Dignidad.

English

A partir de una fecha que ya quedó inscrita en la historia de Chile, el “estallido social” del 18 de octubre de 2019, comenzó un enorme movimiento social al que yo personalmente suelo referirme como “movimiento por la dignidad”, por ser ésta una palabra que se ha vuelto clave en la discusión pública. Desde entonces hemos tenido protestas masivas y violenta represión por parte del estado. Las razones de la protesta son muchas, pero decantan en el reconocimiento de que nos regula un sistema que favorece los intereses económicos de los grupos privilegiados por sobre los derechos, la seguridad social y el respeto al medio ambiente. Ya que el problema es sistémico, a partir de esto se instala la petición central de una nueva constitución, escrita en forma democrática, que reemplace a la escrita durante la dictadura de Pinochet. En pocos días será el plebiscito que decidirá el camino a la nueva constitución. […]

Dignity.

Español

A date that’s now been etched into Chilean history, the October 18, 2019 protests breakout marks the origin of what I personally refer to as the “dignity movement”, since dignity has become a keyword in the collective discourse. From that point on, massive protests and their corresponding violent suppresion by State agents have been daily occurrences. The reasons to protest are too many, but they all boil down to the realization that the overarching system of our society favors the economic interests of a small privileged group, while rights, social security and environment protection take the back seat. Given that the problem is deep-rooted and systemic, the central demand became the formulation of a new and democratic constitution, drafted to replace the one written during Pinochet’s dictatorship. In just a few days the referendum that decides the future for this constituent process will be held. […]

Front page is multilingual.

It’s six months later and I finally did what I intended to do with the agj.cl front page. It’s the same barebones design, but programmed in Elm and with language switching. I’m happy with what I learned about Elm in the process, and I’ll definitely continue using the language in future projects. It’s a joy getting front-end stuff done in a functional way.

Oh, and it’s old news already, but the Valdivia Film Festival was really fun. My friend Kiyohara Yui from Tokyo U. of the Arts was there to show the film she made (Our house) as her graduation project in university. I also met another Japanese filmmaker, the super young Yamanaka Youko, who brought Amiko—a small but exhuberant made-with-friends indie film. I got acquainted with her actually because she and Yui knew eachother from other film festivals they ended up touring together, starting with the Japanese Pia. And as it turns out, in Valdivia they didn’t have an interpreter ready for their two Japanese guests, so I (on the two’s request) filled that role. It was tough but interesting.

Front page design update.

I kept the previous design (archived here,) it turns out, for a whole eight years. I modified it slightly over that time, changing the words, the links, and the colors. Its main conceit (the text getting increasingly obscured with time) never changed, and while cute, is not very helpful to the visitor. I decided to change it to be simpler and nicer. My website in general has always reflected my contrary attitude somewhat, but I guess the front page should just do its job of introducing who I am and link to some relevant places, to anyone nice enough to want to know. Yes, I am aware of how obvious the previous statement is.

The new page is a completely static HTML+CSS design optimized for mobile devices. My original plan was to give it a tiny bit of interactivity in the form of language selection, which I wanted to make my first Elm miniproject. But I ended up going to the Valdivia International Film Festival and had to hurry it up a bit, since I wanted something presentable in case anyone would take my card. (I might write about the festival later.)

Elm is a rather new language that compiles down into javascript, and which I’ve been learning recently. It’s been a pleasant and enlightening experience. I first considered learning the specific configuration of React plus whatever frameworks are needed to be able to develop for the web in a “fully” functional programming environment. But the overhead of learning all of that to, in the end, just having a sham of a functional environment, made me turn my attention to Elm, which was a language I’d been eyeing for some time. Basically, using just javascript, very little of any complexity can be made for the web, thus needing a bunch of libraries/frameworks of dubious compatibility and ease of use, laid on top of the shaky foundation that is the javascript standards. On the other hand, Elm has been made from the ground up to address the current landscape of the web, with a purely functional design. An easy tradeoff for me: I’d much rather learn a well-designed new functional language than be forced to hold my breath while navigating javascript’s murky waters.

Virtual reality workshop at K-Arts.

One of the cooler things I was involved in during my studies at Tokyo University of the Arts was the two-week virtual reality workshop in Seoul I was invited in, last February—the “VR Cubic Workshop.” Students from three universities corresponding to three countries (Korea National University of Arts, Communication University of China, and ours) studied the technology and created content for the HTC Vive using Unity. Teams were split according to university, and given the task of creating a VR space inspired by a historical figure representative of their country. In our case, we chose Sen no Rikyu, a master of the tea ceremony that cemented most of its traditions during the 16th century. We based our space on one of his designs, the Taian, a two-tatami-small tea room that embodies the rustic simplicity of wabi-cha. While the video above shows a demonstration of our project, The tea room, I also edited a video (below) with the closing presentation for the workshop, which was held in Seoul with all of the students and professors. In it you can see demonstrations of the whole three projects. […]

A constructed language.

