Sonnet 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red ;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare

Yes yes yes you know this one. Everyone does. There's a reason. It's good. Also Shakespeare.

So in English last year, we read this poem after reading another more flattering one. Afterwards our teacher asked the girls if they would be flattered if they were the subject of this sonnet. I raised my hand, but no one else did. I was asked to explain myself, and I honestly did a crap job. I'm going to redeem myself to the about one person who actually reads this.

Here goes.

The sonnet, physically, is unflattering. Not gonna lie. But in all honesty, my eye ISN'T anything like the sun, my lips aren't redredredredred and neither are my cheeks, I am neither the pale standard of back then nor the ubertan that's popular now, perfume probably smells better tham my breath as I don't eat roses all the time, music sounds better than my voice, and yeah, when I walk, I walk ON THE FRIGGIN' GROUND. Heavily sometimes. This one is honest. I am not perfect, nor is Shakespeare's mistress, nor is ANYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD EVER.

The honesty here is key. He realizes that she's not perfect, and he'll say it, too, but that's entirely beside the fact that HE LOVES HER. He loves her and her imperfections. She to him is not an idol but a person. One whom he loves.

Nobody's perfect. People need to realize this. Imperfections are what make people people. I, for one, would like to be a person, not an idol. And that's why this sonnet would flatter me.

~Niki
(sorry if this doesn't make sense it's lateearly)

Andbutso

Hey.

I've been not doing a lot with this thing. Sorry.

I've been keeping busy, generally with the absolutely brilliant discovery of six years of Doctor Who on Netflix for my general enjoyment. Why wasn't I watching that before it'ssogoodomgaskghdsewe[ ahhhhh. Also Masterpiece Mystery's Sherlock is up there, and that's absolutely amazing. They've revamped Holmes for the modern day, incorporating technology WITHOUT BEING LAME ABOUT IT, and making Watson not a complete derp. Because Watson really isn't a complete derp. See: below.

Hark! a Vagrant, by the way, is awesome

Also on Netflix is Psych, which has been one of my favorite shows for YEARS now. Maybe I'm just a sucker for witty dialogue and action and awesome stories and general badassery, but yeah.

Also I've been swimming. Woot.

~Niki

BEDA XIV

(rambling whilst trying to write an essay. Also I'm grounded. woot.)

Leechblock is amazingly awesome for productivity. Seriously, if you have Firefox and have a project or something coming up, GET IT you have no idea how wonderful it is. If you don’t have Firefox and are using Internet Explorer: SWITCH Firefox is amazing. It’s wonderfully beautiful, and intuitive, and amazingly third-party-developer friendly. Chrome is fine with me, but I dunno if there’s an equivalent feature on there.


Need music? I have one answer for you (okay well a couple but whatevs). Driftless Pony Club. Yeah, Quintessential indie band name, but seriously they’re amazingly awesome, in the truest sense of both of those words. Also Passion Pit. Just go buy Manners on iTunes. And get the Deluxe version, because they’ve got two of the tracks stripped of the electronic wonder and it’s still just as good if not better. Moth’s wings, free of editing, has such feeling put into it, just, awesome. And then buy the TRON soundtrack, because Daft Punk did an amazing job and did an awesome job on all the tracks, and all the tracks are not Derezzed. Son of Flynn is nice, clean, and lovely; and Fall’s got an amazing beat and bass and it’s just perfect for so many things.

GAH I love music.

I wonder how many people know that. I don’t really show it much, but I am in love with tonality and beat and musical artistry and harmonies and lyrics SO MUCH. I am a general music fangirl. And probably a bit of an elitist cuz I hate rap and hip-hop and stuff. I mean, if it’s on in a swim practice or in someone’s car, I’m fine with that. I’ll just pull a DPC or Passion Pit or something into my mind and listen to that, but I fail to see the appeal. I mean, it’s a drum machine and unartful, trashy synths with either drug, sex, or booze filled lyrics, often all three. I realize the fine line in between techno and electropop and Ke$ha. The difference? Musicality. Techno is very dance-y, but it takes care to be tasteful.

(Also this site: http://8tracks.com/)

BEDA XIII

GOTTA GET STUFF DONE BAI!

BEDA XII

Pokemon Global Link is now live, so there goes all my productivity.

Today we went to the Art Institute! They let you take flashless pictures, so now I've got a whole slew of Impressionist and Romantic cell phone backgrounds!

Also there were a lot of pictures of naked ladies, so I learned that that is a very timeless subject of painting apparently!

Also modern art is weird.

I like Impressionism. The colors are very beautiful!

