Breaking the Cardinal Law of the Internet

I've always heard people say to never google yourself. Nothing good is supposed to come out of it. But Kerry's presentation said exactly the opposite. The first rule of creating your own personal brand is googling yourself to see what's already out there about you. Then you can decide what you want to show up in the future and work towards making that happen.

I googled myself as soon as I got home that day and was delighted to see that I really like the results. Most of it is actually me--though there is a doctor out there named Autumn Shuler--and that it's all stuff that I proud to be associated with. Some of my Zelda blog posts come up, as well as a lot of my yarn stuff, my various social media profiles, and some feminism.

It's interesting to see what I boil down to on the Internet, and how it truly reflects what I want it to. I guess that means that I'm doing something right, since that's all the stuff I consider to be most important to me is actually what I'm talking about.

Blogging as a Class

My Writing for the Digital Age class has started giving our final presentations, and I'll be posting up some blog entries about the various subjects brought up.

Today I'd like to talk about Jordan's presentation. Jordan chose to reflect on our class and point out what she thought worked about its format and what didn't. I agreed with her on many points, but most of all on her point about our blogs. 

Though we were all required to keep a personal blog about whatever we wanted, we weren't required to read each others's blogs. I know that not everybody is as gung-ho about the whole blog thing as I am, but I read each and every one of my classmates's blogs, and I'm so glad that I did.

Because we were allowed to post about whatever we wanted and not just about class readings, I feel that I've learned a lot about my classmates from their individual blogs. I feel that I know everyone in my class much better than any other class I've ever taken, purely because I paid attention to what they had to say online.

I think Jordan's suggestion that future sections of this course be required to comment on each others's blogs is a very good one. Interaction and interconnectivity between peers is an excellent thing, and is made all the more so when it turns your peers from just students into complex individuals with lives outside of the classroom.

Link to the Past Part 4: Ice and Death

Long time, no see! It feels like forever since I posted last, and I'm excited to share my experience with Dungeon 5 of LttP.

I located the dungeon fairly easily, despite Logan's warnings that I was probably going to have a tough time with it. I think he gets used to my gameplay being poor and severely underestimates my puzzle solving abilities. If there's one kind of game I have lots of experience with, it's puzzle games.

My elation faded quickly once I actually started the dungeon. Ice floors? Really? Because I don't have a hard enough time getting around already!

This room in particular gave me a lot of trouble. (image from blondenerd.com)

According to my Google search for that picture, the dungeon is called Ice Palace. Now I feel really dumb, because I've just been referring to all of these places by their number rather than their titles. I had no idea! Loss of nerd cred right there.

Anyway, I ended up walking through the majority of this dungeon quite a bit, because the ice psyched me out and the enemies are getting tougher. Fortunately, I now have blue mail, and that helped quite a bit in the enemy department. Once I had that, I got to the boss much more quickly than I expected.

I certainly felt that I was getting the cold shoulder. (image from zeldadungeon.net)

I am pleased as punch to announce that this is the second boss in a row that I beat on my first try! Fire rod and potions all the way!

Watch out Dungeon 6. You're next.

Navigating a Sea of Jobs

Today is a "two cups of tea first thing in the morning" kind of day.

Yesterday I gave my big Capstone presentation. It went very well, and I was extremely happy with the amount of audience participation I received during the Q&A session. My mom came up to see it and was very proud, and treated Logan and I with a trip to Tom&Chee and Coldstone.

All of that stuff was wonderful, but it certainly made a Wednesday feel like a Friday, which is always a dangerous game to play. This morning I'm having a hard time getting started because it feels like it should be the weekend already, and it is anything but. I'm probably going to be pulling a twelve-hour day on campus because EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING TODAY. I have a million places to be and not enough time to really be in all of them.

But that's not what makes this a two cup kind of day. No, in addition to all of the stuff that's going on on campus today, I'm job hunting. I've been casually job hunting for a little while now, just to see what types of things were out there and to figure out exactly what I'm interested in, but so far it hasn't really gone anywhere. But yesterday I stumbled on a job that I REALLY want.

Reeeeeeeeeally want.

And now I'm panicking because I found it yesterday and it closes tomorrow, which means I have to get all my stuff together today. I have a resume that I've tailored to the position using my base resume that I'm fairly confident in, but I'm getting stuck on the stinking cover letter. I'm writing ok cover letters over and over again, but none of them seem to convey just how much I want this job and how good of a fit I would be for it. Every one of them falls short of the (admittedly high) bar I've set for them.

