Jackson Free Press

Yesterday revelations were made during a twitter conversation with my sister that confirmed to me the presence of some weird paranormal thing in our house. Not really all that comforting.

It started sometime a month or a month or two ago. I had left my computer on all night by accident and was signing back into my Windows profile. The program windows were glitching out: especially Windows Live Messenger. I had used my laptop's webcam the day before, and the window was showing random squares of images I recognized as taken from the webcam. I figured it was just glitching out, but I noticed that some of the pictures were taken in the dead of night, long after I'd used the camera. I looked more closely at these pictures and one stuck out to me. A face. It was a face.

http://jacksonfreepress.com/users/photos/2012/jul/12/3703/

The dark square near the middle is the one in question. I still think I see some sort of freakish face there, and I still have no idea what it could be. Whatever it is it scared the bejeezus out of me.

Not long after I saw someone running past my room to go to the bathroom or my sister's room. thing is, my sister was not home that night and nobody else was up. My next guess was my little step brother, but why would he be us super late RUNNING around the house? Not only that, but they looked to be jumping past my door, and were at least as tall as my mother, but there was absolutely no noise. I thought it was my imagination or a bug flying past my lamp maybe, but a few minutes later I saw it run by the other direction again, and it was very obviously not my imagination.

The next night I was lying in bed with my laptop and I noticed someone standing in my doorway. I looked over, and saw nothing. I looked away and there they were in my peripheral vision again, just standing there. They didn't even really seem to be there, just a shadow or something standing there. I could see a white face, but since I couldn't look directly at it I could not discern any features. It creeped me out so I sat with my laptop obstructing my view of the door and carried on ignoring it.

Then yesterday, my sister said on twitter that she woke up and one of our cats had been there, and her moving surprised it and it ran off. She's been sleeping in the basement to avoid the heat, as our home in Colorado has no air conditioning(cheap landlord to blame for that). She said "Hey, cat" to it, and then saw all 3 of our cats come out of our mother's room. Except that was on the opposite side of the basement that the cat had run towards, it couldn't have been a cat at all.

She then revealed to me that the reason ...

I spent my birthday weekend watching AMC's The Walking Dead. According to my friends and family, that was a lame way to spend the big 1-5. According to me, it was AWESOME! 19 straight episodes of my favorite show on television ending with a black-and-white episode of the Pilot episode and "The Talking Dead", a live show where the author of the graphic novel, and other people with influential roles on the show talked about the seasons we had just watched and the season to come.

AWESOMENESS.

Seriously. I spent the weekend in my PJ's tweeting about The Walking Dead, writing about the Walking Dead, and, of course, watching The Walking Dead.

There was one problem, though. The longer I watched, the more I thought. (SPOILER ALERT: Shane was Rick's, the main character, best friend and partner before the epidemic spread. Afterwards, while Rick was in a coma, Shane took Rick's wife and son to help the avoid the walkers [zombies]. Eventually, Rick awakens from his coma and finds Laurie, his wife, and Carl, his son. Everything is all good [or as good as life during a zombie epidemic can be], but Shane has fallen in love with Laurie and feels that Rick should get out of the picture. Shane attempts to kill Rick, but Rick gets the upper-hand and murders him. Carl is heartbroken to see his father kill Shane, who Carl looks up to, so he pulls a gun on his father. Shane zombifies and Carl shoots him instead of his father. SPOILER OVER. YOU CAN READ AGAIN.)*

Towards the beginning of the series, Shane tells Rick that the zombie epidemic started with a few strange stories on the news.

PAUSE.

A few strange stories on the news. Re-read that. A few strange stories like the guy who ate the other guy's face off in Miami? A few strange stories like the dude in New Jersey who cut out his own intestines and threw them at police officers? A few strange stories like the one in Maryland where the man killed a guy and ate his heart? A few strange stories like the one about the Canadian porn star that murdered and ate people? A few strange stories like the story in Sweden where a man is alleged to have cut off his wife’s lips and eaten them. A few strange stories like the story in New York where a man chewed the ear off of of another man at a restaurant.

Am I the only one who was really freaked out by that?