And pictures of moving water. The sea is very beautiful!

I am talking a bit like a five year old you just went to the Art Institute, right?

~Niki

BEDA XI

Ohey look I'm in class now for this part ohohohohoho I am so cool. Actually I just finished the Computer Science lab in like twenty minutes and am super duper fast at this class so I quickly run out of things to do, so Imma do this.

Lessee, 15 minutes left of class how can I be interesting ohey that's work.

Let's do a list of fictional characters that I like, shall we?

• Shawn Spencer (Psych)
• Peeta (Hunger Games)
• Harry Potter (duh.)
• Sam Flynn (TRON~)
• Miles Halter (Looking for Alaska)
• Will Grayson (see: duh)

And then just a list of awesome characters from everything~

• Quorra (TRON [Do you know Jules Verne? "Yeah" What's he like?])
• Finn (Adventure Time)
• Marceline (Adventure Time)
• Hermione (HP)
• Bellatrix Lestrange (HP)
• Sirius Black (HP)
• Remus Lupin (HP)
• Takumi (Looking for Alaska)
• will grayson (see again: duh)
• N (Pokemon B/W)
• Sapphire (Pokemon Adventures (the manga))
• Ruby (see above)
• Norman (see above)
• Diamond (see above)

And there are a whole lot more. As odd as this may sound, I really like the father characters. I dunno why.

ANYWAYS boring list-blog over and out. I'm thinking sometime this weekend I'll do a "teach people some useful Internet things" post. I need screenshots for everything so it could take a while.

BEDA X

Yesterday I was not interesting. I aim to change that. Lessee, how can I be interesting today...

Hmmmmm....

Let me see....

Ohey how bout that one thing that I think about sometimes. 'Kay. /starts

Sometimes I feel left out and/or confused when there are references to like Star Trek or something that I don't get. I've seen a couple of episodes and I found them interesting, but I don't speak Klingon, nor am I able to quote lines from it and I feel like a bad nerd, especially with all the how nerdy are you tests out there basing like half of their questions on this sort of thing.

But one day it dawned on me. The majority of the content generated on the Internet was borne of those who were young enough to be involved in the phenomenon. That generation could set aside an hour every week to watch the plot develop and become absorbed in that culture as it happened.

My generation can experience the entirety of Star Trek, yes, but only through a service like Netflix, or buying all the boxed sets, or being pirates doing swashbuckly pirate watching on the Internet.

Then I got to thinking more, and realized that there are nerdy, awesome things happening for our generation to experience anew. I can remember just a couple of years ago, sitting in my room, frantically devouring Deathly Hallows in my excitement. I can very easily remember the months constantly refreshing Serebii so that I could see the new generation of Pokemon roll in.

Sometimes I look at the copyright dates of things or the year they were first made and comparing them with my birth year. Pixar has been releasing films since the year I was born (Toy Story, the first one, is as old as me and one of my favorites). Pokemon debuted at the same time I did. Harry Potter first came 7 days after my sister. This is the nerd culture of the Digital Age, and I'm glad to be as young as I am.

~Niki
The very-bad-at-staying-on-a-specific-idea blogger

BEDA IX

Woah, wireless keyboard and mouse on this one. I just noticed.

ANYWAYS I got like half an hour before I fail again.

Also I hear someone coming.

BYE!

BEDA VIII

Once upon a fairly recent time, there was a girl. Her name was Enid. Enid was a fairly intelligent girl, able to think and make her thoughts known. She had a perfect amount of friends of varying degrees of nerdiness, and a difficult time keeping the verbs in written stories in the past tense.

Eventually, Enid realized that she interacted with her various groups of friends as if behind a veil, obfuscating her true personality. Her sporty friends all thought she was adorable, for she was a bit shy around them, unwilling to pull back the veil. Her academically inclined friends saw in her a smart girl who was too much of a lazyass for her own good, for she failed to move the veil enough for them to see the ways she passed her time, fearing judgement. She kept the veil on around the friends of her friends, for she was unsure how to behave around people she hardly knew. Then came her nerdy friends. Her veil was still on, because the fear of judgement persisted.

Then a revelation came. Enid found herself in the works of others. She found herself in the Internet, and in music, and more in books than she ever had before. She now had true passions, things she loved and loved to talk about. This was her greatest change, drawing the veil back from herself. She saw herself clearly, flaws and all, and saw plainly her deceptions. She saw the need to pull the veil back from anyone who was fooled by it, and started on the path. Following it, she found that others had been living behind veils, that they were not who they showed to the world. She found that so many people were like her, veiled in fear of judgement, and once she began taking her veil, others followed. And the exposed had never been happier.

