"Independence" by Chuang Tzu Genre Change

This BitStrip was created for my Intro to Literature class. I create this to give a more visual affect of the story Independence by Chuang Tzu. The link on the title will take you to a copy of the actual piece that I found through Google.

 I used a site called BitStrip to create my piece here. This is a really cool site because it has built in characters, settings, captions, speech bubbles, and props. The only thing within this piece I had to create was the turtle. I actually created this in about five hours. So it was a little time consuming considering the little work that is shown here and how long the piece actually is. But it was a fun site to use and it was neat to put the story into a different format.

Mischief Managed Mug

So I may be behind in this neat little invention but I saw it on Facebook and had to share it.


When I was younger my mom had this cool cup that if you poured a hot liquid into it, the cup changed. It originally would say "I love you" around the top, but with a warm liquid the cup would then show the image of the phrase in Sign Language.


Well, this idea has been transformed by Harry Potter fans. A Mischief Managed Heat Transformation Mug has come on the market! Take a look here!

If you would like to buy this mug follow this Link.

I thought this was really neat because it brings to life the magical world of Harry Potter. While it may not actually be magic, I know that it feels like magic when you're a kid. My mom's "I love you" mug was my favorite whenever we had hot chocolate because it made it feel magical. To not only incorporate the words but also the magical theme of the series into this mug brings a whole new level of awesome to this product!

Press Release for Ivanhoe and Ivanhoe Project

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Finding Literary Connections in Ivanhoe, MN

 

It has always been clear that Ivanhoe, Minn. was named after Sir Walter Scott's novel, Ivanhoe; however, it is not so clear where the suggestion first originated or the specific connections that lie between the town and the novel.

A new wikia page, now accessible online, called Literary Connections: Ivanhoe and Ivanhoe helps to enlighten the public.

"I was intrigued by the connections I saw while reading Scott’s novel," says Brittany Vlaminck, creator of Literary Connections: Ivanhoe and Ivanhoe and native of Ivanhoe, Minn. "It gives my hometown a deeper meaning that I wanted to share with the public." Vlaminck shares that this sparked the idea for the project.

After reading Scott’s novel, Vlaminck researched the town’s history at the public library in Ivanhoe, Minn. After this, she traveled the town to find literary connections that can be noted between the town’s streets and benches and Scott’s novel. This information can be found on Wikia.com.

“Ivanhoe is actually named after an estate owned by a knight named Wilfred, this creates the mental image that the favored knight comes from the town in Southwest Minnesota,” says Vlaminck. Information like this can be found with in the 21 pages about how the town's name and nickname came to be and their connections to the novel. It also shares information about the characters and places the town's streets and benches of Harthill Walk are named after.

The site is strictly educational and free to the public. Visit at Literary Connections: Ivanhoe and Ivanhoe.

If you would like more information, contact Brittany Vlaminck at 507-828-4094 or email her at brittany.vlaminck@trojans.dsu.edu.

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IZombie: Comic Book "turned" TV Series

iZombie Ad featuring Rose McIver as Liv Moore

IZombie, a new CW show, was first introduced to the public on March 17th, 2015. The show follows the life, or rather living death, of Olivia "Liv" Moore played by Rose McIver. This character is a young woman who was turned into a zombie when, at a party, was scratched by a fellow zombie. The show starts five months after the incident. Her live has been turned upside down because of this change, including her career choices, her love life and her eating habits.

Liv has gained an ability that allows her access to memories, habits and abilities of the people whose brains she consumes. Because of this, mixed with her access to the brains of murder victims through her job as a mortician assistant, she becomes the assistant to a cop that looks into these murders.


This show, created by Rob Thomas and producer Diane Ruggiero, is a loose adaptation of the comic book, iZombie, written by Chris Roberson and illustrated by Michael Allred.

iZombie comic book cover page of #1

The comic book's main character is Gwendolyn Dylan, a 20-something grave-digging zombie, whose best friends are a ghost and a were-terrier. Gwen also has the ability to gain access to memories, habits and abilities of the different people through the consumption of their brains. She, just like in the show, uses this ability to help solve murder cases of the people whose brains she has consumed.

The original version consists of many introductions to supernatural characters, including zombies, ghosts, were-terriers, and vampires.



While the two versions of the story differ greatly, we can still see that the underlining idea of the original story is present across these two medias. Both of these stories are showing a young woman living life as a crime fighting zombie.

I'm normally not a fan of when new medias change much of the original story, but I do like what CW has going and I'm hoping they start to incorporate more of the original plot by adding in other supernatural beings.

