December Update

Now that NaNoWriMo is over, I should be back to regular updates this week! I already missed Monday, however, so we'll see how far that goes.

Regarding NaNoWriMo - I won! Again. This was my fourth year in a row winning, and my final word-count was somewhere around 100,211. In case you're wondering, that's about 139 single-spaced pages on my word processor, which might translate to about 350-400 pages in a paperback. It's very, very rough, with copious misspellings, grammatical errors, and plot points that I only remembered to add in halfway through, and are thus out of context.

I sort of feel like this has been my hardest NaNoWriMo yet, though I'm sure I've felt that every year. Still jobless, I doubled my word goal from 50k to 100k, and managed to work away at it pretty easily for the first week or so. During the second and third weeks, I remembered that a particular video game that I had been waiting for would be coming out before the end of the month, and in order to give me some days off to play it, I averaged about a thousand words extra every day.

Week One with Skyward Sword

I don't think I'm going to be blogging this entire game, but I definitely wanted to give you all my week one reactions, especially since, a) I've been waiting and saving over two years for this game, and b) I know quite a few people who haven't been able to play it yet, and have been asking me what I think. This'll be long, and I apologize in advance - but there are many pretty pictures to look at!

Bram Stoker's Dracula

According to my Tumblog, which I updated sometime right after starting the book, I spent a little over a month trying to read Bram Stoker's Dracula.

In the book's defense, I have also been working on NaNoWriMo, so I've had my mind on other things, but as I also had most of the month of October to try to read this extremely well known novel, I don't think this escuse really counts. As it turns out, Dracula really is just one of those stories it takes me an unnecessarily long time to wade through.

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.

Sarcasm Hand

The problem with sarcasm is that it isn't always easy to detect.

In speech, sarcasm is relatively easy. There's a certain inflection used when being sarcastic, stressing words to point out how obviously untrue, and thus sarcastic, a statement is. This becomes less clear when being sarcastic with a person you don't know very well, but most people tend to shy away from sarcasm with anyone besides friends.

Sarcasm becomes more of a problem in writing, because there isn't any good way to point it out. For example, I could write the statement "I love that movie," visually stressing the word 'love' with italics, but there's no clear way of knowing if I stressed that word because I seriously do love that movie, or if I stressed that word because there was obviously no way on earth I could love that movie.

Shadow of the Colossus

If you've been paying attention to anything I've been writing, then you may remember that I like stories. All kinds of stories - deep and meaningful, or light and fun; fantasy, sci-fi, or realistic; stories from books, graphic novels, TV shows, movies, and yes, even video games.

Because sometimes, in my opinion, video games can have the best stories. Sure, there are your silly arcade games and pointless shooters or beat 'em ups, but for every handful of those, there's at least one game with a truly captivating story. One of the greatest gems of literary fiction that I've ever seen happens to be the video game Shadow of the Colossus.

Friday Comics: Philosophy

I intend on drawing 'Friday Comics' most weeks, and I promise this isn't a cop-out just to keep from having to write full blog posts (though it will be when November rolls around). I probably would have written a full post today, if this hadn't happened while I was drawing  last week's comic.

If this had happened, it would have been pay back for drawing a comic during his lecture.

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.

Zelda's 25th

Look at that - I'm talking about video games again. Oh well.

I mentioned this in my E3 Coverage post, but this year marks Zelda's 25th Anniversary, 25 years since the first Zelda game was released in Japan by Nintendo. This is pretty exciting for me, as The Legend of Zelda is one of my favorite fiction series of all time.

Adventures in Cat-Training

We recently bought my cat a scratching post. She's been getting older, and goes outside less often, so she had taken to scratching at our furniture. Our old couch was fraying at all the corners where she'd attack it, so when we got this new one a few months back, we used a special kind of double-sided tape to keep her away; the fabric on my piano bench was also coming apart, though now it's been reupholstered.

I've also noticed my cat's claws getting caught in things. Cats, unlike dogs, can retract their claws (well, except for cheetahs), but when my cat stretches out in front of the doormat, she flexes her claws into the fabric to hold herself steady, and finds herself pulling the carpet up with her as she tries to move. Something had to be done.

Treadmill Reviews: Steven Moffat's Doctor Who

Unfortunately, today's post is going to be another one of those that only a few of you will care about (At least I'm not talking about video games again). I'm sorry for that, and I'm getting back to regular posting again this week, after a couple weeks of rocky updating.

