Author: Jackie Zhou

Since what we created yesterday was a short story, I decide that the alternative meaning of a story would then be different perspectives of viewing the same story.

Our original story, in a nutshell, was about destruction: alien throwing bombs on earth then getting into a fight with the protagonists that eventually blew up Earth. To view this story from another standpoint:

This picture serves as a date of this couple. Pictures before this are their moods before date (happy, as illustrated by the happy face) and pictures after this are their moods after date (angry, as illustrated by the unsynchronized lines).

4. It doesn’t have to be a bad ending: our original story ends with the Earth blowing up, which is considered as a bad ending. However, we can see the drawings as what happened to the alien so that the Earth is not what blows up, the alien is.

5. It doesn’t have to be about super power: our original story assumes Alice and Bob to have super power, which is normally not the case for human beings. So, it could be a total loss for the humans and the world is just easily destroyed by the alien.

Five ways of illustrating this

I decide to illustrate my second re-interpretation. The following are possible means I could use:

1. I could tell another full story.
2. I could draw a set of comics
3. I could make a video of this
4. I could make a collage of the key elements presented in the story
5. I could make a small game with the psychopath being the protagonist

I chose the fourth choice, and the following is what I made

As a math major, I have been trained, in all my courses, the practice of vertical thinking. The mathematics that I study are strictly based on provability of axiomatic procedures – in which we start off from some known axioms, and then prove one theorem after one another like pushing dominoes. This process, as what the book will describe, is staying in one hole but digging it very deep (one set of theories is based on one set of axioms). Upon reading this short introduction, I suppose that the process of redesigning the axioms then incorporates lateral thinking. This reminds me of a recent research I did with a professor on probability theory. We managed to replace one of the three basic probability axioms, then we worked out some interesting theorems and observations. This process, indeed, includes destructing what’s previously given and making new things out of new starting points, and therefore lateral thinking.

Thoughts on Otis

1. He’s a friendly person that I feel like is easy to get to.
2. I like his improvisation a lot! I have been playing saxophone for a long time, but I’m not quite sure how he made the airy sound. It’s pretty impressive.
3. He’s very creative.
4. He genuinely enjoys what he’s doing and encouraging us to do things that we enjoy. I like his mentality.

The part where Kermit talks about being creative resembles living in the swamp, as one first needs to be make a living, reminds me of what my high school sociology teacher taught me:  one reason humans took longer to evolve from hunter-gatherer periods to agricultural periods, compared to the rapid advancements from agricultural periods onward, is that agricultural societies had leisure time. Similarly, creativity requires one to first stay alive (not to worry only about survivorship). If a person is so desperate that he/she is seriously starving to death, then the chances that person could be creative is small. Just like during hunter-gatherer periods, most people were busy chasing after beasts or picking apples with barely any leisure time, whereas in agricultural societies, many people have the leisure, after a working day, of designing an ax or shovel, where creativity possibly plays a role. However, this is not to say that creativity comes with spare time only; it lies inherently in every one of us. Rather, as long as one person, in the current society, is not in some extreme situations, he/she can surely be creative.