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Friday, October 30, 2009

What the Bleep Do We Know?


The movie, What the Bleep Do We Know, was definitely a different kind of movie and kind of difficult to follow. This movie was kind of like a sci-fi documentary style movie with a lot of connections with physics and scientific formulas. Also it was kind of animated with real life. It was about a deaf female photographer who was cheated on by her husband and now views herself as ugly and is depressed. As the movie progresses she realizes what her own thoughts can do and how powerful they are. Instead of viewing herself as ugly she sees herself as beautiful and loves herself. She stops seeing people in a bad light and notices that not all people are horrible, she begins to trust again. It wasn’t my kind of movie but it was defiantly unique and interesting.

Video Games


The last games we played in class were Grand Theft Auto Vice City, which personally I found pretty boring and pointless, but it did show some stereotypes; Super Smash Brothers, and Wii Play. The game itself wasn’t very interesting to me and I didn’t get the goal or what you were supposed to do in it, but as you go to different parts of town the stereotypes were prevailed. Such as when you went to Little Haiti everyone was just shooting at everyone and they had hydraulics on their cars. As for Super Smash Brothers it was fun and they had all the different characters to choose from. For instance if you were Princess Toadstool she had a frying pan for a weapon, she saved herself from dying with an umbrella and other female stereotypes. The Wii Play games were fun and interactive; you could also choose and create your own character.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Violence & Popular Culture


This article is mostly about how my generation, young people, are technology and computer savvy. It also looked at the relationship between violent videogames and the Columbine High School shooting. The internet and the computer are only advancing and a lot of people either don’t know anything about it or know everything. Those who seem to know everything are the young people and the older generation has to rely on us to understand and learn. There are also many people that are looking into a career in computers because of the popularity and necessity. There is good and bad to this new age but there is good and bad to everything one just needs to know the difference and how to sort it. The parents job is to help their children understand the good and the bad and to monitor their usage.


The internet can pose a threat or an ego boost depending how you use it. There are sites out there for kids who feel isolated in their schools but they feel equal when they enter this site. They can find a good and supportive community within the internet that helps them get through the tough times. The popular culture needs to learn to make their own judgments and parents need to understand what their children are doing and why. This will help prevent another catastrophe such as Columbine.

Fair Play

This article looks at violence, race, and gender in video games. There is more serious and significant violence in video games than any other kind of violence, as opposed to comedic violence such as jumping on a character’s head. Weapons such as guns are the weapon of choice but there is also a high amount of violence used without any weapons. Violence is a major theme for most videogames and it’s considered ‘not fun’ if there isn’t any kind of violence in a game.

The gender issue is unequal just as it is in anything else. Males dominate the videogame characters, even nonhumans outnumber women. Females are mostly used as props and/or are scantily clad showing off their assets. It is very sexist and stereotypical; while a male would use aggression a female is more likely to use her words. Either if they are male or female their body parts are accentuated to make them more appealing.

Race also poses its own problems with the majority being white and little or none at all Native Americans or Latins. There is almost always a white protagonist, Latinos showed up more in sports like baseball. White are most likely to use weapons while African Americans use their aggressiveness. Every other race besides white was somehow related more towards a sport.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Surrogates


Surrogates was another movie that paralleled Existenze. Without giving away too much of the movie I will do my best to explain without spoiling. Humans no longer went outside their homes; instead they sent their surrogates out to keep themselves from harm. You could be anyone you felt like, for example if you are a overweigh male your surrogate could be an attractive powerful female. Your surrogates lived your life for you and it was supposed to be a better and safer way of life. Also there seemed to be very little or none racism; a white guy could be a black guy and there were quite a few African American males in high positions. They were disconnected from the real world but connected to their surrogate. There were also those people who weren’t persuaded to ever get a surrogate. Those who didn’t live their life through a robot they had their own little world in which they lived and hated the other side of the spectrum. You have the believers and non-believers, the real and the fake.