You could say that the authors of The Walking Dead decided to say that to freak people, such as myself, out because of what was happening on the news. That's what my mother's theory is. I jut think that this theory is flawed because the episode came out before all these people started showing zombie-esque tendencies.

My past weekend was caused me to write, "Adria's zombie apocalypse survival tips." ...

Okay for the past 2 weeks I have been trying to come up with something remotely interesting to blog about so far I have been unsucessful.

I thought about doing something silly like my love for stange combinations of food (I mix honey hickory BBQ sauce with yellow rice its gooooodddd). Then I thought about blogging about something serious like the abortion clinic story or the controversy surrouding voter ID, both of which I could discusss in soooooooo much detail.

Espcially the abortion clinic. For some reason, after talking to the President of the Clinic, I have deveolped some strange emotional attachment to that clinic even though last week was the first time I had even gone anywhere near it. I think I feel that way about it because....I am not sure how to explain it but I feel bad for the clinic and the people who work there. Not like pity bad but I just feel they are being condemed for one service that they offer especially since the service is so controversial. For lawmakers if they are for the womans right to chose then if an anti-abortion bill came to them they would shoot it down and if they are against abortion they would pass it. Abortion to me, is more of an opinion driven issue and its not fair to put a law to an opinion. With other laws against murder you dont have a pro-murder and pro-not murder (I cannot think of a better way to put it but you get my point). No one believes killing another human being is right. But with abortion, you have the pro-life side who says that its essientially murder because the fetus is a human at conception. Then there is the pro-choice side who believes that the woman should have the right to chose because it is her body. If you are pro-choice to some pro-lifers its like you are the devil's rencarnate, which really pisses me off.

I never realized how strongly I felt about this issue until I got to Belhaven and for one of my classes we had to go a group project on a controversial issue in the state. My group decided to do abortion (to my dismay because I knew exactly how that project was going to go). NO ONE wanted to pro-choice side in my group in fact they were not even going to cover that side of it. Being the type of person that I am, I could not let that slide so I told them I would do it....by myself and I did, it was awesome. Not because of the presentation I did but because I presented a side that most if not everyone in that class disagreed with and my information was not opinionated it was factual. And I did not try to bring people over to the dark side with my pro-choice information, I just told them everything that the movement was about and I hoped ...

Videogames are a thing that I care about a whooooole lot. Were there a text-based method I would spread my arms wide right now to show you how much they matter, and my arms would be really wide apart. Some of the best games I've ever played have been coming out, and every year seems to top the last. It's hard to look at the industry and still have fond feelings, though. Large corporations that were once friendly, that once cared about making a quality work of art for the world to enjoy, have now become cold, and squeeze everything they can out of gullible consumers using dirty business tricks. Sure, the indie scene is on fire, and great stuff is coming from small developers, but the big publishers that are the face of gaming to the world and provide much of our larger scale entertainment now range from idiotic to downright malicious. This didn't happen for no reason, sometimes I wonder how we got here. How did we get to always-on DRM, Publishers telling us we cannot sell our games, constant slow patches, overpriced DLC, and the cannibalization of studios by the big publishers? Two things happened to cause this: Games got too expensive to make, and Call of Duty made more money than pretty much anything ever.

It was only a few months ago that Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning caused a nightmarish financial fiasco in the state of Rhode Island. Developers 38 Studios and BigHugeGames, along with publisher Electronic Arts, took at a whopping 75 million dollar loan from the state to move their studios to Rhode Island, and develop this game there. The deadline by which they had to pay off the loan meant that in it's first month alone Amalur would have to sell 3 million copies. This was a new property with little marketing, the companies behind it were betting on an MMO they were going to develop farther down the line, and it fit into the same genre as last November's juggernaut of a game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. There are a few franchises you don't try to go up against in this industry, and The Elder Scrolls is near or at the top of that list. It's been less than a year since that dropped, a fantasy action-RPG is not going to succeed in the face of something with so much hype, and such a huge fanbase. Amalur was NEVER going to sell 3 million copies in a month. And so, the loan was not completely paid off, and the people of Rhode Island are out not only the jobs they tried to get out of the now defunct BigHugeGames, but around 30 million dollars.

