Listen

I really love this, but I know many people could take it in a very wrong way. That's why you have to slow down and really pay attention.

It's Christmas?

Going to Walmart, you see the Christmas lights. Hear the Christmas music. Get the Christmas feel.
....But wait. We haven't had Thanksgiving yet. Come to think of it, the Christmas music seemed to be playing right after Halloween ended.

The thing is that it seems that stores automatically skip over the Thanksgiving holiday all together...except for the high sales on the turkeys of course. Even on ABC Family there was a count down to the 25 day Christmas countdown. How often do you see a countdown to a countdown? It just seems like stores force the Christmas season onto everyone.

Not to try to push down the Christmas season. I absolutely love Christmas. It just seems like stores put Christmas on fast forward to "get parents to buy their gifts early" or to "buy the Christmas lights while they're on sale." It just seems like Christmas comes so fast, and people forget about Thanksgiving and being thankful. Instead, a person has to worry about getting everything they need for Christmas.

I still and will always love Christmas, but I feel like Thanksgiving has lost a lot of it's moment in time. This meaning people don't think about being thankful for things as much as they used to. With Thanksgiving coming up so soon, I feel that we really need to step back and look at how thankful we should be for the things we have.

An Added Genre

When things change, they normally change for a reason. Take Facebook for instance, Facebook is constantly changing. When it does, people who use it either see a light bulb turned on with such a good idea, or they don't really like it just BECAUSE it's a change. 

One not extraordinarily new but recently new genre that was added to Facebook was the pop out slideshow for pictures. Instead of when you click to view a picture, and having to open up a different webpage to view the full sized picture, Facebook now has the picture pop out so that you never leave the page.

At first, I completely hated this new genre. I mainly didn't like it because it didn't let me right click and save the picture anymore. Instead, I had to download the picture and save it. It felt like Facebook was just trying to create a big hassel for me as the user. After a little while though, I started to really see the benefit of it. Facebook had created it so that when scrolling through the news feed, and just wanting to view one picture, a person could view that picture at full size without ever leaving their place on the news feed.

Now, I love the new genre; especially if I am wondering far down within my news feed. After I am finished looking at a picture that I click on to view, I am brought back to where I started so that I don't have to scroll all the way back down again. Not only that, but Facebook modified having to download the pictures in order to save them. Now, I feel like the whole process is hassel free and just awesome. This makes the new picture genre a great addition to Facebook, and it is now one that I really enjoy.

Ambient Findability

Look at the title. Now back to this body. Now back to the title. No, the title does not say Fidelity, but findability. What exactly is finability, though? And why is it next to the title word, Ambient? Is that a book?

Yes, the book, Ambient Findability was written by Peter Morville in 2005. Though I haven't completed his book yet, Morville I feel that I've gotten at least a small grasp on understanding what Morville was trying to  say about findability, and it's really amazing. With technology constantly getting more and more advanced, the internet is constantly advancing, too. With the internet advancing, there has to be an accessible way to find all of the information that people want to find. This is findability.

Today, there is a constant use of findability through words and tagging. If you see within all of the blogs, there are always tags that help people better find some information that they might want to find within my blog. The way in which you might search on Google to find information, is tagging findability. The way in which people search to find a video on Youtube is also findability. Searching for a friend on Facebook is finability. The whole internet is set up by tagging words to make them findable.

This is what I believe Peter Morville was really trying to express would happen. Most everything in technology is made to be more accessible, easy to use, or just better. For people to be able to find what they want, all information needs to be made findable. This is one of the things that I think Morville was really trying to express.

Immortals

Tonight, I went and saw the new movie, Immortals, and I must say it was much more different from what I thought it would be. I definitely still liked it, though. It was made by the makers of the movie 300, witheld the same type of graphics and images that 300 had. This in itself might automatically make me biased, because I love the extreme graphics and special effects that are used in both of the movies.

The movie is about a time when a man named Hyperion tries to raise an army up to fight against the gods, and to release the Titans to destroy the gods with a particular weapon. Theseus, a mere peasant vows to kill Hyperion after he kills Theseus' mother. With the help of some other men, and the help of a beautiful oracle woman, Theseus tries to save mankind from Hyperion's realeasing of the Titan evil.

Overall, I thought the movie was really cool. I would definitely say that it is not for kids, though. It constantly has blood, gore, and extreme violence. Though it doesn't show as much nudity as 300, parts of nudity were still in there. Since it just came out tonight, I don't think there could be very accurate reviews. I think that the movie should get some good reviews, though. With that said, if you don't want to see it in theaters, you should seriously Redbox this movie once it comes out.

Again Again!

So I had a wonderful last couple of weekends. Halloween is such a fun holiday, but only because I love dressing up. One of these days I'll find the evidence to show you, then put them on here, but growing up I always had to put together my costumes...I never bought them. So when I came to college and realized I needed a good looking costume, I decided to make step into the unknown, and get a costume. Sadly I realized I LOVED getting a new costume, and dressing up. I always used to pretend that I was someone or looked like something when I was younger through my imagination. Then when last year, I went and bought an Aphrodite costume and became a Greek goddess, I fell in love with dressing up.

The saddest thing is that I never get invited to dress up parties, so I have to wait once a year to get to become someone else. This last year, it wasn't as creative or cool, but I still got to have fun being an airport strip search officer since I was matching my boyfriend. Even if you don't have a fun time dressing up, it's still a blast (at least to me) to go out and see other people's costumes! Some people are so creative! Yes, some people are extraordinarily slutty, but hey there are always really cool ones that overlook those.


I then went out last night to a hang out with some friends in costumes, and we all dressed up, so I improvised with some clothing I already had.....cowgirl!! (yes this is when you can say, "of course") I still had fun with my friends, and got to see all of their costumes. At least on Halloween, it never gets old.

Typing Type

So there were a couple of pages within Ellen Lupton's book, Thinking With Type, that I found very interesting. This book is a book that talks about how printed typing fonts came to be, and how they were shaped and changed over time.

thinking with type

Dart280

One of the pages I found very interesting was page 36, as you see to the right. It is all about the anatomy of typing, and what certain parts of the font mean. I found it very interesting to see how mear lines that I type or write myself had parts with names, and an anatomy just as a body would.


Another page that I found very neat to learn about was page 16. This page showed pictures of different ways that different people throughout the years figured out their way of creating a new font. I found it really beneficial to find out exactly how the structure of some of the letters were created, and by whom.

All together, this book really helps me understand how many changes have went through the typing world....and are still going through the typing world. This helps me better compare technology, and how it is constantly changing, but only because of different preferences and to try to better something already made.