Blog Reflection

     During the past year of writing and reading blog posts about so many different books, I've learned a lot of new things, and read more books than I can remember. It was hard to maintain such a vigilant reading schedule to be able to finish one book every week, but it was rewarding in that it taught me a lot about what kinds of books I like, and what kinds of books I don't, among other things.
     I learned a lot about myself as a reader throughout this year, such as: learning that I liked sci-fi a lot, learning that I liked fantasy a little, and learning that long books can be read really fast if I put my mind to it. This will help me in my life, because I will find more enjoyment in reading than I have before this year, because now I know what books I like. I also learned that the more I like a book, the faster I finish it.
     Writing online is different from writing in a notebook, because pretty much anyone can read it without necessarily knowing you, and you wouldn't know if someone were to read it. Also, in a notebook, for me, it's harder to write down what I want to write down, only because of the limited amount of space and my bad penmanship. Online, I have an unlimited amount of space and perfect penmanship to work with, so the only thing I have to worry about is what I'm writing.
     Writing online, especially anonymously, can be liberating in that you can write whatever you want and not have to think about the consequences. There is nothing that I can mention that is necessarily limiting about writing online, although the liberation that writing online provides can be used for bad things, like cyber bullying or something along those lines.
     I think that it depends on the person whether or not they are real online or not, and where they are posting on the internet. For instance, if I'm on Facebook, I'm pretty much myself, because I know just about everyone that is friends with me on Facebook, but on a site where I know no one, I may not be myself. For me, it really depends on how many people I know, because I might feel uncomfortable acting normal in a group of strangers.
     Teenagers definitely abuse the freedom that sites such as Facebook provide us. We type things we wouldn't say to people's faces, mostly mean things. This is a bad thing, because it can make people feel really bad about themselves, and might push them over the edge. For instance, there was this Irish girl who came to America, and went to high school here, but was cyber bullied by so many people that she eventually committed suicide.
     I can't really imagine myself keeping up THIS blog, but I can imagine myself creating a new one. It would probably be about something like video games or movies.

Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson

     I recently read the book "Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson. It is about a being named Joe on Jupiter, who is truly the mind of Ed Anglesey, a man on a space station in orbit of the planet. Ed Anglesey is crippled and does not have control over anything but his head and arms, and so he uses Joe, an experimental life form that was created to live on Jupiter, who has full use of his body.
     Ed Anglesey used Joe to escape from reality. I can relate to this in that when I play video games, I fins my own space to do as I please outside of the real world, and I don't have to think about anything else when I'm doing it. This helps me cope with real world situations, because they don't weigh down on me as much as they would if I perpetually thought about them.
     Ed doesn't exactly evolve over time throughout the book, but the reader's idea of him does. This happens throughout the narrations of someone studying why one instrument used to put Ed's mind into Joe's keeps shorting out. In the beginning, I thought that it was because Ed was scared of something on Jupiter, because the person said so. But throughout the book the ideas of Ed and what he fears and does not fear change drastically, until they are almost exactly opposite of how they started.