Entry #1: A Blog About Blogs

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 achieve 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.

Entry #2: The Importance of Food

                So, I am a huge gamer, it’s always been a passion of mine from the moment my hands first came across my neighbor’s Playstation controller to today. The types of games I play vary and I enjoy all types. The game I am currently playing is one called “Don’t Starve”. It is a survival game where your object is, as the title implies, not to starve. The game goes so much further than that though, it’s about planning ahead, being creative and using resources wisely. It has a cute, Tim Burton-esque horror theme to it that helps to draw the game together. Player’s start the game off with their chosen character being dropped off into a world they know practically nothing about with a tall man in a suit standing over their character telling them “you better find something to eat before night falls”. With that he disappears and the player must figure out how to get that done with a hint that something ominous happens in the night time.

                The player might start off noticing that there is a bunch of objects that they are able to pick off the ground, and a menu for building things on the left side of the screen. Some of the items are obvious what their use if for, such as berries, while others are not apparent what they do, such as flowers. Collecting twigs and flint the player can start to make tools to help them gather more valuable resources, such as wood and stone. The player needs to make sure they build a fire or some other source of light by the time the first night comes as the ominous hint given in the beginning is very true and there is a monster named Charlie hiding in the darkness. At night Charlie will come out and attack any player not in the light, killing them rather quickly. Whenever the player dies that save is deleted and logged into the morgue, a running list of all the different times the player has died. In other words, once the player dies they must start the game over.

                Once players have begun to gather resources they should start looking for a relatively rare resource called gold. Gold can be found in certain nodes of rock. Gold allows the player to start creating structures that unlock more advanced things to build. Having built these structures (science machine and alchemy machine) a player should start looking at the food tab and building farms and other things out of it to help them survive.

                The true danger of Don’t Starve is usually not the food part but rather the means that players go about acquiring this food. Hunting is a very efficient way to acquire food and other useful items however the creatures of the land do not die easily and will attack the player when the player attacks them. Furthermore, there are hounds that will periodically spawn and hunt down the player until either the player is slain or the hounds are. Finally unbeknownst to the new player, there are seasons in the game and winter offers unique challenges in having to keep warm and a general lack of food during the season.

                There is generally thought of a way to “win” the game, though really the object is to survive as long as possible. There is a portal somewhere in the world that takes the player out of “survival mode” and puts them into a separate realm of “adventure mode”. Adventure mode provides unique challenges for the player where they attempt to assemble 5 items in the new realm they spawn in and assemble them into a new portal to move onto the next level of adventure mode. There are 5 levels in total in adventure mode and players who complete all 5 are usually thought of as having beat the game.

                Overall Don’t Starve is a great puzzle game that I have put way too many hours into. The game is challenging and offers a new challenge every time it is played. With the harsh “restart the game” consequence of dying it makes it a real challenge to try and survive and thrive in the world of Don’t Starve. 

Entry #0: The Beginning

Hey all, this is Alex, a current student at GCC reintroducing myself for the revamping of my blog. I am a huge gamer and love playing both board and video games. In addition to gaming I explore all over Arizona, going both caving and hiking. At GCC I study business and will be transferring to a University to get a degree in either accounting or finance. Beyond school and recreation I work at Quik Trip (the best gas station out there) as a clerk. For this blog I will be creating a casual/professional blog that investigates a wide variety of topics that I find interesting and I am sure you will to.

Entry 11: The End

Blogging has been a unique experience I have never done before nor would I ever have if not for my English 101 class. The act of sharing my thoughts for the world to hear has been rather fun even if no one is really around to read them. I have been using this blog almost as a personal journal using the free-write entries to highlight and share some of my favorite things with the world. Blogging for me has been an experience of making the things I am interested in interesting for other people, which has been something I have rather enjoyed. I never really took the blogging project overly serious besides making sure it done for my grades. I always just took it easy and let whatever I wanted to write about be what the entry ended up being rather than trying to force something or plan out my entries, I tried to just let the writing come naturally. I will probably not continue blogging in the future but I am happy to have had the experience of blogging.

Actually blogging has changed my opinion on bloggers as well. They have to put more thought and effort into their works than I had originally given them credit for. While there are still bad bloggers out there that spread mis-information and use their blog to promote an agenda there are also plenty of interesting and fun blogs out there.

There is a lot to learn with blogging. Blogging makes the author think more about who their audience is than normal essay writing does. Furthermore the author has to consider the fact that the blog is accessible to everyone and must be more thoughtful of what is being posted. No one wants the blog they wrote in community college to end up being used against them in the future.  Beyond just academic learning I learned a lot about my class mates by reading their blogs. They shared a lot of personal and interesting things that I would never have found out without the blog project.

