About This Blog

You may be wondering why Athena is in the name. I don't believe in the Greek gods, but Athena has always intrigued me. Athena is the goddess of wisdom, inspiration, and arts (as well as several other subjects). I consider English (the reading and writing part specifically) to be made of wisdom and inspiration - as well as an art form. It's beautiful and constantly changing and growing.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Final Post (for this semester...)

I really like blogging and I had just started my own blog last semester. This semester I was shocked to find that two of my classes had us start blogs so it was a bit overwhelming for me.

I thought it was really cool that as a class we worked with Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others to learn about the concepts we went over in class. Levinson's book talked about "new new media" areas that I was familiar with such as Facebook and Twitter, but they made me realize what I was using them for and maybe change what I was using them for. I found most of the chapters I could relate to. In the second book we used, Jenkin's Convergence Culture, I was not familiar with all of the chapters. For example, (and I have friends who can't believe this) I have never read the Harry Potter series.

The class also worked on a wiki with all of the information learned throughout the class. Looking at the differences between my writing on here and on there, I was very different in my tone of writing. On my blog, I am more personal and free to be creative. On the wiki, I was trying to be more formal and factual based on information in the book. I hope to keep the blog going but I would like to focus more on my personal one that I use to share my writing.

Friday, April 19, 2013

Worlds & Expanding the Boundaries

Today in class we talked about worlds that have been created and the public have expanded on or created sub-worlds. To give you an idea of what we are talking about, start looking up fan fiction or just stories in general: Middle Earth, Forgotten Realms, Star Wars, Eragon, Star Trek. To help you get started look at Eragon and here's some fanfiction for you. I don't know where I found this one story, because it was a few years ago but it had Eragon and Arya getting together and having a daughter who becomes a Dragon Rider as well. With Angela the herbalist becoming a key bad guy in the story. I wish I would have kept the link and read more when more was written because I loved it! And being a romantic, I loved that Arya and Eragon ended up together.

We also mentioned historical worlds like Greek mythology, Valhalla, Yggdrasil, Atlantis, Marvel & DC, Avalon, etc. How many stories have you read or movies watched that have been made using these worlds? Greek mythology particularly interests me because of the Percy Jackson series.

My own story that I have been working on has influences of Christopher Paolini's world as well as Avatar: The Last Airbender series with a twist of morphing into specific animals. A secondary story I have started is influenced by Skyrim, specifically the town of Riften.

Sidenote: When The Last Airbender series was first being aired, I watched them as often as I could. I even discovered on YouTube that fans had created scenarios/drawn scenarios with Zuko and Katara getting together. Which was like a Romeo and Juliet story that I loved. Watching these fan-created videos of pictures of them together, really sucked me in. But then watching the series, it was Aang (rhymes with hang not how they say it in the newer movie) who I wanted to be with Katara. Now that they are onto the second part of Avatar, now called The Legend of Korra, and I'm just as hooked.

What have you written/or noticed that is influenced by certain things? Feel free to share/comment :)

Thursday, April 4, 2013

A New, New Media Wiki?

I was browsing the Internet today and I found this website randomly (actually, I was avoiding doing homework and I was looking through my blogs. I got bored of looking so randomly I googled "new new media").

http://newmedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

It was created May 6, 2006 and they say that anyone can help with the Wiki. They even towards the bottom of the page have a "How to contribute to this Wiki" section. Thought I would share this, especially for my Foundations of New Media class, in case anyone was interested in participating in a Wiki!

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Smaller Potatoes

Talking about news & music sites mostly.


Ok in terms of music:

I've been using Pandora for a time because it was something I could stream on my phone rather than listen to the radio. The problem I run across is sometimes during my Disney station, I get songs that are not Disney. While I may like the song, I don't want it on my Disney station. Or take my Country station, that's not the place for Rap music. Country mixed with Rap = Crap in my opinion. When I'm in a "country" mood, I just want Country. I also hate running out of skips, so when that happens I switch to a different station.

I looked into Spotify a bit, but I (being a broke college student in thousands of dollars of debt to be able to go to college) do not want to have to pay for not having ads nor do I want to have to pay to be able to use Spotify on multiple systems.

Someone in class (I'm pretty sure it was Laura), mentioned Grooveshark.com that sounded interesting and looks interesting. Definitely something that I will be trying, especially because it looks like I can stream it on my phone as well.

News and "news" sites:

We talked about Reddit, Digg, and news sites like CNN or FoxNews in class today. Reddit at first glance reminded me a lot of Imgur because of upvoting. I'll have to look at Digg a bit more in depth another time. But I think the main difference between Reddit & Digg vs. CNN & FoxNews is that the latter two are run by major news corporations.

