Blogging Around 5-13-2013

This week, I read some of my classmates blogs and responded to their posts!

First, I read and commented on Kali's post where she talked about her process when creating our Mashup projects:

Next, I read and commented on Ruxi's blog which discussed the process of writing and editing her Short Story:

You are the weakest link

Goodbye

Dialectics: Truth and Ignorance.

Truth and Ignorance

Truth: a fact or belief that is accepted as true

Ignorance: lack of knowledge or information

Imagine you were in a world, and you find out that the world you're living in, the world as you know it, was fake. A chimera that you've been taught to believe is real. Would you want to live in the truth, or go back to the ignorance. 

You might choose to live in the truth, but what if the truth was unbearable. The Truth was something you couldn't even dream up.

In The Matrix, Neo is introduced to reality, a world completely unlike the ones he thought he'd been living in for years.
He's asked to choose between reality and ignorance when he's given the choice between the red and the blue pill.
The red pill will only submerge him deeper into reality, whereas the blue pill will send him back into ignorance where he can continue to live the life that he had previously been living.

The question then naturally arises, which pill would you have taken?

*

Right now, I believe that the world I'm living in is true. The blanket over my legs is one I put there, and my dog is on my bed because he's my dog and my family bought him, not the matrix.  But what if I am not actually living in the truth, what if I'm actually the ignorant one and I am in fact living in the matrix. How do I know? You don't, but that's another blog post. see this post

Ignorance and truth, although seemingly not extremely related, can be seen as both opposites, as well as extremely relevant.
In order for you to be ignorant, there must be a truth to ignore. If you use the word ignore though, that implies that you are aware that there is the possibility of something more than your ignorant life....

cue Twilight zone music.

Metacognition: The Mashup

Hello.

     When writing my Mashup (A compilation of multiple sources and medias used to convey a single message) we were given several ( I love that  word) choices from Mr. Allen. Immediately  my eyes were drawn to the topic "Challenging the Status Quo." As soon as my brain processed the words, the High school music song "Stick to the Status Quo" assaulted my mind. This song then continued to play on repeat for the remainder of class.
     After being forced by my internal mp3 player to think about the status quo for a solid class, I realized it would be a fun topic to do this project on.
     While searching for my sources, I initially went into the task looking for examples of Jane simply challenging the status quo, but my mind began to deviate a bit. I soon began seeing patterns about how the more society tries to push the norm on you, the more likely you are to rebel and try and deviate from that set norm.
     I found this very interesting because you wouldn't expect that something that is made to be a fairly reasonable standard for society, often ends up creating an "uproar" rather than normalcy. Status Quo also seemed to foster the idea of normal into other peoples head, while fostering the idea to defy the status quo in others.
    While putting together my mashup, I feel like I could have been thinking more clearly than I was. By the final steps of the project, I'm thinking I might have been overly confident. I think I should have taken more care with organizing and thinking about the chronology of the elements.
   I'm really happy and proud of how my Mashup turned out, but I feel like given a little more time, I could really think about my project and add to it for the better.

-jordan

Metacognition: Writing a Short Story

Howdy.

In this blog post, I'm going to be talking about the oh so lovely process of writing a short story. Sounds Harmless right? Wrong. The first step to writing a short story is reading some to get your brain flowing, and then you have to think of the plot, or at the very least, your main character(s).
     I hit a block here. Considering the fact that I was only on the first step of the assignment, I wasn't feeling too hot. Then an Idea hit me. The words started flowing out of my pen onto the blank page in my notebook. I thought my idea was great. I girl who goes out for a run, she witnesses a car accident, turns out her husband was a part of it and died. Great idea at the time, three drafts later, not so much.
     I was left three days before a complete draft was due with absolutely nothing. Now I had to come up with a completely different story idea and I had three days. Two of which were spent looking at a blank computer screen. Do you have any idea how hard it is to come up with a story idea that isn't completely obtuse? Probably.
    Anyways..... I basically spent the whole weekend attempting to write my story, and the idea didn't come until my family ditched me to go to a St. Patricks day party. I cried for like two-ish hours, and then it dawned on me that, if i just changed the names around and the alleged assignment around, that I'd got my story. Awesome.
    Something that I learned through writing my story, was that original and intelligent ideas are very hard to come up with for me. I supposed this implies that I'm not a very creative person. Never have been never will be. (No seriously though, I can't do a craft project well for my life.) I have a lot of ideas, but not many of them are great by any means.
   I think it's pretty sad that I've lost whats left of my creativity. I feel like creativity is almost suppressed in school nowadays with very straight-forward/rigid assignments. Welp, that's another blog post I suppose.

