Tag Archive for writing examples

This Week on Persephone: Silliness and Bones!

April 20, 2012 Writing
Writing Category

This week’s articles both had some really great discussion going on in the comments, so click through to Persephone Magazine to check it out and make sure to check out the rest of the article by my fellow writers. We’re got a smart bunch of ladies over there.

Positivity Challenge Week 15: Embracing Silliness

One of my fictional Positivity Mentors (that’ll be next week’s topic) is Phoebe from Friends. While her character may have been conceived and initially portrayed as the dumb blonde, the writers clearly saw that Lisa Kudrow could give them so much more than that and created one of the most interesting characters in television history. From her bouncing careers to her street smarts from being homeless, to the search for her birth father, and her carrying surrogate babies for her brother, Phoebe takes every challenge that life throws at her and hits it out of the park with a smile on her face. But the thing I love most about Phoebe? The fact that she unabashedly embraces silliness.

Recap: Bones, Episode 7.09, “The Don’t In The Do”

Scalping, academic publishing, baby blues, and blow-outs? It’s an all over the place episode of Bones, this week, and even Brennan ends up seeming kind of disgusted at the killer.

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Last Week on Persephone: Taking Changes, Bones, and Nick Offerman

April 15, 2012 Writing
Writing Category

Sorry about the late update this week (I’ll explain more in a post tomorrow). This is what I’ve been doing this week at Persephone Magazine.

Positivity Challenge Week 14: Putting Yourself Out There

We’re going to put all our hard work on positivity into action this week with a challenge that might push many of you outside of your comfort zones. This week, I want you to put yourself out there and try something new.

How does this relate to positivity? What’s your thought process when you decide not to try something new? Does it go something like this:

Oh, hey, here’s a cool event that I’d like to go to. But I don’t know anyone who’s going. Well, I could go by myself. But what if I get lost on the way there? And what if everyone there already knows each other? And I won’t have anyone to talk to. And they’ll look at me like I’m that weirdo loner person. And I’ll probably get there early and be even more awkward. You know, it’s just not worth going because it’s not it matters whether I go or not since no one I know is going. And I have lots of Game of Thrones to read, so, it’s just better all around if I just stay home. Yeah, good decision.

The amount of negative self-talk contained in a line of reasoning like that is astounding when you break it down.

Recap: Bones 7.08 “The Bump in the Road”

This week on Bones: An extreme couponer finds herself on the wrong end of a semi-truck (as in, underneath it), Brennan goes back to work, and Cam’s daughter finds a new love interest… in the lab. With bonus Tina Majorino!

A Night with Nick Offerman

When Nick Offerman entered the room in an unbuttoned American flag shirt, carrying a guitar, and did a victory lap around the room, I knew this was going to be an awesome night.
For those not familiar with Nick Offerman, he is best known as the libertarian, woodworking, curmudgeonly director of the Pawnee Parks Department on the NBC show Parks and Recreation. He recently had the opportunity to do a small tour of universities, testing out some stand-up and songs. I was lucky enough to snag a seat for Wednesday nights show at the University of Florida. In case you aren’t in one of the areas he’ll be visiting (there’s no schedule posted, but check your local universities… this gig was only announced about a week in advance), here’s a run down of what an evening with Nick Offerman is like.

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This Week on Persephone: Bodies and Bones

April 5, 2012 Writing
Writing Category

Positivity Challenge Week 13: Body Positivity

In this week’s Positivity Challenge, I tackle Body Positivity, which is one of the hardest things I’ve written about since I started the Positivity Challenge.

You may think that body negativity only affects you when you look in the mirror, but having a negative view of yourself is something that you carry around all the time. Having a negative view of your body or your appearance has a trickle-down effect. If you feel your shape is frumpy, you try to cover it up rather than dressing to flatter your curves. If you hate your hair, you won’t bother styling it or even drying it some mornings. The next time you look in the mirror, the person looking back confirms what you feel about yourself and so propels the negativity in a vicious circle. Even without looking at cases of diagnosed body dysmorphic disorder, some studies have shown that women in particular have a distorted view of their own bodies (which, of course, can then lead to BDD and eating disorders in severe cases). In a 2010 study, researchers found that the brains of the participants warped the size of their hands in their own mind, and researchers stated that the same warped view could be extrapolated to the rest of the body. In other words, body positivity is something we need to actively work for since our brains are naturally working against us.

Read more at Persephone.

