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Random Chat, Thoughts, Posts, and/or Rants Thread

ZF Lee

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Just to share some thoughts...

A few weeks ago, one of my church leaders asked me, 'ZF, do you want to share something on the pulpit for Mothers' Day?'

I got taken aback at first...I hadn't done public speaking in a long time.
I asked my sibling about it, and he just said, 'Just say no...no need to trouble yourself.'

But that felt really silly.
A lot of people HATE church, but that shouldn't be an excuse to not give anything.
So I said to my leader, 'How about I don't just share a testimonial...how about I make a video?'

He said OK, so I started work...

At first, I looked at CURRENT Mothers' Day videos made by churches to see how they did it.

I noticed they focused on mothers' reflections, rah-rah pumping them up with love...but not much on exhorting us folks on loving our mums better.

Even quite a few Christian vids did not discuss anything on the Word...which is like bread without flour.
So there was room to make a video that discussed tenets of the Word, and skip the Mothers' Day rah-rah.

Read the Word, reflected on it...and decided to make a video based on how Jesus loved his mother Mary, and how we can learn from Him to love our mums better.

There were many other Biblical mothers like Naomi and Hannah, but since Jesus' the OG, I went with Him.

Spent 4-5 days on the script.
It took that long because I had to read tons of blogs and commentaries to make sure I won't twist the Word.
(Gotta give pastors credit for all their time spent on prepping sermons)

Then I sent the script to my leader to check.
This step may seem normal, but you may be surprised how little folks follow-up on prepping presentations and events.

The next part was the technical stuff...assembling visuals and soundtrack.

I liked the style of James Jani and Nas Daily, which was all about motion...snippets of small videos with text (that didn't stay in one place). So I applied their approaches.

I wrote the script having some general ideas of what visuals to find
(eg for dialogue 1, have this clip of mother with son, for dialogue 2, switch over to mum working hard at kitchen, etc)

Hunting for good video clips was a bit tough at first, with Shutterstock's paywall. But I found lots of stock videos on YouTube that had no or smaller watermarks. And because I picked Jesus' mum Mary as a main topic character, she already had plenty of movies made on her.

Soundtrack was tough.
Not only did I have to pick matching music...I had to time different sections with the emotions of the various video messages.

The best Christian-ly soundtracks I could find were from Piano Guys, One Voice Children's Choir and some violin pieces. So I decided to look for other pieces outside the church.

Since most music out there is 90% sex and drugs, I thought I was doomed.

Then I remembered an anime series I watched some time back: 'Violet Evergarden'

Basically, it's a story of how a teen soldier, Violet, learns how to feel emotions and write letters for a postal office after she loses her guardian, Major Gilbert.

I tried some of the OSTs against my visuals, and found they matched OK!

The final works:

At the Mothers' Day service, folks were blown away by my video.
Got comments like:

"This is really well put together. Good job on the edits!"
"This is emotional...a lot of potential"
"Meaningful...beautiful."


The truth?
I hadn't made a video like this in the last 5-6 years since high school.

So it's interesting what we can do when we work to create something, instead of just buying something from a store or hiring on Fiverr...

Had I listened to my sibling, would I have created the video at all?
Would I really know what I could actually do?




Later, for my mum's birthday, I didn't run out to go buy a birthday card as most folks do.
I just took out my watercolours and painted one. Did flowers and stalks.

Turned out pretty well after 5-6 years of no practice...all I needed to do was to start with light colours, wait for it to dry before applying medium and darker tones. And to watch out for 'bleeding' from wetness...I did not use high-grade paper.

My mum was pretty pleased.

I feel a bit sad though...I realised that when we are young, we have more space to start picking up arts, handicrafts, cooking, music...and when we enter the SCRIPT and the working world, we just have no time to build up further mastery in these things. How much more does the SCRIPT rob us of, besides financial freedom?
I think that should be one of my aims for getting wealthy...having the time and resources to master cooking, music and arts.
 
Last edited:

Ocean Man

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Just to share some thoughts...

A few weeks ago, one of my church leaders asked me, 'ZF, do you want to share something on the pulpit for Mothers' Day?'

I got taken aback at first...I hadn't done public speaking in a long time.
I asked my sibling about it, and he just said, 'Just say no...no need to trouble yourself.'