Myspace:

I have never made an account on Myspace. I have heard about it for quite a few years but I only joined Facebook in the summer of 2010 after high school. I never really branched to other sites except for Twitter, Pinterest, and Imgur in the past year or two.

Cyberbulling - The Dark Side of the Internet

There are several stories that I've heard over the past year or so about cyber bullying - many of the victims in the stories ended up committing suicide. When you're a young teenager, and you have one or several people bullying you, you start to believe them. Even if it isn't rational, it's peer pressure.

The Lori Drew/Megan Meier story was another one of those stories. I just don't understand what makes people think it is okay to be so rude to people. It's despicable to me. This is one of the dark sides of the internet. People find it easier to talk to people online and therefore it makes it easier for someone to be a cyber bully and most likely get away with it because "physically" they aren't hurting anyone.

I found this video that I think everyone needs to see.


Tuesday, February 26, 2013

The Harlem What?

I only just learned about this new dance craze called the "Harlem Shake". The link will lead you to the video that I think is one of the best representations of it.

It's neat that people are able to create their own video and post within minutes of recording, showing you how technologically advanced we are all becoming. But I have to admit the constant posting of new videos is getting annoying. Some of the posts are actually a bit too....too...I can't think of the word I'm looking for that will have the magnitude of power I'm looking for. But basically inappropriate.

I love this video that perfectly seems to describe how I'm feeling. I'm glad I'm not the only one.


Friday, February 15, 2013

Do YOU YouTube?

Are you asking me? Yes, yes I do. I have several different playlists. One for Watch Later another for specific sounds and songs while I'm writing my book "Thief's Honor". I have one with yoga segments on it for times when I just want to do a quick session. Another playlist is titled Instrumentals, and it has my some of my favorite songs and song renditions from Jun Sung Ah, Lindsey Stirling, and The Piano Guys. If you'll take a few moments to watch the links that I have attached to their names, you'll see some of my favorite songs by each artist.

My brother, cousin and I used to just search for videos that had content from TV shows or what we had heard from schoolmates. Our favorite to watch used to be the Avatar Stupidity episodes. We watched the episodes by ThelgDemon. My favorite episode is Avatar Stupidity Episode 6:

I used to mostly use YouTube for comedy like Key & Peele and WKUK. While I still use YouTube for  comedy, I use it for music, movie trailers, Photoshop tutorials. Normally I turn to YouTube when Facebook gets boring (which seems to happen a lot). 

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Twitter

I joined Twitter grudgingly at first. Everyone else was doing it so I was curious what was so interesting about it. Before this semester, I purely used Twitter to look at tweets that would make me laugh or interesting facts that I'm not sure are true or not (but the thing says "true facts" or something like that so they have to be true, right?). But this semester opened my eyes to using it for news as well. Not just weather but also for updates in teaching, English, New Media, Video gaming, etc.

Mostly my followers consist of people from my high school or people I've met during college. I follow the majority of them back (I think, don't quote me though). But I follow so much more than that. Besides the funny accounts, I follow a lot of my favorite musicians (unless they tweet almost every other second), members of the Packers, DSU & Deubrook Dolphins, tons of video game accounts as well as video game news. I am trying to go through and delete ones that I don't remember why I originally followed. My list is getting smaller but it's still pretty large.

When it comes to tweeting, I used to use Twitter to take either say stuff I can't on my Facebook because I have family members on my Facebook. Now it's to retweet something funny or lyrics I like. I think I'm going to try and change my view of Twitter and try to use it for something productive. Well, at least more productive than venting so my mother can't see.

My profile is just one of my Senior pictures, and my description is "Writer, reader, athlete, unique, individual". I do realize that I am in a sense labeling myself but those are what I identify myself with. It's not derogatory in anyway.

Friday, February 8, 2013

Visiting Others' Blogs

For class today, we were asked to explore other people's blogs. I really loved the pink and orange on Brianna's blog, and I know my mother would too. She loves pink and orange together! It just looked pretty sweet :)

While I'm linking to a few blogs, here's another one for you. Travis' Captain's Log. The entire look and feel of the page and the content reminded me of a pirate, and I love everything piratey! The look of the blog fascinated me!!

Loved this post by Andrew title "A Fly in the Social Web". The fact that it was written from the perspective of the fly was neat!! And he kept the theme of that going through the whole post. Very well written and I enjoyed it. It kind of sparked some ideas for a short story or just a small ditty.