Amalur is only the tip of the iceburg, though. Almost every time a studio that isn't owned by their publisher releases a game, the cost outweighs the profit by a mile and the studio goes under. Back in 2008, during the beginning of the financial crisis we're ...

A harrowing tale of fallopian adventure, with twists and turns nobody would ever expect!

I'm not really sure how you go about doing on of these.

I've tried blogging many times before, I have at least 4 blogs on Blogspot.com, and 3 on Wordpress.com.

Whenever I decide to blog, I go in with a "This will be the one. I will blog the blog!" attitude. My gumption normally fizzles out in a week. The only blog I've managed to keep up is my Tumblr account, but that's probably because the only effort in Tumbling is clicking a re-blog button. I have literally 3 posts on my Tumblr that I've written. All of my other 360 pages are of other people's post or pictures that attract me.

My main issues with blogging are:

A) I always feel like I'm talking (or typing), to myself. When I start feeling that way, I start getting worried that either no one will read my entries, or I'll start rambling and they'll think the whole thing is a joke.

B) I am a rambler. A rambley rambler. If there were a rambling competition, and I had to compete against hordes of ramblers from across all of the lands, I would still take the "Best Rambler Cake" cake and ramble about taking the cake. I would go on a five minute detailed explanation about how delicious the cake looked, how I liked that the baker thought to put realistic brown and white spotted cows on the cake, how the cake probably would taste wonderfully if I ate it and washed it down with a glass of milk. Have you ever noticed that a lot of cows aren't really black and white? When my mom and I are driving through smaller towns or past farms or whatever, I always look for the cows. I have an unusual obsession with cows. The obsession stems from literally nothing. One day when I was in about 6th grade, my English teacher had us do a free write on our favorite animal. Up until that time, my favorite animal had been mountain zebras. In that moment though, I knew where my alliance belonged. I was supposed to love cows. Ever since then, I have had an unusual obsession with cows. I'm so obsessed with cows, that I refuse to eat beef. How could I possibly eat my favorite animal? Do you know how cows are tortured just so you can have one of those disgusting McDonald's burgers? My friends and family feed this cow obsession by giving me cows themed gifts. I have stuffed cows, cow print pillows, a picture of a cow, ceramic cows, cow drawings, a cow print rug, a cow soap dish, a cow key-chain, a cow themed piggy bank, cow pillow-pets.. You get the picture. Wait, this isn't supposed to be about how many cow-themed gifts I've received. This is about how cows aren't really black and white. I mean, some are actually black and white. The majority of cows I see when we're driving, though, are brown and ...

Three years ago after seeing the life altering documentary Food Inc. (which I highly recommend), I decided to stop eating bad meat. By bad meat I mean the kind of meat that is produced by mass production companies such as Tyson and Sanderson Farms. The kind of meat that is served to you at fast food restaurants and even supplied by nicer restaurants. So... if there's a bad meat, there must be a good meat too, right? Right. The problem is, not a lot of people know the good meat from the bad meat. I didn't know until I saw Food Inc. I'd love to see Jackson become a healthier, more environmentally conscious city. So this blog entry is designed to help those people out who want to eat organically. I'll start with a couple requirements for good meat: 1)Good meat comes from animals that are free range. This means they don't live in unnaturally small spaces, crammed in with their own kind (and all the waste their own kind produces). They aren't deprived of necessary things like a balanced diet and sunlight. Free rang animals roam around in their natural environments, enjoying a humane and healthy life. Large food companies keep cows and chickens and pigs on small plots of lang because it is cheaper. This way the higher-ups of the companies can pay the farmers, butchers and other workers minimal amounts of money, and keep the big funds for themselves. 2) Good meat comes from animals that eat what they would be eating in their natural environments. For example, most of the corn that is produced today goes towards feeding cattle. Cattle are not supposed to eat corn. They are supposed to eat grass. But on the small dirt plots where they live, there is no grass. Because of this, cows develop intestinal problems and have to be given fistulas, or holes that lead from their skin directly into their stomach (look up fistula on google images... I'm not kidding. These cows have holes in them). These holes allow for scientists to study and regulate the way that cows are digesting their high corn diets. Scientists need to do this because all the corn they cows consume has caused problems with their health that needs to be fixed. Funny enough, no one's ever thought maybe they just need to stop feeding cows corn... Furthermore, corn is not the way it used to be anymore either. Starches now make up the larger percentage of a corn kernel, instead of the actually nutritious germ part of a kernel. This means that cows are being fed primarily simple sugars. These simple sugars turn into fats, and the fats don't go away when the meat is butchered. So the meat most Americans eat these days is full of fat. Try grilling an organic burger and a bad burger side by side. You'll see the difference in the drippings. Again, companies feed cattle this way because it is cheap. 3) Good meat comes ...

