Is this justice?

Hello readers.

Today I want to confront you with a topic I personally found very shocking and which often appears in the latest news. The topic I want to write about is "Freedom of speech and expression".

Charlie Hebdo

"100 lashes if you don't die of laughter!"

Charlie Hebdo is a weekly published satire newspaper containing cartoons,  reports, polemics and jokes. It was attacked twice because of it's controversial Muhammad cartoons. The second time it was attacked by three people reuslting in 12 people dying including Charbonnier, the editor of the newspaper, and several contributers. 

Since the attack, people from whole France and all over the world protest against self-justice because of "religious insult".

Raif Badawi

Raid Muhammad Badawi, born on he 13th of January in 1984 is a Saudi Arabian blogger of the former and closed down website called "Free Saudi Liberals". He already was arrested in 2012 for his public opinions, "insulting" the islamic religion on his website. In fact, he praised equality of religion. He subsequently was sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes. Later he was resentenced to ten years in prison, 1000 lashes and additionally he was fined around 200.000€. 

The punishment is going to be carried out through 50 lashes a week, overall 20 weeks. The first session took place on the 9th of January 2015, public for everyone in front of the Jeddah mosque. A part of his family turned away from him and left him to his justice. His wife, he has been married to since 2002 and their three children fleed to Canada to support him through this time. Even though, wounds caused by these lashes cannot heal within a week, the procedure will take place every friday until finished.

Opinion

I have to admit, I am not that kind of person who reads the news every day but these two reports really shocked me. Why is sharing your own opinion against the law, resulting into self-justice by other people. Everyone has the right to share their opinions to the world, whether others agree with you or not. People shouldn't judge someone because of their opinion.

On the left side you can see a picture saying "Raif Badawi is Charlie". It means that everyone, including the punished blogger Raif, should have the right to share their opinion through writing a public message.

I now want to encourage you to raise your voice and help stopping this inhuman punishment by signing one of the many petition on the net to stop this procedure.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Free-Raif-Badawi/397956733638642

https://www.change.org/p/free-and-safeguard-the-liberal-saudi-raif-badawy-no-600-lashes

https://campaigns.amnesty.org/actions/write-for-rights-raif-badawi

Disney Movies - Old vs. New

Hello readers!

Do you remember all the old Disney movies, which were drawn by hand? They looked much more appealing to me than nowadays CGI movies. Don't get me wrong, I like the looks of Frozen and such movies, but I really prefer the old fashioned movies and their appearance back then, when they were drawn by hand. You could see the details, all the effort and the love they put into their work.

What is CGI?

CGI means Computer Generated Imagery and is a program that produces 3D graphics used for movies, video games, commercials, videos, simulators and visual effects. It is easier to use such a program for movie producers because they can model their characters, landscapes, fur etc. without having to draw every frame on their own.

Old vs. New

When I was a child I used to watch series or movies, especially from Disney, which were still hand drawn such as Pinocchio, Bambi, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Cinderella. Nowadays you only get CGI series and movies to see on TV or in cinema. I find this really sad. 

On the old movies you could see how the background was drawn by hand and how just the characters were drawn frame by frame. It looked a lot better than nowadays CGI movies such as Frozen, Tangled or Brave. They look just terrible in my opinion. It might look nice to see every piece of hair and fur, but the love is missing.

Just look at these two examples below. You can clearly see how the background images are drawn by hand and that just the character themself are drawn on computers. This is real dedication and effort.

Pinocchio

Bambi

And now compare the two following ones with the ones above. Hair and fur are so realistic but yet, not satisfying to the eye. All of it is abstract, in other words, every bit of anatomy is lost. She shape of the body or the dimension of the eyes are so disproportionate that it doesn't even look real. The only thing that look realistic are the structures of the hair, fur and clothing.

Tangled

Frozen

I really love the two stories of Tangled and Frozen, but I don't like the CGI effects and the looks of the characters. They look realistic but yet unrealistic due to fake proportions. Maybe they just want to "hide" the disproportion by making the characters look all fancy, who knows. But after all, I still don't like the character design.

You still can enjoy both, old and new, as much because it doesn't affect the story after all. That's something Disney always sticked to. :)

My Granny's doll house

Hey there.

I recently discovered my granny collecting magazines with instructions and components for crafting your own "Doll's house". It is a series from eaglemoss comming out with a new magazine and more components every week costing around 10€ each. My granny loves to have all kinds of dolls, she always has been. She even has 50 cm tall porcelain dolls in her flat, sitting on a wooden bench. They look really charming and fit perfectly into the rooms.

