One More Thing

While on good old YouTube, I found this: You classic gamers should know the tune.

Free Time! - My Opinions on FF6

Free posts are sweet. It gives me chance to just talk, and ramble, and be as absolutely wordy as I want to be.

Lately, I've been playing a lot of Final Fantasy 12 as part of my "Senioritis Regimine." The newest incarnation of the rather ironically named series is slowly becoming one of my favorites. It's also lead me to wonder, which one is my favorite? Not counting Tactics and 11, which I have never played, there are aspect of each that I appreciate. But, on a whole, I would have to say 6 is my favorite.

Over the summer, in between work, differential equations, storm chasin, watching wrestling, and being as lazy I could possibly be, I played a lot of 6. What's great about the game is that there really isn't 1 main character. There are in actuality 14 playable characters, all of which have their own fleshed out story. Some stories are more interesting than others. Some of the characters involved are a king, a ninja, a kung fu artisit, a feral child abonded at birth, a half-human half-esper woman, a yeti, a mime, and a Moogle, a character native to the series. Each character has a story that is really interesting and adds to the total end of the story.

But, what really makes the game is the main villian of the game. In short, using the source of all magic in the world, destroys it. He is the only villian in the series history to do such. While he doesn't physically destroy the planet, he does end up rearranging continents, killing most of the denizens of the planet at the same time. Of course, the 14 main characters don't die (but one will if you don't save him), because that would ruin the game. But, as one character one year after the armageddon, you round up all of your friends (while riding an airship with the coolest overworld music of the series plays in the background) and defeat the villian, who has ascended to god-status.

Recently it has been re-released, but was first released on the SNES years ago. While its graphics aren't as good as they are now, the game plays better than most out today. The music is amazing, the gameplay is great, and the story is terrific. You owe it to yourself to play.

New Reading Notes - A Title That Eludes Me

I enjoyed last week's reading that had nothing to do with Lexia to Perplexia. Don't get me wrong, it's interesting stuff, but it's so WEIRD.

I'd like to elaborate some on "From Grid to Network." First, grids. Grids are quite efficient. Everything within has its place, easily accessed, and may even look good. Look at the map of New York we received. Sans traffic, the city would be a dream to get around. It just looks efficient. Meanwhile, Paris looks like a veritable train wreck. One way streets only work in a grid system. Organization is key. In a physical world, grids are a necessity. But, grids aren't everything. While terrific for city planning, the network is great for the World Wide Web.

If the internet was a grid, it wouldn't be nearly as terrific. What makes it work as a network are the links . Sure, a grid internet would have these things, but there wouldn't be a chance to access other related things. Look at Wikipedia. Every entry on the site has link to other related things or hyperlinks to sources at the bottom. I spend a lot of my down time just kinda surfing WIkipedia to just learn new things. Most of my obscure, worthless knowledge comes from this place. I do trust most of the content, most of the incorrect things are blatantly obvious. A gridded internet wouldn't allow a crossing of topics, it would only guide you to the same information over and over again. You know? That's boring.

But wait. Could it be that the internet is a bunch of grids networked together? I would say yes. There are many sites out there, and I would say that the grid aspect of the site is the genre, while the networking aspects of the sites is the hyperlinking between them. While you can easily stay within the genres, and therefore the grid, you can hop to another site via the network. In this non-physical world, the network is much more efficient. The internet is the grid-network hybird that is slowly becoming integrated to every facet of life.

Reading Notes 3 - Serious for a Moment

If I could be serious for a moment, I present to you this week's edition of Reading Notes.

I talked about my reading notes in class last Tuesday and that went over like flatulence at Easter services. Hopefully this week I won't be so controversial. This week I would like to talk about Lexia to Perplexia. All I can say is I'm in stunned silence.

I have never seen such random coherent incoherence in my life. I THINK I'm getting my head around it, but I really don't know with absolute certainty what is going on. I certainly hope that it's just not me. In the first section, there is wordplay with HTML code and words, kind of a cyber mash-up of actual text and of cyber text. This got me to thinking about how hypertext and regular words are similar but so different. HTML code is words, but they are words that create visuals. I think of it as onomatopoeia for the eyes. I come back to our website creation assignment as well and see this notion. Dreamweaver and the HTML I code creates a picture for me to enjoy after coding or writing.