BEDA VIIISKIPPEDADAY

I AM A BAD PERSON.

I have TWO WHOLE FOLLOWERS GUIZE! *waves*

I have decided that in order to be interesting today I will list things I find interesting in no particular order because order is for fascists. Here goes.

1. Buckminster Fuller
2. Music
3. Why the enter button on the new text editor is not getting along well with firefox 4
4. Firefox 4
5. Pokemon
6. Wikipedia
7. Twitter
8. Quotes
9. Handwriting
10. The French Revolution (it's not a revolution without pikes, man)
11. The art of my friend Kristina (seriously, a-friggin-mazing. Check it out.)
12. not the research paper I should be working on
13. the Cold War and the spies of it and the red scare and the resulting space race and the scientific research it engendered
14. WWII as far as the daily life of civilians is concerned esp. Jew hiders
15. Nazis
16. Soviets
17. Fascists
18. THE ENLIGHTENMENT IS CAPS CUZ IT'S AWESOME. REASON FTW!
19. TRON
20. History presented in the style of Kate Beaton (aka hark! a vagrant. check it out *too lazy to link*)
21. the lyrics of Driftless Pony Club
22. the quotes of John Green
23. the general psyche of the Internet age
24. OPEN SOURCE
25. computer science
26. xkcd
27. the search for the Higgs-Boson
28. subatomic particles
29. science

Yup. There's more, but I got hmwk I gotta get done kthxbai

I am not a very productive person (BEDA V)

And the Internet doesn't help any.

Really it doesn't.

*tries to do homework*

Yup. Still nothing.

Also BEDA IV went on twitter but only one person reads this so yeah.

*poofs to try some homework for a change*

BEDA III

If  you were wondering, you should be reading that as "Bayduh the Third." Yes.

Let's see, how can I be interesting today oh I know.

See why I love Computer Science:

First off, you know that you already have the tools you need the create the program you've been told to create. (Redundant? Whatever.) It's up to you to figure out how to implement them in a way that will make the computer do what you want, because computers are stupid without the help of programmers.

Second, it's a class that requires nice, logical thinking. The way I think can easily parallel to the way that I would need to think. It's problem solving, in the best possible way. The limitations mentioned above can only help. The answer is clearly and definitely there, and there just needs to be a bit of digging to find it.

Third, the computer tells you, perhaps in unclear and roundabout terms, what the problem is. I'm fairly good with deciphering meaning out of things, so I can figure out what the problem is and how to fix it.

Fourth, TRON.

Fifth, xkcd. Seriously.  Reading that comic has made me want to be a programmer more than anything else has. I don't know why, but all the comics about science an programming have really pushed me far into the want to do that sort of thing.

How many ways can I end this let's see...

Peace Off!
(music)wheezywaiaiaiter(/music) *ding*
You will not see me and I will not see you, but you will READ me, on the next episode of Niki Wells blogs every day in April. GOODBYE.

BEDA II

I think homework should be assigned differently. There should be options, for English and History at least.

Notes for history should be an option. They work for so many people, but there is a significant part of the students that view it as a waste of time busy work stupid face time waster that's stupid an takes too much time. Alternate assignments could be answering the questions at the end of the section. You know, thinking.

Instead of giving a narrow selection of topics for a research paper for English, let students choose what they want to research, like truly choose. Also give an alternate assignment instead of a research paper/speech. How about reading and analyzing a contemporary work of fiction, eh? Thinking, you know.

As far as I can tell, the purpose of high school English is to get you to think and to coherently write down your thoughts. If that can be done in lieu of researching some dreadfully dull topic, then why shouldn't it be?

And with History, I believe that its aim is to get you to be able to learn about the past, and by extent, be able to manage cause and effect.

None of the assignments in those subjects that I mentioned above currently require the use of thinking. That's my problem. Thinking is way more interesting for me than parroting information found in a textbook. I can easily thing in term of computer science, and math, and science. That's interesting for me. Research and notes, however, require more of a worker bee ethic than anything. And I can't do that.

Also those two things are making my spring break suck a bunch.

PS: in checking my page views because I'm a narcissist, apparently someone from Indonesia's seen thin o_0

BEDA I

So Jess is suggesting that I do this thing where I BEDA and I said sure, I'll try it, so here I am trying it. YAY!

My spring break is kind of suckish because I've still got half a chapter to take notes on for Euro which sucks and also reasearch for some 500 point english paper which is basically my fourth quarter grade which sucks cuz I hate research papers especially when I have to use multiple sources and can't use Wikipedia because apparently it's unreliable and crap.

merrrrrrrrrrr.


