www.qwantz.com
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Define: Philosophy
Philosophy: The art of pretending to be deep so as to impress people.
www.qwantz.com
www.qwantz.com
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Alt. Art
It is back through popular demand. Well actually Liam said I should and I have nothing better to do as I wait 20 minutes for my delicious chicken and pasta dinner.
(Han Solo and Chewbacca)
Spongebob Squarepants
Avatar
Muppets
The Simpsons
Star Wars
(Han Solo and Chewbacca)
Spongebob Squarepants
Avatar
Monday, June 22, 2009
Sexism; Part 2
After reading Chester's blog I realised that I wasn't very clear in my previous blog. So I'm just setting a few things straight and elaborating on what I said and what I didn't say.
Firstly, I don't think I was clear on this, but the degradation of women in these videos doesn't come from them being overtly sexual. The degradation comes from the nature of the relationship between the males and the females. The women are generally being overtly sexual to get the attention of one male who will generally ignore them. It is implied that even though he ignores them, they are still so clingy and need him so much that they hang around trying to win his affection through their sexuality.
And it is this portrayal of a relationship between men and women that is my main problem.
Also I'm not trying to push some kind of moral panic. Sexism in music videos is not the most important issue to be concerned with. And I don't think the media is quite as powerful as some people think. But the media does carry some weight. Especially among younger more impressionable people. And the mysoginist man is portrayed as a good thing or something to aspire to be. I'm not saying that everyone that watches television will suddenly behave like the people they see, but I have known it to happen.
In my old home of Papua New Guinea, the image of the powerful, mysoginist man was very influencial. This could be because of the cultural history of the "Big Man" system. But regardless, in Papua New Guinea with the introduction of MTV 90% of teenagers who were looking for an identity chose to be 50 cent. And the women, who had never been equal in Papua New Guinea and probably won't be for a very long time, went along with it.
But maybe, the effect of these videos in a place like Canberra is less influencial. Infact I'm sure it is.Probably because of the cultural differences or the education level, I'm inclined to think it is a combination of the two.
well, that is just to make things more clear.
Firstly, I don't think I was clear on this, but the degradation of women in these videos doesn't come from them being overtly sexual. The degradation comes from the nature of the relationship between the males and the females. The women are generally being overtly sexual to get the attention of one male who will generally ignore them. It is implied that even though he ignores them, they are still so clingy and need him so much that they hang around trying to win his affection through their sexuality.
And it is this portrayal of a relationship between men and women that is my main problem.
Also I'm not trying to push some kind of moral panic. Sexism in music videos is not the most important issue to be concerned with. And I don't think the media is quite as powerful as some people think. But the media does carry some weight. Especially among younger more impressionable people. And the mysoginist man is portrayed as a good thing or something to aspire to be. I'm not saying that everyone that watches television will suddenly behave like the people they see, but I have known it to happen.
In my old home of Papua New Guinea, the image of the powerful, mysoginist man was very influencial. This could be because of the cultural history of the "Big Man" system. But regardless, in Papua New Guinea with the introduction of MTV 90% of teenagers who were looking for an identity chose to be 50 cent. And the women, who had never been equal in Papua New Guinea and probably won't be for a very long time, went along with it.
But maybe, the effect of these videos in a place like Canberra is less influencial. Infact I'm sure it is.Probably because of the cultural differences or the education level, I'm inclined to think it is a combination of the two.
well, that is just to make things more clear.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Sexism
In the words of MC Vagina:
"It isn't sexist because I'm saying it in song, now shut up and take off your thong"
Before I begin I realise that Chester has already blogged on this topic, but you know, what the hell I'll do it as well.
I was watching some channel V as I do occasionally because it, unlike MTV actually plays music occasionally. Or so I thought. I began watching the 100 hottest or something like that and this song came on, that was about as subtle as a rock being thrown at someone in a wheelchair.
