Media Channels and Platforms

I was interested in the idea of the movie Arrival (2016) when the trailer came out, but not actually interested enough to actually go to the movies to watch it. That's why I was happy to see it on Netflix. *I won't spoil anything that wasn't shown in the trailer here* The movie is about an American linguistics professor dr. Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, who is asked to decipher an alien language after they have landed on earth. There are 12 of the alien spacecrafts all around the earth, and one of the biggest plot points in the film is the different countries' failure to communicate effectively with each other to figure out why the aliens have arrived and what they want. *Here there be some spoilers* I mostly wanted to watch the movie because I'm interested in languages and fascinated by constructed languages. I loved the idea that a linguist was the main character in a sci-fi movie. That's why I was disappointed by how t...

I gave up trying to find a music video with both characters and a plot of some sort from the bands I listen to so I ventured to the trending page on youtube. I ended up picking the song Woman like me from the four-person girl group Little Mix and Nicki Minaj. (Is girlband the correct term as opposed to boyband?) I picked it solely on the name of the song assuming that it'd have something to do with gender. Who knew, I was right! So there's really no plot in the video, but the song is about whether or not this theoretical man could ever fall in love with a woman like them. The man is told to be kind of shy while the singers have no filter, cause trouble and dress fancy. It's a pretty tired set-up but I'm more interested in what is shown in the video. Besides showing the singers dancing or just standing around the video shows the women balancing stacks of books on their heads, ironing, and posting around a massive scale. They also show the women eating, but their...

As I'm writing this it's 23.35 o'clock and Fallout 76 comes out at midnight. I figured I'd write an entry on the new game because I'm still a bit wary of the social aspects in it. It's the first multiplayer game in the Fallout series and there are no NPCs. Instead, all communication is with the other players. This worries me because I'm not a big fan of the kind of crew online multiplayer games tend to attract. I don't really play much online multiplayers, but in Overwatch my communication with the other players usually is kind of a "kill them with kindness" situation. I try to make friends with my teammates in the voice chat and sometimes with people from the enemy team as well. My psychology behind this is that if I'm kind to them first they have less incentive to be an asshole back at me. I have zero reasons to trust the others players; there's no honor system in online games. I'm going to continue writing thi...

I landed on Justin McElroy because of the people whose profiles I stalked his was the most active. There's a surprising amount of people on Twitter just cross-posting their Instagram feeds. Justin McElroy is a podcaster and a former journalist for the video game website Polygon. I listen to a bunch of the podcasts he makes, mainly My brother, my brother and me , which he makes with his brothers Travis and Griffin, and Sawbones, a medical history podcast that he makes with his wife, Dr. Sydnee McElroy. Justin posts on twitter multiple times a day. Most of the tweets he makes himself are humorous in nature, but he retweets and links to more serious subjects as well. Most of his page is links to projects and articles that he wants to bring attention to, such as cross-promoting various podcasts and bringing attention to his wife's campaign of standing up against anti-vaxxers. Not surprisingly, this week a good amount of tweets went ...

by  http://webcomicname.com/ A couple of weeks ago we talked about advertising in class, more specifically about how in the case of Nike and United Colors of Benetton they took a stance on political issues in their advertisements. It's just one way that these brands are making themselves more prevalent in our lives. The conversation made me want to dig deeper into these brand identities and how they work and why they bother me so much. The point of brand identities is to give a certain brand a sort of persona. In the case of Nike and United Colors of Benetton, it could be said that the advertisement is done for honourable reasons: for calling attention to social issues. While that's cool and valid and all we have to remember that the goal, the bottom line, is always money. They are creating this type of "woke" socially aware image of their brand, which advertises directly to a certain demographic. According to BBC Nike's online sales grew by 31% after ...

The Portal games have been a favorite of mine for a very long time. Valve released the first portal game in 2007 and the sequel in 2011. It's the series that I recommend to people who are interested in playing video games, but for whatever reason haven't started playing yet. They're not super long, the beginning is slow paced so there's time to grasp the controls, the characters are captivating and there's not a whole lot going on story-wise so it's easy to follow. They're also on sale constantly so buying them for three euros is not a huge investment. Plot  Here's the plot summarized as briefly as possible to the best of my ability, there are some spoilers so tread carefully: the player controls a character names Chell, a mute woman, whos' forced to complete different physical tests for an AI called GLaDOS. The first game has only these two characters. GLaDOS can only be heard through voice messages from a speaker system. Most o...