Final post for real I swear

So I've got a small list of questions to answer. 

Favorite topic: Breaking down a story to pick out subtle themes and messages. As much as I complained about that, that IS a very important skill to have in life. I frequently do that very thing for fun with my favorite books and shows. I, just like most humans, simply do not like being forced to do it.  

Least favorite: The group work. Great griefing hell I hate group work. I usually end up doing the whole thing by myself anyway so why bother with a bunch of other people I need to tazer into gear? I was lucky this time and one other person was productive, but come on educational system. People in college don't have time to meet up and hash these things out. They have jobs, and families. Sometimes two jobs. Plus *other classes* come on board of directors or who ever decides the course curriculum stop doing this to us. 

What did I learn: How to do an I Search paper. I still maintain that I search are the most annoying and aggravating thing. Like, if you have to have my paper explained to you in minute detail for you to understand it it's a pretty bad paper. The fact that the paper got wrote at ALL should be proof research was done. All sources are cited in the bibliography. I Search are just redundant. 

What do I wish I had learned: Having not learned it, I cannot tell you because I don't know what it is that I don't know. Which I why I don't know.

Last post, most likely

Between all my classes I have about five essays to write before Thursday. Tired petition for the school board to realize people have lives, jobs, family, responsibilities and other classes and stop giving professors a minimum homework amount to throw at us. Oh well. Just one more week left of this semester.

@_@

College

“You can’t pay $60,000 a year? Sorry, you can’t go to college.”

“You dropped out of school to earn money and now you’re at a dead-end job? Why didn’t you just go to college?”

 This is from a Tumblr post, but aint it true. Also a prime example of why community college is so valuable. You get the same education for much less. If you go a full year (three semesters) You only need to pay about $10,000. Still too much for a minimum wage job, but if you get loans it's that much less debt.

Spring Break

What did I do on spring break?

Nothing. I quite enjoyed it. 

PET PEEVES IN MOVIES AND TV

• There will only be a chalk line for a body if the vic was STILL ALIVE when the police got there and had to be taken to the hospital before the crime scene was finished being cased.
• For the love of god people learn about time zones. When it is Noon in New York, it CANNOT be Noon on the other side of the planet.
• Or daylight for that matter
• You can't see a solar eclipse all around the world at the same time, because it will be night on half the planet
• Same for meteor showers
• If the bomb is going to go off in less than a minute, don't have a ten minute scene while the clock keeps ticking the background
• If you're going to have a scene where people are speaking a foreign language, have the decency to actually use that language, not just random words that SOUND like they're from that language. Trust me, someone will notice when you start dropping Italian and Dutch into your Spanish.
• Same for writing in another language. If the secret message is supposed to tell you where the treasure is, I better not be able to use my freshman language skills to realize you're reading a shopping list.
• What the hell is with the french bread in shopping bags? Also, why does everyone always get paper? Where the hell are they shopping now days where paper is an OPTION?! Not Walmart.
• You can't hot wire a car by messing with the wires under the dash. You could fry your radio and blinkers though.
• If you're going to drop a Deaus Ex Machina at least have the courtesy to make it make sense.

Writing Resources

  http://referenceforwriters.tumblr.com/post/74054579022/writing-masterpost

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

HUGE list of writing resources. Pretty much anything you could think of.

Offensive words

Words I find offensive? I never know until someone says one and I have the urge to beat their face in. The word is usually accompanied by laughter, which raises the annoyance levels to seething violent hatred. Which is weird as fuck because words are just a collection of sounds. The same utterance of sounds don't event have the same meaning, depending on the language. So why should one noise be okay while another make us hiss with hackles raised? Who knows humans are weird.

Sentence Prompts

• "Who wouldn't be angry you ate all of my cereal and faked your death for three years!"
• "I’m going to need you to put on some underwear before you say anything else." 
• "Quick catch that cat it stole my wallet!"
• "Fuck I feel like I got hit by a car… Wait I did? And it was your car?"
• "The skirt is short on purpose."
• "I can’t believe I’m sitting in space jail with you of all people."
• "So why did I have to punch that guy?"
• "I may have accidentally sort of adopted five cats."
• "I hope you know that my name is actually ________."
• "Please stop petting the test subjects. "
• "That is the tenth demon summoning this week holy shit."
• "Please put me down it’s just a sprained ankle" 
• "So what if I broke my arm I’m still doing it."
• "Why exactly do you need chloroform at 2AM?"
• "I’m like 75% this won’t explode on us."
• "You need to stop leaving dead bodies in my kitchen."
• "I understand the whole sleep talking thing but what I don’t understand is the princess dragon dream and why I’m in it."
• "I’m sorry that I got way too into playing house and accidentally kissed you passionately."

