Impatient for next year!

"And that's what makes my life so freaking fantastic!"

"The Fear" - Lily Allen

Thank you so much for reading this blog! This is the fortieth and definitely last entry of Littlest Things, the place where all kinds of English tasks and thoughts/opinions of myself have been harboured throughout all of 4th of ESO (which upsettingly can also be said as "the WC where my brain has been defecating during the brownish amount of time of nine months...")!

Today it's Friday the 11th of September, which means the 2015-16 school year is just a weekend away from beginning! Taking a look at Littlest Things, and trying to find a word or some to describe what I feel about the upcoming chance of the creation of its successor, I can only think of "amazed," "nervous," and, specially, "curious!" Curious for seeing what my next blog could be about, curious for seeing what's to come, curious to feel what I'll feel, curious for interaction and curious for conversation, curious for knowledge and curious for learning, curious for love and curious for yearning... Just curious about everything, actually!

So, right now, Littlest Things is on a hospital bed screaming out of pain and physical suffering for a (maybe too big) baby to come out of her... mp3 Goear audio file, and cursing off whoever caused her grief (thanks, English Department, for getting my 1 year old daughter pregnant...) from scream to scream. So, leaving this disturbingly painful jocose metaphor behind (and hoping it landed without offense), you'll be able to find next year's blog in a gadget on the right-hand side of this blog (unless Google decides to rearrange blogs' design completely and it moves to a far plane where only spirits of madness and random parenthesis-filling can find it along with other forevermore lost gadgets) with a linked image accompanied by a description which comes to mean that it's a link to the so mentioned blog. It takes a genius to find, right? Well, actually, [at least from this computer] it seems the image is broken, so... just click the broken image. That one, not my profile image, regardless of how sexiness makes it considered broken, duh.

As a premise, look at this cat:

So, long story made short: see you this year, my unexistant if-existant-forever-silent fans! I love you! Now marry me! Or not! It's your life isn't it!

From Heathereia to Littlest Things

"I wouldn't want it any other way

But now you're gone and I'm all alone

Lying here naked and staring at the phone."

"Goodbye To Yesterday" - Elina Born & Stig Rästa 

These two years (3rd and 4th of ESO) have been weird in a lot of different aspects. It might sound conceived, but the idea of a blog per student is great and really made this years better; it's true that it was not programmed for 3rd, but I did it because I thought it would be fun: it was, even when, at some point, it got surprisingly serious (it went from random humor stories to disordered and full-of-rage writings which were quite similar to the "my world"s you can see in Littlest Things).

The blog I made in 3rd was Heathereia [LINK]. I'm not precisely proud of it, since it clearly shows how stupid I was just a year ago, but still it's work I did and appreciate from myself. But, over all, it's different from L.T., and that's what amuses me the most. Actually, in just a summer my English became much more refined and precise. I'm not saying that Heathereia is inherently worse than Littlest Things, but sometimes it clearly was. Still one can really have a laugh with "The Labyrinth Of Doom" (my first English blog post ever!) or "Heather Reacts To: Mr. Ando Of The Woods"...

Heathereia also reminds me of what it means to use one's creativity in a funny way: I remember the flying orange whose life I wrote as a project about King Arthur (don't ask me why), the adventures of the girl who became Beyoncé and had a dance fight with Britney Spears, all the things I wrote but didn't upload because of laziness (which will be uploaded this summer in Heathereia under the tag "Unforgotten Files")...

Wow. It's true that, at least at the start, Heathereia was much funnier than Littlest Things... Maybe it will come back some day, not as a school blog, but as what it was meant to be: a random humor blog.

A different sight on what I said before

"I'm embarrassed to confess

I am a jealous girlfriend"

"Jealousy" - Marina And The Diamonds

Revising all my My World texts, I see that, even though I wasn't really that wrong in most things I said, there are some things in my posts that were clearly said too quickly and deserved a second thought and some empathy to be spoken about...

The first thing I can think about when it comes to mistakes I've commited is the post "How To Make Real Life Interesting" (LINK): I must say that the post hid some personal issue of mine in it, but thinking slower about it there are some points where I clearly messed up:

• When I said that someday one would want to draw actual animals instead. Well, the simple possibility of drawing an actual 100% animal with the aim of creating pornography is messed up itself. I hope everyone got that what I meant was that, actually, one should not be trying to create that kind of content while being underage. It's OK to draw furries, just keep it safe ;)
• Everything I said about porn is EXCLUSIVELY directed to underage people. After one gets some psychological baggage, they probably won't get influenced by what they see and, actually, have already had real experiences related to the topic. Whatever; what I mean is that the four things I mentioned (manga/anime, video games, the Internet and porn) are not inherently bad but can literally mess up one's life when in excess. Anyway, as I've always said, everyone can do whatever they want with their lives while it doesn't affect any other (friendly reminder that the first point of that post was especifically regarding people who economically depend on others but spend their whole life unemployed plugged to a computer) :_D
• I'm still not sure about the video at the end of the post. Some time ago, I saw a study shared on Facebook that concluded that porn wasn't bad per se. Anyway, I didn't think about the possibility of making this post back then, so I lack the link of it. I recommend searching for different scientific views on the topic and taking a conclusion for oneself.

