If only...

Firstly, I apologise for having left at least two of my blogs in limbo - to be continued is such a wonderful cop-out - but dammit, I'm a poor student working two jobs, suffering from an extreme case of laziness with a bookshelf full of never-been-reads!

I'm currently reading my first non-Sevenwaters piece of Juliet Marillier's - The Dark Mirror, and I cannot really understand why it's taken me so long. I first discovered Marillier's writing in my local library as a thirteen year old. I was drawn to Daughter of the Forest because of its gorgeous cover. Ladies and gents, it blew my mind. It was beautiful, complex, and contained one of the most wonderful love stories in my reading history. It remains to this day one of my most favourite of all favourite books. It's position in my bookcase is considered before all others, like the Queen or a dear elderly relative.

And yet, I have had a friend's copy of The Dark Mirror since I left highschool. That's three years - oh GOSH I'm a terrible person. Don't worry! I'm returning it the minute I finish it with a thousand dollars in late fees. Maybe I'll get my Martha on and bake something to (minus the scariness). That was a joke. Please don't kill me Martha. I adore you; I baked your giant skillet cookie and it was a-mazing.

But back to my original germ of a thought. Why has it taken me so long? Why have I still not finished Gone with the wind? Perfume? The Constant Gardener? I've never read any Austen! I adored what I've read of George Orwell (Down and Out In Paris and London), but haven't made time to read more.

I guess what I'm saying is, dear Universe: I would like a job in which I write every now and then - being a published author could be nice - and then divide the rest of my time between reading glorious books at all hours of the day, baking giant delicious things in skillets, and idolising Liz Lemon while watching hundreds upon hundreds of wonderful episodes of 30 Rock.

Can't wait!
Here's a picture of the wonderful skillet cookie. Make it with kids - so easy, so delicious and such a novelty!

Until next time I leave the couch to post,

Lazy Ophelia

Wed me Regina?

Let me begin this review/blatantly biassed ode to the lovely Regina Spektor with the story of my purchasing tickets to her Adelaide show. Flipping through Adelaide's very own Rip It Up on my lunch break, I mentally listed my live music bucket list: The Strokes, The Vines, The Wombats; and last but certainly not least, Regina Spektor.

And with this wish having barely completed its imprint on my psyche, I flipped to a delicious full-page ad of Regina's tour dates in Australia. I have never been as happy in that building as I was then, (the day they asked me to build a paper mache` Mr Potato Head is a close second). I was so excited that the next day I rushed out to buy my ticket without asking anyone else if they'd like to join me.

And so on April 23rd 2010 I sat alone at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre, wearing an enormous smile in a section separate from my friends.

Reader. If she ever comes to your town - RUN to the nearest ticket outlet without consulting your friends, because Miss Spektor delivers the best live music performance I've had the honour of experiencing.

I laughed. I cried. My ear to ear smile was only ever swapped for painfully exquisite gasps of utter awe (these stemming from what I suspect is a severe case of affection).

to be continued!

One Fine Day

Amazing book? Check

Perfect weather? Check

Adorable/hairy companion? Check

Splendid :)

[Said amazing book is Son of the Shadows by Juliet Marillier, second in her successful Sevenwaters trilogy. Another love story? You bet yo sweet bippy. Stay tuned - once my friend & I finally give up on this uni nonsense watch out for the Sevenwaters puppet show tour soon to be gripping the nation]

Ophelia's Complaint of the Day

Pineapple.

Get the heck off my pizza and into a cocktail.

Numbabet & Knuckledusters

7

The amount of bobby pins I could hear mingling in my purse. Upon investigation I discovered they had mutinied against me (obviously from the years of stress of trying to hold back my heavy hair), formed a hole in the lining of my wonderful bag, and tried to head into an early retirment. As punishment I will now ponytail my waist-length hair with nothing BUT bobby pins; haHA!

4

The amount of people I have taken the pleasure in convincing to read The Bronze Horseman by the lovely Paullina Simons. If you love love, READ. THIS. BOOK. I mean... if you want to. Act on your own impulses. It's a relatively free country. Unless you perhaps live in the Soviet during WWII ... like a certain protagonist I adore... OH JUST READ IT!

[Dear Reader, aka myself, I assume there will be much more on The Bronze Horseman in future posts. A full review. A blow-by-blow description of all three novels. Basically, transcripts of the passionate/only conversations my friends and I share these days]

14,876,390,000,060,000

The amount in dollars that I will need to fund my newly discovered Matina Amanita habit. That implies I have bought something. Reader, I apologise. Wishful thinking on my behalf. Pictured is a Matina Amanita ring from her Globetrotter line. Oh, and did I mention it too is inspired by Russia?

