What the eff was I thinking?

So I blogged a couple days about classes starting. I'm blogging today to report that I'm fully ready for winter break. lol. I'm having a "why did I decide to persue English?" moment. I understood from the beginning it would be a lot of writing. I guess I was naive to think it wouldn't be an un-doable amount of reading also. But I'm feeling a little overloaded. I'm just extremely happy that I didn't take more than 12 credits. I almost signed up for another class- just because only one of the classes I'm taking is actually going to be usable towards my degree-- but I can't imagine how totally overwhelmed I would have been with a Medieval Readings class thrown in.

But I went to a very cool lecture last night, which is a required part of my ENG325 class. The lecture was called "The Technology of Reading" and it explored some cool topics. For instance, I didn't know that humans shouldn't be able to read. We aren't "hard wired" for it, but somehow we manage to do it. Also, that revolutionary electronic book that everyone is so excited (the Kindle, just to name one) is actually very conservative. There are some books it wouldn't be able to play. Pretty much any book that has footnotes is out of reach for the "revolutionary" Kindle. (I enjoyed this part of the lecture especially, since I'm anti-Kindle because it takes away from bookstore sales and ultimately author sales).

The professor also made us aware of some pretty cool websites. I'll share them with you:

wefeelfine.org

This website is really awesome. The creator has this program that scans blogs (such as this one) and anytime it comes across the words "I feel..." it copies it to the website. They've composed a website full of emotions, basically. You can go to any date during the year and search any emotion and something will pop up. It's really cool... go check it out.

thewhalehunt.org

This is a mixture of cool and boring. This guy spent a week in Barrow, Alaska (I'm still trying to figure out why anyone would live in Barrow, Alasaka, but that's beside the point). As many of you might know, Alaska is pretty much full of eskimo's. He spent a week with an Inuit(spelt wrong, I'm sure) family who has special permission to hunt whales because that's how they pretty much make their living. He took his trusty camera along with him. Cool/boring thing is, he had it set to take pictures every 5 minutes. Faster, if his heart rate went up. This is cool because while they were actually out on the whale hunt, the camera was taking pictures like every thirty seconds. This is not so cool because it took pictures every 5 minutes even while he slept. In all, there's like 3214 pictures, or something ridiculous like that. The latter part is the more interesting...that's when the get the whale and start slaughtering it. Faint of heart, skip this one.

http://www.yhchang.com/BUST_DOWN_THE_DOORS!.html

Play that one on a computer with sound. It's a poem that's repeated eight or nine times and the pronouns change everytime. By the last time, it sounds kind of psychotic. And the music totally adds to the feeling.

There are a couple more I want to share, but the computers at work don't have the graphic cards to support the websites, so I'll post them later after I make sure the links work.

Happy Thursday!