Gaming and Advertising

I recently read a section of a book called "Play Between Worlds" by T. L. Taylor. The section, or rather chapter, was entitled "Where The Women Are" and the chapter discussed how women have become very common players in the gaming world. While the chapter focuses on women who play Everquest, it can be said, for almost any game, that women have become common and valuable to gaming culture. So if this is becoming so common, why are we still focusing our advertising strategies towards men?

The following link will take you to a paper I wrote for my Contemporary Rhetoric class that discusses the advertising strategies of this game and how new media allows easier access to these advertisements.

Advertisement Analysis - Game of War: Fire Age

Pacman On Google Maps!!!

Today, April 1st, a beloved classic arcade game can be found on Google Maps! Pacman was released in Japan in June of 1980, and since October of the same year, people all over the United States have had a love for this game.

Pacman is an arcade game where you play as Pacman (the little yellow guy with the big mouth) and command him to roam the map "eating" PacDots, or pellets. While he roams, there are three or four enemies that try to catch him, Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde. If they catch him, the turn is over. But Pacman can pick up big dots that turn the enemies blue, and this allows him to eat them up for points.

Sound intriguing? Just by clicking on the little Pacman icon on the bottom left side of your screen, when you have a destination open, allows you the opportunity to turn almost any map into a Pacman level! 

Some of the most intricate places you could search would be Boston, San Fransisco or even New York City.

Brookline,MA

But even little towns like Madison, SD has the ability to become a Pacman level.

Madison, SD

But you might want to hurry! This opportunity is only available today!

I found this neat because it shows how life can be manipulated and recreated through technology and creativity. To turn something so mundane like travel maps into a level for an old arcade game is pure genius. The fact that even little towns have the ability to be transformed really helps to spark an interest for young people to get into this type of thing.

Making Bank on Youtube

So, originally I had started a blog post today to discuss some video game advertisements I had seen recently. When I opened up YouTube to grab links to the video game advertisements, I was recommended to a video that looked really interesting. I opened it, and THREE AND A HALF HOURS LATER I finally closed YouTube up. And yet in those three and a half hours, I never made it to the video game advertisements I had been looking for.

I have no idea how many videos I watched during this time, and to tell you the truth, I don't remember what they were all about. But during this time, I remember feeling extremely hungry and not being able to put my computer down. I was so intrigued and entertained that it made it hard to look away.

When I finally closed YouTube and looked at the two paragraphs I had originally started, I dreaded the idea of going back to YouTube for fear that this would happen again. This is not the first time I have diverged into binge watching when I was supposed to be doing something important, and it probably won't be the last.

I started thinking about all of those videos that were created by the same users. Here are some of my favorite YouTube channels that are consistently adding new videos:

BuzzFeed

Here are some of the other BuzzFeed channels.

CollegeHumor

JennaMarbles

An article from CelebrityNetWorth, called 25 Highest Earning YouTube Stars, estimated (in 2013) that the annual income that Jenna Marbles makes is about $4.3 million, while CollegeHumor only makes about $3.3 million. BuzzFeed isn't even on this list but it's likely that it is also making a fairly good sum from their YouTube channels.

It was amazing to me to see this because these people have made careers using this new new media. They have established a fan base that continues to grow and change, but the truth is that as long as they keep posting, there will likely always be that fan base for the information they offer. It's inspirational to see these channels succeeding to the point of making millions for simply getting views.

The study of English is a study of the way we communicate with the world through language and shared stories and that's exactly what YouTube allows us to do - share stories.  JennaMarbles has been sharing her life story for over four years. She has introduced the public to her family, friends, boyfriends and pets. CollegeHumor has shared knowledge and stories that are focused on the humorous thoughts and situations we deal with in college or around that time frame of our lives. BuzzFeed tells stories, shares information and discusses serious topics. All of these stories can be experienced over and over again the same way we can experience literature over and over again. YouTube just allows us to experience these stories in a different format than classical literature.

One last thing I'd like to note is that since all of the videos are like little stories, and because they are all within this larger frame that is YouTube, we can consider YouTube a Frame Narrative!! Woah! Mind Blown!

Foundation Project... Ivanhoe!!

Just visited Ivanhoe, MN to do some research for my Foundations project.

The plan right now is to created a new media project that shows the connections that can be found between Ivanhoe, MN and Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. Thanks to the help of Sue Vizecky, one of the Ivanhoe Public Library librarians, I have many leads and avenues that I can use to create this project. But with it being due in a little over a week, I know I have my work cut out for me.

Wish me luck! There will be more to come as the project comes into being! :)

Lit Genius.... Woah!!!

In my Short Stories class a few weeks ago, we were discussing a few short stories and my professor introduced us to this really cool website called LitGenius. Originally, the site was created to share song lyrics written by well anyone, but it has become a place where people create annotation about stories that they know and love.

