OH HEY THERE BLOG

It's not that I haven't been reading every single post on this website eagerly, I have.  I just haven't been commenting or posting because I wasn't really sure what I wanted to talk about. Despite the fact that that really hasn't changed, I guess I can talk about...summer plans?

This is the first year that I haven't known exactly what I'm doing for the summer (seeing as how I totally quit that darn pool job...FINALLY).  Don't get me wrong, money is nice and all, but I think I'm getting a little old to show up to work with no pants and not be, like, sliding up and down a pole or something. I will miss the no shirt, no shoes, no pants, no problem job though. A little.

So I've been forced to range pretty wide for jobs, including Alaska (horse guide, zip line instructor, and dog musher being the positions applied for), New York City (publishing internships...Penguin started recruiting this week!), and good ole Chicago, where a friend wants me to move in to an apartment with her. All this is cool, but I would like to know like...NOW what I'm doing for the summer.  The suspense is killing me.  KILLING ME. On top of that, I have a lot of work to get done, and way too many end of the semester projects that I've been putting off. Yikes!

What are everyone else's plans for the summer, anything exciting? concrete? hopeful? Let me know!

In the meantime, listen to this catchy little ditty about how much I REALLY JUST WANT TO GO OUTSIDE. The video is actual footage from the church that later became the cult that drank all that poisoned koolaid. The band superimposed themselves on the footage...ah!  Still a very catchy song though :D

Suddenly, Bees.

Man I can never think of a story long enough to make into a post.

I just never do interesting things for extended periods of time. Except go to China I guess, but whatever man. What happens in Shanghai stays in Shanghai.

Anyway, I think I mmmiiiiiight be staying up north for the summer. It is just way easier to find shitty summer jobs on campus. I hope no one is too crushed by this, and you are all welcome to come and visit whenever. We can play more tactical laser tag. It is pretty bitching.

As for music:



I just finished playing Skyward Sword the other week.
I loved the game. It was beautiful.
I know they shoved motion controls down your throat, but I liked them. It felt pretty natural to be moving how I was moving.  
I know the graphics were worse than they were in Twilight Princess.  That was disappointing, but I liked the art style.  I thought the character's faces were the most expressive they've ever been.

I just thought it was too easy. There. I said it. They held your hand through the whole damn game. It blew.  Sometimes I just want to figure things out for myself! And the fairy-esque guide, Fi, was a steaming pile of shit. 

Also, I thought the ending was dumb. The final boss battle was like..... the easiest fight in the whole game. Like seriously.  Super dumb.

But it held a lot of value to me, because Zelda is one of the franchises I have followed from the very beginning.  It gave me lots of feelings, this game.


By the way... who else is totally grossed out by the Oocca now?!

Brief Deviation

I know I already posted this week, but my class got canceled for the second time and I found myself with a lot of time on my hands this morning.

I wanted to deviate a little from what we usually do here to bring this to your attention: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/03/is-fan-fiction-ready-to-go-mainstream-thanks-to-fifty-shades-of-grey#more

I posted it on Sarah's FB wall, but having discussions on FB these days can kind of be a pain the ass. So I'm putting it here. And I wonder--what do you guys think of this business?


My initial reaction is to reject the idea entirely. I don't know if this is because of my mass media law influence or for some other reason, but things like this scream copyright issue to me. Of course, I know nothing about the book Fifty Shades of Grey, so this is definitely a knee-jerk reaction. (and looking it up on Amazon, I am assured it's not the kind of book I would want to read anyway).

According to Tor's article, I guess the book spawned from some Twilight fanfiction? Aside from what sounds like a bad relationship model based on the one in Twilight, I can't really tell how valid that claim is, though the article's author assures me its there or whatever. But my issue isn't so much with the book itself, but rather with what the article goes on to say about our generation and "sampling," and how our digitized age makes this even easier. I have to agree with the article on this point: it's definitely easier and more common for people to share their fanfiction online, in communities and forums and whatnot. I'm not a huge fan of the whole process (as a reader and as a writer), though even I'll admit I have had some fun playing around in other writers' backyards.

But to me, that's where that sort of writing belongs: in the backyard, free to read online, forever. Fanfiction is a great way to develop your own writing style and voice, a perfectly valid way to exercise your budding writing prowess. The websites and forums you find it on are fun places for fans of the universe created by another author. It crosses a line for me when money gets involved.

I'm not saying that this has happened already--again, from what I can tell from the plot blurb on Amazon, I can't quite see the Twilight connection aside from a super shitty idea of what a functional relationship is. But on the other hand, if what Tor's article says is true, then the work was borne from a Twilight fanfic and simply changed to cut all ties with Meyer's less-than-thrilling universe as created in Twilight. Does that make it okay? Maybe, but in all honesty I'm leaning a little towards "no." No, it does not make it okay. And not necessarily because of the whole copyright infringement thing.

I lean towards no because more and more often, I encounter novels and stories and TV shows that are all THE EXACT SAME THING AT THEIR CORE. Seriously. How many re-imaginings of the supernatural hunter/detective story are we going to see before we finally move on to something different? How many more authors are getting caught up in this trap? This sampling business, to me, is a potential catalyst for the continued destruction of original ideas. I know that having an "original idea" is fairly impossible--pick a novel, any novel, and you can trace an idea back to something else--but I feel people did and could still do a better job if perhaps they "sampled" less. Don't take a core idea--the detective story! with demons and banshees and bears oh my!--take something smaller, some tiny little fragment, and mix it up with something completely different. It might end up being disastrous--or it might end up super fricking awesome.


