#dodd4

Growing up, we are often told about drug users as if they are horribly under-developed villains in bad films and books. They are simply "bad" and rarely do people get the chance to understand the humanity behind addiction; the backgrounds of addicts and their mindsets. The Heroin Diaries provides that bridge from a former drug user and the world.

  The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star is the novelization of a year's worth of diary entries by Motley Crue bassist, leader, and main songwriter, Nikki Sixx. The diary entries are lifted verbatim from the personal diary he maintained throughout 1987. During this time, Motley Crue writes, records, and tours their Girls, Girls, Girls album. However the main conflict lies within Sixx as his struggles with substance abuse, and in particular heroin, come to a head.

  Given the main content of the book, the vocabulary and writing abilities reflect the humanity of the story. This is not a narrative. This is a day-to-day venture into the hell of a drug-addled individual. We are met with harsh language and thoughts that were initially intended as a private memoir, not a novel aimed to appeal to others. From the relationships with family, women, and bandmates to personal moments of paranoia locked up in his own closet, The Heroin Diaries is as powerful of a memoir as they come. Throughout, there are moments of reflection by Sixx and those that are being talked about in the diary entries. This provides the reader with various views on many events and to see the changes in these people over the past twenty-plus years.

  A soundtrack was recorded by Nikki Sixx's side project, Sixx: A.M, featuring vocalist James Michael and Guns n' Roses guitarist DJ Ashba. Titled "The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack", the album features both spoken word tracks, lifted straight from the book and read by Sixx. All of the other songs surround the events in the book and after reading the book, it is easy to imagine what each song is about.

    A link to purchase the book

  http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/heroin-diaries-nikki-sixx/1100333525?ean=9781416511946

    The lead single for The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack, "Life is Beautiful"

The National Football League has had a strong rise in how concussions play a role in an NFL players future. This concussion issue seems to be reoccurring more and more these days because it has had a stronger impact on ex football players.

There has been a large increase in ex NFL players having severe brain injuries and even taking their lives due to depression. One of the most recent players to have an incident was Junior Seau. Junior Seau was one of the longest tenured most beloved players throughout his time in the NFL. His sudden death so close to the time he retired was an absolute shock to everyone. Junior had very strong morals and was very close with his family the fact that he took his own life was something no one could wrap their mind around.

After Junior Seaus death his family donated his brain to Concussion and brain trauma research in order to see how strongly his concussions in the NFL correlated with him taking his life. I hope that through more of these studies with ex NFL players we can hopefully gain more knowledge on how to help players get more help in the future in order to cut down on these tragic loses.

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/sports/201309/junior-seau-nfl-death-concussions-brain-injury

For the first time in my adult life, I took the 2 hour trip north to Jacksonville. Me and my buddy wanted to get away so we decided to book a hotel and discover what Jacksonville has to offer. After doing some research and asking some friends from the area, I found several activities to try out. Jacksonville landing was our first destination and was surprised at what I saw. Everything was dead on a Friday night and there were very few people our age. We ended up settling on a Hooters and, while Hooters is always solid, we still felt that we were in the twilight zone. We had a few drinks and talked to a few locals for a bit. Then it was time to rest up for the next day.

We headed to breakfast at Maple Street Biscuit Co. And oh my goodness it was an outstanding breakfast. We had chicken, biscuits, and cheese all with sausage gravy. The crowd was more family oriented and it started to seem that Jacksonville had the same vibe as a typical coastal town in Florida. Not much night life and many old people.

From there we went to the Jacksonville Zoo. This was a lot of fun. It was huge and there were several large exhibit to check out. We were also able to walk off our large breakfast. After checking out rhinos and elephants, it was time to head back and grab some lunch. We tried River City Brew which was so-so. Again very slow and a lot of old people. Keep in mind this is right in the middle of downtown Jacksonville. I had a shrimp pasta that was good, but I’ve had better. After trying their local brew we headed out and took a nap. We were exhausted.

