Monday, June 7, 2010

sutherland's second final

    Having a blog throughout this whole year has been a blast for me for many reasons. For one it improved my writing greatly. Before this year started I honestly never had even thought of creating a blog since I didn't see the point writing stuff to share with others. At the beginning of the year when I was told I had to turn in a 300 word blog weekly, I had one thought in my mind, which was that i would never finish it and that it would take up a whole lot of time. As each week went by, my opinion on the blog changed dramatically. I actually started to enjoy the weekly blog post and thought it was a great assignment that also helped me on my writing skill that happen to be in need of improvement. Throughout the year my writing slowly improved and I was becoming surprised with myself. My first blog post had quite a bit of errors but as time progressed and the end of the first semester it started to look more like this. Now that we have reached the end of the school year it looked more like this with an increase to 500 words a week. 

    The topics that are usually on my blog are how good or bad my skating session was that week. I think this is one of the reasons that my blog post don't consume much of my time. Blogging along with quick writes have improved my thinking speed that will help me prepare for the SAT because once they give me the topic I will be able think on my feet and complete the essay in the given time.

    Before we started writing blogs, I thought of writing as the most boring and pointless thing that people have ever came up with that just makes your hand hurt and waste your time to keep you out of trouble. Since we got to picked our topics that we were writing about, it made writing better then I thought it was going to be. I Believe it is the fact you can just write freely with no one telling you what to put on the paper that makes blog writing enjoyable for me. It is much different for me on a topic that I am unfamiliar with because then I am not really inspired to write it besides that fact that I am getting graded for it. Because of the blogs that we had to do weekly, I now see the positive side of write and not just the bad side.

    My weekly activities is were I get most of my weekly blog post topics. The reason that I decided to write about my weekly activities is because it keeps me from getting writers block, which leads to me stressing out on the assignment. The reason that most of my blog post are about skate boarding is because it is the most time consuming thing in my life. There was also a couple blogs about call of duty, and god of war 3 which are both games for the Play Station 3. One of the more random blogs were about Pokemon and Yugioh, which I just randomly felt like writing about for the hell of it.
  
    At first, before all this blogging, the only time that I actually did any write was if it was for school since I would fail if I did not do it, even though I hated it. When sutherland actually told us that it was going prepare us for the writing part of the SAT, it greatly encouraged me to do the the weekly blog post. As time went on, I got the idea that I could save my post and look back at time to see how my skating style when I was just starting out and how greatly I had improved or even inspire young ones to keep skating if they were in to the sport but felt that they sucked at it.
    
    There was two games that I had blogged/review about. The first one was Modern Warfare 2, which was one of the most anticipated games of 2009 and probably one of the top games of that year to. I wanted to write about this game mostly because I believe that the deserve props for creating a great video game like this. Another inspiration   was that I was basically addicted to the game for about a month non stop still I finally got myself out the house to go skate since I was getting hella fat sitting at home all day. The other game that I blogged about was God of War 3, which I believed is one of the most anticipated games that came out this year because the had pushed back it's release date a couple times before the final release date which was earlier this year. I hope to be come a part time video game reviewer to make a couple easy bucks while enjoying the games before they come out. 
   
    As I said before, my english is not the best and my determination to improve it was the strongest inspiration for me completing each of the weekly blog post. One of the main ways that my writing has improved is that I can start writing and brain storming while I do so which is going help me a lot when it comes to the SAT since we are not going know our subject or topic before you take the test. Since I found many mistakes in my blog post while looking over it, I told myself that I would start proof reading my work before I turned it in, but to be honest, I was to lazy to do that which is bad because I am going on to my senior year. But I found that has time progressed, the mistakes migraines started to slim down, which makes me proud of myself cause I have work the whole year with the goal of improving my writing which was reached with the help of Sutherland course.
    




Wednesday, June 2, 2010

monthly review

    Armageddon Summer by Jane Yolen and Bruce Coville is a first person novel that switches between two characters by the chapters. The first person is a girl named Marina that lives with her family. The other person is a boy named Jed. They are both teenagers. Another weird thing is that each of them have one parent that is a believer if Raymond Beelson theories. One day, their parents tells them that the world is to end on July 27 of that year, which is reveled when  Jed's dad said "On July twenty-seventh the world as we know it is going to end."(page 8). Marina nor Jed really believes that the world is going to end, though Marina finds comfort in the religion while she mourns for her dad, who was left below the mountain in the arms of another lady. Jed's mother ran off to Colorado with a photographer, and Jed's dad has immersed himself in various things since her departure, including this cult.

    The thing that is cool about this book is that the end of the world is July 27th. The leader of the cult, Reverend Beelson, says world will end on July 27 in the year 2000, and 144 of the faithful people must go to the top of a mountain and set up a camp there. Only those who seek heaven at the top of a mountain will be spared from the fiery wrath that God will rain down upon non-believers. As the cultists prepare for Armageddon, Marina and Jed happened fall in love during the journey.

    The two main characters of the novel are Jed and Marina which have many things in common. Like both have one parent that had left them for someone else and the parent that stayed became a believer. The first main person is Marina, who happens to be living with her mom and brothers after her dad had left because he did not want anything to do with the Armageddon crap nor did he want to be a believer. When it was time for them to go up to the mountain top to be saved from the end of the world, Marina happened to be one of the few youngsters that were there. She had fell in love with Jed after the second time she saw him which was weird considering that they barely even knew each other. As time went by while they were on the mountain, they started to have feelings for each other and hung out more often and begin to grow a strong relationship with one another. Also since her mom was obsessive with the believer and Armageddon crap, she has to be the parent figure for her little brothers and takes cares of them while her mom goes and spend her time with the believer stuff.

    The other main character of the book is Jed, who also has a single parent because his mom had left his dad and him for an other guy and photography. Another thing that they have in common is that they both were not sure if they believed if the world was going to end or not. There are also things that he believes in that is reveled when he says" I believe there's something bigger than us that we're a part of. I believe there's something inside us that you can't kill, that lives on afterward. I believe no one has a lock on the truth, or the Truth for that matter. I believe people spend too much times fussing about details and not enough time looking at the big picture. I believe you have to connect, with people, with the world to be really alive. I believe you are the best thing that ever happened to me." which was part of an email that he sent to Marina after he had moved to Colorado up in the mountains. After the Armageddon had happened, There was a bunch of people that had died including Jed's father and Raymond Beelson, who was the one that came up with the idea that all of that stuff was going to happen in the first place.

    I think that this book was intended for teenagers and young adults because not a lot of the other adults are interested with love stories and the world ending. I thought the book was alright but not great so it might just be intended for the young adults but I am not one hundred percent sure if my opinion is correct or not. But then again it might not depend on age but the types of things that you are interested in. If your a type of person that is fun of love stories then I would recommend this book to you, but if you like a fun of action books like I am, then this book probability would not be a good read for you, even thought it is not that bad of a book. I thought that having two authors writing the same book and breaking it up in to parts was a pretty good idea, and kept the book some what gripping and readable. I would like to see other books that try this style in writing with different prospective by having different people writing as different characters. This idea to write the story in this way was thought of by Yolen, who later had asked Coville to co-write the story with her. Yolen was the one that wrote Marina part while Coville was writing Jeds part.