18/1/15, 22:20
Life is a movie. You sit in the cinema, watch it, eat some popcorn. Stuff happens to you all the time. You are passive.
But it’s not a normal movie. It’s a VIP cinema and a VIP movie.
You can change the script while it’s going on.
As you are watching it, if you don’t like the plot or theme of the movie, you can ask for a switch.
If you notice you are in a romantic comedy while you want drama, you can tell the conductor “less humor, more drama and plot twists”.
If you lack action in your life, just shout it out, and suddenly you’ll be a car chase, killing some dirty cops and sleeping with hot babes.
You can take the director’s seat of this movie. You usually just watch this movie… but it’s totally up to you to be the director.
Or, if you like the plot and the actors, just keep watching for a while… you can also change it later.
18/1/15, 17:23
The power of names has been discussed in our culture for millennia. In fantasy novels, people guard their true names and banish or control their enemies by invoking their names.
There is a basis to this lore.
Giving something a name, or learning its name, is powerful. It allows you to refer to that when conversing with other people, to seek knowledge about it, to attack it or connect with it. It allows you to build upon it.
Language is, by and large, a never-ending collection of names. Names of people, of actions, of ideas, of things. When you reason about something without giving it a name, your thought process is more cumbersome than it can be. The act of naming a thing encapsulates it into a box, and allows you to build greater and greater ideas from these boxes.
P.S. I can’t finish this post without giving one cool example of a name used as a key theme and plot point – our beloved Doctor Who. This idea is pivotal to the very name of the show … Doctor Who. What is his real name? Nobody knows, he is just “The Doctor”. His name is later in the show actually used as an incantation, a secret his enemies seek, a riddle, a signal of trust. There is even an episode called Name of the Doctor.
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