in a giant corporation to be bashed until my soul is destroyed and my will yielded to their monolith income generating strategies…

However there is one company I would love to work for (well I have discovered more) After watching the Life at Google videos, I found that Google is an amazing company with a mission I love, and a work culture that is different from what you’d think a typical business would be…

Valve

This seems even more chaotic and creative than Google, with no boss, Valve runs on a completely flat management system and employees are free to create and innovate in all their ventures (also their desks have wheels, so there’s no getting stuck in a rut ~ always moving ~ )

FutureMe.org

I was going through the lists of passwords and accounts I have, updating them, since I’m deleting two old email addresses of mine, and stumbled across this account I completely forgot about (luckily the email address it’s sending to is not being closed)

It’s a website where you can send an email to yourself some distant time in the future, like a time capsule.

I’m not going to read mine early, but here’s the details:

Hello future pushka~
to: email@address [edit]
status: private [make "public, but anonymous"]
January 12th, 2011 January 11th, 2015 delete

I know that my life has changed so much since then, so it will be like getting an email from another person – so interesting ~

I have always been involved with languages other than English ~

My parents are from the Czech Republic, and I grew up speaking Czech and listening to Czech every day. When I was very young, I spoke Czech beautifully, but alas, my sister who had already been going to school and who was learning English, started speaking with me in English, and so it became more than second nature to me…

I then later wanted to learn French for some reason.. I don’t really know why, I just did, but never did.

Then in year 8 in high school, I became interested in Asian culture.

A friend in my class by the name of Jenny was reading Japanese comic books, and drawing that style of art. I was fascinated by the artwork, and also wanted to learn what she could do. I bought a comic book, and started trying to copy the pictures. It was a shaky start, but after some years I could draw pretty much anything that I wanted. I also, through reading the comic, was exposed for the first time to the Japanese culture, which was so different from the European and Australian Western culture I had always known…

I started becoming more and more interested in both modern and traditional Japanese culture, cooking, food, clothes, music, art, etc.etc. ~ and taught myself Japanese from a $10 CD for my senior years, learning a few grammar points, vocabulary, the 2 alphabets and some Chinese characters, (also used in the language.)

I then learned Japanese intensely in Macquarie University, and also traveled there~

I am now going to a church near Macquarie University that has many Chinese international students, so I have also started learning about Chinese culture and geography etc. I would love to learn Chinese, since I have so many people I could practice with, but I find it so much harder to get than Japanese  ~

One tool I discovered from a video on YouTube, is www.Lang-8.com

It is a website where you can write a journal, essay, letter etc.etc. – in the language you are learning, and other users who are native speakers of that language can correct your written work. Then in turn, you can help people who are learning your native tongue.

Best of luck in your language endeavours !! Even if you only know one ~ ^__^

29.8 GB, 6.5 hours - 394.5 minutes recording/ drawing time

I had too much spare time before starting work – and I got a blank drawing book from my sister who got it really cheap, since Borders was closing all its stores in Sydney…

I got this awesome tip from this blog on the original procrastination hack.

What you do is a rotation of time periods, you can do 10 minutes then 2 minutes, the 1st section of time working as hard as you can on your next action of your to do list, then 2 minutes doing anything ~ surfing the web or whatever

And then repeat – each cycle doing some other thing on your to do list.

You can make the times longer, I usually do 15 minutes, and 7 minutes or something like that.

And after a while, you really get into it and both segments are enjoyable ~

You can use this online loop count down timer 

Alex Day Nerimon on YouTube, as with many other non giant conglomerate corporation based internet video producers, has undertaken a wide range of intriguing entrepreneurial ventures, the latest of which is very exciting for one who doesn’t like the idea of the addictive nature of the basement based internet – not being the best for one’s health, both physically and socially.

I’ve a tendancy to keep by myself and away from people, though I do also, as with Alex, love collecting things and gathering interesting experiences.

The venture is LifeScouts - lifescouts.com as with boyscouts, but for people of all ages. On Tumblr, one can reshare badges one has along with a note about your story pertaining to said badge, or one can add a video or photos to it.