As an assignment for class the blog project was great for highlighting the importance of choosing your audience and writing in such a way as to appeal to them. Overall it was an interesting aspect to take rather than having us do another essay. I appreciated the fact that the work was spread out over time rather than having another large assignment to do in a short amount of time. I think the commenting on other’s blogs could should have been expanded, I enjoyed giving others comments on their blog and receiving some on my own.

The main place I did not like the blog project and felt restricted by it was when I had to write on very specific topics that I had no interest in. While this is a good writing exercise in and of itself it was hard to generate an entry that I found was worthy to post when I felt like I had nothing worthy of being said on the issue. I noticed that many of my class mate’s blog posts were rather short, being around a paragraph in length. Personally I found that these posts were terrible to make comments on and usually did not say much. Adding a guideline of what a minimum blog post should be might be helpful to give students a better perspective on what a good blog post involved. 

Entry #7: Fresh

In class this week we watched the movie Fresh. Fresh is a movie shot the style of documentary portraying different aspects of the food industry, specifically the anti-industrial farming movement. The film highlights the benefits that alternative farming methods have over industrial farming. The film is very light in tone, the people talk to you as if you were a friend. The shots were taken in very authentic ways; the crews filmed the farmers as they were working in the field, talking on the phone, or over meals. To compare to these alternative farmers a industrial farmer is also interviewed and their position is used as the standard for those in industrial farming. When they are interviewed there is a slightly different mood than when the alternative farming farmers are interviewed. The industrial farmers have an air of despair around them, they are mellower than the other people interviewed and the colors in the frame are darker than those of the other farmers. The industrial farmers also have a little dog with them that looks absolutely ragged, mirroring the image the film producers are trying to portray of industrial farming.

Fresh is targeted to those who don’t really think about their food habits much; those who are not firmly entrenched into the industrial farming side or the alternative farming methods. It attempts to persuade their audience to support the alternative farmers by buying the products that they sell. Even if you only “spend 10 dollars a week” on these alternative farming products the impact is still significant according to Fresh. While the film has a clear bias in attempting to get people to buy the products that these alternative farmers sell they are relatively fair in their assessment of the food industry situation and attempt to present both sides. They do not however highlight some of the reasons people would farm in industrial way other than monetary reasons and there are advantages to industrial farming beyond monetary (though monetary is the main reason for it).

The only place I had a problem with the film is when the question of Genetically Modified Organisms came up. It was never directly addressed and only briefly mentioned by several of the alternative farmers. One of the farmers stated something along the lines of I like the modern technology in the farming industry but I would never use that genetically modified stuff. There is no real reason given as to why not to use the genetically modified organisms yet every person interviewed seems to just brush them away as if they are clearly a inferior choice that isn’t even worth considering.

Entry #10: Starting Over

There are times in our life where we have to look back and evaluate the choices we have made that have led us to where we are. Sometimes we find that we are not where we want to be, somewhere along the way we stepped off the path we thought life would take us and onto a path we never wanted to be. For me that time was my first attempt at college. I had followed my high school girlfriend to college, giving up a full ride at NAU to pay my own way at U of A. At the time I made every excuse in the book; I wasn’t following her, NAU just wasn’t as strong as U of A in the program I wanted pursue, Flagstaff is too cold and I wouldn’t be happy there, I liked the school spirit at U of A, my cousin went to U of A and was really successful. Really though the deciding factor was her. This decision was the decision where I stepped off the path I wanted to be on and took my life in a direction I never thought it would take. I wasn’t happy at U of A having a pre-existing social structure led me to not expand my social structure nearly as much as I expected to. I wasn’t making new friends I didn’t dive into my studies I floundered instead of flourished. Three years later I was still at U of A, I was still dating the girl I followed to U of A but our relationship was tense. My schoolwork didn’t improve and I was in danger of being expelled. I was suffering from a deep depression and hardly was able to get out of bed each day.

Something had to change and so I restarted my life. The girl I was dating and I broke up in what was a semi-amicable break up. I moved back home with my parents and restarted my academic career, attending Glendale Community College. Now I have been very successful with my new life. I have been making new friends, rediscovering who I am and maintaining a 4.0 GPA. I am seeing a therapist and my depression is under control; I am happier now than I have been the last 3 years. This new found success is due to the fact that I hit rock bottom and decided I needed a change in my life, a drastic one.

Sometimes it takes that drastic change to get the life that you want to live. It was terrifying leaving the comfort of a relationship I had come to rely on, the social structure I had built for myself, to go into something new. The pay off was there though. Had I stayed in Tucson attending U of A nothing would have changed, my life would have continued to decline until there was absolutely nothing left to live for anymore.