Recap: Bones 7.07 “The Prisoner in the Pipes”

On a lighter note, the TV show Bones is back and that means my recaps are, too! And with a great episode, too, in “The Prisoner in the Pipes:”

In baby news, Booth convinces Sweets to use psychology tricks to try and talk Brennan into having a hospital birth. Sweets doesn’t want to take sides, but Booth plays the “but I thought you were a friend” card and Sweets is totally played because he just wants big brother Booth to accept him. When he pulls B&B in to do a “partner assessment” and asks a bunch of leading questions, he totally gives away the goat when he uses a totally hypothetical example of home birth vs. hospital birth. Brennan is rightly pissed and done listening to male opinions on where her daughter is born. She does provide a compromise to Booth, though… she’ll let their daughter be baptized. Every child needs mythology, she claims, which of course Booth takes objection to. Brennan points out how the whole Mary, Joseph, no room at the inn, manger birth was a pretty darn well plotted story.

Read more at Persephone.

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This Week On Persephone: Positivity and Fitness

March 29, 2012 Writing
Writing Category

This week on Persephone Magazine, I hit the three month mark of the Positivity Challenge.

Positivity Challenge Week 12: Get Out and Move!

Continuing in our effort to internalize positivity, this week I’m going to tackle a somewhat contentious topic: Exercise. In fact, I’m going to try and use the word exercise as little as possible. How about we call it “Movement”? Getting up and moving can be one of the hardest things to actually start doing, but the rewards can boost your positivity and mood in general more than anything other than pharmaceuticals practically.
You’re heard it before and you’ll hear it again after this: Exercise releases endorphins. Beyond the effects that physical fitness has on your body, the effects it has on your mood and mental health can be even more powerful. Some studies have shown that it can even make your brain process information more effectively. From personal experience, I can vouch for the boost in energy and mood that comes along with an increase in my level of activity. It’s really hard to know where to start, though, especially if you’re not already in a habit of getting some movement into your day.

The post has been getting a really great response. Writing about fitness is always kind of a touchy topic and I think I managed to strike a really nice balance. Share your thoughts at Persephone Magazine.

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Anthony Weiner and the Importance of Social Media Security (UPDATED)

June 1, 2011 Portfolio, Visual Alliance Media, Writing

Celebrities and Politicians are popular targets for online hacking and smear campaigns, but sometimes the “hack” involves less code-cracking and more forgetting basic online safety precautions. The unfolding story of WeinerGate is a key example of this.

Anthony Weiner, outspoken Democratic Representative from New York, has embraced Twitter in the same unique and colorful way he conducts himself on the house floor. Becoming the unofficial King of Hashtags, Weiner has used the format to connect with his followers in his own style: namely witty and barbed. Here are some prime examples:

weinertweet1 weinertweet2 weinertweet3

 

Over the course of the weekend, however, a strange tweet showed up in Weiner’s timeline containing only an @tagged username and a link to a picture on yfrog. The picture was a shot of a man’s covered family jewels with little identifying markers to anything else and was seemingly from Rep. Weiner’s yfrog account. A conservative Twitter user (who had teased weeks ago that a major Democrat would be having a sex scandal soon) was the only person who seemed to catch and retweet it before it was deleted from Twitter, and eventually yfrog. Bloggers and the media descended upon the user mentioned in the tweet and a tale of cross-country illicit Direct Messages was spun.

Without getting into the conspiracy theories on either side (feel free to look them up if you want), it’s actually pretty evident that getting that picture onto his account would have been fairly easy for someone who had the motivation and means. The Cannonfire blog details the yfrog security hole that allows this to happen: If someone has your yfrog upload email address, they can post anything to your account and directly to your twitter stream, without any hacking or password cracking. I tested it myself (with a picture of my puppy, nothing nefarious) and was even able to tag another user (blacked out for their privacy):

mytweet

Weiner’s yfrog email could have been compromised by forwarding a picture from his email account to someone else, leaving the code following the username visible. Heck… it could even have been guessed by someone with too much time on their hands.

A routine security bug isn’t a big enough story for most of the media, however, leading papers like the New York Times to instead focus on the fact that smart, attractive women tended to follow and be followed by Rep. Weiner (a much juicier story that you’ll have to search out because I won’t link to it). But readers here should take the real lesson from this: with so many social media services offering an “email to post” type feature, you must remain vigilant about not sharing that email address with others. It’s as good as a password, and a wayward click could allow anyone a backdoor into your accounts.

Update 6/7/11: Rep. Weiner admitted in a press con fence yesterday to accidentally tweeting the picture, which he intended to be a direct message, then panicking and lying about claiming to be hacked. Nonetheless, yfrog looked into their post to email function and advised users to keep that address as safe as a PIN.

Originally posted at Visual Alliance Media: http://tampabaysocialmedia.com/weiner-gate-hack-found

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