Wrapping Up.

As always, I come to the end of the semester with mixed feelings. It's been good to blog again, though I haven't had as much time for it as I might have liked. I still haven't blogged about my boyfriend the puer eternis, or about college as a rite of passage, but that's not to say that I haven't learned a lot about those things, nor that I won't write about them later.

I will say that I'm quite impressed with all the final projects. People have been doing a really great job with them, and they've been quite a bit more interesting than most group projects usually are. It's really great to see things coming together at the end, and I hope I can pull that off with my blog as well.

I'll spend a moment or two talking about what we've learned this semester. It's been so fun to see myths popping up all over the place as I began to take the time to learn from them, and it's been fun to listen to my classmates as their in-class discussions and blogs have really taken off. Things have definitely snowballed in this class in a good way, and I think everyone's learned a lot and had fun too.

When we first looked at the syllabus, I thought the best sections would be the ones about more modern topics, like Harry Potter or Firefly, but it turned out that those chapters weren't as fun - since we didn't read or watch the actual stories they felt a bit more dry. I think it would be good to incorporate more of the actual stories into those sections, to help make the connection (particularly for those who haven't read them before, or read them so long ago that they've forgotten all the good stuff).

Just a few final thoughts as we wrap up the semester. Hope you guys have had just as fulfilling an adventure and that you keep on seeing myths wherever you go!

Lazy Teenage Superheroes

So, this is just a silly little video, but when we were talking about artificial intelligence and the way literal commands can drive artificial intelligence crazy I thought of this. There's a bit of that a few minutes in, and then at the very end. It's a short film, about 12 minutes long, with a bit of language (fair warning) and an interesting take on what it means to be a hero. Watch it here!

Drunken Epiphanies

Talking today about the word epiphany, and how that's basically the word for your god taking over you, reminded me of something else I've encountered recently. For the few people who weren't already convinced that I'm a complete nerd, a group of friends and I recently started playing a game called Pathfinder. When we were building characters, my boyfriend decided that he would play a cleric, and found that required him to select a patron deity, and complete some sort of ritual that would "reconnect" the two of them and fill the character with his deity's power. My boyfriend being the sort of guy he is picked Cayden Cailean, the god of, well, booze, who's a bit like Dionysus. That's his holy symbol up there. And of course the best way to connect with the god of freedom and wine is through happy hour. Upon going and reading the page I've provided above, it's somewhat surprising to find that Cayden Cailean, like Dionysus, was not born a god. Read the page to find out how it happened!