A Star Defender's Ship: First Floor

The first floor of Isaac's ship.

I thought that, for further understanding of the Star Defenders, it's a good idea to take a look at the inside of the typical Star Defender space ship. (For you Dittotopians: Yes, this is the inside of Isaac's ship.)

Keep in mind that, from the outside, the ship looks quite small. But the inside is very spacious. This is due to special technology of altering perceptions of space. There is a second floor and a basement too.

Now for the floor plan key.

Chandelier Welcome Hall (magenta): The entrance (and exit) of the ship. Each Star Defender has his/her own chandelier hanging from the ceiling of this room.

Hallways (cyan): Just regular hallways. Nothing special about these.

Bathroom Modules (yellow): There are 17 bathroom modules on the first floor, each with a toilet and a sink. Transportation to these modules is special: Across the entire first floor are teleportation pads (indicated by yellow circles). Each is connected to a unique bathroom module. Once a person steps on one and is teleported to the module, that pad becomes inactive so that others cannot enter until the person inside the module steps on the exit pad.

Dining Room (dark red): Where Star Defenders eat, especially when one has visitors on the ship.

Kitchen (bright red): With a fridge, stove, oven, and all sorts of kitchen necessities, the Kitchen is the place to cook on-board.

Picture Hall (teal): A hallway adorned with pictures of the Star Defender's choosing.

TV Rooms (blue): Each TV room has a large TV with all sorts of video game systems available. All the rooms share an electronic database of videos, DVD's, and video games through which one can borrow one with a few touches on a touch-screen in each room.

Concert Hall (purple): Where musical and theatrical performances are held, or where rehearsals for such performances occur. The reason such a thing is on a spaceship is as such: Performers and audiences from across the universe can board a ship, which will fly to a place so that, by the time-space continuum, no time passes from wherever any given audience member's home is when he/she returns.

Private Practice Rooms (gold): Soundproof rooms for individual (or small group) music practice. Each has a piano, a tuner, a metronome, and a speaker system for playing recordings. There is also an electronic database of songs connected to the speaker system that one can play whenever he/she wishes.

Library (bright green): Much of the library is just a whole bunch of tables and comfy chairs and couches for reading and relaxation. Book borrowing is done through electronic databases. There are also several computers for internet access. The atmosphere has a special noise reducer that keeps any noise within the library very low.

Private Study Rooms (dark green): Includes a table, computer with Internet access and color printer, the electronic book database, rigid chairs, comfy chairs, and newspapers. These rooms are soundproof.

Slide Hall (dark blue): Actually, this hall can be used for whatever the Star Defender wishes. Isaac has set up a little playground novelty called Random Slides. One climbs up the ladder and then slides down, but the actual slide changes every time one uses the slide.

The rectangles on the bottom are stairways. The one on the left goes to the 2nd floor; the one on the right goes to the basement.

So, there you have it. An inside look at the inside of Isaac's ship. Coming soon: the 2nd floor!

New Link!

Anti-Typo-Demon Team: A blog of the NarniaWeb Anti-Typo-Demon Team. Beware those pesky typo demons!

The Elements

Here is the first in a series of posts detailing assorted stuff about the Star Defender world. (For those from Ditto Town, perhaps this will help you understand the world from which Isaac comes from better.)

So, in the Star Defender world, there are ten elements. These have been captured in the form of cards, and Star Defenders can use these cards to harness the power of these elements. Here are the elements:

Fire: Associated with heat and the consumption of material to be released as energy. When used, releases a blast of fire.

Water: Associated with the nature of liquids. When used, releases a blast of water.

Electric: Associated with electrons and their movement and transfer. When used, emits strong electricity.

Plant: Associated with biological life and earthen objects like rocks. When used, stimulates plant activity in the area.

Ice: Associated with cold and the nature of solids. When used, releases a cold blast that freezes liquids.

Poison: Associated with chemicals and good/bad health. When used, shoots out poisonous sludge.

Wind: Associated with the nature of gases. When used, releases a blast of wind.

Psychic: Associated with the mind and thinking. When used, releases damaging psychic waves.

Dark: Associated with the darker, more unpleasant parts of life. When used, enshrouds area in darkness.

Light: Associated with light and the brighter parts of life. When used, emits strong light.

Cards can also be combined. When combining cards, the Star Defender declares the combination that results; if the combination makes sense, that card will work. A common example is Movement, made by combining Wind and Psychic and used to move objects, or can be combined with Psychic again to create Teleport, which allows the Star Defender to teleport to preset checkpoints. A Star Defender can only combine cards up to a certain level (which increases as the Star Defender gets more experience using elemental cards). The level of a combination card is the total number of the basic ten element cards needed to make the card. For example, Movement is level 2 and Teleport is level 3.

