Comments for The Little Blog Engine That Could

Comment on Writing Crimes; Graffiti by Bill

Bill — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 06:29:03 +0000

Niiice! theres this really cool british guy who does some awesome stenciling. I forgot his name but he’s famous and no one has ever seen his face. he even hung his own portrait in this museum and nobody noticed for days. i wish i could remember who this guy is. google could help but only if i knew what to google. “famous graffiti stencil guy”?

Comment on I’m trying to Collaborate by northr60

northr60 — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:14:08 +0000

I’m glad to hear about kids taking initiative with their ideas, espescially with collaborative writing like this. Sounds like the two of you have put a lot of thought into this and there’s a million different directions you could go with it (the beauty of a time traveling plot). I myself have been trying to collaborate with a friend of mine in a similar fashion, with me writing and him illustrating for a comic book… only we’ve been talking about it for about three years now and still haven’t done anything. It’s funny, last night he was telling me about a video game he was designing and, being the critical bastard that I am, I pointed out a lot of holes in his ideas while offering some ideas of my own as a solution to them. We went back and forth, almost passively arguing with each other, for hours. As the discussion went on, we both ended up shedding light on each other’s ideas and really getting somewhere. Keep in mind, this was just a little idea that he’s not even sure he wants to materialize at all (it stemmed from a conversation he had about a while ago about there being no way to make a cool golf game, to which he saw as a challenge and started designing characters) and we were really getting into it. If we would do this with some of the serious ideas we’ve come up with, who knows what we could accomplish. I’ll be sure to bring that up with him next time I talk to him.

Great idea you have there. Keep with it.

Comment on RSS – Hey that’s me! by Bill

Bill — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:25:46 +0000

Tell your brother that Google and other sites may have RSS feeds, but none are as robust as Netvibes. . . .

Comment on Writing Arts Frustration by albano04

albano04 — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:10:39 +0000

I share your plight. I want to be an author, not a teacher, not some backroom corporate typist. Rowan is raining us to be nothing special and i am not learning any of the skills i need to succeed in the competative world of Writing. I will certainly be looking into your group.

Comment on Hey! Read this! by sachsr26

sachsr26 — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 02:54:27 +0000

Interesting paper Zach, or Zack…
I definitely agree with you on the obligation of the performer to entertain the audience beyond the normal playing of their music. When I go to concerts, the intent is to rock out and be fully entertained by a singer or group that I absolutely love. Otherwise I wouldn’t waste the money on a concert ticket when I already have the CD for $10. Case in point: this summer in London I went to the Hard Rock Concert featuring 6 or 7 performers. Jason Mraz (I’m a big fan) joked with the audience and entertained beyond his normal song playing. Robert Randolph (another big fan) did likewise, and got creative with his songs, doing the ad-lib thing and encouraged audience participation. It makes you feel like your fanship is really appreciated by the artist. Hey what do ya know, they actually do know that they would not have the job they do without a fanbase. However, Eric Clapton came on stage, played his songs, talked very little, sat on his stool, and was very CD like. Not my idea of a concert performance – especially if you’re the headliner Sir Clapton!!!!

As for the dancing situation, I suggest going to concerts at more organized or “civilized” locations than a bar. Where yes someone is going to be upset if you want to dance in their standing room. Especially since they’re likely to be drinking and everyone is always a little more emotional with alcohol.

Good paper.

Comment on Writing for “Family Guy” by sachsr26

sachsr26 — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 02:39:18 +0000

Aww Family Guy <3
A guilty pleasure of mine. It’s so silly and yet so entertaining.

