Surfing,Media, and the Internet Essay -- Sports Technology Essays

Surfing,Media, and the Internet Surfing is a passion. It is a culture, a life, a disease. With the help of movies such as Endless Summer, Gidget and Beach Party, and tunes like â€Å"Surfin’ Safari† and â€Å"Surfer Girl,† surfing became the fad of the early sixties, and has lasted. Being exposed to the Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon Beach Party movies brought surfing to my immediate attention. I love their cheesy plots and musical numbers, and of course, their portrayal of the surfing lifestyle. After watching Beach Blanket Bingo, I was hooked. Unfortunately, I live hours from a beach, and further from one with decent waves. So my time thus far has been spent discovering my passion through the media. As it is not as popular as say, football or basketball, surfing is not often televised, and never as a competition sport. A few shows, such as California Dreams and The Real World: Hawaii have attempted to capture the lifestyle of the young surfer. When they were still televised, I watched them both religiously. California Dreams was a laid back version of Saved by the Bell, and was from the late 1980s. Surfing was hardly covered though, and usually it would be shown as two guys walking into a restaurant with surfboards in their arms. The Real World: Hawaii also disappointed, with the main purpose of the show being the cast, â€Å"seven strangers picked to live in a house ...† and not the sport which is such a part of Hawaiian culture. They did, however, work for a surf shop in Honolulu, and were thus connected to surfing without actually being in the waves. Bummer. Out of the handful of movies, which have been made about surfing, most of the more popular ones dat e back to the sixties. Endless Summer, Beach... ... N’ Sport. Feb/Mar 2001. 3 Mar. 2001 . 2. Hart, Kahea. Home page. 13 Mar. 2001. 16 Mar. 2001 3. â€Å"Learn to Surf.† Ocean Pit Pacific. 21 Mar 2001 4. Quiksilver. 6 Mar. 2001 . 5. Seven Shores Australia. 19 Mar. 2001 . 6. Slater, Evan. â€Å"Me, Myself and iMac.† Swell. 14 Mar. 2001. 18 Mar. 2001 . 7. Surfer Magazine. Vol. 42 No. 5 May 2001. 7 Mar. 2001 8. â€Å"Tapping the Sources.† Swell. 19 Mar 2001 9. Tavarua. 6 Mar. 2001

How to Make a Lava Lamp with Household Ingredients Essay

Edited by Sondra C, Nicole Willson, Jack Herrick, Krystle and 104 others Two Methods:With Vegetable Oil and WaterWith Mineral Oil and Alcohol Have you ever caught yourself being hypnotized by a lava lamp? You hold it in your hand, move it slightly, and watch as the liquid quivers and separates into different shapes and colors. Then you look at the price tag – and put it back. To do your wallet a favor and make a lava lamp with household ingredients, follow these instructions. Method 1 of 2: With Vegetable Oil and Water 1. Get a 16- or 64-oz soda or water bottle. Any tightly sealable container works, but you probably have an empty water bottle laying around somewhere. Ad 2. Add oil, water, and food coloring to the bottle. Fill the bottle 3/4 of the way full with vegetable oil, then top it off with water and about 10 drops of food coloring (or enough to make the solution appear fairly dark). 3. 3 Cut an Alka-Seltzer or Airborne tablet into pieces. You can either ration the pieces to make your lava lamp last longer or add more than one piece at a time for more interesting effects. 4 Add pieces of the tablet to the bottle. This will cause the mixture to bubble. Repeat every time the bubbling stops. Unfortunately, with this type of lava lamp, the effects are temporary. 5 Put the cap on and tip the bottle back and forth. This will cause the tiny droplets of colored water moving around inside the oil to join together, making bigger lava-squirt blobs. That’s what scientists call them, anyway. 6 Place a strong flashlight or search light under the bottle. This will illuminate the bubbles for maximum effect. But don’t leave your bottle on top of a heated surface! Plastic will melt and you’ll get oil everywhere. Method 2 of 2: With Mineral Oil and Alcohol Get a glass container. Glass can withstand heat if you want to keep your lava continuously moving — otherwise plastic will do just fine. Any container that you can seal up and shake is good. 2 Add in a combination of 70% rubbing alcohol, 90% isopropyl alcohol and water. You’ll need more 70% than 90% to get the right density and just a few tablespoons of water should do the trick. The water is heavier and makes it easier for the â€Å"lava† to flow through. Experiment with ratios to see what  warrants the best results. 