On Saturday, the final episode of the 6th season of the revived Doctor Who series aired, and since that's such a mouthful I'll refer to the revived series as just plain "Doctor Who" and the original series as "Old Doctor Who" from now on. I didn't actually watch the episode until yesterday, but since this has been the first season I watched entirely as it aired, and since I watched most episodes while walking on the treadmill, I want to do a review.

Tumblr and TV Intros

A couple short things today.

First, I signed up with Tumblr (here's a link to my page there), after much insistence from friends of mine who use the site. Actually, I did this back in July, before I left on my summer vacation. I intended to write an introductory post back then, but I totally forgot about it until just recently.

In all honesty, I still don't really 'get' Tumblr. It's a micro-blogging service, which means it's like a mix of Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger all rolled in one. Most people, it appears, just post funny pictures or gifs that they want to share with friends, which is cute but not enough to make me join up. There are a lot of people who do post short written pieces, however, so it seems like that's what I'll be doing.

Treadmill Reviews: Fullmetal Alchemist

Walking on a treadmill, if you've never done it before, is actually quite boring. We happen to have one in my house, and it's become one of the few ways I can get exercise reliably, but the only way I can stand to use it is if I sit a laptop on the top tray and watch TV shows. And of course, when I watch something interesting, I want to tell you guys about it.

The show that I've been watching these last few weeks is the newest anime adaptation of a very popular Japanese manga, Fullmetal Alchemist. I read the books years back when I was in high school, and I didn't mind going through the story again in anime format because I already knew that the entire thing was and would be incredible.

Social Media Changes

Those of you who use Facebook regularly are probably aware of the new User Interface changes just released. Facebook has gone through a series of almost constant changes since its inception, and it seems like once the users finally get used to the last change, another one rolls around.

My language on Facebook is currently set to "English (Leet Speak)," so I actually have no clue what the new Facebook changes look like. If you've seen the changes and hate them, like most people seem to, I may sound like I'm bragging. I am. Of course I am.

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.

Intense

Of course, you understand, I keep hearing 'In Tents'.

I know it's a stupid joke, but I'm not exaggerating; every time someone uses the word 'intense', I think of tents (such as 'that movie was in tents!' or 'this book is in tents!' or 'that was an in tents car ride'). When I'm in mixed company, I refrain from actually saying anything, but I always think it in my head.

I was hanging out with friends today, which is why today's post is short and late. My friends are leaving for far off colleges in a week or so, so we're trying to fit in as much "chillax" time as possibly before we can't anymore. How did people handle this before in internet? Well, I guess they wrote letters, right?

Computer Troubles

I like to write blogs reviewing things I've seen and talking about stuff going on in the world that I think you guys would be interested in, but every so often I have to talk about things going on with myself, so you'll understand where I'm coming from (actually, I've been doing this a lot recently). Today I wanted to take some time out from your regularly schedule broadcast and talk about my computer troubles.

Lately, computers and I have been having a strained relationship.

The Singing Painting

Sometime last year, while looking through Bed Bath and Beyond for something or other, my mom saw a print of a painting that she instantly fell in love with. The print was pretty expensive, so she didn't buy it, but later that week she showed me the painting, and I gave her my blessing (such that it is) to buy it.

The painting my mom saw is called The Singing Butler, and it was one of the first pieces done by contemporary Scottish painter Jack Vettriano. He was around thirty when he painting this particular piece, and apparently he had very little experience painting.

What makes the painting so memorable, however, isn't the backstory, but the images. It's very minimalistic, but with little understanding of who the characters are, the viewer can still see exactly what's going on.

Wisdom Teeth Extraction

I got my wisdom teeth removed today. They're gone. I'm not 100% sure what they were doing there in the first place, since it seems like everyone just wants to get them out eventually. I'm sure a five minute Google search would lend me an answer, but I find I don't actually care enough to go look it up. Ah, 21st century.

I got to the dental surgery place a bit early, after driving myself and my dad there in his truck - which is a stick-shift, by the way. Remember how I said I never wanted to have to drive manual transmissions? It's because I hate them, and I think I'm going to either die or kill someone else when I'm in them. A few minutes ago, I looked up "pros and cons of learning to drive stick-shift," and you want to know what the best 'pro' reason was? "A lot more fun to drive."

It's totally not.

Wake Up Juice

Getting ready for the school year to start became official last Sunday, when I turned on my phone's morning alarm tone. The particular tone I use has gone through some changes in the past year, and since I'm doing my 'back to school' special, I wanted to highlight a few of them.

When I started school last year, I didn't have a phone, so I woke up using my favorite little Bob alarm clock. I got it years ago from Brookstone, after seeing a friend use it at summer camp, and I always thought it was super cute. Unfortunately, it emits a sharp, repetitious beep in its attempt to wake me up, and listening to that day after day, year after year, was grating my nerves.

