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.

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). 

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.

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.

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!!

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: