The End of the Challenge

So - here we are, the last Saturday of April and my final post for the Blog-Post-A-Week Challenge.

The goal of this whole affair was to get more comfortable making posts. Sort of a shock-therapy thing; get rid of the panic of posting, and I could get to all the bloggy stuff I'd imagined doing back when I had the idea to do this.

When I made this blog, it was late at night in a rush of tired recklessness. I can second-guess and hesitate my way out of just about anything, and I've learned that sometimes I can give myself a push and everything will turn out all right. In this case, though, I think my hesitance was well-placed.

I may be a writer, but I'm not a blogger yet. Practice makes perfect and all, but every week it became clearer and clearer to me that I just had nothing to talk about, or if I did, no real proof that I knew what I was talking about, so it came off feeling very pompous.

Another thing I realized while working on posts was that I was neglecting other things - like getting to know other writers on Tumblr, an opportunity I should have taken advantage of the moment I found writing blogs, or just plain working on my own stories. I'm really wasting the time to use the resources I have...for not very good reason.

All in all, though, I'm glad I stuck with the challenge. It's good to know for sure now, so I can get to work on more productive, useful things without any doubt that I've given up too soon.  And hey, I got to rant about a movie, so it wasn't all bad.

If I get ideas for posts I'll give writing and posting them a shot - but for now, the weekly updates are over. Thanks for sticking with me if you did; hopefully I'll be back at this, but better, soon enough.

Classes for Worldbuilders

This entry is gonna be short and sweet, let's do this!

Sociology
The study of culture and how it affects people and people affect it. Sociology is a great class in general, but for writers specifically it helps shatter your ideas of "normal" and how a culture "should be". It also breaks down a concept as enormous as culture into smaller blocks that are a little easier to work with.

Psychology
Get a better understanding of how humans/sapient beings tick.
Abnormal psychology - which most intro to psych courses at least touch on - will help anyone looking to write mental illness with more realism.
Bonus points if you have to write any sort of scientific journal articles for these classes; go through a few psychology classes and you'll never have trouble writing excerpts from textbooks or scientific documents in your stories again.

Biology
A bit more for sci-fi writers or those interested in non-human characters, but it's still an intriguing look at how life as a biosphere works. Building cohesive ecosystems is easier when you understand what a cohesive ecosystem is.

Anthropology
Cultural anthropology is especially helpful. It's something of a sister class to sociology, peeling back the veneer of social norms a bit. It's also useful for learning about how cultures and parts of culture develop among different groups.

History
How have economics, culture change, revolutions in technology, war, environmental disasters, and much, much more, affected humans in the past? They say the past is the best indicator of the future; if you're looking for human behavior, it's hard to get more accurate than the huge test chamber that is human-inhabited earth.

This incredibly short post brought to you by the huge Software Engineering project I have due on Monday, and by the letter P. P stands for such wonderful words as "panic", "pressure", "pain", and "please please please let this be done on time".

Rant on Ice Age: Continental Drift

I missed posting for my challenge last week, had absolutely nothing prepared for this week, and then I made the mistake of watching Ice Age 4 around 9PM. By the time the movie was over, I was awake and angry enough to record a vlog, but too tired to judge if vlogging was a good idea.

I really kind of want to polish this up, make a more scripted version that would summarize the plots of the movies - all four of them - a little better, maybe show some of the scenes that were wrong and compare some of them to the original... That probably won't happen since the sequels have to go back to the library and it'll be a while before I have any time for that sort of project on my hands, but it might be fun to do someday.