It's the end of the world as we know it

Well, this is it: the end of Writ 1122.  I found this course interesting, but not entirely what I expected.  I liked the idea of following the news as it gets forwarded and countered.  This idea of news evolving and being shared was something I came into the class curious about, and I'm happy to know more about it.  I do want to keep on following the spread of ideas, even if I focus more on the concept of memes or not.

As for writing, I have never felt more confident in my ability to write.  I have struggled with writing before, and I'm happy that I can just sit down and write about 1500 words on Google Fiber just for fun.  I do not plan on abandoning this blog.  Writing may be less frequent when I don't have assignments for it, but I do not plan on letting this blog stop.  So stay tuned for more :)

Time Warner: Be Afraid... Be Very Afraid

I recently read an article that stated that Time Warner Cable is not afraid of Google Fiber.  For those of you who don't know, Google Fiber is an Internet service currently only available in Kansas City (both KS and MO) that offers 1Gbps Internet.  That's currently 50x faster than Time Warner's fastest service for most of America and 20x faster than those with Wideband.  Time Warner saying that this isn't a big deal is news because saying something that's 20x faster than your best offer isn't worthwhile sounds crazy on paper.  I decided to do a dollar-for-dollar comparison between Google Fiber, Time Warner Cable, and it's biggest competitor, AT&T U-verse.

Before I start, I want to clarify some terminology.  1 Gbps (Gigabits per second) is exactly 1000 Mbps (Megabits per second).  Since all the other offerings are measured in Mbps, I will use Mbps as the main unit.  One thing to clarify is that Mbps (Megabits Per Second) is not the same as MBps (MegaBYTES Per Second).  Specifically, 8 Mbps is equal to 1 MBps.  For reference, at 20 Mbps, a 2 GB file will take 13 minutes and 20 seconds to download.  I should also clarify that all prices listed by Time Warner Cable and AT&T are only guaranteed for a year.  After a year, they will usually negotiate a higher price, while it looks like Google won't (but only time will tell).

Google Fiber offers three plans.  The first is FREE 5 Mbps.  How could the competition compete with free?  Well, the free plan does not cover the installation cost of $300 (or $25 for 12 months).  Now we can see how long you can last for that much on equivalent plans.  Time Warner Cable does not offer a 5 Mbps plan, but does offer a 3 Mbps plan for $30 a month.  After only 10 months, you have reached the $300 and are now overpaying.  AT&T offers the same plan for the same price, but unlike TWC, offers a 6 Mbps plan at $35 dollars.  You spend $300 after only 8 and a half months.  After that point, you are paying $35 a month for 1 additional Mbps over Google's plan.

Now how about paid plans?  Google offers 1000 Mbps for $70 dollars a month.  I should add that this plan also includes a free 1 TB Google Drive plan that can be used to store Google Docs and personal files safely online.  So how do Time Warner and AT&T compare?  Well, if you live in select cities, you may be eligible for Time Warner Cable’s Wideband, a new connection standard that supports up to 50 Mbps.  The closest plans to Google Fiber are the 30 Mbps plan for $65 and the 50 Mbps plan for $75.  While still an improvement, it does not even come close to Google.  Even more upsetting, these are the numbers for Time Warner’s download speeds.  Both of Time Warner’s plans only have 5 Mbps upload, while Google promises 1000 Mbps both upload and download.  AT&T's plans do not cover anything close to Google's in price.  While their highest plan is only 24 Mbps for $55, we can compare how much "bang per buck" they both offer.  AT&T's highest plan is $2.30 per Mbps, but Google has an astounding $0.07 per Mbps.  Dollar for dollar, it's an obvious choice.

