"Dark Days" Analysis

After watching the documentary “Dark Days” the one thing that captured me the most was how there was no narration throughout the whole video. No narrating made the whole documentary come off as one very long recording of these people’s lives. I think I liked it so much because it was the absolute bare minimum of what a documentary could be. There was no (noticeable) outside opinion shaping what the documentary was supposed to mean. What you got from it was what you got from it not what someone else wanted you to. One of the other things that captured my attention was the choice for black and white. I thought at first it was to show how bad their lives were living in the tunnels, but it did not make sense because at the end when they got the section 8 housing it was still black and white. I think the choice to have black and white was to strip the video again of anything but the story. It gave no specific directions on where your thoughts were supposed to go, just a direction towards the point of the whole thing. So if you look at the entire video the bareness of it actually drew you towards a very broad topic which is different from every documentary we have watched so far. Though the topic was broad it was not vague and actually very powerful. The bareness actually helped to make every person look exactly like one of us, except not living in a subway, it made them human which in turn made the graveness of their situation slap me in the face.

Link to Final Movie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7r1pwWz8a4

Videogames and Art

Videogames to an extent can be art. In the first article what was talked about was a “rock” stage. This rock stage was where the magic happened and where every other thing was shut out, so what is important could be focused on and turned into something amazing. This I believe is when videogames are art, it is when there are no people playing the game and you can just marvel at what was created for us. This is not true for any video game; games like “WACO” and “Grand Theft Auto” are not. Those games do not have any purpose, argue all you want about how they are expressions of what people feel but explain to me how the senseless murder and other bad things are art. If you were to say those are killing games so all killing games are bad you would be wrong, other games involving killing have purposes, reasons, and motives. When some video games are being created it is about the game and what the creators are trying to produce for the public. Most games up to this point should be considered art. When you add the players into the mix, you see that video games as art disappears. We play games and manipulate what was created and destroy the world that was painstakingly planned out and created. What is done in video games is not art and those who create the games know this, why else would after everything we do in videogames it all resets. Nothing is every permanently ruined in videogames, so what was created can be restored and brought back to its former beauty. Lastly there are videogames that are purely for destruction and have no purpose. Like the games I mentioned earlier and others like them. I would argue till the gas is turned off to anyone who believes games like those are art. As far as I am concerned people who think that those games are art more than likely believe that Christ’s image burnt on toast belongs next to the Mona Lisa.

 

Pictures for Video

This would be the first picture, because in the first sentence it talks about what i do when i first log onto facebook

 This picture would come up because i talk about how i am a rugby player.

 I picked this one as the picture showing my party side....because its the only one that would be

appropriate.

This picture of my cat will for the purpose of the video be Schrodinger's cat.

.....

The songs will go in this order: Gyorgy Ligeti - Requiem, Clint Mansell - Requiem For A Dream, And only the crescendo at the end of Tchaikovsky - 1812 Overture for the conclusion.

I also plan on using paint or text boxes on youtubes editor to help explain the relevence of each picture.

I will have the other six photos by tomorrow evening because contrary to what others may think it is surprisingly hard to take pictures that you can relate to a somewhat difficult quantum mechanical theory.  If I could get any suggestions in class or as a comment I would be very grateful.

Tracks for Essay (with explenations)

Gyorgy Ligeti - Requiem 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1lcZM0MNek&list=FLn4c5eIAqDdUhnWZkZHgAXQ&index=17&feature=plpp_video

I chose this song because my essay starts off as a cautionary tale meant to cause despair and frighten people into becoming who they really are and not who they want to be....and nothing says despair like a song written by a holocaust survivor whose inspiration is the suffering he felt in Auschwitz.

Clint Mansell - Requiem For A Dream
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22ut_pzoWgY&feature=BFa&list=FLn4c5eIAqDdUhnWZkZHgAXQ

I chose this song because it is just one of those songs that can really build you up, in this case for my conclusion.

Tchaikovsky - 1812 Overture
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0cpKzDoOdA

I chose this song because it is such an awesome song to end anything, like in V for Vendetta.

Analysation of Screen Caps

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6WGNd8QR-U

This is when the tempting hallucinations start in the video. Beforehand, one of the crew members noticed some gages that are spacing out.

