Serenastyle Scrapbook

It took a digital excavation of my past to realize,

before someone coined the term “social media” and it all became about followers, friends, and feeds…

I used to blog purely for myself, without an audience in mind. Fear of judgment killed half the creativity in me.

August 20, 2007

I can’t sleep at night.
Thoughts rotate in my head faster than the speed of a hamster wheel in motion,
trapped–disillusioned by the illusion that point A will lead to point B.

Repeat, peat, and re-peat–
Pause button’s broken, fast forward key’s stuck.

Waiting for the tedious burnout,
Complete brain blackout.

February 18, 2008

Pen lines come alive and rearrange themselves on the pages; some disobedient ones even leap out of the boundaries and into the next frame. Splashes of color intermingle; a few get along beautifully, others mix and turn green–colorful mishap, perhaps. I cut and paste words on pictures, and the characters begin to speak to each other–sometimes they’ll even say hello to me. I speak back and say, “Goodnight, it is time to close my sketchbook. Tomorrow, you guys will come alive again when I have thoughts and ideas to feed my Moles.”

March 9, 2008

It made perfect sense while I was thinking in bed, but when I got back up to write it down, I couldn’t formulate it in words… the idea, the concept, the conclusion that I had arrived at just wouldn’t translate itself to be transcribed into a textbox. Can my pictorial thoughts appear in some logical sequence without ever having any strings of words attached to interpret the images? Basically, is interpretation possible without an underlying basic understanding of language? Perhaps emotions are, but what about something that requires sequential or iterative reasoning? How can I even arrive at any conclusion or have these captivating epiphanies that I so desperately want to write down but can’t?!

and then I moved to Tumblr, and a typical post became like this:

July 7, 2008

There’s a certain type of thrill that comes with being one of the first out of your friends to use say, Digg or Twitter. Lame, I know, but the addiction’s real. I just signed up for a Ping.fm account and obtaining that beta code was almost as exciting as receiving my Livejournal passcode the summer before high school started (yea, remember those days)?

I thought Virb was going to become the next MySpace, but I guess it’s targeting a niche market instead. I don’t really see Identica rising up, and although Pownce and Plurk both have better features than Twitter, Twitter’s still the original with the largest user base. So why Identi.ca? It’s new, it’s a fad. July 2nd, 1730 users. July 3rd, 5800 users. July 4th, 9888 users. I just had to jump in on it, because this is my addiction.

So. Who wants Ping’s new beta code?

Actually, I started my Tumblr February 2008, but it consisted mainly of scrapbook items, not blog posts. At this point, I was clinging dearly to my LJ while simultaneously blogging on two Wordpress blogs, before I truly let go of LJ and started caring about # of subscribers on my self-hosted blogs and how valuable my content was for my readers. and Tumblr was just there for shitty posts like this one.

Time to bring back Fuck. That. Shit.

Blogging is hard work!

Never in my life have I put so much effort into one blog entry…

• Translated an article from Chinese to English
• Did extensive research on mobile platforms, trends
• Tried to decipher a Taiwanese mobile tech’s messy website

…so read my article on mobile tech in Asia here :)!