Thoughts From Places

I don't believe I've mentioned on here that the vlogbrothers are doing a 100 video-long series entitled Thoughts From Places. It's a set of "visual essays," and they are amazing. There's only been about 5 of them so far. I will embed the most recent below for your enjoyment, and if you want to watch all of them, here is a link to a list of them.





I've been reading Orson Scott Card's Shadow of the Giant for the past week or so. It's the 4th "Bean book," and they're a parallel series to the Ender Quartet. All of them are some of my favorite books ever.
In Ender's Game (the first one), Ender's older siblings Peter and Valentine slowly begin to change the political tides via anonymous essays posted online. Peter was "Locke" and Valentine was "Demosthenes." They pretended to be arguing in a carefully calculated scheme that prevented a third world war.
Being someone who posts essays online, I would love to have that kind of influence. Unfortunately, I'm not as interested in nor knowledgeable about current events to do something like that. I just want my ideas out there. I was thinking about that a few days ago and it occurred to me "But I have a blog." 
The thing with blogs, though, is there's a lot more difficult to find. With YouTube, a quick search can lead you to all sorts of places. With blogs, it's usually from other people's blogs, or by word of mouth. It's a lot more difficult to gather readers like that. Not that I'm asking you to recruit people. It's just something I was thinking about.


My grandma had some surgery yesterday morning on her knee, and I went to go visit her in the afternoon (both Monday and today). It was the first time I'd been in a hospital since 11.5 years ago when my youngest sister was born.
The funny thing was, while said sister was constantly asking loads of questions about what different stuff was, it felt like I'd been in hospitals loads of times. Why?
Because I've read a lot of books and short stories with hospitals.
That particular hospital, as I said to my mom earlier today, "Looks exactly like the hospital in The Price by Alexandra Sokoloff." She was confused as to how I knew that, seeing as how it was a book and not a movie.