I’m going to do a short series on Disney movies that I feel are underrated. On my list is Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Brother Bear, and Treasure Planet. Know another movie I should take a look at? Comment at the end of this post or email me or something. Anyway, let’s see what the verdict is about Atlantis. Onward!
Signs, signs everywhere…
Semiotics and the study of meaning
Signs are all around us. But I don’t just mean street signs or those plaques outside the public bathroom. In semiotics, a sign is anything that has meaning. So traffic lights, religious buildings and insignias, the alphabet, the color white, chirping birds, running water, smoke, and even the entire English language are all signs. Signs can be pictures or symbols or gestures, and they can also be sounds or tastes or smells.
Semiotics is “the study of signs”. It’s the study of meaning, the study of how we communicate. We think in signs, and so we communicate in signs. But before we talk about why semiotics is both so fascinating and important, let’s talk more about what these “signs” actually are.
Get ready to have your mind blown.
But Can’t I Have Both?
In a story I wrote, Be What You Are, a girl dreams of being a dancer. But she doesn’t just want to be a dancer, she wants to be one of the most prestigious dancers in society – one that performs for the king and his family and guests. A sort of fairy godmother or guiding spirit, Mother Heron, appears to the girl and tells her that she has to choose: she can either find her own path and be a “true” dancer or be a dancer for the king. She can’t both be herself and be a court dancer.
Everyone has to decide what’s right for them and their own life. But I’ve learned that what you think you want and what you actually want are two very different things.
To use the girl from the story as an example, she loves dancing and is fulfilled by it. At her very core, she is a dancer. It’s what she’s meant to be. And so when she looks at the world, she assumes that this highest dancing position (what’s better or more important than dancing for the king?) is the one that she’s meant to take.
18 Months In, 18 Months Out: An analysis of what I did before and after I dropped out of college
I became a student at the University of Florida in August of 2013. After 18 months, I dropped out. And it’s now been 18 months since I dropped out. Because of the beautiful symmetry in time, I thought I’d analyze all the things I did while I was studying vs what I did after I quit.
So here’s all the stuff I’ve done in the past 3 years that has contributed to my personal and professional success:
38 Books in 12 Months
When I moved to Poland on August 30th, 2015, I decided to make a list of goals for myself. One of them was to read 15 books within the following year. It turns out that I read 38 books. That comes out to 7,942 total pages read or 209 pages per book on average.
Just… why? Why did you do this?
I dropped out of college in January 2015. Lots of factors played into my decision, but the biggest problem I had with university was that I wasn’t learning enough and I wasn’t learning what I wanted. So since dropping out of school, my education has been exclusively in my own hands. If I want to learn new things, I have to consciously set aside the time to do so. It happens that books are my favorite way of learning. Reading is awesome. I do a lot of it.
So without further ado, please enjoy the fun graphs and master list of all the books I read (with the link to the review I wrote of each book, if applicable) presented below.
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