Opinion Paragraph

It is really needed a turn to realist fiction. It is the best genre in order to express the reality of a time. So, for example, today’s social problems can be described and therefore we can raise a global consciousness. Moreover, I am pretty sure that in the future the most known works of our years will be those that describe the difficulties that people have to face nowadays. As a consequence of this, realist fiction is going to be the top genre.

Descriptive Paragraphs

Describing a place

The place I like the most is my future house. The place where it is going to be build is in the middle of a huge forest near a small river. However, it will be neither warm nor cold anytime of the year because I will place there a lot of solar panels that will be decorative. It will have plenty of rooms, some bigger, some smaller, but all of them will have little decoration. I do not like ornamented places, I prefer practical ones. Of course it will have an ancient-looking fireplace and lots of books and technologies. I can’t wait for the day I live in that place!

Describing a person

The person I like the most is Carla. She is very shy but, in turn, she shows every single time that she is very self-confident. The problem is that she needs to learn to socialize a little bit more because she has troubles meeting new people. She thinks she is ugly but I don’t think so. Her pretty big dark-brown eyes shine like an autumn day; at least that is what they remind to me because she is melancholic. However you can have with her really good conversations, with deep topics. Because all of these I think she is the best, and maybe one day I will meet her…

Brainstorming

There are at least three ways of writing a brainstorm. I am going to use making a list, freewriting and mapping bearing in mind the next topic: Is corruption a reality in Spain?

Making a list

• Bárcenas
• Granados
• Andalucía
• public money arbitrary spent 
• people's perception
• statistics
• non declared money
• black cards

Freewriting

The case of Bárcenas is a clear example of corruption but there are others like Granados' or the employ politics that have taken place in Andalucía. A lot of public money has been spent without control, and all that is perceived by people, who don't trust anymore in politicians. There are also a lot of statistics that confirm the high levels of corruption in Spain, a country where people is used to pay with non declared money. Caja Madrid's black cards are another example of this.

Mapping

Slavoj Žižek (Part I)

As you can see in the title, today I am going to talk about a very different topic. I am not continuing by now the story I was writing. Today I want to talk about an idea that I have heard in a Youtube video. This can be found embed at the bottom of the entry. The topic of what you can see here is a philosophical or sociological one. Slavoj Žižek poses the following question in the short clip: The world is advancing, or evolving, faster and faster during the last few centuries. Should we stop and think?

As you can see, this post is deeper than the previous entries. Anyway, as a first step towards reaching any conclusions, we must analyze a bit the figure of the Žižek, or, at least, we must try to recognize him as a known thinker of our time (he has interesting writings on theories about cinema). So he is not an unknown person. Because of that, I consider the statement I commented before about evolution a very interesting one. Why?

For me there is a sense of increase of the human development’s speed. That is obvious. Just think about our ancestors. They discovered how to use the fire in the year 350.000 B.C. while the first known wheel dates from the year 3000 B.C. However, nowadays we discover a lot of new things, especially technological ones, that are far more complicated but they are as used, if not as useful, as the wheel. At least you have to recognize the acceleration of our evolution.

However there are consequences of this development. You can’t imagine the Cold War without the risk of a nuclear attack. That is, the evolution has problems that are more evident the more you think of the recent years or centuries. There is a huge magnitude of consequences that we, as humans, are able to provoke with our recent discoveries.

For me, the first part of the Slavoj Žižek’s idea is true. But this is the most interesting part: Should we stop and think? Is it necessary to stop and meditate about what we are doing in order to avoid future dangers?

Number Three

So as time went by, I forgot my initial prejudices about what I was doing and started to develop the new hobby. One of the first things I did was installing a program called TOR which gave you access to a brand new list of forbidden sites which are not compiled by the searching engine of Google. It was astounding. I don’t know if you know it, but if you want an example of what you can do with this program, I will let you know that you can buy any kind of drug in an online market and you receive it at your house via conventional mailing.

This point was not believed by my mates who asked me to prove it somehow and one night I decided to try. My friend’s house in the country was going to be empty and the Halloween day was the perfect time. So I decided to buy some hallucinating mushrooms.

The days passed and Halloween was at the turn of the corner. Nothing had arrived. I even sent an e-mail to the drug dealer who was from Belgium. He replied and told me that everything was ok; police never detect minimal quantities of drugs. And he was right, the very same day of the festivity two letters arrived, as the usual format of a letter but fulfilled with everything we wanted. Now the decision was ours.

Number Two

For example, one day I saw a video of a pack of chickens that were alive. In the video you could see how they were triturated. How is it possible to see that without internet? Maybe you could spend some months just preparing everything for that. But with internet in your side, after that video you could see another one as much impressing as the one of the chickens. That is what amazed me.

This tendency towards rare and surprising digital content was shared by most of the people of my age. However, they stopped one step before and I felt good when I showed them good and new material that I had found. Like the one where you could see a guy falling from a cliff and the next thing you saw was the man in the hospital and a medic closing his head as if it was a book. Amazing. If you see that in your real life you can’t forget it in your whole life. When you meet with people and start telling stories, that would be one of the first and more impressive forever. So, what is the difference? Why is it impressive living that but it is detestable to watch videos about that? 

Number One

For a long time I had been very addicted to new technologies. Particularly to everything that had to do with internet. That is not surprising at all nowadays. However, I have always considered me a kind of person that is very self-reflexive. And I think I was able to see how far my addiction was going by the time the events I am going to relate happened.

Everybody knows for sure what can be found during a session of internet, you go to Google or Youtube and there you spend hours and hours doing just nothing. But me, I had got tired of that long time ago. My use of this tool was more visceral. I started watching videos of Mexican drug dealers from ‘Cartels’ killing innocent people or recordings of the most painful accidents that people have suffered.

It seemed to me a diversion that was innocent. The internet can be seen as a window of a floating house that will always offer a different view anytime you look through it. I wanted to discover everything that people in the past could not have seen no matter how much money for traveling they had. And I was on my way.