General

The series provides a magazin including instructions on how to build up the house with additional information about the components (where they belong to and side storys) and always a few more pieces for the house such as furniture, wooden stripes for the floor or wallpapers. Every magazine has a different piece of furniture etc. On the backside of the magazin is a preview of the next episode as well.

Building

Kitchen and wooden floor

The house consists of a kitchen, livingroom, bedroom, closet and a childs room. All the parts are very detailed and except from the furniture you need to craft the rest on your own such as the floor or the curtains. The series provides fabric or the stripes for the wooden floor though. 

To guide your way through this procedure, a sheet for the tiles in the kitchens floor, for example, are drawn on a piece of paper, so you can just follow it step by step when glueing each tile onto the paper. This will be glued onto a stable and thick piece of cardboard. The same will we done on the walls with the wallpapers.

Furnishing

Every piece of furniture is very detailed. Just to name an example, the bed is premade and has a matress and pillow already on it.  The quilt covers can be seperately added to the bed. Carpets, the fabric for the curtains, towels and more are all adjusted to colour and pattern of the furnitures coating right away. Cutlery, books and even a tiny hat are provided to give the doll's house a lively atmosphere. Additionally, you can also add lamps for each room to make it come alive even more. It is even possible to open every drawer seperately.

Every piece consists of realistic materials (no plastic!) as in, wooden chairs and tables, woolen fabric for carpets etc., glass containers and ceramic tiles, toilet and bathtub. It is indeed very lovely.

Opinion

In my opinion, even though it might take long to collect and build the house on your own, it is really worth all that effort. The costs are not too high for what quality you get from it and it is a nice hobby to have for your free time. 

When someones has a hand for crafting, the free time needed and a lot of patience to go through this procedure, it is definitely worth it getting such a collecting series started. Once you are finished you will be all proud because it is your work, but you need to be very dedicated and put a lot of time into it for it to look pretty. 

I will totally look forward to helping my granny builing her own doll house once she has all the pieces needed. :)

Her name is Alice.

Hello there.

Today I want to introduce a game to you I currently play and fell in love with. The game I want to write about is called "Alice: Madness Returns". I'm quite sure that everyone at least heard of the fairytale "Alice in Wonderland" once in their life. In this game, the story is a completely converse to the story everyone knows. It also is the sequal to the first game "American McGee’s Alice", although you cannot notice one bit of missing story.

General

The game was published on the 16th of June in 2011 and can be played on several plattforms, such as Windows, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. It can be classed into the genres Jump 'n' Run and Action-Adventure and its theme is horror and of course Alice in Wonderland. It is fully dubbed and available in 5 languages; German, French, English, Spanish and Italian. 

Gameplay

Weapons

The game is played in a 3rd person view, which means that you see the character itself, jumping around and fighting. Alice can float with her unique and from chapter to chapter adjusted dresses to each platform. She has the ability to shrink and then find hidden paths which lead to additional puzzles and memories of her life. There are collectibles as well, for example, bottles with memories or pig snouts. They are not important for the actual storyline though.

A few dresses, each representing one unique chapter

She has 4 weapons available to fight with. The Vorpal Blade, Hobby Horse, Teapot Cannon and the Pepper Grinder. These also reflect her being a human being and her child like attitude. Additionally she has two more tools to defend herself with. The Clockwork Bomb, which is essential to some puzzles and the Umbrella, which can knock back an attack from enemies. Through her journey, she collects teeth to upgrade her weapons and has red roses as currency of her life. 

Story

You play Alice, a girl who lost her family by a fire in their house and who just left a mental institution. This made her traumatised and she now lives in an orphanage and is under therapy to handle the happenings in her past. One day when she left the orphanage, she comes back into contact with a nurse from the mental institution, causing visions and memories which makes her jump back into the world of wonders.

Mad Hatter

There she meets her old friend the Cheshire Cat, telling her how the current situtaion is and that the wonderland is changing and falling apart. In 6 chapters, with transitions and stories about her current real life causing her hallucinations, she finds out bit by bit what are causing these visions and in fact, they are just reproductions of her influented mind from her therapist (the Mad Hatter) who wants to just distort her mind so he can sell her as human doll, and many other girls before her, for prostitution. During her journey, prostitution and doll like appearance is always slightly influenced by abstract and naked statues in the game.

Enemies

She is facing and fighting a lot of bloody creatures during this journey, which reflect her real life situations. They mostly look like black slime with doll faces popping out but there are many other creatures such as Samurai Wasps, Eyepots, Snarks, Canon Crabs and several more. 

