Thing Are Different Now

I started to write this post in my Journalism class one day —the naughty boy I was, for I was supposed to be working on something else— and have not touched it since.  That was possibly back in October or November, and the note you see below seems to be foreshadowing what I my life has turned into now:

Odd feeling, shh, Journalism.
Starting something new, a different feeling in the air.  I don't know.
The reason I've been away, got too tied up in schoolwark, too sucked in.  Wanted to escape, but couldn't.  Had ambitions to return in the summer, but those were squashed with my job.
Started this, my last year in highschool, with high hopes, was very ambitious.  Then I hit a brick wall, could not make any progress in my life, was forced to turn inward and gaze upon myself

And when I finally did make the decision to turn inward and reflect upon my life up until this point, I was shaken by certain realizations that forced me to reshape the way I thought about myself and about my plans for the future.  My conscience chose to do so very quickly, so I had no other choice but to try to keep up.

I struggled with trying to come to terms with it all and I feel that it had almost cost me my life because of it.  It was a sink or swim battle that I could not afford to loose and I had to choose whether or not I was to fight, and stand a chance at living, or if I was to just let myself work deeper and deeper into my sorrow and let myself die.  I chose to fight.

That is the meaning behind the "starting of something new" and the essence of a "different feeling in the air."  I had to find some other direction to take my life in than that of the grave, and dwelling on my struggles wasn't going to help me achieve this at all.  So, I needed, very desperately, to find something else to distract me from my woes and draw attention away from my current situation.  I had all this extra energy bottled up inside of me, and instead of unleashing the front of it on myself, I decided that the better option for me was to  put down the knife and to ignore my procrastination in picking up the camera instead.

My new focus in life has become my YouTube channel and my hope is that it will prevent me from entering that state of depression and fear once again.

Beginnings of Western Art: Stonehenge

Artists: Possibly created by pagan druids.  Evidence shows that it had undertaken various structural changes throughout its existence, undertaken by a number of different societies.  
Time period: (2000BC)

Location: English county of Wiltshire

Thanks to Wikipedia for this image!

Stonehenge is considered to be one of the British Isles' greatest landmarks.  What amazes people about it is its immense size for the time period in which it originates from.  Nothing before it was built with solid stones quite the size of those that compose much of the circular ring at Stonehenge.  It is a mystery as to how it was built, (for the most part) and there are several creation stories attributed to it.  One of such stories even suggests that aliens had a hand in lifting the stones for the druids, but, as to how creditable that theory is… Well, you could guess that there would be a great deal of speculation about such claims.



Interesting Facts:
Besides the fact that the stones are huge, they are actually constructed to be in-tune to the sun’s yearly patterns!  When the sun rises on the summer solstice (June 21), the light coming from the northeast shines its way past the heel stone, which sit outside of the main ring, through an archway, and lands directly on the altar stone close to the centre of the ring.  A similar thing happens upon the setting of the sun on the winter solstice.  How cool!

Some of the stones at Stonehenge came from Wales, which is more than 200 kilometers away!
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Further Reading: 

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=_pXtHqAGN6E

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This is the same video as the one that is listed in the "Further Reading" section above.  If you wish to watch the video directly from YouTube, then click on the link provided.  

I had to do a full-on assignment about Stonehenge: it's creation, modern significance, etc., for my grade 10 history class and after sifting through numerous web-sources and library books (yes, because there still are some of us left in the school systems that do such a primitive thing) I found this one to be the most helpful in my studies of the ancient, historical landmark.  

"Gee, I hope this helps!" -LEN 

What I like: Visual art

This was originally done on Feb 11 for my Fine Arts online course at school.  Now, I know that I said that I was only going to post these kind of things on Mondays (art interests) and Fridays (art history), but now I'm not so sure.  I have obligations with school that have to be met and the crunch is really on to get things done as the year is rapping up, so it will have to rest at a basis of "post when ever I can afford to" until school is done.  


Section B: Visual Art

Title: Like An Artist

Medium: Comic Strip

Artist: Ida Eva Margrethe Neverdahl

Link: http://jellyvampire.deviantart.com/art/Like-an-artist-197147822

In a few sentences, describe this piece of work and what it expresses (its theme).  Include a sentance telling the message that this piece expresses to you:

In this comic page, the girl tells her story of what it was like for her to take the path of an artist.  It expresses the common problems that most artists feel they have when they think that they have reached their artistic limits.  However, this story gives hope to those who feel that way because it states that this feeling is often something you get before you reach another level of your abilities that you never knew existed until then.  This comic speaks to me, telling me never to give up hope; when I think that I have come to my end, try another route and see where it leads me.