How it works:
You create a profile, and you search for your favorite story or for a story where you discovered something really cool within the text of that story. If you find it you go to a section where you discovered that really cool think and you comment on it. In the comment you can add pictures and links to help explain your point. This comment is then considered an annotation.

You can also vote annotations up or down depending on if you thought the comment was helpful. You comment on the annotation to tell why you agree or disagree with it, or you can suggest to the author to edit the original annotation so that it explains what they were trying to say more efficiently. 

If you can't find the story you searched for it's really easy to add it so you can share your discovery with others and so others can share discoveries they've made while reading the piece.

Why this is so cool!:
This site is really neat because it allows people of all walks of life to share and discuss their favorite stories. It creates the opportunity for people to look more critically at a piece and to share their discoveries.

This new media site also allows easy access for people to discover new stories that have been written and they can see what other people have said about the story while they experience the story themselves. I think this is important, especially for stories that can be hard to understand, because it allows us to give specific details about what the author meant and how the words can have different meanings today that can help create different readings of the story.

Some Examples:
Shakespeare's "Sonnet 130: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"
This is honestly my favorite Shakespeare sonnet, and to find an annotated version is interesting because it allows me the opportunity to see what others have said about it.

Joseph Conrad's "Youth"
This was the first piece that we, as a class, worked on together. We each had to create an annotation within the piece.

Carolyn Kizer's "Bitch"
I studied this piece in my Intro to Literature class and found there were two meanings to the word "mistress" and knowing there were two definitions to the term "bitch", made this a really interesting piece in my eyes and I wanted to see what others have said about it!

The Nightingale and The Rose

For my short stories genre class, I created a presentation about Oscar Wilde's short story, "The Nightingale and The Rose". The presentation was to show different adaptations that have been created of the work. The presentation has information about Wilde and his life, a summary of the story and some of the themes within the story. It discusses some of the styles used by Wilde and then it goes into the adaptations. These include a ballet and opera and also different videos that I have linked within the presentation.

The Nightingale and The Rose from brittanyvlaminck

The first page covers information about his life and family and what he wrote. Both of his parents were writer, which ultimately sparked Oscar's interest. He married a woman named Constance Lloyd and had two sons. He later began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas and was arrested for the affair shortly after. He died due to a severe ear infection that turned into meningitis.

He created many works including a book of poems called Poems. Two short story compilations, of which The Nightingale and the Rose can be found within Happy Prince and Other Tales.  He wrote one novel that had been first published as a short story but was edited and republished when his critics asked for a longer story.  He also created many well known plays.

SPOILER ALERT! The story is about a young student who is in love with the daughter of his professor. She says she will dance with him at the ball the following night if he can bring her a red rose. The student does not have a red rose in his garden and the nightingale hears his cry. She searched the garden and talks to the different rose bushes until she comes to a red rose bush that says he can produce a red rose only if she is willing to sing to him all through the night while pressing her heart into a thorn in the bush. SPOILER ALERT!! The nightingale agrees to do this in the name of true love. In the morning, the student walks over the nightingale's dead body and pick the red rose. When he presents it to the young girl, she refuses because the chamberlain's nephew has given her jewels. The student throws the rose into a gutter and it is run over by a cart while the student goes back to his home to study. SPOILER... well, too late if you already read through this.

Wilde's style has a lot of recurring devices and themes. Some of these are pointed out in this show with excerpts of where they can be found in the piece.

ADAPTATIONS!!! 
Some adaptations that were created include the ballet and the opera. The ballet slide has a link to a video from the backstage of the production. The ballerinas and the creator talk about the adaptation because there it was difficult to create the production. Since ballets use only music and dance to convey a story, and Wilde's story use lots of dialogue, it was important for the audience to read the leaflets before the ballet began to understand the story fully. The opera was a compilation of Wilde's story and four poems from Christina Rossetti.

Other adaptations have been created that can be found on YouTube. The slideshow links to a couple of these videos.

Generation Y - Traits

For another class, me and a group of my peers are looking to create a project for our Contemporary Rhetoric class. We were discussing our audience, and since the prompt suggested targeting our generation, I started looking into Generation Y.

This generation normally consists of individuals that were born between the 1980s and the 2000s. It is also called the Millennium Generation, the Echo Boomers, and IGen, or Internet Generation.

An article found on About Careers.com called Generation Y by Sarah Kane says that the most common traits of the individuals from generation Y is that they are tech-savvy, family-centric, team oriented, achievement oriented, and attention-craving.

