Hello! Welcome to my Composition Two class blog. Keeping this journal is my extra credit assignment and I'll try to stay pretty regular with it. How about some introductions? I'm Chris Demmons, I'm a human being (citation needed), a student at SPC, a geek, and a bit of a writer. I am currently working on my web development certificate and my associates degree concurrently, which may well qualify me as crazy.
To start with, I want to talk about some of the things I enjoyed in Comp One. Then I'll talk about my library, some of the things I've written over the years. There will be some rambling, a really dumb disclaimer and perhaps some cake.
I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed Comp One, I had it and an online C++ programming during the summer term of 2009. I very much expected my programming class to be the main attraction, but really it was kind of dull. I felt we went over the basics far too frequently "This is a variable, this is an array, etc" - this is all stuff that everyone should have learned in the one thousand level class.
Composition One was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the quote based free writes though I think I could pick better quotes to write about. We also did a sensational piece based on A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift. I think everyone but my partners felt like backing away a couple of feet from me after we wrote that one. Our modest proposal was an essay about potential solutions to a rising wave of senior citizen violence, using the strategies aimed at young people as a model. At the time, there were a number of cases of shocking criminal behavior in the news where the perpetrators were older than fifty-five years old. I think the most difficult piece was the first assignment, because I had fallen out of the habit of writing. It really is a skill, and if you do stop doing it, you will lose it.
I really enjoy reading, I have a huge library and a trip to bookstore is as much of a bank account killing endeavor for me as a trip to the local EBstop. Truthfully, I don't think video games and books are very far removed from one another - but I'll save that for a later post. I have a love-hate relationship with my local library. I love the fact they exist. I hate the fact that they never have, or have very limited stock of the books I want. But seriously, support your local library. Speaking of which, I love science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries in terms of fiction. In nonfiction I read a lot of things related to technology - programming manuals mostly, self-improvement, history, and current event related titles. You can see my aNobii bookshelf here, it's only a fraction of what I own, but hopefully this will motivate me to catalog and review the rest of my collection. That collection is just one shelf, I probably own ten shelves worth of books easy. I also spend far too much time reading things on the web, and I'll share those with you soon.
I've spent a lot of time writing, mostly as a hobby, but one fool actually paid me cold hard cash to put words to paper. But let's get a little context first. I started out writing as a kid, just because I wanted to be like my heroes. Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, R. A. Lafferty and a few others that I can't recall. I wrote for my school paper in High School from tenth grade until graduation. I really loved journalism class, even though I had a pretty difficult time getting my articles to see print. I was probably the most censored journalist in my high school, though my collaborator during that time can claim almost as many red marks from the administration. Our advisor loved us and was completely amazingly great, though. Mostly we wrote humor and table-top role playing game pieces. I occasionally produced some science fiction back then too. I wrote a few things for a student run literary magazine - which was also censored by the school. Noticing a pattern here? After I graduated I wrote a one shot magazine. Short magazines were a really big thing back then, and I had a great time with it. I'll probably put on my rose tinted mirror shades at some point later and wheeze on about it. More recently, I've been writing a few articles using the Notes application on Facebook - mostly directed at friends and family, but I might post a few here as well.
Lastly, I may spend a little time talking about the publishing industry and intellectual property issues. This might be a little out of scope for this blog, so I'll tag each piece with these words ("publishing", "intellectual property") but I believe that both are highly relavent. When I talk about that, I'll be discussing how books are published now, the crisis facing the industry, some of the changes brought on by the internet, and how authors should be paid.
I shouldn't have to say this, but I will. Obviously everything on this blog is not representative of Saint Petersburg College (SPC), my instructor, or any other person connected with that institution. These are my opinions, and they are to be used for entertainment or annoyance only. So if you're looking to dice a potato, you've come to the wrong blog. With that said, I'm looking forward to class and hope you enjoy my work!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)