Then you get to the whole section with the eyes, and that just is insane. It reminds me of "A Clockwork Orange" for some reason. I think about how the guy's eyes are kept open while he is forced to watch violence as to make him aware of the violence he causes. The whole rest of the thing continues on like that too. It's so weird.

I have a question. Is this thing insane for a reason? I just don't GET it. Sure, it makes me think of the connections of HTML to regular writing, but is there more? Is there a notion of "fast rhetoric" in there? Is the whole program a metaphor about how the internet is a place where true writing is lost?

Honestly, I think I'll stick with Wikipedia.

Correlations

Currently, I'm taking 5 classes. This one, an African-American Studies Class, and my 3 weather classes: mesoscale, radar/satellite, and capstone. This hyperlinking post is not that easy for me, as that's quite a spread on class material. But, I'll try.

Global Warming

We all know the global warming debate. Is it man made? Is it real? I swear, half of my capstone class is dedicated to it, while a smattering appears in the other two classes. It's a real question mark and a contentious issue between climatologists and meteorologist.

I don't know about the rest of my classes. My African-American class deals with racism, which doesn't really show up in any of my other classes. This class is more a of a networking class. My weather classes have the most corssover appeal.

We get words like radar, and thunderstorms, and lots of cool stuff.

Reading Notes Deuce - MEXICO

I just finished up doing two things. First, I did this week's reading. Second, I was watching one of my favorite individual episodes of any television show ever, Wonder Showzen. If any of you have seen it, you know what I'm talking about. Think Sesame Street, but gear it toward adults, and then smoke some crack. That's about it, really. (Note: James Conrad does not advocate drug use. Not cool.) The pilot episode is named "Birth," and has overlying themes of "Mexico." Random graphical cutouts of Mexico fly across the screen during some transitions between scenes. When one puppet character asks a child what they learned from a short film just shown about Mexico she answers "Eat Nachos." Also, the picture seen here is also from the same episode. This child gives it to a man on the street, who is genuinely surprised by it. A giant puppet letter S has sex with a giant letter N, and give birth to a lower case I, and the family spells out SiN in a family portrait (as they are unmarried). Brilliance.

You may be asking yourself what this has to do with this week's reading. Surprisingly, I feel it has everything to do with Marshall McLuhan's article, "The Medium is the Message." In it, McLuhan states that objects (and later, media) shape society on how they are used, not just what they are. One example used is the electric light. Electric lights brighten surgeries and baseball games, but that surgeries and night baseball games came about because of the light bulb. This doesn't change the light itself. A factor throughout the piece is the notion of people asking what something is "about." My theory is this: Electronic media, which we've been analyzing for the last couple of weeks, is governed by use.

Let me explain. I've gone into depth previously about Wikipedia. It can be a cornucopia of knowledge, or a total lie. Who assemble the truths or the lies? Whoever put the page together. YouTube can be a place to find cool videos or a place to find illegally copied copyrighted material (talk about a gray area). What I'm saying is this: electronic media is a gun (which shoots to kill), whose purpose is set in stone, electronic media is a fluid idea of communication that has multiple ways of use. The light bulb is not a fluid idea. It lights up a room. The End. A blog can be a multi-faceted message. On the top most layer, a blog says, "Hey, I'm an internet writer!" On the next level, there's the actual words that the person writes, whatever that may be, good or evil. On an even lower level, there's sarcasm, and wit, and all those literary bits that we all know and love.

Electronic media is as multifaceted as the show I was just talking about. On the surface, it's just talking, kind of like how the show is absurd for the fact of being absurd. But, there is a deeper level of involvement with electronic media and other types of media than there is with a light bulb and a gun: rhetoric. The spin you put on things, just like WS does, is what separates media of communication, electronic or otherwise, from a light bulb and a gun. Material things just do what they do, communication does what it does, but spins it and adds layers to it. One must think about what is being relayed to him when talk to, but you don't really need to consider a gun being shot at you.

So this brings me back to where I began. I'm still wondering what Mexico has to do with a fake kid's show.

Sweet, Sweet #4 - When Dinosaurs Roamed!

When I think of academic writing, I think of one dreaded assignment: the essay. Quite literally the bane of my existence, the essay has drilled holes into my ever loving soul. I'm also beginning to see that the essay, to the advanced people of society, may partially be relegated to status of "dinosaur of the past" soon: extinct.