First Day

About a year ago, I came onto my local community college campus to start my first day of classes. It was a truly terrifying experience.

For starters, I had to take the bus to campus. The college campus is a 20-30 minute drive from my house, and since I didn't have my license at the time, one of my parents would have to drop me off on their way to work (which, by the way, is in the opposite direction). Instead of taking me all the way out to campus an hour early just to get to work on time, they dropped me off at a local bus stop. My first experience riding a bus was that first day of school, and I had no idea what to do. I managed to deposit the money and find a seat without too much hassle, though I ended up sitting in the same spot for almost the entire semester.

I, Robot (Issac Asimov)

The 1st Edition cover.

Except for a few short stories in my Middle/High school English classes, I'd never read anything written by Issac Asimov, considered to be the master of science fiction. With that in mind, I finally picked up a copy of I, Robot earlier this summer, and I've finally now finished reading it (Unfortunately, the only version of the book at Barnes and Noble had Will Smith on the cover. I like Will Smith as an actor, but I dislike owning the 'movie cover' versions of books).

When the 2004 Will Smith 'I, Robot' movie came out, I saw reviews for it online that said it was "nothing like the book." At the time, I thought that meant it was dissimilar to the book in the same way that all the Harry Potter movies were dissimilar to the books, and years later I figured the I, Robot movie was probably just like the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time movie (which gave a totally different set of characters in a different setting the same items and ultimate goal from the original game).

Having finally read the book, I can say knowingly that the movie is truly nothing like the book.

The Amazing, Versatile Semi-Colon!

A few months ago, when my mom was boasting about how smart all her children were, I turned to her and proudly said, "My favorite punctuation mark is the semi-colon."

My mom looked back at me and said, "Never, ever, say that in public."

Sorry, mom; I'm obviously still in my rebellious phase.

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.

Everything Bad is Good for You

A while back, I wrote a review on a book titled Reality is Broken (by Jane McGonigal). If you didn't read it or don't remember, the book is about video games, and how they can positively impact the people who play them. Jane McGonigal's goal in writing the book was to help dispel the negative image associated with video games and to try to get people to incorporate the positive aspects of gaming into their everyday lives.

While writing that review, I discovered a similar book, called Everything Bad is Good for You (by Steven Johnson), and the idea intrigued me so much, I decided to buy it and read it as well. Johnson's book, which was written a few years ago, is about Pop Culture in general, and how it's actually making people smarter.

No Excuses

This is my, 'I could have written an interesting blog today if I'd isolated myself in the back room and limited my internet access, but instead I hung out with a friend this morning and coordinated to give another friend a wig I'm still not sure why I own' fill-in blog post.

I will be posting today's blog post tomorrow instead. It'll be good - I'm reviewing a pretty subversive book - but it'll take quite a while to write, and I'm already several hours behind. Luckily, with the two week break I took, I've got a good list of topics to write about in the coming weeks.

Just a forward; I'll be having my wisdom teeth taken out in a couple of weeks. It'll be a Tuesday, so I'll try to pre-write that Wednesday's post, and hopefully I'll be healed and lucid enough to write that Friday. After that, school will be starting for me, so there's a chance I may miss a day or to. I'll try to keep you all informed. Thanks for reading!

Cowboys and Aliens

The Friday before we left on our vacation (the 29th, I believe), my mom and I went to the theaters to see one of the few titles coming out this summer that looked interesting: Cowboys and Aliens.

When I saw the trailer for this movie sometime last year, I thought it looked hokey, and wanted to see it, just to have fun with the ridiculousness of it. The title was an obvious play off of "Cowboys and Indians" - as someone who likes words, I can appreciate the fact that 'Indians' and 'Aliens' sound similar and have the same number of syllables - and the movie premise sounded like something made up on the spot for a silly, would-be blockbuster, like Megashark versus Giant Octopus.

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.

Vacation Time

This is a short update to you guys know that I'll be out of town for the next two weeks with sporadic internet access and probably minimal time to write. I'm hoping to be able to post at least one blog each week, and there are a couple of things I want to talk about (including a review on Cowboys and Aliens and a book I've been reading), but I can't make any promises. I'd suggest subscribing to my RSS feed or, if you have a Google or Blogger account, 'following' my blog to see when I update with new posts.

I hope you are all having a wonderful summer, and I'll be back to regular thrice-a-week updates when I get back!

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.