Google offers one last plan to boot, though.  For $120 dollars, you get the same plan as above PLUS HD Television w/ DVR.  This plan includes (for free) a TV box, a 2 TB Internet hard drive for both DVR recordings and personal storage, and a free Nexus 7 tablet (plus the 1 TB Google Drive).  According to their channel list, they offer about 150 national channels plus the local channels.  So how does this plan compare with the competitions’ available bundle plans?  Time Warner Cable's price was clear: for the same price (save two dollars per month), you can get their digital TV plan and the Turbo Internet plan (20 Mbps).  While TWC has more channels (Google lacks some big names like HBO), Their DVR stores much less, and while TWC's DVR can record 2 shows at once, Google's can record 8.  AT&T did not make it easy for me to try to compare.  AT&T does not provide TV service where I live, so I had to resort to trying random Google maps addresses to try to find a price.  Even after all that, I couldn't find a plan that worked well for this comparison.  Offering something like 8 different television plans to mix and match with the existing internet plans didn't lead to any equivalent prices because of the lack of fast internet options.  In the end, I resorted to seeing what plans they offered for the difference in prices between the two Google plans.  That put me between the U-family plan (130 channels) and the U200 plan (280 channels).  Again, while AT&T generally offers more channels, Google has more going with it with the DVR, and AT&T can still only record 4 shows at once.  While both Time Warner Cable and AT&T offer more plans with more channels (as does Google to a small degree), the question is: do you really need all of them?  For most people I know, they only use TV for sports and watching the few highly rated channels like Comedy Central and Fox (as examples).  The others are increasingly unnecessary given all the ways of getting the same content through the Internet.

So, is Time Warner wrong in their statement?  Well, not completely.  Time Warner Cable and AT&T still have one thing over Google outside of just coverage area: versatility.  While Google only offers the two ends of the spectrum (free and $70), Time Warner Cable offers many more plans in between.  Their most popular plans are the Standard plan (15 Mbps) and the Turbo plan (20 Mbps) for $50 and $55 dollars respectively.  It begs the question why Google didn't have any halfway plans, especially since Wi-Fi doesn't even come close to providing 1000 Mbps.  Time Warner is right in that most people don't need 1000 Mbps now, and the cheaper plans from them might still be fine for now.  A 1080p30 h.264 stream (a popular HD streaming standard) still only requires about 10 to 12 Mbps, and the 13 minutes to download 2 GB is still adequately fast enough for considering the rarity of downloads that large.  On top of that, most Internet services can't even come close to 1000 Mbps to actually connect you at that speed.  Most tests I saw online never went too far above 100 Mbps, just 1/10 the possible speed.

There are, however, four things going against Time Warner's statement.  Firstly, everything mentioned above is measured in TOP speeds.  While 15 Mbps sounds good on paper, the actual speeds you would get from that plan may not be as good.  Secondly, the demand for more bandwidth is increasing rapidly.  HD video takes a lot of bandwidth already, and the better you try to make that image, the more it needs.  One of the biggest demands for Internet right now is online gaming.  Games keep pushing for more low-latency bandwidth to work without lag, and the demand from games is growing.  Thirdly, many households demand multiple connects.  While 15 Mbps could work for one person, it is pushing it for a household.  While I am playing online games, my mother may be streaming Netflix while cooking dinner while my father is on a video chat for work upstairs.  The need for Internet for more than one person and device is the largest driving force behind requiring more bandwidth.

Lastly, but most of all, the statement from Time Warner Cable shows the level of arrogance in the industry.  Having not had any major competition in most areas for a long time, the industry has become stagnate and arrogant.  With no need to drive innovation, these companies are more than happy to give us the same horrible Internet for large prices because it's in their best interests to go against our interests.  Of course there's "no necessity for gigabit Internet," they drove the market to the ground making sure there couldn't be.  In addition, Time Warner Cable is infamous for terrible customer service.  I have more than one horror story about how they messed up serving my family, but we haven't had anywhere we could turn for better Internet and service.  This is where Google is stepping in.  You can argue endlessly about their policy on using personal information to target advertisements, but it can't be said that they stop innovation or have bad customer relations.  If there is any company that can knock these tech giants off their pedestal, it's Google.  So continue on, Google.  You are the beacon of hope in this world of dull grey commercialist monotony.

EDIT: wow.  Almost exactly one month after writing this, I get the news that Google Fiber is coming to my hometown, Austin.  Yay!  To celebrate, I made a few edits to this to fix some typos and to make sure it's easy to understand.  Hooray for Google Fiber!

Truth or Fail?

When thinking about what I wanted to say, I felt kind of confused about it.  Unlike the last post, I actually understood the article; I just couldn't decide if I agreed with it.  In the end, I decided that it was accurate, but misguided.  Sort of like rolling a strike in the wrong lane.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire by Errol Morris makes a bold claim.  The first two sentences sums up his view very well.

Pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words. But a picture unaccompanied by words may not mean anything at all.

He goes on and talks about how pictures cannot be true or false themselves, and must be put into context to make any sense.  While nothing that he says in the article is incorrect, I don't feel like it accurately portrays photography (or any still images) as a medium.  Take a look at the following image.  Is it true or false?