***

And now some parting words.

My mother regarding the fact that my brother sounds like a dying whale when he's annoyed/remotely sick.

"It's hard to tell if he's got a hang nail, or he's dying."

-my mother for ya.

An Inconvenient Truth: Mankind is Stupid

      In this blogpost, I will be discussing a truth that is rather in convient. As a part of mankind, I think I have the right to say this, as a whole, I think we're pretty stupid.

     When you look back at history, we look like absolute idiots. Sure we can capture energy from the sun and have any information you need in a light up box on your lap, but really compared to all the really dumb stuff we've done? Allow me to list just a few: WWI, WWII (didn't see that one coming did you? ;), race superiority, etc. I'm pretty sure those outweigh the technological advances that we've made.

    In class this week, we've been discussing love and how the motion picture "Once" compares to how we perceive love. Today in class specifically, we were talking about all of the insights that "Once" has given us about love: Love is uncomfortable, Love is hard to speak about, and the one I'll be focusing most on in this blog post is Love isn't always fair.

   Okay, for some reason, from what I see, most people get upset when things don't go their way. I'm pretty sure someone has told them in their life that "Life's not Fair," so why they would get upset when everything doesn't go their way baffles me. Don't get me wrong, I get upset when something doesn't go my way too, but I try and move on just like everyone else does. (some people are better at this than others.) It also helps that I'm a strong believer in the "Everything Happens for a Reason" theory, so there ya go.

   Well now that we got off on that tangent, back to our regularly scheduled programming. I think that people who think that everything is easy and is going to go their way are stupid. I know, I just called myself and probably the majority of the planet stupid but hey Jack, this is the internet, I can say whatever I want.

   Plot Twist------

  It seems like every history class since 6th grade, we've started out the year answering the question "Why do we study history?" This question bothers me because I personally don't think we should study history, al least not at the depth we delve into it. Anyways, the answer we always seem to come up with is: We need to learn history because it prevents us from repeating the past. children have been learning history in school since my parents were in school, so when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and I think we've repeated history just a couple times ya know. They're only been like half a dozen + genocides, countless civil wars, a couple of times when we discriminated against people.

    Mankind is stupid. We learn about something every year for 14 years, and then go and start another war. We say, life's not fair, and then mourn for 2 years after our relationship doesn't work out.

    This inconvenient truth bothers me because, as a member of mankind, I don't like calling myself stupid  but as the term implies, it's the truth.  Mankind has been stupid though for over 2000 years, (although I think it's gotten exponentially worse in the last 300.) So I guess we're just going to have to work on being a little smarter, and think before we perform an action.

**le sigh**

Best of Today: Darkness

hello interweb.

In today's blog post I'm going to be referencing a discusion we had today during class about the Book "Heart of Darkness" It's really a very interesting book about an adventure into the Congo during the late 19th century.

The main point that stuck with me from today's fishbowl discussion was from when were were discussing the title of the book- "Heart of Darkness" - where it came from, and for that matter, what is the "darkness"?

via

During class, we not only discussed that the darkness the Conrad was referring to was the colonization of Africa, but that the Europeans during the time period were really the one's in the darkness. They had no clue how terrible the actions really were that were going on down there in Africa.

I think that this a really cool and unique way to analyze the title of the book. I think that being able to access the title of the book and find the deeper meaning of it like we did in class can bring you deeper into the book because it's shows you almost a hidden tidbit that the author planted that many other people may not see.

I think that the insight that the Europeans are the ones really in the darkness is a valid and accurate insight into the book. It definatley makes sense literarily and historically. An insight that I've somewhat developed myself is that maybe the book is titled "Heart of Darkness" because the Europeans believed they were doing something good by civilizing the African's (the heart) and the darkness comes from the fact that although the Europeans see it as a good thing, (having a heart.) The heart, in all reality, is filled with darkness.  I doubt that made much sense, but i suppose it's pretty self explanatory anyways. Maybe.

I can definitely see myself using these insights, as well as the other ones we brought up in class to help with my understanding of not only the book, but also to the history we've been learning about recently. I think it's really cool that we get to connect our english work to what we're currently learning in history class. It gives you a much different perspective on what happend and I think that's a very academically enriching experience. :)

-jordan

Blogging Around: 2-1-13

Hey Hey Hey :)

Today's blog post is all about other peoples blogs!

I read Emily's blog post about procrastination, and shared my thoughts on the subject in the comments.

The next post I read was Stephanie's post about preparing for her recent trip to New York. She talked about how she prepared for her trip and her extra precautions resulted in a much smoother trip.

Thanks for reading and Go check out these peoples blogs! They Rock!

:D