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).