Monthly Archives: August 2013

i wanna be the very best, like no one ever was!

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if you don’t know what line comes next, i’d suggest skipping this post coz it’s gonna be a face-full of cartoon nostalgia. oh where to begin?

so these last couple of months (over the holiday’s mainly) i’ve been, lets say indulging, myself in all things cartoon. well not all things. more just revisiting all those great things i loved as a

child but haven’t really thought about over the last ten years (well, except for Pokemon, that one’s stuck with me the whole way). why do we stop watching the things we love? i guess the number one reason is that we “out-grow” it. but as i’ve just realised, i have not even come close to outgrowing my old faves like Teen Titans, Pokemon or Kids Next Door. in fact, i even just watched all 3 season of avatar (the original cartoon, not the movie with blue people) which i had never even seen before and loved it!

so, if we don’t out grow them, what else is it? often it’s the sad reality that our favourite after school show has been cancelled. but i think the main reason we stop watching is that, as we grow up and move into secondary school, watching cartoons

stops being “cool”. and in high school, everything is about being cool. so if you’re still watching ash and pikachu try and become the best in all of kanto (or johto, or sinnoh, or hoenn. or unnova (but who really watched the unnova season?)) then you’re a nerd. no-one wanted to know which element you would rather be able to bend (for me it would be air or water) because soon it was all about which house would you be in at Hogwarts? (gryffindor of course) and then were you team bella or team edward? (neither, i can’t stand those stupid sparkly vampires) and now, if you don’t watch game of thrones, then you know nothing (john snow).

but, what’s life if you can’t enjoy the stuff you love? so i went and ‘aquirred’ all 5 seasons of Teen Titans and boy is it great. i miss all this kids stuff. i miss spongebob’s crazy antics. i miss debating with myself over whether i would rather have raven’s or starfire’s powers. i miss wishing that i had Fairly Odd Parents to help me get out of doing homework. i miss the playful adventures of the rugrats. and i never thought i’d say it but i miss team rocket. as a kid you just think they’re the bad guys, always trying to steal pikachu. but they are the comic relief of every episode. however, now that i’m older, i’m a little worried

by all their cross dressing, but as a kid you don’t pick up on that stuff. but they do it a lot. and being older, you notice things you didn’t. like all of meowth’s cat puns, or every time team rocket break the 4th wall.

so i say screw being “cool”. because all those old cartoons were the best. and if you can’t honestly sit down and find one thing you like about a show you used to love, then you should be ashamed. because your childhood is an important part of who you are today. and lets face it, pokemon are awesome.

 

(wow, that was a nerdy post)

iPads in 1968?

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one of the readings this week was about design fiction. what is design fiction you ask? i’m still not entirely sure of a full and proper definition but here’s the one given in the interview: “It’s the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change. That’s the best definition we’ve come up with. ” (the interview blog can be found here: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/03/02/bruce_sterling_on_design_fictions_.html).

kinda confusing but as i continued reading i began to understand a bit more (just a bit). that design fiction is creating things that we don’t have. kinda. i know what i mean. i just can’t really get it into words.like a prototype for something that hasn’t been made yet. like the hover boards in back to the future 2 (which i’m still very upset that we don’t have yet, btw. even if it did struggle over water).

what i don’t get is whether design fiction is supposed to simply remain just that, fiction, or whether it’s to be used as a method for innovation and the creation of new technologies. like that “a day made of glass” video that was featured in the post. is it made purely as fiction, for people to watch and wish for, or as something that will hopefully become a reality one day? coz that glass stuff was cool. although you’d probably get a bit sick of everything being see through all the time. that world was very bright. but all the intense touch screen stuff was great.

one of the other things mentioned in the article as design fiction   was the apparent iPad’s that can be seen in the 1968 movie “2001: a space odyssey”. for one, those didn’t really look too much like iPads.they were just big square things that were showing a video. although i guess that’s essentially what an iPad is. but there’s been stuff like that in every sci-fi show you can see on tv. star trek has a bunch of technology that didn’t exist when the show was made. (kudos to arthur. i got that great star trek meme from his blog. loved it so much i wanted to include it in mine too).

another example that came to mind was the thunderbirds. another old sci-fi show, thunderbirds had a bunch of awesome technology, some of which actually exists now today that didn’t back then – such as sliding doors (no not the movie, i mean doors that open when someone approaches them). no, we still don’t have those awesome hovercraft things that they used to cut that family out of the burning building, but maybe one day we will. i think that is the point of design fiction. innovative thinking and use of media and technologies to create things that we used to only be ably to dream about. and who knows, maybe one day soon we’ll all be moving about on hover boards, wearing shoes that tie their own laces and jackets that dry us off if we happen to fall into a lake because the hover board couldn’t get us across.

