Odd happenings

A bit odd that I am attempting to get back into this an exact year after my last post but whatever.

I am trying to find a good location to start hosting my upcoming webcomic and don't know if the current layout of this site is to my liking for such a thing, but, short of writing up my own html (which I am not terribly great at) or I could use Wordpress which I ma not used to.

I have been working on my art in the mean time and am still in the middle of school.

When I have a proper front cover I shall attempt to upload my comic book and see how it suits me.

Goodbye for now
The Flying Banana Artist

The Modern Band

I gave my presentation in class on Wednesday on how media has affected the way bands work. I looked mainly at how it is different from how famous groups like the Beatles and Elvis had their starts as opposed to how bands can get their start now. For Elvis, a singer, he had to find a band that would take him by leaving his record at the the recording studio to play for bands without a singer already. This method took over a year before he was finally picked up by a band. The Beatles were fortunate that their group was easy to start but they needed to play gigs, pass their record around to companies and mostly serve as background music for more famous individuals. Their first record was a flop and only ended up playing as background for telemarketers and that was only because they had a friend who worked there. 

Starting a band around this time period was not easy it involved stopping everything else because a band has to keep moving and stay relevant for people to be interested. Most bands did not make it far simply because their music would not appeal to everyone and thus record companies would not take a chance to hire them.

Skipping to today I would only need a few things to start a band and basically cut out middle men and the record company all together as several bands have proven so far. Using a video camera and some instruments a group of people can post a song onto youtube by the end of the day within a couple of hours if they feel motivated enough. Thats pretty much it a process that usually takes years can be done in a weekend it is a quick and effective way to gain an audience. A band like this does not need to visit a record store or really go out of their way to make music. Things like garage band further take the recording studio out of the equation and using youtube it is possible to target a more narrow audience interested in a certain kind of music. Finally using things like Garage Band and drop box which someone else talked about in class band members no longer really need o be in the same room to put music together. Media has helped to alleviate some of the problems bands use to face and now everyone should go start a band.

Digital Nation

For my choice of videos to watch I chose to the one discussing the digital nation everyone is now growing up in. The video which can be found here is a fairly in depth look into the digital media world and its effects on mostly college aged students and teachers. I only watched the first twenty minutes of the hour long video but the video was far from encouraging, with quite a few negative effects being highlighted almost right away.
One of the negative effects being creating a nation of people who want to constantly multitask when they should be concentrating on one task. For most of us it is not so hard to balance one or two things like writing a paper while occasionally checking Facebook every hour or so but the video shows an alarming number of people who well be doing something important while texting, checking Facebook, twitter, email, etc. every few seconds all while not being very good at multitasking causing all the work to suffer. This happened with many MIT students, students who are quite frankly suppose to one day lead the world in new technological innovations.
Another problem of the study was the question on whether the digital media can be addictive and act like a drug with just as many ill effects. The short answer seems to point to a yes, though the video focused mostly on games and students forming an addiction to playing non stop until their grades and health become a problem. I can quickly add in that anything can become an addiction as long as it produces a pleasurable effect that persuades one to go back for more, people can even become addicted to things that are suppose to be good for them like exercise.
The portion of the video I saw was enlightening and it raises more questions as it is already two years old so I wonder if things have gotten better or worse since they made it.    

Journal Project

Hopefully everyone was able to turn their projects in on time and without much trouble. I kind of went into this project with an idea of how it might turn out in the end. I do not always pay attention to how much I use the media in but I have done it enough to know what I typically use it for and for how long.
The recording went relatively well even though I found myself forgetting to record something right away quite often. My recordings show an awful lot of TV usage but I found that most of the time I have the TV on as background noise when ever I do other things for some reason. I use to play a lot of video games and while my record shows that when I do play it is often until three in the mourning I seemed to not play them with as much frequency as I use to. Another interesting thing about my records is the pretty much total lack of books, I do actually read some just not with any real frequency and probably not as much as I should.
I did make two graphs but I included only one in this post. I wanted to see what I end up using the media for most of the time in four categories. Entertainment came out the biggest reason I use media and the second largest was a mix of media when I tend to use two or more types of media at once for different reasons.

TED

I gave a presentation on TED in class so I thought I would make a post to also explain TED. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design; they started holding conferences in 1990 at various locations and then started recording the conferences and putting them on their website.
        The conferences cover a large range of topics from technology to music to some inspirational thinking. The speakers chosen also vary but seem to always be very knowledgeable in their subject; when one man talks to the audience about the future of robotics he is doing it because that is what he studies, he designs and builds robots for commercial and even military use so he knows what he is talking about.
          Age also varies, in one conference the speaker was a twelve year old girl (although she has already published a book).
         There are several reasons to use TED probably the most important to college students is the various topics it covers I think can help spring board ideas for class papers. I had to do a research paper in my English class on a controversial subject. I could have looked up TED which often covers subjects that can be controversial and are more interesting to write about then the usual subjects of controversy. Another reason is the relevancy of the subjects. One conference I watched had one man talk about how self driving cars were soon going to enter our lives and just a few days ago I saw that Nevada had actually legalized self driving cars relevant article
The last reason to use TED can be found in their motto on their first page Ideas Worth Spreading.