Visiting Twin Peaks

Last Monday, I sat down for the first time to watch the pilot episode of what is arguably one of the most memorable shows in TV history. Twin Peaks, which aired from 1990-1991, probably wouldn't be considered one of the best shows of all time, but anyone who happened to see it might remember how this campy, bizarre, unconventional show changed television expectations

Captain America: The Star Spangled Avenger

Friday, as I sat hunched over the laptop watching Twin Peaks (more on that later this week), mom poked her head into my room and stated that she wanted to go see a movie on Saturday. She does this every now and then - it's a healthy reaction to having months off work (she teaches at an elementary school) and spending most of her time at home with few other people around.

We don't watch movies that are rated R, or movies that just look stupid, so our options this summer are severely limited. After a quick brainstorm, we decided to go see Captain America, which I have to admit was bordering on the 'looks stupid' side of my chart (I'm not a fan of superhero stories, really). However, of all the movies out right now it's the one I was most interested in, so Saturday afternoon we drove out to see Captain America.

The Guild: Game on!

The Guild returns next Tuesday for a fifth season! I'm super excited!

I know I've mentioned The Guild before, briefly, on previous blogs, but I doubt many of you really know much about it. The Guild is the name of a web series, started in 2007 by a small-time actress, Felicia Day. Tired of auditioning for small roles and getting very few calls back, and avidly addicted to Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMOs), Felicia decided to write her own television sitcom based on her experiences. She produced the show online with a few friends in the business, using her own contacts, their own equipment, and their own money.

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.

Kenna Moon's Emmy Nomination: Anna Torv

The Emmy Award nominations were announced last week, and I'm starting to wonder who did the nominating. I wouldn't consider myself at all qualified to make a decision on something like this - I have a handful of shows that I watch regularly, which I've managed to keep to less than seven before this year, and I can only state my opinions on the shows that I am seeing. I can't say which shows last season were the best in whatever category, as there are several dozen I have absolutely no experience with.

If I did have any nominating powers, however, there's at least one nomination I would have been totally comfortable making; for Best Actress in a Drama, I would definitely have chosen Anna Torv, who played FBI Special Agent Olivia Dunham on J.J. Abrams' sci-fi drama Fringe.

Apologies

For anyone looking forward to my blog, this week has probably felt a bit like a cop out. On Monday, I just posted a list of facts which you may or may not have been interested in. Wednesday there was no post at all. I can console myself with the fact that I don't really have a huge readership yet.

As some of you may know, I'm taking two summer courses at the local community college, one of which just ended this week (I think). For my final, I had to give a ten-minute presentation, which I'll use as my excuse as to why my blog posts have been infrequent as of late. There was also an exam in my Psychology class as well, so I had to balance studying and preparing for my presentation at the same time; oddly enough, I ended up doing really well on my Psych test, only missing three question after barely studying, while previous tests with more dedicated studying had gotten lower scores. Hmm....

My presentation was on Internet Subcultures, and how they're forming the 'Modern Myth' (it was a Myth and Legend English course). It was an interesting presentation to prepare, and apparently everyone really liked it, even though I felt like subject was too broad, and I definitely had a different point of view than what people were expecting.

For today, however, there's really no excuse as to why there's no post. I spent the morning alternating between working on a puzzle with my mom (which you will definitely hear more about in upcoming blogs) and watching Netflix. Around noon or so, Mom and I decided to head outside and do some shopping, because, in all honesty, both of us needed to get outside a bit. I got some Animal Crackers from Target, which was exciting because I haven't had those in a long time.

Then we got back at 4:30 and I realized that I hadn't written a blog yet today. Instead of working on something substantial and posting it late tonight, I decided to give you, dear readers, this cheesy apology post and a promise to write something interesting next week.

Looking at my Blog Idea Book, however, I noticed that I'm running out of interesting ideas. I have a bunch of old ideas that don't seem nearly as interesting anymore, and a few reviews I need to write as soon as I finish what I'm planning on reviewing, but other than that, there are just a few mildly interesting 'Personal Opinion' pieces. If anyone has something they want me to talk about, please leave a comment below. If there's anything you'd like to hear my opinion about, any books or movies you want me to review, or anything else, I'll be glad to take any suggestions into serious consideration. Thanks in advance!

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.

Escala

A couple years ago, a certain car company ran an ad for their newest line, using an orchestral piece that seemed unnecessarily epic. I can't find the video online, otherwise I would link you to it, but I remember the music from that commercial. A friend of mine found the track and downloaded it onto her iPod, because it truly was amazing.

Sometime later, one of my brothers took me and our mom out in his car, and in his car stereo he had a CD of music by the all-female string quartet named Escala. I only realized sometime later, after my brother bought our mom the CD because we both loved it so much, that it was their signature piece 'Palladio' that I'd first heard in that car commercial.

