Fam Wars
Fam Wars Revised

I decided to do my video collage on the progression of family throughout the ages. It was an interesting project, and choosing the different periods was tough. I basically just picked the three biggest time periods: tribal life, medieval life, and modern life.

Just remember: Family will be with you...always.

As we all know, Thanksgiving is but a week away. I'm know everyone is excited, if not for the family gathering, then the simple pleasure of being away from school. I can't wait to go home and see my entire family.

Spending these few months away from home has made me realize just how important family truly can be. I'm very close to my family, and living away from them has been tough. Family, I've discovered, is the thing you can always fall back on if you need to. It's always there for you, even if, sometimes, you rather wish it wasn't.

I remember the few days before I left for school, I was totally psyched to get away from my parents and my brother. I thought it would be absolutely amazing being completely free for the first time in my life. Alas, we humans are gregarious by nature, and I guess expectations do not always match up with reality.

Monty Python Spoof

For my mash up, I used the witch scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I thought it would be the perfect set up for a critique of models through a spoof I've always found hilarious, and I've notived that comedy gets points through better, sometimes, than a serious tone. Basically, I poke fun at models' lives, such as their need for bodily perfection (one example in my mashup is the "model's" false nose which refers to rhinoplasty). I know this is necessary for them to maintain their profession, but the lengths to which they go is laughable.

(I can't remember if I'm supposed to post this week or next, and if it's next, my bad.) Anyway, I've noticed that the semester is slowly coming to a close. What with registering for classes and professors discussing, to some degree or another, finals, it finally hit me. I've noticed to, sadly, that as my classes slowly progress, I find the monotony to bore me almost to tears. Most of my classes require one thing, that is reading, and that for every class. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy reading, and the material I'm supposed to read is very interesting. But doing it everyday just gets tedious.

It makes me almost miss the high school class schedule, where, in my case at least, I had a pretty varied range of subjects to work with every day. A single portion of my brain was not overwhelmed every day with the same kind of work. Although I detested doing homework then as much as I do now, I could at least get through it at a much more rapid pace because I could relax the different pieces of my brain between subjects.

I Playlist
To Appomattox

This was probably the most entertaining assignment thus far. I love creating stories, especially incredible fantastic ones (meant not in praise but as descriptors of reality). I had a great time finding the correct songs, though sometimes the process was...frustrating. My playlist tells a story of a futuristic civil war in the United States. I thought the story would be interesting to describe because it is possible, although not very probable, in today's society. There is enough strife and conflict everywhere that I would not be totally surprised if some kind of military conflict did erupt in this country. I also used the story to express some of my political perspectives, such as the power corporations have to influence politics. Although I'm a moderately successful "classical" writer, it was a lot of fun to experiment with a new method of expression. This assignment taught me to think outside the boundaries of normal literature, that strictly "canonical" writing styles are sometimes insufficient for expressing an idea clearly.

This collage brings together the different aspects of the story my playlist tells. War is followed by peace, but this peace is only illusory. It is shattered by the monopolies of the great corporations and the terror caused by their death troops. The martyr is silhouetted against all of these factors and he binds them altogether. He is separated from the rebels by his death.

Olive branch -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/brian_ford/177400111/
Death troops -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/unnamed/47093899/
Factory -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/schlegl/226557032/
Rebels -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/maya-bird/242079009/

My song collage is for the song Green Eyes by Coldplay. it's a song about the desire to love one person, and how that person makes the lover feel.

Cause I came here with a load
And it feels so much lighter, since I met you.
Honey you should know, that I could never go on without you.

Man on rock -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/salim/5796735/
Green eye -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/wfdt/113760408/
Sea scene (Ummm...can't remember. Used a different computer to find it, but I'll look for the link.)

I used lots of masking and editting to manuever the man on the rock into the picture. The original scene was full of reds and oranges, so I used a simple color switch to make it green. I lowered the opacity on the eye and used an overlay (I think)to position it as the sun. I used a flash function (I used PhotoShop) to create the reflection in the water.

Gaming today has become for some almost an addiction. They sit in their rooms at their computers or staring at their television screens for hours, sometimes days, on end without rest. Why? What is the benefit of such destructive behavior?

Unfortunately, I can be such a person at times, especially when I just buy a good game. However, I can see what it does to a person. Gaming restricts social behavior (except among certain gaming circles), causes sleeplessness and insomnia on occasion (when fretting about how to beat a level or something of that nature), and just creates a general lack of physical exercise which the human body needs.

I hope I'm not the only one who has had this problem in the past, but it seems to me that sometimes class syllabi are quite difficult to keep up with. Twice already, I've had to do last-minute rush jobs of assignments because I either didn't remember to check the syllabus or I was too busy checking the others. I have one of those Day-to-Day planners, but it almost never gets used, and although I've found I use desktop post-it notes more effectively, I still have difficulty keeping track of all my assignment due dates. What does everyone else do to make sure they don't have that panicked and he

Bat and I are coming along pretty well. We have all of our ideas. All that leaves is a few more recordings and soundbytes to insert, and then we should be done. It shouldn't take much longer, but it probably won't be finished today.

We'll be finished soon.