Some buff guy was dancing around in front of his 'pimpin' cars, drinking some product placement wine, talking on his Iphone (which was zoomed in on) and surrounded by what some might refer to as "Skanky Booty Hoes".
I don't care if this guy writes his music and gets product placements, buys pimpin cars and seems to be living the high life. My problem with this style of video is the degradation of women. I mean, this guy had three women hanging off of him as if they were objects. Sure this may seem harmless as my peers and I seem to be able to take this with a grain of salt and know that it is ridiculous.
But this music was in the top 100 which means someone likes it, and someone must identify with the image being portrayed in the clip. For males this means they aspire to be a mysoginist douche bag and for girls it means they want to be brainless, skanks. Neither of which are particularly admirable.
But maybe I am overeacting, maybe this sort of thing has no effect on anybody. And I mean, I'm not trying to write off a certain genre of music, as you may have figured out that I am talking about hip hop music in general. I do realise that hip hop music is not all like this, as it started as the voice of the disenfranchised black man and produced seminal artists like Tupac etc.
And hip hop is not the only genre of music to contain sexist elements, infact I'm sure you could find it in every single genre. Bands like ACDC sing about effectively the exact same thing. I guess my problem is that these videos seem to lack any sense of subtelty, and just come across as insulting and silly.
But maybe that is just me.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Alt. Art
I feel like I should post something and the only thing I can think of posting is some of this Alternative Art that I really like.
Just to be clear I did not do any of this, I just saw it and thought it was really cool so I right clicked and hit save as.
Pokemon
Alice in Wonderland
Super Mario
yeah, just realised that this is taking a really long time. So post is ending here, enjoy the three photos.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Pokemon
Pokemon.
The word evokes many emotions, for me I feel the slow and tedious process of training and evolving the damned things, the empty feeling I get when I realise that pokemon is a vacum that is sucking up my youth and the rage I feel when you press A one time too many at the pokemon centre.
Yes, it is a terrible, terrible thing yet why can't I stop?
I get pokemon urges in the middle of the night I will wake up in a cold sweat and think to myself:
""My God I have it, I'll give pikachu a thunderstone!"
It is painful because I have realised that I don't actually give a damn if my pokemon are good or not but it doesn't stop me playing pokemon.
I spent days people, I kid you not, days growing berries to evolve pokemon. Feeding them to make them love me, my total play time is 250 hours plus the 33 I just wasted on platinum.
So now that I have gotten all this off my chest what am I going to do tomorrow you wonder, when Jack says to me:
"hey Chris, how are your pokemon?"
I'm going to look him sternly in the eye and say:
"really good man, how are yours?"
and pull my DS out of my pocket and continue wasting my life.
because despite pokemon being physically painful it is awesome.
The word evokes many emotions, for me I feel the slow and tedious process of training and evolving the damned things, the empty feeling I get when I realise that pokemon is a vacum that is sucking up my youth and the rage I feel when you press A one time too many at the pokemon centre.
Yes, it is a terrible, terrible thing yet why can't I stop?
I get pokemon urges in the middle of the night I will wake up in a cold sweat and think to myself:
""My God I have it, I'll give pikachu a thunderstone!"
It is painful because I have realised that I don't actually give a damn if my pokemon are good or not but it doesn't stop me playing pokemon.
I spent days people, I kid you not, days growing berries to evolve pokemon. Feeding them to make them love me, my total play time is 250 hours plus the 33 I just wasted on platinum.
So now that I have gotten all this off my chest what am I going to do tomorrow you wonder, when Jack says to me:
"hey Chris, how are your pokemon?"
I'm going to look him sternly in the eye and say:
"really good man, how are yours?"
and pull my DS out of my pocket and continue wasting my life.
because despite pokemon being physically painful it is awesome.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Quality Journalism Will Not Die
This is my attempt at a feature article that I have to write for my investigative journalism class, please leave some feedback/comments, cheers.
If one was to walk around the corridors of Dickson College and peruse the students who attend there they would probably be filled with a number of emotions, shock, disbelief and nausea to name only a few.