This blog confuses me greatly. Are we blogging about ourselves, or the things we like, or what? Somebody comment on this and tell me because if nobody stops me I am just gonna post photoshops of Willem Dafoe's face on other people/animals/mythical creature's bodies, and that may very well kill us all.

In seriousness I should introduce myself and what I am about to start off. I'm Dylan! I used to live down here in Mississippi, but I've spent most of my life in Colorado. Many people think that it's always cold and snowy, that Colorado is the Canada away from Canada. Sadly, it is not so. In fact, even in the winter, on cold days, it probably won't snow too far from the mountains. It's just too dry in Colorado; dry and sunny. That makes it get pretty hot(albeit 10 degrees lower than it is down here).

But about myself? Well, I'm a bit of a child. I collect toys, mostly Transformers. Not just toys from Target or Wal-Mart either; I buy very, very expensive toys. Maybe I can show some photos some time, but last year I bought a $275 Optimus Prime. Part of me feels like a sucker. Part of me feels like a hero. Outside of toys I'm somewhat of a movie buff. I don't watch as many movies as I'd like, nor do I watch as many cartoons as I'd like, but I try to squeeze time in.

All that is fine, but my passion, the thing I really get worked up about and cry at and never stop telling people to experience more of, is videogames. In 1997 I first played Super Mario 64, and I just picked up momentum after that. It used to just be something I did for fun, something I thought was a piece of entertainment like any other. Then one day I happened to branch out and try playing Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. After that I realized that for me, it wasn't just entertainment, it was the highest form of art I could imagine. People dying in movies didn't bother me. The only time I cried at a movie was when they killed a dog. I believe there's too great a disconnect between the audience and the art when it comes to most mediums. When Harrison Ford is hunting down Replicants in "Blade Runner", it makes me think about the nature of human existence, and question what the character was doing. Metal Gear connected with me on such a deeper level, though. It made me ask why I was doing these things. When you are involved with a character in such an immediately intimate way as in in videogame, there's much more potential for an emotional impression, it's just a shame only a handful of games ever take advantage of that potential.

I took a programming class in highschool, found it fairly fun, and decided that's what I want to do with my life. I want ...

Hello, I'm Ariss King! I'm a graphic design intern here at Jackson Free Press. Ever since I picked up a Jackson Free Press, I have dreamed of being involved with it. Let me share with you about how this place rocks my world each day.

Interning this week has been great! It entailed lots of writing (duh!) and lots of knowledge. Donna introduced a Lunch and Learn series just for the JFP interns! Now, I’m tempted to call her Momma Donna (lol). First…we had Cynthia Joyce, who recently left MSNBC as web editor to teach journalism at Ole Miss. I know right! They bring the big shots after I graduate. SMH

http://jacksonfreepress.www.clients.ellingtoncms.com/users/photos/2012/jun/23/2654/

So…she shared with us her great sense of humor and a wealth of knowledge that stems from experience and passion. What’d I take? “Don’t think that you shouldn’t do it because it doesn’t come easy,” she said. Say what?! Writing can be a challenging and tedious process that breeds self-doubt and frustration for a newbie and maybe even some oldies. However, we all keep coming back to it. It takes work, but we love it. So to the little voice in my head that says, “Christianna, what do you think you’re doing? You can’t do this.” I’ll say, “Watch me!” Thanks, Cynthia Joyce!