Each of them have their own way of fighting and attacking. Some of them just make use of ranged, magical attacks or physical attacks when others are using defence as their weapon such as being invicible, immortal or hiding for a specific time in the ground. In these situations you have to wait for your time to attack and take them out strategically by causing damage when they are vulnerable. 

Sometimes there are more than just one enemy at a time, causing a lot of damage. In these times you have to make Alice dodge and avoid attacks. When the life gaudge is down to one rose, she can fall into hysterie causing massive damage for a short time. In  this mode everything turns white except from the blood on her dress and her weapon equipped. Blood is also purposfully sprinkling from the enemies every time Alice hits them. After you killed enemies in the status of hysteria, you won't get the full reward for this fight though.

Eyepot

Colossal Ruin

 

 

Daimyo Wasp

Summary

This game is a very disturbing but yet interesting and thoughtful game which has a complete contrast to the original storyline. It is definitely worth playing and leave you in thought and addiction for a very long time. With 16 hours of gameplay time, it is indeed a very successfully made platform game. By the wonderfully illustrated and themed areas which appear in every chapter as different type, such as being underwater or in the oriental world, you can tell that the game was made entirely out of dedication and enjoyment.

If I have caught your interest in this game, I will link a video down below in which you make yourself a better picture of how this game actually looks like, it is a gameplay trailer. I will also add a song by Shinedown called "Her Name Is Alice" which I find very fitting, it tells the story of Alice in Wonderland and was originally made for the movie itself.

Have fun listening and watching!

What a good blog looks like

Hello readers :)

To give you an overview and so that you can skip to the topics you find more interesting I will list a "table of contents" right after. Thereby you can skip parts you might not be interested in and since this is going to be a VERY long post, I recommend scrolling through and read what catches you the most.

Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. Type of Blog
3. Consistency of blogging
4. Consistency of writing
5. Design
6. Variation and choice of topics
7. Language 
8. Emotions
9. Closing words & summary

Instruction

I have been given the task to take a look on a few blogs which were <good> from last semesters and then analyse them and explain the parts which were successfully done by that person and which I could also make use of.

What is a blog?

A blog, also called Weblog, is a website on the internet which is a (mostly) public journal or diary, in which the so-called Web-logger, short Blogger, posts  most of the time short articles about the daily life, specific topics such as news, travelling, food, art etc. or simply a bit of all of these in a regular appearing time.

After reading several articles from other bloggers and their stories I thought that Blogging can be categorized into simple points: 

• Type of Blog
• Consistency of Blogging
• Consistency of Writing
• Design
• Variation and choice of topics
• Language 
• and most importantly Emotions

Type of Blog

First of all, to set up a good blog basis, a blogger needs to find a good blog type. This means, the blogger has to choose a specific direction he wants to write about. If a blogger, for example, writes about the daily life, then he's not likely going to write about philosophical articles about how an earthquake is produced and what he thinks of it. 

If you want to be a half way successful blogger, you should choose a blogging

route you want to go for. What do you want to write about? What are your interests and what do you care about the most? Does your topics sound appealing to your readers and catch their interest? What is your intention, in other words, what do you want to reach with your posts? 

If you are more likely to be a philosophical blogger, then ask yourself; Do I share opinions with other people and can I actively implement them in my posts? Can I give examples of situations happened in the news, daily life, documentaries, which might be worth mentioning?

Once decided, you should plan how often, how much and how detailed you are going to write. This makes it easier for blogger and reader. For example, if you blog about travelling and you travel for a longer time, then its more likely going to be "every one to two months I write one post over one place" - Blog. This makes it easier for a blogger in 2 things; the post can be detailed AND long. 

If you are going to go for a "reviewers blog type", then of course it is expected that the person will blog frequently but short about 1 topic.

Consistency of blogging

A blogger should have a consistent, in other words, regular time of writing and posting their articles. When a blogger has intentionally blogged for a specific amount of time, it is expected from readers that the posts appear frequently and in a consistent period of time. This means, that when a blogger and writer has a regular publishing date(s) every week, people will more likely be hooked and come back to their blog.

People are interested even more in the bloggers thoughts when the articles appear in a consistent way, because they can come back and say "Oh I loved this article. This blogger seems to have a regular posting date. I'll have a look again next week to see what else has been posted in the meantime." 