There; hope that wasn't too confusing.

My Links - 05/23/05

Okay, here's a bit of an introduction to all of my links.

Google News: I didn't feel like deleting this link. ;-P Check it out if you want some news.

IMSA: The official website of my high school, the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, which I will be leaving in 12 days... It is a really cool school, so check it out!

Official Narnia Site: "The Chronicles of Narnia" have to be my favorite book series. This site contains some basic information about the series (if you look hard enough), although right now it is primarily the official site for the movie of "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe", coming out December 9 this year! There is a good deal of information about the upcoming movie here, and overall the site looks beautiful and is very cool.

NarniaWeb: This website is on top of things when it comes to news about upcoming Narnia movies. Not only that, but the forums are bustling with all sorts of Narnia-related (and non-Narnia-related) discussions. The forum environment is different from many other forums I've been to: it's a lot stricter and yet the people are much nicer. You get the sense that you can trust these people. Indeed, I have made many e-friends through this site. So if you wish, check it out and join the forums! (If you do, be sure to check out The Ditto Club, the place for random conversations and fun, insane stuff!)

The Ditto Story: A special place on the NarniaWeb forums, the Ditto Club includes a story that some forum members who are also "members" of The Ditto Club (although there is no real "membership" process) help write out. In this story are the adventures of Isaac, the Star Defender. No background with the Star Defenders is needed to read these parts of the story. The other members have also written very fascinating story segments in this story. Have fun reading it!

The Dittopian Thread: The official "newspaper" of Ditto Town. I will write stuff for this online paper every once in a while, so check it out if you want to find more of my writing work.

My Xanga: No longer my blog site, my Xanga is now limited to the telling of another story of mine, "The Neighbors: The Second Generation". I'll try to put in new "episodes" for this story every once in a while.

So, those are my links. Take a look at them if you wish.

Poetry: The Great Unknown

Some poets can write down
Entire worlds of meaning
In four lines of poetry.
Can I ever do that?

That is a poem I came up with one day when I was thinking about poetry. It was mostly meant to be an amusing poem, but in some ways it really does show what poetry is all about. In fact, there probably are entire worlds of meaning in those four lines of poetry: the ability to do something one does not know he can do, having role models, doubting one's own capacity, etc. There are probably many more that others could come up with.

There are some questions that I had to deal with in my year of learning poetry in Dr. Goodman's Modern Poetry class. What is poetry? What is the difference between poetry and prose? How does one find meaning in poetry? How do I write poetry?

Perhaps those first two questions are the most important--and the most difficult. What is poetry, exactly? What makes a bunch of words a poem, and not a prose piece or something else? I tried to answer that question early on in my poetry class... and all I got out of it was a check-minus on a paper on the subject. Now, with the rest of the class having passed me by, I think I understand the nature of poetry better.

However, I still don't quite understand poetry. In fact, I must admit I really don't understand poetry at all. What I do know is this: Poetry is that which cannot be understood. This is not a statement coming from some bitter person who's just really frustrated that he got a B in a poetry class. If I could say anything about what poetry is, I would say that it is the description of something, somewhere, someone, or some combination of the three, written in a way so that one cannot understand it through mere reading of it. Poetry is like that planet in another galaxy, yet undiscovered, just waiting for some Star Defender to take a spaceship past its atmosphere to unearth its secrets. There is a certain je ne sais quoi to poems: what do those poems really mean? Even if you discover one layer of meaning on the surface of the planet, you dig past that only to find a whole new world underground, still waiting to be discovered.

And that's poetry. It's exploring for those new worlds, searching for new secrets. It's not like you can't learn anything from prose, though. Prose can also teach you fascinating things about life; but it does so in a more direct way. Prose is like a tour guide showing you around a new planet. Poetry plunges you into a new planet with only a towel and forces you to check things out yourself. It's more adventurous and exciting at times.

Now, I won't say that prose is always clear and direct, allowing no room for further exploration. However, I think that oftentimes, prose can become poetic at times. There is such a thing as a prose poem, after all. In fact, this all is prose, but you could probably detect some poetry-like stuff in it already.

So now I've landed on the planet of poetry, and now I'm off to explore this planet. There's just one problem: How do I go about exploring? How to read a poem is the next big question in poetry. What does a poem mean? Well, what I've learned in my poetry class is this: A poem means whatever you think it means.

I've probably learned this primarily through writing my own poetry. Once I've read my work to others in my class, the discussion of my work starts... and they start pulling all sorts of things from my poems that I had never intended to put in there! Part of me wonders if maybe my subconscious had sneaked them in there without my conscious's knowing.