Agree: I was intrigued. It is well known that our generation has grown up using a wide variety of different mediums, making the tech-savvy observation likely to be correct. And thinking about how this group project has already been going, I can see that every one in my group (all of which are members of the Y Generation) is also very team and achievement-oriented because they are working together to create a proposal and to create a full proof plan on how to attack this project. We have also already planned future meetings to keep updated with each others work so that this is a group effort rather than individual work. This idea of attention-craving suggested more that we like praise and feedback on our work. We want to offer the best work we possibly can because that is what our generation has always been told to do. "Do your best." And because we have this desire, we look for someone to tell us whether they think we did well or if we could have done better.

To Disagree: The only trait in this list that I feel any disagreement with is this idea that our generation is family-centric. I'm not saying that we aren't just that I believe there is a better way to describe this trait. Personally, I am very family oriented, but the reason I like a flexible schedule (as the article suggests) is because there are many things I want to do with my life outside of work. I believe it's important to have a job to provide for our families and our lifestyles, but I have things I want to learn and to be a part of outside of my job. As I'm looking into a career of editing, I'm thinking to myself about my desire to travel to all fifty states, and to become a sommelier, and to own a stylish wardrobe made of dresses and giant sweaters and far too many pairs of leggings. I want to read the Classics of different time periods and locations, and to compare them to the novels that are now being created today. These are all activities that I need free time to be able to do.

I feel that our generation focuses so much on Internet and other mediums because they offer us the ability to communicate, write, read, work - all while on the go. We can share information easily through these new medias and we have the ability to learn new things with just a few clicks of the buttons on keyboards and touch screens. This ability is what we crave because it offers us the option of having free time to see the things we want to see and do the things we want to do while keeping a job and earning that living that is so important in our survival. 

Back to the Top: So back to the different traits that describe this generation - I feel that the phrase "family-centric" is the wrong word choice. I feel that the trait they are trying to describe here is "Self Indulging". We believe in an understanding of balance of life between work and fun. We allow ourselves to enjoy life whether that means focusing more time on our families or focusing on goals outside of our work and home lives, we let ourselves indulge on the pleasures that life has to offer. 

This discussion shows the connection between English and New Media because it is an article that a writer created that was offered to the public in this medium to reach a large mass of people. Anyone who wanted to know about Generation Y had the ability to find this knowledge by just a few clicks of the keyboard or screen. New media has allowed us to find information faster than before. It also allows us to share our thoughts of the things we read and experience the way this blog is allowing me to share my thoughts after reading Ms. Kane's article. 

Medium is the Message

The way a message is shown and/ or shared with the general public - the medium in which the message is shared is a message in itself.

There are so many different types of mediums that we have the opportunity to use: from old media to new medias like books and newspapers, oral stories, essays, poems, television programs, movies, music, social medias, blogs, video games - all of these different mediums have a way of reaching the public in a different way, they're also meant to reach different audiences.

When studying stories in class, I have noticed that there are so many options to learn about the story. I can find where the story first comes from and I can look for physical copies through those books. I can find an electronic version and read it straight from my computer, nook or phone. I can also look for videos of audio readings, whether it's from a tape or from YouTube. I can also find movies about the story or based off of the events and characters in the story. There are so many options to find this one story.

The thing about all of these different mediums is that there's a new message being sent because of the change in the original. The physical version, the original medium (normally), says "You need to work to find this book and take time to read this book to get this story." While audios found online say "as long as you stumble upon me, you can clean, drive, and do other activities while getting this story." Videos say "Hey we're gonna cut the time you spend reading or listening to this story in half and engage new senses to show you the story."

But these different mediums can also change the story. When we read the story from its original medium we get the personal feeling of how the story was meant to be shared but once you start to listen to the story or watch videos, the story changes because the person creating and sharing the new medium may perceive and display the story in a new way than it was originally intended to.

New mediums are meant to make it more available for the general public, the audience, to get the story. But they do change the original message and the original story.

Participation with New New Media

I have participated in

• I have posted and re-posted links, videos, and other such things on Facebook.
• I have liked and followed pages on Facebook.
• I have liked videos and channels on Youtube.
• I have commented on videos on Youtube.
• I have posted a video to Youtube through my channel.
• I have pinned, re-pinned, and liked posts on Pinterest.
• I have created boards and pages on Pinterest for specific purposes.
• I have liked movies and tv shows on Netflix.
• I have have posted and re-posted tweets on Twitter.
• I have a blog.
• I have blogged on a group blog account. 
• I have commented, liked and followed other blogs.
• I have used Google Docs to collaborate with fellow students.
• I have helped with a Omeka Exhibit, the Museum of Fictional Literary Artifacts.
• I have rated and given feedback on Amazon products.
• I have also put Amazon products into a personal wishlist.