SEGWAY!

These are some art styles I really like:

Kate Beaton
Adventure Time
My friend Kristina

Things I want cuz I'm selfish and a product of the american consumerist society

1. Platoon of Power Squadron T-shirt
2. Pizza John shirt
3. xkcd Shark shirt
4. xkcd Stand Back Science shirt
5. xkcd buttons
6. Wheezy Shoe!
7. HEELYS!
8. 3DS!

Now it occurs to me that I have quite a penchant for shoes.

An inquiry contract for an English paper about lobbing that I wrote and quite like

When in the course of the high school curriculum, it becomes necessary for one person to dissolve the bands of sanity that connect her to the world, and to assume among the Powers of her mind, the insane and irrational station to which the Teachers of English and of Proponents of Research assign her, a decent respect to the knowledge of teacherkind requires that she should declare the topics which are focused on by her research.*

The topic that I will be researching extensively and exhaustingly is lobbying. The right to lobby is set out in a document written a couple of years after the one mentioned under a citizen’s right to petition. I’m going to find how this right to petition is swaying government policy today and how. My position might change a bit when I’m less ignorant of what lobbying actually is.

From reading the Opinions section of the Chicago Tribune fairly frequently, I can gather that lobbying is the efforts of outside influence to influence government legislation. I also know that the current My Pyramid, the guide for a healthy, nutritional diet that our government had created, was influenced by lobbyists and is incorrect. The first fact I believe I can call general knowledge, as dictionary definitions often are. The second fact is the knowledge of at least everyone in my health class, as our teacher has repeated it often enough for the almost sleeping kids to understand. I expect to find that lobbyists have influenced many more government policies on behalf of their special interest groups, and also that some lobbying has positively affected legislation.

One must approach research as a way to answer the questions posed by a lack of knowledge. I would like to know the extent of lobbyist influence on the government and proposed methods of removing corruption from the lobbyists, or if that can’t be helped, removing lobbyists from government.

I do indeed have background knowledge on this topic, but nothing more than any responsible underage citizen would have. Never have I ever researched this topic extensively for a paper or any other sort of formal writing. I super promise. †

*This paragraph heavily influenced by the Declaration of Independence, which rests in the public domain
†For more information, see the inquiry contract of a Mr. William Oneofmyclassmates (He had a fair amount of writing on the nature of super promises. Basically if you break one, your family is doomed to eternal shame)

[Also did you hear about the changes being made to Blogger? I'm excited for a better text editor, one worthy of a Google product]

I am what I am what I am

But what did I want to be in the past? I definitely had some ideas. I remember wanting to be in a relationship by freshman year, but that's not the case. I'm not particularly disappointed about that one as it just hasn't worked out.

Other things: I really loved Nancy Drew at some point, and wanted to be just like her when I grew up. I wanted to solve crimes and be a supergenius and everything. And that didn't work out. Also I've become disillusioned with Nancy when I learned her author was more than one person.

Which brings me here. I've always loved mysteries. Always. Give me a good, plausible mystery and I'm set for a while. My dream career was to be a mystery author, and I always aspired to do that at a young age, leading to predictably unfinished stories about kids trying to find lost gerbils, with themes always heavily borrowed (looking back on one in particular it was almost like plagiarism) from the books I was reading at the time.

My perceptions of the future have changed drastically. I still think it would be cool to be an author, but given my track record of unfinished stories I doubt that's ever going to happen. I've found the awakening of a passion for computer science, and a wide range of interesting careers that I would love to be a part of. My dream now is a position at Google, perhaps a software engineer or something of the sort.

But my present self... that's complicated. To quote Buckminster Fuller: "...I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category."

I really don't know what I am. Adjectives are insufficient to describe this tired, irritable, odd girl. I'm not a category, I'm a sum of experiences and thoughts and beliefs.

However, I've begun to find myself through these most recent of experiences. I'm an emerging citizen of the world, able to see that these United States are not the best place ever, but that they are indeed a pretty damn good place to live. I've begun to find that the center of the universe is not me. I keep becoming more complex, and I am proud of that.

I think my younger self would disapprove of aspects of me, like my swearing and my atheism and procrastination and lazyness and general un-good-ness, but in other ways, we'd find we still have so much in common. We both love reading and Pokemon and civility and things like that. We both get frustrated with things and overemotional with others.

To add another Fuller quote: "I seem to be a verb."

~Niki
(Also I don't seem to be any better at staying on topic than my younger self)