3 Add in mineral oil as your lava. If you’d like it dyed, use artist’s oil paints or shred a permanent marker. Stop before it reaches the top and overflows! The mineral oil will not mix with the alcohol/water solution. Don’t worry. If you’d like to dye the water, add food coloring, which is also water soluble. However, the more variables you have, the more likely it is not to work. 4 Put it on top of a heat lamp or light. As it warms, the lava should move. If the lava isn’t cooperating, you may want to add Turpentine or another paint solvent to force it to coalesce. Be careful with dangerous chemicals — you don’t want anything all over your furniture, on your clothes, or eaten by the family dog. Top of Form Add your own method Save Bottom of Form Tips You can also add decorations like glitter, sequins, or tiny beads. If you don’t have Airborne or Alka-Seltzer, salt works as well. This experiment demonstrates some science you already know: that oil and water do not mix. Even if you try to really shake-up the bottle, the oil breaks up into small drops but will not mix with the water or the (water-based) food coloring. This will keep the oil distinct from the colored water, giving the lamp a nice effect. In addition, the Alka-Seltzer or Airborne tablet reacts with the water to make tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide gas. These bubbles attach themselves to the blobs of colored water and cause them to float to the surface. When the bubbles pop, the color blobs sink back to the bottom of the bottle. Salt is less expensive than Alka-Seltzer, but if you use salt, you will still have to add more to keep your lava lamp working. Lava lamps such as these are a great way to reuse empty jars such as those used for  peanut butter and jelly. They’re also great for science projects. OozingGoo.com has instructions on how to make several kinds of â€Å"heatable† lava lamps. Warnings Do not drink the contents. Do not heat the bottle like a normal lava lamp or allow it to become heated by holding the light underneath it for too long if using plastic. Hot oil in a plastic bottle is a definite hazard. Things You’ll Need With Vegetable Oil & Water 16 or 64-oz plastic soda bottle and cap, empty and clean Vegetable oil Food coloring An Alka-Seltzer or Airborne tablet Water With Mineral Oil & Alcohol 70% and 90% alcohol Water Container, sealable Mineral oil Artist’s oil paints Food coloring (optional) Light or heat lamp Related wikiHows How to Create a Science Fair Project How to Make a Lava Lamp from a Water Bottle How to Create Your Own 3D Glasses How to Test Insect Responses to Color How to Decorate a Lampshade How to Add Color to a Fluorescent Light How to Build a Lamp How to Make a Soda Bottle Volcano How to Make a Rainbow How to Make a Cloud in a Bottle How to Make a Light Bulb How to Make an Oil Lamp Sources and Citations http://www.oozinggoo.com/ll-form2.html SteveSpanglerScience.com is the original source of this article and has more instructions on this experiment. Article Info Featured Article Categories: Featured Articles | Candles Lamps and Fireplaces | Science Recent edits by: WritingEnthusiast14, Qimu, Souphead In other languages: Espaà ±ol: Cà ³mo crear una lampara de lava, Deutsch: Wie man eine Lavalampe aus Haushaltszutaten macht, Portuguà ªs: Como Fazer uma Là ¢mpada de Lava com Ingredientes Caseiros, Italiano: Come Costruire una Lampada di Lava con Ingredienti Casalinghi, Nederlands: een lavalamp maken, Franà §ais: Comment faire une lampe à   lave avec des ingrà ©dients mà ©nagers, Ð  Ã'Æ'Ã' Ã' Ã ºÃ ¸Ã ¹: Ã' Ã ´Ã µÃ »Ã °Ã'‚Ã'Å' Ð »Ã °Ã ²Ã ¾Ã ²Ã'Æ'Ã'Ž Ð »Ã °Ã ¼Ã ¿Ã'Æ' Ð ¸Ã · Ð ¿Ã ¾Ã ´Ã'€Ã'Æ'Ã'‡Ð ½Ã'‹Ã'… Ð ¼Ã °Ã'‚Ð µÃ'€Ð ¸Ã °Ã »Ã ¾Ã ² Discuss Meet a Community Member Meet Hinni, a wikiHowian from South Australia who has been active in the community for over a year. She’s started 122 articles and patrolled over 22,000 changes. She enjoys writing articles, answering requests, and patrolling recent changes. Her favorite article she’s worked on has been How to Make Leche Flan, and she’s proud of being a Featured Author. She loves how everyone in the wikHow community is so friendly and willing to help and answer questions. To new editors, she says: listen to advice from experienced wikiHowians; then pick topics that you like and start finding little ways to edit them and help out! Join The Community

Soapbox on Chavs

Don’t even get me started on chavs! CHAV: Council House Anti-social and Violent. We’ve heard about them all before, and we see them on the streets all the time. We all hate them and I’m here to explain why they should all be banned †¦ and preferably incarcerated. They are well known for their advanced linguistics and decent attire. The first thing we notice when seeing a chav are their tracky bottoms – or should I say their underwear, because their trousers usually hung down in the ankle region. They are usually aged about 16-22, and their stereotypical dress code would probably be wearing the famous snapback facing in a 90 degree angle, of course, wearing baggy fake adidas tracksuits with tonnes of fake gold jewellery which they can barely carry. These people are in gangs acting as if they’re 8 foot tall and built up like a rugby player, in the corner of the McDonald’s car park. I once unfortunately came into contact with one of these ‘gangsters’ on my way walking back home from my friend’s house. I was half way there when I just looked to my left and saw some filthy unwashed scum in a hoodie. I was trying my best to avoid when he shouted at me ‘Yo fam, ya got a cig on ya mate’. ‘Fam’ is an urban abbreviation for family; I was thinking to myself that how could this pathetic, low-life imbecile even think that I am his family or related to him in any possible way, whilst I didn’t even bother turning his way. If you haven’t already seen one, they are easy to spot, just look for people with a gangster limp. Don’t get me wrong, I mean I’m not a judge a