What do you guys think about all this business? My argument isn't exactly stellar, I know, but there it is.

Oh, and here, have a song:

Love me some Shinedown.

Ffffff...

When I was a freshman, I took a night class. It was Greek Philosophy, and it lasted from about 6 pm to 9 pm. The class was interesting, but I hated hated HATED the time slot like nobody's business, and was so relieved when that first semester finally ended. I swore from that moment on that I would never take another night class ever.

No such luck.

Because my school is known for being a science school, the science program is the biggest, and its majors tend to have more time slots. For the other majors, however, there is often only ONE slot available for any given Lit or Comm Arts class. I've managed to be lucky in this regard so far, but this coming Fall I will be saddled with not one, but TWO FRIGGIN NIGHT CLASSES.

Fffff.

Alright, enough complaining. Today marks my first Monday back from spring break and I can definitely feel myself in the home stretch. My break, while not exactly wondrous (though the Hunger Games premiere was great), gave me enough time to recuperate and get ready to close this semester out. And man am I ever ready for it to be over.

The Hunger Games-inspired album had some pretty good songs on it, this one included. Hope you enjoy as much as I have been, though I admit I'm not very familiar with this band.

Guys I'm So Tired

Guys

Guys
I am so tired.

I have just been doing a bunch of work all of the time
and when I should be sleeping, I just think "Man you know what would be fun?  Dicking around with some people I know."

Sleep is for the weak.
I can sleep when I'm dead.

In other news, I think this video is absolutely hilarious.





I also really want an Alaskan Klee Kai.
Maybe his name will be Keanu.
Definitely he will wear a bandana
Probably he will wear some sweet sunglasses.

Is that the sleep deprivation talking?  Most likely.

Finally, a song.  I almost forgot how much I loved Eric Clapton, until my history of rock and roll class made me remember.
Ughhhyessssss like nobody listens to that bass but seriously listen to it. And this is actually Clapton fucking up. His solo is on the wrong beat. Still...
So good.

Spring-like Side-Effects

GOOD LORD it is gorgeous out today. I woke up at my usual early hour (is seven even early? seems fairly late to me, but I also might be crazy) and IT WAS ALREADY 55 DEGREES OUTSIDE. I love winter and all, don't get me wrong, but there's a certain place in my heart for ideal hoodie weather, too, and despite the insane amount of wind whipping around out there, today's weather was/is that kind of weather.

My iPod shuffled to this song as I made my way to Spanish:

and it just seemed perfect.

The weather also reminded me that Spring Break is almost upon us. Anyone got any plans? Coming home, maybe? I know we all have different breaks, so when are yours? Mine is like the week of March 20th or something.

So many Colors. So many Numbers.

When I first started my web design class, I was a little nervous about the color system. Colors, as some of you may know, are represented as hexadecimal numbers and oh my goodness there are a lot of them (16,777,216 according to my text book, and only SIXTEEN OF THEM are allowed to be called their own names). And of course, I want nothing to do with the named sixteen, because frankly they are all garish and horrible. Which means as I'm sitting here writing this post, I am also deliberating over the best shades of the colors I want to use for my first web project, due on Tuesday.

But despite my freakout over the colors, I must say that I am deeply in love with this class. If I ever doubted myself when I chose to be a Writing and Publishing major instead of just a lit major, this class is more than enough to convince me that I made a good decision. The combined degree lets me write and study lit theory as I would as a lit major (minus the need to take standard lit classes, like American Lit, Brit Lit, etc, though I am taking the former for fun this semester) and also lets me study media law, editing, layout design, and coding for web design. That's a win-win right there, especially since the world seems a bit eager to get ahold of young ladies and gents who know the languages needed for coding.

I'm also going to look into going beyond what my current class can teach me (we're learning XHTML at the moment, and we'll cover CSS and I want to say some Java), but I also want to learn HTML5 and Ajax. Learning how to write things like apps for the mobile technologies would be nice, too :D

Hopefully, if everything works out, I can make money doing web design things in order to support my career as a fledgling author. And if the author thing doesn't work out, I'll still have a good job regardless.

As it is, I need to start taking a closer look at grad schools, too. I mentioned to my mother that I wanted to take a year off to dedicate to working to put a dent in my student loans before I pile on more money I owe the banks, and she about had a heart attack. So the year off thing seems unlikely, or I'll never hear the end of it. I'm hoping to find a program that will allow me to take a certain number of credit hours for a set price per semester that will allow me to work practically full time as well without me wanting to shoot myself in the foot. One school in Maryland seems to fit the bill in this respect, but I want to do more research before I decide to go for it. The program in question is dedicated solely to creative writing, which isn't an issue, but I'm hoping to find something similar to what I have now that also allows me to branch out into web design more.

I am a little bummed out that I can't travel abroad like all you other lucky folks. Changing my major halfway through sophomore year like I did means I can't take a semester off to do it, and my school's fees shoot up pretty insanely in the summer, so that's out. Blargh. That's alright. Once I get settled in Maryland and pay off a good chunk of my other debts, I can start saving to go to Ireland or England or something. In the meantime, the rest of you must take ALL THE PICTURES EVER.

That reminds me--I've only got my senior year left and then I'm heading to the East Coast. That's one more year with all of you--let's make it count, eh?

Music:

I've known this song for a while now, but I ran into it the other day and remembered that while sometimes I don't like it, other times I do. Just gotta be in the mood for it, I guess:

I've also been on a bit of a Borderlands kick, and to appreciate the next song I feel the first game's trailer should be watched:

Here's the song in full (I just really like the beat, haha):