Little Brother is one of the better novels I have ever read! I absolutely loved it. I found myself reading ahead of the specified schedule and couldn't stop reading my computer screen to see what would happen next. This is not your typical heroic story that we all usually think of, but in my opinion, it is definitely considered one in my eyes. This boy, at 18 years of age, fights against the government and builds an underground network of gamers and hackers to fight against the unjust ways of the Homeland Security. He has absolutely no sense about him and that's what I love about it! He doesn't care whether he is being dumb or losing his friends. All he cares about is fulfilling his promise of making the DHS pay. In the end, I predicted that he would get caught and would be killed by the DHS. To my surprise, he was actually rescued by the journalist and the SWAT team and survived this horrible situation that he was in, which was certain death by torture. The only thing that made me a little angry/frustrated about was that the government let the short-haired woman go, who was Marcus's main fear throughout the book. I loved how the story ended though, with him and Ange being all close, knowing that everything would be okay and they had made it out alive and unscaved. That rounded out the progression of them finding eachother in my eyes. Great book!

I have been reading Little Brother and I absolutely love it!! I am already through chapter 13 and I'm continuing to move farther and farther into the book. For those of you who have not got that far or even started the book, I'll give you a slight summary of my ideas and opinions. 1. There is no way the main character can continue fighting against the government and get away with it. He has already almost been caught quite a few times and he is now trying to set up an underground clan if you will. I don't know how long he can keep this up, but I'm definitely cheering for him. I don't think he will "change the world" with his intense bravery and adamant nature, but I do think he can get his point across and can maybe show the Homeland Security that they need to back off some. 2. My boy has got himself a girl, and I'm interested to see how their relationship progresses and if the Xnet comes between them, just like it did with all his gaming friends. 3. If you haven't read or aren't very far, catch up because this book is legit!

Well, I have already read through 4 chapters in Little Brother and I really love the book. I have never been a big fan of surveillance topics and such and wasn't really looking forward to reading a book based on the idea of surveillance. I have always found the subject to be quite boring, but then I started to read this book and I was instantly entertained. Little Brother is amazing! It has some extremely cool gadgets and genius plans in it, along with a terrorist attack and basically torture along with that. It is interesting to see how American's treat other people from other countries because as a citizen, we don't see and comprehend the awful things that go on behind the scenes. Our soldiers were interrogating this guy who was only playing a game and now he is suspected of being a terrorist. I honestly don't know why the boy just didn't tell them that he was playing a game so he could have got free a long time before he did. Also his stubbornness and sarcasm didn't help his cause at all, which was stupid for him to use. This book makes you think about surveillance and how they can watch your every move and know where you are, what you're doing, and when you're doing it at all times! This is a scary thought and it makes me wonder how much privacy we actually have as American citizens.

So after class today, I came to the conclusion that my paper was pretty dang good, except for one aspect of it. I saw that I needed to include a comparison or analogue in it to make it even better, so that is exactly what I did. During class, my group studied the legalization of marijuana, which is already my topic of choice. We went to some websites and found some good ones, relating to the anti-legalization of marijuana. I found a website today that I put into my paper about the comparison of the pros and cons of marijuana use, by someone for it and someone against it. I feel like this small addition into my paper was well integrated and it helped someone see both sides of the topic, which is good because when they choose my side, my paper will have done it's job with great effectiveness. Oh and by the way, since no one believes me haha, I seriously have never smoked anything! Don't know why people don't believe me, but they don't.

As you all know, we have our contextual analysis paper due next Thursday. Since my schedule is completely brutal, I have already started on my paper and written three pages. My topic is the legalization of marijuana. This topic relates to the political, economical, social, environmental, healthful, historical, and cultural of both the past and the present, as well as the future to come. Since I do not know a lot about marijuana, I did a bunch of research and found some extremely interesting facts that I will be able to incorporate into my paper. It is crazy how so many people misinterpret marijuana and its uses and effects on so many things, such as the individual and the environment. I found out that marijuana was basically only made illegal because of racism against the Mexicans. Also I found out that weed was used in cloth, food, medicine, and many other cultural events and items. This topic is so interesting because people don't know all the facts about this plant, so they just assume it is awful because it is illegal for the time being. Marijuana has actually been legal 99% of the time in which it has been known to man and I believe that within our lifetime, we will see marijuana become legalized.