book by its cover kind of guy, I have reasons for why I despise these people. Anyway it’s their own faults for why they are in that situation because they’ve all dropped out of high-school, and ran away from home living off on government benefits. Why should we constantly pay our unnecessarily high taxes for a bunch of self-homeless townies? And I’m not being sexist about this either because there are also female chavs or better known as ‘chavettes’, which quite frankly aren’t any better. These anti-social group of ugly teenage girls, black and white, who usually hang around near shopping centres, waiting for someone to p*** them off. There are the stupid teenage girls who hang out in groups of threes on their phones, chewing gum obnoxiously loud, with 1 earphone in acting as if they are 10 men shouting at a little kid two or three years younger than them. Then there are the 14 year old pregnant girls who will ram their pushchair right into the back of your foot, and give you a menacing glare, like wat u gna complain. They try to make a name out of themselves by starting fights and causing riots to get in the news to frighten the innocent people at home. Most people are afraid of getting out of their houses after sunset due to these ‘bad men’ as they like to address themselves. Isn’t it funny how the majority is scared by the minority? I suppose it adds to their gangster factor though, and also assists in making them look hard. I mean, come on, if we saw their un-matured, baby face walking down an alley, we wouldn’t exactly be scared would we? Even though they might be carrying a knife in their pocket waiting to shank you, more than half of them I bet won’t even know how to use it. It is quite obvious where these people get the idea from, it is all these disgusting celebrities; the teenage girls obviously follow celebs like Nicki Minaj and the boys attempt to imitate 50 cent and lil’ wayne. With all this in mind, I hope you will come to an agreement that they are a waste of space and this contagious disease should be dealt with before more of the youth in today’s society catches it. So please, friends join me in my rebellion and together we can make chavs history.

Tips for Scanning Restoring Digital Photos

Tips for Scanning Restoring Digital Photos Do you have old faded or torn photos that youd like to give a facelift? Have you been meaning to take that box of old photos from Grandma and scan them? Learning to create and edit digital photos is fairly easy and very worthwhile. Digitally restored photos can be used to create digital scrapbooks, post to websites, share through email, and print for gift-giving or display. You dont have to be a technology whiz or a graphic designer to become proficient at photo restoration, but you will need a computer, a scanner, and a good (not necessarily expensive) graphics program. Scanning Tips for Digital Photos Check your photos for dirt, lint, or smudges. Gently remove surface dust and dirt with a soft brush or lint-free photo  wipe. Canned air, available at most office supply stores, helps to blast away dust and lint from photographic slides but is not recommended for heirloom print photos.Check the scanner glass for lint, hair, fingerprints, or smudges. Use a lint-free pad or wipe to thoroughly clean the glass (basically anything that is sold as safe for cleaning camera lenses will also work for your scanner). Household glass cleaner can be used to clean your scanner glass, as long as youre careful to spray it directly on the cloth before wiping, not directly on the glass surface. When using your scanner or handling photographs, it is best to wear clean white cotton gloves (available from photo stores and hardware stores) to avoid leaving fingerprints on your scanner or photos.Specify the type of scan. If youre scanning photos, you have a basic choice of color photo vs. black and white . When scanning family photos, it is usually best to scan in color, even if the source photo is black and white. Youll have more manipulation options, and you can change a color photo to black and white (grayscale), but not the other way around. Determine the best scan resolution to assure the quality of your digital photos. The optimal resolution depends on how the image will be printed, saved, or displayed. A good rule of thumb is to scan your photos at a minimum of 300 dpi (dots per inch) to assure decent quality for enhancement and restoration techniques. Its even better to do 600 dpi or greater if you plan to eventually store these photos on CD or DVD, and have space on your computer hard drive to handle such large images.Carefully position your photo on the scanner face down on the glass, just like on a photocopy machine. Then hit prescan or preview. The scanner will take a quick pass of the image and display a rough version on your screen. Check to see that its straight, that no part of the photo has been cut off, and that the photo appears free of dust and lint.Crop the previewed image to include only the original photo. For archival purposes, do not crop only a portion of the photo at this point (you can do that lat er if you want a cropped photo for a specific purpose). However, you should make sure that all you are scanning is the actual photograph. (Some scanners