Terry Pratchett: A Man Not Soon Forgotten

Another short post today. You may have heard yesterday of the death of Terry Pratchett. Hearing this news made me really sad, and put me in kind of a funk all day yesterday. But seeing the response on social media has actually been an encouraging experience (rare, I know). People love Terry Pratchett, and the respect that has been shown for him is amazing. The way that his passing was announced was heart-breakingly beautiful to begin with, and then the twitter storm that followed was subtle and respectful. 

This response to his passing has made it seem a little less sad in some ways. Today, I came across this article, written by author Scott Lynch, and it made me tear up a little. I highly recommend reading it, but be warned, it might make you a bit emotional if you are familiar with Terry Pratchett. 

This was how his death was announced. If you don't know, his character of Death talks in all caps. 

I also encourage you, if you so wish, to scroll through the Terry Pratchett hashtag on twitter. He wrote so many amazing quotes, so many of which are still very pertinent for him. 

One quote that comes to mind for me is this one: “Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?” 

― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

Terry Pratchett's name will be spoken for years to come.

Hank Green Quotes

I have several blog posts I really, really want to write, including a life update, a summary of a conference I went to, some thoughts from another conference I didn't really go to, but spent time at, and at least one topical post. I don't, however, actually have time to write any of those posts right now. Things are kind of crazy at school, but when things slow down a bit, I will write those posts.

Today, however, I just want to share the excellent tumblr Hank Green Out of Context. You should most definitely read through it. I also want to share a few of my favorites. I love that I actually have know where the majority of these quotes come from. These are all quite recent.

"There were sirens and the cops were there and they took me to the police station and I got arrested, it was really embarrassing. They actually just— they impeached me over the whole thing, they tried, well, they did impeach me, but I didn’t have to actually stop being president, so it was okay. The police weren’t actually that involved, it was mostly Congress."

‒Hank Green

"You sense and feel something different than I do, even if we lick the same kitten."

‒Hank Green (via hankgreenquotes)

"You’re my brother and my wife, what can I say? It’s a little weird but I guess that’s how it works."

‒Hank Green

"Okay, I think that this is an appropriate amount of body hair for Jimmy Carter."

‒Hank Green

Also, someone compiled a list of ten of the best Hank Green quotes, which I also love. These are mostly older.

1. “That’s way hotter than the last time I was on this fish.”
2. “Never give your girlfriend a cake with sunglasses. Or a radish.”
3. "I’m on a Tetris piece. I’m on a gigantic Tetris piece, baby. Without you."
4. “I firmly believe that I get haircuts in order to save my life”
5. “You missed the most horrifying thing about the traumatic insemination of bedbugs! How dare you!?”
6. “This antelope has been replaced by a giant metal rhino. I may need to hump it.”
7. “Wouldn’t it be awkward if annoyance felt like an orgasm and then your little brother annoyed you?”
8. “If you ever kill a vampire with your cactus, that’s because of me.”
9. “The man in the front says I’m a very pretty girl.”
10. “That was the scariest lamp I’ve ever experienced.”

Hopefully that was at least a little entertaining. Visit the main site linked above for many, many more.

Who Reads This Blog?

I was looking at the analytics for this blog today, and I noticed some interesting things. It's been a while since I had time to really look in depth at the stats, and things have changed since I did it last. Here are just some interesting facts about who reads this blog, and how they get here, in no particular order.

1. Nearly a third of all traffic last month was direct traffic, meaning people typed my URL into their web browser. This is super interesting to me, because I tend to assume that those views make up a very small portion of my readership.

2. Facebook referrals make up about a quarter of my views, which makes a lot more sense to me. I do a lot of promotion there. If anything, I'm actually surprised that number isn't even larger.

3. Google Plus and deviantART round out my social views with just a few percent each. This shows a big shift, as in the past a large percentage of my views came from Google Plus.

4. About 11% of my views come from search engines (Google and Bing), and of that, a quarter are new visitors, which is a surprising number. I would expect most of the search hits I would get would be from family members and other people specifically looking for my blog.

