blog 26

So i truly hate watching television episodes online, it takes forever with all the buffering. It has to buffer like every 5 minutes, and it just makes the episode hard to follow or care about. So, I wonder how long before Battlestar Galactica the show Caprica takes place. I noticed they still use the word frakking, and since lingo seems to completely change every couple years it seems like the two shows occur really close together. Basically what happens in the show is this girl blows up a train after being recruited by a virtual gang. Her parents then go on a tv show to convince Caprica that their daughter is not a bad person. It is potentially partially the fathers fault since he is designing the technology that the gang thrives. Somebody almost has the wife assassinated, but it gets called off. I don't know how this episode could connect to the real world. Possibly just the fact that people go through really difficult things sometimes. Possibly that people have to deal with being blamed for stuff that they didn't see coming and couldn't stop. Maybe the message is that life sucks. I don't know. Though this is based exclusively off one episode from each series, I feel like the show pushes too much to be like BSG. I did enjoy Spence from the King of Queens being on the show, best part. I thought it was absurd the way the cops busted in the school with a warrant. That was completely not the way it would go down. The school would just cooperate. The school has nothing to gain or lose.

blog 25

Okay, so we watched an episode of Battelstar Gallactica today in class. It was entitled "33". I thought it was a mildly interesting episode. Basically, humans are running from robots, go figure. They determine that one of the ships that are in their fleet is being tracked somehow, so they shoot it down. This is very controversial. This, obviously, is an example of doing something you really don't want to do, but you know that you really have to. For people with specific moral values when they hit a car in the parking lot and no one is around, they don't want to, but they leave a note on the car with their information. Sometimes you have to do what you don't want to do for the greater good. I thought it was interesting how the fleet could feed and have enough water for nearly 50,000 people for that amount of time. Probably some wild technology. I thought the faster-than-light drive was interesting. It's a neat concept at how to travel really fast, as opposed to just being able to go that fast at any time you want. I don't really know what to think about that Baltar character. He is kind of coming across as a potential mole in the series, possibly a great protagonist. It would be interesting to see his character develop throughout the series. I also find his hallucinations pretty crazy. There are a lot of unexplained things that happened in the episode. It would be interesting to see another episode.

Blog 24

Yeah, so i don't like poetry really. I heard this poem in one of my classes this quarter, it's called "Invictus" by William Ernest Henly. I do really like the poem, as far as poems go. I really like the ballsy feel of it. It's sort of like the person speaking is just completely fearless and "unconquerable" and i don't know. the speaker sounds like a cool dude. I think i can relate to this poem, or would like to think i can. Here it is:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.





I really like the dramatic tone of the poem. It adds a lot to the poem. The diction really adds to the tone. Has some really cool words. I guess if i had to write poetry i would write stuff similar to it, maybe. The poem feels kind o dark and a little depressing. I really like the length of the poem. It's the perfect length.

blog 23

Alright, so we watched an episode of Dollhouse in class today titled Epitaph One. It was very interesting. I have never seen an episode of this series so I was pretty unassuming. It seems to me like somehow the world ended or nearly ended because of this crime syndicate that takes people, basically deletes their minds, and turns them into whatever the client wants. They gave mega-rich people the opportunity to have basically whatever they wanted in another person. It's a really strange concept: to basically create your own human. I really wonder how this service for the mega-rich would have this major of an effect on the entire world. Then again, perhaps it's only in America and not the entire world. The show kept me interested throughout, so i was pleased with that. I thought it was kind of strange that that "doll" woman was just roaming around that underground building place. That was kind of eerie also. Overall this episode did make me more curious in the show. I think it would be nice to have more back story on the show, it would be nice to see the first couple episodes. I thought how not only could this Dollhouse organization erase and upload memories into a person but also how they could also put an entire persons memories and feelings into a completely different person. It's a really intriguing idea. The fact that they kept calling this place they were trying to reach "safe haven" interested me a lot. The show seems to have some promise.

blog 22

I thought this episode was pretty interesting. I thought the alternate realities Buffy was experiencing was really cool. It never did become clear which reality was the real one that she was actually in or even if there was a real "reality". That's kind of confusing to talk about. In the end it seemed she just chose the reality that made her the most happy. Naturally she would choose the one where she has friends and where she isn't a freakish mental patient. I don't really understand why she would assume in the first place that the reality where she is a mental patient is her true "reality". I would think she would think they were just visions after getting attacked by the first monster in the beginning. There is a chance there are other clues in some other episodes throughout the series. I never realized that Buffy was intimate with Spike, the other vampire dude. That sort of blew my mind. He looks a lot older. It was really shocking to me when Buffy, after all these experiences with her friends, could just turn on them so easily by just a couple of crazy visions. That was very surprising. She just decided that they were just figments of her imagination, which is a crazy thing to pull out just like that. It seems like it would be a lot easier to see the mental patient situation as the fake reality. I was also wondering where Spike was when Buffy was beating up all her friends. I feel like he was convieniently left out.

Perception is in the Eye of the Beholder

Perception is a very crazy thing. The way one person looks at an object depends on many variables. The way different people see different things is a very cool thing. We each can evaluate any situation in any of numerous ways. In the show Firefly a girl names River and a guy named Jubal are very perceptive and in-touch with their surroundings. They each evaluate different objects in completely different ways. River sees a gun as a twig and Jubal sees a different gun as pretty and it has a good weight, and he acknowledges and evaluates it as a killing machine. This is a very crazy differential between the two comparisons. How can one person see the a gun as a twig and another person see it as a pretty killing machine? This proves that perception is a very wishy-washy term. Perception can mean a lot of different things. What it is generally used as is a way a person interprets what they are seeeing at the time. This is why sometimes there is no one right answer when two people are in an argument. Each person sees the situation in a different light. Perhaps if two people lived together and grew up with each other than they would perceive things similarly to each other.216 However, it seems like this way be impossible to know. What we do know is that every person is different and every person sees things in a different way from each other. it is almost unfathomable to think that two random people could feel the exact same about anything. There are so many variables.

blog 21

I did the draft for the Common Place paper. What i did for the draft was basically just cut out the the less relevant information, as well as, the facts that wouldn't be very important to someone that hasn't seen the show. My thesis is still about perception and how people can view the same thing in many different ways. My paper is still kind of long standing tall at five pages, however; I do have a decent amount of work to do on it. It is only the rough draft. I would like to make the Common Place paper a little more light-hearted than my original paper, which talks a decent amount about haunting, eerie issues or qualms that some up in the episode. also the Iraq War is one of the big connections to the real world in my Analytical Research Paper, so yeah ideally I would like to maybe just cut that out altogether I don't really know yet what direction I will go in. One of my arguments is about the 88 defined constellations. It's about how someone named these constellations to look like something, and most of them look like nothing.There's one constellation that's called Crusades, it's supposed to depict a battle scene during the Crusades and it's just two stars.I definitely want to make my paper less about the episode and more about the connection to the real world. I'm considering dropping my first paragraph that talks about Joss Whedon and how he created the show as well as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. It seems kind of unnecessary to have in there. I need to make the summary more concise. It's pretty descriptive and most of it should probably be left out. My final argument, aside from the Iraq War and constellations, has to do with how artists perceive things they paint. How two different artists can paint a picture of the ocean and have them look nothing alike. I'm probably going to end up not using a couple of the sources I used for the ARP. So yeah, that's basically what it's looking like for me right meow.