Consistency of writing

Most importantly the writing is what counts in a blog. Having a blogger going off-topic during their writing is the worst he can do. A blogger has to be consistent when writing an article. Imagine a blogger talking about Venice. Sightseeing, holiday, enjoyment, the food and then he writes about how great the beach of Costa Rica was on his last trip. I mean, yes, of course the beach is nice there and it might belong to the topic travelling, but it does not belong to actual topic.

Design

The worst a blogger can do is by not having a perfectly set up blog appearance. Imagine how awful it must be to read an article on white with light yellow font, or a font that is so abstract you cannot even figure out what letters they are. It is also important that the choices you make in design will reflect your type of blog. 

Preferably I would always suggest smooth colours, blending into each other that can be combined such as beige background with black or light grey font and rosé coloured headings and eventually a tint of green for the subheadings. As a background picture there should of course pop up some flowers and decal. This combination would make a good look for a florist blogger, don't you think? Image a florist using black background colour and a background picture with air balloons and the paragraphs are tinted in rainbow colours while the articles he posted is about flower. This does not fit. It actually reminds more of a child's birthday party.

Use pictures as well but not too many to catch the readers attraction the most. Pictures have the function to underline the text, not overtake it. 

Variations and choices of topics

If a blogger is choosing a more daily type of blog, it might get boring for the readers in a while to always just read about what happened on the bus, the street, in school or in the restaurant. "Oh, there was an elder lady coming into the bus an nobody offered their seat. Some kids also were playing around with the handles so the bus driver complained to them. The bus was full and a young man couldn't get out in time because people blocked of the door. And oh, if i not mentioned yet, the ticket machine was broken."

If you talk explicit about that one day when the whole bus routine did not work out, write about how you offered the seat to the elder lady and how you eventually told the children to behave better and they might get hurt and how you told the people that they should step out of the bus for a second so people can get to their destination and how you was so kind to tell the bus driver that the ticket machine was broken. 

Let your actions of your daily life influence your posts and articles. This will not just make people think you're a good person, it will also help people realise that environment can be influenced and made better by being helpful. This will give your posts meaning and tell the readers your story.

Language

Two other important aspects are in which language you write and what audience you want to write for. A travel blogger who has been to Japan, Italy, Russia and the USA will more likely write his articles in English than in any other language, due to the language being accessible for everyone and it is easier to follow a blogger who travels a lot in English than in a language barely anyone knows. Since he has been to a lot of places it would just make sense in my opinion.

The way you write for your audience is of important manner. Let's have an example of a technic-interested blogger who writes a lot of computers. It would feel so weird for the reader to read a formal written article about engineering when you have no clue what he is talking about. Of course if he writes for an audience that are also technic-freaks then it would fit, because they know what he is talking about but what if he wants to tutor people out there how all the part of computers work. It would be strongly recommended to write in a contemporary, modern way of writing. This will reach the audience better and make them understand everything as clear as possible. 

Therefore "Slang" is also an important factor. If a travel-blogger is writing about several different places, he will probably intentionally avoid slang words which might not be known by everyone to transmit his feelings and emotions better towards his audience that which he had when he was having his stay in one place. This leads to my next headline.

Additionally I also want to point out how important it is to check your words. Is their spelling correct? Does the word explain exactly what I want to say about my topic? Checking up words is important. 

Don't use too complicated and high-classed words that are far-fetched and not fitting your writing. It is more important that you write in a personal way for the readers. It gives the posts and articles more personality and make the reader not forced to think too hard.

Emotions

In the end, emotions are what people like. Adjectives is the mysterious word to achieve emotions. Everyone wants to describe and achieve specific feelings for the readers to have. Sometimes more and sometime less. Bloggers mostly tend to write in a way the reader receive a specific feeling of the situation the blogger experienced and understand the Bloggers' point of few. 

What does a blogger want to achieve when he writes about a story that was so tragic to him and very meaningful to his life? He wants to write a moving story about it. What does he want to achieve when he writes about how amazed he was by the last place he visited? Then of course he will more likely choose words such as thrilling, breathtaking, overwhelming, stunning, etc.

Using a variety of adjectives which explain the writers' point of view better is the key to successfully transmit feelings.

Closing words & summary

After a long time I have spent on this topic I finally want to conclude it. If you managed to read the whole post without falling asleep on your keyboard I would be very pleased. I hope I described my point of view about this topic as best as I could to give you some key points about how a good blog should look like. Maybe it will help you AND me, now all the essential parts are listed, to make your and my blog better. I will try my hardest to do so. But most of all, enjoy blogging!

