Digital Media Showcase

I went to the digital media showcase last week. Some of the films I had seen in class, and some of the graphics I had seen hanging in the MCA. It was interesting to see them all in context with one another, though. I have to say, Nuria's charcoal film was gorgeous. I also enjoyed the talking faces. They really cracked me up. I thought it was pretty neat when we watched the Sledgehammer one and I knew why Sledgehammer was the soundtrack because of the music videos we watched in class. I know Leeper had shown some of those animations in Intro to DMA, but I didn't know at the time that you all planned on stringing them all together. At any rate, it was pretty neat seeing everything on screen: "Yes, these are my friends and classmates...and they're awesome!"

Board Games

The board games everyone presented last class were pretty awesome. I am so impressed with all the creativity that went into all of them. Javon and Hannah's was definitely very professional-looking. I thought the game was fun, too, but I think maybe after five turns of not getting off "Go," someone who is not dice-rolling-inclined should be allowed to get a gimme and start going. ;) Not that any of us were in that situation...heh. Nuria and Lily's board game was pretty awesome, too. I loved the paper dolls--they looked like they came off a designer's idea page. My little sister Hannah loves glitter, fashion, paper dolls, etc, so she would have had a blast if she could have played that game. The "Galactic Chess" (what was it called?) game was pretty neat, too. That's a game my little brother would have liked to play. He's the only one who ever plays chess with me. None of my other siblings have the patience. The best for using what they already had and working from that, though, was the Etch-A-Sketch-It game. I didn't get a chance to play it in class, but it looked like a bunch of fun. Of course, I was an Etch-A-Sketch fiend when I was a kid, so maybe that just comes from nostalgia. At any rate, it was pretty darn cool.

Evelina's and my board game didn't turn out quite the way we planned, but that was mostly because we ran out of time. We wanted to make 30 trivia cards and 30 opportunity cards, but we only wound up with 6 trivia cards. We made the goal for opportunity cards, though. The money amounts were a bit skewed. As a prototype, it turned out nicely, though. I was quite proud of my little Sculpey graduation cap and messenger bag. :)

Act Justly, Love Mercy

He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. --Micah 6:8 (NIV)

Peter Vander Meulen spoke at a Forester Lecture on December 5 about The Micah Challenge. The Micah Challenge is mostly about bringing justice to the oppressed. The main goal of the Micah Challenge is to “halve global poverty by 2015.” As he put it, we should be “freeing captives, opening the eyes of the blind.”

I like this idea of doing all we can to decrease poverty. After all, the average American is spoiled rotten. I get very irritated when my friends complain about how they have to wait until next payday to buy the DVD they wanted or how their parents “only” give them a few thousand dollars for college each semester. Sometimes I want to smack them in the face and shout, “Wake up! You are so blessed! Look around you…you have heat, shelter, 3 meals a day, not to mention so much more extra comforts than you could ever need.”

This summer I made what was possibly a bad decision, but nonetheless a learning experience, when I decided to take an internship 5 hours away from home. Since my parents weren’t there to bail me out of financial problems, to make a long story short, I wound up not being able to buy food a couple times that summer. I can honestly tell you, being hungry without options for nourishment really stinks. Your head is pounding almost all day, and you black out easily, and it’s hard to think straight. You’re really shaky, and all you want is for your day to end so you can go to bed and not feel the hunger anymore. And I wasn’t really in all that dire of straits. I think my housemates knew my financial problems, and they would “accidentally” make too much food for their dinner every once in awhile. But, think of the people who go for days and days without any food, and no kind housemates to bail them out when it gets rough.