 

how to have a class discussion

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so, the second networked media class has come and gone and what have i learnt?

that i’m not a very good listener. and i have a very short attention span. i was always a better reader anyway.

but when we’re asked to sit down in pairs or threes and discuss the answer to a given question, it shouldn’t be so hard…right? i guess not if you know the question. but i seem to have the terrible trait of tuning out at precisely the wrong moments. i have to get that fixed. so the majority of what i learnt in class discussions was that my discussion buddy and i share vary similar tastes in television shows. (who else here misses lost? anyone?)

but, despite my inherent lack of listening skills, i did manage to pick up on some stuff during the class (thankfully because i typed down anything elliot or my other peeps said because it was a lot more useful than what i was saying) but the main point i have is… i still don’t actually know what “networked media” is! so far the last two classes and “unlectures” have predominantly been about the blogs. “what is a blog?”, “what can we put in our blog?”, “why do we blog”, but thats just an assignment (yes, i know it’s important in the whole scheme of everything) and i still want to know… what actually is this subject?

all i got in class was “networked media is not necessarily social media”. ok, so now i know what it’s not. can someone please tell me what it is? i guess i’m single loop learning again here, just waiting for someone to give me an answer. ok, lets double loop it up. to be honest, i’m still not even sure that i get the looped learning thing. elliot explained that “Double loop learning involves questioning the assumptions that you make about the process and in doing, so renegotiate the task based on what you’ve renegotiated about the process.”.

we did have some interesting discussions on the blogs though in class. what i really liked was how elliot described the blogs as “cataloguing our thinking”. its similar to what was discussed in the previous unlecture about our blogs being ours. we are creating an online persona/identity, something which is vital in todays technological society. also interesting was when someone (sorry, i don’t remember who!) brought up the concept of consumption vs. production – our blogs are a way of us contributing to the online world, putting our voices out there to be heard.

this is going too long again. i’m still not getting the hang of short posts. i tend to write a lot, as i’m sure all those millions of people probably not even aware that my blog exists have now figured out. so one final thing from class that i liked.

i don’t really remember how we got onto the topic (me tuning out again!) but i think it was around the time when someone asked what is the network? elliot responded with this cool little bit of info about “web 1.0, web 2.0 and web 3.0” as elliot explained:

“Web 1.0 – any kind of technology that allows any user to post any kind of info (early internet)

Web 2.0 – info getting pumped in to online space – info must be categorised and organised eg. Google (analyse amount of links to a page and quality of content within that page)

Web 3.0 – streamlining content towards specific users. Adapts its content in a way that is specific towards a user – advertising. Eg. Amazon will recommend products based on previous purchases.”

i don’t know what this info really had to do with networks except, like, online info and stuff, but it was really interesting so i do hope to use it someday.

Where is the mole???

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ok, before i get started, here’s a little warning to you all. i am a tv fanatic. i don’t watch every tv show (although i do watch a lot) but i just tend to get a wee bit obsessed with the ones i do watch. just ask my friends. i can name you every episode of supernatural, almost in order, and tell you what happens in every single one. and there are 200 of them. i can tell you the entire story of lost, almost episode by episode, and all the hidden clues that were in each one. i can also list all 50 states of america and their capitals off the top of my head (no, not tv i know but i just think it’s cool. and pretty useless. but so is pretty much everything i know). anyway, my point was, get ready for a lot of tv posts.

and heres the first. and it’s about the mole. and if my family saw this they would think i was crazy. i am the first one to say that i do not like australian television. ok, don’t count in scripted stuff like offspring or whatever coz i don’t watch any of those. just our reality shows. i just can’t stand them. everything is so overdramatised and exaggerated and dragged on and dumbed down. its like they (you know, those tv people. and yes my plan is to be one despite my obvious disdain) think we’re all stupid. and yes, we probably all are. but only because we’ve been shown this stuff thats made to seem like we’re unintelligent.

let me give you and example. back in (ok, not really sure how long ago this was, assume like 07/08 or something) when biggest loser was all that. we would get the american season and it would be a nice, one hour episode on a sunday night that had a challenge, a couple of exercise sessions, a weigh in and an elimination, all wrapped up in one neat little episode. then take our australian version. we would have and hour long episode on each night from sunday to friday. and oh were they dragged on. everything would be shown from five different angles. you would get video diaries of people describing in unnecessary detail what we had just seen. and we would come back from an ad break to see the exact same footage of the last 5 minutes before the ad break. there were ridiculous temptation challenges that pretty much forced the contestants to eat fatty food and don’t even get me started on that stupid “Stone of doom” advantage. (ok, it wasn’t called the stone of doom but i like the word doom and those stones annoyed me so much). you know what i’m talking about, “the walk” where they picked a stone out of a fish pond and could eliminate a contestant or have some other huge power. why do we need that?

ok, that rant dragged on a bit long. and it’s probably not that last you’ve heard from me on this subject. my actual point for this post was my annoyance tonight at the mole being shifted!!!! yes, it is just as terrible as all those other reality shows that i can’t stand. but i’m hooked. and i need my weekly dosage of suspicion and mole-action. especially because its the american summer hiatus and none of the shows i actually care about are on until october. anyhow, at 9:30, i excitedly ran downstairs to my tv to find some interview with footy peeps has pushed my beloved mole out of this weeks schedule!! i know it’s ratings are horrible and channel 7 is clearly trying to push it away (we had 4, hour and a half episodes in week one and now its just a crazy 2 hours blast out late on a wendesday night) but at least just put it on after or something. but now i have to wait a whole nother week before i can spend two hours shouting different guesses at my tv. yeah, the essendon drug scandal is big news, to those who love footy. but why are those people watching channel 7 at 10:00 on a wednesday night??? its a conspiracy to get at the mole. i just know it. and that footy panel was so awkward to. well, i actually have no idea. i stormed away from the tv in a huff. but thats what i heard from others.

ok, this has probably been a bit too long. i tend to get carried away when i rant. sorry. will try to keep them shorter in the future. but if the mole gets pushed back again i can’t promise anything.