Yet Another Pyrrhic Victory: The Making and Aftermath of "The Wasteland - Analogue Style"

I am a master - no, the master - of doing things last minute.

Take the English presentation about reviewing the literary devices used in short stories today as an example. I and Jianqing literally (and I do mean literally) finished editing our script and video within the last few minutes. And that's counting the increased time given to us for not being able to finish earlier.

That aside, what happened next was... interesting.


I am not a person to do things in a conventional way. An exception is when I'm lazy, which is admittedly often, but presentations usually fall under the "worthwhile" category. Being the last group to present, I was treated to slide after slide after Powerpoint slide of literary analysis.

While I did have the chance to relax and enjoy the typography from a scatter few of these groups (shout out yet again to Jolene here; honestly, others need to step up), I was dismayed by the overwhelming disregard for one very important rule of presentations: Never, ever write up all your content onscreen, which makes you basically just reading off it.

Something had to be done.

After a few short back-and-forths lengthy and spiritually-fulfilling discussions with Jianqing and later the team, we agreed that 1) he would record himself drawing several cartoons related to the story we were reviewing, 2) we would have no slides, and 3) we would rely entirely on vocal projection to get the points across.

As with any beta project, we had issues, mainly with sound. While it wasn't obvious to most of the class, the audio jack of my laptop had failed spectacularly (further inspection shows faulty driver software), so I acted on the spot and plugged my phone in. This meant our pre-controlled volumes and fadings were thrown out of the window entirely, so to cut things short, our vocal projection plan wasn't pulled off very well.

The response was, well, significantly negative. When asked for feedback, much of it consisted of criticism focusing on this issue. Which I took in stride; I'm not sure if I sounded believable enough, but when I thanked everyone for their feedback (read: criticism) my sarcasm level was naught.

I was, however, rather disheartened at two things.

I actually received quite a bit of positive response from several people - yes, there was still nagging about the sound issue, but overall there were people who appreciated what was being done. What saddened me is only one person truly voiced it out (you're awesome, Kayleen). As I wistfully told a few of these people, I appreciated these comments, but it would have been much better voiced out to the rest of the class, and the entire team would get to hear them too. Definitely would have created a much more balanced perspective to the whole thing.

The other, which really quite pissed me off, was what I term "the lazy people". Some of the criticism came from people who actually thought and detailed exactly what they didn't like, which was great (though it still came back to sound mostly). A few others, however, took the easy route of just bashing the presentation entirely, and dismissing entirely the idea of an alternative form of presenting.

I have only a short response to this, in the form of: 1) [redacted], and 2) make something better. These were the same people whom I quietly noticed were sleeping/slacking/working on unrelated stuff when other people were presenting in the first place. Yet somehow, they felt entitled to judge a piece of work as if they had produced work widely praised by everyone. As I mentioned in class, it takes enthusiasm and work to even attempt doing something different in the first place, so when people give themselves the authority to be so judgmental, it's really insulting. Besides, it was never a competition in the first place, so why be so keen to pull others down?

Reading this, you may get the impression that I'm fuming right now. Honestly, though, I've been rather calm throughout the day (surprising even to myself). The reason I write about this is that I find it mirroring our default human behaviours so well; we are often quick to judge and criticize, but never quick to praise. And I think a little bit of that comes down to our own egos, in the sense that we are afraid to admit that others may just be doing the same thing a little better than ourselves.

Either that, or disregard all the above and put it down to "shit happens".