Bloggy Notes

Re-arranging My Links, And other Fascinating Topics
You'll notice I've added a few new links, and cut out some old ones. There have been a number of people that I've been meaning to make a permanent link to for a long time, but never got around to (Chris Powell, Rob Patton, Jared and Rachel's, new blogs, etc.)

I've also done my best to keep my list of links from spiraling out of control by trimming the fat a little bit. I cut out all the "Dead Blogs" from people who had stopped blogging (But if you're reading this, and you start blogging again, just let me know). Also I cut out my links to progressive organizations in Japan. It was a good idea, but I don't think anyone was checking them. I know I certainly wasn't. And there's no point having a link that I myself don't even check.

(Also in an effort to keep my list of links under control, I didn't link to every single blog that I regularly read. Especially if that blog was already linked to by other blogs in my circle, I felt it a bit redundant. Hope no one is offended. I'm still feeling my way through blogging etiquette).

You may notice I moved my list of "Stuff I Wrote" to the top. (I'm needy). And you may also notice I added a new blog to my list: "Papers I Wrote", because I thought what the world really needs is my undergraduate papers posted on-line.



Last year around this time I posted my amateur stories on line. Then the following Spring I created a link to everything I ever wrote on the web. Now I'm posting my old papers. That's right, I get more and more pathetic each time.

Here's the line of thought that lead me to do this: I was thinking one day about all of my friends who were in graduate school, and all the papers they were writing, and I remembered my own under-graduate experience. In this age of blogging, when everything is shared on the internet, it seemed so weird that there was a time when I would work my ass off on a paper, and then have it read only by my professor. I thought that if I was to go through college again, in the age of blogging, I should post everything I wrote on-line. It may or may not be of interest to people, but, hey, it's already on disc anyway, might as well just throw it on-line and see if anyone wants to read it.

And then I remembered that I still had a lot of my old discs lying around the house. I went through the discs I had in Japan and found a couple things of interest, but to get most of the stuff I had to wait until I came home for Winter break. So, now that I'm home, I've been going through my old discs and seeing what I could find.

In the end it was a bit random. You would probably have the same thing I imagine if you went through your old discs. Some of them were broken. Some of them were lost. Some of them had been cannibalized and copied over by my siblings, etc. There was a lot of stuff that I would have liked to post on-line that I just couldn't find anymore, such as my paper on the "Student Movement in Japan in the 60s" or "The Formation of the Chinese Communist Party", etc.  [Update: I have since recovered those papers and posted them here and here respectively.]

Here's what I did find though:

This paper critiquing the 1999 NATO bombings in Serbia. It was based almost entirely off of Noam Chomsky, and the Socialist Party Website. I got a decent grade on it (a B, I think), but I was criticized by the professor for basing it entirely off of Polemic sources. And he was probably right.

But then I wrote a smaller version of the same paper for another professor, and got an A on it, and he called it a solid indictment of the NATO airstrikes. You never can tell I guess.

For the final history course, I wrote this paper on the Sandinista Revolution as viewed by Christian Periodicals. The requirements for this paper was that it had to be "an original piece of historical resource based on primary sources". Which means it's the only truly original thing I ever wrote. And, (perhaps I flatter myself but you never know) it might be of use to somebody else online. On the other hand, because the bulk of it is just a year by year analysis of articles, it is the most boring thing I ever wrote, and I can't imagine anyone reading it for pleasure.

These papers on "The Conditions Leading up to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement" and "Communist Parties in Great Britain" were interesting to write for me, and if you share similar interests, you might find them interesting as well.

I also found this write up on the 2000 RNC protests, that I did at the request of a friend in Media Mouse for her Zine.

And speaking of protests...At the time I wrote up journal entries of each of the major protests I went to. I had the sense of participating in something historical, and I wanted to keep notes so I could remember it years later. I decided to throw them online also in case anyone else was interested in protest/ social movements, but be warned, they read like journal entries. I was simply trying to record everything I could remember, not write in elegant prose.

I found on disc my entries from the 2000 IMF protest, Windsor FTAA protest, RNC protest, and Quebec FTAA protest. Somewhere I have a write up from the Bush inaugural protest, but I couldn't find the disc.

I also found a couple of Chimes articles I wrote, but which Chimes never published for one reason or another. And, I couldn't resist adding the one article I wrote for the high school paper, even though I had to re-type it.

Link of the Day
Wow, Monster Post by Matt Lind on ideas for the Democrats running for Congress. If you need some bedtime reading, check this one out.