Lit Terms: 109-End

Justin, Kris, and I finished our Prezi (finally).  Check it out!

Rising Action:  plot build up, caused by conflict and complications, advancement towards climax
The heroes walked...and they walked some more...then suddenly, a battle!

Romanticism:  movement in western culture beginning in the eighteenth and peaking in the nineteenth century as a revolt against Classicism; imagination was valued over reason and fact
Revolutionary idea: there's no gravity!  Wait, no.  We're not on Earth!  Yes!

Satire:  ridicules or condemns the weakness and wrong doings of individuals, groups, institutions, or humanity in general
Animal Farm by George Orwell

Scansion:  the analysis of verse in terms of meter
Since meter is a system of binary oppositions in which syllables are either marked or unmarked (long or short; stressed or unstressed), a binary code is all that is necessary to transcribe it... --T.V.F. Brogan

Setting:  the time and place in which events in a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem occur
It was a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...

I Am Here

I haven't actually progressed with my specific senior goal, but I have done things in a similar light.  Although we haven't made much progress on the Project Greymatter game, I have started work on our Senior Project, which fulfills the "big project" that I wanted to do.  Whenever we do video projects for school, it always ends up being haphazard improvisation.  For the final one of the high school, we wanted to change that.  We're starting a couple months early and actually planning out the scenes, for once.  So far, the project has sated my appetite for a large collaborative endeavor.

Regarding the course as a whole, I still feel like I'm pulling off some high-wire balancing act.  There's a lot of facets to the class.  All of these, plus responsibilities from other classes and recreational activities have me constantly switching modes.  However, the pace has been more relaxed overall, and I think I've recovered enough from last semester's stumbling to move on full-force.

Lit Terms 83-108

I think the lit term numbers got mixed up somewhere along the way, so the first/last couple words may be not for this week, sorry.
Here's this week's Prezi that Justin Thompson and I made!

Onomatopoeia: use of a word whose sound in some degree imitates or suggests its meaning.
BOOM!

Oxymoron: a figure of speech in which two contradicting words or phrases are combined to produce a rhetorical effect by means of a concise paradox
Pretty Ugly

Pacing: rate of movement; tempo
Some books are over so fast the reader is left dumbfounded.  Others...are like Grapes of Wrath.

Parable: a story designed to convey some religious principle, moral lesson, or general truth
The parable of the Good Samaritan

Paradox: a statement apparently self-contradictory or absurd but really containing a possible truth; an opinion contrary to generally accepted ideas.
If I went back in time and killed one of my direct ancestors...then what?

Lit Terms 56-81

Here's the vocab Prezi Justin Thompson and I made.

Genre:  a category or class of artistic endeavor having a particular form, technique, or content

Gothic Tale:  a style in literature characterized by gloomy settings, violent grotesque action, and a mood of decay, degeneration, and decadence

Hyperbole:  an exaggerate statement often used as a figure of speech or to prove a point

Imagery:  figure of speech or vivid description, conveying images through any of the sense

Implication:  a meaning or understanding that is to be arrived at by the reader but that is not fully and explicitly stated by the author

Collaborative Literature Analysis: A Tale of Two Cities

Here's a Collaborative Literature Analysis I did with Justin Thompson. Let us know if there's any holes to fill!

Summary:
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens is difficult to summarize without trivializing it.  Speaking in very general terms, it is a story of love -- whether it is between lovers, family, or friends.  The story takes place in the late 18th Century, a time when fear of revolutionaries was at an all time high.  Within this social conflict, Lucie Manette attempts to revive her father after his years of unjust imprisonment.  Along the way, the lives of several individuals become complexly intertwined.  With revolution erupting and old secrets coming to light, "friendships" become tested and the happy band of protagonists become splintered by the destructive force of mob rule.

The Time of My Life

I wrote on Friday's journal topic (which I forgot to turn in, again...) that I planned to pursue discussion of my SMART goal during the class "Free Play".  Predictably, my plans got hijacked.  Luckily, it was still a somewhat productive discussion.  We ended up discussing Justin Thompson's nature blog, which I am a co-author and sorta-editor for (I just do superficial grammar checks at my discretion).  The bulk of what we talked about was publicity.  What direction did Justin want to take the blog?  He expressed a desire to make the blog more professional before sharing it.

A couple ideas were thrown around regarding publicity, from Facebook sharing to Reddit posts.  As far as content goes, we also mulled on the idea of theme weeks.  Early in the year Justin covered a number of snails over the course of the week, included the scaly foot gastropod, a personal favorite of mine.  From this spawned a running joke of the blog's "Snail Week", analogous to Discovery Channel's Shark Week.  Given that one of the difficulties of writing for the blog is deciding on a research topic, we figured that themed weeks would be doubly useful.

We also considered branching out the blog to cover other topics, such as biology and genetics, rather than just unique lifeforms.

Literature Analysis: Three A.M.

Summary:  Three A.M. by Steven John takes place in a city of an indeterminable time near our own.  Following a lethal pandemic that killed a majority of the population, a dense mist has descended on the city.  This mist is nearly impenetrable, and quickly warps society.  The result is a world characterized primarily by its grayness.  Citizens keep to themselves, and all quietly fear what lies in the mist.  Thomas Vale, the protagonist, is a private detective that takes the stereotype to the extreme.  At the story's start, he is characterized mostly by his cynical gruffness, as well as frequent abuse of alcohol and pills.  For some reason unbeknownst to him, he wakes up at 3:00 A.M. almost every night.  The story is centered around a case given to him by a woman named Rebecca Ayers.  While the details are slim, and he rightfully has suspicions, the pay is good enough that he doesn't care.  Vale is quickly finds himself entangled in a complex conspiracy far bigger than him.