cool game in production

i recently found out about a really interesting game called Achron. its the first game to let you actively use time travel during a battle in order to change past events whenever you want. if you are interested you can check it out at www.achrongame.com

well its the first time I've even looked at this blog in months so i thought i would celebrate with a new post about absolutely nothing. so for my first random thing here is a song by Ok Go in which they made a rube Goldberg machine which is synced to their song, this too shall pass.

Final post

I think that there have been many memorable things i have learned from this course and that really makes it hard to choose one of them so instead i think i will choose 2. the first is 'America the Illiterate', and the second 'is Google Making us Stupid'. these two readings really surprised me and started to get my interested in the news for the first time. my view on writing really changed because of this class. before i though of writing as being essays, papers, articles, or books. i also though it was always boring but it didn't take long for me to change my mind about that after i started writing these blogs. i don't know if i can answer the last question because i cant tell how my own writing changes. sometimes you can tell that it has changed but i find it difficult to truly know how. i think i'm going to miss these posts after a while and who knows maybe i will decide to continue writing them in the future.

here is the link to access my paper

After much deliberation i decided that i should revise one of my favorite posts, "why i blog" by Andrew Sullivan

After reading “Why I blog” by Andrew Sullivan I started looking for the reasons that he blogs, and I kept coming back to this short little sentence that he wrote and which, I feel, sums up the entire article.

“It [blogging] is, in many ways, writing out loud.”

through this simple quote Andrew Sullivan is able to sum up most, if not all, of blogging. Many times through the article I felt like he was just pointing back to that sentence while outlining individual pieces that fit together to form this little puzzle of a sentence. Now when I compare it to a puzzle I don’t mean that it’s complicated or confusing, but that while it is one sentence, it encompasses many different ideas about blogging in this one, small, simple sentence. So my next order of business is to outline a few other ideas about blogging which Andrew Sullivan wrote in his article and to show how they point to or are connected with this sentence.

There are many things that he says about blogging which can also be said about talking or speaking. One of these is that blogging is “the spontaneous expression of instant thought”, just like during conversation you are not going to spend an hour or more deciding what you are going to say next. this spontaneousness is a big difference from what he says about other public writing, like a newspaper. “If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried in the interstices.”

Another Idea he puts forth is that unlike most writing, blogging is strongly affected by the public who can respond almost instantly to anything you decide to post, allowing a blog to be more than just words on paper, it becomes a discussion or even an argument.

To wrap this up I want to give you one more thing to think about. “Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.” Emphisis on the “writing out loud” part.

countering

Harris says that countering, "is not to nullify but to suggest a different way of thinking. in countering you bring a different set of interests to bear upon a subject, look to notice what others have not. your aim is not to refute what has been said before, to bring the discussion to an end, but to respond to prior views in ways that move the conversation in new directions."

i recently read a story that seems perfect for this. the story mainly deals with global warming and the energy crisis, but the story is also taking another look at the financial crisis and how it may not be all bad.

so far when people talk about the recession they are usually talking about the negative effects. some may even say there are only negative effects. the IEA (international energy agency) though has a more optimistic view.

"the economic crisis having cut into both the amount of energy used around the globe and the carbon dioxide emissions associated with them. According to the IEA, this creates an unprecedented opportunity to start curtailing our reliance on fossil fuels."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/11/energy-agency-financial-crisis-an-unprecedented-opportunity.ars

Although the recession has had negative effects on our lives in the present, it may be able to greatly improve them in the future. right now demand for fossil fuels has gone down and that opens the market to renewable energy. if we can keep the demand for fossil fuels low and switch over to using mostly renewable energy then we may be able halt global warming.

this story is altering the view of the recession from a unfortunate yet temporary down turn to a unique opportunity to prevent global warming.

harris first described forwarding by relating it to his email program. the <-- was for sending comments back to the sender, but the --> "directs them out to other readers." then he goes on to say that, "a writer forwards a text by taking words, images, or ideas from it and putting them into use in new contexts." he then proceeds to break forwarding down into 4 types, illustrating, authorizing, borrowing, and extending.

Illustrating is for when you are trying to make a point. you go and look for examples where other people have made the same or a similar point. Authorizing is when you use drawl upon the expertise or status of another writer in order to support your writing. borrowing is when you use the terms and ideas of other writers in the process of thinking through your subject. extending is when you take terms or concepts from someone else and use them in a different way the the original user.