Curation Progress (Blog 9)

At this point, basically all I've got left to do is to put the finishing touches on the last half of the posts (adding  photos of the artists and the album art for each artist, and adding the track list for each available album).  And all of that really isn't too hard because the rest of that is just copying and pasting things into the right place.

And although these last few steps aren't all that difficult, besides the temper tantrums I have because my computer is the baby blue equivalent of a netbook, they are overwhelmingly time consuming. I'm not sure that one inanimate object has ever angered any human being so much.

But I'm glad that I managed my time on this curation project because had I have done all of it at the last minute, I wouldn't have taken anything positive away from the experience. I would have been doing it just to get it done.

Curation Progress (Blog 8)

So as I had mentioned in the previous blog, I had to sift through my enormous and stressful list of songs that looked like it was written by someone severely dyslexic (what does that say about me), but  the point I'm trying to make is that IT IS FINISHED AND CLEAN. After several hours of basically cleaning up my brain, I was successful in beautifying my music choices.

Nice and beautiful, right? Honestly, I was significantly proud of myself because of how frustrating that job was alone. But I learned an incredible amount of all of these artists, I feel like their information is seared into my brain. 

The next few steps I've got to take are to enter all of the photos, and album covers for all of the songs as well as a short description of the artist and that specific album history. 

Curation Progress (Blog 7)

        The largest and most difficult part of starting my curation project/blog was choosing the right music. Since I did Old school hip hop and new school hip hop, I basically had to sift through what felt like the whole Internet in order to end up with exactly what I wanted. Of course I started out with a crazy, freak ugly list of songs because it was such a mess. But I figured I'd properly sift through that list once my brain started to function again.

         After feeling brain dead from song searching, I decided to do research on the list of artists and songs I had found and thought that could clear out that three page list. That doesn't sound like much of an accomplishment, but once I finished going through half that list, I felt like I could breathe again.  Also, after all that research, I found out that one of the most prominent hip-hop artists (MF Doom) used an alias for one of his albums. I was always wondering why that album was so impossible to find and without even trying, I found my answer.

My next three steps will be to finish sifting through that freak list and narrow it down to just the essentials, then to organize them in the order that I want them to show up, and then to finally begin typing up descriptions/thoughts on the songs.

Best of the Week: Shakespeare (Blog 6)

        Reading Shakespeare this quarter has actually been anything but the stereotypical, mind numbing reading of Romeo and Juliet . Our class is taking a pretty unconventional approach to reading A Midsummer Night's Dream and that rules because it puts a lot of people out of their comfort zone (including me). I absolutely sound like a fourth grader saying "it rules", but putting us out of our comfort zone by making us stand in front of the class and read with legitimate emotion is a pretty good idea. It's kind of a funny, get to know you better exercise that pushes us to see this play, and our classmates, from a different perspective. Rather than having every aspect of the play explained to us like kindergarteners and still not understanding it, we've got to learn to comprehend what we read ourselves (even though we've still got help).

        But I think the best part might be that Mr. Allen won't take our crap when it actually comes to reading out loud. If it sounds bad when you say it, lucky you, you get to do it again. He has no shame about it and I think that's actually pretty funny. You can suddenly see people starting to regret their decision to go up and perform the part of Puck in rapping form because all of the blood drains out of their face and they look like they want to vomit. But I've honestly never had such a positive experience with in-school Shakespeare.