and software will do this step for you automatically.) Avoid corrections while scanning. After scanning, youll be able to edit the image in a graphics software program which offers much more control. The order of steps should be: scan a basic image, save it, play with it.Check your file size before scanning. Youll want to make sure the chosen resolution you wont create a photo that is so large it will crash your computer. Some computers have enough free memory to handle 34MB photo files, and some dont. If the file size is going to be larger than you thought, then adjust the scan resolution accordingly before making the file scan.Scan the original image. This shouldnt take too long, but it could take a few minutes if youre scanning at a very high resolution. Take a quick bathroom break, or get your next photo ready for scanning. Saving Editing Your Digital Photos Now that youve got your photo scanned in, its time to save it to your hard drive. Be sure to choose an archival method and select a good photo-editing program. Storage Tips for Digital Photos Choose your file type. The best file type for scanning and saving archival photos is TIF (Tagged Image Format), the undisputed leader when the best quality is required. The popular JPG (JPEG) file format is nice because its compression algorithm creates smaller file sizes, making it the most popular photo format for web pages and file sharing. However, the compression that creates the small files also causes some quality loss. This loss of image quality is small, but becomes important when dealing with digital images that you plan to modify and re-save (something that you are likely to do when restoring damaged or faded photographs) because the loss of image quality compounds itself at each saving of the file. Bottom line- unless space on your computers hard  drive is at a real premium, stick with TIF when scanning and saving digital photos.Save an archive copy of the original photo in TIF format. You can then place it in a special folder on your hard  drive or copy to CD or DVD. Resist the urge to edit this original photo, no matter how bad it looks. The purpose of this copy is to preserve, as closely as possible, the original photograph in a digital format- a format that, hopefully, will outlast the original print photo. Make a copy of your scanned photo to work on. Use the copy instead of manipulating your original scan. Save it with a different filename (i.e., you can use the original file name with -edited on the end) to help prevent accidentally overwriting the original as you work on editing the photo. Choosing a Graphics Software Program The key to good digital photos is selecting a good graphics software program. If you dont have photo editing software yet, there are a lot of good options available- ranging from free photo editors to beginner photo editors, to advanced photo editing software. For photo restoration, a mid-range graphics software program offers the best balance of function and price. Step-by-Step Photo Repair and Restoration Now that youve done all the tedious work of scanning and saving your photos as digital images, its time to get started with the fun part- photo retouching! Pictures with stains, creases, and tears may have character, but they arent as pretty for framing or photo projects. These photo editing tips will help make your old pictures album-ready. Editing Tips for Digital Photos Open your photo editing software and select the photo. Be sure that it is a copy and not your original digital image. (This way you can always start over if you make a mistake.)Crop your photo using the crop tool. This is good to do in cases where there is a mat or extra wasted space in the photo. Depending upon your purpose, you may also wish to use the crop tool to cut out the background or focus in on a particular person. Since you have saved a copy of the original photo, you dont have to worry about losing important historical details by getting a bit creative with cropping.Fix photo flaws including rips, tears, creases, spots, and smudges, with a variety of handy fix-it tools.Creases, Tears, Spots, Smudges: Most image-editing programs have a cloning or copying tool to help fix photo flaws by filling them in with patches from similar areas in the picture. If the area is large, you may wish to zoom in on the area a bit before applying the cloning tool. The best alternative in low -budget photo editing software is usually the smudge tool.Dust, Speckles, Scratches: Set Radius and Threshold settings at their lowest settings and then slowly increase the Radius until you find the lowest setting that will rid your image of the dust or scratches. However, since that makes your whole image look blurry, you should then bring the Threshold setting way up and then slowly lower it until you find the highest setting that still removes dust and scratches from your photo. Check the results carefully- sometimes this process ends up removing eyelashes and other important content that mimic scratches. Many graphics programs also have a global dust/speckles filter, which looks for spots that differ from their neighboring pixels in color or brightness. It then blurs the surrounding pixels to cover the offending ones. If you only have a few large specks, then