Given that one of my finals was so Star Wars centered, this was what ended up in my head when I finally put some thought into what I'd present. I giggled a little at the idea of this actually being the case for this individual.
Monday, April 30, 2012
Nobody must know my secret...
Given that one of my finals was so Star Wars centered, this was what ended up in my head when I finally put some thought into what I'd present. I giggled a little at the idea of this actually being the case for this individual.
Class Afterthoughts 4/23
The trash projects certainly a interesting take on things. For me it definitely redefined what I consider trash, as when I hear the word trash, I usually picture the stuff that was brought in with a slimy coating of soda dribbles or animal fat. I'm reminded of when I threw a Capri Sun in the wrong dumpster at school once, the one for cardboard stuff, and how not-unpleasant it was, I mean, it was just a heap of cardboard, yet still trash by technicality I suppose. Turns out when I chucked the Capri Sun in, it didn't splatter everywhere, the corner of the pouch ended up getting hooked on a rouge staple, it was pretty neat.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Fear and it's various faces
Of all the presentations, Sarah's (At least I think it that was her name. A whole semester and you hardly know a person's name.) was probably the most unsettling to me. Spontaneously waking up deaf, or loss of any other sense, rather than having an accident or some time-bomb of a genetic train wreck to set it off is a rather terrifying idea.
Much like pretty much everyone else, sight and sound at the very least I take for granted. I play video games, a lot, and audio is just as important as the video and having one of those halves just yanked away with little to no reasoning seems unfair and would most likely throw me into untold amounts of insanity and depression.
I chose a more tame fear, something I had control over rather than something like this for pretty much that reason. The inevitability of such a situation and that it can't change course once it's set fills me with a genuine lead-stomach dread. The same kind of dread that I'd have for wondering how my family will keep together after my mother's gone. I don't like to entertain the thoughts, even though I know it could happen as soon as anything else.
Much like pretty much everyone else, sight and sound at the very least I take for granted. I play video games, a lot, and audio is just as important as the video and having one of those halves just yanked away with little to no reasoning seems unfair and would most likely throw me into untold amounts of insanity and depression.
I chose a more tame fear, something I had control over rather than something like this for pretty much that reason. The inevitability of such a situation and that it can't change course once it's set fills me with a genuine lead-stomach dread. The same kind of dread that I'd have for wondering how my family will keep together after my mother's gone. I don't like to entertain the thoughts, even though I know it could happen as soon as anything else.
Fear and it's various science-y bits.
DA OBSERVATIONS
When I was relaying the story to the class, I noted some looks of passive interest, possibly recognition, and maybe a bit of unease when I showed the still of the video in question. As was rather expected at that point, laughs were certainly had by the class when I brought up the unexpected fear reaction from my door being thrown open, which was obviously the stronger reaction from everyone else. Admittedly by the time that day rolled around, even I thought it was pretty hilarious.
COMPARISON TO HYPOTHESIS
Expected class reactions were expected. On my end, having actually read the story behind the image, the significance was... not diminished, but perhaps re-ordered. Having a reason for the image, as a show-and-tell piece to a more eerie story rather than a random video with gibberish audio and a menacing thumbnail. As I watched the video, I thought about the characters in the story rather than the image itself and by doing that the image was less intimidating.
WHAT I COULD DO DIFFERENT
At this point, my only regret was that I didn't record the whole thing. Since I'd gotten over it by the time, I could've easily shared it in class. Perhaps next time, I'll set up a similar scenario with a quickie horror game SCP-87, record all the happenings and read out loud associated materials.
When I was relaying the story to the class, I noted some looks of passive interest, possibly recognition, and maybe a bit of unease when I showed the still of the video in question. As was rather expected at that point, laughs were certainly had by the class when I brought up the unexpected fear reaction from my door being thrown open, which was obviously the stronger reaction from everyone else. Admittedly by the time that day rolled around, even I thought it was pretty hilarious.
COMPARISON TO HYPOTHESIS
Expected class reactions were expected. On my end, having actually read the story behind the image, the significance was... not diminished, but perhaps re-ordered. Having a reason for the image, as a show-and-tell piece to a more eerie story rather than a random video with gibberish audio and a menacing thumbnail. As I watched the video, I thought about the characters in the story rather than the image itself and by doing that the image was less intimidating.
