11/11/2018 2 Comments James Gunn Done In 2010, James Gunn was still just an up and coming director making low budget films, searching for his big break. Today, he has directed two extremely well-received Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy films and has just been fired from his job. Four months ago, Disney was directed to James Gunn’s twitter feed from back when he was still relatively undiscovered. There the company found a plethora of highly inappropriate tweets referencing molestation, pedophilia, and other unspeakable deeds. These tweets were not formatted in an obvious joke format and it was very hard to understand, especially in today’s culture, how this man had not been publicly shamed yet. Disney, realizing that this man could be roasted by the internet at any moment if these tweets were picked up by the wrong person, promptly fired him without any chance of him coming back on with the company. The miscommunication here occurred with Gunn’s motive, tone, and intent behind these tweets. Apparently, back in the day, James Gunn had a very ‘shock humor’ personality. Similar to South Park, he would say things merely to get a reaction out of people. Therefore, it can be seen that these extremely inappropriate tweets were just posted to get a rise out of anybody for the purpose of comedy, yet Disney was protecting it’s image from people who may think that Gunn was a filthy human with disgusting values. Looking at the situation rhetorically, it is easy to see why there was this disconnect and what caused the tension and drama between Disney and the Gunn supporters. Gunn saw his audience to be anybody online, but he mainly viewed it as the people who followed him on twitter. Disney viewed this the same way, but with more emphasis on the ‘anybody online’ part of the vantage point. Gunn’s purpose for posting those tweets was to shock the people who saw the tweets and hopefully get them to laugh in the process, while Disney saw it as him supporting or advocating for these things, or at the very least, not condemning them. The context is the most important part of this miscommunication and why this is even an issue to begin with. In 2010, nobody really cared what you said online. It was a place to troll, laugh, be vulgar; there were a lot less rules. Today, everything you say online matters, and within a second, your whole life can be destroyed because somebody didn’t really like what you said, even if it was a joke. One can also note that because Gunn now works for Disney, he isn’t just promoting his own brand when he maneuvers online anymore, but he is promoting Disney and their beliefs as well. There was obviously no way for James’ Gunn to know in 2010 that what he was saying would have been taken in today context, but there is nothing he could could really do about that except have deleted what he said after he was hired by Disney. A good amount of people actually sided with James’ Gunn, which is odd for today’s culture. They believed that since James had finally found his calling and could put his talents to good use, that Disney should at least give him another chance and rehire him now that he is grown up and not James Gunn from eight years ago. Here are some tweets from James’ brother as well as from some of the cast members from the Guardians movies. Because the context of these two incidents are so vastly different, and the choices James would have made today would have been so vastly different, I have to agree with his brother and the cast of the Guardians films in casting my vote for giving James another chance. But because of today’s culture, that’s probably not going to happen for a long time.
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10/3/2018 0 Comments StoryboardI plan on documenting the making of a song. From the programming of the drums to the recording of the vocals. I plan on utilizing screen recording technology as well as playing the actual track.
9/26/2018 0 Comments Website
I began this website thinking that I would be able to create my entire project from scratch, but it turns out I was vastly overconfident in my coding abilities. I then resorted to using a flex box layout from w3 because it seemed extremely practical and flexible for many different platforms, both mobile and desktop. Once I read some more on the w3 site I learned how to manipulate flex boxes and was able to create my music page with all the different album covers on it. That was a bit more difficult that I had imagined, and resizing all of the photos through photoshop took a bit of time. I got into a flow with all the key command shortcuts in Photoshop and I was able to finish that process in a reasonable amount of time.
My ideal website would have been a lot darker and more like the Christina Aguilera website we looked at in class. I would have loved to create an artist page, but I have no music, no tour dates, and no videos to share, so it didn’t really seem practical to try to do something like that. I am content with embedded vines and pop music album covers. I first used, obviously, the visual mode to create my website. What would have been really cool is if I created a website using only the aural mode, to be able to create mental visuals using only sound by implementing sonic landscapes and voice control, such as Siri. I could have created a whole new, almost game-like, experience. But hence, I did not do that. I used the aural mode merely as an assist to the understanding of the vines on my final page. Some vines would be funny if they had no sound, but 88% of vines are memorable because they are quotable and that requires you to be able to hear them. I also used the linguistic mode. My word choice was very underdeveloped and was supposed to be ironically simple. Uses of cliches in my bio statement and phrases such as, “pls enjoy,” were meant to portray a youthful sense of bliss and understanding of the internet culture. For the elements of design, I began with emphasis. I used color and size to emphasize the titles of the pages; having them contrast their background and making them much larger than the other words on the pages. The website was designed for the audience of our class and the one and only Professor Overall. I used proximity when designing the music page. I wanted the album covers to be close together to show how many there were, as well as to give the feel of the classic Apple “cover flow” in Mac OS Leopard from 2007. And finally, I chose to keep the default color scheme of the layout because I thought it contrasted nicely (or poorly) with my basic linguistic choices. I was going for a very ironically casual website and I think these design choices either worked to make that happen or made it look as if I didn’t try at all. I guess it will be up to the audience to see whether or not they agree with my artistic choices. 8/29/2018 2 Comments Vine is Life 2012 was when social media and being online really started to become prevalent in our high schools in North Carolina. Everyone was getting on twitter, everyone already had a Facebook and had moved on, and Instagram was just starting to be formed as a platform, not really known to many people. My main priority in high school was to make friends and connect with as many people as I could, and social media, specifically twitter, was a brand new unexplored medium, appearing perfect for coming together with friends. In turn, I had no regard for being careful with what I posted or how I managed my time online. I would subtweet my friends when I was mad at them at them; I would post pictures when I did something fun or special so that people would think that I was cool and had friends. I would spend at least 5 minutes taking pictures so that I could remember everything I did, and I loved people being able to know what I was up to. Privacy was not a concern of mine and I was enthralled with being connected with my friends. Then vine came along. Six second videos, creating trends, jokes, and memes, singlehandedly changing the way comedy worked within schools and in the world. Vine created a subculture within the realm of online creation and consumption. If you were on vine, you knew what people meant when they said, “I’m in me mom’s car”, “I sure hope it does”, “Is this Kesha?!”, and “Why you always lying?” It enabled us high schoolers something to bond with and have a language that adults and people not on vine couldn’t understand. It was the ultimate inside joke creator. And this is where my view on social media changed. I no longer needed to share everything that I did to feel connected, but instead I could consume media by myself and bring what I learned to real life. I could be present when I was with people instead of worrying about what other people thought of me when I was away or online. So now in a world where instagram dominates the social media platforms, and where everyone on twitter is either complaining about how to world works, making fun of people, or reminiscing about vine. I no longer feel the need or desire to post anything myself on social media. Not because I am scared about privacy or because I feel like I don’t have friends, but because I feel connected enough by the memes and the jokes that relate a culture of people and create joy and laughter within people. I do not worry about how many likes I get on pictures because I haven’t posted on instagram in 2 years. The stress and anxiety is replaced by meme references, quick jokes, and laughter; enhancing my real world friendships, instead of isolating others, trying to build myself up by social media bragging and wanting to be liked online. I don’t need or even want an online presence. Vine changed my life and I could not be happier because of it.
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November 2018
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