All of my classmates' blogs are pretty sweet, but class is almost done and alas, I wanted to post this quickly so that I would not forget about it. With the limited amount of time, I was only able to mention a few.

Monday, February 4, 2013

Superbowl, Wings, & Little Smokies

My family had a typical Superbowl party at our home that included 2 cousins, 2 of my brother's friends, my parents, my boyfriend, and myself. With the unanimous decision that we wanted the Baltimore Ravens to win, we watched as Alicia Keys sang the anthem and waited for kick-off. No one was grabbing any of the food, so I got to be first in line. First choice of the wings (which were amazing), a scoop of little smokies & meatballs, and the first handful of BBQ chips. Of course, once I started eating everyone else quick ran to the kitchen in between plays to get food. I was not too concerned because neither were my teams and the game really isn't over until the last handful of plays in the fourth quarter.

I thought it was pretty neat that the coaches were brothers. In my opinion, the better team won the Superbowl and the majority of the commercials were pretty good. The only commercial I didn't like and thought was a bit disgusting (and showed twice!!) was the GoDaddy commercial. If you missed it, it was a blonde Barbie-type girl who represented the "looks" of GoDaddy with the stereotypical computer nerd who represented the behind the scenes. And they made out... Very gross actually, to watch on TV and it zoomed in on the making out. Ewwwww....

That's beside the point though. I thought it was interesting that the lights went out and the game was paused for about half an hour. It really changed the momentum of the game. The Ravens were on a roll and after that, it was like the pause that San Francisco needed to come back. I thought San Francisco would win the game until that play in the endzone. You know the play, the one that many people think should've been called as illegal contact or something or the sort. I will agree that there probably should've been a call, but I'm very glad there was not. The way I understand it is if it would've been called, San Francisco would've gotten the ball on the 1 yard line with a 1st down. That would've been the end of the game. But the play wasn't called and based off of who was pumped up before the lights went out, I think the right team won. I found this picture hilarious:


Here's another form of media for you to enjoy.


Video for English for New Media


This is the video I made for a project in my Foundations of New Media class. I will admit that I did procrastinate but then I remembered the website Xtranormal and this was the result :) The video had to be under a minute and talk about New New Media. I really like this site, I'll have to use it more often!!

Friday, February 1, 2013

Linking to the Outside

LENS

This was one of the blogs listed on the NY Times Directory that I thought would be interesting. I mostly picked it because it said photography and videos. When I was looking through the pictures, I noticed most of the pictures were of war zones or soliders and police. Some of the pictures were not and they were just of overseas places, but I had to navigate back to the directory page. I noticed that this blog was listed under "News and Politics" so that makes sense now.

Summary of My Blog

On this blog, I have not been quite as faithful as to my first blog, One Crazy Kruse. The topics on this blog stick to what we discuss in class/what we are required to write on our blogs. I have technically 3 published posts, with 2 still in the draft section. They will be published by this weekend though. I haven't linked to anything from my blog posts on this blog, other than my fellow classmates' blogs. My template was a preset one, that I can tweak to change it to my liking. I so far have not had any comments on this blog and I haven't commented on anyone else's blog. The traffic mainly comes from other people's blogs who have links to my page. I don't have any widgets, but I'm now going to look into adding some. Here are some screenshots for this blog:




On my first blog, my topics range from what I'm working on with my writing to topics that I feel like talking about. On this blog, I so far have 13 posts on this blog. If you navigate to this blog, you will see my last post was titled "Love & High school"to which one person (my cousin) commented on the blog itself but I had several of my family members and friends comment on the link of the page I shared on my Facebook wall. My brother and my aunt even shared it with their friends :) I moderate the comments because I do not want spam or anything negative (specifically profanity) on my blog. I will take note of the criticism, but I do not have to allow it to be posted. The beauty of being in control of one's blog!!
I did have one negative response to that specific post. This girl, who is actually close to me, asked if it was about her. While I wanted to be a smarty-pants and say "If the shoe fits." I was hesitant to do say that, so I went with a diplomatic answer. I will be visiting with her this weekend to explain that is is relevant to all. While I had specific people in mind during certain parts, I will be telling her what parts she fits into. I don't as of right now have any links, I'm going to start adding my favorite links to it though. I feel that my blog is just a bit "blah" so links and widgets will be coming soon!
The traffic mostly comes from Facebook, and usually only if I repost a link to my blog sharing my latest posts. I have noticed that some must have bookmarked my page so that they can access it every now and then.
Here is the stats for that blog:



Friday, January 18, 2013

Hardware & Software

I started playing video games before dealing with computers. I started on a Nintendo 64 and Gameboy Color. Let's look at the Gameboy first. I then moved to a Gameboy Advance to Gameboy Advance SP to Nintendo DS to Nintendo DSi XL. For the 64, I moved to a Nintendo Gamecube then to a Wii. We added a Playstation 2 to our collection when we had a Gamecube. Traded that when the Playstation 3 came out. I used to be PS3 all the way, but I switched to Xbox 360 recently and I like both of them.

