Truth

Yes I do, Facebook.  Yes I do...

One year and counting!

Holy cow!  I've had this blog for over a year, and just realized it now!

Silly me for not realizing this.  Taking a look at the statistics, it's fun to see what topics and audiences I've gotten to play with this past year.
I've had over 2,500 views from 9 different countries.  Not too bad, considering I do very little to advertise it.  It also speaks considerably to the larger range of people that I have contact with now, considering that this is more views than my youtube channel got in 3 years of steadily advertising it in high school.  Of course, being in a K-12 school with just 200 students total, it's kind of a limited viewership.  I think the most views for a video I made during high school was me being a goof off with too much caffeine and Shakespeare, which got a little over 200 views.
Getting to Rice, I had a change in audience, with suddenly so many more people around me who were of similar interests.  This naturally produced a lot more views from people who wanted to watch things I made, and even better added a lot of highly talented people willing to film with me.  This resulted in quite a few fun videos, ranging from trying to give myself food poisoning to the Party in the Library Incident.
Now, this last video was great, not only because it guaranteed I would have far more fun trying to run for public office with that online, but because it showed that with a few posts and tweets, Rice University could get more views on one video in a week than I could in years of working by myself.

And now this blog is moving up into the top spot of viewership of media that I'm producing.  I'm quite a fan of this.  Hopefully, this means people are even more interested in reading in what I have to say than simply viewing my work for comic relief.  I'm sure many people still do read this just because they like seeing me be ridiculous, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that my top viewed post this past year was First World Problems, which got even more views than my backflipping escapade. 
So maybe I can have some sort of impact with my message.
Before I leave- an interesting note on technology-
I read a rather ridiculous article on super expensive computer chipped socks.  Seeing things like this always frustrates me, because sure, while I'd love to have my socks match themselves, I'd rather see brilliant scientists putting work into researching ways to treat neglected diseases that kill hundreds of thousands of people.  And $200 for a pair of socks is disturbing when 50 cents can give someone immunization against many of those diseases for an entire year.
Not that I'm against the development of pricy technology as a whole.  There's this awesome device, the Vscan, which is like a stethoscope that costs $8000.  The cool thing though, is that it also can analyze the heart well enough to prevent the need of a potential follow up echocardiogram that costs $1,500 to run.  Plus, this thing can be carried in a backpack, and could be used to scan hearts basically anywhere in the world.

So that's my rather lengthy post for the day.  Yes, there's a bucketload of hyperlinks, and probably too much text for more than a few people to actually read all the way through.  But I've done some self assessment, and seen that pulling random ideas together from different fields to form an argument or conclusion is something I'm good at.  So I'm going to keep doing it, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop me. :)

More words, more words, more words?

Last post was pretty non-representative of most of what I've randomly written these last few months.  Just for fun, I'm going to put up a smattering of random quotes or excerpts from things that I find mildly amusing or thought provoking.  These can be musings, class notes, or attempts at a novel this summer that I still deserve to be beaten to death with a fish for not completing...

"The material on the SmarterBoard was always formatted the same way and the walls were always that same color of puke beige.  Not that puke is a shade of beige, but that’s what Devon wanted to do every time he saw it." from Numberless, the book that I've needed to write ever since I had to go through AP testing...

Why Daniel is too ridiculous to be allowed to title chapters:
"Chapter 1: Night is dark.  And there’s no light too."

"HOW DO PEOPLE HAVE TIME FOR 151 HRS OF TV A MONTH?!" A completely valid reaction in notetaking to learning this country's average tv viewing habits.

On selecting character names:
"Other names come up off the top of the author’s head, or from random encounters with envelope labels, waitstaff, or other works of fiction that names are subsequently borrowed from.

These particular names come from popular names for pet slugs.  Thank you, yahoo answers.

As you can tell, I do not have the highest opinions of men, particularly ones I get to write about."

Aaand finally, the introduction to a book which rightfully was not followed through with, because writing books about my life tempts me to live a far too dramatic of a lifestyle.
"Fiction is the expression as life the way we wished it went, with less rules, physics, social norms, or any inconvenient, inglorious obstacles.  It minimizes the average in the human experience, and brings out our fantasies and heights of imagination.  It is a wonderful thing to live these out on paper, on television, in a perfectly simulated environment where we play the roles of that which we wish to be.  Yet by empowering the imagination artificially, one key factor is overlooked.  Man’s potential is not bounded to reality in the dull patterns that we see when comparing it to new unreal worlds.  It can become so if we siphon our creative efforts solely into worlds where we cannot be physically present and invested. 

We are all that stops us from entering a world as good as fiction.

Who says we cannot write our own story?  We’re already responsible for 50% of the dialogue, the actions of a main character, and some portion of the direction.  Authors can write a story without knowing the ending, if they know how to follow their instinct.  Life doesn’t have to be a set course.  Decisions can change its course, move us from one plotline to another.  Characters and subplots can be addressed or dismissed, and learning experiences can easily enable new adventures.

Open your eyes to the story around you.  This is your book.  You can be an author of a greater story, or merely a citation for dialogue."

Words, words, words...

