Counternarratives

Item #38

http://mith.umd.edu/arguing/admin/items/show/38

Monica’s class notes don’t seem like class notes to me. There is some text on the paper, but who knows if it’s relevant to class or not? None of us can read Arabic.

I see the text as some sort of documentation of the mysterious creatures Monica drew, since all the text was written around the drawings. I can recognize three distinct creatures. They are not creatures that exist on Earth, but more like ones that exist in the virtual world, perhaps in computer games since I saw Monica game a lot when we roomed together.

Instead of taking class notes, Monica was actually taking notes of fictional monsters in a computer game. She described them in the upper area of the paper, drew them in the order of their sizes and strength in the middle and listed down their weak points at the bottom.

She did so to seek easier ways to defeat them, and she wrote in Arabic so that those who don’t read Arabic can not figure out her attempt.

Item #7

http://mith.umd.edu/arguing/admin/items/show/7

If you take a closer look at Amanda’s white MITH mug, you will notice one difference between hers and ours—yes, the words printed on Amanda’s mug go from right to left rather than left to right. Although every other feature of the mug, including its ceramic luster, its half oval-shaped handle and the bold black text “MITH MARYLAND INSTITUTE FOR TECHNOLOGY IN THE HUMANITIES,” remains the same, the reversed text makes Amanda’s mug unique.

She might have had a talk with Kirsten Keister during the design process, asking Ms. Keister to make her mug look slightly different, but not completely different so that people would not notice the change and request for the same favor. Ms. Keister agreed to help, apparently, and since the mugs were plain white, changing the color of Amanda’s mug to red or blue would be too extreme, the only element left appropriate for Ms. Keister to play around with was the text.

So that’s the secret behind Amanda’s unique mug. She seems to like it a lot, as you can see in the photo that she put it with delicious “MITH-working-time chocolate.”

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