rocksandy.rocks

Today’s assignment: leave comments on at least four blogs that you’ve never commented on before.

I’ve been a sucky neighbor. I haven’t commented on any blogs to date. I have been reading and liking and following and learning from other blogs, selfishly sucking it all in but failing to give anything back. I am going to blame Blogging 101 for keeping me busy at this point – but I promise to start being a better neighbor.

Ah, time. Sigh. I finally feel like I am getting somewhere with this thing. I found myself sad on Friday morning…wishing I didn’t have to go to work so I could work on my blog all day. I’m guessing that I’m not alone in getting sucked into it…?

I finally spent some quality time on the sites of my readers and easily found four blogs to comment on. However, I am cheating on the assignment again and only featuring three in the interests of time. This rocker chick is going to see Kid Rock and Foreigner (with Kelly Hansen from Hurricane  singing, yay!) tonight and only has until mid-afternoon to sit here in her pajamas and work on this stuff. I am determined to finish Day 9 and 10 before Monday!

Below is a bit about each of the three blogs I spent some time looking around and commented on.

Goddess Whispers – Musings of a Virtual Goddess by PrettyFlower Vale

This first blog features photography, specifically Second Life photography. A sort of spellbinding, relaxing existence radiates from these photos. They come with an easy description of the exotic and tempting world in which they are set…it’s a lovely place to visit. 

For those of you who are not familiar with it, Second Life is described on its website as “the largest-ever 3D virtual world created entirely by its users.”

PrettyFlower Vale is a virtual goddess who loves to explore virtual realms. She loves being a beautiful pointy-eared, winged faerie, but in a world where you can be anything you want to be, she has also been seen as a butterfly, cat, dinosaur, doe, merfaery, mermaid, and male faery.

This photo struck me immediately and is one of my favorites – I love that they are looking beautifully contemplative on a stack of giant books. I love the coloring – I love things in black and white contrast, and I am always drawn to silvery white. I love the look on PrettyFlower’s face and the gleam in her eye. That gorgeous hunk of a male faery is River, PrettyFlower’s male dollie avvie. 

I commented on a post entitled Paradise Art Colony at Perfect Paradise. It was a story involving a photo shoot, exquisite male model and all, in a Second Life artist community island (or sim, short for simulator, which is what SL regions are called) Perfect Paradise. PrettyFlower is a SL photographer – meaning she does basically everything in SL just like photographers do in reality (we could get deep into the meaning of reality here but you get what I mean) – finding lighting and posing and playing with filters. 

This magnificent creature is PrettyFlower’s model, Mac, patiently and quietly reflecting on a hammock in Perfect Paradise. PrettyFlower re-envisioned him as a pondering angel who had just dropped from heaven – you can see this on PrettyFlower Vale’s Flickr page too. 

May I go off on a tangent about photography? It has always baffled me how two people with a camera – both taking aim and pushing a button at what they see in front of them – can end up with vastly different photographs. One has depth and emotion and character and is mesmerizing in its scope, but the other is a flat picture that merely accurately records the scene. Is the camera seeing what the eye of the beholder is seeing, someone who who has an innate talent for seeing more than there is to see, or has a different way of seeing it? We all live in our own realities, right? But how do they get the camera to see that reality they are seeing? How are they are able to capture that extra element? For the most part I am one of those flatland photographers, occasionally coming up with a good one. But I wouldn’t say that the flat photographer isn’t seeing the depth, so maybe it’s just that they don’t know how to capture it…? Hmmm. 

When I read Goddess Whispers I get a glimpse of tranquility. It’s a calming and almost meditative distraction from all other things. It’s a good place to get to every so often.

Humsofsum by Summer-Tan, or Sum

Sum is “An artistically inclined edgy engineer in her early twenties that often ponders about questions on human nature and the meaning of life.” Such a clever blog site name. Humming is like letting it all out – sometimes when I’m at work I’ll stop and say “humhumhumhumhum” and it feels like a release of my pent-up busy-ness that helps me refocus.

Sum writes a lot – I admire her blog work-ethic! She has numerous pop culture media reviews – television, film, awards shows, red carpet – where she gives a thorough review and personal commentary. She has a really effective “About” page – very clear on who she is and what she blogs about, all laid out in an eye-pleasing manner. She makes it clear that she doesn’t just review pop culture – she will also “Muse about mind-boggling questions about humanity and life.”  And my favorite line of hers – she says she will “Expose you to Music (No music no life!).” Well put, Sum. 

She lays her current angst out there on a blog in the “Speak My Mind” category called Finding Mei: I Don’t Know. Her indecisiveness about her future is tormenting her. I don’t recall any such angst about my future at that age – was it because of my place in time in a different day and age? Did I forget? I certainly had no intention of going to college when I was 22 – I lived for the now and knew everything would work out somehow. I rarely see optimism in young people today – it makes me sad. But then I try to imagine growing up in the world over the past twenty years and I can’t. It’s hard enough to digest today’s world at age 50.

It also fascinates me that she recognizes that her self-esteem is suffering, because I’m pretty sure we never reflected about our self-esteem back in the ’80s. I will say that a sense of awareness seems to be settling upon the world in general. Is it the Age of Aquarius dawning? I see it as a good thing.

Sum invites us to join her in on her “… journey of self-discovery and finding my way back to self-love with serial postings tagged “Finding Mei.”  I plan on following her honest search and sending her some good energy along the way. 

Afunyythinghappenedwheniwaslearningmyself by whereshappy

Whereshappy is a hilarious “42 year old woman with the personality of a 16 year old girl.” I love that! She makes you LOL at just everyday stuff.

She says “My default mode is usually in the negative and I have to work hard to pull myself into the happiness of life.” There’s some relatable stuff here, like I Can’t Turn My Head to the Right. Like Sum, Whereshappy has an awareness that she recognizes and works with, and clearly finds the humor in it all. I like that. I’ll enjoy her amusing yet thought provoking writing.

This assignment was an excellent Blogging 101 element – thank you to the lesson planners! ;o)