Tentative Research and the Sake of Arguement

There's plenty of topics in the world to over a point over. Are democrats or republicans responsible for our current economic problems? Do video games turn our children into homicidal maniacs? Is Elvis really dead?

Well, maybe not that last one. I have no desire to chase after a paper based on conspiracy theories.

However, video games and their effects on today's youth might be a worthy topic. Lets break it down for a moment.

Video games are accused of jading children to violence and other such material normally seen as acceptable only for adults (sex, crime, death). Some go as far as to say that this desensitivity is destroying our youth and causing them to even become excited by the prospect of mayhem.

However, most people who seem to have gone off the deep end and emulated their favorite video games in real life have been noted as having serious quirks and psychological problems already. So perhaps instead of video games sending children out into the world to destroy... maybe they are simply something said people found an easy way to put into action something they may have already been ready to do. Besides, the media portrays things many times more disturbing than found on the average video game.

It's something to think about.

Wordle

Innocent
People
Political
Cartoon
Picture

These are the five words I seem to have used an over abundance of during my writing of "The Obvious". My paper centered around a political Cartoon of Benjamin Franklin and promoted lax gun laws. I've tried in vain to decide upon words to replace these I seem to have used excessively. When I write, I tend to write using "people", "person" and "one" as pronouns. My paper was about a political cartoon so "political", "cartoon" and "picture" are understandably used often. "Innocent" is the only word that stands out to me but I can not seem to think of a way around using it. Well, no way that would not require myself to write in a much wordier fashion. Perhaps the best thing to do is simply limit my pronouns more often.

Revised Writings of Style and Structure

Andrew Carnegie came to America from Scotland. To support himself, Carnegie took work as a factory hand, a telegrapher, and a railway clerk. His savings from these jobs were invested in oil, and later, the largest steel works in the country. Historians do not agree in their assessments of Carnegie. Some consider him a cruel taskmaster and others, a benevolent benefactor. His contributions to American society however, cannot be denied. He established public libraries all across the country and spent much of his time promoting peace. For better or worse, he ranks as one of our most noteworthy nineteenth-century immigrants.

Media Madness and Marketing Hell

What media do you typically consume?

For me, the typical media intake comes from a combination of the Internet and radio.

What are your favorite TV shows? Bands?Movies? Web sites? Video games?

I enjoy "Law and Order", "CSI" and "NCIS". I also watch a lot of the History Channel.

I don't have any particular bands I'm affiliated with but I do listen to a lot of music. It's a way of self medicating the ups and downs of the day.

My movie preference is about as wide as my music selection but I do have a particular fondness for poorly made and older Sci-Fi films. I enjoy getting friends together and riffing on the movie while it plays.

I have an addiction to Wikipedia, I get on there and just randomly type in any subject I have ever thought about and then read til I see something that catches my eye and takes me to another subject. There is no telling where you'll end up.

I used to play a lot of video games and I still do when given the opportunity, but that hasn't been the case here of late. I'm not restricted to a particular genre of gaming... Stratagy, RPGs, Shooters and a whole lot more. I enjoy playing it all. Well except sports games. If I'm going to play a sport, I'm doing it outside in the open air.


How does what you see and hear influence your language, your perception of normal,your likes/dislikes, and your opinion of what’s “cool”?

I've never been an aficionado on "cool". I learned a long time ago that if I act how I feel like acting, say what I'm thinking and pursue whatever it is I like doing, one of two things will happen. Either people like me or they don't... but the ones that do like me, are people I get along very well with. Everyone else is of no consequence to me. My surroundings and the company within does have an affect on the vulgarity of my language. I tend to try and limit my contact with such influences.

Write a paragraph outlining the effects of “cool hunting”on your own life or (if you aren't a teenager and don't feel like this applies to you) the life of someone you know.

"Cool Hunting" did affect my life. By marketing to my age group the Media shaped those around me, twisting thier perceptions of what's acceptable or not, they indirectly forced me to cope with thier own percieved veiw of reality. Still, while my ideas on things like sexuality, being more conservitive than presented by the media, were thought laughable by some people, I found plenty of people that accepted me. So I guess in the end it doesn't matter.