 

For whatever reason he is temped into taking off his helmet causing him to die, from the window you can see his crew mate panic.

The crew notices that something is going on, and star freaking out.

They try to figure out what is going on here but to no avail. This only causes more panic.

The system warns them that something is going on, yet the still try to persevere and fix it.

The system on the spaceship runs a program to select who will be going out next to work in the mysterious void.

When the computer selects the next man for the job the others force him to accept it and without much hesitation he accepts.

When he goes out in the void everything is going fine. Inevitably the gages start freaking out again, and he begins to notice some strange things. It is still too much for him however.

He takes off his helmet and succumbs to his fate causing more panic inside the ship.

One of the last ship mates goes out and stares at the bodies; he begins hallucinating like the others before him but the video ends before that.

Music Video Analysis

I chose to analyze Mastodon’s song “Oblivion”. It is a song about the things in life that attract you the most can sometimes be the worst thing for you. The video itself has the members of the band out in space at a space station. The go out one by one and while they are out there they are memorized by some unknown force that convinces them to take off their helmets, killing themselves the moment they do. The part that really gets me is the members are scared to go out because they know nothing good is out there. Even though they know it is bad for them they still go outside and get tricked. The words of the song like most mastodon songs are pretty crazy and cryptic but they can be easily understood if you listen for instance “I flew beyond the sun before it was time, burning all the gold that held me inside my shell” is like if you do something before you’re ready and it ends up hurting you in more ways than you thought. Then “The eyes of a child see no wrong, ignorant bliss, impending doom” says that we do childish things that we know will hurt us and for a moment we are happy but we won’t be for very long at all. The music is cool because there are three different parts for each verse and those parts are each sung by a different member of the band. For each part the rhythm and intensity of the music changes, now it is Mastodon that we are talking about so it is still heavy metal but you can still since the change in every part. Also, it is not the heavy metal you’re used to. It is almost like a heavier version of Pink Floyd, all the intense strong meaning with heavier music

Speech

http://soundcloud.com/william-l-schmidt/this-i-belive-speech

Revised Draft of Talk

Explaination of Schrodinger's Cat

Schrodinger’s…Facebook?

How do you use Facebook? If it is anything like the way I use it you may be in trouble. So when I log on Facebook I update my status with something goofy, I comment on the pictures from last weekend and I post something on the wall for my pledge class. Those few things are just a fraction of the day. For most of the day I am rushing between classes because I am a material engineering student and meetings because I am captain of my fraternities dance blue team and I am service/philanthropy chair. When I go back to my dorm people do not see me reading, doing homework, or scheduling and planning events. This is a problem because we are only showing a part of our personality. It is not the real us. It is an even bigger problem when I apply for a job and my highlighted personality on Facebook makes me look like a bum.

I use Schrodinger’s Gedanken thought experiment to explain this thought because of how perfectly it is applied to us and Facebook, it also provides a simple solution. Getting on to the experiment, its similarities to my point are pretty stunning. Essentially without Facebook we are in the same super position as the cat in the bunker, we are a sum of all possibilities (possibilities being moods, mindsets, etc.). What Facebook does is opens the bunker and whatever personality traits we chose to put on our wall become who we are as a whole; we are no longer the sum of our whole selves. This is a bad thing, because now new “friends” see a contradictory Facebook page from your personality and potential employers see someone who they do not want to hire. Just like how we would see a cat that is alive with many traits if we were on the inside of the bunker, but the bunker creates a narrow collapsed view of a dead cat.

As if that was not worrying enough, according to the experiment we cannot have a very diverse and deep personality while Facebook takes and shows only the one shallow, cut down personality. It is like when the cat is in the bunker and with all of the possibilities, and the outside observation forces one outcome to become entangled with that cat. Hence, causing reality to collapse on what we observe inside the open bunker. Taking this over to Facebook, it is like having our diverse personality stuck in our bunker but what we think the public want to see in the bunker becomes what traits of our personality we chose to show. So this means that even though we have diverse and deep personalities, the narrow personality that Facebook creates, is subconsciously what we are trying to become. It means that even though I am a responsible, smart, chair of philanthropy and service, and captain of a dance blue team; I am secretly and subconsciously striving to become the wreck less, goofy, rugby player on my Facebook.