Comment on W.r.i.t.i.n.g_f.o.r_f.u.N by northr60

northr60 — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:57:10 +0000

Very interesting. Creative writing is my favorite kind and kudos to you for your clever way of exemplifying of it. Have you ever heard of automatic writing? It’s arguably the most creative of creative writing processes. It draws directly from your subconcious, a la surrealism, and is basically putting pen to paper, writing with little or no direction, and seeing what you come up with. Stories written in this fashion make little sense when read in the traditional sense but contain wonderfully colorful language that allows you to form a story of your own in your head as you read. It takes quite the imagination, both to write and read it. For more information/an example, here’s a link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Champs_Magn%C3%A9tiques

Comment on The Singularity by northr60

northr60 — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:21:21 +0000

That’s an interesting theory right there. I clicked on that link and read the little synopsis on that book. It churned some of intriguing thoughts out of me. Since you brought up a massive die off, I started thinking about this percieved armegeddon humanity is fascinated with. A lot of people think we’re on the threshold of this now, what with all the weapons of mass destruction in existence/development. That and the fact that the massive human population is ruining the enviroment makes it seem as if we are indeed near the end. However, if you look back throughout history, people have ALWAYS thought that the end of the world was near. I think it’s our base survival instinct that makes us fret about such things. In the old days, people feared God or some other supernatural force putting an end to the human race. Now we have our own devices to do it and I think that scares people even more. But what I think people who fear technology fail to realize is that although we have the ability to cause such destruction, we don’t necessarily have the capacity. Two atomic bombs have been dropped on other humans since their conception and it’s likely that they will be the last. No one wants to repeat such an atrocity, no matter how megolomaniacal they may be. Nukes are an insurance policy more than a weapon. No one will press that red button first because they know that as soon as they do, they’ll have missles up their ass as well. We’re not programmed to cause our own extinction and whenever we develop something that could possible do so, we use it with the utmost discretion. Why we invent such things is usually just to prove that we can, plain and simple.

I believe that we’ll eventually have the means to evolve through our own designs, which seems to be what Kurtzweil is suggesting, though I can’t say how close we actually are to achieving such an ability. I do know that people fear such a thing coming to fruition, arguing that it’s unnatural or it goes against God or some such, so things like cloning and stem cell research are illegal. What confuses me is that regardless of how much we fear nuclear and biological weapons, these same people who are against stem cell research don’t seem to mind the fact that there are scientists out there developing anti-matter bombs, which could theoretically be more devastating than any WMD to date. It’s as if they’re more a fan of civilization wiping itself out and the remnants being the next line of human evolution, rather than the much less horrific path of us evolving at our own pace by our own mechanations. I’m not sure I want to see how all this ends up playing out…

Comment on Smarty Pants – Nov 18 homework by northr60

northr60 — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:51:51 +0000

Hey, since I can’t get to the readings and have yet to do a post on this, I’m just going to build off of yours, Rachel.

I’ve always thought that the conventional measures of intellegence are not only the cause for much pretension in the world but are often unreliable. Rachel was right, there’ no real way to measure someone’s intellegence. You can test a certain criteria of knowledge and even one’s capacity to learn (IQ) but neither will show how smart a person actually is. One need not look past their own experience to know this is true. We’ve all met those kids who were in advanced placement classes but had the common sense of a toddler. There’s also the road scholars who’ve experienced plenty in their lives to make them wise but lack any kind of intellectual credentials, wasting their savvy on a minimum wage job. Both these examples are smart in their own way, but also stupid in their own way. Also, both are likely to wear what they do know on their sleeves, seeing what they know as outweighing what they don’t, resulting in that afforementioned air of pretension.

This gives me an idea: what if we didn’t measure people’s intellegence and instead measured people’s stupidity? That would be, I think, a very necessary, humbling experience. I feel like we live in a nation of underachievers. People tend to covet what they already know as being all that is necessary and if they can survive just on that alone, they will. Their seeking of knowledge tends to end after school, sometimes even before then. However, I think if we showed everybody how unintelligent they really are, they may not be too proud to continue actively learning. I have no idea how we would go about doing this but I think it’d be quite the experiment if we did.

Comment on Hello world! by Mr WordPress

Mr WordPress — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:53:32 +0000

Hi, this is a comment.
To delete a comment, just log in, and view the posts’ comments, there you will have the option to edit or delete them.