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I present… Expectations/Reality!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR4G9NoNulI&feature=youtu.be

Script by: Ed

Direction by: Tess

Editing by: Kelsey

Her body, sleek and muscular, outfitted with ripped and worn camouflaged army pants, black leather combat boots, and a tight black t shirt. Her hands perpetually clenched. Her eyes, though soft and feminine, focused. Her mouth set. Trained in the martial arts, she was stealthy but well-prepared for combat, a perfect soldier to be released into the matrix. She had been prepared as a lethal weapon in government facilities from early childhood, but she broke out during the great civil war of 2050. Now, she worked for Argus, a faceless head of the rebel group designed to enact vigilante justice, unwarranted watchmen of the cyber world.

Pulling the goggles down over her eyes, she zoomed in on each person as a small group passed by on the dirty urban street. The lenses in her goggles whirred as they zoomed in on each person and quietly indicated that that group was safe… at least for that night. Caid lit a cigarette, more to pass time than to satisfy a nicotine craving. Litter blew across the street like tumbleweeds as she waited, never losing focus on her main goal. Though this job was certainly never a position she saw herself doing and one she still wasn’t sure she wanted, she was good at it, and for now that was more than enough. There was security within Argus’ group. It was as close to a family as she had ever experienced.

Minutes later, footsteps echoed in the alley, as someone approached from the left on the sidewalk. Caid leaned forward slightly, enough to focus her lenses on the shady looking man passing by. A green check appeared momentarily in her left lens, and she knew she’d  found her guy. She replaced the goggles to the top of her head, dropped her cigarrette to the ground, and with a quiet leap, left the brick ledge and landed on it, smothering the flame beneath the toe of her boot.

“Here I come,” she said with a devilish grin, and was off.

This is Pointe Du Hoc as I remember it.

Muir likens exploring a natural space in real life to reading a book. If only it were that easy in the digital world. My first virtual trip to Pointe Du Hoc, France, one of the sites of military action during the Normandy Beach invasion on D-Day, was largely a geometric blur, largely unlike what I remembered of it from when I visited a summer or two ago. My second trip was worse, because Earth was somehow stuck in ground level view, a useless tool for a place with no buildings, and the entire beach was just a flat yellow space with the cliff sharply standing out in the background. I tried to travel around a bit, but the space was incredibly blurred and half-loaded. The photos that others have uploaded to Earth, however, help create a disjointed picture of the place.

Digital exploration, for me, has rarely provided the same experience as actual travel in a place. The sights, the sounds, the smells, the feeling of the wind and the total realization of what role you actually play in your environment has never translated to me through a computer screen, where I feel detached from the surroundings. Yes, you can gather the beauty, or the potential for beauty through the screen, but similar to my argument against e-books, there’s nothing like being there and experiencing it firsthand.Also, the lagginess and the loading, however brief, usually add to the disjointed feeling of the digital exploration.

I think even a textual tour can sometimes be more powerful than a digital tour because it conveys the feeling of a place using every sense, and not just one-dimensionally through sight. There are emotions, there are stories, there are connections between the reader and the place that may not be conveyed otherwise. I am not a person who can just stand and look and feel something – I’m really bad at art museums for that reason – I need to be active and involved, and I think that’s why for me digital worlds are not ideal – they don’t give me much to do besides click around and stare.

There’s certainly no harm to exploring a digital world. For those places we may never get to visit in reality, Google Earth and even Second Life are good, if not interesting tools for exploring the area, getting a feel for what it looks like, what being there might be like. But in my eyes, a digital tour does not provide the same experience as visiting or even reading about a place.

(I’ve included some pictures from when I visited to illustrate what the place actually looks like as compared with the GE version)

Care is a moral idea that is heavily emphasized in this game. The main goal is to care for a town and help it grow. Especially with the townspeople, with which the town leader (whom the gameplayer controls) has a lot of scripted conversation, the idea of care and harm are very present. Players frequently come to the town leader with problems that need to be solved, and choosing a good solution earns the town leader rewards, like wood for building or extra energy. Also, it is the town leader’s responsibility to aid injured townspeople.

Loyalty to the game is also heavily emphasized through game rewards and achievements. Returning every day earns players additional bonuses, like free houses and experience points. Too much time between visiting houses lowers the townspeople’s moods, as indicated by a red or green smiley or frowny face on the screen. A crop left too long will die. And there’s only a limited space of time in which an ill person can be healed before they die. These are all effective motivators of game loyalty for achievement-oriented people such as myself.

Fairness, however, does not exist in this game. Often, some sort of natural disaster will come by, forcing players to spend large amounts of money to lessen damages and then expend precious energy points to repair the broken buildings and heal wounded animals. These occurrences are often random and unprovoked. Three can happen in the span of an hour, or a town can go incident-free for weeks. In this way, the game is unfair because negative events occur without much reason or predictability. It has nothing to do with how dedicated a player is, there’s no way to strategize and prepare, and there’s not even any sort of warning or pattern that would indicate that something might happen. I suppose along this line we could also say sanctity is cast aside in the game, because it encourages constant change and the randomness of “life-like” gameplay – it’s supposed to be like real life in that sometimes, bad things cannot be foreseen and things change.