When it comes to computers, we started with a big clunky Dell desktop. We have a newer model of the Dell but it's still pretty big. My high school when I was a Junior started a laptop program which I thought was the coolest thing at the time. We had these small HP laptops. Once graduating and coming to DSU, I was introduced to the Fujitsu. And I absolutely loved it! It could swivel to both sides, it was a tablet and a touch screen. But during the start of last semester, it became a pile of crap. I watched as my beloved laptop became a nightmarish monster. I never knew if it would work or not. That was when I knew that I needed to make the switch. Now I have a MacBook Pro 13.3' laptop and it's like nothing I have ever used computer-wise before.

I used to have just a small RCA 2GB MP3 player and then moved onto the 3rd Generation iPod 32 GB. I lost my 3rd Gen and bought the (at that time) newest model which was the 4th Gen. I still use my 4th Gen 32 GB iPod to this day.

I have always had a Canon camera, I started with just one of the cheap Canons and it served me well for a few years. This last summer I saved up to buy a Canon Rebel T3 and I absolutely love it!! I've used it several times the past couple months for Senior pictures (and of course, several pictures of my dogs).

I used to have a "dumb"phone and have just recently made the switch to a smart phone. I chose the LG Lucid and it was probably one of the worst mistakes of my life. It was cool at first but now I find myself wishing that I had chosen the iPhone. I'm experiencing some problems with my phone malfunctioning. Mostly not being able to turn it off without having problems turning it back on, sometimes freezing when I try to use apps, and the keyboard not being able to keep up with the speed or register which letters I actually put. Autocorrect sometimes fixes that problem, but I've also had some major Autocorrect fails. It makes so much sense to me now that I should've gone with the iPod because I love my iPod. I think I just wanted to try the Android system and I'm sure not all of the phones are like my Lucid.

For software, I'm quite familiar with Microsoft Office. In high school, I knew very well how to use Adobe Photoshop although I'm finding now I need refresher courses on how to do the most basic functions.

Active: Mac, Nintendo DS XL, iPod, LG Lucid, Canon Rebel and Xbox 360

Inactive: All of the Gameboys, Desktop computer, Nintendo 64, Gamecube, Wii, PS2 and PS3

P.S. I still do like the Playstation, the only reason I switched was for the game Skyrim. PS3 was not able to get all of the DLC packs so I made the switch. I like both Playstation and Xbox.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Concerning New New Media

Have you ever thought about how "into" technology you are? I have never really thought about it before. I have a Facebook account, but I was a bit behind the times. I signed up once I graduated high school in May of 2010 (which I consider smart because I've seen all the drama from high school students that happened - ugh who really cares?). I had an email (which I still use) from when I was 13, but now due to college and requiring random emails for different classes, as well as forgetting a password once or twice, I know that I have 2 Gmail accounts, 2 Yahoo accounts, 1 Hotmail account (can't remember that one), and 1 Microsoft Outlook account. I really only use my Gmail and Outlook though. Back to Facebook - I am highly addicted to it but I'm trying to wean myself away from using it consistently throughout the day.
I have a Pinterest account which started out as just for recipes and now I have too many boards and pins that I look at when I get bored. I have a Twitter account which I use every now and then. I first started with Twitter because I was following tweets from major video game producers and designers to get the latest info. Now I hardly use it - maybe a handful of times a week if that. I have recently acquired a Goodreads account specifically for the purpose of keeping track of books I've read and finding new books to read. 
Next is Youtube and Blogger. I use Youtube about as much as I do Pinterest which is right behind Facebook. Normally for songs or for watching funny pranks to get ideas though (have to compete with my brother so I need all the help I can get). Blogging appealed to me as a writer because it was a way for me to start sharing my writing. I also did it because I wanted to become more confident as a writer. I have two blogs for two classes and one for my own personal writing and thoughts. 
I never really thought about how dependent I am on technology. My phone and my iPod all have apps that connect to the social media sites. Sometimes it's alright to be so involved in the internet and technology but if you aren't staying "safe" online or it takes up most of your day, it's probably not a good thing. Actually scratch that - it is NOT a good thing.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Woo!!

This is my English for New Media blog. Who knows, I may continue to keep it even after this semester. It's a mystery, muahaha!