Thoughts & Ramblings of a College Student

For one, I want to say, this was the most relevant and informative presentation we've had all semester, as it relates to our time directly and forces us to look inside at what we are truly doing with our social media intake and how we are using it to impact the world. In terms of Social Media campaigns, the possibilities are pretty endless, and the level of impact they seek to have is also endless. In efforts to bring light to a smaller campaign that seeks to do something simpler but impactful, I will  be talking about the #UNLITTER campaign. Seeking to inspire people to keep the earth clean, for the sake of the environments and its animals, the #UNLITTER campaign looks to rally people and encourage them to help pick up pollution, liter, trash, and any unnatural debris and invite their friends  to do the same by posting on social media about the impact they are making in their communities. The #UNLITTER movement also seeks to bring awareness, and inspire people to live a lif...

1. My initial reaction to the text was aggravation. What was the point of that, if nothing was done. However i realize that that exactly is probably the point of the story, to expose the way things work in a place, and how frustratingly nothing gets done because of the constant interruption of other "forces". In the same manner it was a sort of story inception where there was a story being told about telling a story that was never told, or well, completed. Needless to say the lack of information as to why the sequence happened in that way was frustrating to me, and made me feel slightly aggravated. 2. Being from Venezuela, I could connect to some of the ideas of brute force as the leading method of communication and of getting what you need or want, because similarly this kind of violent actions happen there too. I was also able to connect to the narrator's frustrations of the totally unnecessary situation, and inability to complete a simple task. I also could connect...

I think this course ought to include live music. As an avid concert goer and festival goer, i think its important for people to view and feel the feelings that come with live music. These feelings can range from anywhere in the spectrum from happiness to anger and back again. I believe if anything is the universal language, more than mathematics, music is the universal language. Regardless of lyrics and cultural aspects of music,  music is not just heard but more importantly felt. In the live setting, I believe we receive the energies and the feelings a lot more profoundly and somehow in our subconscious music speaks to us, and allows us to express things we don't have words or images for. It's also interesting to see the kind of culture that live music has developed, specially music festivals as they've become a lot more mainstream and attainable to people, especially in America. Which goes to show universality of it, as many different walks of life, ages, and kinds of ...

What a joy to watch something that was nothing like what you expected... in a good way! The End of the F****** World World was a wonderful series to dive into, as it was easy to consume and the content wasn't as lengthy as some other of the shows, which is very appealing to me. Personally, binge watching is not my favorite form of media consumption, because the information gets jumbled in my brain and sometimes I cant even synthesize the information, or truly understand the intricacies of what is happening in the show. I much rather watch one episode a day for the duration of the series, but I definitely never mix series, meaning I will watch one series at a time, not many different episodes from different series in the same time frame. On the topic of binge watching, long form television, is an identifying quality of our time. With the phase out of common cable broadcasting, and the onset of Netflix, and all its subsequent streaming services, we have started leaning towards co...

Reading comics is a very particular kind of literary experience. For me, a person who hasn't picked up any kind of comic but maybe once in my life and never finished, I found that it is unlike most literary experiences, and that there's a process to how to do it, and what to pay attention to. The imagery in comics informs you just as much as the text if not more, and there's a particular order in which to look at a page and to make sense of it. This, for me, makes it a more confusing experience than simply reading a book, as I have far more practice in that realm. In the world of the graphic narrative, we see the authors voice come through a combination of  the imagery they present, the format of said imagery, and the writing style they pursue. In My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, the imagery and the format are the main factors for me. This pen sketching style on ruled paper, seeming much like an illustrated diary of sorts points to the idea of someone speaking from inside,...

This week I chose to explore Sofia Coppola's work, almost solely based on the tiny fact that she is the wife of  the leading man of a band I thoroughly enjoy, Thomas Mars of Phoenix. I was surprised to realize, I had seen a lot of her work before, actually, MOST of her work before this moment. So I was excited to be able to look at it with a critical eye instead of having to decipher the plot and point of the movie. I watched The Bling Ring Marie Antoinette Somewhere The Virgin Suicides Lost in Translation and for some fun and to see the way her voice might have translated i also watched The Flaming Lips : This Here Giraffe Phoenix: Chloroform I found that the her voice certainly shined through every single movie, and the first element I  noticed make an appearance time and time again was the way sound was used in the movies. More often than not the dialogue was sparse and there was use of a lot of mundane sounds we don't truly pay any attention to in our real live...

Reading screen plays, for me, was an entirely different world. It certainly takes a certain kind of imagination and knowledge to be able to read a screen play and truly make something of it, thus I salute movie makers everywhere for the way in which they bring these fairly vague documents to life. I made the slight mistake of reading a  rather difficult screen play to follow, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  After much confusion and being unable to really piece things fully together, I switched over to reading a screen play for a movie I have even watched and love, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and still had a very hard time with the hypothetical thinking and filling in all the blanks of the people places and visuals involved. After reading the screenplays I certainly  had a new appreciation for all the people and creative power it takes to create a movie and to bring these conversations, essentially, to life. Although i studied costume design very briefly befor...

