ELS Autoblog

After what had to have been one of the longest and most frustrating days of my life, I have gotten what little sleep time has allowed me and am now able to post. The Griselda story was, in my opinion, a strange choice for a final tale in the Decameron. Reading it, there are no big surprises, but more dramatic irony in the fact that we know what the marquis is doing while Griselda does not. Without a sense of allegory, it is an immensely frustrating series of events because of the unbelievable patience Griselda shows to her husband. Of course, Job would seem to be a fitting parallel for this story, but the moral is a little harder to grasp. In Job, we are clearly supposed to be more like Job, always having faith despite hardships. In Griselda, it’s hard to believe that anyone would put up with […]

Original post by timothyjones

On Monday, we were all discussing Ashley’s idea of creating a Facebook page for the class. Many ideas were thrown out (see? there’s that phrase again) and I thought I’d recap a couple. These are more thematic than technical, but I think this Facebook thing has huge potential.

Page rather than group, because we want flexibility of content.
This will serve as an online community for the members of this class. Even after the class is over, we can stay in touch and continue to exchange ideas and engage in discussions.
Even more exciting is the potential for new members! Future members of this class can join the community and expand the circle of students actively involved in this exploration. Students taking new media courses at other colleges will be able to join us too, until we have a huge community of students thinking, discussing, and creating.

What better way to further online […]

Original post by arynna

I think I can finally connect a few thoughts I was having last Thursday.
Web 2.0 is all about connections between people and interaction in the online environment. It involves creation of new content in addition to simple acquisition of available information. But what about the cabinet in the short story we read? It automatically knows what Bishop wants. Right now we input information into a computer and use it to find what we want. The computer does the work for us, but we still have to tell it what we want. Is it possible to have a computer that performs the exact functions we want without any input from us? I know it sounds outlandish; after all, wouldn’t that be bordering on the psychic? Perhaps not. There are already programs in existence that use minimal input as a starting point for extensive retrieval of desired information, even when inquiries are […]

Original post by arynna

Do you have any idea how boring painting doors and door jams can be? Let me tell you, very boring. I just spent the last few hours of my life painting doors. The bad news is I will never get those three hours back. The good news is I have taken in so much information the last few days that I was able to convert three tedious hours into brain “processing time”. I’m still overloaded, but I feel a little better.
Errol Morris…who is this guy and why haven’t I heard of him before this class? Beats me, but thanks to Dr. C I’ve had nothing but strange (yet fascinating) movies on the brain for a week now. I loved “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control”. I want to watch it again very much, but to be honest I don’t know that I […]

Original post by kcannon

I would like to start this post off by thanking Dr. C For putting me in a depressed mood for the rest of the day. Just kidding. But no, that ending made me so sad and made me think about a lot of things. And the way class ended was just… I don’t know… very moving. It was so interesting to see what this movie was really about. When the movie started I put on my ENGL 345 eyes and looked and listened to everything. My initial thought on the movie was that it was about domination and control and how everything is controlled by something. I also thought about how all the stories were related, and how Errol Morris blended stories together so perfectly, like talking about the behavior of the mole rats, and showing a picture of the audience at the circus, […]

Original post by khusband

Let’s just say I had a total Matrix moment during our FTC day talking about reality and portraying what was real and what reality really is. Maybe we are all just imagining this world and we are really being controlled by robots? Oh wait, that also feeds in to Fast, Cheap and Out of Control as well.
So is a movie reality? Is it free from bias? Free from the hands of a human since it is a machine recording it? A movie is reality. Well, it was. In my view, we see people, we see the settings, we see scenes. Maybe the scenes were set up, the clothing picked out on purpose, the acting rehearsed. It is still reality. We see actual people and nature. That was true up until CGI however. Movies are no longer reality and can’t […]

Original post by khusband

Let me put this in perspective for you all. I am so fascinated and intrigued by Errol Morris, that I have struck an accord with my Dad: hassle-free (and highly skillful, I might add) lawn care for the rest of the summer without charge – in exchange for the DVDs Fast, Cheap and Out of Control and Fog of War. Cha-ching!
I don’t even know where to begin. FTC day yesterday we spoke a lot about reality. I buy the whole concept that it is difficult to tell what is real when you are looking at a photo, or film. What is staged, what isn’t – I get it. All I can keep thinking, though, is what I know is real – my reaction from the films, especially Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. Not […]

Original post by malbrooks

While we were talking about the rationality of Mole-rat behavior in class today, I couldn’t help but think back to an article I read a few months ago concerning a new mine-clearing robot being developed for the DoD. Interestingly enough, it appears to bear a striking resemblance to the robots being developed by Rodney Brooks.
This part of the article gave me pause:
The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.
This has bad results, of course, if you’re a human. But not so much if you’re a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That’s why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test […]

Original post by crain2mn

Okay…let’s try this again. I think I’ve spent most of my awake hours today in a fog of intellectual confusion, which is great. The movie didn’t help either–talk about beauty, depth, meaning–Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control is art. At least as I view it. What does it mean when a documentary meets my definition of art?
Okay, let’s calm down. I had a point earlier that I made very badly: that film does have a narrative responsibility (that perhaps is on the decline; I think an argument could be made for that but it’s not really the point) that excessive realism interferes with, and that excessive realism destroys the escapist experience that is why many people to go the theater to view films at all. However, this narrative responsibility-escapism connection is by no means the entire purpose of film. I realized after I made that statement that in doing so […]

Original post by anniek

I knew I wouldn’t be able to quit the blogging for long. I had a few hours before class, so why not? ICHC simply must be talked about.
What is?
I Can Has Cheezburger? (ICHC) is a WordPress archive of cleverly captioned photographs of cats and other animals. As of today, the archive holds about 860 captioned pictures and grows at a rate of about three pictures a day. These pictures are collected throughout the Internet or captioned and uploaded on the spot via the Cheezburger Factory. Once submitted, visitors can comment on and rate the hilarity of a picture on a scale from 1-5 cheezburgers (as opposed to stars). They can also tag, save and share pictures using ubiquitous Web 2.0 utilities like del.icio.us.
Roots and lolculture
It all began when a couple of guys on the Internet found this image you see to the right. Its humor was so simple yet so […]

Original post by humanisticmystic