Treadmill Reviews: The Last Enemy

Masterpiece, previously Masterpiece Theater, is, as far as I can tell, a PBS owned Anthology series which re-airs really awesome British dramas, among other things. I'm still not completely sure how this works, but the idea of a television anthology seems awesome enough for me to trust their judgement.

In my ongoing efforts to convince myself to use our treadmill more often, I turned to BBC/Masterpiece Contemporary's 2008 near-future drama The Last Enemy, a mystery thriller about a mathematician returning after four years to a Britain which is becoming hauntingly similar to Orwell's 1984.

A Desire to Make Things Better

Early last week a girl I happened to be following on Tumblr posted a query to her followers asking if anyone would be willing to edit an essay she had written. I, as you might know, have quite a bit of experience with writing and editing (or at least more than the average internet user), and I instantly thought that I could do so easily. Instead of informing her, however, I kept quiet; she seemed to be a relatively popular user, and of her many followers I was a random nobody.

She reblogged the query again an hour later, at which point I realized that, despite my expectations, nobody had responded. Since I really wasn't doing anything that afternoon, I nervously sent her a message, which she responded to a few minutes later, and before long I had her essay in my email box ready to be looked over.

Life on Mars and Other Things

Last year I managed to do pretty well with my regular treadmill sessions. I think I clocked almost an hour a day six days a week for the entire last six months, which may not sound like much but was definitely more than I had been managing before. After my brother's wedding in October, however, my treadmill sessions started to become few and far between.

Around New Years, someone I was following on Tumblr mentioned wanting to get back to exercising regularly, and I decided it was high time for me to return to regular exercise as well. I'd built up a small list of things on Netflix that I could watch while on the treadmill, so I couple of weeks ago I picked a TV show at random and started walking.

BBC's Sherlock

I didn't always listen to their advice, but over time I've discovered that my family members have a wonderful taste in fiction. I spent years refusing to read Animal Farm purely because my dad suggested it, only to realize what a great book it was after all, and since then I've been trying to listen to all of their suggestions.

I'm not sure whether to attribute this to my eldest brother or his awesome wife, but some time back they informed me that I needed to watch Sherlock, an interesting sounding series being produced across the pond for BBC. It took me a while to finally watch it, but I'm glad I did; BBC's Sherlock is easily one of the best dramas being produced today.

New Year's Traditions

I may be a week late, but Happy New Year everyone! 2012 is a year that I know many people have been looking forward to.

Personally, I'm not very big on New Year's Resolutions; everybody jokes about how we all forget them within a couple of weeks, and it's true. I agree that goal-setting is a worthy activity, but waiting until that specific day to start them seems a bit arbitrary.

As a family, we've also never been pretty big on the whole 'New Year's Eve' thing either. I hardly ever remember staying up to cheer on the New Year, or watching the ball drop in New York. A friend introduced me to the idea of eating black-eyed peas for good luck, but I don't think my family has ever done anything of significance for luck in the new year. Generally, I'd stay up late (as a normal teenager on break) and listen to our neighbors making noise before finally nodding off an hour later.

NaNoWriMo Music

One thing I like to do while I write is listen to good mood-setting music. This means something different depending on what I'm writing, but it helps me get into the feel of what I'm writing, and if others are home at the time, it helps block out whatever noise they're making.

My first year of NaNoWriMo, I listened almost exclusively to a Japanese band called Plastic Tree. Listening to English lyrics, I'd found, really distracted me (if I knew the song, I wanted to sing along, and if I didn't, I wanted to find out what the song was about, and either way lyrics always ended up in my writing), and since I was really into Japanese modern culture at the time, I found the Plastic Tree songs very helpful.

My novel in '08 was a period piece called Princess Kate about a king's daughter who was slowly discovering that she had a multiple personality disorder (the actual name for the condition is Dissociative Identity Disorder - DID - and that's where I got the URL for my blogs). Plastic Tree's music matched the tone of my novel because most of their recent stuff was softer, with a melancholic sound with some occasional heavier rock influences.

NaNoWriMo '11

Happy Halloween, dear readers! I hope everyone's having a great time dressing up, trick-or-treating, going to parties, or whatever it is you do to celebrate!

Halloween marks the last day of October, as you well know, and the last day before the writing craze NaNoWriMo begins. I don't mean to detract from Halloween here, but NaNoWriMo is a bit higher up on my list of priorities - and by 'a bit' I mean that I've been planning my novel for months, while I don't even have a Halloween costume this year (in case I need to go out, however, I can just grab my Hufflepuff scarf and say I'm studying charms and herbology).

HUFFLEPUFF.

Trip to Oregon: Part III

There was no blog post on Monday, because I spent the morning coming home from a week-long stay in Portland, Oregon. We flew up there last Thursday to attend the Saturday wedding of one of my older brothers, and, as you might image, it was wonderful and fun and amazing!