Next…Claudia Dreifus, NY Times writer and Columbia professor, graced us with her presence. Can you say “star struck”? She interviews some of the greatest science minds in the world, and she was here. Yep! I couldn’t even eat my Aladdin salad (lol). It took me forever to think of something to ask her. Well…I was a little tongue tied :-&

http://jacksonfreepress.www.clients.ellingtoncms.com/users/photos/2012/jun/23/2655/

What did she impart? Listening to her, I couldn’t help but feel writing makes the world smaller. It connects us all. Writing doesn’t just reveal community. It creates it. She gave some gold nuggets that I desperately stuck in my pockets: “Journalists are on the front row of history.” “Develop a confidence to judge information.” “People want to hear an authentic voice.” Thanks, Claudia Dreifus!

What now? What happens to those of us who sat and soaked in all of it? To my fellow interns who inspire and astound me, I say, “Will the real sponges please stand up?”

http://jacksonfreepress.www.clients.ellingtoncms.com/users/photos/2012/jun/23/2656/

http://jacksonfreepress.www.clients.ellingtoncms.com/users/photos/2012/jun/23/2657/

http://jacksonfreepress.www.clients.ellingtoncms.com/users/photos/2012/jun/23/2658/

http://jacksonfreepress.www.clients.ellingtoncms.com/users/photos/2012/jun/23/2659/

I'll start by saying......This is my first time ever blogging.

Lucky me. Yesterday i got two very nice interviews out of the way and toward the end of the first interview an old college friend rang my phone(Called Me). Not recognizing the number I just had to take it. But, I'm in the middle of my interview.

Lucky me. Her phone rings almost simultaneously....So I seized the opportunity. "Excuse me, I have to take this," I informed her. Answering her phone, she nodded complingly.

Lucky me. Ok, back to my friend on the line.....She expressed to me she needed a photographer immediately to take photos at a small meet and greet for 2013 Jackson Mayoral Candidate Chokwe Lumumba.

Lucky me. I finished up my first interview and just my luck the interviewee expressed interest in getting ads for her biz in the JFP.....I made sure i told her about JFP's Boom magazine.

It's almost over....I promise....

Lucky me. I got some great shots of Lumumba and the people and I guess it was just my luck that amongst the crowd was a young lady who is running for Jackson's City Counsel Ward 7 seat.

Lucky me. Ward 7 is the ward myself and my partner Liz are assigned to write about......Sweet. I made sure to get her card and put her number in my phone on the spot.

Lucky me. I made it home safely and finish up a stellar second and final interview for the day.

-Darnell Jackson

For Sam Buchanan, executive director of the Mississippi Center for Legal Services Corporation, it is important for Mississippians in all communities to understand civil legal concerns.

“The more educated the persons are, the better prepared they are to address or avoid legal issues that they may encounter,” he said.

MCLSC, along with Hinds County Human Resource Agency, will host the legal services workshop June 22. Buchanan will speak at the workshop, which he said will provide “information on several specific areas of the law as part of our community education outreach efforts.” His specific focus in this workshop is how to acquire social security benefits and how to prepare wills and trusts. "This is something that is important, regardless of income level, especially when we talk about wills" says Buchanan. Sadly, however, in his experience, low income people often don't leave a will behind because they think they don't have much to leave. "But if you don't leave a will, the state decides what to do with your property. If you do a will, you an control, from your grave, who receives your property," says Buchanan.

The Mississippi Department of Human Services provided a grant for MCLSC to conduct the workshops. The grant requires the company, which offers legal aid in 43 counties, to sponsor workshops around the state to supply citizens with helpful information on how to navigate the judicial system. The grant also initiated the partnership between MCLSC and the Hinds County Human Resource Agency.

“Under the grant, we collaborate with local agencies in order to reach as many people in the communities as possible,” Buchanan said. The company conducted a prior workshop in Leakesville and is planning several others through the end of September.

Friday's workshop begins at 10:00 a.m. at the Laura E. McNair-Shady Grove Neighborhood Service Center (2118 Ridgeway St.). For more information, contact Cherri Green at the Office of Resource Development at1-800-959-6752, ext. 2919