I know that I need to just slow down, take a step back, and restart the situation. Nothing good comes out of panic for me. It's just hard.

Ugh, here's a picture of an alpaca to make myself feel better.

Image from cutestpaw.com

A Link to the Past: Part 3 ft. The Most Annoying Dungeon (I Hope)

Image from justpushstart.com

Over the weekend, I beat Dungeon 4. I call it Dungeon 4 here for the sake of keeping the blog family-friendly, but trust me, I don't call it Dungeon 4 at home. It has a quite a few colorful names there.

I found the dungeon (do these things have real names, or they actually referred to by their numbers?) fairly easily. Logan thought I would have trouble tracking it down, but since I've gotten into the weird habit of pulling on stuff while I'm thinking because I think the animation is hilarious, I found it almost as soon as I walked into town. Of course, the completely inconspicuous statue helped.

I mean, this doesn't look suspicious at all. Image from zeldawiki.org.

I even managed to get through the dungeon fairly well. If there had been any more rooms, the similarity between all of them would have gotten me very confused, but after a little while of trial and error, I got used to the set-up.

Then I found the maiden.

Image from nerdgasmnetwork.blogspot.com

As per her request, I tried to take her outside, only to have her run away when we got to the entrance. I immediately thought that she wasn't a maiden after all, but was actually the boss. I went all the way back through the dungeon, got her again, then led her into the room that the compass told me would house the boss fight.

Nothing happened.

I knew it had to be something to do with the light outside that made her run away the first time, so I figured I could beat her with some bright light. While exploring the dungeon earlier, I found an upstairs area that was brightly lit. I led her up there, smug with my intelligence, and she ran away again.

Frustrated by getting beat by the puzzle and by Logan's obvious desire to help me, I ran around in circles upstairs while I thought. That's when I noticed I could bomb the floor right underneath a beam of light. Lo and behold, the "you did something right" noise went off, and I went to fetch the maiden for the third time.

The third time was the charm because when I led her into the boss fight room, she transformed into Blind -- the master thief who hates light.

Image from nerdgasmnetwork.blogspot.com

I'm extremely proud to say that -- despite being confronted with two invincible, fireball spewing heads in addition to Blind himself -- I beat him on my FIRST TRY! Huge success!

The fact that I used two potions is irrelevant.

A Link to the Past: Part 2

Image from justpushstart.com

A lot has happened since my last LttP update. I am now able to travel between the light world and the dark world, which is pretty exciting.

The most exciting thing that has happened since my last update was getting the hookshot. The hookshot is the greatest thing ever. Ever! And I beat the boss of that dungeon on my very first try! Thank you hookshot.

Image from gamespot.com

I also finished Dungeon 3. Twice.

Yes, you read that correctly. About 3/4 of the way through the dungeon, one of my cats somehow managed to eject the cartridge. So, I went through the whole thing again. And the whole thing took way, way, way longer than it should have because of the hands.

Master Hand is not my friend. And I have a bad feeling that haven't seen the last of them.

Why vs. How in Digital Communication

Today, I'd like to talk about a quote I found in the article "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century."

The goal was to allow students to set and complete their own tasks with the focus almost entirely on the production process. Little effort was made to give youth a context for thinking about these changes or to reflect on the new responsibilities and challenges they faced as participants in the digital culture.

This quote is interesting to me because it brings up two main points.
1. Teaching in the digital age is focused on production.
2. There is little context for thinking critically about digital culture itself.

In my experience, it is much easier to learn how to produce something on your own than it is to understand how something works. For example, trying to explain why blogging is interesting in the digital world and what it means to be a blogger is much more difficult than acutally going out and just writing up a blog post or two. But we still focus on teaching production.

Now, I'm not saying that we should stop teaching production. It's important to be able to make things competantly and confidently, but it's more important to focus on why we make the things we do rather than on how to do so.

But there isn't really a space for us to talk about this new "responisibility" and the "challenges" it creates. And I don't mean actual space -- obviously I'm talking about it right now. I mean a space in our social order. We don't give our forms of communication as much thought as we probably should. We don't take the time to figure out how and why something works before we go and start using it or making assumptions about it. It's time to change that.