Entry 8: Schemings

As I have mentioned previously I am a huge gamer. There is a continuum of games where the influence of luck versus skill trades off with each other. At the far end are games such as Chess and Go where other than who goes first players start out as perfect equals and there is only the difference in player skill to determine the winner. These games feature a wealth of choices for players to make, they are very unrestricted in strategy that must be used and there is an incredible variation in how the games end up; there are more variations a game of Go can be played than the number of atoms in the universe. Opposite to those games are simple board games such as monopoly where the outcome of a game is usually determined by who rolled the dice better or spun a spinner to more advantageous numbers. In these games players may make one or two decisions but usually it is evident which choice is the better one and the strategy in these games is simplistic enough for children to understand. For some people to fun of a game is all about the luck involved and so they gravitate towards game such as monopoly, life and war. One of my favorite past times is playing card games. Card games take on a different role when compare to other types of games. Card games generally are a contest against other players, a battle of the wits where the only thing determine the winner is a small amount of luck and mostly skill; they are close to the chess/go end of things but luck takes enough of a role in things to keep it interesting.

The most popular card game would probably be poker, a game where players make bets against each other on how “good” their hand is compared to the other players. All players start at the odds, same as with chess, they all play with the same deck and as such have the same chance as any other player of drawing a specific card. Where the strategy comes in is with betting. Players acquire information about the cards in their opponent’s hands based on body language and the way other players are betting. This is the aspect where strategy comes in, betting in such a way as to mislead your opponents and get them to make the wrong movements.

The main card games I play are less well known yet still incredibly popular. Magic the Gathering is one of my favorites, a trading card game with a fantasy theme where players utilize a resource called mana that is produced by specific cards in their deck to cast spells, summon creatures, and attempt to lower their opponents health to zero in order to win the game. In this game there is a large card pool players are restricted to build their decks out of but each player will have different cards in their deck. This adds an element of strategy that poker does not have, the element of deck making. Some decks will be inherently better than others or have a strategy that is a counter to a different deck’s strategy. Unfortunately this adds an aspect of “pay to play” to the game as the cards are not free and generally the more powerful a card is the more expensive it will be. Magic and Poker cross over greatly; many famous Magic players go on to play poker as there is more money in that game than in the professional Magic scene. Players in Magic gain information through body language as well as the other cards the player has played so far. Often cards that can be used synergistically together will appear in the same deck so if a player knows what cards work well together in the pool of available cards then they will have an advantage in that they can predict the other cards in a player’s deck.

Unlike poker Magic has a lot of direct interaction with other players. Cards will directly influence the opponent’s game plan, such as cards that stop opponents from casting spells or destroying each other’s creatures. This aspect is the aspect that makes Magic more enjoyable for me than poker, there is something very satisfying about unraveling an opponent’s game plan and watching the plans they were making crumble.

Enty #9: The Slime is Pink but Does it Stink?

Watching the pink slime video linked below, it is obvious why the public could be scared of this so called “Pink Slime”. It looks like Play-Doh more than what people identify as food. But is this mix something that should have actually caused such a wide spread scandal? Something that completely changed the way people consumed meat for years to come, reshaping the beef industry in a moment. Really all the media did was hype something, they provided a scary picture, a scary sounding chemical name and said this is what you are eating; nothing more. People are afraid of what they don’t understand and it seems like this fear extends greatly into the realm of food. Society by and large has become very detached from the means of production that our food comes from so when biased information appears they do not have the necessary background to necessarily notice that bias. Listening to video itself it is clear the reporters are not presenting all of the facts nor are they presenting the facts they do have in a fair way that remotely reflects both sides. They go so far as to make objectively false claims such as “the US has no standards” while talking about regulations. Clearly they have never heard of the FDA before or the amount of regulation that actually does go into the food American’s eat. They justify this claim by comparing it to what a McDonald’s Canadian spokesperson claims that “we would never use such a disgusting product in our food”. Maybe that statement had nothing to do with the quality of the product or regulation are rather had more to do with the fact the Canadian spokesperson wanted to distance themselves from the scandal happening in the US. Bad press is bad for business and if you have to throw someone else under the bus in order to keep your name in the clear than that is just good business practice.

When it is examined more closely it would make sense for the “pink slime” beef to look exactly how it does. It is “extremely finely ground meat” and what happens when you grind something as fine as they did in the case of the beef? It becomes a paste or a “slime” so to speak. Using a chemical to eliminate bacteria isn’t unheard of either and the practice of which was allowed by the FDA, declared safe for human consumption. The new way that lean, finely ground meat is being treated is through citric acid. Citric acid is a chemic that naturally occurs in citrus fruit such as lemons and limes. This process appears to appeal more to consumers and as the price of beef is increasing the demand for lean finely ground meat is increasing, showing once again that consumers care more about the price of a product than any other factor. Even misleading press releases that create a scare in the population.