A Message About Shame

     This is not a work of fiction.

     This is not simply a book about shame.

     This is a book about us.

     About us and our ability to ruin lives as easily a few keystrokes and a click.

     So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson is a non-fictional book beginning with Ronson discovering how influential online shaming via a incident with a Twitter spambot. As a result of this incident, Ronson goes on to investigate notable incidents where public shaming played a huge role, interviewing people involved in various shame fests such as a writer caught fabricating a quote, a normal person who made one bad tweet, a 4Chan user.

     So You've Been Publicly Shamed is a dialogue on how we use social media today and how we use shame to tear others down and how we're influenced by others and how we use shame to make ourselves feel better.

     And though Ronson's book is dark, there are messages that needed to be said within the book. Shame can be a powerful tool against oppressors. Yet, oppressors have an equally powerful tool, it is Shame.

The video that started it all

3rd Quarter Independent Reading Reflection: The Boring Part (Sorry Mrs. Leitsch)

Books I've read this quarter from most difficult to least difficult is as follows:

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by mark haddon (No literally, everything was in lowercase)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Art of Racing in the Rain By Garth Stein
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton
The Martian by Andy Weir
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
The Limit by Kristen Landon

So my goals were to

1: Read at least 7 books

2: Read a book from the fantasy genre and a book from the mystery genre.

     I'd say I completed both of those goals. I read 8 books this quarter and Walton's The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender is fantasy while the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon is mystery/realistic fiction.

     As for goals for this final quarter, well, we have 2 months left, 2 months = 8 weeks. So let's try to read 1 book a week totaling up for 8 books this month. Additionally, I want to read at least 1 book from 4 different genres this quarter: Romance, Horror, Thriller (Horror and Thriller are different, right?) and Historical fiction.

Point of View - Sheila Moss

Hyperlinks Fun Stuff 

I'm sorry that this is gonna be a boring post

Tax Forms, Tax Forms, Tax Forms

Are You Smarter Than Your Smartphone?

Sheila Moss’s point of view is “Humor”. Some aspects of her column that had let me know was the informal diction that Moss uses and the silly ideas she uses throughout her columns such as the idea that she is “not smart enough to have a smart phone” (Smarter than Smart Phone). Additionally her use of first person allows readers to connect with her every day life experiences.

One technique that Sheila Moss uses that adds to the humor point of view in her column is the use of self depreciation. Sheila Moss uses self depreciation to mock herself to generate light hearted humor. One time she uses this is when she comments how she isn’t “smart enough to have a smart phone” (Smart Phone). Additionally, another time she uses self depreciation to mock herself is when she freely admits that she “had enough trouble trying to figure out Medicare” (Tax Forms). The end result of this use of self depreciation is that the readers learn not to take any of her comments too seriously, allowing for light hearted humor.

Things I Learned Last Year: A Poem in Cheesy Rhetoric

Things I Learned Last Year 

(With extra commentary in parenthesis to alleviate cheesiness)

Music is as much a part

of me as is my brain

Marching Band is not

as bad as one thinks

(No matter how much I make it seem so)

Even when trying

to imitate a poem

I completely utterly

fail at poetry

Emotions cannot be

restrained forever

One cannot avoid their fear forever

One must eventually face them

(Counterexample: My arachnophobia)

Sometime, Somewhere

When I die, I want to die

With a smile, content

With my life

Happy

(... Why does my poem look like a down arrow? Or maybe a radish. Or a someone wearing a Top Hat with a chin beard.)

Every time I stare into this poem, a little part of my soul dies on the inside. It's just so... cheesy. I mean, all it really is a bunch of empty optimistic rhetoric that makes only a slightest bit of sense to me and (probably) no sense at all to anyone else. Really, I just added the commentary thing just so I can dilute the cheesiness with humor. Everything's better with humor, except for when it's not, then its just stupid. (It's or its?)

In a more serious sense though, I feel like last year was actually an year where I felt like for the first time since never where I felt like I actually had a vision of where I would be in the next 10 years. (Now then, I always knew where I would be in a 100 years but let's not go there, shall we?)

I modeled my poem in the same way I-forgot-his-name-and-I'm-too-tired-too-look-it-up's poem where the first 2 stanzas share some theme (For me, music) the 3rd stanza is completely different in style, shape, and tone (For my 3rd stanza, it takes a more casual, self-aware, self-depreciating tone) while the next 2 stanzas share a theme as well (Emotions) though in the case of those stanzas, I purposefully made them vague because, I don't know, reasons that I'll keep vague because vagueness.

Then the final stanza is similar to I'm-still-drawing-a-blank-on-his-name's final stanza where both stanzas are about what the author would want when they die. Finally, I decided to add a bit of my own little style in the form of the totally not obtrusive commentary, simply because I like to keep things light-hearted.

For those who were like "tl;dr" (Too long, didn't read) (I'm sorry, this could've been more useful before the reflection paragraph)

Too much cheese. I add humor. Streotypical "I have a purpose in life" speech. Poem modeled after I'm-probably-the-reason-the-reflection-was-too-long-because-Tom-just-wants-to-get-this-over-with-so-he-could-sleep's poem by stanza and stuff.