If one can get past the conspicuously blood shot eyes, drunken slur and complete disregard for any form of decency then maybe, just maybe the students who attend here may be deemed hopeful for government welfare. However short of a very generous social worker there is very little hope that these students won’t simply drop out and start smoking ice.
If we were to now take a short trip to the bustling metropolis of New York, New York. Were we to then grab a coffee and head up to the editor-in-chief’s of the New York Times office we would see something very different. The mood is tense, as he reads about the closing of more newspapers and wonders how long until he is out of the job.
With the relatively new medium of the internet having now officially reached V.2 there is very little hope for newspapers. Just to clarify V.2 stands for Version 2 of the internet. This new version has come into being as the internet has become fully interactive.
Nowadays if I want to see a man get hit in the groin I can find it with the click of the button, I can then post a video of myself laughing at the man getting hit in the groin, someone else will then post a video telling me that I shouldn’t be laughing. I will then inevitably go onto my facebook account and put my status to: Upset by some mean guy on youtube.
You get the picture. If I want to put a video for everybody on the face of the planet to see, I can. If I want all my friends to know that I am upset, I can. If I want to start a blog where I pass out half baked opinions as actual fact, I can. And this is where a problem presents itself.
Why would I read some journalists opinion on the war in Iraq when I can publish my own?
Newspapers are becoming redundant as news moves online. Of course newspapers are trying to make the shift online as well with many publishing their newspapers online. The problem is however is that online newspapers do not make money. The traditional money maker for newspapers is no more. The gold that was the classified pages has now moved online meaning newspapers are no longer profitable. Because now if I want to buy a house, meet a sexy single or tell people about my wedding I can do it all for free online.
Without this source of income the future for journalism does not look good. But the problem extends beyond the poor owner of the New York Times who is chewing his fingernails to the bone as he awaits the inevitable. The problem is that without a feasible income for newspapers who will report our news?
The short answer is that journalism will be overtaken by a new breed of citizen journalist. This idea sends a cold chill down the spine of almost every ‘serious journalist’ everywhere. They cannot imagine a world where they must compete with the slack jawed commoner for their news to be noticed. In fact the idea seems preposterous, and it is a very bad idea.
The vast amount of uninformed opinions that would be posted by every Tom, Dick and Harry would lead to a poorly informed society. Statistics of course would mean that there would have to be some good journalism out there that would be worth reading but the sheer amount of misinformation would make it impossible to navigate.
You may be sitting there saying to yourself, “So what? If journalists are so great they wouldn’t be dying out?”
Well, journalists may be dying out but society needs them. Imagine a world without journalists; politicians would be able to do whatever they pleased without fear of reprisal.
“Oh, to be a state or local official in America, [without newspapers], To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption." –David Simon, The Wire
Journalists are needed to keep society in balance and that is the long and short of it. You yourself may not read newspapers, or watch the news, or even listen to the hard hitting stories of the likes of Mel and Kochie. But you still benefit from them. Because while you don’t watch the news, someone does and this means journalists are reaching someone who will be outraged by the latest scandal. They will be so outraged they are sure to make something happen about it. Which in turn benefits you.
We now have the full problem; newspapers are dying and taking journalists with them. The journalists are being replaced with poorly informed citizen journalists on the world wide web, this new breed of journalists will never be able to do the job of their predecessors thus throwing society into chaos.
It is all sounding very grim, however if we remember the slack jawed plebes of Dickson College. There is not a lot that these students are proficient at, but one thing they can all do with amazing skill is operate the internet. In fact everyone born after the year 1990 has the internet as second nature.
The internet is where the news is heading, and as said statistically it is very likely that there will be some quality citizen journalism. Now we take these students who have an amazing control over the internet. How long will it take for them to find the good news? How long will it take for them to spread it virally, through facebook, msn and the like? The answer is not very long at all.