Divine by Choice

Just got done reading "Divine by Choice" by P.C. Cast this morning. Despite my whining I am worried this journal is actually part of my grade so...

To be perfectly honest getting through the first two chapters is difficult. If I hadn't already read some of Cast's more recent works I would have put the book down and not looked back. Thankfully the writing gets better as the book moves on.

The novel starts off with Shannon, a thirty something high school English teacher, driving down an Oklahoma highway in her Mustang. She's talking to herself and exclaiming the most random things in order to set up her character. 

Shannon is heading to an estate auction. She notes that she is an antique collector and spends the pre-auction viewing clumsily moving through dialogue. She becomes drawn to a vase engraved with her own image (less shocking than no one coming to find out what she was screaming and flailing about) and through a series of events ends up buying it for 3$.

On her drive home a sudden thunderstorm knocks her car around. The vase glows. She sees a woman whom looks exactly like her coming at her from the mouth of the vase and....

Wakes up in something out of ancient Rome. The writing improves from here on.

Shannon discovers that she has been transported to an alternate dimension where she is high priestess and Beloved of Epona. You know, the horse\war goddess? Her hand maiden (who is an exact copy of her best friend back home. Doubles are everywhere of people she knows) instantly knows that she isn't Rhiannon (the woman who switched with her) and urges her to keep quiet about who she really is. Oh, also could she get dressed in this nice stuff because she needs to get married to a centaur now.

What?! Not exactly what was on *this* voluptuous, tall, red head's agenda! The ceremony is short and sweet. Unlike the next hundred or so pages of her trying and succeeding to get some of that horse booty. Which is smoothed over with "no it's ok he can turn into a human man for a little bit".

Sometimes.

Yeah if you take out the whole "Evil vampire things doing evil evil things to Good people" it's pretty much just one big flirt and fuck fest between Shanon and her new husband (who hates her for all of five pages due to thinking she is Rhiannon.)

Once you get over the oh my god she is screwing a horse bit the book is a decent read. Lots of funny moments where Shannon makes pop culture references and confuses the local yokels. 

The series has at least three other books. I'll let you know how those go. If you want to check out some of P.C. Cast's later (better) works, check out the "House of Night" series. That one has twelve books and a few side novels to keep you busy.

why is this thing even part of my grade

I am so bitter that if a lemon licked me it would shrivel up and die. Every time I start feeling good about myself again someone is right there to remind me that I don't deserve to. God I hate people. Is it too much to ask that we all just be nice to each other? Or stop, even for a second, to actually consider that an opposing opinion might be valid? Honestly I feel some days like if I said the sky was blue, everyone would be lined up to tell me how stupid I am for thinking that. No matter how much evidence or facts I find to support my claim I'm just stupid and gullible and how *dare* I open my silly little mouth and contradict someone. 

If people are going to hate me no matter what I do, I might as well be an honest person. At least then I can tell myself they have a reason.

How powerful is the media?

Pretty damn powerful. Especially when you consider that most people just blindly believe everything they hear on the news. I could go into detail but I wont as this is supposed to be a short paragraph and not a fifty page essay. 

To put things in perspective, two days ago someone posted a picture of a dress online. They posed the question "Is this dress black and blue or white and gold?". The internet is in an uproar because no one can agree on what the colors are. This dress appeared on the news channels twenty four hours after posting. If you haven't heard about it you probably do not have TV OR internet.

The entire world knew about this dress and it's problems within twenty four hours. That, is powerful. 

Jupiter Ascending

So trying for something positive today.

Saw the movie "Jupiter Ascending" a while ago. The action sequences were very well done and the CGI was pretty masterful but...

The movie starts with a Tragic Backstory (capital letters because trope) about how the protagonist's father was murdered and her mother illegally immigrated from Russia. Jupiter (named for her father's favorite planet) was born on a ship in the middle of the ocean. In a dirty railroad car that was stacked for shipping because as mentioned her mother was immigrating illegally. Why she felt she needed to sneak over the border when this woman was a well off college professor I will never know. Actually yes I do. For character building, but there were other ways it could have been done without the whole Tragic Backstory thing.

Fast forward and Jupiter is a maid with her mother and aunt, who work for this man who seems to be her mother's brother in his cleaning service. Despite being very poor and cleaning toilets for a living, Jupiter's makeup is always perfect. 