One particular experience contributed greatly to my knowledge of poetic interpretation. For one assignment in my poetry class, I chose to compose a musical interpretation of some of Walt Whitman's poetry. Converting the ideas in the poem to music helped me understand that I could only convert what I understood. One can only get out of a poem what he personally gets. If a certain allegory goes over a reader's head, that reader will not understand the significance of the allegory. If a certain poetic element, unintentionally placed by the poet, gets noticed by the reader, that reader can take something from that element, even though the poet didn't. A poem may be written by the poet, but it ultimately becomes the property of the reader.

This all means that when exploring the unknown planets of poems, there is no right or wrong way to explore. One discovers what one discovers. If you ask me, that makes the exploration of the planet far more exciting, since there are no limits imposed by rules and correct answers. Donald Hall puts it best in his memoir, "Life Work": "Each human division reads the same story; each responds from an opposite place." ("Life Work", pg. 22)

Writing poetry is something special. If reading poetry is like exploring new planets, then writing poetry is like making those new planets for others to explore! Indeed, sometimes, when I write my own poems, I feel like Slartibarfast, working on the shorelines of Norway, wondering how the humans to walk those beaches will enjoy the scenery. One thing that probably makes me different from many poets is that I don't like to spend a whole bunch of time fine-tuning a poem to become just the way I want it to be. I find that my best poetry comes from when I write from the heart, pouring out the soul of God into my poems, and adding a bit of humor in it for good measure. Then, once I'm done with the poem, I call it a day. And yet, my classmates still praise me for my work. I suppose that it's not necessary to pick on a poem over and over again... although even I go back and change something I didn't like here and there every once in a while.

I wonder what would be the look on Slartibarfast's face if he were to see an Earthling, walking along one of his shorelines, suddenly discover a cave that was not put there on purpose. This is what I find to be the greatest joy of writing poetry. I set up the planets for others to explore, and then someone finds something I didn't know I even put there! Sometimes, I write a poem just to see what others can find. I am only the maker; the reader explores the planet.

Poetry really is wonderful. Reading poetry is like exploring new and unusual planets; writing it is like making new and unusual planets. My grade in my poetry class is not that important. Far more important is the lesson I learned about poetry.

Mathematics

I think many of you know of my love for math. Now, I'd like to take some time to show why.

I can't say for sure what fascinated me about it when I was a wee little kid. All I remember was working out multi-digit multiplication questions in the sandbox when I was about six. (My, was I a geek!)

Something about those numbers, combining in different ways to churn out different numbers. How odd numbers are, even back then...

It was on to higher and dryer stuff. Geometry. Logic. Beginning algebra. Divisibility rules. Quick ways to multiply numbers. (Did you know that you can easily multiply a two-digit number by 11 by "splitting" the number into three digits (34 becomes 3_4 and 57 becomes 5_7) and then putting the sum of the two digits as the middle digit (adding one to the hundreds digit if the sum is greater than 10) (34 becomes 374 and 57 becomes 627)?)

Then came algebra. I think here I can explain why I liked math so much. Algebra is about finding relations to the unknown: that variable known as x. What is x? How does another variable, y, change with x? How can one find x? There was just something... mysterious about it. Something about that x... an unknown number... math held unknown territories, new tricks to discover, new formulae to learn, new mysteries to ponder over.

I must say, my high school, the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), helped me a great deal with my love for math. Why? Because instead of just churning out a whole bunch of formulae and processes to memorize, they showed me how they work. And that allowed me to understand it all better, but it also added a sense of beauty to math. There was an entire art behind trig identities and whatnot. All this made me itching to explore more into the unknown planets of mathematics.

I could continue on and on about all this, but I think you've had enough. ;-P

Basically, the reason I like math is that it is an immense universe full of beauty and mystery, ready for the Star Defender in me to explore its planets and discover its secrets.

For those of you who don't like math: don't worry. I'm sure there are other universes for you to explore. I just wanted to explain why I like math so much... and why I would like to major in it when I go to Case Western.

Ah, so that's mathematics for me. Rather poetic, I'd say...

A short history of the Star Defenders...

It all started back in... oh, 3rd grade or something.

My best friend and I have been inspired by Buzz Lightyear to go into outer space and fight aliens. In the world of my elementary school playground, we rode spaceships and blasted extraterrestrial foes.

And thus started what would eventually become the Star Defenders.

How did I get into space exploration? I think I know why. I was longing for another world.

A fantasy world.

And my best friend was interested in astronomy and space.

So the realms of outer space became my fantasy world.

Really, though, my desire for a fantasy world came from a desire for something greater than this world. In fact, through it all, what I really wanted was to go Home. And my fantasy worlds would reflect this desire to go to that great Place awaiting all of us.

Perhaps this is why I like reading--and writing--fantasy/sci-fi stuff.

Now, why I like mathematics... that's a different story.