The problem however still persists that a free lance online journalist will have zero funding. How could they possibly cover news extensively without the resources to do so? Without money for trips to foreign countries or the capacity to sit in on parliament the average Joe journalist will not be able to deliver.
This problem is easily resolved. At universities across the world, copious amounts of money is spent on think-tanks which fund research that will hopefully discover something to benefit mankind, or just simply discover something. What then is stopping this money being spent on internet journalism? Journalism is just as good for society as a new discovery about a disease and it is a lot more frequent.
Newspapers may be dead, but journalism is not. To many the internet may seem like a scary, soul stealing machine but to the youth, who are the future of journalism, it is not. Citizen journalism is an inevitability and so long as it is well resourced citizen journalism is bound to still be quality journalism.
If one was to walk around the corridors of Dickson College and peruse the students who attend there they would probably be filled with a number of emotions, shock, disbelief and nausea to name only a few.
If one can get past the conspicuously blood shot eyes, drunken slur and complete disregard for any form of decency then maybe, just maybe the students who attend here may be deemed hopeful for government welfare. However short of a very generous social worker there is very little hope that these students won’t simply drop out and start smoking ice.
If we were to now take a short trip to the bustling metropolis of New York, New York. Were we to then grab a coffee and head up to the editor-in-chief’s of the New York Times office we would see something very different. The mood is tense, as he reads about the closing of more newspapers and wonders how long until he is out of the job.
With the relatively new medium of the internet having now officially reached V.2 there is very little hope for newspapers. Just to clarify V.2 stands for Version 2 of the internet. This new version has come into being as the internet has become fully interactive.
Nowadays if I want to see a man get hit in the groin I can find it with the click of the button, I can then post a video of myself laughing at the man getting hit in the groin, someone else will then post a video telling me that I shouldn’t be laughing. I will then inevitably go onto my facebook account and put my status to: Upset by some mean guy on youtube.
You get the picture. If I want to put a video for everybody on the face of the planet to see, I can. If I want all my friends to know that I am upset, I can. If I want to start a blog where I pass out half baked opinions as actual fact, I can. And this is where a problem presents itself.
Why would I read some journalists opinion on the war in Iraq when I can publish my own?
Newspapers are becoming redundant as news moves online. Of course newspapers are trying to make the shift online as well with many publishing their newspapers online. The problem is however is that online newspapers do not make money. The traditional money maker for newspapers is no more. The gold that was the classified pages has now moved online meaning newspapers are no longer profitable. Because now if I want to buy a house, meet a sexy single or tell people about my wedding I can do it all for free online.
Without this source of income the future for journalism does not look good. But the problem extends beyond the poor owner of the New York Times who is chewing his fingernails to the bone as he awaits the inevitable. The problem is that without a feasible income for newspapers who will report our news?
The short answer is that journalism will be overtaken by a new breed of citizen journalist. This idea sends a cold chill down the spine of almost every ‘serious journalist’ everywhere. They cannot imagine a world where they must compete with the slack jawed commoner for their news to be noticed. In fact the idea seems preposterous, and it is a very bad idea.
The vast amount of uninformed opinions that would be posted by every Tom, Dick and Harry would lead to a poorly informed society. Statistics of course would mean that there would have to be some good journalism out there that would be worth reading but the sheer amount of misinformation would make it impossible to navigate.
You may be sitting there saying to yourself, “So what? If journalists are so great they wouldn’t be dying out?”
Well, journalists may be dying out but society needs them. Imagine a world without journalists; politicians would be able to do whatever they pleased without fear of reprisal.
“Oh, to be a state or local official in America, [without newspapers], To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption." –David Simon, The Wire
Journalists are needed to keep society in balance and that is the long and short of it. You yourself may not read newspapers, or watch the news, or even listen to the hard hitting stories of the likes of Mel and Kochie. But you still benefit from them. Because while you don’t watch the news, someone does and this means journalists are reaching someone who will be outraged by the latest scandal. They will be so outraged they are sure to make something happen about it. Which in turn benefits you.
