Setting and Plot

Settings plays a significant role in a story. Setting basically created the story's plots, and characters from different settings may behave diffriently, and THAT marks the differenence between the two stories. Taking two enraged families who has extreme hatred for each other for an instance, the way the famlies interacted with each other will be very differnt in different settings. If the famlies existed at the time of 2010, there probably wouldn't be much fighting going on. Since physical violence is not encouraged in our society today, and doing so may expose both families to the dangers of society law enforces. Reasonable members of the family might decide to call it truce and maybe they will become friends, who knows? Even if the families did got engaged in a negative physical interactions, gun powders will be used and that can cause severe deaths and injuries. On the otherhand, if the story had took place in perhaps the 1959s in the city of Verona, it would be a complete differnent story. Due to the lack of polices and direct law enforcements, the families could have broken into a fight. Instead of carrying guns, the people would be carrying swords and sheilds in a body armor. At this time, the love of the children from both sides can lead to a great tragedy( Sound famalier? This happened in the tradegy: Romeo and Juliet.). And that will be the end of my journal for today.

Writing is Difficult

Writing, to most people is an agonizing and aimless concept .  For them( especially students) writing seemed to be an endless struggle, a battle  between them and the words, a battle they are almost certain they will lost. There are minorities, however, whose minds were simply different from the rest. and they can find writing interesting. Good writers are often great story tellers, they can make up fascinating stories that sung infants to sleep, stories that teenagers dream of when sitting in front of their piles of homework, stories adults thought of during the absence of their loved ones, and stories in which elders smile upon as they set in their rocking chair staring out a window, stories that lasts forever. Writing is simply a way for the storytellers to spread their stories. It is the most efficient tool for one's story to become popular.  Most writers have extreme dislikes for the subject " writing" , since writing itself is tedious, but the stories behind  the boringness motivates them to go on. I suppose Ray Bradbury have similar opinion as mine. He may have extreme dislikes for the concept of writing,  yet was fascinated by the arts of storytelling. Which is the reason he chose writing as his career. And as time went by, he got better and better , and one day he might suddenly realize and let out, " Hey, it's not so bad!" I wouldn't say that I would choose writing as my career since judging from my writing so far, I have zero talent. My imagination doesn't flow the way some writers do . And my grammar and spelling mistakes can haunt people even in their dreams. That would be the difference between a talent, and a non talent I suppose.

Chronological Order

The story indicates a sequence of events that had happened on August 4, 2060 when humans become extinct. The main events that took place thoughout the story are: The clock called for breakfast. In the kitchen, the oven let out a heavy sigh and injected perfectly made toasts, eggs, and coffees. Than, after sensing the dinning time had past, robots cleaned up the food which had never been touched. Those robots than cleaned up the spotless house. Just around noon, the family's dog who had fortunatly or unfortuantly survived the nuclear war wailed and the house let it in. It circled the house looking for signs of life, but found none. Finally, he laid down and died. After some hours of the dog's death, the house caught on fire. Though it did everything it could to save itself, it still got burnt to the ground and exploded into ashes. There will never be such a house again, because the originators had been long gone. What a pity that it took months to build a house, perhaps years to build one as great as this one, yet only seconds to destroy it. What the author was trying to indicate is sometimes humans gets to a certain point when they thought being greedy is an ok thing . This thought costed the entire human population's lives.  Yet, humans 's inventions which had been made to obtain human uses lived on. Yet it won't last. The destruction of the house marked the complete extinction of the human kind. They simply dissapeared, forever. With no glories, no tributes, no commemeration, nothing. Nothing but a distance, sad memory.

