Making Picture-Links in Blogspot

So, in a couple of my classes, we are maintaining academic blogs on digital literacy and its ties to Moby Dick and John Milton (Paradise Lost). As lots of people are posting pictures, I wanted to do a quick post for anyone interested in making blogspot pictures link to external websites. , it's pretty basic:

1. Click on the [Insert Image] button

2. Choose the picture from the available options (Upload, From a URL, etc.)
3. Select the picture when it comes up in the window, and click on the blue [Add selected] button on the bottom of the window.
4. Position the image wherever you want, then click the HTML button on the left. This basically  brings up the code that makes your blog work.

5. Use the find option (CTRL + F in Windows, CMD + F for Mac) or scroll through the text to find "a href." An example from this document looks like this:

6. Check to make sure that this is the right picture (the filename is the last thing in the quotation marks), and change the entire web address (the content in the quote marks) to whatever website you want to link to. You'll end up with something like this:

7. Hit [Compose] to go back to the regular blogger editor, and you're done! That's it! Now, if you haven't been clicking on the pictures all along and you have made it this far, you might as well enjoy a few Google easter eggs by doing so now...

Happy blogging!

Study Break

I needed a break from reading, and I'm trying to do better at blogging consistently on this blog. I have a couple other blogs that I've been working on for classes, and that's kept me busy pretty constantly. This blog sometimes becomes the neglected child in a big family of other projects, though, and that's my biggest daily regret. The problem is that though beautiful thoughts nonetheless come from beautiful minds, it's hard to find anything in a mind cluttered by so much else.

I crave weekends, because they are really the only time when I can really just forget about everything and live in the real sense--go on adventures, write, read for fun, compose music. I am still trying to figure out the whole balancing life with school thing, because school's winning even though life is a lot more fun sometimes. The world is so full of beautiful things and beautiful ideas and beautiful people: I just wish I had more time to really come to know it all.

On a side note, I think I am going to start carrying my camera with me wherever I go, because I want to capture this moment in my life. I don't know why, but I feel like it's a really important one, and right now, I don't have the words to capture all the beauty that I experience--mostly all the people that I see--on a daily basis. I was riding my bike home the other day when a small bird shot out of a bush as I passed. I was going fast enough that as it flew away from me, it appeared to just hover before my face for ten seconds or so before finally veering off, and I was left with the impression that I had faded from existence for a moment and become the wind on its tail feathers. The week before, a butterfly brushed against my skin, and I remembered touching butterfly wings as a child, blowing the fairy dust from my fingers.

Grace alights upon us each day, I think. Our task is just to be there and remember.

The Face Behind Emoticons

One of my deep dark secrets is that I overuse exclamation points when texting and emailing. The hardest part is, it's a conscious thing. I don't finish a text only to find that somehow T9 has changed every period to an exclamation point (though it does seem to enjoy turning my every instance of "happy" into "guppy"). Rather, I go through my texts and  substitute in exclamation points in place of any periods that might mistakenly convey disinterest or lack of excitement on my part.

It is almost certainly a neurosis. 

The thing is, I just worry that people will "read me" wrong, because there is so much more to communication than just words. Words are great--don't get me wrong--but in the end, they serve as only an approximation of the rich array of feelings and interactions that make up the human experience. There is an implicit loss in meaning and complexity as emotion and perception are distilled to concrete thoughts and and then reduced and quantified within the arbitrariness of words.

Interestingly, however, we have developed pretty interesting ways of putting humanity and meaning back into text-based communication through emoticons. Though in some sense text sterilizes human interactions, removing the verbal emotion that might be present, say, in a phone call or the visual communication implicit in a face-to-face conversation, we have found ways of inserting ourselves--or at least our faces--back into even the most restrictive or limiting textual environments. Combinations of otherwise independently meaningless punctuation marks have become, instead, textual extensions of the human body, reintroducing facial expression into a form that, because of physical separation, would otherwise be preclusive to such levels of communication. Through emoticons, we become capable of conveying a much broader range of emotion and expression, which provides in turn for a more pleasurable, more human interaction as a whole. Go ahead... tell me this isn't the case the next time you see a ;) in the King James Version of the Bible. I know I smile every time I see it. And okay, maybe "I'm sad" is a perfectly fine sentiment to express, but it can hardly compare to the simplicity and elegance of :(  I mean... look at that frown. That guy is really sad.

