CCDoctor's blog

The internet is a strange place. You can find pretty much anything you'd ever need on the web, even go grocery shopping! With its creation, globalization started on an exponential level: two groups of people from different sides of the world who knew very little about one another could suddenly communicate with ease, assuming they knew the same language. People with the same interests could make a website and congregate there.
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When I first heard "Photopia" in class, I thought back to commercials for the Post cereal company's website for kids with "awesome" shitty flash games on it called "Postopia" (at least, I think that's what it was/is called). Fortunately, this was not what Photopia was about at all.
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Recently we've had to read the choose-your-own-adventure story "The Abominable Snowman". While the book is a fun read, the genre of novel is simply obsolete, due to the rise and increasing complexity of video games. The novel puts on a sort of "veil of reality" with it's use of the second person, saying "you did this" and "you did that." It works to some degree, but how the novel is arranged so that each time you get to a branch in the story where you can do one thing or another, you have to turn a bunch of pages and find the right out come, sort of brings you out of the story.
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Written narratives are primarily judged for their content, but this judgment can be changed with small visual factors. This can be seen in some novels through the changing of font whenever the story switches perspectives. For example, in the fifth Dark Tower novel, Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King, a certain character tells the story of his past several times throughout the novel, in which case all of the text goes into italics.
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Mash-ups are one of the commonplace things on the internet today and the things Dr. Rao showed us in class, like the political videos or the Grey album were great examples of the phenomenon. They change what the original narratives were supposed to mean. Some more examples are here in the form of Seinfeld Horror or mixing a Queen and 50 Cent song together.
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Krazy Kat's a very interesting older comic, in that it frequently references itself as a comic, or uses metalepsis, much like Little Nemo, but to more comedic effect. I actually found myself laughing at many of the Krazy Kat comics. Nowadays, newspaper comics rarely have that effect on me, due to a strange lack of creativity. However, that's not to say that there aren't ANY funny comics around. Far from it. With web comics like Penny-Arcade or Cyanide and Happiness, I have plenty of material to laugh at.
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The old Winsor McKay cartoons we watched in class were pretty amazing, from a technical point of view. In the Nemo one, when the..erm..."Throne Dragon" (?) came out and went past the screen, he got the perspective absolutely perfect, to the point where it actually looked three-dimensional. My senses actually interpreted the effect as computers out of instinct, even though I knew that this was not the case at all. I wonder if he got tired of drawing only slightly different versions of pictures over and over again while doing those animations? I mean, assuming he did all of it by himself.
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I never really noticed how a lot of the frames in comics had sort of fibbed perspectives until reading some of these "comics analysis" essays. I guess it just shows how masterful the artists were that they could create a world out of pen and some ink with completely different physical rules than our own and make it seem (to a point) believable. In middle school and early high school, I experimented with making comics, convinced that it was what I wanted to do with my life.
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After reading a good chunk of the Little Nemo comics, I have to say it's hard to believe Winsor Mccay didn't find very much success. Now, it's been a good while since I've been a child, but usually kids don't really care much for plot and only like the cool pictures, or at least care for the pictures a good deal more than words or plot. The artwork here is among the craziest I've ever seen so I don't exactly see how it wasn't very popular with the children.
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Well, when I got assigned to download and play a video game for homework, I was pretty surprised to say the least. I was extremely curious about what it was I was just assigned to play, so I actually downloaded and played through Passage as soon as I got back to my dorm.
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