Wiki Article!

I made a new article on Wikipedia about a book named, Second Chance by Kip Moore! Here it is!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chance_(book)

Second Chance (book)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Second Chance (book) by Kip Moore, is the story of Chance Moore who contracted E-Coli while on a family
 vacation which put his very life in jeopardy. Kip Moore describes all of the details of Chance's first days with 
the illness and how fast his son took a turn for the worst. When Chance was taken to his doctor, she sent them 
to the hospital right away. After less than 24 hours of being in the hospital, all Chance could do is lay miserably;
 a shell of his former self. Soon after arriving at the hospital, Chance's sickness worsened, causing his kidneys
 to shut down. As Kip and his wife Marti Moore stood in The Children's Hospital of Denver, they had to ask
 themselves, " Is my son going to die?" Second Chance answers this questions in an inspiring and touching
 way, showing a story of answered prayer in the midst of what seemed like hopelessness.

[edit]References

Moore, Kip. Second Chance. Golden: Second Chance Publishing LLC, 2010. Print.

Moore, Kip. Second Chance. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Nov 2010. <http://www.secondchancestory.com/>.

Here's a kind of blurry picture in case it got deleted.

Hybrid art close reading on "Maelstrom"

The hybrid art piece called, "Maelstrom," by Roman Kirschne is a documentation of a black and white sandy substance interacting and moving all over the screen, creating a masterful piece of hybrid art. This piece of art was based off of an Edgar Allen Poe story, however it can also represent lessons that are learned in life. "Maelstrom displays the realities and truths of the world with the fluid coming together and mixing of the dark and the light.

The screen starts showing an all white background with just a small lining of the black sandy substance on the bottom. Within the first few seconds, a black streak rushes to the top of the screen, overtaking the white and blending together, mixing and and spreading over the pure white. This fast blending automatically shows how fast the dark can overpower and take over the white (or light) creating a metaphor for the truth that both good and bad times faced in life, and how the light parts can so easily be destroyed by the dark parts. The dark then continues to spread until the majority of the screen is taken over by black swirling smoke, showing how negativity and depression spreads quickly after surfacing overtaking all that was light and pure. Through all of this part, the art is showing the initial reality of the dark parts of life beginning to set in and take over.

Kirschne then switches the image to a faster moving one, where the light and dark substances are interacting more closely and quicker, with the exception of a black blob that sporadically takes form and moves quickly over the screen, feeding off its surrounding dark spots and leaving behind trails of black. This black blob is the darkness taking effect in life, feeding off of all that is black and leaving behind residue of depression, hurt, or memories; the realities of overcoming difficulties. There is a few times when Kirschne has a white "blast" where the white substance seems to try to overpower, but it is quickly lost and taken over by all of the realities of darkness. It is difficult for the light to shine through all of the black; it keeps coming back. Just like in the world, bad things seem to always resurface no matter how hard we try to "blast" them away.

Kischne changes the perspective again, but this time takes a big step back. It's as if he's trying to say "this is what the big picture is." He shows the viewer the whole surface that he is using instead of just a small piece of it, forcing the audience to view take in the entirety of what is going on. This reveals more white areas that wasn't seen before, showing the positive parts of life that can be hard to find when right there in the middle of all the chaos. This step back also causes the black blobs that are moving around to look much smaller and insignificant, just like some of the difficulties faced in everyday life; when compared to the rest of the world, they can look pretty minuscule.

The fluidity in the piece represents the constant movement of the world, never stopping no matter how much darkness or light is taking up space. This constant movement can make our heads spin when we are aware of everything (dark and light) that is going on in the world. Life never stops moving, and the darkness and light that is experienced in it is always interacting and mixing with one another. Life is a constant balance of good and bad, darkness and light, negative and positive; each cannot exist without the other. This piece of art shows off the realities of this idea of the intermixing of two parts of life in a fluid and creative way.

Kirschner, Roman. (Artist). (2010). Maelstrom. [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.romankirschner.net/index.php?movie-maelstrom

Presentation Slides!!!

Website and Readings Assignment

1.)  1.)  Match.com http://www.match.com/index.aspx

Article: “Clicking for Love: How Match.com Changed the world of dating”

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/31/how-match-com-changed-online-dating.html

Someone in my family has used Match.com and showed me a little bit how it works, and it’s also free to look and browse around to see who’s in your area before you sign up.  It is fascinating how many relationships actually start online in the present day, and I think it would be neat for the class to take a deeper look at this new form of meeting people and dating. The site has you enter in information about yourself, and then be able to ask questions and view pictures of potential people to date. This article I found talks about the founder of this online dating service, Gary Kremen, and the creation of his site that played a huge role in revolutionizing the dating world we know today. It covers the background of the website and of online dating in general and the types of affects and statistics it has brought into our society.