One class mate of mine remarked the other day, "Too bad there's not a font for sarcasm." The idea maybe sounds a little bit out of the ordinary, but maybe it's not too far-fetched. I mean, we have emoticons for emotion, italics and bold for emphasis, and all caps for people over 60 who text, so why not a font for sarcasm as well?

Pleasta Meecha

 Well, I was asked to write a blog post introducing myself for a class that I'm taking on John Milton, so I figured I would post it here as well just for fun. I am not a big guy on taking photos of myself, so any time I want to post one for a profile or whatever, I have to take one on the spot, so I've included an obligatory photo. I feel like when introducing themselves, most often people emphasize the same five or so things and then finish it all off with "something interesting" which invariably becomes nothing more than an extension of one of the first five things, so this time, I'm going to take a little bit of a different approach and share some things that not everyone might know. I hope you can get to know the everyday stuff about me from just regular interactions, here and in real life.

I am a technology enthusiast with reservations. I follow all sorts of cool new technologies, from transparent solar cells to 3D printers that can be used to print viable human tissue (to quote the oracle from Hercules, "...it's gonna be big"). I'm interested (though shamefully inexperienced) in lots of different forms of digital expression, from 2D art to filmmaking, and I'm really interested in reinterpretations of older forms, like spoken word poetry and the work of young and aspiring Youtube artists like Lindsey Stirling. It's secretly a dream to make a successful vlog or Youtube channel someday. I remain adamant, however, in my opinion that just because your phone is an egghead, mine doesn't have to be a "dumb phone" even though it's from 2005. I like a lot of the features of modern phones and stuff, but I know myself well enough to know that if I had a so-called "smart" phone, I would probably quickly get sucked into all the cool apps and other stuff. So, I stick with my museum-worthy RAZR. 

See, MSPaint isn't thaaaat bad...

Ever since I was 15 or so, I've wanted to develop a low-cost method of water purification for application in low-income areas. That's pretty much what made me want to study chemistry originally (that, and the prospect of going into food sciences and developing calorie-free Goldfish crackers so I could not feel bad about being practically addicted to them). I worked at a nature preserve for a summer and actually served on a municipal water council to raise awareness of water-born illness and to encourage "green" building techniques. Yep... closet hippie. Eventually, though, English called my name, so I can still be a hippie, just in different ways.

Amarillo

New house! Yay!

Ever since I started college, I've dreamed of living in a house, and somehow this semester, the housing gods smiled upon me and things worked out just right. I guess I've always kind of gone with apartments simply because it's what my older siblings did, and added onto that was the fact that during spring and summer terms, I am incapable of living anywhere that doesn't have a good pool. I think I might spend more time during the summer swimming than sleeping, and that probably deserved some psychiatric attention, but nonetheless that's how it is. Anyway, I'm in The Amarillo House. For those of you who speak Spanish, you invariably read that wrong, because it's actually pronounced just like it looks in English. I know, strange, right? But despite the hick American feel that I get every time I tell someone where I live, I really like the place. Part of that might have to do with having my own room for the first time in about six years, but among other pluses are a washer and dryer, utilities that are included in the rent (which is oddly cheaper than any fall/winter housing that I've paid for), a family of quails in the back lot, a friendly neighbor dog, and some pretty cool roommates. I moved from my previous apartment with my roommates Joey and Aaron, and then we ended up with another guy named Greg who is really cool so far. I am really liking it so far, in any case.

School starts back up Tuesday, and that means that the next week will be full of much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, but it also means that people have started flooding back into town and the streets are crowded with lots of Freshmen who look about fifteen and lots of worried moms who look like they have lost fifteen years of their lives worrying that their kids won't have enough food on the meal plan. I, on the other hand, have been trying to squeeze the last bit of hakuna-matata out of my two-week summer vacation. That means lots of swimming, reading, friends, piano, and writing, among other things. I've been going through some old journals, and I've been working little by little on typing up some old writings, so anything that I find over the next few days that seems to be of any worth will likely end up here. Here's a little tid-bit that I found from my flight to Moscow. It's short, but I thought it was kind of quaint, so here ya go:

The horizon was an endless rainbow with reds like deep, auburn sandstone and blues so blue that you don't ever even think to ask whether it's cerulean or navy. And right down the middle was a broad band of green--the first I had ever seen in a sunrise. It was as if the entire sky were alight with hope and majesty, and the blanketed forests rolled out beneath us as spindly veins of taillights snaked across the expanse below us. Lifeblood of the land, these streams of sparks stretched on and on, spiraling out from the glowing clusters of the small Finnish towns that jumped out of our way as we passed. 