I think everyone who has never experienced poverty should try fasting. We always speak about “the hungry children” and it feels so distant. It’s always “the hungry children in Africa, or “the hungry children in China, never “the hungry children in Appalachia,” or even “the hungry children in Huntington.” After this summer, I understand hunger so much better. Now the only thing is remembering the way it feels as the years progress—not falling back into my oftentimes blinded ways, getting so used to my comparatively cushy life. The whole thing about not getting wrapped up in our own silly lives is hard to remember at times. Vander Meulen referenced James 5 from The Message, which he said he liked to use because it was so harsh:

And a final word to you arrogant rich: Take some lessons in lament. You'll need buckets for the tears when the crash comes upon you. Your money is corrupt and your fine clothes stink. Your greedy luxuries are a cancer in your gut, destroying your life from within. You thought you were piling up wealth. What you've piled up is judgment. --James 5:1-3 (The Message)

I’m not sure exactly how possible it is to halve world poverty in ten years, but the worst that’s going to happen is “sixthing” or “thirding” world poverty. Even if the Micah Challenge falls short of its goals, it’s still a good idea. After all, that’s what we’re called to do—to be deliverers of justice.

Creepy Computer Characters, Batman!

I was reading Wired News today when I came across an article entitled Monsters of Photorealism. It talks about how today's technology allows for videogame characters to be so realistic they're scary--literally. The author of the article argues that the closer human portrayal gets to reality, the more uncanny they are. Usually, our mind fills in the blanks, which is why we can equate cartoon characters to human characters. The closer you get though, the more accurate you need to be. I remember Leeper talking about something like this earlier in the semester--the more realistic human animations/drawings are, the more it weirds us out.

Say-tan's an Aaaaaalien!

Okay. All I can say is that the article on evangelism through Halo 2 is...amazing. And not in a good way. Sorry for the title, I couldn't resist. It's like that "Satan is a Nerd" shirt. Okay. Serious writing now:

It irritates me when people try to make everything "Christian." Everything that should be that way has already inherently been made that way by God. He made creation. He made people. So, people who are in tune with what God wants us to be doing are going to be making media, making art, that naturally has Him in it. This Lane Palmer person is trying to force a square block in a round hole. It just won't go. I highly doubt that the designers and developers behind Halo were thinking, "Hmm, what kind of morals can we insert in this game?" Not exactly plausable. So why try to force something that's not there?

When I was a kid (13 or 14), I played this one particular free MMORPG. One day, I had the same brilliant idea as Palmer. I don't remember exactly what I said, but it was something along the lines of "Jesus loves you." What can I say? I was a pretty idealistic kid. At any rate, it didn't go over so well. It wound up so that I eventually got called a troll and flooded with angry whispers from highly agitated gamers. I decided I should probably not do that again.

The point is, there are some situations for which witness is good. Directly relating salvation to videogames is pretty lame. Witnessing online to a complete stranger is grounds for being labeled names ruder than "troll." Casually witnessing to unsaved friends while they're hanging out at your house playing videogames? That's pretty cool. Just don't tell them that Satan is an alien. You'll thank me later.

Bathtime in Clerkenwell

Bathtime in Clerkenwell was a simple but highly entertaining film. The soundtrack and the fun black-and-white animation combined to make a fun film. I really like simple art. Sometimes I have a hard time focusing when the image is too complex. Still, even though the images were simple and repetitive, there was always enough variety to keep my attention. And yes, the song was addictive. By the way, I have figured out the lyrics. They are--and I quote (*ahem*):

Ob-a-doodley-boogle-doodle-boogle-deetin-dat-daht-dum.
Ob-a-doodley-boogle-doodle-boogle-deetin-dat-daht-dum.
Ob-a-doodley-boogle-doodle-boogle-deetin-dat-daht-dum.
Ob a deedle-e-doh.
Hup a dootie dote duhm.

There you have it, folks. Now you can have lyrics to go with that tune that is forever stuck in your head. I'm sure you feel your life is much more fulfilled for knowing those lyrics.

A Feather Tale

A Feather Tale is a short film about a relationship between a particular woman and man. It is evident that the relationship is abusive, but any speculation beyond that is open to interpretation. Although some have been saying the woman in the film was raped or a prostitute, I disagree. I think it was rape, but within a "normal" relationship--as normal as an abusive relationship can be anyhow.