In a few sentences, explain what it is about the piece that causes you to like it:

The story and its images reminds me of myself.  There are a lot of parallels between the author’s life and my own.  I love how the artist chose to use the panels in the comic as an artistic metaphor of the normal boundaries that each person, no matter what the dream or reason for perseverance, sometimes feel they have.  Ida, the girl in the story, shares the same goal as me “to become an artist.”  Seeing that she continues to walk her path and does not give up so easily makes me look up to her.  I suppose that I would like to be where she is today in her career, perhaps even further if I give it a good go! 

Atomic Bomb: the beginning

How the Atomic Bomb came to be:
According to Dictionary.com, an online resource for finding the meanings of words or phrases, defines an atomic bomb as being the following:

Google and Dictionary.com sometimes do funny things!   Just look at
what I discovered while searching for this definition on the net'! 

A nuclear reaction occurs when a nucleus of an atom is altered in some way, either trough fission, fusion, or radioactive decay, that causes it to release its mass-worth in energy as the atom flies itself apart in a massive explosion.

Radiation was first discovered back in 1895 when Antoine Henri Becquerel, the inventor of x-ray technology and the first man to photograph an x-ray image, just so happened to place a packet of photographic plates in with a small amount of the element uranium before closing his office one night.  He had originally believed that a radioactive material’s energy had to come from an alternative source such as the sun.  He felt that this energy was only stored in the material and that the material’s slow release of the energy was what he had first been picking up in his initial tests on fluorescence.  But when he got the photographic plates developed, he was surprised to find that they were showing that they had interacting with radioactive material that had not been out in the sun!  His discovery in the properties of uranium marks the beginning of the nuclear age.

Becquerel’s research later held the interest of German scientists in high regard.  Right before the start of WWII, Germany began looking into the possibilities in the implementations of nuclear energy in warfare.  The information about their theories was kept quiet, only disclosing it to the number of people involved.  However, there were those among the group who feared that the research was too malicious in nature to be kept secret, and thus pasted it on to others in seeking to hear their opinion of it.

Albert Einstein, who had good ties to the United States and their people, was one of the first individuals to relay the message of what the Germans had come across in their research to the continent of North America.  On August 2, 1939 in a letter to the President, who at that time was F.D. Roosevelt, he said…

Einstein had immense knowledge about the make-up of the Universe, so if he was concerned about this new discovery, then so too should the United States.

The USA then went on to undertake what was known as The Manhattan Project, in which their main goal was to produce and test a viable atomic bomb.  On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb, whose codenamed was Gadget, was detonated in Northern New Mexico, at a safe distance from any residential homes.  However, the light from the explosion was so large that people in a faraway community swore the sun had risen twice that morning.  It was so intense that even a blind girl who happened to be facing the direction of the explosion said she saw a glimmer of light in her dark field of vision.

After the Manhattan project had been successful, there was nothing to stop the USA in their race to produce more nuclear warfare and as much as possible.
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"The Atomic Bomb of Hiroshima"
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Table of Contense: Atomic Bomb of Hiroshima

Whew!  I'm done!  That's right, I just got finished doing a-not-so-big-gone-really-big project for my Fine Arts 110 online course for school, and man!  Am I ever glad to have that behind me...  Well, not yet exactly; I still have a couple of things I want to do with it here on my blog before I call it quits.  To tell you the truth, I was very moved by it.  I found that the content surrounding the fatal dropping of the two bombs in Japan was so disturbing, I just felt that it deserved more than just a glance.  (I still, however, found myself going in a little too deep.  I think that I even lost some sleep over this, but in order to make sense of what I was reading and learning about I just had to deal with it.)  Oh, the sacrifices I make for you guys~!!

 

Anyhow, like I said, I am going to post this here and I am not all that sure how I'm going to go about it.  This introductory post is bound to be edited several times before the whole thing's said and done, but here's the names of the sections it contains:

1. Atomic Bomb: The invention that wished it wasn't made!
2. The Setup (a look at both sides of the war)
3. The Dropping of the Bomb
4. The Great Inferno (a look at what happened inside of Hiroshima in the hours the fallowed the massive explosion through eyes of those who saw it firsthand. Plus, a look at art created by a-bomb survivors.)  
5. Effect it had on the world in the years after WWII 
6. Effect doing this project had on me
7. Further Reading

*Some of these are likely to be grouped together within a single post.  I will let you know more about what I'm doing with this in the days that follow.