WHAT I COULD DO DIFFERENT
At this point, my only regret was that I didn't record the whole thing. Since I'd gotten over it by the time, I could've easily shared it in class. Perhaps next time, I'll set up a similar scenario with a quickie horror game SCP-87, record all the happenings and read out loud associated materials.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Fear and it's various facets
EXAMINATION STAGE
Fear is certainly a large grey area in the emotional spectrum. From what I've experienced, it's that lump of self-doubt in your stomach when being unable to talk to or convey emotions to that special someone, it's that jolt of adrenaline and sinking feeling you get when know what it means when a storm gets quite and you have to pop your ears twice, it's that feeling of paranoia and dismay at the inability to have nice things you watch Final Destination. It's also that weird thing where you read really intense creepypastas that you enjoy when you read them, but start fearing the dark and monsters again when you put it down and try to sleep, swearing never to do that under the cover of darkness again.
I was rather fascinated when I discovered creepypastas, how they're so obviously fake, but so masterfully penned that you get invested in the story and get instilled with a general sense of unease, which I find interesting considering I was terrified of such things less than a decade ago.
One lovely side-note of my past and childhood was that I was plagued by a creature in my nightmares, I have yet to find out what he might be or what he represented, but it was a formless, shadowy, human-sized figure. It has no discernible features except for two blazing red eyes, while I can't describe them as more than two points of red light, not unlike that thing outside the window in the original Amityville Horror, but when you look at it you're overcome with dread and paralyzed with fear.
Interestingly enough, a lot of 'lost episode' or 'hidden game feature' creepypasta's feature fanart including a similar setup, darkened monochrome scenes with pitted eyes that glow as if with blood-tainted hellfire. For a while, this was very unnerving for me, going to read/listen to the Lavender Town Missing Frequencies story when off in the 'recommended for you' section I see this staring back at me:
Which for several months made me paranoid about what was just behind my shoulder for about 4 hours after I saw it again.
After a while, I'd gotten back into creepypastas and found the wiki dedicated to gathering them in one place and finally sat down to fully read more famous ones like "Ben Drowned (Majora's Mask)" and "Lost Silver (Pokemon)." Eventually I'd made my way into the "Lost/Missing Episodes" section and saw this bugger again. I'd decided to man up and read the story behind the image, which honestly didn't really have anything to do with the image at all, and unsettling in other ways, but it seemed to take the edge off the image itself.
EXPERIMENT STAGE
I plan to play around with the various pastas that deal with this black-image-red-eyes scheme seeing what about it makes it so unnerving to me.
HYPOTHESIS STAGE
Depending on how and who is in the class, I imagine something between silent understanding, to attempted dream interpretation, to flat out laughter if the experiment goes awry.
EXPERIMENT STAGE
I'm going to present that backstory as well as introduce a few creepypasta images/idea to educate the class to make sure everyone's on the same page. What I'll then be telling about is how the experiment went.
The experiment itself will be getting into the mood by reading a few creepypastas, and then attempting to watch Squidward's Suicide, and then try to carry on with my nightly activity without running frantically to a door or light switch.
RESULTS:
Well, lets set the scene: It's 2am, I've been up two hours past my bedtime, the reading's relaxed me to almost sleep, yet my mind's in a half-paranoid state from the actual readings. My room's window is open and the porch door is open in the living room because I live in a 3rd story apartment and it's been FREAKING WARM the past week. As I get to a crescendo in the video a slight breeze kicks up outside , nothing too bad, it'd been doing that all night, but the pressure difference in the rooms threw my previously-shut door open rather loudly.
I screamed like a little girl and slept entirely under the covers that evening, any regrets for doing that I had wore off over the next few days.
Fear is certainly a large grey area in the emotional spectrum. From what I've experienced, it's that lump of self-doubt in your stomach when being unable to talk to or convey emotions to that special someone, it's that jolt of adrenaline and sinking feeling you get when know what it means when a storm gets quite and you have to pop your ears twice, it's that feeling of paranoia and dismay at the inability to have nice things you watch Final Destination. It's also that weird thing where you read really intense creepypastas that you enjoy when you read them, but start fearing the dark and monsters again when you put it down and try to sleep, swearing never to do that under the cover of darkness again.
I was rather fascinated when I discovered creepypastas, how they're so obviously fake, but so masterfully penned that you get invested in the story and get instilled with a general sense of unease, which I find interesting considering I was terrified of such things less than a decade ago.
One lovely side-note of my past and childhood was that I was plagued by a creature in my nightmares, I have yet to find out what he might be or what he represented, but it was a formless, shadowy, human-sized figure. It has no discernible features except for two blazing red eyes, while I can't describe them as more than two points of red light, not unlike that thing outside the window in the original Amityville Horror, but when you look at it you're overcome with dread and paralyzed with fear.
Interestingly enough, a lot of 'lost episode' or 'hidden game feature' creepypasta's feature fanart including a similar setup, darkened monochrome scenes with pitted eyes that glow as if with blood-tainted hellfire. For a while, this was very unnerving for me, going to read/listen to the Lavender Town Missing Frequencies story when off in the 'recommended for you' section I see this staring back at me:
Which for several months made me paranoid about what was just behind my shoulder for about 4 hours after I saw it again.