I honestly don't know what awaits me in the year to come. I think these next two semesters are pretty much set in stone, but then I'll be done with school and on my way to somewhere or something. I think sometimes how funny it is that we always seem to be rushing off to nowhere in particular, but I guess that's just the way it goes sometimes. I have thought a lot about teaching English in China next summer, which is another secret (or maybe not-so-secret) wish of mine. A lot could change in two semesters, though, so we'll see where life directs me. In any case, I'm going to really try to make the best of this last year at BYU, because I'm realizing more and more how unique of an experience it is to be here. I've had my struggles with certain things in the Happy Valley, but it really is a wonderful place in so many ways, and I think when it comes time to leave, I will miss it as I have perhaps missed no other place.

Free World

This picture is here just in case you don't
want to deal with my crazed rant.
At least you got to see a koala, right?
Clicking that link was worth it after all...

So we call ourselves the free world. We say that we are at the height of civilization, that we are the most advanced, the most successful, the most cultured. We are the emissaries of freedom. But who is really free, and what is freedom?

Is the man free whose country lives in debt to another? Are citizens free who are shackled by addictions and apathy--who can't go a day without coffee and caffeine, who can't go more than a few hours it seems without the Internet or their favorite TV shows? "They can, they can." I know. But they don't... Is a nation free whose poor starve and whose population is bound to the concrete mausoleums we call metropoli? Is the nation free when money takes precedence over moral, when who you know is more important than who you are? Are people really free when blinded by bias, when a person's skin color or religion is a justification for hatred, and can a people ever be free when they work so tirelessly to renounce the freedoms that their fathers purchased so long ago?  Are we truly free when money and social status are the currency of dreams rather than ingenuity and determination? Where is our liberty when shackled by the mind-forged manacles that we call beauty or the bonds that we call social refinement? How can a country be free when its rulers--its representatives--are slaves to corporations and conglomerates, when a man's conscience must take second stage to his political mobility and his approval rating? How can we trumpet democracy when the government has forgotten the people--when Ploutos and Oligos have crushed Demos beneath their heels?

I guess the problem that I have with writing stuff like this is that I still don't have any answers. All I have is my discontent--the feeling that things aren't as they should be, that maybe things aren't as they seem. I write, perhaps, only to stay afloat in the darkling sea that is this unintelligible world. In the end, though, maybe it doesn't really matter. People can pretty much do what they want. It's a free world, after all...

But we are thralls to apathy

Lotus Blossoms

With an eternal shrug, we run from ignorance to indifference because caring hurts too much. There are too many questions, too many contradictions, and which voice do we heed? There is too much that's truthy and not enough truth, too much myopic boldness in declaring things we don't understand and too little courage to live by the truths we know and have ever known. So it's educators' fault, right? The government's problem? Ah, but we've forgotten: we've been sitting in front of a monitor too long to remember that success begins and ends with S or us. Does the flower cease to grow when the gardener's away, or is he there to give the plant the things it needs to grow on its own time? Does the lily shrivel and die in the field when God at times seems far off? 

So maybe we really think we're justified... Sure, they waste my time with things I'll never use. Why should I wear out my eyes to memorize their fickle facts and truths that might be lies? I don't need them; I don't need anyone! The wisdom of the eternities is before us--a click away! But the thing is, no matter what you say, we're surfing through a sea of trifles and we're drowning. That Pandora's box before our eyes, that epileptic frenzy of images and sounds that sear our senses and cauterize our minds, it reduces us to a state of vegetative bliss (and surely none can fail to recognize the rapturous euphoria of cauliflower-existence). So we're happy with our lot. We're content to while away our hours in books of faces that we barely know, to breakfast on discontent and lunch upon our lotus leaves. And only thunder wakes us from our reverie.

[This is an excerpt from a spoken word poem in three parts, each addressing problems with the American educational system. Stay tuned for "Hegemony" and "Insularity," the accompanying (unfinished) sisters to this selection.]