Another - possibly the worst, certainly the most life-threatening - societal issue of the 21st Century

What is WRONG with people? Not all people, certainly, but a good big ol percentage of society are just plain ... bad.

See dear reader (aka imaginary friend), I work in a movie theater. *Pause for pitiful sigh*. One of the few places left in this wonderous planet of ours (aside from rainforests and public restrooms. and public transport. and nightclubs), that people feel the right to vilify beyond normal standards of vilification. I apologise if (when) I exaggerate; everytime I blink images of popcorn-carpeted cinemas and ticket stub confetti bombard me. People are just awful, and I just can't decide who's worst.

1. You've got your standard group of school kids. There's about a million of em, each clutching to the box of popcorn some doll in the candybar just sold to them (remind me to elaborate later on the painful task of upselling), that happens to be bigger than their torso. Afterward, the cinema resembles what a savoury snack bomb site might look like. Hansel and Gretel, eat your heart out - and miss your mouth every second time - cos popcorn trails are quite obviously the shiz, right behind Ben 10 and Dora the Explorer. Maybe they're the latest in personal security. All I know is that school holidays at the movies are one of the greatest tools for abstinence.

Blogalism or tablogs? Journalogs or blogloids? The weblog phenomenon

An article that I read recently (on a blog, incidentally!), discussed the link between blogging and journalism. The first sentence gave me such a sense of understanding, of clarity about the linked worlds of blogging and journalism: "To ask 'Is blogging journalism', is to mistake form for content". After reading this, and becoming a blogger myself, I realised that it is indeed wrong to pidgeon-hole all blogs as the self-indulgent diary entries of cyber-megalomaniacs. They are one of many media platforms and should instead, be judged according to their content.

A blog (the abbreviation of weblog), is a type of mini-website. It can be defined as "a frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links". However, this definition is rather generic. Two contrasting examples of blogs that both might fit under this definition are a journalistic research-based blog and a personal entertainment or specialty-based blog.

It was in the 1990s and early 2000s that weblogs were made accessible to people unable to use HTML codes. It is this accessibility that has made blogs so popular today, and yet also contributes to the detriment of their reputablility. On one hand, they are a fantastic channel for media that wouldn't otherwise get past an editor or censorship protocols. On the other hand, anyone can make a blog; and they can say and omit whatever they choose to in that blog. These authors are free to be anonymous, and aren't forced to abide by ethical rules (apart from minor censorship guidelines). Unfortunately, it is hard to trust people to do the right thing. Indeed, who am I to say what the right thing is? I could be anyone; a random person of any age, gender or race who chose the name Ophelia on a lark. Everything that I say could be completely tainted by bias. It could also potentially be completely false!

This modern blogging phenomenon makes it extremely difficult to judge them according to a generic format, as one often can with a newspaper or academic journal. As I mentioned earlier, each blog must be judged according to its individual content. Yet with the thousands, in fact probably millions, of blogs floating unchecked out there in the world wide web - who has the time to check them all?

Ophelia in the blogosphere

This post is probably always going to be in progress. It's main purpose is to serve as a place for me to take note of my experience with this weblog - my triumphs, and any not-so-triumphant hiccups along the way - that will hopefully save another blogger out there a minute or two of head-scratching.

- A design issue I've had with this blog has been synchronising my fonts! After much (Ado About Nothing - can't help but think of Shakespeare!), thinking someone asked me if I had been copying and pasting the posts/articles with different fonts from Microsoft Word. I had. Problem solvered!

- I have fixed it now (somehow), but for a few hours the font in the first paragraph of my Big Brother post decided it wanted to stay extremely and irritatingly tiny, no matter how many times I tried to change it.

- The process of editing blogs can feel a little tedious. Perhaps I'm doing it the long and hard way (it wouldn't be the first time), but I have to click on about four different links to go back to a post from my blog to be able to edit it.

- I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing I can do to change the font colour of the text at the bottom of the opinion poll, or about the lack of spacing between some of my pictures and its post headline.

- The more I attempt to polish and format my blog, the more design issues I seem to face. Paragraph breaks are one example; things seem to be fine until I change something which appears to set something else off. It is slightly irritating, yet I am accepting it along with the freedom of the blogging territory. No one thing is completely without fault!

- Apart from these minor issues, I quite enjoy blogging. It's rather liberating to create something that is entirely under your control; that you can edit and fine-tune and change dramatcially if you choose. Creating and using a pseudonym gives me a sense of freedom to express my personal opinions without the harsh protocols that may come with different publications, such as print.

Head to head, paper to screen: differences in design

As technology rumbles by in a flurry of dust and money, change is thrust upon all of us. This is clearly visible when we observe the contrast between designing for a traditional print publication, as opposed to the way we would design for an online one. According to DC Reep, the purpose of document design is to "provide readers with the information they need" (2006, p 134). The aim is to both organise your information and capture - and hold - your audience's attention. Designing for any mode requires patience, and a willingness to learn and experiment.