But that felt really silly.
A lot of people HATE church, but that shouldn't be an excuse to not give anything.
So I said to my leader, 'How about I don't just share a testimonial...how about I make a video?'

He said OK, so I started work...

At first, I looked at CURRENT Mothers' Day videos made by churches to see how they did it.

I noticed they focused on mothers' reflections, rah-rah pumping them up with love...but not much on exhorting us folks on loving our mums better.

Even quite a few Christian vids did not discuss anything on the Word...which is like bread without flour.
So there was room to make a video that discussed tenets of the Word, and skip the Mothers' Day rah-rah.

Read the Word, reflected on it...and decided to make a video based on how Jesus loved his mother Mary, and how we can learn from Him to love our mums better.

There were many other Biblical mothers like Naomi and Hannah, but since Jesus' the OG, I went with Him.

Spent 4-5 days on the script.
It took that long because I had to read tons of blogs and commentaries to make sure I won't twist the Word.
(Gotta give pastors credit for all their time spent on prepping sermons)

Then I sent the script to my leader to check.
This step may seem normal, but you may be surprised how little folks follow-up on prepping presentations and events.

The next part was the technical stuff...assembling visuals and soundtrack.

I liked the style of James Jani and Nas Daily, which was all about motion...snippets of small videos with text (that didn't stay in one place). So I applied their approaches.

I wrote the script having some general ideas of what visuals to find
(eg for dialogue 1, have this clip of mother with son, for dialogue 2, switch over to mum working hard at kitchen, etc)

Hunting for good video clips was a bit tough at first, with Shutterstock's paywall. But I found lots of stock videos on YouTube that had no or smaller watermarks. And because I picked Jesus' mum Mary as a main topic character, she already had plenty of movies made on her.

Soundtrack was tough.
Not only did I have to pick matching music...I had to time different sections with the emotions of the various video messages.

The best Christian-ly soundtracks I could find were from Piano Guys, One Voice Children's Choir and some violin pieces. So I decided to look for other pieces outside the church.

Since most music out there is 90% sex and drugs, I thought I was doomed.

Then I remembered an anime series I watched some time back: 'Violet Evergarden'

Basically, it's a story of how a teen soldier, Violet, learns how to feel emotions and write letters for a postal office after she loses her guardian, Major Gilbert.

I tried some of the OSTs against my visuals, and found they matched OK!

The final works:

At the Mothers' Day service, folks were blown away by my video.
Got comments like:

"This is really well put together. Good job on the edits!"
"This is emotional...a lot of potential"
"Meaningful...beautiful."


The truth?
I hadn't made a video like this in the last 5-6 years since high school.

So it's interesting what we can do when we work to create something, instead of just buying something from a store or hiring on Fiverr...

Had I listened to my sibling, would I have created the video at all?
Would I really know what I could actually do?




Later, for my mum's birthday, I didn't run out to go buy a birthday card as most folks do.
I just took out my watercolours and painted one. Did flowers and stalks.

Turned out pretty well after 5-6 years of no practice...all I needed to do was to start with light colours, wait for it to dry before applying medium and darker tones. And to watch out for 'bleeding' from wetness...I did not use high-grade paper.

My mum was pretty pleased.

I feel a bit sad though...I realised that when we are young, we have more space to start picking up arts, handicrafts, cooking, music...and when we enter the SCRIPT and the working world, we just have no time to build up further mastery in these things. How much more does the SCRIPT rob us of, besides financial freedom?
I think that should be one of my aims for getting wealthy...having the time and resources to master cooking, music and arts.
I think for special events like Birthdays, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc… the older you get the more it’s kind of expected to buy cards or spend money on gifts than hand making them. I personally would rather enjoy making something but I’m not Vincent Van Gogh. The result may not be that great, haha. But I agree, it’d be nice if more people accept and pick up the arts and use their creativity rather than default to buying things.
 

YanC

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Am I the only person who constantly feels like I might be in the wrong vehicle for the fastlane?
It seems to me that some sort of constant self doubt is inherent to being on your own. On good days, I feel it less, on bad ones, more. At least this is my experience... I think it helps pushing myself forward though.
 
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Ing

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Just got an email from Andrew Clarc, who won the lottery and wants to donate 950000usd to me.
What a luck!
 

Madame Peccato

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Just got an email from Andrew Clarc, who won the lottery and wants to donate 950000usd to me.
What a luck!

