Entry 3: Future Tech

Technology has increased at an exponential rate and the more it increases the more we integrate it into our lives. The above video shows an Indian company working on a technology to truly integrate the technological, virtual, world with the physical world. This technology is incredible in the way it works and I believe technology like this would significantly change the way we live our lives.

Having everything connected to the internet, the ability to look things up and have everything seamlessly integrate together seems like a fantasy right now, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a reality in the future. It seems like this technology combined with technology like Google glass could create a world where the way we work, live and interact is completely different than the one we are living in today.

I have read several Sci-Fi novels that deal with the concept of augmented reality. Often they create a world where the have and the have nots are even more separate than they are now. Those who can afford the augmented reality technology are the only ones who can truly work and succeed in the society, those without the technology don’t integrate into the world and as such cannot really be true citizens of the society.

Despite some warnings about the problems augmented reality technology could create for society the technology is still exciting and one I hope to see in my lifetime. If used carefully this tech could connect the world in ways never seen before and increase the potential for human achievement beyond what it already is. 

Entry 4: Showings

There are a lot of activities to do to keep oneself entertained in the Phoenix, Arizona area. For almost entire life I have been a major theatre kid. From 6^th grade throughout high school I was always involved with some type of theatre production, whether it be community or with my school. It should come as no surprise then that I enjoy watching theatre just as much as I enjoy acting in it.

This past weekend I watched two different productions of Broadway level performances. The first was Les Miserables produced by Theatre Works. The second was Cabaret at Gammage Theatre, with the Broadway travelling cast. The cast of Theatre Works are some of the most talented young people from across Arizona. The youngest in the cast was a talented 9 year old boy who played the role of Gavroche the oldest was only 18.

Les Miserables is my favorite musical of all time portraying a love story that happens during the French revolution and the power of what can happen when someone is given a chance to make a difference in the world. Theatre Works did an amazing job with their performance. For such a young crowd their vocals were amazing, the acting powerful and their professionalism unmatched. I unashamedly cried at least 6 times during the performance, the actors portraying such powerful emotions on stage. There is something about hearing a room reverberate with the sound of 50 people singing about freedom, revolution and standing up for the downtrodden that I couldn’t help but be moved to tears.

Cabaret has a completely different feel to it than Les Miserables did. Cabaret is show about pre-Nazi Berlin portraying two different love interests and is highly symbolic in nature. I found the first act to be incredibly weak, the writing relies entirely on the sensuality of the dance numbers to keep the audience entertained and does not care much substance to it. I began tracking when characters were portrayed smoking because it was more interesting to try and analyze for symbolic meaning than to pay attention to what was happening with the plot. The first hour and a half provides nothing but exposition with the conflict of the play being introduced less than 5 minutes before intermission. With a weak first act the second act does everything it can do to remedy the mistakes made in the first act. The ending is powerful, it takes the conflict that is introduced in the second and act resolves it in an amazing and heart stopping way.

If you were to be looking for a play to go see I would recommend Les Miserables. While the cast of Cabaret was very skilled and professional the script doesn’t hold up to be worth paying the price to see a play at Gammage. The fact that the cast of Les Miserables is so young brings to life the skill they truly possess and makes the performance even more powerful than it already is. 

Entry 6: Fun and Games

Why I game

All my life I have played games of one form or another. It all started when the neighbors across the street got a PlayStation, the original one. I hung out with them a lot and they were always more athletic than I was. So any athletically based game they won, I had no chance. But here came this amazing machine. This machine where suddenly I was the one winning some of the games we played. The great equalizer.

From there my own interest in gaming did not diminish. Eventually I got my own Playstation and eventually a Game Boy to join in the hand held craze as well. When I was in Boy Scouts I saw some of the older boys playing an interesting looking card game with fantasy characters that looked very intense and interesting. I learned the game was Magic: The Gathering and thus began my journey into card gaming as well. During my first year in college some of the people in a club I joined invited me over for “game night” where we played a myriad of board games that I had never imagined even existed, from games of superheroes teaming up to beat a villain, to murder mystery games to games where you attempt to build the best train line across a continent.