Even if you want to believe in fairies, you have to admit this photo is fake.  This is, in fact, one of the first fake photos ever taken.  Two girls borrowed a camera form one of their fathers, and took this photo with painted cardboard.  This photo was taken with a specific intent (to "prove" fairies existed to their parents) and uses fallacious means of doing it.  I believe that this photo can be called false (even though fake works better).

Despite that, I do believe that she was right in a lot of ways.  It is true that looking at an image of The Lusitania without any context doesn't tell the whole story.  In fact, most modern images gets it's context from society.  80 years down the line, somebody's going to look at a LOL cat and will have to have it explained to them because the same social constructions wouldn't exist.  That being said, writing isn't the only way to convey a message.  No one medium (especially images) is exempt from great story telling.

"Approach but never reach" -Zeno

When I sat down to write this blog post, I had a hard time actually starting.  Of all of Harris' weird ideas, this one is the most difficult to follow.  It might be that he tries to make a contrast between creative works and intellectual works.  I kind of lost him for a while after that point.  

My understanding of "taking an approach" is basically forwarding, but with the style than the content.  The idea being that if you like an authors style or taste, you would make a piece trying to write it as if it was him/her doing it.  Maybe here would be a better place to define a parody.  This seems to be enforced by the line "And what you listen for in a good cover is not an imitation of the original... but a new rendering of it."  

But again, it's when he tries to define writing in this that I start having problems with it.  "But while creative artists often reshape plots or images that strike them as somehow troubling or flawed... academic writers tend to make a more generous and sympathetic us of their influences."  First of all, artists don't make covers (or parodies for that mater) because they don't like them.  Jonathan Coulton's cover of Sir Mix-A-Lot's Baby Got Back is very different, but has gone on record saying that he liked the original, but wanted to try something new.  Not all artistic "approaches" have to be out of any sort of disapproval.  Also, why must "academic" writers be so different from artistic writers?  While writing for, say, school does require a different writing style, it does not mean that it has to approach the work from completely different directions.  In fact, I feel that the best academic papers are the ones that have a lot of artistic voice in them.  

But that's just my thoughts on it.  If you read this, please comment.  It's how I judge how well my blog posts do :P.

This Title Is a Lie

Before I start this post, I would just like to mention something I put in my extended essay.  In it, I mentioned Tangental Learning, or the idea that if you present somebody with something, they will research it themselves.  I experienced tangental learning when I read the Monty Python quote in the start of the chapter, as I googled the skit and watched it on YouTube.

Joseph Harris invents many words in his book Rewriting, but "countering" might be the one I like the best as a concept.  Countering means to create a new line of thinking from what the author originally wrote.  This could be from taking the complete opposite opinion from the author to testing the limits of the position that the author originally took.  For an example of rewriting, but I noticed my earlier blog post on Hadges fits the description well (I realize it's kind of egotistical to pick one of my own writings, but it's a post I know well).  Much like Harris' essay he mentions at the beginning of the chapter, I went in to the blog post with the intention of arguing a number of his main points he said in the article.  While not all countering is strait disagreement, it is the easiest way of presenting it.  Countering is an important part of critical analysis.  If you read something that you don't like and can't counter it, then you really need to work on that skill.  You need to be able to not take everything at face value, and figure out all the details that go into it.

Countering and Forwarding go hand in hand to me.  Forwarding is kind of the opposite (forwarding emphasizes what the author wrote while countering negates parts of it), but they are related in that they have the same goal: to work off of the previous work and expand it for it audience.  While countering my change the views on the writing, it is sometimes important to let your own ideas take control of your paper.

Re: Re: Fwd: Re: Amazing Blog Post

In his book Rewriting, Joseph Harris coins the term "forwarding."  He defines it as taking a work, and rewriting it for a new audience.  At the beginning of the chapter, he quotes Kenneth Burke talking about a conversation that continuously gains new people in the middle and compares it to academic writing.  My first thought when I read this was that it sounded a lot like myths.  The old "classic" tales get retold over and over again until the original story almost disappears into it.