Today was one of my favorite days to date in english class. It was a very fun, sort of laid back day, but it was also extremely informal about our upcoming paper we will have to write, which is a contextual analysis. Watching those movie trailers helped me understand the why the director made the trailers that way and how they were effective, whether it was a contrast of the original movie's intent or the way the lighting, sounds, and music played a different role in intriguing the audience to go see their movie. Personally, my favorite one was the Alien one, which the people who made that website also agreed was the best. The effectiveness of the different images going back and forth, the music that made the clip more interesting, the lighting that made everything dark and suspicious feeling, and the transition of the title were all very effective, genius ways to make the movie trailer interesting and make people want to go see that movie. Also I really liked the unbreakable trailer because that definitely caught my attention and made me want to go see the movie because of the cool story plot that the trailer portrayed. I am interested in seeing how my paper turns out because I'm not sure if I have written a contextual analysis before, and if I have, it has been a while, so I'm looking forward to finding my topic and starting my essay.

Alright, well today in class we finished up the movie Children of Men. I would first like to say that I really enjoyed the movie and found it very controversial. The ending left me wanting more and wanting to know what happened with the girl and the baby, but I guess that was the director's intention. This movie had conflicts left and right, beginning with the social and cultural conflict, which was portrayed through out the entire film. It is funny how when things start going downhill, everyone loses their cool and freaks out! Take this recession for example. As soon as the stock market crashed and people started losing their money, they thought the world was coming to an end. Everyone started losing their collectiveness and everything seems kind of chaotic now. Same with this movie. There is no fertility in the world and people started bombing public areas and brought about an uprising. Fertility had the possibility of coming back, just like the economy, but people didn't wait long enough. We all want instant gratification these days and that's unrealistic. Yes, it had been 18 years since the last kid was born, but someone did get pregnant did they not? Okay, so if they had just waited and not shit a brick, people would have realized that this girl was having a baby and that there was hope in the future. This movie correlates to our situation here in America because in both scenarios, when something goes wrong, all hell breaks lose.

Well since we are in football season and I absolutely love football because I was raised watching it and I also was a decent little player back in high school, I will talk about football. I'm not going to lie, this football weekend was a little disappointing for me. The Vols lost, which I wasn't even upset about, because I honestly thought we were going to get beat worse than we did. I was pleasantly surprised by the way they played and that gives us hope for the upcoming weeks and even years. By the way, I love Tebow as a human being, but I absolutely hate him as a football player because he is just straight beast and it's not fair to play against him! Then on Sunday I became very frustrated. I thought we would steam roll over the Texans, but of course they beat us. Nothing new about my luck. Well, I actually won $7 dollars playing the Powerball so I was pretty stoked about that! But back to football... Let's just say I was not too fond of the outcomes that occurred this weekend relating to football. Even worse, I have no cable in my dorm room, so I only get 20 channels, which doesn't even include ESPN, so I can't watch any sports, except for UFC, which is amazing if you haven't seen it before. Basically it's two dudes, trying to kill each other, and doing it in whatever way they can, besides a few rules. The only way the fight can be stopped is by the ref, and the explosiveness of these fights is incredible, so watch it! Alright I'm going to bed so peace.

my dream

Last night, as I said in my first blog, I got 9 hours of sleep. This means, that since I dream every night, that I had some dreams. My first dream was about my ex girlfriend... don't ask me why. I can't control my dreams, so whatever I dream about, it's not technically my fault! So in this dream, I am with my ex at the house I am currently living in, except it is her house, not mine. I really wanted to ask her if she still loved me and still had feelings for me, but I didn't because I didn't want her to think I had feelings for her, which by the way I really don't. All of a sudden she disappeared and my brother showed up and I kept asking him where my ex went. He didn't know, so I walked around trying to find her and she was outside, carrying a weed eater and a lawn mower. She then had 8 dogs follow her in, which she doesn't even have dogs. Then, since I am not too fond of her parents and they are not too fond of me, came in the door, I freaked out. I was so scared that they were going to treat me like they always did, which was basically like shit. Then they suddenly disappeared and my parents were there, bringing in groceries. Then i woke up and was extremely confused. My second dream was about my brother and I watching the UT/Alabama football game at my grandmother's old house. Alabama was winning 45-31 with 2 minutes left in the game. All of a sudden I was playing football for some random high school. Then it transitioned back over to my grandmother's and my best friend's older sister wanted to watch the game with my brother and I so she hopped in bed with us. Then I jumped out of bed and went into another room for some odd reason. Then I woke up for class... Weird huh?

