Joe's Got Ideas

"Someone please save us, us college kids What my parents told me, is what I did They said go to school, and be a college kid But in the end, I question why I did." -Relient K, 'College Kids' Following an enlightening verbal sparring match with my parents, I attended freshmen orientation at the University at Albany on Monday and Tuesday. Both experiences were informative and exciting. In the parental discussion, I posed the simple question: Why go to college? The answer I received was overwhelmingly 'because it gives you better job prospects.' I still am not convinced that that is the case, and I said as much on Sunday night. They countered with the example of their own respective engineering and material science degrees allowing them to get jobs. Not only is that a different story because of the field involved (STEM, not something like journalism), but their job hunts took place many years ago. The times they-have-been-changing, as illustrated by...

[On Friday July 21, 2017 I decided to just interview somebody. After stopping at a couple places and coming up short, I landed this interview and now am posting my 'article' I made from it. Enjoy!] Part-Time Historians: Uncovering Local History at The Stillwater Blockhouse by Joe Hoffman, 7/23/2017 Though he says he's just biding his time here until shipping to Parris Island for boot camp, I can see the sparkle in Gabe's eyes as he discusses the differing strategies of the French and the British in the eighteenth century. Afternoon sunlight streams into the cozy Stillwater Blockhouse from the wide wooden doorway. It's a local mini-museum inside a replica of a French-and-Indian-War-era military encampment. With only about 500 square feet of floor space, the various placards, weapons, replicas, and exhibits practically engulf you. Which, for me and my fellow museum-lovers, is heaven. I'm sitting at the humble front desk talking to the soft-spoken y...

[Completed 15 December 2016] Men of the Hour: Elliot, Dylan, Seung-Hui, James, and You All but one of the five people listed above executed their own separate mass shootings in public places, taking the lives of a combined 66 people, wounding a total of 118, and spanning fifteen years. They are joined in infamy by around eighty other persons who have committed similarly confounding attacks in the United States in the last thirty years. These attacks, now known as a “mass shootings” have become more and more frequent (Follman, Aronsen and Pan). And after each latest attack occurs, and its details are displayed on television screens and newspaper covers everywhere, the nation spends agonizing hours pondering, arguing, and screaming that same one-word question in frustration: Why? It is my desire to be one voice offering an answer to this question. And it is my wish to go about answering it in a way which differs from the norm. Typical responses to an active shooter incident...

Happy Day of The Week, Stranger! I don't know how you found this sorry corner of the internet, but as your browse I hope you'll be intrigued by the ideas, reports, updates and experiments found herein. My main intent in creating this blog is to give myself a space to write and post projects. By projects I mean, well, pretty much anything. The first project I'll post is my brief article on mass shooters. I wrote it for a community college English 101 course, but it was more than a compulsory assignment -- I'm quite fascinated with school shooters, tragedies, the human condition, etc. It was a blast to gather research and compose some original thoughts on the subject for the paper. I guess if you've gotten this far you may want to know a bit about me. Or maybe you don't. Oh well, I'll tell you anyways. My name is Joe, I'm eighteen, and I love gathering information, forming opinions, talking to people, and generally exploring life. I'm not as...