For my Master’s dissertation project in the New Media program at the Tokyo University of the Arts, I quickly devised a small constructed language, something that would be a tool for me to explore language itself in abstraction. Before I undertook the subject of human communication languages, I had been researching programming language design, and in that process came across a paradigm that was new to me, called concatenative. This paradigm is mathematically very elegant, structurally very simple, and in superficial appearance very similar to human written languages. I thought I could use it as a basis for a simple human language, and so I took the main ideas of it and applied them to my design.

My language is not really a language in most traditional senses, if you compare it to existing languages. It does not comprise a lexicon, nor does it have any inherent writing system, or phonetic system. It consists of just a set of rules, and they can be applied in many ways in any pertinent medium (written, oral, electric, etc.,) and is purposely unspecific about other things. It is, if you will, a framework for communication, or a protocol, more than a language as they’re most often thought about.

[…]

A ‘metaclass’.

Kanji metaclass posterEspañol

I was invited by the center I formerly studied Japanese at (Ceija, here in Santiago) to give a short workshop. It was an open invitation, as I could suggest what the theme for it would be. I decided long ago that I’m no good as a teacher, so I almost rejected the request, but finally decided to propose a non-traditional program in which I would not be a teacher but just someone who’s been studying longer (a senpai, as a Japanese person would put it,) and turn the classroom into a more level place for discussion and discovery. The themes to discuss would be the Japanese kanji writing system, and self-study. I called it kanji metaclass, loosely using the ‘meta’ prefix the same way it’s used in the word ‘metadata’: that is, to suggest recursiveness, learning about learning.

Although I haven’t found the teacher in me, I do think about education a great deal. I’ve been teaching myself lots of things since I can remember. I am largely frustrated by the way in which education has been institutionalized. And I work developing ludo-educational software.

I strongly believe in intrinsic motivation as key to learning. Extrinsic motivation would be grades, rewards and punishments; that is, how most schools nowadays work. Intrinsic motivation would be doing something because it is its own reward, or because it leads naturally to our reward. Put another way, I think that mainstream education teaches us to hate study and learning, by making those the hurdles we need to hop over to get to the carrot they put in front of us instead (or to get away from the whip behind.) But, of course, there’s no better stimulus to learning than just wanting to know.

So this class I’m about to finish offering this week reflects my views on education at large, and experimental as the format is (for someone inexperienced like me,) it’s been, from my point of view, a great success. My main priority was to make everyone curious, invested, and in charge of their own learning. I got everyone enjoyably (even excitedly) discussing varied subtopics, once they got comfortable enough with me and one another (that is, by the second session.) The flow of each session is almost entirely freeform, it leading wherever the discussion takes us. I prepared beforehand a long document full of little packets of (largely personal, even anecdotal) information, though, which I use as a resource to plant new ideas and questions. It still remains to see how this influence impacts their learning, but first I just felt the need to impact their mentality.

So that is one of the things I’ve been up to. And to end this post, here’s a little bullet-point manifesto I wrote for myself, to keep me focused on my goals for this workshop:

  1. The classroom is a place for active discussion, exploration, and exchange of knowledge and ideas by and for all.
  2. Our themes are Japanese kanji, self-study, and the intersection of the two.
  3. When leaving the classroom, study has just begun.
  4. A student questions, asks, errs, researches, teaches themselves, shares their knowledge.
  5. The teacher is but a guide.
  6. If one must teach, teach that which is elementary and general.
  7. Better than teaching is suggesting.
  8. Better than suggesting is asking.
  9. Better than asking is listening.
  10. Anything can be debated.

[…]

Bye bye Pixelpost.

Spambots were having a field day with my neglected piclog Pixelpost installation (old picture blogging CMS, not updated in several years), and it was getting hit so ferociously that it was hogging resources and my host complained. So I took it down. But since I have a few blog posts that link to pictures over there, I fixed it. I basically scrapped Pixelpost, downloaded the database, and implemented a super simple version of it that uses YAML files as a database and PHP. And no commenting, since it wasn’t getting anything other than truckloads of spam anyway. The design and all, I couldn’t be bothered to update. I did, however, change the URLs to make them a tiny bit prettier, taking care to redirect links written in the old format.

The Japanese countryside.

I just came back from Japan, after spending six months improving my Japanese there at a language school and generally enjoying being in such a culturally interesting environment. I made tons of friends, Japanese and from countless other countries; it was extremely stimulating.

The place I lived at was a small city called Ueda, located in a valley in the mountainous Nagano prefecture. If you asked someone from one of the bigger cities in Japan, they’d say where I lived was what they call inaka, the countryside. But would you ask the people who had lived there their whole lives, or in one of the surrounding, smaller cities and towns, they would say no, that’s not inaka. Of course, me coming from a pretty large city, the place was small and cozy; refreshingly so. I started using Vine —the short video recording app— during this trip, so here are some of the best ‘moving photos’ I captured from those places.