Comments of Past Works

I'm not wholy sure how this is supposed to go down. I was overjoyed at leaving early the other night and I failed to write down eveything you said... you were no the only one who wasn't feeling well, sorry. I really just wanted to go home.

Anyway, I've looked over my comments... uh, your comments, and I see nothing I didn't expect. I have always had difficulty with a thesis statements and the way I organize my thoughts rivals that of an intoxicated monkey. It's a personal thing, I think. I don't think about the reason I've done something till after I've done it and I am very scatter brained. My train of thought is more of a train "wreck"... I do see where I failed to narrow my paper down to a specific audience though. I wrote everything out and forgot who I was writing it to.

I'll try do pull myself together better for this next paper. Hopefully the practice will help me form a better why of writing thesis statements and I'm sure with a little cut and paste I can solve the organizational issues.

Thank you for being precise in your comments. I can't stand when people write "this could be better" and leave it at that... I'm guilty of it but I still don't like it. Thanks again.

Five Minute Madness: Quick Comparison of Pictures

I have two photos for my compare and contrast paper. THey both center around fire. they Both represt fire in an extreme case. But they are not the same type of fire. One fire is wild and uncotrollable and consuming Athenian neighborhoods while the other is fierce but still controlled in the woods of British Columbia. These pictures represent the life giving and life destroying power and awe that fire has. Their colors are similar but still different. the wild fire has a more orange glow to it while the controlled fire is a deeper red. Also, the there is a difference in technology between the pictures. The wild fire shows a single out of date water wagon while the controlled fire shows several helicopter piolts with ready choppers... who are most likely the ones controlling the fire.

Imagine the Immagrants

"Close the Borders to All Newcomers"
Daniel James proposes that incoming immigrants into the United states is destabilizing the work force and leading to an alarming list of other economic and ecological problems that can be linked to over population. Surprisingly, illegal immigrants is not the main worry of this journalist. Rather, he fears that legal immigrants, which he states are three times the quantity of illegals coming in each year, are the people who must be denied access to this country. By revoking these people access, James proposes that immagrants already inside the border will be forced into assimulating into our culture instead of forming little pockets of multicultural neighborhoods and isolating themselves from the rest of socioty.

"Give us Your Best, Your Brightest"
Stephen Moore takes a different approach from James when looking at immagrants. He states that Americas constant consumption of legal immagrants is what has made this country great. He cites studies where so much as 12 percent of all valvictorians are in fact legal immgrants. He says that some of the most productive, hard working and influential busness men and women in the United States are infact from other countries. Even illegal immagrant coming into the country are not the bottom rung of the economic latter that we as a socioty have come to believe but are often white collar workers trying to make a better life.

Immagration as presented by these two men is a serious issue but depending on wether you feel immagrants are contriduting to or taking from the American work force will drastically change your opinon. Both men have presented interesting ideas as to the effect of closing out borders. Moore feels that we would loose access to untolf potential while James beleives it will save the Country from serious economic peril.

Of Facts and Fallacies

"Don't Copy that Floppy" or something like that.

It's an old slogan but the principle still stands. There is an on going campaign to prevent the copying copyrighted materials. To aid in their copyright crusade, proponents of ant piracy have resorted to using a digital DJ... in what I can only assume is an attempt to connect with today's youth. They are so enamored by that bling you know.

Now then, we are here to look at this fantastic piece of propaganda and analyze it a just a wee bit.

It's not a hard stretch of the imagination to assume that everyone present at the start of this video is at least a teenager. This gives us an assumed target audience. The kids in the film are laughing at another commercial from the 1990's. This older commercial features a goofy looking rapper who warns kids not to copy floppy disks and other material that may be copyrighted. This is an attempt at Pathos, or the use of humor to touch the audience. The older commercial is actually quite silly looking. Times and styles have changed and something that may have been slightly silly a decade and a half ago is now prime comedy. This is further propagated by the teenagers poking fun at one of their friends while he makes copies of CD's and DVD's, which are the floppys of today. There is an irony that old the anti piracy commercial should be playing as this young man makes modern day versions of what it is advocationg against.