As a short summary, I will summarise and list the most important points I interpreted through this post. 

• Choose your type of blog and stick to it.
• Consistant blogging and writing will attract more people.
• A nice design and a few pictures will catch the readers' eye, keep him hooked and spice up the text.
• Do not bore yourself and the reader by "mentioning" parts of your story and always talking about the same things. Use actions from yourself and let them influence the story.
• Make clear what audience you want to write for. Use widely known and clear vocabulary.
• Implement emotions to your text and make it come alive.

I wish you all good luck and success with blogging. Let creativity be with you!

Long time no see, huh?

Studying or learning a new language, in my case russian, is not easy - it is indeed very challenging. In addition to that, even more when you have lectures you need to study for. In Austria there is this law, that when you don't pass specific lectures, you can't keep on studying. This is called STEOP (Studieneingangs- und Orientierungsphase). It was made so students can have an "orientation" on what they are going to study and what it holds, in my opinion, it's a completely stupid rule. You can't just rely on one grade. It just destroys motivation completely and in fact even the whole education you was going for. Isn't this amazing? Isn't there enough pressure and stress caused by the parts you want to focus on yet?

However, the next 3 weeks are going to be the most stressful ones in my entire education by far and I'm not exaggerating.

As a student you don't or barely get handouts you can rely on for studying either. Nor do you get any proper teaching, in my opinion. It might sound rough but "studying" is not AT ALL what I expected it to be. Technically, by the amount I get taught in university, I could just buy a book and read it at home instead and study/learn in peace without pressure. 

Going to university turned out to be a very pressured, time clustered and beyond stressful time, which I can't endure proper. So much for  "Studying time is the best time of your life!"

If I ever had to decide again whether I go to university or working and additonally take courses and take my time, I would take the latter.

But not to completely ruin your day by my depression, have a picture.

Ho Ho Ho!

It's christmas time! Christmas songs, decoration and present all over the place. The time of year that goes by so fast and you find no time doing anything except the preparation for christmas. What did I do?

Presents

While I still was in Graz until the 18th of December, I had to get presents before driving home, since Graz has a lot more than my little town Steyr. My students home had problems, as so often, with the internet so I decided to get my shopping for presents done.

Depot - CityPark

I decided to go to the shopping center "CityPark", which is near my students home. Once arrived I already was clueless what to get. I discovered a nice decoration shop when I walked passed all the other shops and I decided to have a look in there. The shop is called "Depot" and is at the first floor or the shopping center. 

I was so surprised that they had so many neat things you can easily gift someone without having to worry if they'd like it or not, because they definitely would! They have all sorts of decorations starting from nicely decorated cups up to cushions and small but effective decoaration. It was the perfect store to find all the presents I needed, well most of them.

Since I wasn't done yet buying presents for everyone, I went to "Saturn" at the top floor and bought a few more things.

Unfortunatey there wasn't enough time to wrap them on my own and because I'm so lucky, I discovered a wrapping place which was all for free. The, as they called themselfs, fairies were really amazed by my presents and asked me straight away where I got them from, so I told them. I have a knack for presents :)

Decoration

Since I came home very late and my family didn't have much time either, we decided to decoarate the christmas tree just yesterday. My family is very fussy when it comes to decorating. Everything always looks spot on perfect and is always nicely decorated. The table has a different kind of tablecloth and fitting napkins with reindeers and other decoration on it. All the windows have christmas stickers on them and ornaments hanging down and a lot of athmospheric lights, like candles and holiday lights.

But back to the christmas tree. I couldn't be there when my family bought the christmas tree, but for an accident they bought a premium tree which was a little more expensive than a normal one. It is also a lot better looking than the normal ones.

Once the tree was settled we started decorating. First we started to spray the tree with artifical snow spray to give it a snowy look. We still have no snow yet, so it is nice to have the tree a bit white at least. Once that was done we continued with hanging up the fairy lights. The fairy lights are such a pain to get perfect onto the tree, especially when they are not one-ended. After a half hour we managed finally. Now we set the main clothing of the tree, we continued with the ornaments. My family tends to buy a few new ones every year, so our collection is quiet big. We have birds, reindeers, butterflies, angels, snowflakes, ornaments with glitter and of course some casual ornaments.

As always the tree turned out very nicely. I can't wait until tomorrow, because I really love seeing the happy faces when everyone unwrapped their presents. Last year we had way too many, but this year it's luckily not as much, because we had problems fitting them all under the tree.

Everyone a very merry christmas and enjoy being with your family!