Aww, poor neglected blog.

I wanted to do a post about one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Regina Spektor, who I’ve been pretty obsessed with lately. She’s a quirky, joyful, soulful young Russian-born pianist who’s probably best known in the mainstream world for her hit “Fidelity” (which is what I first heard from her).

Not only is she crazy talented, but she’s gorgeous and adorably humble to boot. I would love love love a chance to see her live — she seems like one of those unfortunately seemingly uncommon performers that is if anything better live than they are recorded. Here she is singing “Ghost of Corporate Future” live:

Besides her excellent songwriting (other songs of hers I’ve been in love with lately include Braille and Eet), she has done my favorite cover ever of the ubiquitously-covered Hallelujah and has contributed vocals to Ben Folds’ You Don’t Know Me.

They say she’s one of those artists you either love or hate, and I definitely love her. For me she’s definitely an artist where the songs I first fell in love with are not always the songs I ultimately come to love the most — a lot of her stuff feels like it needs to sink in over time, and that always gives me something new to fall in love with.

So I have this marketing class and I had to make a blog for it. Knowing a specific subject would be the best way to go about it, I decided to make posts showcasing things I liked on the internet over the course of the two weeks of the assignment.

The project has ended and I still have so many things I’d love to post about.

And so I’m establishing Makes Me Happy, a blog where I can write up features on things that make me happy — not just web-oriented things but also music, theater, events, and so on.

It’ll give me an opportunity to not only share with the world things I think are worth your attention, but to allow myself to look back at things I used to like and to analyze why I like things.

As I write this I’m getting ready to go see my high school’s spring musical so I’m in a very theatre-y mood. In recent years I’ve become pretty obsessed with a few musicals (those who were with me in Vicom-123 might remember the teasing I got for having seen Spring Awakening three times across two different cities) and my love of theater definitely spreads into my online habits.

So first I want to talk about a musical that is famous because of YouTube, and that is A Very Potter Musical. If you have any sort of love for the Harry Potter series you need to see this musical. It was put together by a few University of Michigan students in early 2009 and was performed for free. It’s more an affectionate parody of Harry Potter than any real attempt to make the entire series into a musical, and it is SO hilarious and well done despite being amateur and low budget — in fact, that just makes it even better. I’ve watched it several times through and it never stops being funny and awesome and I highly recommend it. The soundtrack is also available for free at their website. There’s talk of a sequel.

The second part of today’s post is some blogs — not vlogs, I mean those actual written things with words that you read. Wow, right? These are blogs from some theater actors that I enjoy:

Emily Kinney is an actress currently touring the country in a play called August: Osage County (which, no, I’ve never seen). Her posts are written in this quirky overdramatic style that is very charming.

Krista Pioppi is an 18-year-old actress touring with… wait for it… Spring Awakening. She’s a swing, meaning she doesn’t have a set role in the show but rather steps in for any of the girls (including the leading lady) if they can’t go on and also occasionally rotates with the two girls in the ensemble. Seeing as her job is a little unique she has tons of stories of being thrown on for a role at a moment’s notice and general tales of life on the road at such a young age.

Krystina Alabado is a… 20-year-old? actress who is also touring with Spring Awakening. She’s an ensemble member — Spring Awakening has seats on the stage that audience members can get tickets to sit in (and actors also often sit in when they’re not in a scene), and four teenagers, dressed in normal clothes and acting like they’re regular audience members, come in with those audience members and innocently sit among them — until the show starts and they leap up and pull out microphones to sing harmonies. I got tickets to sit on stage the last time I saw this show, and I got to sit next to none other than Ms Alabado. My choice to try and get that seat was definitely influenced by this blog where she also gives accounts of her now over year and a half with the tour. She also understudies all the girls’ roles in the show and has plenty of stories of her own, including tales of mid-show injury and Christmas on the road.

Interesting that I mostly read girl’s blogs but watch guy’s vlogs. If I try and analyze why these things are worth reading… I think, for better or for worse, it’s not unlike why some people love reality TV. Sometimes it’s fun to hear anecdotes from the lives of people who living interesting lifestyles far from your own.

Today I’m starting with something in the “funny and useless” category of things I like on the internet.

And that is… ShadyURL, which is the latest source of useless hilarity among my friends. What is it? Well… the tagline says it all: “Don’t just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening.”

It becomes like an awful test of your friends’ trust to see if you can convince them it’s safe to click a link that looks very much like it will lead to a virus or some other unpleasantness. Often they really do look creepy, and other times, the links are trying so hard to be creepy that they come out sounding completely hilarious. Thus far the reigning champion of most ridiculous shadyurl I’ve encountered is “horse-slaughter_u5c0f_click-on-this-and-youll-be-taken-to-page-that-will-create-pop-up-windows-until-your-browser-crashes.” Very to the point.

And I also want to share xkcd which calls itself “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” One cool thing about xkcd is its creator, Randall Munroe, is able to make a living off the merchandise sold in the store while continuing to put up the comic not only for free but under a creative commons license.

Randall Munroe is also awesome because he has a ball pit in his house. True story. His blag is pretty worth following as well, especially if you’re a mathematical sort of geek.