Each different type of gaming fulfills a different need but they all share a universal joy for me and have become a passion of mine. Gaming creates a field where all start out as equals, using only skill and luck to win the day. For me this battle of the wits, the pitting of strategy against one another is one of the greatest draws to gaming. Seeing how others strategize and plan gives real insight into who they are as a person, where they see strength and weakness and what aspects they like to develop. For example I have a game where you acquire and use cards to spread influence on a board, trying to take the most territory for yourself. At the end of the game the value of your territories and your deck is added together and whoever has the most points wins. There are varying approaches you can take to acquiring the most points. For example the way I play I like to acquire as much territory as possible and play a very aggressive strategy. I enjoy the feeling of overwhelming an opponent while I play and so my go to strategy for this game is one of conquest. Another one of my friends likes to see cool things happen and so while he will never have the best position on the board or the most powerful deck his cards will interact in ways that will lead to interesting and sometimes powerful effects happening. He likes seeing each of the different parts come together to form a potent combination. Another plays for the long game and tries to ignore the board completely instead trying to build the most valuable deck possible. If the game goes on without end his strategy would be the most powerful revealing that he likes to think in long term plans but can sometimes oversee the benefits of short term planning. Often if the game comes to a surprise ending he will have the lowest points as his strategy got the most disrupted by the sudden change.

Entry 5: The Future

Watching the above clip from Wall-E is very disturbing to many of us. It reflects a little too accurately the way society is evolving, at least in my opinion. Humans interact solely through screens, even if they are in the same location as each other, requiring machines to get around and no even having the ability to walk. Watching the clip makes me incredibly sad for the future of humanity and calls into question the way we interact with technology now.

The future portrayed in the clip is a very dark and ominous future. It makes me think of times in my life where I have chosen to interact with technology rather than with real, material things. I have a group of friends which I play video games with and interact with over Skype. There have been times where we could have met up and done something together but instead we chose to talk over the internet and play video games together at our individual houses. Personally I feel it is less fulfilling to interact with each other in that manner, I prefer the face to face, real human interaction. The virtual interaction does have its merits however. There are times when we cannot all meet up in person and I still get to spend times with my friends, and it feels close to having them in the same room with me. I believe the problem comes when we interact solely with technology and ignore the real life interactions, a future portrayed in the clip. Humans must safeguard themselves from falling into this trap of solely virtual interaction if we do not want the future of Wall-E to become a reality. We must watch ourselves and others, ensuring that real interaction is happening as well as virtual.

 Humans, fat and floating on chairs, represent the way we get around now, we rely on cars for transportation, and while there are trips we need them for, other times people take them for trips they could have walked instead. More and more we rely on automated transportation rather than moving around the old fashion way. Furthermore, it highlights a decreased level of activity in the human condition in general; when the man in the video falls out of his chair he doesn’t even have the strength to get back into it. The way these people live their lives mirrors the way we live our own, albeit taken to the extreme. They turn to machines for easy and quick satisfaction, not willing to put long term effort into something for long term pay off.

The screens in front of the people of the clip are clear symbols for the way we interact with cellphones in the modern day. More and more people walk around with their cellphone in front of their face, not present in their current environment, instead existing in the virtual one. We ignore those around us when are heads are buried into our cell phones. The clip shows how unaware people are of their surroundings when Wall-E was attempting to get to Eva and the large woman interacting with her screen kept blocking him unintentionally. It was only when Wall-E disabled her screen did she notice his presence and let him pass. Furthermore, when the woman’s screen was disabled she stared in wonder at the world around her in wonder, not having seen it for a while: too busy interacting with her screen to take note of the beauty around her until forced to turn the screen off.

