Monday, May 5, 2008

Well Played Sir

Well played Barack! he stood by his pastor and church until mister Wright came out and made a bigger fool of himself claiming that this was an attack on the black church and insinuating what Mr. Obama really believed. only then did Barack really distance himself from the loony. Jeremiah has to have realised that the media works in soundbites and every piece of his message has to stand on its own. there is no context in the contemporary press. Basically, Barack gave the guy enough rope to hang himself and now Mr. Obama has come out smelling like roses. Nicely done.

Rocky

that famous movie bear rocky killed its trainer :-( How many of these stories are there? it seems to me that being a wild animal trainer is the same as consignment to death. everyone dies or gets mauled. it's ridiculous! i suppose it might be comforting to know you will die doing what you love but still, there is a difference between domesticated and wild animals. notice that none of our domesticated animals are three times the size of a man. are bears and lions really so important in cinema that we have to cage train and die from them? i'm going to go ahead and weigh in on this one. No! case closed.

crazy austrians

Good God! a man locked his daughter in a dungeon for 24 years and fathered children with her?! this is like something out of a movie. and she was 18 when he put her in. i'm so astonished i really can't muster much commentary. Kiss the Girls and Hannibal barely even touch this one. that is something that i realised after watching the discovery channel though. There was a show that never plays anymore called "most evil" about serial killers. they had some famous academic profiler come on and rate the evilness of their crimes. although the idea of one evil event getting a higher rating than others is kinda silly to me the content of the show was insane. if i had watched a movie about some of the stories instead of learning about them on this program i would have laughed. for instance: i thought Seven was impossibly cheesy but some of the stuff on this program it seems like an everyday event. anyway i am sorta changing my mind that there is some tremendous difference between movie reality and real reality.

miley cyrus

somehow i had no idea miley cyrus was billy ray cyrus's daughter. comencement of laughter. anyway, this photo bit is pretty trivial and it blows my mind that it gets as much airtime as it does. the girl was posing for vanity fair. its not like a paris hiltonesque sex video. and i hate these people that keep calling her a child. she's fifteen. young yes, but the photos were not pornographic and not at all indicative of a drew berrymore child run amok. it will be amazing if she comes out of this as a well balanced adult but such is child stardom. the amount of play does bother me though, not for any reasons concerning her welfare, but they make me wonder about our profit driven media. there used to be a real divide between news and tabloidism. but if a networks perogative is to make money money money then any outlet suitable for drama. "CHILD star miley cyrus has been taken advantage of. on a lighter note our economy is in the toilet, and the war in iraq is going eeehhh so so."

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Media Artifact

So, it turns out I am taking this class again.  This weeks  blog will be short and sweet as I already know what to expect from the class and my professor knows why I am taking it.

My artifact for this semester will be the Halo series.  More specifically the Halo 3 release.

The three questions I hope to answer:

A.  What does the Advertising of Halo 3 say about the way Microsoft views its audience and the way the gamers view themselves?  In fact, the real question is how does Microsoft believe the gamers view themselves?  How does narrative of the advertising of the newest release of this series answer this question?

B.  What genre of activity does the consumption and interaction of the game fit into?  Is this a sport?  Is it like a board game?  What genre of entertainment (beyond the obvious it's a video game) does this first person shooter fit?

C.  How does the proliferation of video games (specifically multiplayer) change the way people interact socially?  This is not like some MMO, rather people are in the same physical space yet interacting through a separate medium?

Simple questions  -  hopefully large enough for multi-page papers.