When thinking about forwarding, only one thing really came to mind.  I realized a good modern example of forwarding is the entire concept of a meme.  For example, the YouTuber known as saraj00n forwarded two pieces of work by Chris Torres and Daniwell-P when he created the video we know today as Nyan Cat [cite].  The idea of a meme directly relate to forwarding.  When someone likes something, and then does something with it, such as reposting, covering, parodying, revamping, adding/changing audio, remixing, or even just recaptioning (as is the case with advice animals), they are forwarding it to their own audience.  When a lot of people forward a piece (and the people who saw the forwarding forwards and so forth), it becomes a part of the culture (or in other words, a meme).  

Random fact of the day: the word "meme" comes from the Ancient Greek word "mimeme" meaning "something imitated."  Maybe an argument to make is that imitation is a form of forwarding.

Another random fact: the word "nya" (the word nyan comes from) is japanese for the onomonopia "meow"

Newsy Type Stuff

In his article The press becomes the press-sphere, Jarvis discusses how news reporting has changed because of the internet.  He explains how news changed from a linear system (story to journalist to writer to editor to print) to a large interconnected system he calls the "press sphere."  The press sphere is affected by many different factors including companies, readers, external news sources, and comments. They're all connected... like some sort of WEB that spans the entire WIDE WORLD or something.  All kidding aside, I actually agree with pretty much everything that he said.  I am a firm believer that the internet will replace all other media as the main source of news and entertainment in 10 to 20 years (at least it will if the FCC and Google can actually make this free internet thing work).  All these people connected to such a collaborative medium as the internet, we're going to see a huge shift from larger organizations (such as news channels) being the main source of information to individuals and small collections of people.  Heck, there are already great examples of this.  The already viral nature of how media is being shared on the internet holds the key to fast and accurate news reporting from every possible angle.  Much like the videos from the numerous revolutions in the middle east helped actually present the news to the world, the future of news will center around people with their smart phones (or whatever) capturing the news as it happens.  It is much harder to miss a story when everybody can report, not just a select part of the population.  

Anyways... Yeah.  Go Internet!  

News vs News: Who Will Win?

Reading through a large number of posts from the last blog assignment, I found two different sides of this.  The side I'm on is the "word of mouth" side.  Over half the people I read get their news for the most part form friends and family and Facebook.  Much like I do, they don't read too many publications, and prefer to have their friends filter through and find the meaningful stuff.  The other side is the people who DO read articles.  Most of these people read online sources, but some do read paper sources.  Most people use online newspapers or magazines, such as The New York Times website, or television websites, such as CNN.  These tend to present their information the same way as their own media, but in a structure that fits searching the web.  I don't have a problem with this model; I just don't like these sites as news sources usually.

I would like to add that in the time since my last post, I did find a new source of news: reddit.com.  Reddit is known for being a way to find memes (not so much a source for new ones; that would be 4chan).  However, it does often have links to news sources to interesting topics.  If other people (who like what reddit usually does) likes it, they "upvote" it which brings it to more people's attention.  The really good news articles bubble to the top, and I'll usually read them.  Horray :)

While I don't really care what Hedges or Sullivan or Carr would say on this, I do know that this would mostly just enforce their preconceptions.  People are stubborn with their beliefs and faiths usually, so something like this, being interpreted in different ways, would enforce each of their beliefs.  Hedges might say that this split between the class is the split between the literate and the illiterate America, Carr might say that this is due to the internet's influence on our attention, and Lunsford might say that it's just us soaking in different writing styles.  Is any of them right?  I don't care.

Breaking News: I Hate News

When I read the blog post assignment, I knew immediately what my answer was.  The problem I felt like I faced was trying to figure out why it was, and I think i have an answer.  So, where do I get my news from?  The answer is simple: I only get news from word-of-mouth from fiends and family.  I do not read new articles from news papers or website, I do not watch television news, and I sure don't hunt down news.  If there's any news story that's important, my parents will tell me.  Even so, the last major piece of news I got interested in was pointed out to me by my roommate.

So why?  Why do I not go after news personally?  The answer is simple: I hate news.  For the most part, I find news can be split up into 4 major categories, and I have a reason each for not liking them.

The first is political news.  This became very prevalent last year for obvious reasons, but I despise them not for what they are, but for what they represent.  Politics is just people with firm beliefs trying to push their beliefs on other people.  I don't believe that there is one right solution for most problems – I do not believe that either raising or lowering taxes is inherently a good or bad thing – and I despise anybody not willing to compromise, which is all politics is.  Political news is just these same uncompromising people not getting anywhere.

The second is "Hollywood" news.  This is the easiest to explain why I don't like it.  It's people obsessing over people I couldn't care less about.  Enough said.