Irony

In the story " There will come soft rains" , humans lived in an ideal life in which their every need was easily satisfied. Yet, they ended up destroying themselves in a nuclear war. What would lead people into war and destroy each other? Well, the answer is quite simple. In fact, it had been the reason that any war or battle was started in the first place. The reason is called greed. Humans have a flaw, or I guess you can say a superior trait , and that is called greed. Greed makes you felt that nothing is satisfying and you want more and more things. Once you got more and more things, you want even more things. Greed can also be a good thing though, without greed, humans would live like other animals and be perfectly contented with a full belly and a nice good sleep. Yet, too much greed will lead humans into a war that ended up as a self-destruction. I felt that the story itself was pretty ironic, since humans created technologies and a satisfying world, but ended up dying because of it. Humans created nuclear bombs, but ended up being killed by it. This kind of situation is of course applicable to our world today. Humans ended up being killed or ruined by the things they have most, or create. For example, a rich man can ended up treasuring it's money so much that it killed him to simply leave them, or spend a penny( this actually had happened before). Humans invented thousands of weapons, yet used it to kill each other. Ironic huh?

Thankful

The word thankful meant to be pleased and relieved,  and to express gratitude towards your position right now. That, is basically what the word thankful meant to me. It is to be happy with who you are and what you have been experiencing without complaint no matter how hard it might have been. I am thankful to a lot of things. I am thankful to my parents, who had raised me up and sent me to an expensive american school to receive better education. I am also thankful to certain classmates in my class who made the classes a lot more interesting than it could have been. I am thankful to my friends as well, who had helped me along the hardships I've gone through. As in for the downhill side, I am not thankful for the home works I have to do, the science test next week, and the english test tomorrow. I am not particularly thankful to our journal time music either. Others are thankful to a lot of other things. Some are thankful to friends, good, technology, sleep, and some are simply thankful towards their good luck. Many religious people are thankful towards God/Gods/Goddess/Goddesses, which is the reason that many say a prayer before they eat, sleep, or at the crack of dawn.

My invention

Ray Bradbury's story "There will come soft rains" is full of imaginary inventions of the future designed to save labor and make life more convenient for humans. Think of something that you have to do on a regular basis. (Chores, homeowrk, carrying books) that you would like to make easier and more convenient. THen design an invention that would help you do the work, or even do the work for you. Describe it in detail: what is it made of? What does it look like? What are its functions? How do you use it? What warnings go along with it?
I wouldn't describe myself as an inventor of any kind. I don't have those brilliant light bulbs that popped out from time to time the ways those brilliant scientists do. Yet, if I really have to, I guess I would deisgn a light device that can lift humans into the air. The device will be small enough to fit in your pocket, and once you clicked the start button, it will simply take you automatically into the air. It will listen to your instructions of where to, how to...etc verbally. Anyone can control it, it's simple. Maybe even simpler than stuff like walking and running. I think that would be an interesting invention. Imagining the elders and babies all drifting in the air, there will be no inconvinency due to a person's age. ELders or children wouldn't have to sit around all day waiting dor busy adults to pick them up, or get them where they're going. Instead, they can simply travel on by themselves. This invention will came out as a packet with a flygin device, a bungee jacket( designed that no one will get hurt falling to the gruond and also to keep you warm but very light0, a helmet, and a pair of sneakers that go with it ( for decoration).

New Technology

Life after a couple centuries will be a unimaginable world with many technologies people today can't even dream of. Judging from the rate of technology advances, people will have robots taking care of their everyday life. Those robots will be able to detect a person's brainwaves, and present the person's needs. People's mouths will be only used for eating, breathing, and perhaps chatting. Their bodies will be plainly used for decoration and entertainment( I mean sports, dancing, stuff like that). It will be similar to what had happened in the Disney movie Walle when humans simply lie around all day and concentrate on nothing but sleep, eat, and chatting. Ok, maybe not as bizarre, I mean there is still gravity, so it's not like we're all going to turn into giant meatballs or something. Yet, the percentage of overweight will definitely rise. Which, will cause people to have a different perspective about beauty. They might consider fat women pretty and skinny women ugly, who knows? Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. The standards changes from time to time. Finally, people will get to a point that they are so dependent on technology that they refuse to learn anything themselves. It won't be hard to imagine. If you were to brought a person two hundred years ago here, he/she would have been amazed that people don't know how to farm, raise cattle, trade with foreigns who may be from the arabian peninsula...etc. We don't have the skills they do because they are no longer needed in our everyday life. Why? Because technology had done it for us.