Not Quite a Salutation to the Planet

I have a tendency toward making "hello world" posts that... aren't. On my personal blog, I'd made a dozen or more posts before I bothered to tell anyone that it existed, and it was only at that point that I made a "hello world" greeting any hypothetical readers. Here, too, I can't in good conscience call this a "hello world" when it's far from the first post on the blog-- even if it's the first from me.

I'm Becky. I like to call myself a storyteller, because I'll tell a story in any medium-- in text (whether novel, short fiction, poetry, etc.), in theatre, in song-- you name it. I'm a Professional Writing major, and studying in the Concurrent Education program. In addition to stories, I am passionate about language and languages, grammar and translation, imagination and the written word.

I exercise my passions in teaching, which I do for an after-school program once a week; in the fiction writing I do basically nonstop in all the time I don't have; in co-running a collaborative writing game for a community of friends. It also came up last year when I helped save the world (in an ARG, anyway). To save the world, my friends and I had to solve problems and crack codes, research creative solutions for strange situations that came up, write fiction and music and persuasive essays, and be generally nerdy and/or heroic.

To be absolutely honest, I want to learn how to reframe 'research' in my mind. I'm perfectly confident researching with such tools as Yorku's e-resources, GoogleScholar, and the Responsa Project, but I can't shake my mental associations of the word "research" with "boring" and "dry." It would be nice to make that go away.

I've never used RefWorks or Zotero before, though Zotero looks like it could be particularly useful to me (perhaps it could even solve my frequent "tab explosion" problems!). I also don't have experience with podcasting-- the closest I've come was either an experimental one-shot vlog about ducks or an audio recording of a short story that I made as a favour for a friend. I am very excited, though, at the prospect. For one thing, it's something new, and yay new things! For another, I talk a lot. I'm talking a lot right now. So recording myself talking a lot should be fun.

As of right now, I'm inclined to choose Grammar Girl or Lexicon Valley for the course project. After all, I love grammar (deeply), and I love words. The only difficulty, I suppose, would be limiting myself to fifteen minutes once I start talking about language.