Wilde and Unruly

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I have the beginnings of what would be a list of dead people who I really admire. It's not really a fully-formed list - in fact, I can only accurately think of two names from it, the first being Albert Einstein, who I don't have to say anything about, and the other being Oscar Wilde.

I get the impression that many people today don't actually know who Oscar Wilde is, which is really unfortunate. In my opinion, he's one of the best and one of the funniest English writers of all time. In all fairness, however, he only ever wrote one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. When he was alive, he was most famous for his children's fairy tales, published in two collections titles The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates, but nowadays I'd wager most people recognize his name from the numerous plays he wrote, including Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Monday the Fourth

I don't have a main topic for today's blog, so even though there are several things I'm going to go over, it'll be relatively quick.

About a week ago, I preformed a system restore on my dad's old laptop (which I've informally adopted) to clean it of any malware. For some reason, after the software reset, the 'Control' key fell off of the keyboard (In case there are any computer illiterates following along: there's no reason that something in the software would effect the keyboard hardware). I was unable to click it back into place, so instead of wasting the opportunity, I decided to sew the 'ctrl' key onto a bracelet that I could wear around, because the symbolism was too good to pass up. I don't know if I'll ever actually wear it, but it's pretty cool looking.

In other news, this past week has been pretty interesting. I managed to make all three of my blog appointments last week, so I'm really not doing too bad, but last Monday was a pretty late update (surprisingly, according to my stats, my post on the 27th got an unexpected amount of hits. Who knew people were so interested in hats?) I blame Monday's tardiness on my mom's compulsive desire to catch up to me on Psych.

Bookshelf

I talk a lot about video games, movies, and TV shows on this blog, and I worry sometimes that people might think I'm not as bookish as I really I. Because I really am.

These are the bookshelves in my room. As you can see, they're nicely decorated with knick-knacks that I've collected over the years - the majority of those kick-knacks being books. For some reason, I prefer to own the books that I read rather than borrow them, so if I get in the mood to read something, I almost always go out and buy it instead of checking to see if it's at the library, or if a friend owns it. I do occasionally get rid of books, but currently the number of fictional or otherwise narrative novels (or anthologies) on my wall is 232 (given a 1% margin of error).

Heavy Noire

In mid-May, the highly anticipated video game L.A. Noire was released around the world by Team Bondi and Rockstar Games (most famous for their Grand Theft Auto series). The production studio used a special new state-of-the-art motion capture system called MotionScan to record real actors' faces from 32 different angles, which they used to animate realistic facial expressions for the in-game characters, each voiced and portrayed by their respective motion capture actor. The resulting graphics were astonishingly realistic for a video game, and gamers couldn't wait to get their hands on it.

John Noble, recording motion capture for one of
the game's antagonists.

Hearing all the buzz about this new game, however, I was reminded of another game that was released a year prior, called Heavy Rain. I heard about Heavy Rain last summer when I was looking for some video games that had emotional storylines. The Heavy Rain producers were praised for their use of motion capture technology, but mostly for their involving plot, about a man whose son is kidnapped by a serial killer and must go to great lengths to save him before he's drowned.

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).

Research Essay - Pluto

Last fall, for my final in my English class, I was assigned to write a research paper on any topic I chose. I had to have an opinion about what I found out, so I guess it was a double research-persuasive paper, and after going over several possible topics, I finally decided on one that I felt the most passionate about: whether or not Pluto should still be considered a planet.

I'm no scientist, and my opinion on the matter really has no credence, I understand, but I have done a lot of research on the subject, and I was pretty proud of myself for writing this. We turned our papers in on Finals day, and never bothered to pick it up from his office later, so I'm not sure what grade I got, but I passed the class and my professor complimented me more than once on my writing skills. I know a few people were interested in seeing what I wrote, so I decided for today's blog to publish, online, the final copy of my Pluto essay. Citations have been kept intact, and the photos were added just for this blog.

High-Level Art

I've recently come to realize that most of the comics I enjoy are directed towards demographics that I'm not a part of. I'm not quite sure how this happened.

"Wikipedian Protestor" by XKCD

For most of my life, the only comics that I knew existed were the color "Funnies" that were printed with the newspaper on Sundays. Later, I realized that those same comic strips came out every day in the newspaper in a black-and-white format, which meant more humor throughout the week for me. I've never really read the newspaper, but there was a time in my life when I'd come home from school and read the comics page as part of my daily routine (which meant I always missed Saturdays and government holidays).