We now have the full problem; newspapers are dying and taking journalists with them. The journalists are being replaced with poorly informed citizen journalists on the world wide web, this new breed of journalists will never be able to do the job of their predecessors thus throwing society into chaos.
It is all sounding very grim, however if we remember the slack jawed plebes of Dickson College. There is not a lot that these students are proficient at, but one thing they can all do with amazing skill is operate the internet. In fact everyone born after the year 1990 has the internet as second nature.
The internet is where the news is heading, and as said statistically it is very likely that there will be some quality citizen journalism. Now we take these students who have an amazing control over the internet. How long will it take for them to find the good news? How long will it take for them to spread it virally, through facebook, msn and the like? The answer is not very long at all.
The problem however still persists that a free lance online journalist will have zero funding. How could they possibly cover news extensively without the resources to do so? Without money for trips to foreign countries or the capacity to sit in on parliament the average Joe journalist will not be able to deliver.
This problem is easily resolved. At universities across the world, copious amounts of money is spent on think-tanks which fund research that will hopefully discover something to benefit mankind, or just simply discover something. What then is stopping this money being spent on internet journalism? Journalism is just as good for society as a new discovery about a disease and it is a lot more frequent.
Newspapers may be dead, but journalism is not. To many the internet may seem like a scary, soul stealing machine but to the youth, who are the future of journalism, it is not. Citizen journalism is an inevitability and so long as it is well resourced citizen journalism is bound to still be quality journalism.
Is Chris McNee a stooge?
Today in sociology, I was sitting there minding my own business as I often do. Listening to Conor waste time as he spoke about something nerdy. I occasionally looked at Gabe and we exchanged witty remarks about the entire situation.
This for me was a normal day, until I glanced to my left, and to my horror it wasn't Declan's encouraging smile that met me but rather the face of the devil himself.
yes, the hairy face of one Chester Michael Adamik, and he said to me:
"Chris, update your blog you stooge"
Well, here I am, updating my blog.
The problem does remain that I don't know what to blog about. My assingment is over, so this isn't acutally necessary and now that no one in my class is blogging Chester and Declan are most likely the only people who will ever read this.
But does this stop a dedicated blogger?
"Hell No!"
I will publish my opinions in the false belief that someone out there in "teh intrawebs"(Conor Bendle, Line 6 sociology) will read it and be so blown away by my sheer amounts of awesome that they may continue to read all of my posts and maybe even forward it to a friend.
I have decided that today's post will be about Robert Frost, and more specifically a random poem I select from his collection of poems. Exciting I know.
Profound Robert Frost, profound.
anyway this has been enough bludging for me as I must return to my real homework. But please enjoy the poetry Declan and Chester.
This for me was a normal day, until I glanced to my left, and to my horror it wasn't Declan's encouraging smile that met me but rather the face of the devil himself.
yes, the hairy face of one Chester Michael Adamik, and he said to me:
"Chris, update your blog you stooge"
Well, here I am, updating my blog.
The problem does remain that I don't know what to blog about. My assingment is over, so this isn't acutally necessary and now that no one in my class is blogging Chester and Declan are most likely the only people who will ever read this.
But does this stop a dedicated blogger?
"Hell No!"
I will publish my opinions in the false belief that someone out there in "teh intrawebs"(Conor Bendle, Line 6 sociology) will read it and be so blown away by my sheer amounts of awesome that they may continue to read all of my posts and maybe even forward it to a friend.
I have decided that today's post will be about Robert Frost, and more specifically a random poem I select from his collection of poems. Exciting I know.
A Time To Talk
When a friend calls to me from the end of the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don't stand still and look around
on all the hills I haven't hoed,
and shout from where I am, "What is it?"
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade end up and five feet tall
And plod: I go up to the stone wall,
For a friendly visit
Profound Robert Frost, profound.
anyway this has been enough bludging for me as I must return to my real homework. But please enjoy the poetry Declan and Chester.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
