Posts

How to read the Bible

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The Book of the Books In terms of the title, this should be the topic for another Blog of mine ( Deep Breathing ). Focusing more on the "life-hack" aspects, however, I should write it in this Blog. These are some sort of experiential tips around my own everyday Bible reading. As a regular Bible reader, I think the Bible is one of the most important and interesting books in the world. If you are Protestants, your Bible consists of 39 books in the Old Testament and of 27 books in the New Testament. If you are Catholics and other Christians, there may be more contents for your Bible (or less for some groups). Together with other numerous classic masterpieces, the Bible is indeed one of the compiled books that people have ever greatly paid various attentions one way or another and most studied by diverse disciplinary approaches. The Gutenberg Bible, the first printed Bible Due to such situations around the Bible, once you got caught by what you can see in it, then prob

Innovations on Writing

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It was almost decades ago when I used to attend various field trips and study tours sponsored by NGOs, universities, and churches. Being young with full of curiosity, I was always trying to do my best acting like an "anthropologist" who do his field work. One of such efforts is keeping your field notes all the time. It was a kind of "intensive" version of your diary or journal keeping. For any field works, or even a classic type of 19 century expeditions, the value of such activities have been always depended on the "records" you were able to keep. With this principle in mind, I also tried to keep my journals literally all day long. For your usual days, the time when you do your journal writing could be only at the end of the day (before sleeping) if not in the beginning. In other words, you can do it only outside of your daily activities. That would be normal for everyone. If you are in the fieldwork and trip, however, the situation is different.

On Manual Typewriters

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Right now sitting on the couch putting iPad on my lap I am typing this entry with its very interesting sound, the sound of an old portable manual typewriter. This is my first attempt to use this fantastic app called " Hanx Writer ". As mentioned my previous entry, when I do writing, the tool I use is very important. It must be one of the distraction-free writing tools. And it must be with the nostalgic sound of a manual typewriter. This is the reason why I prefer to use WriteMonkey . And I thought it was a kind of unique, special effort among the distraction-free tool developers. But one thing I did not expect is there is such effort even among iOS app developers. This is one of the most unexpected and yet a very exciting news. As always, when I was searching for the best possible writing tools with the sound of an old manual typewriter, then I've encountered several articles introducing this app. According to them or even to the website of this app, Tom Hanks (Y

Meeting the Muses

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Writing is thinking. You cannot say you are really thinking unless and until you start writing. This is the phrase you may often hear from many writers. I totally agree with them. There are a lot of (seemingly) good ideas in your mind and you can create a lot of fabulous outlines out of them. But then, your thoughts can never become "substantial" unless and until you start writing. Perhaps (if you have written a lot) you can recall such experiences that your writing has deviated from your original thoughts, ideas, and outlines as if the process of writing per se has "created" something totally new. Muses and Poets Sarcophagus relief. Pio Clementino Museum; Octagonal Court This is what we "freewriting enthusiasts" believe as its key advantage and benefit. We do not trust our thoughts and ideas in our mind alone; we do not trust our nifty outlines on a piece of paper alone. What we believe is only the real process of writing. This is similar to

Distraction-Free Writing Tools

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To conduct your freewriting exercise, the tools you use must be also important. As far as I know, the recent favorite tools are in the category of so-called "distraction-free writing tool". There are various kinds of tools; some are free and  for some with well-crafted features you have to pay. Or, using the default applications would be a kind of minimalistic approach in a sense you do not have to be bothered by your effort to choose which tools and application would be the best fit for you. To some extent I also have such principle. For example, if someone ask me what is your favorite tool in Windows, then, paradoxical enough my answer would be Notepad. This is so simple and so free; you would never be bothered by any "unnecessary" features. It is a kind of "ultimate" distraction-free writing tool, I think. By searching the Internet, you can easily find many "life-hack" entries like the top 10 best distraction-free writing tools, etc. Th

Freewriting Blog

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Freewriting is one of the best methods making your writing habitual; in other words, removing the fear of your writer's block. In the days of social media we can say everyone is the special writers who can say something special and contribute to enrich our digital sphere. If we have any questions, the first thing we do is needless to say, searching internet. Considering our behavior decades ago this is a kind of amazing. Without visiting the libraries and checking the dictionaries and encyclopedia, we can get more information from our shared digital sphere just a few clicks away. The Passion of creation by Leonid Pasternak And this kind of thing is possible only because everyone is creating and posting anything there. The more we do this, the more such digital sphere looks like our huge collective consciousness. People also call it Big Data; or even we can say the huge collection of various big data storages. But also some say that while there are a lot of huge data in th