We headed to the Burrito Gallery for dinner. We finally saw some younger people and felt like we had discovered Atlantis. The burritos were great and I moved to the bar in the back and tried a delicious Bulletpoint Whiskey. We moved on to El Burro which was a very hip crowd. After one drink we left. It was too weird for us. We finished up at Dos Gatos which was pretty fun. The bartenders were all dressed up as Rocky Horror Picture Show characters. I tried the Basil Hayden Whiskey, a personal favorite. We made conversation and closed our tabs after a few hours and it was time to go.

This video was posted at the beginning of this season.  It shows how ready our team was to take the world by surprise.  I don’t know about you, but in the last minute of the Louisiana game last week I almost had tears coming down my face.  I was so happy for our team.  They have worked so hard and to finally be recognized in the top 25 is absolutely amazing.  Turning on ESPN and hearing them talk about the University of Central Florida is humbling, but I never get tired of it!  Our school is FINALLY being recognized for what it really is, GREAT.  I am a huge football fan and I will never get tired of watching the highlights from that historical game.  

ESPN reporters and other sports reporters talk about this being history for UCF. It is.  Other schools will now look at us as competition and not a fluke.  We beat Louisville at HOME on their HOMECOMING!!! Typically schools pick their homecoming games based on the strength of the team they will play. Meaning, Louisville thought playing us would be a walk in the park.  Not only did we ruin their undefeated season, we shocked them. It was great! I have never been more proud to be a UCF knight. 

This game not only brought recognition to our football team, but also to our school.  This week while I was at the gym, I looked up and ESPN was doing a special on UCF.  I got a huge smile on my face as I walked to my next machine. UCF is so much more than anybody knows.  It is a beautiful campus with great professors and great opportunity.  

I knew I chose the right school for my college career. Not only for a great education, but for a great family.  Thats what we are at UCF, one big black and gold family. It’s time other people see that as well.  Once again, congratulations to our football team! You have made your school very, very proud!

I love the Broadway fandom, and ever since I left my last fandom, I’ve found myself to be happier and all-around more relaxed. That’s not to say that I don’t have my share of issues with the fandom itself, however. I’d barely been into Newsies for a few weeks when I noticed that while I was so taken with Kara Lindsay and Laurie Veldheer and eventually Caitlyn Caughell and the rest of the female cast, everyone, including the media, loved all these boys so much that they didn’t pay as much attention to the girls. I simply thought that I must be reading too much into it, or maybe not following the right people, and promptly forgot about it.

All the girls who've played Katherine Plumber in Disney's Newsies— ever!

Unfortunately, soon enough I realised that it wasn’t just the Newsies fandom this was happening with.

Other than the big names, like Laura Osnes, Sierra Boggess, Sutton Foster and so on, most of the lovely Broadway ladies who I admired so much weren’t getting any attention. I started paying a bit more attention, and it was soon enough that I noticed the problem.

Around the time that Matilda was opening on Broadway, everyone now had a new show, in addition to  Newsies, or Bare, and some were suddenly all about Matilda. Understandable, right? The show has an amazing cast of talented children, not to mention the ensemble, who do wonderfully every night on stage. Except once again, the media attention seemed to be going for the boys — Ryan Steele, Clay Thomson, Thayne Jasperson and Taylor Trensch were talked about more than anyone else was, and it left me puzzled. Being in an ensemble was a feat of its own, and the five girls deserved the attention, too!

The four actresses who play Matilda (from left to right, Milly Shapiro, Sophia Gennusa, Oona Laurence and Bailey Ryon).

Even Sophia or Oona or Bailey or Milly, not to mention the girls in the ensemble, didn’t received much attention either. I couldn’t understand. And then it finally dawned on me — in a predominantly straight fandom, the attention was going right to the attractive boys, and all those lovely ladies were barely getting the focus and love they deserve.

I understand celebrity crushes, and I understand that feeling of finding someone so completely amazing and talented and adorable all you can blog about is that one person. I get it, I do, because if you look at my archive on tumblr from earlier this year, it’ll be mostly Kara Lindsay.