In the beginning of the film, the man calls the woman on the phone after she awakes crying. As the woman cradles the phone to her ear, it turns into the man. He looks to be whispering in her ear, reminiscent of the "bad conscience" typology in children's stories. In my perception, he was whispering words that were on the surface encouraging, but were in truth simply words to get her to come to his place so he could have sex with her. I thought the fact that she (symbolized as a chicken with a female head and legs) was delivered to him was a parallel of how women who think themselves capable of nothing better virtually hand their entire self, emotion, ego, and all, over to an abusive boyfriend for him to easily manipulate.

At first the man is gentle to the chicken, lulling it into a false sense of security and trust. Once he calms it down enough, he begins to stroke its wings. Eventually, he becomes increasingly more violent in response to the chicken's unease and finally plucks away all its feathers and begins to devour it. This is reminiscent of the stages of an abusive relationship. First, the abuser convinces the victim that he (in this case, though women abuse men as well as men abusing women) is trustworthy. Then, he gets her to completely trust him, usually to the point of him becoming the only person she trusts. Often, this is the point where she will begin to completely neglect her other relationships in favor of being with the abuser. When she begins to get uneasy about the health of the relationship, or even simply if a certain point is reached that "flips a switch" for the abuser, the relationship becomes outright physically abusive, and the abuser begins forcing the victim to do things she does not wish to do.

In the case of A Feather Tale, it seems to me that the man wanted the woman to have sex with him and she did not wish to do so. In the end, he forced her to have sex with him, causing her to lose her dignity. The imagery of the chicken's feathers being forcefully torn off, and the woman bending over them at the end of the film, symbolizes the dignity that was lost and the irreparable damage done when she was forced to play a role that she did not wish to play.

As a kid, I envied my friends who had the opportunity to be corrupted by MTV...

Even though my cousin was a month older than me, her mother allowed her to watch MTV, whereas my mother believed it to be "inappropriate." She was virtually the same age as me, but may as well have been ten years older than me for all the privileges I thought her to have. Most importantly, though, she knew Michael Jackson was not a girl.

I remember watching Free Willy with my cousin and aunt when it first came out on video, and naively asking in regards to the effeminate musician that I saw singing on-screen before the movie began, "Who is she?" I'm sure it greatly amused my aunt and cousin, as evidenced by my aunt's laughter-choked response, "That's a he, honey." At that moment, I think my scorn for my family's television regulations was at an all-time high. Now that I'm an adult, though, I look back and believe I could have been perfectly content with the world without knowing that such disturbing people existed.

In later years, while visiting my cousin, I recall her flipping around stations and pausing on MTV. A rather boring, quite tame music video was playing. Cue the confusion. Why did my mother have such an aversion to MTV? Obviously, not all music videos were as tame as the one we happened to land on. However, after reading I Screen, You Screen: The New Age of the Music Video, I can begin to understand why MTV was so off-limits in my mother's mind when I was a child. It was around the time that I was starting to become old enough to watch shows other than Sesame Street and the Polka-Dot Door that MTV began phasing in such mindless shows as Beavis and Butthead. My mother wouldn't have needed to see much of shows like that before deeming MTV at the very least a waste of time.

Looking at some of the old music videos that aired when I was a kid and comparing them to some of today's television music videos, the old videos don't really seem all that bad. That isn't to say that my mother should have let me watch them. That is saying that it's a scary thought that when my little brother finishes saving up for his long-desired PSP, such garbage will be at his fingertips. My little brother is a virtuous kid (way better than his big sis here), but not all kids are so good at listening to their conscience.

We need to get more good stuff out there. Let's make the choice easier for them. It's so impressive how wired society has become. If you want a song, it's on your iPod in a snap (assuming you use a Mac, but let's not go there). Want a movie? Order it on your television and there you go. Now with the advancement in wireless and handheld technology actually allowing such devices as the PSP and the iPod to become legitimate players in more than one aspect of media, and forcing old standbys like MTV to regroup, this is our chance to change the industry.