5. About 8% of my views come from referrals from other blogs. One site I get a lot of referrals from is the blog of a real life friend of mine, and that makes sense, but the other referrals are from a much, much larger blog of a homeschool family in my local area. I'm not actually sure where those views are coming from, but I would suspect they are from a time that I commented on that blog several months ago.

One interesting thing to take away from viewing these stats is that a lot more people read my blog than interact with it. And also, some of these views are far more valuable than others. People who come from social sources tend to stay longer, and view more pages, but direct views are more likely to comment. Search engine views and referrals tend to span short visits with little interaction.

University of Victoria {College Visit Notes}

Welcome to my first college visit post! These are all going to have the same basic format, which some changes for each school to cover it's unique points. This is going to be in the form of a Q&A, with the questions being ones I asked at the school, and the answer being what information I received or gathered on the topic.

What is the living situation for students?

Dorms are guaranteed for first year students, but no one is required to live on campus. Most students live off campus after their first year. Most dorms are single rooms, but there is also cluster housing, where six or eight students share what is basically an apartment. There are also a small number of double rooms.

What travel opportunities are available for students?

There are many foreign exchange options. Also, through the co-op program, students have the ability to gain paid work experience in their field of study, and those opportunities often involve travel all over the world.

All the stuff I got sent home with.

What is the academic focus of the school?

Academically, UVic seems to be a strong school in most fields. They have a strong focus in research, particularly undergrad research, which tends to lead more to a focus in STEM fields, but it does seem like they are strong in many areas.

How are Running Start credits handled?

This was one question I didn't really get a good answer to. I'm not sure how they would handle my RS credits. They did say that if you had 8 or more transferable college courses you were automatically a transfer student, so that might be how that would go.

What is the size of the school?

There are 17,000 undergrads and 3,000 graduate students. A lot bigger than a lot of the colleges on my list. Not necessarily too big, but I wouldn't want to go any bigger.

What is the cost?

$27,000 a year (including room and board). One major issue potentially is the ability to take U.S. scholarships to Canada. Some you can take, others you can't. It's a bit iffy.

What is the town like?

Victoria is a beautiful city. It's one of the safest cities in the world, and I think it would be a great place to live.

I don't have any pics of campus, but this is downtown Victoria.

What is the campus like?

The campus itself is a little confusing, thought I'm sure if I went there I'd find my way around pretty fast. It's a young school (about 50 years old), and that means the campus is in an odd position where it doesn't have any of the beautiful old buildings you see on many campuses, but  it also doesn't have any of the shiny new buildings you see on a lot of campuses. 

How are homeschool applications handled? 

This is another iffy thing. If you homeschool through an "accredited program" it's fine, but if you don't (and I don't), it's trickier. We're currently looking into how this might work.

Interesting Read of the Day: Oliver Sacks on Death

No time for a long post today, but I just wanted to share something I read today. This is an article written by Oliver Sacks after he received a terminal diagnosis a few weeks ago. He has a limited time to live, which is a tragedy in and of itself, considering what a brilliant and important man he is. But really, his attitude on life now, now that it's almost over, is thought provoking. It really makes you think about what's important.

His writing is really moving as well. He has a way with words, and he manages to convey emotion beautifully. His article is a short read, but it is moving. I highly recommend looking at it if you have a few free moments today.

"Oliver Sacks at TED 2009" by Erik Charlton - originally posted to Flickr as Real Awakenings. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Things I Like Right Now {Podcasts and CGP Grey}

Recently, I did a blog post about some blogs I read, and I thought maybe it would be fun to do a similar post, but instead of blogs, it would just be other random stuff I'm into. If you guys like this, maybe I'll try to do these regularly, maybe every month or two.

My big obsession recently has been podcasts. I've been listening to Welcome to Nightvale for almost a year now, and it introduced me to the wide world of podcasts. Radiolab, and This American Life are classics that are favorites of mine, and of course I had to jump on the bandwagon with Serial as well.

