CAIT_tothe_LIN's blog

I tried to run with McDonald's corporation with some success, but what caught my interest was reading the explanation for the creation of this game. Under the "Why This Game?" tab, I read Ronald's attempt to explain the faults of the McDonald's chain. As stated in the letter, to deny the accusations against McDonald's negative impact is pointless, but is a game detailing how this notable restaurant impacts our world helping the case against McDonald's? Sure running a successful business has it's costs, but experiencing the "necessity" through this game didn't make it seem any better to me.
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I spent a good amount of time testing the boundaries of ELIZA's interactivity with vague and slightly insane statements. ELIZA spent a good amount of that time testing my patience with repetitive and grammatically incorrect questions. ELIZA is interactive in the sense that she allows, well, actually requires active participation by her 'patients'. But does she establish two way communication? If you're a 4 year old, maybe. It all depends on what constitutes interactivity.
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While trying to define and categorize what reality tv is, we established that many different shows all have some element that could label them as "reality". Are all of these true reality shows? In my opinion, none of the shows are portraying a universal, accepted reality; there's always and angle. I think we also put out there that a common theme of reality shows is taking people out of their element, transplanting them in a "plausible" (an extremely relative term when it comes to tv nowadays...) situation, and observing the result. Well, where's the reality in that?
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Last class we looked at narrative at opposite ends of the temporal spectrum. 1200 years ago so much labor was put into the creation of narrative in the form of manuscripts. Simply creating the medium by preparing hides was labor intensive, not to mention the artistry that went into the calligraphy. It is hard not to consider this narrative with all of the work that went into the production and the presentation of this type of narrative.
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Professor Rao's guest lecture on mash-ups and their political influence was especially relevant to someone who spends way too time on youtube(me). A good question was thrown out for musing, what is the role for new media in the development of political candidate's narratives? I've always just taken mash-ups and spoofs for their assumed face value, purely as forms of entertainment.
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I realize that I'm kinda jumping straight into the discussion for next class, but as I was reading the assignment, I couldn't help but wonder what the difference was between being fictional and being untrue. I sat and thought about it for way longer than I should have, just trying to find some way that the two were different. I kept blurring the line between the concepts, so I referred to my trusty, dust-collecting dictionary. According to Webster's fictional is defined as something that is feigned, invented, or imagined; untrue is something that is contrary to fact, incorrect, or false.
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Although it wasn't my first time watching "The Dot and The Line", the direction of the plot is pretty transparent. I'm not saying that it wasn't entertaining (I still found the the dated exclamations of "hot stuff!" and witty puns amusing on the fourth viewing), it's just that we expected the dot and the line to end up together even when their genders were still uncertain. It's always assumed in many narratives that the protagonist will come out on top in the end. We know that there are many exceptions to this, but there's always a part of us looking for a clean, happy ending.
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Visual communication is tricky business, it has so many forms and as a result, different interpretations. In the form of multistable and nesting images, the objective is to be interpreted multiple ways. There is no right or wrong answer, we just have to make up our own ideas about the image we see and what it means to us. This is how we do things in our everyday lives, someone says something to us and we understand it as it applies to us. It's a somewhat selfish way to go about doing things if you think about it, but that's the rub of being human.
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Winsor McCay's Slumberland is a vision in ink. Unfortunately, his protagonist, Nemo, seems to have the attention span of a gnat. He visits Slumberland in short bursts, always waking up not long after the trouble really starts. His dream world is one without consequences; whatever palace is disassembled, whatever landscape is destroyed Nemo, the Princess, and Flip are escorted out of the scrap by a royal entourage. Their misadventures don't really seem to have a point, rarely leading them to a destination.
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When I first read "Setting the Record Straight", I wondered what the little Harry Potter look alike McCloud was doing talking to me. The metaleptic element was not lost on me, but I found it amusing that a little cartoon man was defending comics. I never really had anything against comics, in fact I was a faithful reader of the comics in the Washington Post, but comic books always struck me as something of days gone by... nostalgic art forms collecting dust in basements everywhere. As he continued his visually captive argument, I found myself agreeing with McCloud.
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When I first played the game, I was looking everywhere for anything to transform into some deep, meaningful proverb. So as I analyzed the symbolism of the name in relation to the view of the screen, I noticed that my charming little block boy had aged right before my eyes! Suddenly comprehending that the numbers in the corner of the screen were counting down the moments my character had been living his life (if you could call remaining immoble at the starting point a life), I realized he needed to live his life.
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