 

 Series:

"The Atomic Bomb of Hiroshima"

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I have so much computer work from school that I know would work great with my blog, it just requires the commitment and interest needed for me to get it out there.  I want to... just not enough, apparently.

Expect me to do more of this kind of work in the summer, that's when things will really start taking flight with my blog.  I have few doubts.

"Atomic Bomb Embedded in Facebook?!" Oh, my!

Recently, I've been working on a presentation for my Fine Arts 113 online course, and it just crossed my mind today that I should maybe think about posting the presentation here.  

There were a wide range of topics to choose from in our introduction to World War II assignment but the outline seemed to be calling for events and people who made the war more towards the side of dramatic (and let's face it, what can be more dramatizing than an Atomic Bomb?!)  So, I decided to run with concept of basing it around this.  

I decided to narrow my topic down from just atomic bombs in general, to the one that fell on Japan and then to "Fat Man" (the one that fell on Hiroshima) in specific.  However, as I was searching around dictionary.com for definitions of atomic bomb this is what came up:  

I feel sorry for Mr. Bomb... Atom's parents must have a really poor sense of humour.

-So does Google for generating absurd adds such as this one.  Don't worry though, I'm sure that Adam's (Oops!) I mean Atom's parents got a good dose of karma the first time they tried to go on a family vacation to Cuba.  "Your name, sur?" Lol...  But wait, there's more! 

This is just too hilarious; I checked the link to the site, and it turned out to be some kind of skincare product. 

-"Let's go rub our skin with leftover radioactive waste from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor in Japan in hopes of bettering our epidermal appeal!"  "Mmkay..." 

Yeah, I don't know about these ads, but I sure hope that my presentation will be worthwhile.  We'll just have to wait and see on that one.  

I made a crossword... Wanna' See?

Recently, I have undertaken a little art project for my English class.  We were put into groups and asked to come up with a lesson plan to teach the class about a romantic poet of our choice.  My partner and I decided to do our's on William Wordsworth.  The name just seemed to jump off the page when I read it, so I knew we had to pick him!  Plus, we both knew a thing or two about him, or at least remembered reading one of his poems before.

I based them off a couple of portraits I found of him after doing a Google Image search.  He was from a time long before photographs and camera were around.  This is all I had to go by.  Still, I think I have a feel for the kind of man he was.  

There was a list of things we had to do over the two classes allotted for us in teaching the class.  One of the items read...

Arg!  I messed up on Plue's hand!  (That's right, I decided to call him Plue after all.  It's short for Polarious.)
Maybe it is too soon to be saying this, but I am thinking about giving him an appearance in my comic
"Knights of Mamus'sa."  Although, I don't think that he will look like this... You'll just have to wait and see!  

As Polarious said, I thought to myself "I should do this..." and not just do it I also really wanted to do it.  And so, I did.  Here are some pieces of draft work for you to ponder about:

I made a crossword but it is not quite pieced together.  However, I can guarantee that it will posted here as soon as it is!  (Or whenever I feel it's right to... I haven't made up my mind yet.)

See? No Lies.

     I wasn't kidding when I said that I was going to give my blog a face-lift, and I have to agree, 'I love the new look!' (^.^) It's got some richer background colours than before, and I've actually enabled commenting. (yay...) I'm sorry about not having comments turned on before, but I guess that Blogger's default setting for its comments is not to allow anyone but blogger users to send them (or perhaps to not allow anyone to send them at all, I forget which one it is...)  Anyhow, everything is looking well; everything is feeling better!  I'm feeling a little better about this whole blog thing... all is well!  "W-w-wait! Did you forget to mention something,... perhaps about my comic... you know, the one that basically this whole blog is supposedly about!"

     Errr... umm, yeah! That thing.  Well, let's just say it could be faring better.  It's not that its not going to happen, because it will!  It's just taking me a lot more time than what I had been hoping for.  But, It's not really my fault, because I am a grade eleven student and my homework is a little much.  But not to worry! Because I am beginning to manage it better than I had before, and improvements to my quality of school-life are appearing upon me every day.  ~Life is Good.