zoom in on them and edit the offending pixels by hand with a paint, smudge, or cloning tool.Bye, Bye Red Eye: You can re move that annoying effect in your photos with automatic red-eye removal, or with the pencil and paintbrush found in most photo-editing software. Sometimes an automatic Red-eye Removal tool will change the original eye color. If in doubt, check with someone who has knowledge of the persons eye color. Correct the color and contrast. You may find that many of your old photos have faded, darkened, or become discolored with age. With the help of your digital photo-editing software, you can easily repair and restore these photographs to their former glory.Brightness: Lighten up a dark photo with the brightness adjustment. If its too light, you can darken it a bit.Contrast: Best used in conjunction with Brightness, this feature adjusts the overall contrast- bringing out features in pictures that are mostly middle tones (grays with no true blacks and whites).Saturation: Use the Saturation tool to help turn back the clock on faded photos- giving photos more richness and depth.Sepia-tones: If you want to give your color or black-and-white photo an antique look, then use your photo-editing software to create a duotone (two-color picture). If your original photo is color, youll first have to convert it to greyscale. Then select duotone and choose your two colors (brown shades are the most c ommon for this effect). Sharpen: Use this to add focus to a blurry photo as the final step before saving. Enhancing Your Digital Photos If you have plans to use your newly-edited digital photos in a scrapbook, slideshow, or another digital project, then you may wish to jazz them up with colorization, captions, airbrushing, or vignettes. Enhancement Tips for Digital Photos ColorizationHave you ever wondered how your 19th-century great, great-grandfather may have looked in color? Or perhaps you want to see how that old black-and-white photo would look with a few touches of color- a pink bow here and a blue dress there. If your photo-editor is fairly full-featured, its easy to find out! Begin with a black-and-white photo.Using a Selection tool Lasso), select an area of the image that you wish to add color to. The Magic Wand can also be used for this step, but it requires a bit of technical knowledge and practice to use with black-and-white photos.Once the area is selected, go to the tint or color-balance controls and alter the color level values.Experiment until you get the desired effect.Repeat these steps for each area of the picture you wish to colorize.Colorizing photos can get a lot fancier than what weve detailed above, with techniques such as channel-splitting and transparent layers, plus tips for using the Magic Wand for selecting photo areas. Adding Captions If youve spent any time going through an ancestors collection of largely unlabeled photos, youll understand why we say that you owe it to your descendants (and other relatives) to properly label all of your digital photos. Many photo-editors offer a caption option which allows you to actually embed a caption within the header of JPEG or TIFF format files (known as the ITPC standard), allowing it to be transferred directly with the picture, and be read by the majority of graphics software programs. Other photo information that can be embedded with this method includes keywords, copyright info, and URL data. Most of this info, with the exception of the caption in some photo software, is not displayed with the photo but is stored with it and can be accessed under the photos properties by almost any user. If your photo editing software supports this feature, it can usually be found under Add Caption or File - Info. Check your help file for details. Creating Vignettes Many old photos have soft-edged borders, called vignettes. If your photos dont, its an easy effect to add. The classic vignette shape is an oval, but you can get creative and use other shapes such as rectangles, hearts, and stars. Or you can create a free-hand vignette, following the irregular outline of the subject- as in a portrait.Select an image with plenty of background around the subject. You need this to allow room for effective fading. Use the Selection tool in the shape of your choice (rectangular, oval, etc.), adding the feather option to feather the edges of your selection by 20 to 40 pixels (experiment to find the amount of fading which looks best for your photo). Then drag out the selection until you encompass the area you want to start the blend. The line at the edge of your selection will eventually be at the midway point of your faded edges (in other words, pixels on both sides of the line youve created will be feathered). Use can also use the Lasso selection tool if you wish to create an irregular border. Under the Selection menu choose Invert. This will move the selected area to the background (the part you wish to remove). Then select delete to cut this remaining background from the picture. Some photo-editing programs offer an easy one-click option for adding vignette borders, as well as other fancy frames and borders. Using these strategies, you can save family photographic heirlooms and create a historical record that can be shared digitally and in print.