The answer to this problem however, is pretty simple, do not post just what others want to hear or see. Show all aspects of your personality let Facebook be like a billboard showing everyone what a friend in your close friend circle (what a person in the bunker would see). That would eliminate the personality that is created by Facebook’s collapsing effect.

Rough Draft for This I Believe Speech (Not Complete...Subject to Major Change)

Schrödinger's….Facebook?

If we lived in my perfect world I would assume that everyone is familiar with Schrödinger, but seeing as we do not I will try to explain.  Schrödinger’s cat is a Gedanken thought experiment (an experiment that can be thought about but never actually tested, only supported).  The point of Schrödinger’s experiment was to show how silly Quantum Physics is (it also is a pretty effective way of explain wave particle theory). The experiment goes like this; you put a cat in a box with a radioactive substance and I Geiger counter hooked up to a hammer that is hanging over poison. The cat is alive (or both alive and dead depending on what version you hear) when you put it in the box and you leave it in there for an hour. At the end of the hour the cat is either alive or dead because the Geiger counter either goes of releasing the poison or not. The point however is that for that hour you have no idea if the cat is alive or dead, so technically it exists in a state where it is simultaneously both alive and dead. However when you open the box our observation of what we see becomes entangled with what actually happened, essentially what we observe forces reality to settle on one of the two options. Now what causes reality to settle our reality if it even is settled is one of the biggest debates in Quantum Physics today.

Now me being the nerd that I am started to think about how a theory like that could apply to Facebook. Here is what I came up with. People have very large personalities with a lot of different aspects of their personalities, similar to the possibilities of the cat living or dying. When we are in public with people no one personality becomes the prominent personality (one may be more obvious but not by too much), like the cat in the box it is the sum of all the possibilities. However Facebook is where we only make one of our many traits visible to everyone, so Facebook is what forces reality to settle on one of our traits. The poison and the system which sets it off is any factor that contributes us to have the traits we want to be seen on our Facebook.

In the end I believe that

The Serenity to Change the Things I Can by Mark Olmsted: Response

I did not like this essay because it did not speak to me and it was not very well written, in my opinion. My first issue with the paper is that it did not speak to me. I guess you cannot really call that an issue but it bugged me. Mr. Olmsted is a recovering drug addict who has never liked litter so he decided after his step into sobriety that he would start picking up litter. He now picks up litter every day and says it helps him stay clean. That’s a great story but I was never and never will be a drug addict and good for Mr. Olmsted but if I picked up trash on my dog walking route in Chicago, I would need four bags to do the area in front of my house.  The style and format of the essay is not very well written, in my opinion, because it felt more jumpy then what I think he was trying to do. He would jump between how what he does changes his life and what he is actually doing. It is by no means a bad essay just not my cup of tea.

This I Believe Response: We Need a Revolution by Carol Besse

I chose this article because I too believe we need a revolution. In fact I have written papers similar to this essay. When people think of revolution they think of them as unlawful or wrong, a mindset like that is wrong. Thomas Jefferson once said “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” I like to believe that our country is in a draught, with topics such as the environment or the education system (the two points in Ms. Besse’s article) drying us out even more. Every politician clams to have a key to a well but with every election the cracks in the dirt stretch further. However there is always a quiet before the storm, and we have been quiet for far too long; the storm of our peoples revolution can be seen on the horizon. Its thunder is felt in the distance, but like Ms. Besse said it might take quite a bit longer before we feel any rain. She says that a revolution is painful. She says there is not a revolution now because we do not feel enough pain yet but if we do not feel pain now we eventually will; be it at the pump, at the doctors, or at the grocery.

I liked the format of her article as well. She began with her background which opens up what she is going to talk about in the article. She then speaks of what she expects us to do, and why she thinks we should do it. She finishes off with why she would revolt. I like the format because the essay showed us her background, what we should be doing, and why she would be with us revolting. Her background also shows the reader what her generation would have been doing had they been facing the hardships we face today.