Another post that lacked some thought was "How To Get EQUALITY" (LINK). This doesn't mean I don't think feminism is stupid anymore, since it would be publicly saying that I accept and encourage every form of abusing on men as a revenge for the patriarchy, which I don't. No, the point I failed on was another:

• An open relationship might not be that easy. I literally said one could happily allow their significant other to have sex with others and... well, maybe some people can (heroes, really!), but I must confess it's not my case. By the time I wrote that post, I'd spent much time as a single person and quite angry with love itself for the sentimental kick my relationship with my ex represented for me. Well, a lot of things have changed in the last months, and that's one of them. Right now, looking at my feelings, I must say that I'd feel really bad if my boyfriend told me he's been doing that with another person. It's not that I want to own him; I just want him to be happy, I swear; it's just that the fact that he loves me and only me makes me feel special and I love that. Maybe it's something society pressures us to feel, I don't know. I'm simply not that strong, sorry.

Those are the most significant mistakes I can think about. If you disagree with anything else I said, I encourage you to tell me by commenting on the concrete post you don't agree with :)

An Oral Presentation

 "Oh, all these things that humans do
To leave behins a little proof"
"Immortal" - Marina And The Diamonds

This is the powerpoint I used for the presentation we had to do about a photographer we like (chosen from the list of Magnum Photographers). The one I chose is Hiroji Kubota.

The presentation relied in the speech rather than in the powerpoint, so the file is just a scheme of the "skeleton" (to say it somehow) of it.

Hiroji kubota, life and work from Heathie

A Beautiful Picture

For today's task, we've been given a list of links through which we could choose a photo we liked to describe it. The picture I chose is Nemophila Harmony, taken by Takeshi Marumoto in the Hitachi Seaside Park, Japan. It can be found in the National Geographic website (link).

I think the most striking and eye-catching aspect of the photo is the use of blue, not only in the sky but in the field of Nemophila flowers which create the harmony the title mentions. This one-color composition is only broken by a tree in the right-hand side; the clouds, that occupate fragments of the right-hand side and the middle, getting more diffuse as the sight gets to the left from the center and disappearing by the leftmost; and green strands of grass seen under the flowers themselves.

We made a trailer of Romeo and Juliet!

“Are you mine? Are you mine?
Cos I stay here all the time”

 “Who'd Have Known” - Lily Allen


So, as a final project for last unit, we had to make some kind of video or podcast related to our English reader this year: Romeo and Juliet.
 

Our reader, though, was rather an adapted version for non-English 1st or 2nd grade students, or maybe retarded people in general, but it was not the original version whatsoever.

The thing is that our trailer is by far more full of feeling than our reader, and it isn't really that much tearjerking...
 

 

This trailer was made with Marina (her blog) and Aida (her blog).

Traditional vs. Digital books

"Everything you say

Is old and late"

"Undercover" - Nelly Furtado

As a task, we had to discuss about the pros and cons of traditional and digital books.

My vision's very clear: I prefer digital books. This may seem ironic, specially for the fact that I actually never got to use one but I've got my reasons to say this:

• Free books. Yes, I know piracy is illegal, but people who really like the artist are the ones who are going to pay for their art (call it book, call it album, call it movie, call it whatever), and there are very few occasions when that's me (barely Marina And The Diamonds' albums and mandatory school readers).
• One single side. Getting to read a page without another one on the side has to be simply amazing, honestly. When I read a traditional book, the only way to avoid the annoyance from the side page is folding it so it gets in the back of the book, which puts me in actual danger to break it... so it's definitely annoying whatsoever.
• Light! Reading at night, when it comes to traditional books, requires turning on a light or two, which, unless you live all alone, is probably going to annoy someone, specially when the people you live with are your parents willing for you to sleep at once. And, actually, I would say that, if there's an external light, the user is able to disable this feature. To be honest, I think Kindles don't work with light but with moving ink...

Even though, I can also think of reasons why someone could prefer traditional books in certain occasions:

• Actual library. Seeing your books in your room, right on your shelf, is a privilege only traditional literature allows. I must say, though, from my humble point of view, that then the books that mean so much to the reader get reduced to decoration. Plus, if a reader is avid enough, they could read, for example, fifteen books a year. Within eighty years, that would be one thousand and two hundred books. Is a shelf enough space for that?
• Touch, smells. I guess some people like the touch of pages or the smell of new books. That is fairly respectable, but I have to say you can also touch a Kindle. It doesn't feel the same way, and it barely smells like anything, but it is actually possible.