Ready Player One for me wasn't as interesting or moving (in terms of content directly related to my interests)  as some of the other pieces we have read in the past. Although it certainly brings to light certain ideas about technology and gaming facilitators for escape and building your own alternate reality. I think although we are just discovering the capacities of virtual reality we know enough to create a world around it, like was done here on Ready Player One. I believe it was a successful descriptor of what the creation of that world could mean to many people in real life, and how it could actually affect the real world and doesn't just exist in its digital form. Although I believe we are a a handful of steps removed from reaching the full potential of virtual reality and its impacts in the way they are exposed on Ready Player One, I think Clide does a good job at giving virtual reality a voice in our real world by exposing   Wade's connections and successes withi...

After reading Marriage of a Thousand Lies, I was more than glad to have had that real life Q&A with Sindu. For one, its a given that this novel is relevant to our world today, because Sindu is a contemporary writer of our time, but also because of the issues it deals with within the story. The LGBTQ community, tradition vs the new age, and the issues of the non binary. It is interesting to know that this story is not a "thinly veiled memoir", but a story opposite of Sindus. I, like the people she talks about in her interview, automatically thought she was writing a story about herself. It is interesting to see that she in fact isn't and is going out of her way to write stories not only directly related to her but also doing the active research to find them. However in the same manner I was glad to see that lucky did in fact have some aspects of her personality that came from Sindu and that helped develop the character, which in some ways allows us to know and feel ...

Oh cosmopolis, what a bore,really! In terms of content and storyline anyway. But so much more parallel to real life than many other stories. Cosmopolis certainly shows us a very straightforward depiction of privilege and the privileged and how truly unprivileged they are at certain other aspects of life that, personally, I deem far more important than money and power.  Eric Parker, like the privileged of our world, live in an absolute alternate reality from the rest of society. With their coveted money, come actually very few assets.  The only thing this guy has is money, sex, and luxurious objects. Other than that. He’s literally a zombie. Has barely any sense of emotion other than power or arousal, has no idea how to communicate with a person in a reasonable way, has no sense of how to emotionally connect with someone neither verbally, nor physically.  And in reality, throughout the whole duration of his car ride, he’s got visits and stops with plenty of peop...

If I were to design a wonder woman theme park I certainly would leave the poly amorous bit of its history out of the main attraction, mostly because I feel in some way that children of young ages all still look up to Wonder Woman and although more widely accepted I feel it isn’t our place as artists to dictate when to expose children to those sorts of issues and ideas. If the park was only for a certain age range, say 18+ or so, well that would be a different story, where the more complex ideals could be presented widely.  I would base the theme of the park around the idea of women empowerment as we ride the new wave of “hype” for the recent live action Wonder Woman.  It could go as far as being a sort of role playing situation where you could pick to play from an array of characters pulled from Wonder Woman’s universe when you first arrive at the theme park experience and in some digital way your achievements are recorded. At the end of the experience there could be an...

         In True Grit both the text and the movies, we were able to see the Child Savior myth in action at its finest.  The content shows us how Mattie, proves herself to be far more responsible and mature than the male characters that surround her. Through the duration of the text and film  Mattie often, directly and indirectly, helps the men behave and take action in a more mature way than they would have without her influence.         In class we spoke of how trustworthy the point of view is, as we are experiencing the story through her, when she is already older, indicating in some way that potentially the vision is skewed and that we might not be getting the full story, or the most accurate story, however I personally feel that if her intentions for avenging the death of her father were true and honest, then her retelling would be as true and honest as they could be. This was not something that bo...

Alas! Another novel that transcends its time and has even lived to see many iterations of its story line as it relates to us today. In some ways, people generally think we have come very far from the times of courtship and arranged marriages, but when we look beyond the surface, and beyond what’s directly in front of us, we can really see that we haven’t actually changed very much. At the time, they married for wealth, the married out of necessity, and the emphasis wasn’t necessarily on love. It is no secret, that people today still marry for money, out of necessity, and throw love out the window if they need.   In some cultures, today, the notion of an arranged marriage is still even the norm, and what is expected and practiced.              In a similar fashion, the idea of class separation is still very much alive and well, and in some ways, will always be, especially when it comes to relationships. Although it is not vie...

As it goes, when I read any piece of literature, or content, I often like to consider how this pertains to my current life, or our current state as a society and why it would be of any importance to interpret it. As I read the prologue and the wife of bath, I was inherently impressed with how some of these same societal problems, and questions, have transcended through time, and through many iterations still linger around our society today.             In these selections, we actually see a couple of concepts that we are dealing with a lot today in our society, women’s promiscuity, rape culture, and the notion of what it takes to “please” a woman, or figure out what it is she wants. I have to applaud the wife for being a sort of grassroots feminist in exposing her practical view on men and courtship, although it is not a path I personally would take, nor do I necessarily agree entirely with her point of view, the notion of going ...