After a while, I'd gotten back into creepypastas and found the wiki dedicated to gathering them in one place and finally sat down to fully read more famous ones like "Ben Drowned (Majora's Mask)" and "Lost Silver (Pokemon)." Eventually I'd made my way into the "Lost/Missing Episodes" section and saw this bugger again. I'd decided to man up and read the story behind the image, which honestly didn't really have anything to do with the image at all, and unsettling in other ways, but it seemed to take the edge off the image itself.
EXPERIMENT STAGE
I plan to play around with the various pastas that deal with this black-image-red-eyes scheme seeing what about it makes it so unnerving to me.
HYPOTHESIS STAGE
Depending on how and who is in the class, I imagine something between silent understanding, to attempted dream interpretation, to flat out laughter if the experiment goes awry.
EXPERIMENT STAGE
I'm going to present that backstory as well as introduce a few creepypasta images/idea to educate the class to make sure everyone's on the same page. What I'll then be telling about is how the experiment went.
The experiment itself will be getting into the mood by reading a few creepypastas, and then attempting to watch Squidward's Suicide, and then try to carry on with my nightly activity without running frantically to a door or light switch.
RESULTS:
Well, lets set the scene: It's 2am, I've been up two hours past my bedtime, the reading's relaxed me to almost sleep, yet my mind's in a half-paranoid state from the actual readings. My room's window is open and the porch door is open in the living room because I live in a 3rd story apartment and it's been FREAKING WARM the past week. As I get to a crescendo in the video a slight breeze kicks up outside , nothing too bad, it'd been doing that all night, but the pressure difference in the rooms threw my previously-shut door open rather loudly.
I screamed like a little girl and slept entirely under the covers that evening, any regrets for doing that I had wore off over the next few days.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Things that have maintained perpendicular orientation.
This class was certainly different from what I expected, even with the stories, tales, and recounts of previous classes. First day of class was certainly memorable, when my idea for an egg project that I'd held over from last semester had been shot down with the introduction of the bead.
Singing bowls, man, those things are something. Well enough that I find that a bowl can make a resonant tone like that, then find it could be used on any old bell? Mind = blown. A close second to this discovery being all the fun stuff I learned about large cats and their associated hybrids (and how much free time science apparently has)
Of the class so far, I can say I like how open-ended the assignments can be. (if not flat-out BS'ed) I like to be able to flex creative muscles towards other goals/assignments while not having to worry so much about how the grade will turn out. It's how I feel the educational system SHOULD be, gauged on an individual basis, not a group standard.
I'm hoping that the class finally starts to warm up to each other and be a little more social. I realize that such a large class makes this difficult, but a little friendly topic discussion beats being talked at any day.
Singing bowls, man, those things are something. Well enough that I find that a bowl can make a resonant tone like that, then find it could be used on any old bell? Mind = blown. A close second to this discovery being all the fun stuff I learned about large cats and their associated hybrids (and how much free time science apparently has)
Of the class so far, I can say I like how open-ended the assignments can be. (if not flat-out BS'ed) I like to be able to flex creative muscles towards other goals/assignments while not having to worry so much about how the grade will turn out. It's how I feel the educational system SHOULD be, gauged on an individual basis, not a group standard.
I'm hoping that the class finally starts to warm up to each other and be a little more social. I realize that such a large class makes this difficult, but a little friendly topic discussion beats being talked at any day.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Class afterthoughts: 3/5
Half-sleep is interesting. Your mind's partially engaged, occasionally taking in snippets of the world around you, the rest of the time it's making brief movie clips from those snippets. Needless to say this got weird with the art critic that thinks calling an art piece phallic is a compliment.
The potter sounded like my kind of guy, doing art because he wants to, rather than he has to, and screw and ulterior motives, he's just relaxing. I like to art for the sake of art sometimes, so I can understand. However I find it irritating when, like the art critics, despite the pieces' stated purpose, find deeper meaning that's simply not there. I call this "Scarlet Letter Syndrome" since I felt especially in that novel the english teachers were reaching for meanings that simply weren't there.
The potter sounded like my kind of guy, doing art because he wants to, rather than he has to, and screw and ulterior motives, he's just relaxing. I like to art for the sake of art sometimes, so I can understand. However I find it irritating when, like the art critics, despite the pieces' stated purpose, find deeper meaning that's simply not there. I call this "Scarlet Letter Syndrome" since I felt especially in that novel the english teachers were reaching for meanings that simply weren't there.
In summary it just enforced my thoughts as thus:
Keep on art'n potter dude.
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