Nightvale is definitely my favorite fictional podcast, but of the talk show/educational variety, there is also little competition. Hello Internet is by far my favorite. It's a podcast of the "Two Dudes Talking" style, and if you don't like that, or if you don't like the two dudes (CGP Grey and Brady Haran), you wouldn't like it. It's nerdy, it's educational, it's funny, it's weird, and best of all, there are currently 31 episodes of nearly two hours each, meaning you won't run out too quickly. 

Finding this picture was a dangerous endeavor: I had to do a Google image search for CGP Grey. Grey is anonymous on the web, you never see what he looks like in any of his videos, and while pictures of him aren't that hard to find, I don't want to see them. I just don't.

CGP Grey has long been one of my favorite YouTubers, and since listening to his podcast, he has become one of my very favorite internet people (somewhere up there with Hank Green and Wil Wheaton). I am nowhere near as anal or organized as he is, but is is kind of what I aspire to be. Since listening to him, I've started using a lot of his suggested apps and here are a few that I've come to really like.

1. Overcast. This is a free podcast app that I started using at his suggestion (and the suggestion of a friend of mine who is probably a bigger Hello Internet fan than I am). I haven't been using it very long, but so far I like it. It's a thousand times better than the one that comes on iOS (not that that's very hard), and it's well organized.

2. Anki. This is a flashcard app that I absolutely love. It allows you to create cards and decks, and has many options to personalize how you use it. It's not the prettiest app, but it is very functional. It shuffles your cards for you, and shows them to you at intervals that are optimal for memorization. It can be a bit confusing at first, partly because of it's rather bare bones structure, but if you put some time into getting it how you want it, it's amazing. The desktop app is free to use. You can purchase a mobile app for the hefty sum of $24.99, but I haven't tried that personally (mainly because of the cost), so I can't vouch to it's quality. 

Another random thing not related to podcasts that I love is the webcomic XKCD. I've been a fan of  XKCD for a long time, and I can't believe I've never mentioned it on the blog before. It's funny, it's geeky, it's current, and it's sometimes a little inappropriate, and I highly recommend checking it out. 

On Being an Artist

What makes you an artist?

This is a question I think about a lot. For a long time, I had this idea I could not be an artist cause I don't really like traditional drawing or painting, or sculpting, or any of the things that I usually think of as art. I am a perfectionist, and that makes it really hard for me sometimes to do things like draw. It is never good enough, and the process is so stressful that I just quit. I just can't get past that wall.

But there are many forms of art that aren't just drawing or painting. While I don't usually think of myself as an artist, there are several ways in which I think I could define myself that way.

I am a writer. That is a huge part of who I am. Art is a way of expressing your emotions in a tangible form. Each type of art does it in a slightly different way, but the purpose, in the end, remains the same. Writing, be it poetry or prose, is something you create from nothing. You are a creator, and that makes a writer an artist.

I am a dancer. If you don't think dancers are artists, go watch this video and then come back. Dancing lives on the line between creativity and structure. It allows you to create something new and express whatever it is you want to express, but it gives you sets of boundaries to work within, if you choose to follow the traditional rules. I'm not a great dancer, but I love doing it. Dance, for me, it amazing, because there are specific rules and constraints. Unlike drawing, where anything goes, when I dance, there is one particular thing I'm trying to do, even if I'm not doing it very well yet. And I also know that if I keep working at it, eventually I will get the results I want.

Here is one simple design.

And in a way, I am a visual artist. I love color and the manipulation of it. I love putting colors together and I love creating dynamics with different shades and combinations. The way I often do this is by using coloring books. Yes, coloring books like little kids do. But not ones that you would give to a little kid. The coloring books I work out of are full of complex and often abstract designs that give the person coloring a lot of power.

A design with a lot of white space.

One of my favorites.

Artistry is a mindset. Am I an artist? I've always wanted to say yes, but I felt like an impostor saying that. But what the heck, maybe it's time to gain some self confidence and say yes, I am an artist. Art is something different to everybody. To me, it's a way of expressing yourself. It's something that takes persistence and effort to master, if mastery is even possible. It's a way of thinking.

In what way are you an artist?