Que the "Young woman who is Different From All the Other Girls" and "Not Pretty but Not Ugly" and "Actually Yeah Pretty" set of tropes with a side of "I Hate My Boring Life". Not having perfect skin is not a character flaw, for future reference.

Fast forward, she almost gets kidnapped by aliens. Gets saved by Mysterious Hot Stranger in a thrilling action sequence. Finds out she is a Princss From Another World The Chosen One Somehow the reincarnation of the Queen of the universe. How this is possible is pretty glossed over in a way that only those who don't understand how genetics work would accept.

Now, the movie from here on out is going to be split into three near identical arcs. Which go as follows: Jupiter is kidnapped by one of the children of the woman she is supposed to be reincarnated from. She almost makes a terrible decision to give up legal ownership of the earth (which she has???Somehow???) to said person. Mysterious Hot Stranger man stars in a ten minute rescue seen doing the impossible that as, acknowledged frequently by other characters, would kill anyone else.

Rinse and repeat.

End of the movie Jupiter goes back to her boring earth life in poverty (despite being Queen of the Universe and being able to choose to live anywhere else) and lives a happy life moonlighting with Mysterious Hot Stranger whom she is now dating. You know, instead of using her new found power to try and stop the frequent *genocide of entire planets to create fountain of youth water*.

Why the rest of the royalty doesn't just go ahead and harvest Earth with her on it, or the one person who knew she existed kept his mouth shut about it since he wanted her dead we will never know.

post

It's hard to write on this thing when I have zero interest in maintaining it. Maybe I should start doing book reviews or something. At least then I'd actually have something to write about. Gotta get that grade. Can't eat it, can't spend it, can't use it to stay warm but damn if that letter don't determine your worth as a human being.

Another generic post

Apathy is truly homework's greatest enemy. I used to stress over getting that perfect A, but now I'm really starting not to care. Life isn't grades and tests and papers. Life is love and family. Life also requires me to get those perfect A's so I can get a degree and *hopefully* get a job that makes more than minimum wage. Which, despite the intent of which the law was written, is NOT a living wage. Why should people who put boxes on shelves make 15$ an hour? So they can feed their families and pay their bills.

Food yay

Making some noodles. Pretty sure my blood is 90% pasta sauce at this point. The remaining 10% is most likely bitterness. So my blood is tomatoes and bitterness. Kinda like a bad costume job for a zombie movie.

Snow

Seeing as this is my personal post I'm going to be less formal today because I'm tired as shit and don't have the energy to *care*.

Snow is like a good adventure story. Pretty to look at but absolute shit to be in. Staring out my window and the ten thousand tons of white nonsense, watching the idiots drive past my house going fifty in a thirty on the icy ass roads. I cannot wait for spring.

What is a story?

A story is a telling of events that describes a happening or teaches a lesson. That's the big poofy textbook answer anyway. Honestly I think a story can be anything you want it to be. No need to over analyze it. To the contrary, I feel that if you HAVE to analyze it to understand what was going on, it was a bad story. Impressions and realizations should be natural and intuitively woven into the narrative. If you end a book and can't tell someone with confidence what you just read ("It was about a farm! I think.....") then the author took "subtle" too far. It's easy to forget that your audience doesn't know all the tiny tidbits about your character that you've kept off page. Tidbits that explain certain things-  

And you know what? I'm rambling. 

A story is a retelling of events or a crafted work to teach a lesson. Or on a non text book note, to share a world or idea.

A story is a good story if you enjoy it. End of discussion.

Sleep

I love sleeping. I really, really do. Even though I constantly do that thing where you want to stay up forever. Just not enough hours in the day to get things done you know? Then when you finally do get to sleep waking up is the last and most horrible thought on your mind. Weekends (the ones where you don't have to do anything at least) are the best since you can sleep as late as you want. Want to take a nap in the middle of the day? Go for it! Just don't do it on the couch unless you enjoy being covered in cats. 

Which I do.

So I will.

K. Jones

Greetings~!

To commemorate my first blog post, I'm going to divulge some simple information about myself. Starting with the tidbit on how I severely dislike the word "blog". No particular reason. Just hearing the word sends shivers of disgust down my spine, however, so I would immensely appreciate if you refrained from using it when making replies and comments here.

"Journal", "Article" or simply "Post" are acceptable substitutes.

Like most females my age these days it seems, I draw, write and read as pastimes. I also quite enjoy video games though I'm not very good at them. 

I have three cats, one whom is which rather bipolar, and cuddle them daily. Kitties are made of love and fluff.

Wrapping up as I must work on another assignment. 

Ta!


K. Jones