But what frustrates me is that there is still unequal attention — sure, there are other people appreciate female cast members just as much as male cast members, but for the most part, unless it directly correlates with one of those male cast members, these girls don’t get as much attention. And girls should stick together, right?!

Case in point: many shows have either a mixed cast, yet the girls don’t stage door every night and because the girls out there aren’t waiting for them. They’re usually only waiting for the boys. I spoke to Laurie about this after seeing her in Thoroughly Modern Millie, because I had commented that I hadn’t seen her at the stage door when I saw Newsies earlier this year, and she said that the reason she didn’t come out a lot of the time is because she felt like people weren’t there to see her and didn’t even know who she was, and would only confuse her with Kara. However, LaVon, is almost more popular than the boys of the show at the stage door! It all depends, I just wish it were more universal.

                  I have always believed that social media is an amazing “creation”(if I can call it that); it gives us the opportunity to establish relationships from all around world! Sometimes I just wonder how people in the cave ages lived, no phone, no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitter! I personally think I would not be able to survive.

What I find most amazing and innovative of them all is a topic we talked in my Social Media class a couple weeks ago; apps.

The ability that we now have to communicate, play, inform ourselves, or even inform others, via cell phone (and now iPad, iPod, etc.) applications is amazing! After we finished the project and I was able to talk to other classmates about their application projects I was so interested on how all these idea came around, their creator’s backgrounds and thoughts, and most importantly the mass of people (sometimes even millions) that download and use these apps. I remember when having a Blackberry was the coolest cell phone a person could have, especially because they had BBM (Blackberry Messenger), until the iPhone took over. Turns out that recently this month, a Blackberry Messenger App for iPhone and Android came out! So now nobody needs the Blackberry at all, they can have their best feature on the iPhone! I downloaded the app, and to be honest I like it even better this way than the Blackberry way (although their features are almost the same as before).

Since taking my first class, PR has always been interesting, especially crisis PR. Although not a crisis for anyone but the company, the incident of Wild Games Studio taking down a video critiquing their game was a PR nightmare. Pretty recently, Wild Games Studio started a Kickstarter (A new way to fund creative projects) for a game called Day One : Garry's Incident. The Kickstarter itself failed, which should have been the studios first telltale sign. Instead of quitting, the developers looked at Steam Greenlight to get their game onto the market. Steam Greenlight is a way for the steam audience to vote or rate certain games to be released onto the steam platform. If a game does not get any backing it will not arrive onto the market but if a game or project receives enough support from the community it will be green-lit and be able to purchased by gamers around the world. So surprisingly, after the Kickstarter already bombed, Day One : Garry's Incident was green-lit by the and available for purchase. Now comes the sketchy part.

The reviews on the game's page on Steam are interesting.

“Day One: Garry’s Incident brings its own undeniable charm with the main character being an alcoholic slob”  Kotaku  “the concept is a compelling one, it's definitely a game to keep your eye on.”  OverclockersClub  “Day One: Garry's Incident is one of the most interesting independent projects being developed in Canada right now”  ShogunGamer  

Not very positive and oddly specific. It seems like Wild Games Studio decided to pick out the best pieces of a review they could find and place them on the page.

So when the developers of Day One : Garry's Incident decided to send a steam key to TotalBisuit, a popular YouTuber who reviews games, he gave it his all. He tore the game apart with some harsh critique and it became the most viewed video about the game on YouTube. Soon after, the video could not be viewed anymore. How strange. It became quite obvious that Wild Games Studio had used a copyright claim to remove the video from YouTube due to its negative critique of their game. This was their explanation : "We protected our copyright because Total Biscuit has no right to make advertising revenues with our license."

Now there are two issues with this. First off the reaction to this was terrible PR. TotalBiscuit made a new video about what happened and backed up his review of the game. This video has close to 19,000 up-votes of Reddit and over a million views on YouTube. The scandal has brought a lot of people to rate the game poorly on various gaming websites. The game will receive barely any sales because of this and was a terrible way to manage the situation instead of reaching out the reviewers to see what they could have done better even if they ignore the suggestion. A simple thanks for taking a look at the game is a million times more helpful than reacting negatively.