For this assignment, we were supposed to create a map of the world(in Prezi) showing all of the literature I read, and all of the movies that I saw, all for this class. Here it is:
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This is the assignment in which we make two maps of books that we have read for this class. Here is a map of key events in Cyrano de Bergerac:
And here's a map of key events from Les Miserables:
This is the assignment in which we were assigned to talk about either global food distribution, or global wealth distribution. I went with food, because I love food. :)
www.powtoon.com/c/fU5MAMEDw6g/1/m Also, here's a link to the page that helped me find out a bit of stuff for this assignment: www.amusingplanet.com/2010/07/hungry-planet-what-world-eats-by-peter.html This is the last movie night assignment that we will be doing. This one, as you can see from the title, was called "Not One less." Here's the IMDb page to it, so that I don't have to summarize it: www.imdb.com/title/tt0209189/
Well, this movie was a challenge. It was completely in Chinese, though it fortunately had English subtitles. But we had to read the subtitles in order to actually know what was going on, so it was hard to take notes while watching it. Fortunately, I have found out how to write by hand without actually looking at the page. So, woohoo! Right then, on with my thoughts. Well, to start with, having Wei, who is a 13 year-old, be the teacher seems like a bad idea. It made sense why they had her be the teacher, because there weren't any other options. Again, though, I think that it was a bad idea. Signs of her not being prepared for teaching is the fact that she didn't start school until noon. I'm not entirely sure why she didn't start earlier, but she might've been simply unsure of when to start. And my goodness, she is stubbornly determined. I have found the perfect phrase that describes here: Obnoxious and Consistent. I mean, seriously! When a student is given a great opportunity, you don't try to hold them back. It's just not right. Also, there's one scene where she is trying to get to talk to the station manager and just keeps on asking to see him, WHAT THE HECK? How can someone possibly be so obnoxious? Wait a minute... I'm a teenage boy, it should be obvious. Drat. Wowzers, she is also shy, it looks like. When she was on TV, it made me cringe a ton. Yah gotta talk, kid. It was interesting seeing the sudden different side of her personality. It suggests her shyness in the beginning of the movie, when she's talking to the teacher she's substituting for, but it's never very apparent throughout the rest of the movie. Mostly, it's apparent that she is stubbornly determined Well, it was interesting watching a movie that was in a completely different language. I will forever be thankful for the subtitles. Also, I absolutely loved the scenery, the type in particular being the mountains. I have now set a goal to someday see mountains in China. It's interesting seeing how the different settings in this movie contrast each other. In the first half of the movie, it's set in a very rural area, whereas the second half of the movie was set in the city. And so ends my thoughts on the movie "Not one less." I hope you enjoyed it, for this was the last movie night for this class! I loved all the movies, but I'd say that my favorite movie that I watched for this class was the movie "Arranged." I loved the other movies nearly as much, though. Onwards and upwards! For this assignment, I wrote a review on Goodreads for Cyrano de Bergerac. And here it is:
"I read this book for a class I'm taking, and I absolutely loved it. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me groan, thinking "Why did you make that stupid decision?" It was well written, and I enjoyed reading it for every second. It would be so fun to actually act it out. However, I don't think that there are enough women characters with significant parts in the book. There was Roxane, but that's it! So, I think that it could have been better if there were a few more female characters in it. Of course, if there were more characters, then the directer would have to somehow get more actors. Oh well. Anyway, I love this book, and would recommend it to anyone. Happy reading!" And here's a review that I admire: (Note: I didn't base my review from any review in particular, but this one I found was rather good.) www.goodreads.com/review/show/1341470176?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1 Steve: It’s a good thing Mark Watney was from Chicago. For one thing, the cold winters would have prepared him for the climate on Mars. Plus, being a Cubs fan, he must have learned how to deal with disappointment, like when you get caught in a dust storm one week into a planned month-long stay on the Red Planet, a gust of wind impales you with an antenna forcing you face down onto the craggy surface with no vital signs registering from your spacesuit at which point your endangered crewmates assume that you’re dead and make good their escape. The conflict needed to drive the narrative was easy to come by on Mars. Mark starts his log on the first day in survival mode by characterizing the deep doo-doo he’s in. If his oxygenator were to break down, he’d suffocate. If the water reclaimer were to break down, he’d die of thirst. A breach in the Hab and he’d “just kind of explode.” Supplies that were left behind were limited, and the next Mars landing wouldn’t be for years, so even if the equipment didn’t fail, he’d starve. Actually, deep doo-doo isn’t strictly correct. With fecally enriched soil, he might have the means to grow food. Fortunately, in this battle pitting Man versus Mars, the man had evidently stayed awake in his science classes. Each crew member had two specialties. Mark’s were botany and mechanical engineering, but he seemed to know a lot of chemistry, physics, computer science, and astronomy, too. This was the book’s greatest strength – a real celebration of ingenuity and STEM-based problem-solving skills. Weir was apparently born to be geeky (a term I use with the utmost respect). His father was a particle physicist and his mother was an electrical engineer. Weir himself was hired as a computer programmer at a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin at the age of 15, and has been a total NASA buff for years. He is so good technically that he didn’t graduate from college, which I believe is one of the new standards signifying computer wizardry. Whether it was turning pee into rocket fuel, using a highly unstable isotope (Plutonium-238) for heat, or making water from Hydrazine (burning hydrogen to mix with the oxygen in the air), Weir gets the science right. NASA scientists also verified that the code he wrote to figure the orbital mechanics was correct. I was tempted to do one of those pictorial reviews, one with Jesse Pinkman celebrating Mr. White’s knowledge of chemistry with a “Yeah science, bitch!” But someone beat me to that particular punch. For a short while I tried coming up with my own solutions to the problems that Mark faced. It made me appreciate the guy’s resourcefulness even more, and it pointed out the holes in my own knowledge. Maybe I can blame it on all the econ courses I took, where the solution for opening a can of beans on a desert island is to assume a can opener. Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” To turn this line upside down and add half a twist, I could say that any science fiction written by Andy Weir is indistinguishable from hard science. Some readers may be put off by the technological emphasis, but I’m guessing most will appreciate the factual integrity, the clever way it was applied, and the conversational style Mark used in his logs to present it. For quite a while, the book was a chronological account based on those log entries. Then it cut away to NASA where satellite photographs showed evidence of Mark’s survival. That opened a whole new and necessary thread. His Earthbound crewmates entered the picture again, too. The changes in perspective quickened the pace. If I were to rate this by literary standards, it wouldn’t be great. The dialog was often wooden and the ancillary characters were stick-like. Any would-be verisimilitude by way of fuck-b’s, er, f-bombs were ham-fisted, and anything approaching a human feeling was seemingly beside the point. Strangely enough, though, this made me like it more. The nerdy lack of social fluency was consistent and it accentuated the appeal. Weir’s joy in writing it was palpable. It was initially done as a serialized blog with feedback from friends. In interviews, we gather that Weir would be Mark Watney if he could, though his fear of flying would be a sticking point. The author/fan-boy also said that he’s not as smart as Watney, but justified any super-human poise and intelligence to the fact that the guy is an astronaut. The hero worship of space travelers was genuine and kind of charming. Weir said that he also shares Watney’s sense of humor, which came across as sarcastic, slightly bawdy and at times a little goofy. Speaking of humor, that, too, is a Chicago trait, or maybe you’d call it a coping mechanism. Anyway, I liked it. One of his recurring jokes was to state how the disco music one of his crewmates left behind truly sucked. This is yet another Chicago thing, as my astute friend Dave can attest, having risked decapitation to witness it first-hand. Better writers would no doubt have created a protagonist full of angst and navel-centric reflection. But to me, Weir more than makes up for any dearth of emotional realism with his likable main character, an infectious enthusiasm and a sense of scientific wonder. Scanning the many great reviews of this book, it’s roughly equal numbers who compare Mark to MacGyver, for one, and to Robinson Crusoe, for another. References to the Gravity and Apollo 13 movies were also apropos. I suspect Ridley Scott’s movification starring Matt Damon will be quite a hit, too. [See trailer here.] If it does the book any justice at all, I’ll happily go see it.
This is the assignment in which I write an essay about how authors create characters and introduce the characters personality. Here's the link to it: docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQSJqWnjDP0XKegf7b3guX87AyWXeVbNGMZSsLITPADO4tzuYbwKT35lzd8JO1LO65C2sEPOOPRVxvn/pub
And here's the embedded version as well:
This is the assignment in which we argue against the resolution, "Reading world literature and watching global movies is a waste of time." Enjoy.
These are my thoughts on the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy." HErrrrrrrrre wE Go.
So, this movie was a combination of good and weird. I think the reason why I think it's weird is because I haven't seen a movie like it before. It was good, though. It had a nice amount of slapstick comedy. I don't know about other people, but I'm a fan of slapstick comedy. I mean, over the top is too much, but just a bit of it is great. Now for the things that made me cringe. First off, the narrator. He was amusing, but I didn't like how he set apart the bushmen from people with modern technology by calling bushmen "bushmen," and calling other people in the modern world "civilized." I suppose he meant that those people lived in a part of civilization, but he could've also meant that he thought that the bushmen were uncivilized. I don't know which it was, but I got irritated by that. A-THING A-NAHMBA TWO. There aren't nearly enough women with kinda sorta main roles in this movie. There's Ms. Thompson, BUT THAT'S IT. And she didn't even get a very large role! It was mostly GUYS who were on the screen! This is the sort of thing I hate about 80's movies! They kept on finding ways to keep as many women out of a movie unless they couldn't find any way to do that. Bless-you-chicken-soup-with-rice-a-numbah-three. Okay... So, this next thing that annoys me is WHY THE KISSING AT THE END OF THE MOVIE?! Seriously! They barely know each other, they were quite annoyed by each other, it wasn't really a romance, and just because you see someone in their undergarments does not mean you are in love. Just sayin'. Wooh. Okay, venting over. Now for the more positive thoughts. Despite the weirdness, it was still a somewhat good movie. One of the things I wonder, is how the heck did the people who made it get a jeep winched up a tree. Quick thing, the jeeps made me think of Jurassic Park. Anyway, it was interesting seeing how the structure of the movie differed from the movie Arranged, which was the previous movie I watched for this class. In Arranged, There was one story line, or maybe two tightly intertwined story lines. But with The Gods Must Be Crazy, there were 3 story lines which were quite apart at first, then they all just smashed into each other at the end. Why. I just looked at the IMDb page for this movie, and it turns out that a chicken was killed in the making of this movie. During the scene after the attempted assassination when the thugs were making their getaway, they ran over a chicken with the lead vehicle. Everything I've said in this movie's favor was from the previous me. I now have no respect for this movie whatsoever. And so ends my thoughts on this movie. Hope you enjoyed. This is my flipped TED-ed video, in which I added questions for after the video, and two paragraphs in the Dig Deeper section. Here's the link to the video that I "Flipped": ed.ted.com/on/3RxnPOAP And here's the link to the Wikipedia article I found about Christopher Columbus and the 1504 solar eclipse: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1504_lunar_eclipse
This is the assignment in which I sort of prepare for a paper I'm going to write for this class. I made a Popplet cloud thing to help with preparing. The prompt for the paper is, "How does the author intentionally build the primary character THROUGH THE USE OF interactions with other characters?" This cloud thing focuses on that prompt.
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December 2017
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