The morality in this game does not come from player interaction but rather very predetermined gameplay, which in turn creates a very frustrating but addictive game for the achievement minded player.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5883767/Pride_and_Prejudice

For my distance reading, I chose to take a look at the text from the novel “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen.

I was initially struck by the prominence of names in this wordle. Every single “large” word is a name or a title – Elizabeth, Darcy, Mr., Mrs., Jane, etc. But then I remembered that Pride and Prejudice is a 3rd person novel and therefore proper names are a lot more frequently used than “I” or “you” which would have been excluded from this wordle anyway and therefore made way for some of the other words to show up, aside from names.

Something I do find interesting and possibly telling about the prominence of names, however, is that it shows the age and gender differences between the different characters and the way that those differences were represented in conversation and relationships between those characters in the novel and in that era of life. Mr. is more commonly used than Mrs., even though I’d say there was a pretty even split of female and male characters of prominence. Furthermore, the most popular female name is Elizabeth, a first name, while the most common male name is Darcy, a last name. It was Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, not Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam, or Ms. Bennett and Mr. Darcy. It seems to indicate that the males and the elders in the novel got a heightened level of respect. This trend of male surnames and female forenames is further represented in the wordle by the appearances of “Jane,” “Bingley,” and “Lydia,” among others.

There’s also an interesting trend that pretty much every word that isn’t a name or a title is some word of relationship – “father,” “family,” “daughter,” “dear,” etc. all indicate an emphasis on relationships between people – a focus of the novel. It is also intersting that the biggest non-name word is “must,” a theme in this book. The novel focuses on what Elizabeth and Jane and proper ladies in society must do in order to lead happy and fulfilled lives – ascribe to gender norms and marry well, living as a happy housewife for the rest of her life.

I was really intrigued to see that the word “love” is one of the smallest words on the graph. For a novel about women getting married, it’s interesting that the word barely gets used, and I think someone who was just looking at this graph would have no idea what the novel is about. With some context though, I think the lack of the use of the word “love” indicates the nature of the plot – the girls were not supposed to get married for love. it could be a fortunate side effect, but the aim of marriage was wealth and social status.

A distant reading tool I wish existed would be one that detects time period of a text based on types of words being used. It would analyze the words and spellings of those words, as well as their context, to determine their time period. Beyond using this as a tool to analyze literature once it’s developed, I think it would be cool just to be able to develop this tool and determine the potential of a collection of words to deliver historical meaning and determine the possibilities of distance reading.

Beena inaccurately represents this file as a video of some students rehearsing to perform in a musical relating to Charlie Brown. But in fact, she is very very wrong. Indeed, this is a video of several students who spontaneously broke into song and dance on Beethoven day, a very arbitrarily chosen day celebrated on October 4th and set aside to explore and examine and celebrate all that is Beethoven, not the well lauded composer, but the troublesome yet lovable dog from all those 90s movies. Most students hate this day, but moments before this video was taken, five students who also just happened to be members of the MHS drama club, came upon each other and discovered their mutual love for the day and the lovably large dog who tends to mess things up. This masterpiece of musicality and dance is the result – incredibly excited about their mutual passion and no longer feeling alone in their interests in this momentous holiday, the group banded together and somehow each knew the required words, dance moves, and harmonies to fit together into a lovely song and dance routine that is truly inspired. Lucky that someone happened to be filming and captured this moment!

Response to “Old Rollover Animation” by Amanda Visconti

in her description of this web page, Amanda incorrectly interprets this website  as  an animated marionette version of James Joyce. Well, I suppose Amanda was half-right. But she neglected to tell the full story. This is in fact an artist’s interpretation of what happened when a bunch of English majors got together to punish James Joyce for writing “Ulysses,” a novel out of which all of them had been forced to try and make some sense. It was very unpleasant to watch, the english majors tied him to a marionette and made him read punctuation-less novel of Lorem ipsum text of the students’ own crafting, a rather symbolic gesture that can be expected of disgruntled English majors. The artist’s interpretation of the event occurred, of course, many years after the actual event occurred, because they did not have Internet during those time that James Joyce was alive. The colored beams of the marionette are artistic interpretation as well – the actual beams used by the angry students were of course brown wood. The discontented look on James Joyce’s face, however, is certainly authentic.

This was the moment the second plane hit. I chose this moment because I find it to be the most “real” moment in news coverage of that day. What I mean by that is, when the first plane hit, no news cameras were on the scene. No one was live covering the towers. So when they first aired the footage, even the most affected broadcasters had a moment to gather themselves and prepare for coverage.

When the second plane hit, this was not the case.