The third is any news that is "Sad News."  This specifically covers the latest trend of news about mass shootings.  Now I know this will sound a little offensive to people from around here because of the Aurora shooting, but I hate these types of articles.  While, yes, lives lost are inherently a sad thing, the news stories about them show a bit of arrogance and obliviousness.  Daily, lives are lost all around the world.  Lives are lost in all the wars going on.  Thousands of Palestinian rockets have attacked Israel in the last year alone.  Many children die from starvation in Africa.  The world mortality rate is 8.37 per 1000 people, with the highest being in South Africa.  About 577,190 deaths from cancer happen earch year.  Yes, a mass shooting in a school is sad, but why should it get all this attention when there are many more lethal issues to consiter?

The last is just boring news.  Anything that doesn't fit into any of the above categories is just "meh" on my level of interest.  While keeping up with the world's happening is good, there just isn't anything worth reading about.  I would go into detail, but CGPGrey has an article that explains it much better than I can.  Seriously, read that article.

There are, occasionally, a few news stories that catch my attention – such as the Jonathan Coulton vs Glee debacle – but I was personally invested into Jonathan Coulton's work long before the news article.  Scanning a news source for something that would interest me is unrewarding, and not worth my time.  If there's something I would want to hear about something I'm already invested in, I will find it.  Otherwise, I just don't care.

Unit 1 Round Up

I will admit, I'm much happier with this blog (and the class as a whole) now that I'm five articles in.  My greatest concern was that I wouldn't have anything to write about.  Anybody who knows me personally will know that if I have something to say, I can say it (and I've spend the last 5-6 years honing the skill of translating what I would say out loud into what I need to write).  However, if for any reason I am uncertain what to say (either because of a confusing prompt or a length requirement I can't naturally reach), I get stuck, go into a strong writer's block, and end up producing some of the worst work I have ever seen.  If I ran out of things to say in a blog post, or I felt that I had nothing to say about an article, I knew this blog would suffer for it, but I've never felt like I've run out of things to say.  In fact, there have been times where I find myself unable to stop writing once I reach the required length.  Sometimes, what I write about is incredibly tangental (such as that post where I spend more time digitally griping at the author than answering the prompt), but those writings still feel fluid, and they are very likely some of my best pieces of writing in years.  Still, writing isn't my strongest skill, and while I know I would rather be spending my time writing plugins for Minecraft or something, I found this blog assignment both engaging and fun.  I can't wait for more writing assignments for this blog :).

Illiteracy in the Interwebs

Ok, so the last post was a post made out of frustration of a reading, but it seems that this time, we read the opposite side of the debate.  I found I agreed with most of everything that was said in these articles, and I wish I could have just skipped the other two altogether.

Lunsford's article Our Semi-literate Youth? Not So Fast was probably my favorite of the two.  I defiantly that although we may not be reading "formal" writings as much, our literacy hasn't degraded, but evolved.  Take that, Hedges!  I completely agree that the biggest problem facing our generation's literacy is using the wrong word (people dropping the second P in rapping is very common), but also the internet is a resource.  There are tons and tons of resources that point out the common issues, and generally help improve literacy.

Literacy in Three Metaphors by Scribner made me think of a good point involving literacy that I want to bring up.  It was sparked by the quote, "At one time, ability to write one's name was a hallmark of literacy."  This made me remember that public schools weren't always a given.  Publicly funded schools were only started being used to any significant degree during the industrial revolution where education of the working class benefited the companies.  Before that, education was a luxury, and only the wealthy families would send their children to school to become literate.  Today, with a mandatory 10-12 years of education, it's incredibly difficult to find someone who completely cannot read or write.  Since nearly everybody (in America) can read and write, maybe the definition of literacy should be changed to apply to something that not everybody can do.  For example, when my mom joined her current job, the office was loosing a lot of employees because they were unable to learn the new computer system.  Computer literacy is a term used, yes, but the key is that computer literacy is becoming a central part of what makes a person able to fit in to modern society, and that's what should make literacy what it is.

So that's my two cents worth.  Maybe sometime I'll give you my rant on why I believe the current education system needs a reform (something I wanted to say, but ran out of time and space), but for now, these are my thoughts on literacy.

I AM NOT STUPID!!!