How Your Freelance Writing Career Is Impacted By Blogging

How Your Freelance Writing Career Is Impacted By Blogging Writers have their own brand to build, and just like any other brand, they are encouraged to have a website with a blog. But other brands, and their blog writers, don’t make their living writing. The techniques and practices they use to promote their product or service use writing as a method. What about freelance careers, whose writing is the product? Can blogging hurt your freelance writing career opportunities? What Happens To Your Freelance Writing Career When You Blog? via @JulieNeidlingerThis is a topic near and dear to me, and it popped up on my radar both experientially (what was happening to me) and through the discovery of other writers suggesting that writers should not be blogging. There seems to be a two-pronged way of looking at this, and I want to clarify it before delving any deeper: Blogging for yourself and your own brand. Blogging as a writing format, in general. I’m going to approach it using both. Blogging Uses Up Creative Energy One of the main reasons I’ve seen writers suggest that blogs are a bad idea for writers is that they take up time and creativity that you should be devoting to your clients and big projects. Is spending time on creativity for your own blog detracting from devoting it to your clients?Do you ever feel like you've used up your allotted words for the day? It might be easier to slap out a long blog post than work on your next book chapter, and you might find that by writing blog posts, you successfully avoid doing the real work and also avoid feeling guilty about it. All the blog posts in the world aren’t going to help you get that other writing done! I found myself recently telling a friend that when I spend all day writing for clients, I don’t feel like writing for myself at the end of the day. â€Å"I’ve used up all the words allotted me for the day.† The reverse can be said. For some writers, there is a limited amount of writing energy, and if you have client work that needs to be done, you shouldn’t use it all up on blogging for yourself. Summation: Spending a lot of time and energy on your own blog will make a dent in the writing you’re able to give to your clients or your serious writing projects. Find a balance or a schedule if you must do both, and be aware of the danger. Guest Blogging Can Take Up Time I’m not going to devalue the importance of guest blogging. Getting your posts on successful blogs is a fantastic way to get your writing seen. You know the drill on that. However...there may, if you are successful, come a tipping point where you have garnered all the attention and audience you’ll get with that method. At what point will you turn to the pay model and act like a freelance writer, offering to write great content but for pay? Are you even thinking along that line? If a huge chunk of your billable time is devoted to blogging for free for other guest blogs, your income will take a hit. If you’re already getting the traffic and recognition you can get, devoting your writing energy to someone else’s blog may no longer make sense. Or, at the very least, you may need to reduce the amount of free guest posts you offer. One good judge is if your inbox is being flooded with requests to write guest posts. Thin that deluge out by requesting payment. Do guest blog. And do be ready to start transitioning over to accepting payment for your writing. Transitioning from free guest posting to paid blog writing means: Learning to accept some people will make known their surprise that you ask for payment now. Understanding that your go-to guest post sources may not always happily transition to paying for what they used to get for free. Realizing your paid client roster will, over time, be completely different from your guest posting roster. Pursuing and accepting clients you’ve never guest posted for. You will have a transition time where you still have some guest posting while new clients are being asked to pay. Many of my writing clients have seen my previously free writing elsewhere, and ask if I’d like to write for them. I respond promptly and professionally, indicating my rate. Some respond back. Some don’t. That’s how freelance writing works. The main question, as a freelance writer, is to try and be aware at what point you’ve established yourself enough to no longer need the validation of guest blogging and transition to receiving an income. Summation: Guest blogging is an excellent way to get momentum behind a freelance writing career, because you build a name for yourself and your writing. However, at some point, you have to transition to getting paid for your writing, and it’s difficult if you’ve built relationships solely on free guest posting.Suggested Reading: How To Make Money Blogging How To Make A Living Blogging 12 Signs You’re Underselling Your Freelance Writing Services 5 Steps To Make Your Freelance Clients Love Your Writing What You Say May Turn People Away Depending on your blog, your approach, or what you espouse, you might say things on your blog that resound with your audience but turn off potential freelance clients. I’m not saying to water down your content and fill it with caveats- there’s a place for controversial blog posts. And, in a world full of people who seem to want to be offended about something, you simply can’t account for everyone. Some people will never be your client if you’re doing your duty as a blogger. As a freelance writer, should you care if what you blog  turns some clients away?However, there are examples of people who blog in a way that seems to take delight in aggravating readers, or being offensive for offensive’s sake. Purposefully being a jerk on your blog will have an impact on your freelance writing if clients see your blog, particularly if your name is on the copy you write for those clients (ghostwriters may have a bit more leeway if the client doesn’t care what you say on your own time since your name is not associated with them). Just know that what might win you accolades on your blog or get you attention, because of a caustic or combative style, may not get you clients. There’s no guarantee, either way, how what you say will affect whether or not clients will seek you out to write for them, or whether they’ll look at your body of work and decide they want someone else to do the work. Summation: Everything you write illustrates your style, your voice, your capability, your strengths, and your weaknesses. It shouldn’t keep you from writing. It just means being aware that some clients will or won’t like it. Blogging Is An Online Activity Blogging is part of the Internet. Before there was Internet, there was no blogging. This seems obvious, but the point here is that anyone who is old enough to remember concentration levels, researching, and writing prior to the Internet will understand how the research and rewarded components of blog writing might affect other writing. For example, blog posts filled with images, quotes, outside links, embedded social posts, and so on are considered good form. To get these things, you are required to adopt a research and work habit that includes surfing the Web, social networks, Internet searches, and all sorts of distracting activity that can technically be needed but can also technically be a reduction in concentration. Writing projects that require long periods of concentration and different research are going to be foreign to bloggers who have been consistently been rewarded for different work habits. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows is an eye-opener in this area, showing that the Internet can decrease our ability to focus and concentrate for long periods of time. If your freelance writing clients demand more of you than a single blog post and ask you to create content from sources not online, you’ll face some challenges in both your ability to change how you research and to concentrate. If you’ve only known the Internet and have always relied on it, instead of older forms of research or writing with a typewriter or longhand, this point may be hard to validate or understand. But to old fogies like me, it isn’t. I’m highly aware of a diminishing ability to concentrate compared to my writing and work prior to the ubiquitousness of the Internet. I need to find as many routes to reducing my online time as I can, and if that means shaving back my own personal blogging or reducing the amount of blogging clients I take in favor of other writing projects, so be it. Summation: Blogging rewards research and writing behavior that don’t serve longer or more traditional forms of writing well. It may be tough to relearn how to research and concentrate for longer or more involved writing projects. Blogging Has Its Own Writing Style I can freely admit that focusing solely on blogging has done damage to my ability to create other forms of writing. Though I’ve been blogging for more than a decade, it’s only the last four years where that blogging has been my â€Å"day job† and the approach and focus has been different. Where I used to blog on a variety of topics for a personal audience (for fun) using humor or rants or fiction or poetry, the blogging I do now is decidedly of a different formula. There are headings. There are subheadings. There are: Bullet points Lists Pull quotes Bullet points Yes, bullet points. There are thesis statements in powerful introductions, supporting facts, and all of the reasonable teachable approaches to direct, clear copy that ultimately has to sell the reader on something. And, unless I’m writing a planned series, blog posts are short- even the longest blog posts of 2,000–4,000 words are not comparable to longer writing projects found elsewhere. Lovely, if that’s the kind of freelance writing you are focusing on. Less lovely if you also want to try your hand at different styles of writing. Something similar happened after several years of working as a newspaper reporter; I approached everything as if it were a newspaper article. If you become really good at the blogging format and develop the habits and systems that make it possible to write a post on any topic to fit any headline under any time crunch, that’s fantastic blogging. If you are able to twist your content to fit an audience that you’re selling to, again: fantastic blogging. But those same abilities will probably get in the way of trying your hand at creative writing or other types of freelance writing. As it is, when I sit down to do non-blog writing, I have a very difficult time not slipping into the blogging habits and churning out a three-point outline with facts and some bullet points and a call to action at the end. You can’t bullet-point your way to the end of a short story, though I often find myself thinking it would be easier to just drop a bullet list in rather than take the time to write it out in depth in such moments. And, because I’m used to how writing 2,000 words feels, everything I write tends to fit into that sort of rhythm. I seem to have learned to truncate thoughts, words, and explanations in a way that will ultimately fit that word count. When I want to write longer work for other projects and clients, it’s a real struggle; things seem to come out in 2,000 word chunks that don’t always segue well. What works great for blogging doesn’t work great elsewhere. Non-blogging clients will have their own style guides and preferences that may look nothing like a proper blog post and it will require you to work against your good blogging habits and proven blogging writing systems. Summation: If you want to do freelance writing outside of the blogging realm in different writing styles, some of the same habits that have made you a great blogger will work against you.Recommended Reading:  What A Newspaper Reporter Can Teach You About Blogging When it comes to breaking the blogging writing style, there are three ways to approach it. 1. Branch out with purpose. Write a different format/genre, and submit that writing somewhere that isn’t a blog. Get it in front of the eyes of a client, editor, or audience that isn’t blogging. Even if they are critical, it’s how you’ll understand what blogging methods you need to shed to make your writing work elsewhere. In some cases, you may not be paid much (or at all) for certain types of submissions, but if your goal is to try your hand at writing successfully beyond blogging, there is still merit in the editorial and critique process you’ll go through. 2. Take writing classes. Learn about other forms of writing. Go to writer’s conferences. Take writing classes online or in person. Read books about writing. In other words, meet and understand the writing world outside of blogging. I know it’s so tempting to stay in blogging (believe me, I know), but if you really want to do freelance writing beyond your own blog or blogging clients, you’ll have to learn a new writing language. 3. Set non-blogging writing goals. Set a goal to write something that has nothing to do with your blog or blogging. Maybe you’ll start a magazine or self-publish a book. Or maybe your goal will simply be one of starting each day using writing prompts and doing some creative writing exercises. Whatever it is, practice not blogging as part of your daily writing. If there was a recommended daily allowance for writing, make sure you have a well-balanced writing diet. How Blogging Makes You A Better Writer Despite all I’ve mentioned above, blogging can still help you be a better freelance writer as long as you don’t let the negatives overpower the potential. If you’re a serious blogger, you’ve acquired some skills that can help your other freelance writing projects. For example: 1. You write regularly. I’m participating in the James Patterson Masterclass just for some writing fun, and one of the things I found interesting was the difficulty some students expressed at the idea of writing every day. That’s old hat for me, at this point, and so when Patterson says write for an hour, write several thousand words, I think â€Å"is that all?† If you’re blogging seriously, you’re doing this already. 2. You learn to deal with feedback. Blogging (and then sharing on social media) means you’re immediately aware of what people think of your writing and your ideas. There is very little separation between you and the people you are writing to. While feedback and critique can be tough, it’s how you get better at writing. And because blogging allows for instant feedback, you can get better writing right away. 3. You learn to write when you don’t want to. Bloggers know how to write when they don’t feel like it, because there are deadlines to be met and topics to be covered no matter what. Writers often fall into the trap of waiting for inspiration before writing, but freelance career writers don’t have that luxury. You have to find ways to beat writer’s block and get moving.