Now then, the comercial is on it's way, we have laughed at the funny little DJ man from a decade past and we know that no one in the room takes copying serious. So what's the next thing the ad does? It slaps us in the face with a new, and rather hip looking, DJ. Thankfully this one comes with a better song and sense of attire. Together with some plays on words and the singing of a woman in a sound recording booth, the ad attempts to use Logos, the use of logic, to reach the audience and get them to reivalutate any pro piracy stances they may have had. We see talk of money lost by the artest and how police my kick in your front door and arrest your mother. Logicaly, illegal copying is a bad idea because you could be sent to jail if caught. Besides, as the song goes, you could spend you talents making a career instead of stealing.

To finish this fiasco off, there is an interview with a real life pirate. Argh! He lacks the parrot and the eye patch but is appearently spending 4 or 5 years in prison for the illegal downloading, copying and selling of copyrighted materials. He personally pleads to the veiwers to not do like him. That once he's out, he will always be listed as a fellon. This is Ethos, or emotion. You are meant to peel pity for this man's predicament and fear for yourself lest you end up in his place.

Beside the somewhat lame visuals, the message of "it's not just a copy, it's a crime" is clear. I had to look rather hard for a logical fallacy, a weak point in the presented arguement. I looked hard and found none so I've decided to make one. I have a point about fallacies that needs to be made and so it shall.

Had the advertisement decided to use the arguement that... oh lets say Hitler, copied copyrighted material and sold it for a profit, it must be wrong because Hitler was a monster. While both Hitler being a monster and the act of selling copyrighted materials is wrong may both be true, they do not coralate. You can not take two unrelated subjects and use one to suport the other.

The Writing Process of the Mad and Disillusioned

When writing a paper, I tend to sit down and scribble in a note book first. I have never been a fan of spider web diagrams or bubbles or lists. To write is to write and that is what I do. I write first in pencil so I can edit with an ease a pen would not have allowed. My intentions are to get the general idea of what I want to say, and the order in which it comes to me, down on something solid. I'm very easy to distract and often forget what I'm doing in mid sentence so it's very helpful to have a road map of previous thoughts laid out in front of me.

After jotting down a very simple overview of what I plan to right, I read over it once or twice and move on to typing. This is a bit trickier than the scribbling into the note book. Pencil and paper has a somewhat informal feel to it, I can write and not worry about spelling and grammar. However, when I'm typing, I tend to both type and edit at the same time. I spin words around in my head and rearrange sentence structure trying to make my words more pleasing to my own ears. I have limited knowledge of grammatical rules, instead I rely on the voices of authors I've read in the past to decide my word phrasing.

Thankfully, if while I'm typing I come to the end of a thought and I'm not pleased where said thought has left me, I will go back to a place earlier in the document, double space and start my thought again. This leaves my with my previous typing to guide my thoughts but lets me work though the idea again until I have something I can continue on from. I can work through and rewrite my paper several times while still writing the "shitty first draft".

It's not always as efficient as I would like but it has become more refined over the years.

Who am I?

After reading the article assigned last week on discovering one's voice in writing, I must say that the idea of finding a happy median between the formal style of writing those of the higher echelons of learning use to confound us mere mortals and the chaotic mess of emotion that spills from the fingers of the young and foolish, is something I wholly agree with.

I despise reading when the writer has a holier than though attitude about their own intellect just as I hate wasting time on something that looks like it were composed by a school child late for a ballgame who knew there was no getting out of the house without showing that all homework was done. We've all been that kid, substitute ballgame for something else if you must, but no one wants to read that work. It wasn't written to be read, it was written to be done.

I have not had very many exceptional English teachers in my academic career prior to college, but I have had a few. A very few. Of those, each one encouraged me to read copious amounts of literature. Books upon books by different authors, each with a different style. All that I know about grammar and sentence structure comes from these books. I have tried to learn from the men and woman who created for me fantastical worlds, both fictional and factional, and emulate some bit of that person's writing. Personally I feel that I've done a rather horrible job at it as my voice, as the article calls it, has a tendency to change.

More than moods, my writing voice will sometimes weave in and out of those voices I have picked up from my books. To some degree, it's amusing. Yet, at the same time it's infuriating, it reminds me how erratic my thoughts can be. That is something I hope to work on this year. I hope to assimilate the voices and styles I already have, to refine them into a singular voice, one that is my own.