Commercialism is rampant in the clip. The people’s screens are littered with advertisements, ads cover the landscape of the ship, and there is no escaping a corporate sponsored message to be found. An announcement can be heard over the loud speakers “Buy and Large, Everything you need to be happy. Your day is very important to us” implying that material objects are the things that make us happy. When the children are taught the alphabet “B” was taught in the context of “Buy and Large, Your very best friend” indoctrinating children into a reliance and love for the corporation. It appears that Buy and Large is the entity that runs the ship, adding a sinister tone to the clip where not only are the people mindlessly consuming from a corporation, but that that corporation is also actually their government. Portraying the corporation as the controlling entity speaks heavily to the way many people view modern politics, viewing corporations as the real decision makers behind the government rather than the people; the people mindlessly following along with whatever the corporate “best friends” would have them believe.

Wall-E presents a terrifying future for humanity yet it is not necessarily the future we are destined to have. With carefully safeguarding our ideals and watching our actions we can find the balance between reliance on and use of technology. Technology should be something to enhance life rather than replace it.

Entry #2: Off the Beaten Path

Today I want to talk about an activity that not many people know exists, caving. Caving is an activity where people go out explore, survey and conserve the wonderful caves to be found around them. This is a hobby that I have recently gotten into and it has already taken me on some wild adventures,

The first time I seriously went caving was with a friend named Azure to Peppersauce Cave, located about an hour outside of Tucson. After departing from Tucson we took a tiny two lane highway through the small town of Oracle and into the mountains. Before reaching the cave you drive through a small campsite tucked away into a small valley and hidden by trees known as Peppersauce Campground. To find the cave entrance you have to already know where you are looking, there is a small pull off on one of the nearby roads that serves as a parking lot for those visiting the cave. Crossing the road from the parking lot you descend into a valley via a trail not visible from the road. A short walk along this trail and you come to a sign mapping out the cave and giving a little history of it. The map details two entrances to the cave, one forward and to the right the other off to the left. We chose to explore the entrance toward the right. This "entrance" was a crack in the cliff face at an approximate 135 degree angle from the ground. The outside was spray painted with warning label of danger along with some skull and cross bones. Figuring this to be a prank done by some bored teenagers and no real danger was to be had, we turned on our flashlights and entered the crevice.

                                          Picture Courtesy of: experience-az.com

We slid along the rocky surface for about 30 minutes, never able to really stand, more laying on the angled rock. The crevice was only about a foot and a half wide and narrowed at points to where I had to align my body so that my neck was going through pinch points, rock scraping at either side of it. Finally after 30 minutes there was a small round opening at the bottom of the crevice, what we assumed was the opening into the main cave. As I peered into the opening I saw a small chamber, barely big enough for a small teenage girl to curl up into the fetal position in that was completely encapsulate, there was no bigger cave that this crevice led to. As it turns out this entrance was no longer usable to get to the main cave, we had gone the wrong way.

Another 30 minute trek back out of the crevice and we stumbled upon a kind group of older men who pointed out to us where the real entrance was. You had to follow the trail further and then turn to look up at the cliff wall. There was a section where several roots stood out of the wall forming a ladder like structure sturdy enough to be climbed on. Climbing those roots we came to a small ledge and the actual entrance to the cave.

The entrance, just a tiny hole in the cliff face led to a small chamber with another, even tinier hole in the wall. Once inside this first chamber you could see graffiti everywhere, mostly people writing their name. The cave is mostly made of clay, meaning that even crawling through that first hole we began to get covered in the stuff, there was no way of exploring this cave with getting utterly filthy. On we went under this second hole into a large room, pitch black except for our head lights. In this room there were several holes, looking almost like slides that lead off beyond where our flashlights could see. We opted to be safe and stay well away from these, not knowing what lurked at the bottom of the wild ride down the slide.

