A New Journey Begins...

So this is my effort to actually blog. We'll see how well it pans out!

I have a new project underway and worse case scenario this is just going to be a great place for me to write my reviews about my project! I was inspired by the MakeupRehab subreddit on Reddit. For those of you that don't know, Reddit is the front page of the internet. It's a forum of sorts. On Reddit there are thousands of different subpages. There is a subpage for everyone. Typically I browse MakeupAddiction actively. It's a great place for me since one of my IRL friends like makeup much.

Anyways, a few people posted about cataloging and reviewing their entire makeup collection. Since I'm sort of in a monetary drought right now, I thought this would be a really fun way for me to get excited about my collection again!. I'm in the process of swatching all of my products, inputting them into a spreadsheet and writing reviews on them. While I do this, I am also identifying what products I want to destash and try to sell/get rid of.

I actually plan to do something similar with my wardrobe too!

So if you wish to see reviews on what I have in my makeup collection, stay tuned!

So far I have photographed my entire blush collection, minus the 2014 Tarte holiday blush palette and swatched my collection of ColourPop's Lippie Sticks.

I loooove the Milani Baked Blushes. They're fantastic. Luminoso is the most popular but the others are just as great.

Lippie Sticks by Colour Pop in shades (L to R) Grind, Chi Chi, Go FIsh, Wifey and Rocket.

I forgot that I had these lipsticks actually and I'm wearing Go Fish today and loving it! 

Inappropriate Jokes

While I was at work today, I was browsing one of my favorite time wasters, Reddit. Today while I was browsing the front page of the site when I came across a meme that is supposed to be for awkward situations.

In this instance, the sonogram technician is dealing with first time parents who are excited, whereas they have probably heard the same thing over and over again for years and make a joke. While it is funny, it is also inappropriate.

This is a case of needing to improve the micro level of heath communication. The technician is working directly with the patients, while it may be funny to him, the soon to be parents did not think so. While this may seem harmless, it can actually make the patient feel very uncomfortable. Imagine being a new parent and wanting to share your excitement of your newborn with everyone, but when interacting with the person who reveals the gender and any abnormalities, they don't take it seriously. That does not contribute to a healthy, professional relationship.

Also, while it may seem like a harmless joke, what if while investigating the sex of the baby, the technician notices an abnormality? Are the soon to be parents going to feel empathy from the technician, or feel comfortable working with them? Probably not.

While this may seem like a harmless joke to the technician, it really shows a lack of professionalism and empathy on the hospital. If i were in charge of training for the hospital, I would want to take a macro health communication approach and look for trends of inappropriate joking in those who have worked in that profession for a number of years. Chances are, the longer someone works in the field, the more numb they most likely are.

Movie Choices and Our Identities

In this week's chapter, we read about how we choose the media what we partake in, one of the ways is through selective exposure. The first thing that popped into my mind was my movie knowledge. Often, I am picked on by my friends or someone I am dating for not having seen any good movies. This was true, partly. Until this year, most of the movies I saw in theaters were kids movies, mainly Disney ones. So, when my friends would ask me if I had seen Zoolander, Anchorman, or some other popular movie, the answer was typically no. However, if they named any of the recent children's movies that had come out, I could easily give them my opinion.

It actually took me a while to realize the pattern of movie watching that I fell into. I would only pay the high theater prices for things that I really wanted to see and that tended to be a kids movie. I would tell myself that I wold watch the other movies when they came out on DVD, but typically they were forgotten. I also realized that there was a reason to this after a recent guy that I had dated dragged me to see movies that he was interested in to. A lot of the violence in movies went against my personal identity. I wanted to see happy movies that had happy endings, I didn't want to leave the theater having endured an emotional roller coaster or have violent images haunt me in the moments before I fell asleep. I just assumed that any movie that wasn't a kid's one would do those things to me. In turn, I missed a lot of awesome movies.

I love going to the movie theater to see a movie. Nothing is better to me than having the big screen, surround sound, and popcorn to much on during the movie. It has been my mission to break out over the past year and expose myself to some movies that I wouldn't have typically seen. I was mostly pleasantly surprised with the ones I have seen. I feel that this was due to a change in my personal identity that I have made in the past year as well though and was not something that I would have done otherwise. While my personal identity may be going through a shift, I do still find myself favoring the magical happy endings that can be found in things such as the recent Cinderella movie.

Superbowl Advertising 101

The Superbowl is the top spot for commercials and advertisements each year. The cost to have a spot during the Superbowl is astronomical, so the commercials that are aired need to be effective to make up for that price tag.

One example of a great Superbowl ad was the Tmobile Data Stash commercial shown here:

What makes this commercial a great one is that it uses all of the appeals needed for a persuasive argument. The first one that Tmobile uses is Ethos. The person speaking in this commercial is Kim Kardashian who is huge right now. She get's a lot of publicity whether it is for good or bad, but she knows how to take the spotlight. Even if she isn't a credible figure, she is well known which will get people to watch just for that aspect alone. Once potential customers are watching, Tmobile makes use of Pathos but in a ironic way. This commercial is set up like a stereotypical charity commercial would be where they are asking you for money. It seems like it would be sad, but what Kim says makes it funny and keeps the audience watching because they want to see what happens next. Tmobile wraps it all up with Logos. Even though this commercial is funny, it makes a good point. She starts by providing a fact that "millions of gb of data is taken back by wireless companies." Then she mentions that it is data that the audience is paying for. No one wants to pay money for something that they will use, so it is logical that the audience would want to switch to tmobile so that they won't lose their unused data.

This commercial is a brilliant because it is funny enough to entrance the audience but still provides a compelling argument as well.