Everything is LATE this week...

I can't believe I forgot to type up a reflection post after I made my infographic. I guess I should have just done it all at once...




 So, for my infographic, I had a hard time deciding between informative and fun. I think that informative might have actually been easier to accomplish, but I'm getting pretty tired of being serious all the time. Eventually I decided to go with "pumpkin spice" flavored things because the flavor seems to be so pervasive this time of year. I found a website that would host my work and I made an orange background, formatted a title, and started inputting all of the pictures I had collected into my document.



I was nearly finished putting everything together when I discovered that some of the items I had described didn't actually exist! So, I had to go back and re-check each of the items I had found, and, since I was already doing that, I added links to each of the individual item titles, either to a recipe, to an ad by the actual company, or to a place where one could buy that particular pumpkin product.

Pumpkin Flavored Post

Create free infographics with Venngage

Facebook for President 2020

74 percent of american citizens use Facebook. In the last several years the beast that is social media has been growing by leaps and bounds. Because of the spread of people on my friends list on Facebook, I have seen a lot of memes coming from the Bernie 2016 campaign. This has sparked my curiosity about Sanders's campaign(which means the memes have already been effective in some way...) My question is: how are the 2016 presidential candidates utilizing Facebook memes in their bid for election? Is it only Bernie Sanders that is pumping out memes to take advantage of what is basically free advertising, or are there other candidates doing the same thing? How do the many campaign strategies differ from each other in terms of their use of social media?

I intend to create a google site that serves as a social media centered guide to the 2016 presidential campaign. I will look at the social profiles of these candidates and analyzing their use of use of memes and posts to reach a high viewer base. I will be attempting to look at how "effective" these campaigns are. 

In addition to looking at the 2016 campaign, I will be researching the presidential campaigns of 2012 and 2008 to see how these trends worked in previous years.

Modes in "text"

HAVE YOU EVER MET ANYONE WHO ALWAYS TYPED IN ALL CAPS?

Or Someone Who Felt The Need To Capitalize Every Word Of A Sentence Like An Improperly Formatted Title?

I'vE eVeN mEt PeOpLe WhO tAkE tHe TiMe To TyPe LiKe ThIs....

maybe you've run into someone who thinks that punctuation and capitalization are absolutely unnecessary who talks in long sentenceless rambling hardtofollow garble



As millennials, we've been taught from day one that we are supposed to think out of the box. We're supposed to be different from the next guy. We're supposed to break the rules and make ourselves stand out from our peers, but we still get annoyed when we see people breaking

conventions without a specific purpose. Where's the line? When do we decide that enough is enough and being unique and standing out starts to be annoying.

The point I'm trying to get at is, there is a time and a place for experimenting with "different."
Human beings are linear creatures,  so there is a reason we don't type diagonally or sdrawkcab. It simply becomes more distracting than effective.



That being said, I can't argue with the fact that a certain amount of flair works to enhance meaning. Knowing where to push against the confines within which we've functioned thus far in our academic careers gives us an opportunity to mix the textual and the visual in a way that allows us to communicate with each other in a way that our parents could not.



On another note from our reading, every time we start talking about mixed modes and visual texts, I start to think about memes and the huge amount of information we can transmit to each other. The images have become familiar, iconic, if you will, to a point where the background picture sometimes conveys more information than the text.

Can we start referring to "meme" as a genre? I think so...

AV project reflection

Originally, I had an entirely different intention for my AV project. I borrowed a couple of cars and a couple of goPros from my dad, and my sister and I set out to video "people driving like jackasses." We figured out the camera issues and managed to get one mounted to the dash of my jeep (which resulted in pretty poor video quality, as the camera had to view through the windshield), and started driving around.... and then we got pulled over for driving like idiots (that was the point, right?). The police officer was not amused at my choice in topics for my "anything goes" video and let us off with a warning, provided I find something else to record... I complied, and after some frustration, the sushi video was born. 

Armed again with a goPro, I picked up several bottles of sake and joined some friends for a "sushi night" I was expecting a more traditional array of sushi ingredients, but the fact that my friends are weird actually worked in my favor. I recorded some shots of rolling sushi and drinking sake until my camera died(you have to charge those things?!) and then we played Cards Against Humanity and ate "sushi" all night. 

I hate editing video. 

I hate it with a fiery passion.

 Maybe if my laptop were capable of running video editing software and playing video at the same time, I would hate it less, but as it stands, I hate video; I hate my laptop; I hate Microsoft: and YouTube can suck it. 

There... Now I feel better. 

I began by attempting to download Windows Movie Maker onto my machine. It's easier to download Windows Essentials, so I went ahead and did that and I got a nice message that said that everything BUT Movie Maker was successfully installed, so I hit "retry." The same thing happened. I googled the error code, which led me on a wild goose chase through my program files trying to isolate and delete whatever program was not allowing me to download movie maker. After a couple of hours of this, I gave up. Why would Windows Movie Maker work on my computer, which runs Windows 8? That wouldn't make any sense. 

In my search, I found that my computer is pre-loaded with a program: CyberLink Power Director. (In hindsight, this is probably the program running a script that won't let me download Movie Maker...) This program is just about the same as Windows movie maker. I started importing my clips and arranging everything, and everything was going fine until I wanted to speed up a shot. This requires an upgrade in the software. I'd already come too far to go back now, so I shelled out sixty dollars to upgrade my software. 

CyberLink sent me an e-mail with a bunch of download links for the various portions of software I'd just purchased. Total download time for this: about 3 days. Apparently, not only does my laptop suck, but my friend's internet connection sucks too. ( I borrowed his house to do homework. There's a toddler living with me and he can be very hard to work around... I'd begged a friend to let me hang out in his house while he was working so that I could do my homework in peace...I do this on a regular basis... Don't tell my sister... ) At this point, I had a giant "FUCK IT" moment and used only the parts of the software that I could use without an upgrade. I'll let the rest of the software download this weekend so that I can use it for the next project. 

My computer is not capable of giving me a good preview of my project, so I was not able to watch the finished project until after I spent four hours waiting around letting my video render and upload (not to YouTube, because I can't get CyberLink to recognize my YouTube account being tied to my gmail account) to Vimeo, which I'm using for the first time. They also take extra time in posting if you don't upgrade your membership. Once I finally viewed my video, I fixed the text issue in the end scenes and went through the entire process again. Finally, success.. Needless to say, this assignment drove me to drinking. (Twice, actually, if you count the sake.)

Overall, I'd classify my process as perseverance in the face of frustration and the desire to bang my head against a wall. 

Av project without text error

Look! It's a link! Clicky clicky!

AV project

https://vimeo.com/141588472

I hope this works. My Internet just went down so I'm on my phone..
The end of the video has some weird text issues that didn't show up when I previewed the video before rendering, but since the render/upload process took me about 4 hours, I'm going to post it anyway and I'll fix it and re upload it again later.