The Fantastic Four

I stumbled upon this the other day:

...and it brought back memories. There is a nice story behind it (as you would have known if you understood the Vietnamese the artist wrote).

I used to play an MMORPG and made friends from there, among which were guys A, B, and C. Guy A was majoring in journalism (should have graduated by now) and wrote an article about mythologies in MMORPGs. For this he interviewed a bunch of gamers, among which were guys B, C and me. Seeing that we shared the same opinions, guy A decided to make a website dedicated to mythologies as manifested in different MMORPGs and recruited us to the team. I never interacted much with guy B. Guy C was an architecture major (should also have graduated by now) and had done a lot of drawing and CG. Known by the screen name of "flute", he drew this picture to represent us four, the would-be founder of the website, thus The Fantastic Four.

The figures are modeled after the elements and mythical creatures. Guy B is Fire, the Devil (top left), who also has those curly horns due to his screen name's reference to ifrits. Guy A is Air, the Harpie (top right) and he looks just like that in real life. Guy C is Earth, the Reaper (bottom left). I don't think either he or the painting has any resemblance to the Reaper, but I guess the element of Earth does fit his personality. Last is Water, the Mermaid (bottom right) -- me.

We kind of just abandoned the project halfway, but this picture still makes me smile every time I see it.

Salt and Sand

I was recently asked about the title of this blog. Yes, there is a reference -- although me using a random string of words (as in the case of AoNikki) wouldn't be out of character. The reference is from the song "Viva la Vida" by Coldplay:

One minute I held the key
Next the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand
On pillars of salt and pillars of sand

Next is of course the question of what this reference means to me. When I first heard this song, it rang as a strong personal metaphor for the recent years of my life. Just like everyone else, I have been constantly changing as I grew up. In the last few years, however, the changes had been drastic. Needless to say, I used to be a very different person.

To specify the type of person I used to be would be to risk sounding pompous, but this much I can say: I used to be much closer to "a king" than I am now. My "kingness" was built on my thoughts, my philosophy, and my desire to be difference in specific ways. These things are my foundations and I don't lie about them --- when it comes to them, I believe what I say, or write, as I say or write it. However, these things have been, and will be, changing drastically and often. In the context of this song's metaphor, they are salt and sand: they make my pillars, and they fall, and they are replaced.

The connection I feel with the lyrics doesn't stop there, but the rest is irrelevant in this explanation of my blog title. If you really want to know, you can start with listening to a good song and thinking more about it:

The Tragedy of Overcaring

I heard that it's hard to overwater a fig, and yet that's what I managed to do. It was rather difficult to miss this fact as a thick layer of water lied uneventfully on top of the soil. I tilted the pot over the sink so all the free water could escape.

That was a week ago. The fig had been fine during the first few days after that; however when I looked again this evening, most of the lower leaves had turned yellow and seemed like they would fall off any moment.

Additionally, there is a pot of flower that I usually tend to after the fig. After the overwatering accident from last week, I have been a lot more cautious about giving water to the plants, and thus this flower pot had received less water than usual. This evening, however, I noticed that most of the flowers had withered and fell off and only leaves remained. The soil felt dry, so I gave it about a glass of water (it's a big pot). But now I'm really puzzled. Did I underwater the flower? Or did I actually overwater it, but the water is just hiding deep underneath the soil and I couldn't feel it --- in which case I just aggravated the situation?

Caring for plants is hard, as I just discovered. My plants being unhealthy makes me really sad, and I think if the situation with the fig doesn't improve, I'll have to repot it. I've been putting off doing that because 1) it looked healthy and 2) I don't know how to do it. But, as it turned out, my plant isn't actually healthy, and saving it is a lot more important.