Pop Culture And Media Studies
2303, 2013

Go To Class

Do you know Coursera yet? It’s a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) company that provides a huge amount of online courses to a huge amount of students worldwide, all free. Sort of like iTunes University but with some brilliant advantages: it is interactive, with weekly quizzes, sometimes peer-reviews, exams. Students who successfully complete a class will in most cases receive a certificate signed by the instructor.

And it’s growing fast – as of February 2013 Coursera already cooperated with 62 different universities.

I have enrolled in a ridicoulessly huge amount of classes. The structure and schedule is helpful to make sure you […]

1603, 2013

Top 10 Enlightened Resources

My suggestion for a Enlightened-fan’s survival kit on the internet. (HBO’s TV show Enlightened, that is). It really is a remarkable show, as has been said many times. Most often, unique, different and dreamy things tend to get downtrodden very quickly in the current media industry. But “Enlightened” is still fighting, it is still alive and could really be saved, for just a short time longer.

So where to go after watching Season 2’s brilliant finale? How to hold on to that strange, hopeful, magical feeling just a bit longer? Here are 10 suggestions how Enlightened-fans can enjoy the show with […]

1503, 2013

New WordPress Theme

I changed the WordPress Theme. Now I’m using “Avada” from ThemeFusion (link will follow). The old theme was nice but I wanted more functions to experiment with, which allows me to mess up more of my website – and waste more time.

These screenshots are what the website looked like before. I really loved the custom post option “Quote” which made my quotes pretty ;-) I hope I’ll figure that out for this new theme also.

What do you think – about the current look and the ‘old’ one?

1503, 2013

Return Of The Fiscal Cliff!

There was much, much, much talk about it – the Fiscal Cliff. And then it disappeared, to be replaced by less catchy self-made crisis like the sequester.

I’m currently doing a research project on just that: how much talk there really was about it. I was curious as to how the cuts and tax increases behind the term became the name “Fiscal Cliff”. Who decided what to call it? The most puzzling to me was the large amount of media coverage about the term itself. It was constantly being called “the so-called fiscal cliff”, discussed and called into question. In […]

1303, 2013

May The Hummingbirds Stay With Us

What would be kind of the opposite to Walter White from Breaking Bad? Well, Amy Jellicoe from HBO’s Enlightened would be a very good guess.

She is what Emily Nussbaum introduces as one of a new television archetype: The Hummingbird. Nussmbaum describes this fairly new character (the ‘Ur-Hummingbird’ being Diane from Cheers) with Sue Heck from “The Middle” as an example:
“With her braces and lank hair, Sue is a geek, but not in a cute way. In science class, she designs an experiment to prove that smiles are contagious. Instead, people shy away from her deranged, over-enthusiastic grin—only when she messes […]

1003, 2013

Oscar Wilde

“Most people are other people.”

703, 2013

Top ten current TV shows

As I wrote yesterday, no blog about TV shows without a personal top ten list on current TV shows. Before I start, a disclaimer: I’m freakishly interested in a loooot of different shows, worrysome is how many of them I feel passionately about. That means that even a top fifty list would be very difficult for me to write – and more importantly, it is nothing more than a ‘snapshot’ of what I think right now. If I start rewatching The Wire, for instance, it will imediately go up to number one. And if I then return to Breaking Bad […]

703, 2013

Franz Kafka

“So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.”

603, 2013

Pictures and Licences

So, as I just wrote in the post before this one, you’re kind of stuck with pictures taken by me, drawn by me and YouTube videos until I pull myself together and do a five minute google search about the usage of licenced pictures. (Or somebody tells me the rules?)

This post is a nice opurtunity to try out the theme’s “Gallery” format. And for you to see where I live, Hamburg, on a sunny day. (Those a rare. Very rare.) And because I really believe in the freedom of creativity and of the internet: feel free to use them in […]

603, 2013

How to get real pictures in here…

This blog is now – I think at least – very sleek and stylish looking. Waaay too stylish. Which doesn’t go well with me at all, I like when something’s a bit off, a bit crooked, lumpy at the edges. But of course, what I don’t like is to redesign a blog template from scratch – it would definitely be crooked and waaaay off, but it would also not work very well, most likely. So I’m using the freebie wordpress theme “Tetris”. It’s nice. And in deed very sleek looking. I changed the background to something a bit more “Ifoundthisatthebackofmyclosety”. […]

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