As someone who spends most of his time on the internet, I found this topic to be a little personal.  The article "Is Google Making Us Stupid" by Nicholas Carr talks directly about the internet and what it's doing to our cognitive understanding, but I actually found that article unoffending and enjoyable to read.  "America the Illiterate" by Chris Hedges, on the other hand, seemed to dance around the issue – never once saying the word internet – completely offended me on a personal level.

First of all, politics is not decided by the campaigns.  The most influential part of an election is who's on what party.  Yes, the undecided voters play a part in who wins, but the actual vote a person gives almost always lines up with their political officiation, which is defined by permanently instilled beliefs.  The ads may play a part in the election, but it's not going to make Texas a blue state or California a red one.

On the subject of our language supposedly getting lower grade-level, I feel that he's looking at inaccurate statistics.  First of all, how do you define a grade-level of reading.  The problem is that not only is it an ambiguous line, it also changes over time as language evolves.  If the first 8 years of school cover conversational english – just what we need to know to talk to anybody – and the last 4 were on old english that nobody uses anymore, sure Shakespeare's work would be a higher grade-level than modern works, but also the language used in Shakespeare's work is not used conversationally anymore.  Knowing Shakespeare's stories is fine, but it's not going to help you convince your friend to invest in your business idea.

Hedges misses the point in his writings, and it infuriates me.  It's not that people are getting stupid, it's that you aren't keeping with the times, Hedges.  Carr seems to get the point right by not blaming the people, but showing how the medium is changing the status quo.  It's not that we're too stupid to read long articles, it's that the internet provides a way to get the facts faster, more engagingly, and provides access to related articles and anything else we'd want quickly.  Some people are just afraid of change.  Schools have suffered from this, as has the economic market in many ways.  I think people need to stop blaming the internet, and starting searching for what makes it new, unique, and better.


Oh, and Micky Mouse is not the most famous figure.  In 1990, a study with children found Mario more recognizable than Micky Mouse.  At the time the article was written, the most famous figure was most likely Master Chief, and today, over 1 billion views says Psy might be it.

Reading and Writing

Reading is the act of taking in literary text and bringing it into your thoughts.  Writing is the act of taking those thoughts and putting them into text.  Harris talked about how each rewrite changes each time, and that's because as you read, you add the author's thoughts to your own, making a unique collection of thoughts that then goes into your writings.  

ReBlogging

I believe that all writing is rewriting–even when you’re writing something down for the first time, it’s still an act of translation in a way because you’re trying to use text to bring life to this thing that exists in your mind.

- John Green

If you randomly stumbled upon this blog or are an extraterrestrial trying to understand human writings, Rewriting by Joseph Harris is the required reading for this writing class.  The main goal of the book is to explain methods of interpreting writings and to write based off of another writing.  However before he does that, he spends an entire chapter trying to define what writing is.  One key point he makes about what writing is comes when he defines the word text.  "A book is a text, but so are movies, plays, songs... as well as objects like buildings, cars, [ect.]"  I completely agree, and writing itself plays a major part of these.  Movies and plays have scripts, songs have lyrics, and buildings and cars often start as written schematics or even a design proposal.  Writing even makes its way into places that don't seem obvious like video games (it's so not obvious that many people that make them still struggle with it).  Another point he makes is that the word interest has a lot of meanings, but most of them apply to writings.  "(1) How does this writer add interest or value to what has been said before? (2) What is [his or] her interest in this issue, what perspective is she speaking for? and (3) How is [his or] her style in writing of interest or note?"  This applies a lot to what makes a blog good or not.  Unlike a more formal publication, A blogger writes from a personal viewpoint of one person, giving it a strong interest in the issue and an interesting style.  By using hyperlinks, the blogger also gives context to what has been written before, and easily expands on it.  Blogging holds a lot of interest, and like most things, has text, making a very strong writing medium.

Halo AI

Ok, so this isn't my post for the class assignment (I'll get to that a little later into the weekend), but I know I want to say this.  When thinking about to whom I wanted to talk about this with, I remembered this blog.  I first worried it wouldn't be a good idea because it's the class assignment blog, but then I said, "hey, the goal of this blog is to get us to experience blogging, so why not."