Let me explain. Already, in the few weeks I've taken this class, I'm beginning to think that conventional writing is going the way of the dodo. I mean, look at this assignment. It's not a classic, 5 paragraph essay. It's well thought out response (read: rant) in a blog, an unconventional electronic journal. Even in my weather classes, everything we do is web based: model data gathering and maintaining a website are key things we learn. My point is this: in every facet of our lives, we are dealing with new electronic media that wasn't around 10 years ago. If you want to be on the cutting edge, and excel in the many professions out there in that big, tough world of ours, you need to know the latest ways of communicating EFFICIENTLY.

Efficiency is key. In today's culture, many people in society cannot communicate efficiently. Whether it be poor grammar, poor spelling, poor vocabulary, or just being illiterate in general, so many in today's world do not excel in life. The key is not only teaching the new forms of communication, but fixing the problems with ESSENTIALS of communication. You know, like the difference between "its" and "it's." (Oh, it burns me up when people don't get that one.)

So, here's my solution to the proposed question. First, clean up the teaching plans of high school. Make grammar essential to passing. Then, when it comes to modes of conveying words, teach the old modes of communication, such as the essay. While the essay is still used in the science community, today's media is ruled by the blog and the website. Teach HTML and such in college, maintain a website, keep a blog, network with others. Admit it to yourself, the only people that make it FAR in life are college graduates, so teach advanced topics such as these in college, where only the advanced students learn them. Teach basics earlier, not in college. Today, I think to much time is dedicated in college to the basics... some of which are never fixed.

So there it is: the essay, my nemesis, is now relegated to a relic; it is now a basic idea taught to high school students to prepare them for today's world of high technology. We use the essay basics in all writing that we do, but lord know I never want to write an ACTUAL essay ever again.

Part 1 - Pix for thoughts

Reading Notes 1 - Global Warming is not Fast Rhetoric

In this edition of reading notes I would like to take to task the article of Lester Faigley, "Rhetorics Fast and Slow." While I am not opposed to some of his viewpoints, I see the article as a view of a man who has a problem with change overall.

First, I would like to analyze his list (Faigley 6, CP 51) of how his life is "too fast." First I would like to state that his list is entirely subjective. Having a cell phone, being occupied by email, and impatience are all a lifestyle choices that can be altered. Who says you have to make your cell phone more than an emergency device? Who says you have to check your email as much as you do? All of these things can be changed to however he would like to do them. Check your email once or twice a day, near the end, and send what you need to. Don't answer leisurely cell calls.

My point is this: life is only as fast as you make it. But his analog of life being too fast, rhetoric, and the problems of every day life is a bit of a red herring. As I see it, fast rhetoric is today's electronic media: cells, emails, and other sorts of instant media, whereas slow rhetoric is books, letters, and ideas that take time. Faigley himself states that fast rhetoric is quite possibly the downfall of society as we now know it: "fast rhetorics are manifestation of a culture that suffers from A.D.D., a culture where things are quickly used and discarded, a culture where abuse of the environment and gaping inadequacies are ignored." He cites that global warming, of all things, is a problem caused by fast rhetorics. Honestly, I don't see the connection.

Global Warming as we know it today is caused by carbon dioxide emissions from multiple man made sources, such as vehicles, factories, and other fossil fuel burning. How does Faigley make the connection to fast rhetoric? Is it because we as humans shoved it to the back of our minds with other issues that were spread through fast rhetoric? Is it that the facts were watered down through fast rhetoric? Was there a "spin" put on it by lawmakers, in the conventional rhetoric sense? While I'll agree with him on the lawmaking side of the issue, I see that fast rhetoric would only make the problem more prevalent through information spreading quicker. Just this Friday, the IPCC, the leading science community with the task of studying global warming processes, released its latest report on Friday. It is widely available on the internet for all to read. If we were still back in the day of telegraphs and the Pony Express, information to create this report would take much longer to assemble. Policy makers would have no basis for stopping a problem that began during the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, not the INFORMATION AGE.

Faigley comes off in his article as nothing more than a senile old man yelling at children from his porch to get off of his lawn. He needs to adjust to today's world. MAKE time for your personal pleasures. Make the world your own oyster, and you can create with it more than what was possible just 10 years ago. The information age helps solve our problems, not enhancing them.