no class

Hey hey! Well, I am sitting in our english class right now with a few people even though class is cancelled. We figured since we are already here that we might as well stay and blog and look up youtube videos. I mean I don't have another class till 3:30 so I pretty much have nothing to do till then. I would go back to sleep, but I was awesome last night and went to bed at 9, so I am actually not tired. I have to go into the studio pretty soon though and work on my architecture work, but that is no big deal because I have already got ahead, so today is going to be a good day. To change the subject, I will talk about the upcoming football game, in which we are going to get slaughtered. I have been a UT fan all my life, but I am a realist, and the reality of the situation is we are going to get blown out. If you can't even beat UCLA because you play awful football, then how in the world are you supposed to beat the #1 team in the nation? Florida is solid in every position, especially their secondary and their quarterback. UT doesn't have a lot of depth in some areas, so to actually beat Florida, we will have to play a basically flawless game, and the Gators will have to play a bad game. Unfortunately, what I am trying to say is that there is seriously no possible way we can pull off an upset win of the Florida Gators.

appeals

Alright I am going to make a blog about the discussion we had in class about the rhetorical appeals of logos, ethos, and pathos. I'm going to start by saying that the easiest one to accomplish and achieve is pathos. It is by far the easiest way to sway your audience because once you hit the sensitive side of their heart, you will have their attention and support from then on out. I think that ethos is the hardest to achieve because there is not just one set clear cut definition of an ethical argument. It can either be an ethical opinion of a person, what we view in society as ethical, or anything else relating to authority, credibility, and bias. Logos is a little bit tougher than pathos, but it isn't all that hard to appeal to the logical sense and nature of a situation or a person. All you really have to do when using a logical appeal is just have hard evidence and a reason behind your argument. Basically just make sense and get the people to believe and go with what you're saying and you can pull that appeal off with ease. To pull off an ethical appeal, I would personally use rhetorical questions to get the audience thinking and questioning their own beliefs, so they will end up siding with you. And lastly, to pull off an emotional appeal, I would just speak or write from my heart because sincerity and honesty will always win someone over.

Political Cartoon

I found the perfect political cartoon! I believe that I can work with this image and write a pretty specific and understandable rhetorical analysis on this present day political issue. I will try to explain what the cartoon is about and how it looks... There is a huge fat guy who has $1.3 billion dollars behind his back and a huge smile on his face. The money bags behind his back have "profits," "benefits," and "executive salaries" written on them. This man is from the Florida Power and Light Company. I do not want to spoil the intent of the political cartoon and the humor/genius of it, so I'm not going to explain the physical attributes of the cartoon anymore. I will talk about why I chose this political cartoon out of the endless possibilities I had to choose from though. For one, this is a common theme that is happening all around us. It is an issue that should not be happening, but still does because the government allows it to continue. I also chose this cartoon because I can critique it with good rhetorical analysis because the message is clear, but it is shown in a simple visual way, which makes it a good political cartoon in my opinion. The colors and the size of the figures balance well and catch the viewer's eye and the underlying theme, which is quite obvious, is portrayed extremely well. I think this is an amazing political cartoon and it obviously caught my eye and a light bulb went off in my head...literally! when you see my cartoon you will understand. I am actually excited to write this paper now!

Well... I am not exactly sure if we were supposed to make a blog before class on thursday, but I was not going to take that chance, so here is my official very first blog. At this precise moment, and most to all of them in a given day, I sit here at my desk in the Architecture building on the fourth floor. It is ridiculous how much homework the professors give us and expect us to complete in the designated time period. I mean I'm sure they understand we have other classes to attend to, but it seems like they don't try to modify the schedule for their class any, so that leaves us students with strict deadlines and countless hours of work. Yesterday I was given an assignment in Architecture 121 to have 8 completed compositional drawings of plants/flowers in the Tennessee Garden... all due Thursday! On top of that, I have to read 40 some odd pages in my english book, read a whole chapter in my first year studies book, take an online worksheet about time management, and last and not even close to be the least important and time consuming is my studio project for Architecture 171. In that class I have to lay out and place a compositional expression of a line, a square, and a rectangle to show space and geometric meaning. Whoever is reading this probably has no idea what I'm talking about and I don't blame you because this stuff is rough. Now we have to use the same composition, which we have revised literally 10 times, and shade different parts of the figures in order to show emphasis, transparency, and replication. Sound tough? Trust me! It is insane. So now my break is over and I have to get back to working on my projects. I had to vent in some way, so I used my handy-dandy blog! Hope you enjoyed hearing about my horrible life and you should be thankful you are not me.