General principles shared by both online and print publication design are balance, consistency, headings and graphic aids such as pictures and colours. The contrasts between the two media modes stem from the way we read them. Reading is our brain's method of decoding and analysing the information our eyes are showing us. It involves and prompts not only decoding and analysis but response, comprehension and critiquing - all in a matter of milliseconds (Walsh 2006, p 25). When we (members of the Western culture) read a print publication, we do so in a linear fashion. We look first to the top left corner and "work our way across and down, going from left to right and back again, until we reach the bottom right corner" (Wheildon 1990, p 8).

An online publication is different, in that we usually 'scan' the screen, rather than 'read' it the conventional way. Our reading path has little or no set direction: we can go where we want to, when we want to, and at the click of a button. Graphic aids are especially helpful in attracting the attention of the reader. When designing an online publication one must keep in mind that the colour scheme should be kind on viewers eyes; as prolonged exposure to a computer screens is a strain on eyes (Parker 2003, p 270).

This is just a brief overview of the design process, and the similarities and differences that exist within that process. However, I believe it is especially important to take stock of the following statements before you begin any form of publication design:

- Universal rules do not exist in the realm of publication design - only suggestions do.

- That "tools and techniques that [work] effectively in one situation won't necessarily work in another" (Parker 1990, p 1)

- Finally, consider your intended audience during all steps of the design process, and tailor it to them.

References

- Parker, RC 1990, 'Beginning observations', Looking good in print: a guide to basic design for desktop publishing, 2nd edn, Ventara Press, Chapel Hill NC, Chapter 1.
- Parker, RC 2003, 'Designing documents for web distribution', Looking good in print, 5th edn, Paraglyph Press, Scottsdale AZ, Chapter 14.

- Reep, DC 2006, 'Document design', Technical writing: principles, strategies and readings, 6th edn, Pearson/Longman, New York, Chapter 6.

- Walsh, M 2006, 'The "textual shift": examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts', Australian journal of language and literacy, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2006.

- Wheildon, C 1990, Communicating or just making pretty shapes, 3rd edn, Newspaper bureau of Australia Ltd, North Sydney.

Dumming inglish down 4 us kidz

In a 2008 BBC article, academic Ken Smith (an incredibly generic and equally difficult name to google by the way), has suggested that we should accept spelling and grammatical errors as "variant spellings". Smith is a university academic who corrects exam and test papers and year after year is confronted by 'thier', 'arguement' and 'truely'.

I find it depressing that either lacking education or laziness (or both) are permeating so heavily through our society that we would be willing to break the rules of the English launguage. After all, thousands of people run through red lights every year. What would happen if the police suddenly said, 'Look dudes, we've been trying. But they just keep doing it so, I guess we'll allow it'. It would be goddamn chaos you shitty shitty men of the law.

So my argument is, would the majority abide by the rules if those same rules are breached by the minority, and without consequence? I don't think so. Furthermore, how can we improve if we are never corrected? Although criticism can at times be disheartening, it is often the best way to better yourself.

A goddamn fantastic - and hilarious - example of this recently featured on 30 Rock. Main character Liz Lemon snags herself a handsome boyfriend whose lived his whole life in a 'bubble'. He thought he was a tennis god because women begged him to teach them. He thought he could cook fish with Gatorade. He was a doctor that didn't know how to perform the Heimlich manouvre. This ignorant pretty boy led an charmed life because no-one had the guts to criticise the actions, cooking or medical skills of a beautiful person. (The beautiful person in question is Jon Hamm. Yup. Drool factory).

They say ignorance is bliss; but who are 'they'? What if 'they' didn't even know how to spell ignorance? Would we still refer to this age old axiom time and time again if it had been mispelled the first time?

Language in itself is amazing; we just take it for granted because we use it every day. It is a tool that has withstood the test of time, that allows us to understand what other people want or see or feel and allows us to communicate the same to others. The English language is a beautiful and complicated creation. I marvel at the music of phonology and the intricacy of semantics; at silent letters; at the eleven different ways of pronouncing the letter 'a': (“age”, “bad”, “bath”, “about”, “beat”, “many”, “aisle”, “coat”, “ball”, “beauty” and “cauliflower”).

We are the generation coping with - and still contributing to - the loss of the Ozone layer. Many of our endangered animals are currently on the brink of non-extistence. Our civilization has already lost so much of its culture to floods, fires, earthquakes and the wankerish aspects of human nature. Let's preserve the rules of our languages and grammar, and take it one extinction at a time shall we?