2.)   2.) Skype  http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/home

Article: “The Future of Skype”

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/10/the-future-of-skype.html

Skype has become highly popular since its creation and has allowed for people to keep in contact in a more “realistic-seeming” way than before. Not only can you just hear each other’s voices, but Skype gives you the ability to feel like you’re experiencing contact with the person you are talking to by allowing you to see them; not to mention it is mostly free! This has had an impact on relationships and communication all around the world. This article is about where Skype plans to go in the future and what Skype allows people to do and experience.  I think this new form of communication would be a good thing to take a deeper look at, and how being able to see the other person and get a visual glimpse into their surroundings has affected relationships and expectations in communication, and this article gave some insight to that.

3.)   3.) Netflicks http://www.netflix.com/?mqso=80012928

Article: “Netflicks: The Sequel”

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/13/netflix-the-sequel.html

Netflicks has become one of the most talked about sites while basically shutting down all of the Blockbusters and video rental stores in the nation. This new idea of picking out what movie you want, clicking a few buttons, and never having to leave your home has taken over the video industry. This article takes a closer look at why Netflicks has been so extraordinarily successful. It talks about the personal things the site learns about you, creating lists for you based off of what you tell it you like, and allowing you to rate movies that come up. The article looks at how this site has become a very personal yet disconnected way to rent movies. It also takes a look at the future of Netflicks and DVD’s as a whole, which is very interesting because it is wondered if most movie-viewing experiences won’t be all online in the near-future. I think it would be good to take a look at this wide-spread change in movie sales and what it could look like in the future online.

Close reading on a blog!

   Going into close reading a blog I thought I was going to be looking at some flashy bright page filled with emotional posts about high school sounding drama. I expected to get lots of laughs out reading it and would feel like I knew a lot about the persons intimate details of their life. For this assignment, I used someone's blog about a trip to Europe that they had been on this summer, and found it to be very interesting to examine.


 The first thing I noticed was that the blog was covered in pictures. This made sense to me because since they were overseas, they would want to show everyone all of the different things that they had seen. However, as I looked closer, I noticed that the pictures were more of the people than scenery and places. The pictures of the people ranged from them being all dressed up and fancy to them making the funniest face they could manage. This told me that this was someone who clearly wanted to show off the multiple sides of their personality to everyone on the web, and the experience of the trip was greatly dependent on the relationships and quality of time with friends.

    There was lots of personality in the writing that was there too. There was a lot of all capitalized words and smily faces when things were going well, and lots of "sighs" and frowny faces when things were difficult. This is something I think is seen a lot in the online world today. People try to communicate how they would be reacting and even appearing in person when no one else can see them. We use side comments, sound effects, and faces to try to get people to understand our hearts and deep emotions. This blog definitely showed that desire for people to know exactly how this person was feeling every time they wrote, and tried to get the readers to understand what she would be acting and looking like if they could be hearing all of this information in person. As humans, I think this is a deep desire we have; to be understood, and this can be seen through the side writing of this blog.


   Something I found very surprising about this blog was the fact that the background was very plain. With so many pictures and so much personality, I would have expected the background to have some sort of animation or bright colors. Instead, the creator used a basic font with a brown colored plain background. The reason I think she may have in leaving her background plain was that she didn't want it to take away from the personal information she was sharing with the viewer. This makes a lot of sense because I think people that create blogs want the viewers to concentrate on the creator and their life rather than an exciting background that the computer created that doesn't have anything to do with their personal lives. This person clearly wants people who look at this blog to be pulled into her life and everything that she experienced on this trip and not be distracted by the rest of the screen or outside world.


   There were some things I was surprised about when looking at this blog, and somethings that I had expected. The background was a surprised, I was by how plain seeming it was, but in the end it made perfect sense. There wasn't any immature drama in this blog, but it did want the reader to become fully engaged in what their personal life was like during this experience. 

Avatar Creations!

Making my avatar was a very different experience. I had never done it before and I never imagined there were so many different designs that you could use to create one. A lot of avatars that I saw online were very fake looking. They appeared to make the creator look either like they wanted the world to think they were hilarious, or very attractive. The ones I saw first online were very cartoon-like. These usually had ridiculous hairstyles or abnormally colored skin, and these were the avatars that I found make me think the creator wanted to look like a funny person with a crazy side to there personality. There were other avatars that were more realistic, which is like the avatar I made. I wanted my avatar to look like me if I was living in the internet, so I tried to give it the same color and style of hair that I have, same eye color, and same sort of style with the clothes that I would wear. However, so people might prefer for their avatar to make them look better, or they try to live vicariously through their online-self by giving their avatar all of the features that they dislike about themselves. This reminded me of what Bell said when talking how we tend to use identifications rather than identity. To me, identity is something that that you find in yourself, and and identification is when you group yourself to a group of some sort. When making the avatars, there seemed to be groups of people identifying themselves in different ways. To me, these groups consisted of the funny group with the crazy avatars with funny hats and hairstyles, and the attractive avatars who all seemed to be either light blond or very dark brunette with revealing clothes.