The cave is about a half mile deep with several rooms linked together all similar to the one we first entered. At the back of the cave is where the real experience is, a large underground lake. To get to the lake you start at an overhang with a ladder attached to it. Climbing down the ladder you come to a slick clay landing that slopes steeply away on either side. Carefully making out way off the landing there the floor slopes all the way down to the lake, slippery all the way. From there on we crept along the path making sure to keep at least 3 points of contact with the ground, making sure we didn't slip down into the lakes murky waters.

After the visiting the lake we began to head back, retracing our steps through the cave. The graffiti on the walls became incredibly helpful here as there were numerous arrows pointing to the exit. The exit itself is nearly impossible to find without these arrows, being a one and a half square foot hole at the bottom of the wall, cloaked completely in darkness. 

Climbing out of the darkness and into the light we found that we were as expected covered in mud. Luckily we had planned ahead and brought a change of clothes with us so that we didn't have to endure the filth throughout the car ride home. 

This experience opened me to the world of caving. I sought out a local group that does this as a hobby and gives people access to more advanced and dangerous caves, and will be attending one of their meetings shortly. There is no other feeling in the world like feeling rock on all sides of you, going into the depths of the earth to see what is hidden their. 

Entry #1: Where Things Get Meta

Having already introduced myself in the previous blog we can get right into business about what I know all of you are here to know, my opinion about blogging. Well, honestly I never have been a fan of blogs. I have always seen them as something lonely housewives do to try and reach out to the world and interact with it in ways they haven't been able to acheive in their day to day life.

Well that was my opinion anyways until I started looking into what blogging was really all about. Blogging is as varied as people are, while there is the boring blog that is only relevant those who personally know the author there is also a vast expanse of general interest and special interest blogs that would appeal to a wide variety of people, myself included.

One blog that I have visited for years without even realizing was actually a blog was Post Secret. This is a blog where people send in post cards with secrets written on them which are then published on the blog. This blog is interesting as you get insight into people's personal thoughts and experience. There is often reoccurring themes such as a drive towards suicide or trouble within marriage that helps those struggling with those issues see that they aren't the only one in that situation and feel like maybe there is hope for them if others were able to overcome those obstacles in their life.  This blog connects people in ways not possible in daily life. The aspect of anonymity let's users openly share their darkest secrets without ever being revealed, sometimes the internet is the only place these secrets ever get told. Psychology shows it is healthy to let go of things rather than keeping them bottled in and Post Secret gives users a place to do just that.

The layout of Post Secret is very simple, letting the images speak for themselves with little to no interpretative text. When there is interpretive text then it is usually a translation of a language other than English or a single sentence that gives greater context to the entry. The black background makes the website seem serious, somber and highlights the secret nature of the website. The black pairs well with the often dark content of the post cards, yet the white text emphasizes the message of hope the blog tries to convey; the light shining through the darkness.

Another blog with a similar style to Post Secret is The Sartorialist. The Sartorialist appears to be a fashion blog. Now high fashion is not something I have any knowledge of and the website is presented in such a way that I believe requires existing knowledge of high fashion to enjoy. As with Post Secret a simple mono-chromatic background is chosen, this time white. There are pictures of people wearing fashionable clothing with the only text being when and where the picture was taken. The blog claims to create a "two-way conversation on fashion" a claim which it fails to reach. There is no conversation going on as far as I am aware, merely pictures being presented saying "this is fashion" with no expounding on what that means or why the pictures are fashionable.

While the above blogs are very serious in their presentation there are also blogs which are much more light-hearted in nature, such as the blog Dog Shaming. Dog Shaming is a blog where people post pictures of their dog with a written message about something they did wrong, publicly "shaming" the dog for their wrongful behavior. The background for this website is a wooden floor with dog prints on it, creating a playful image as one imagines little dogs scampering across the floor, making those prints.

After doing research and actually opening my mind to the possibility that their may be more to blogging than I first thought I have come to appreciate them more. The blogs that I can form a connection with such as Post Secret and Dog Shaming add value to my life, allowing an online community to form and interact with the content provided while those I do not connect with such as Sartorialist hold no interest for me as I don't feel like I can interact with them in any meaningful way.