I actually watched three streams of the second tower being hit – one from a Japanese station, WJLA in DC and the BBC. I will focus on the last two because I believe I got the most from those two. But I would like to point out that in each one, the anchors were on the phone with someone who was on location the moment it happened.

The BBC had very little to go on. I noticed that they just kept repeating the same facts over again: it was a jet engine plane, no one knows the number injured. Not without emotion but certainly told with the same amount of anchor detachment and professionalism that comes with the job of being a news anchor, especially on live tv. WJLA, while they didn’t have facts, at least had the familiarity with the area to be able to provide insight and context. Not only did they discuss the frequency of low-flying planes (and the fact that a New York pilot would know where the towers are), they discussed the terrorist bomb that had been planted in the basement of the towers a few years previously.

The reactions during the moment of impact were suprisingly different. I expected the reaction from WJLA to be stronger, but the BBC anchor did not even know it was happening. She must not have been watching the live feed because she continued to ask a question as if nothing had happened, and it took a very long time for her to understand that a second plane had hit.

WJLA, meanwhile, had the kind of raw and unfiltered shock that, even 11 years later, still really brings this tragedy home for me. They reacted the exact same way I did – sharp gasp, cries of ‘oh my God.’ This strikes me as the point in the day when all of the pieces begin to fall into place. I believe the female anchor even says that it is now clear this is some sort of organized event.

As far as the footage, both the BBC and WJLA varied wide and close-up shots. Meanwhile, the station in Tokyo used primarily wide shots, showing both the buildings on the skyline. From a journalism ethics perspective, this might have been to protect the viewers from seeing up close anything gory or offensive – especially in Tokyo, newscasters are probably more sensitive to their viewers. It may also just be a matter of what story they’re trying to tell – the BBC and DC station wanted to show the direct impact, what was exactly happening, in an up-close-and-personal way, while the Japanese station wanted to show it as a part of the bigger picture and how the city and country may be shaped.

Sept. 17th, 2001, 9:00 a.m.

CNN coverage at 9 a.m. one week after the terrorist attacks took a look at how people were immediately affected afterward. Coverage focused specifically on businessmen and workers in New York who seemed to be going back to the office for the first day since the attacks. According to the report, thick soot was still in the air, and you can even see it on the footage. A moment of silence was scheduled to take place at 9:15. They had three different on-the-scene reporters in different areas that had been affected by the attacks to show what life was like as a result of the attack. The coverage also addressed “America’s New War” in a logistical manner, through charts, words, and numbers. I didn’t see any real footage of action.

Iraq’s coverage at 9 a.m. EST (or 5 p.m. in Iraq), on the other hand, was very different. There were no shots of New York or DC, and there didn’t even seem to be any real discussion of what had happened or what the aftermath was. Instead, the coverage seemed largely to focus on actual footage from war – I can only assume these were invasions by America that happened directly after and as a result of the terrorist attacks, but my knowledge of exactly what or when invasions took place is a bit foggy. In any event, Iraq’s coverage is largely different from CNN’s, because it used real footage, actually showing the dead bodies and guns rather than facts and figures. A much more realist and direct approach that applies much more directly to the pathos.

It seems both channels were telling a different story about the same general topic – each focusing on how viewers would be directly impacted. But interestingly enough, neither channel showed footage of the actual day. It is my guess that by that point, the video wasn’t necessary to tell a clear story, and showing it would only cause more anger or sadness in the viewers, though the reasons the viewers would be upset might be different in each case.

A harsh January winter was working at the soldiers’ toes and fingers, turning them blue and numb with frostbite as the men waited for their orders. The moon was barely a sliver in the black sky, providing as much light as it did warmth.

They had traveled for days through the largely unsettled west from their settlement at Fort Douglas to the Shoshone village they were set to attack. A small group had set out first and the rest had followed a few days after, led by calculated Col. Connor himself. They were split in this fashion in an attempt to prevent the elusive Shoshone from learning of the attack early and scattering themselves, foiling the entire expedition. But the first regiment had stumbled upon three natives as they got close to town earlier that evening, and many soldiers were unsure of what they’d find of the Shoshone village.

The soldiers waited to attack. Word had spread that the advance was to begin at 1:00, but the night advanced past that hour and the soldiers continued to shiver, huddled for warmth around small fires that were hard to maintain on the wintry earth. They placed their now-frozen canteens of whiskey near the flames in an attempt to liquify the contents, hoping for a sip to numb themselves inside as well as out.

At 3:00, the soldiers began to form ranks, an effort which required some time in the deep and tightly packed snow as the men continued to shiver and shake in the arctic cold. Many were rapidly losing strength from fatigue. But the men were eager to fight, ready to claim the land the natives had been nurturing for so many years, seeking retaliation for American lives lost at the hands of these indigenous people during an ongoing and bloody turf war that the natives never asked for.

Col. Connor paced up and down the lines, finalizing his strategy for attack upon the unwitting natives. At last, they were ready to set off. As the very first signs of early morning began to set in, the first troops set out for the quietly sleeping Shoshone village.