Friday Comic

I always used to wonder how they decided where to place the borders between countries and states. Now I know.

Treadmill Reviews: Gankutsuou, The Count of Monte Cristo

I've been trying my hardest to keep up with my daily treadmill exercise, but it's been getting difficult to find new things to watch while I walk. I had a haphazard list of shows and anime I wanted to go through, and after much deliberation, a couple weeks ago I finally decided on Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo.

Avast! These be Strange Waters!

 Aye, and they'd have to be, too; today's tide bring in one of the best holidays ever: International Talk like a Pirate Day! That's right, landlubbers, ye heard it here. It's the one day a year dedicated to the fierce, rogue, sea-loving pirates, when everyone around the world can affect an accent and dress up for school or work (assuming, of course, you've explained yourself to your captain).

I'm pretty bad at Piratey lingo, so I wont even pretend to try to keep it up for long.

The Ghost Ship Mary Celeste

While wasting my time on the internet a while back, I stumbled upon a very strange story; that of the Ghost Ship Mary Celeste. I don't know too much about maritime lore, but this story is apparently very famous, because it's both very bizarre and seems to have no real explanation. Modern day researchers have been able to come up with an answer to what happened to the Mary Celeste, but even their most plausible explanations don't make this story any more normal.

The Shot Heard 'Round the World

I'm almost certain that every one of you has heard of the 'Shot Heard 'Round the World', as long as you've taken an American History class. Not the shot that kickstarted The Great War, but the shot that marked the beginning of the American Revolution.

I wont give you all the dates of all the significant events before the American Revolution, but the actual fighting for the war didn't start until April, 1775 (a full year before the Declaration of Independence was finalized). Before then, the Colonists on the American continent were just protesting the fact that they were being treated as second-class English citizens. As hostility grew between the Colonists and the British officers sent to calm them down, both sides started preparing for war.

Statue in Concord

Vacation Time: Results Show

Monday, August the first, my parents and I set out for our official summer-vacation-get-away thing. The goal, I believe, was to visit my brother in Utah, see a few people in Idaho, and get to know said-brother's future in-laws in Oregon while we scouted out places to eat in Portland for the upcoming wedding. My own personal goals, meanwhile, were to work through some of my 'to-read' backlog, figure out our new car radio, and drive at least one leg of the trip without mom yelling at me (she's a very nervous passenger).

The drive to Utah took about ten hours, and I drove the first three. The road goes straight through the Mojave Desert, which is relatively pleasant to look at but pretty boring to drive through. Add that to the fact that I didn't know where I was going, and I was kinda stressed (I'm not used to using the overdrive button, so there were a few people riding my tail, and mom was finicky throughout), and by the end of my shift my back was sore and I was ready to stop.

Like this, but with no clouds. Ever.

What's Up With...? (July Edition)

...The Pepsi Challenge Not Working?

If you've ever watched TV, you're probably aware of the blind taste tests that Pepsi started back in the 70s, called the Pepsi Challenge. Essentially, they'd set up a table somewhere and have random people taste a cup of Pepsi and a cup of Coca-Cola, without labels, to see which one they preferred. Most people agreed that Pepsi tasted better, and the blind test was considered a success for Pepsi.

Except that Coca-Cola's sales didn't go down - Coca-Cola sales had been and continued to be higher than Pepsi's. Pepsi marketers were baffled; they'd scientifically proven that Pepsi was better, but people were still buying Coca-Cola. When actual scientists repeated the Pepsi Challenge, they got the same results, so they decided to see what happened when people knew what they were drinking. The same people who, on a blind test, said they preferred Pepsi, on a labeled test said Coca-Cola was better.

Subcultures and the Internet

Last Wednesday, in my Myth and Legend class, I gave an extremely well-thought-out, well-prepared presentation on the mythical perspective of Subcultures, and how the internet is changing them.

It was an interesting class; we didn't take the approach I thought we were going to take on the subject matter, but I wont even attempt to explain everything we did talk about (though, if you're interested, practically everything we did came out of this Bill Moyers interview with Joseph Campbell), because there's so much. The goal of our finals presentations was to find some sort of 'modern myth' - not 'myth' as in an untrue thing we all believe in, but 'myth' as in the way we align ourselves with the world at large.

Joseph Campbell

The obvious choice to me seemed to be the internet. It's huge, it's vast, no one quite understands it, and we all believe in it and take part of it anyways. I narrowed my topic down to Subcultures, as a way to approach this vast idea of 'the internet', and then did a bunch of research to decide what exactly I was going to hit upon during my allotted 10-20 minutes.

