Tag Archives: review

student blogs

Almost Done!

Hey Everyone!

We are winding down to the end! I am happy that things are finally winding down, but I will miss class as well!

My final project is going really well. Last class was really inspiring for helping me hone in on my project. I have finished the visual part of the project and have been working on my outline. I have a basic idea of what my narrative is and the events that I will include in the project. My project will be based in poetry and it won’t be a straight forward narrative like my thesis. Instead, my project will be a series of events that are connected, yet the moments don’t spell out a concrete story.

The moments in my project will be memories of a deceased person and I think it serves the themes of the project better if the story is more abstract like All of Your Time Tossed Selves. I have decided to include an intro page that serves as a frame work for the story. I will let the reader know that the protagonist has killed themselves and that it is up to them to unravel the memories of what was. I think this will be a gentle entry for the reader into the work instead of no intro and letting the reader figure things out on their own.

I am finishing up my outline. Once the outline is done, I just need to create the poems for the piece. Some poems will be written by me and others will be blackout poems of songs. They will be “emo” songs from the mid 2000’s. These are the songs that many millennials, including me, have grown up on. The genre is called emo because these songs are highly emotional. Many emo bands sing about depression, anxiety, and heartbreak. The song that served as a large inspiration for this piece is called “Die Romantic” by the band Aiden. Link here: https://youtu.be/YbygUxEjnos?si=A8oqqqkXBTso4Mom

The song is very dark as it is about suicide and how there is romance in dying. The video shows the singer of the band following around different people who are thinking about self harming or committing suicide. Rather than tell then to keep going, his character is the finally whisper that causes the people in the video to commit the act. It almost subverts your expectations because a happy ending is more acceptable to society. But I think that’s the whole point of the video. It’s that there are people who think and feel dark things and the words they hear can be the final thing that push them over the edge. Rather than thinking in a negative light, it shows that we have the power to help people, but we also have the power to harm. And maybe if we look at someone who committed suicide, like the protagonist of my piece, we will see moments that seemed simple on the surface, but held deep seated trauma. And maybe we’ll start to see things in a different life and embody the phrase “Everyone is fighting a battle that you know nothing about.”

student blogs

Facade and Welcome Home

Façade was a bit of a mess for me. Since I have a MAC, I was not able to access the game and play it on my own. Because of this I had to watch a number of walkthroughs on YouTube to get a chance to see the game. I feel like I missed out on actually fully experiencing the game on my own, but I was happy that it is still preserved for people to see, even if it is incompatible with more modern systems. I found Façade to be a good time. It was interesting to see how the players interaction can change the dynamic of the overall conversation. In conventional literature, ending can be open-ended but are singular. Here, the player’s (or reader) can create branching paths that actually affect the way the game ends. Another thing that stood out from watching different play throughs was how the characters of Grace and Trip react to what the player chooses to say or side with. This dynamic characterization really made the characters stand out way more than I expected them to. Seeing their gratitude and disappointment when you choose to side with one or another was a really fascinating feature. In seeing how the game can end in different scenarios, I think I can see some of the authors intent. In creating these two dynamic characters, the authors wanted players to pick a side based on their own thought process. Some players might see Trip as the main issue in the relationship, with the same being said for Grace. Some players might want to play peace makers and end up getting both characters to reveal their doubts and infidelities. Façade was a very cool piece of E-lit overall.

Welcome Home was also a great work to see. Lost media is one of the most intriguing things look for. Trying to prove the existence of a piece of work seemingly lost to time and presenting those findings seem to be time consuming but fulfilling. In my spare time, I sometimes go down the rabbit hole in looking into lost media, so Welcome Home and the work that goes into these types of projects was something I have seen before. The work and care it took to build this database, redraw and animate old works and track down old merchandise is crazy to think about. The overall website is very impressive to say the least. The only thing that really surprised me was to see that this can be considered E-lit. I would be lying if I was not confused when I opened this link and went through the website for the first time. Over time, I thought about some of the historical non-fiction books I have read and began to see Welcome Home in a similar light. Although it is not bound and written on paper, Welcome Home must have taken immense amount of research and work to put together this project, in the same way some of the book I have read had. Preservation of older media is an important issue to take up since many works by creative people throughout history can be lost to time. Seeing these older works being appreciated and brought to modern audiences is really cool to see.