An oil prince from Dubai died and apparently I'm his heir??? See ya later nerds
 

Ing

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Am I the only person who constantly feels like I might be in the wrong vehicle for the fastlane?
May be well drink a Bavarian beer someday and discuss that!
 

Mathuin

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Kak

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Last edited:

WillHurtDontCare

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I spend a lot of time wondering where courage stops and when stupidity starts.

I don't think that you can fully separate the two - I think that a lot of the time you just rationalize why someone was one or the other based on the resuslts.
 

Kak

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/fully-...jtpav7m53rpfhx3&reflink=article_copyURL_share

I bet the communists still wear them anyway.
 
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WillHurtDontCare

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1620936045023.png
 
G

Guest-5ty5s4

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/fully-...jtpav7m53rpfhx3&reflink=article_copyURL_share

I bet the communists still wear them anyway.
I'm just waiting for the alarm to sound that "unvaxinated people" are "untouchables" and that we are all to be forced into concentration camps and murdered or something.

It's becoming...strange. All of it.

I'm getting "only the obedient ones should survive," kind of vibes.
 

WillHurtDontCare

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WillHurtDontCare

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I'm just waiting for the alarm to sound that "unvaxinated people" are "untouchables" and that we are all to be forced into concentration camps and murdered or something.

It's becoming...strange. All of it.

I'm getting "only the obedient ones should survive," kind of vibes.

 

Madame Peccato

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Deleted78083

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Today I was walking in the park maskless, and everyone was looking at me.

I went to the kiosk to buy a bottle of water and they refused to serve me because I wasn't wearing any mask.

So they lost my money.

Dumb f*****
 

WillHurtDontCare

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Guest-5ty5s4

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All this tells us is that math dictates the universe.

Every one of these patterns can be modeled as an equation.

And the same equations are found all over nature - that's pretty much what science is...discovering those equations.

We can take science down to various levels of abstraction:

- Sociology, Philosophy etc. would be the highest level, very abstract. Honestly, this is more "art" than science
- Psychology would be the next level
- Biology next
- Chemistry
- Physics
- Mathematics - the lowest level - the foundation

Each higher level is made up of the lower levels. Biology can be broken down into chemical components, and the chemical components can be broken down in physical rules about atoms and whatnot, and all of that is determined by numerical relationships.

Basically, it all goes down to basic counting and math. But it can expand to be uuuuuuber complex.
 
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Train

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Found this survey of what different gens see as "rich":

  • Millennials (ages 24 to 39): $1.4 million
  • Gen X (ages 44 to 55): $1.9 million
  • Baby boomers (ages 56 to 74): $2.5 million


Guess when negative net worths are commonplace, 1-2 million ain't too shabby, hahaha
 

MJ DeMarco

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Mathuin

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Found this survey of what different gens see as "rich":




Guess when negative net worths are commonplace, 1-2 million ain't too shabby, hahaha
And then you have Felix Dennis:


IMG_0361.jpg
 
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Mathuin

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In the context of business owners, founders, and entrepreneurs, this list is pretty accurate.

Actually, numbers should be a little higher for inflation since the book is old.

Yes forgot to mention that, A LOT has happened since 2006 lol
 
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WillHurtDontCare

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Hot take that might put me on the naughty list...

I keep hearing about “Asian hate,” but I haven’t seen any or heard any, and I am friends with a lot of deep southern folk who voted for Trump.

What I think could be going on is this is being used to distract from legitimate criticism of the CCP, the Chinese government, which has been accused of genocide, as well as being the epicenter of the coronavirus.

It’s nothing to do with the people, but everything to do with the government.

I keep asking people this - why do you believe for a second that the people who make these accusations are being even slightly sincere?

These people like mudslinging - they don't want to help anyone. The goal is to spread misery with never-ending propaganda campaigns.
 
G

Guest-5ty5s4

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I keep asking people this - why do you believe for a second that the people who make these accusations are being even slightly sincere?

These people like mudslinging - they don't want to help anyone. The goal is to spread misery with never-ending propaganda campaigns.
Do you mean accusations and stories about being called slurs or the accusations against China committing genocide?

I'd call the latter credible since both sides in America (very divided otherwise) seem to agree that it is or was happening.

Even CNN (I'm really surprised) seems to agree on this point: Exclusive: New report claims evidence of Beijing's 'intent to destroy' Uyghur people
 

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