So, considering the fact that I sometimes admit that I'm a writer, I don't post a lot of independent writing on this blog of mine.  Musings, yes.  Bullet-points, definitely.  Snarky commentary, ahhh, sometimes.  But not straight up writing.
Thing is, I do lots of it.  All the time.  Some of the time.  At sporadic intervals, that nonetheless lead me to believe that I enjoy writing when I take the time and focus to do so.  It happens a lot in the fall or after I've been in the mountains, not sure why.

Anyways, I'm just going to start randomly putting things that I write up here, and if anyone has thoughts about them, let me know.  Otherwise, words don't do all that much just sitting in a document on my computer.
I just listened to Ke$ha's new single, and this little bit of counter-pop poetryish sort of just happened.

I will not die young

Nor lead an unlived life

You only die once

You live as much as you let yourself

Your life is not one shot, one course, or one direction

But a myriad of ever-changing fluctuating choices

An exploration of the vastness of knowledge and experience

Partying like there’s no tomorrow is fine today

And sucks tomorrow

Partying like tomorrow will happen can be just as fun

Every day for the rest of your life

A one-night stand lasts…

Lets see…

One night.

But true love never dies.

Playing with fire is fun

But so is growing a redwood forest

And then playing in it for years on end

You can’t be both an arsonist and an arborist

And expect both careers to pan out

Austin is Weird. But we're weirder!

Alternatively titled-
Keep Austin Weird(er)
^Making

Pride parade + Large amounts of sidewalk chalk + Free saturday = Instant epic road trip

Roadside art is such a cool thing to try.

Especially when combined with an awesome parade that was just asking for a little more rainbow!

Naturally, no one stopped us or asked why we were making a giant rainbow starting line all the way across the street in front of the parade.  Most people just took pictures, or asked us questions about the event.  I love it how having fun, effective ideas that you're prepared to put to work makes people just automatically assume that you're supposed to be doing it, or that you're in charge.

Also, Grace and I got our money's worth from some epic knee high socks from Target.  In the middle of Texas's city of "weird" full of hipsters and people trying all sorts of eccentric styles, it was great to see just how many people complimented our matching neon-striped awesomeness.

Naturally, this also gave me a cool reminder that I am definitely related to my sister, who wore almost the same combination the next day in an unconnected, but equally awesome, fashion decision.

Arrrgh! It Be Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Shiver me timbers!  I almost forgot that today be Talk Like A Pirate Day!  Many leagues have passed beneath me keel since I've used me buccaneering mannerisms!  Blow me down and have me marooned, but I won't let that be happenin again.  Seein' as I be at my apartment with costumes about as often as a landlubber sights a giant kraken, I had to make do with the flotsam and jetsam of me OC locker and the props of me mateys.  (There was a guy who gave a presentation recently about following our passions.  I may have used his business card to help make the eyepatch in the costume.  I hope he's proud.)

Though I've seen many a more threatenin' pirate climb a mizzenmast, I was still piratey enough to be considered a health code violation, and asked to leave the (ARRR)RMC.  But I did manage to get a complete stranger in a suit to voluntarily ARRRGH! at me, so if nothing else, I'd consider the day a success.

So, even though I had totally forgotten the vast amount of pirate that has been trained into my system, things are starting to come back now.  So here's a crash course in everything that is wonderful and piratey-

Quick tips on talking like a pirate, a must for every 19th of September- http://www.yarr.org.uk/talk/

All the best piratey songs for singing at top volume-

- Veggie Tale's Classic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaWU1CmrJNc 

- A Pirate's Life For Me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A19q7rysLs

- What Can you Do With A Drunken Sailor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyPuey-1Jw

Fun facts about Pirates:

Pirates would wear one gold hoop earring not for fashion, but because it would pay for funeral expenses if people found their bodies washed up on a shore

Pieces of eight were actual 1/8ths of gold coins that would be cut up for smaller increments of currency

The city of Port Royal, where Pirates of the Caribbean is set, was destroyed in a catastrophic earthquake.  Then they rebuilt it.  Then it burned down.  After that, pirate life in the Caribbean area never recovered.

If anyone wants yet more piratey information, don't miss The Pirate's Primer!

Adventure is out there!

So I seem to have left some people with out an update here for quite at while now.  Thanks to the start of the school year, this is certainly not due to a lack of adventure, but rather a lack of time.  Mostly, that lack of time has been due to discoveries that have made me want to make adventure planning a double major of mine.
Most of these shenanigans have not included cameras, so there is very little documented evidence of some of these occurrences.  Maybe it's best if we leave it that way.  However, I can share some wonderful adventure lessons that I've learned over the past few weeks-
- If you shoot roman candles along the beach, you can skip fireballs off the surface of the ocean.
- 3 dollars of sidewalk chalk can make a 50 square ft PacMan game in the academic quad.
- Trees are great places to have conversations for hours. (Not really new, but still true)
- September 14th is henceforth "Bagel bundle with noodle kugel National awareness day".
- I am probably one of the very very few people in this world to both get a blue mohawk and learn how to use a sewing machine over the course of one day.

- You can get people working at late night food places to do pretty much anything if you ask nicely, and it's for a good cause.
- Mini fridges make excellent clothes racks.
-If you tell google maps you're trying to find a gas station in Houston's industrial district, there's a good chance you might end up in the middle of nowhere outside of the Valero Gas Refinery.
- Most importantly, if you decide that a night is going to be an adventure, there's a very good chance that it will be, but not at all in the way that you expected.