Famous Last Words: The Final Week

This week was my last week because I did enough extra credit to end a week early! It's pretty exciting, but looking at the blog posts for next week, I'm actually a little disappointed I didn't skip some extra credit and do those instead. I know I still can do the posts for next week, but I'm just preparing to be super busying preparing for finals.

I feel pretty mixed about this past week. The readings were pretty excellent! I don't know what it is, but the past few weeks have been super interesting and I just flew through the readings for both days. They were super creepy and weird which is always fascinating to me. As for the extra credit assignments, I did extra reading which was helpful, but I had trouble getting through the other ones. It's always the end of the semester where I lose motivation to finish assignments, so it wasn't surprising. The most disappointment for me personally comes with the story I wrote for my storybook. I just feel like it was so subpar. I had a really hard time coming up with how I was going to wrap up all of the conflict that I opened up in the last story. Agh! I know I can do better, and reading over my first two stories, I know I could have improved those too, but I suppose this will have to do. I feel kind of guilty because I don't feel like it's my best work, but I suppose I'll see what the reception is like first.

Going forward, I'm not sure if I'm going to do any more assignments for this class. It really depends on how studying / the final assignments for my other classes go. I'll probably do a revision no matter what though!

Mixed feelings

via Wikimedia Commons

Wikipedia Trail: From B1A4 to Ecstasy

For this final edition of Wikipedia Trails, I've decided to start out with the South Korean pop group B1A4 because my friend Sarah is a huge fan of theirs.

B1A4

B1A4 as a band is pretty okay from what I've heard of their songs, but the process by which Korean pop groups like them are created is pretty fascinating. Each group member can come from a variety of different backgrounds, and if they aren't perfect for the group immediately, the company will be willing to invest in them to train them to be the pop idol that they want. Pretty neato!

B1A4 performing on stage

photo credit to 와사비콘텐츠

From B1A4, I decided to read about South Korea's famous capital city, Seoul. 

Seoul

Wow, I had no idea that Seoul was such a population-dense city. I knew they had a lot of people, but they're only second in terms of pop. density to Paris. Crazy!

They also have the world's fastest average internet connection AND free Wifi in public places. C'mon USA, let's get our act together...

From Seoul, I jumped to the article on Muism, also known as Korean Shamanism.

Korean Shamanism

Korean Shamanism, known as Muism, is actually much more of a spiritual ideology. It is native to Korea but has a lot of similarities to other belief systems in East Asian, particularly Wuism in China.

It centers around a spiritual intermediary named the Mu, which can be a man or woman leader.

What's interesting is that there is so much life in this religion, from actual rituals involving dancing and chanting to a set of stories that have been passed down about the divine beings that the believers worship. Pretty neat, and it's still pretty active (several millions still practice in South Korea).

To finish this final trail, I am going to read about Ecstasy (the philosophy).

Ecstasy

Okay, so this article was very, very confusing to me and I'm not really sure what is the agreed upon meaning of this philosophy, but there is general agreement that it deals with experiences that involving feeling outside of yourself. I want to say that this is how you can describe "out of body" experiences, but in terms of the philosophy, I'm not sure at all if that's correct.