When it came to making the visuals for my presentation, I decided, instead of making a PowerPoint presentation and hoping the school computer would read it correctly, to make a Google Docs file. I was introduced to Google Docs only a month or so ago, when a brother announced he was getting married. Google Docs lets you create Microsoft-esque files online, like word documents, or in my case powerpoint presentations, so you can access the file form any computer. I felt this was only fitting, with my chosen topic.

Here is a link to my final Google Docs presentation. I don't have a transcript of everything I said that day (and honestly, why would I?), but I'll go over basically everything I said, and you can follow along with the visual presentation.

Five Interesting Facts

Several months ago, I attended a "You're growing up! Welcome to the older-kids class!" party-type thing at the house of one of my church leaders, with a few other girls my age. It was intended to encourage us to leave the teenage Sunday School classes and join the adult Sunday School lessons, though I admit that we haven't exactly done so since then. At the beginning of the lunch, we were each given a bag of M&Ms that we were told not to eat, and each M&M color was assigned a random category (red was hobbies, blue was college plans, etc.). For every M&M of each particular color we had, we had to share that many facts about ourselves within that category (for example, I had two reds, so I had to share two of my hobbies).

One girl had two yellows, and she was asked to share "Two random facts." The idea was to share two random facts about herself, but she ended up saying some random world facts (I forget what they were), and we all laughed at her wit. We ended before I got to yellow, and since I had five yellow M&Ms,  it would have taken me a while to think of five interesting facts anyways. I decided to save those five facts for an interesting blog post (much like my previous, and hopefully reoccurring, "What's Up With...?"s).

This weekend, I had lunch with my brother for his birthday. While touring his new apartment, he asked if I wanted to borrow the Goldeneye Wii game that I had gotten him for Christmas. Part of his reasoning was to "distract" me, because I was writing blogs so quickly. So I decided to fit my "Five Interesting Facts" blog in now, since it should be a quick read, and I can go back to playing Goldeneye when I'm done.

Your Sunday Best

People used to wear hats all the time, and up until about fifty years ago, it was practically a requirement for a proper woman to wear a hat when she went somewhere nice, especially to church. Since then, hats have sort of fallen out of fashion, and many people don't know what the hat-wearing etiquette is. In an effort to re-popularize hats, my mom and I have taken to wearing hats in our church meetings (actually, we're really just wearing them for the fun of it).

This started about two months ago, right after the Royal Wedding. I'm not British, but the wedding was kind of a big deal in the world, so we sat down to watch a recording of the 5-hour news event (we fast-forwarded through 3 of those hours). I had fun watching all the hats, which one of the news anchors said was a mandatory accessory for all the women going into the chapel for the wedding.

Don't worry - I will not wear a hat like this. Ever.

Sometime the next day, a friend of ours on Facebook asked, rhetorically, why women didn't wear hats to church anymore, since they're so fun. My mom saw that and thought, 'well, why don't we?' That Sunday, she dug out one of the few hats that we owned and donned it while we went to our church meetings. She wanted to get something started, so that eventually it would be normal for the women to be wearing fashionable hats in church (significantly more modest and less ridiculous than the hats we saw at the Royal Wedding, of course).

What's up with...?

...the Diving Bell Spider?
The tiny Diving Bell Spider lives underwater. Seriously. They build bubble-shaped webs that are condensed enough to trap oxygen but malleable enough for them to be able to poke in or out and grab water insects to feed off of. I'm not making this up; here's the Wikipedia article, an article from Discovery News, LiveScience, and the New York Times.

And a picture!

Not only that, but their webs work the same way fish gills do - the oxygen from the surrounding water leeches into the web-bubble while the carbon dioxide leeches out into the water. Over time the spiders have to rise to the surface to restock their air supply, but they're able to live completely in the water.

Discovering that this spider exists was the single-most disturbing news I'd had in a good long while. Spiders are bad enough as it is; their long legs are creepy, and while I don't mind looking at them (preferable in a container), I can't help imagining them crawling over me, sucking my blood dry. Imagining that happen unbeknownst to me while I'm peacefully swimming around at the beach, thinking all is right? I know, logically, that this spider is tiny and would be hiding from me, but I can't help thinking nature has some cruel, evil trick in mind with these things.

...James Tate and the Prom ordeal?

My Valedictorian Speech

Last year, I tested out of High School early, because my classes were boring me and I wanted to get on with  my life. I felt a bit like a traitor, leaving all the friends I loved because of my own desire to get out of school, but watching them graduate this week, I felt such a nervous excitement for them. I decided that, in their honor, I would write the speech I would have given had I stayed in school and become Valedictorian. Not that I ever would - I'm very happy with my B+ average, thank you very much, and don't see any need in overachieving. But the idea for this speech came to me, so I decided to write it anyways.