Poetry Project Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Poetry Project - Essay Example Prince sun, as he is described calls her wife, who is always busy shining at night in full, quarter or half. As they sit together, the take stock of their children who include Jupiter, the beloved eldest son, their daughter Saturn, whom they realize that she has grown to become a woman now (Leonora, para 1-5). While they sit and discuss about their family, prince sun takes a roll call of everyone while her princess, the moon sits beside him with her luminous flame shining brightly. Finally, the family re-unites and engages in song and dance, singing merrily with joyful spirit and unity. Doomsday is a science fiction poem that talks about astronomy, it talks about an eclipse that is about to happen with devastating consequences on the human race. It explains a time when the planet earth is headed for a collision with the red dwarf. The South African astronomer makes dire calculations; he decides to make a space ark that would be helpful in saving a handful of the human beings that will survive the collision (Pettit, para 1-2). In the first poem, several characteristics make the poem fit perfectly in the science fiction genre, first, the entire poem describes the solar system as a family of the sun, the moon and their planets as children. According to the family’s description by the author, the reader is left to imagine the kind of picture, â€Å"The princess who’s always shining at night in full, quarter or half† (line 2, stanza one). In the second poem, the author also makes a description of events happening when the earth is headed for a collision with a red dwarf, with pending dire consequences on the human race. The author explains, â€Å"Our home earth was headed for total devastation, a renegade red dwarf star put us in an ominous situation† (line 2-3, stanza one). This poems are interesting with full of vivid imaginations about the picture presented from the given descriptions, the make one to travel into mental

Cold War and Consumerists Mass Culture Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Cold War and Consumerists Mass Culture - Essay Example . The constraints resulting from World War Two and Great Depression led to a frustrated consumerism situation even more than the capitalist system rejection. The new consumerism had led most Americans and policy makers to believe that the under consumption situation in the country was the main cause of the slump. The government policy after the war had encouraged mass purchasing power instead of coming up with measures to equalize the wealth distribution. Consumer society had become a positive communism answer during the cold war. Despite the relations between freedom and consumption in these years, consumerism of the post war era was domesticated rather than hedonistic. It focused more on the nuclear family and suburban homes (Chafe 107). The period between 1960 and 1980 witnessed a number of challenges and changes making the consumer society stronger than ever. Among the challenges included the counterculture challenge on consumerism premises. The specter scarcity brought into question the cornucopia performance upon which the consumer society depended on. The consequent of this challenge was that consumption ended up being more ubiquitous. The socially and individualistic fragmenting consumerism existing today is believed to be rooted on the critique of consumerism that took place in 1960’s. The countercultural figures critiqued idealized and conformity indicates that most Americans preferred to achieve the authenticity through consumption (Breines and Breines 78). Consumerism began to modify its mass production practices in favor of segmented and flexible production in the demographically distinct markets. Consumerism has since then become adoptable to the hip and green. A good example of this is the energy situation crisis in 1970’s when politicians considered the shortage as being as a result of over production. This was rebuked as being naysayers. Consumerist trends toward fragmentation and individualistic consumptions have accelerated in the recent years leading to market triumphant. The resulting radical faith in the market virtues led to politicians to put moral gloss on the market culture unfettered growth in the 1980s. Consumerism also helped in the integration of the diversity of the inhabitants youth mass culture and cynical marketers through the equal division of multicultural segmented demographic units. This led to the shift from a spirited and integrative public popular culture to an increasingly solipsistic and privatized commercial culture in the early twentieth century (Bloom and Breines 142). Consumerist during this era adopted an ideological medal that adopted an unquestioning approach towards the production uses. This resulted to an increase in self-conscious ness in the manipulation