So I was playing Halo Anniversary – a remake of the original Halo game – and I noticed something that made me think.  For those of you unfamiliar with the original Halo trilogy, there are three major groups: the humans (which you play as a part of), the covenant (a collection of religious alien species that want humans destroyed), and the flood (a parasitic creature that consumes sentient beings), all of which end up fighting each other.  There's a few parts in the original (and maybe in the later games; I haven't played them all) where all three fight at the same time, with you being the human side.  I ended up in a situation with me, an elite (one of the more powerful species in the covenant), and a flood zombie when I was playing.  The elite and the flood zombie were fighting it out when I got there.  I shot the flood zombie with my shotgun, saving the elite, and while I was reloading, the elite started shooting at me.  This took me out of the game a little bit, because that wouldn't happen in real life.  If we were to say that this situation happened with three real people from different warring nations, let's say, I do not think someone would start shooting at someone who saved their life and wasn't immediately threatening them.  I would think the party saved would have mixed feelings about attacking him and would wait to see what the party that did the saving would do next.  When mentioning this to my roommate, he said, "Well, the covenant think of Master Chief as the devil."  An interesting point, but I think having your life saved throws any preconceptions out the window.

What do you think?  Please leave a comment saying what you think.

Why I (don't) Blog

Why I Blog by Andrew Sullivan is a well written article about why he blogs, and while I don't agree with all of it, I do think he has some good points.  I agree that hyperlinks play a large part in blogs, but that wasn't something I didn't already know.

The main thing I feel he got right was the community.  I'll admit to spending more time with vlogs over blogs, but the same principles apply.  The comments section is a great place for you to add to my post.  If anything, a blog's community is a sort of variant of the forum.  In a forum, anybody can strike up a conversation topic and get feedback instantaneously, while in a blog, the conversation is started and controlled by one person – the blogger.  How bloggers interact with their audience, how their audience interacts with each other, and even how different bloggers interact makes up the integral body of what blogging is.

There was one thing he said that I think is wrong.  He said that a blog is a place for rapid-fire posts and not a place for thoughtful thinking.  I think there is a place for that type of blog, but I don't think that's the only type.  My friend from high school's blog is a good example of thoughtful and inquisitive posts that work well.  He posts about philosophical ideas and says a lot of amazing stuff, but he puts time and effort into his posts, sometimes taking weeks before publishing.  I don't think that hinders his blog in any way.  A more famous example is the VlogBrothers.  Although they started with "Brotherhood 2.0" using it as a communication between the two of them, it grew, and they started doing a lot of very thoughtful posts.  I don't think blogs have to be instantaneous and thoughtless.  In fact, the better posts are the ones thought through rigorously.

On a related note, in a previous post, I mentioned I don't like to blog too much, and I feel like I know why after reading this.  If there are two types of blogs – rapid and thoughtful – then I have trouble doing both of them.  You will soon learn that If I don't know what I want to say or haven't thought it through enough, I cannot write anything, taking rapid blogging out of the question.  The only thing stopping me from creating a thoughtful blog is mostly laziness, but I guess that can be overcome, seeing as this post is already over 400 words long :P.

Anyways, that's my thoughts on the post.  If you disagree with anything I said or want to add to it, comment in the comment section below, and make sure to subscribe.

Blog b = new Blog("Lewis Fox");

This isn't my first blog I made, however this was my first blog on the blogger platform, so this was new.  My first experience with a blog was when I used a small free hosting service to post my flash games that I was experimenting with.  I used Wordpress to keep everything organized, and did some blogging on it while I was at it.  Sadly, the web server had issues and it is no longer hosted, but I might be able to get some of the posts back if I find my backup.  The other blog I've made was for a school sponsored trip to Scotland.  You can read it here: http://foxscotland.wordpress.com.  I never really felt like a good blogger personally.  It may have something to do with my general laziness of writing, but I don't feel like I would be a good vlogger (video blogger) either, so it just may be that I don't like sharing everything.

When Eric Leake said we were using Blogger, I was unsure, as most of my blogging experience was with WordPress, but after fumbling through the settings, there doesn't seem to be that many differences.  WordPress has a larger library of themes and can be used on a personal site, but otherwise it's pretty much the same.  The biggest difference I could find was Blogger was linked to Google accounts and Google+ while WordPress uses it's own login system that can be linked to Facebook (but only optionally).  Blogger would be easier to share with Google users, while WordPress seems to work by generating a user-base for the interaction.  The person to person interactions seems to be what makes blogs (and vlogs) interesting, so make sure to comment and make the conversation interesting.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog.  I'll be posting here as part of my writing class, but I hope to make this interesting nonetheless.

In case you didn't get it, the title is a reference to this meme: