Final Blog Post

Finally, it is my last blog post on CT101, well you know what they say…

How do I feel? My heart is going to burst because it is full of rainbows, just kidding. But yeah I feel happy and excited at the same time. First off this is the very last assignment that I am gonna be submitting or doing not just for this course but as an undergraduate student at York College. Yeah, you guessed it. I am graduating. I would not have known about CT101 or been in this class if not for fulfilling the credits. Now, that I have been in this class for one whole semester I was wondering…

It was an amazing experience and one of my favorite classes of the semester. Like I said before a million times in my other blogs. I have learned a LOT through this course. This class has made me learn and do things that I never thought I could do myself. CT-101 really brought out the creative self in me. The greatest learned asset in this class was being able to photoshop and edit images. I was able to develop, cultivate and display a lot of skills throughout the semester through CT101 digital storytelling.

Analyzing my work throughout the course a few of my best works in the class were on Are Memes Art and DS-106. Working on the DS-106 assignment was so cool. I was able to develop some digital art skills through that assignment working on the movie poster mashup.  Another is the writing skills through these weekly blogs where I got to create GIFs and memes for the first time. Just reposting my favorite work of art in this class that I created using Photopea online editor remixing the movie posters Alien and E.T. with Stranger Things:

 

Now the most thrilling part of the class was… Of course, starting my own website The World Around Us; which I did not even expect I would get a chance to own and run by myself when I signed up for this class. Now, that I own my own website platform, I definitely want to use it in the best way I could. Currently, I am using my website as a platform where people could go in and enjoy reading some fun, interesting, and scientific facts in the world. My very first blog post on the website was on the topic: The world through the eyes of animals.

The world through the eyes of animals

My favorite blog post to work on was: World’s smallest animals where I got to research and create some interesting GIFs of small cute animals, at the same time write about them.

World’s smallest animals

My website is all about having fun reading and educating oneself at the same time. I love researching and writing about such unique topics.  But I might shift the ideas I work with now and expand them further. I am still stuck with a lot of ideas and ways juggling inside my head that I would like to convert my website in the future for professional uses. Finally a website owner!

The class had given me a whole new view of blogging where I have only been reading other people’s blogs on the internet before and now I got a chance to learn that for myself here at CT-101.  I think I deserve an A because this semester was pretty rough for me but I was still able to complete every single assignment works. Also, I know I started off weak in this class but was able to show a great deal of improvement throughout the course which I am happy with myself. Overall, this was the unique and most fun-filled journey that I had this semester. And I am glad I was able to make it to the very end of the semester even in the middle of these hard times. All thanks to Professor Seslow, for making this class so interesting and easy-going. Adios CT101 🙂

 

 

 

 

#10 Copyright?

What is copyright?

Copyright is a law that protects any form of artistic work including literary, musical, sound recording, etc. from being reproduced without the permission of its original owner.

Why is there a copyright?

Copyright acts as a moral right towards an original work or artwork giving them exclusive rights; also to let people create many more expressive works that benefit society.

Larry Lessig’s TED talk:

In Larry Lessig’s TED talk, he wonderfully presents the ideas on how to bring about a balance between the copyright laws and the remix culture of the new generation. Copyright law is good to some extent, personally, I would not want someone else to take credit for my work. But there is always a line that needs to be drawn to what extent the law takes can act upon. There is nothing wrong with taking original content and using it to transform it into something amazing as long as they don’t just copy-paste the original work. The idea behind that sort of transformation and remixes is still something that needs to be appreciated. The digital world needs more of that sort of remix culture and not worry constantly about a law that you may break knowingly or unknowingly.

 

 

#8 Registering my own domain name and Web hosting

The best part of CT101 so far. Yes, registering my own website. The whole process of registering and deciding my domain name was a great experience indeed. I finally ended up choosing iamanju.com as my domain name.

Most of my domain name choices were available so it was really hard to choose one. So I decided to stick with a general domain name. One reason why I didn’t want to narrow it down to a specific website was that I might plan to change the contents in the future as said earlier I have lots of ideas going on. I have a few ideas that are juggling around my head but not fully satisfied with. But right now my plan is to work on the idea I already started with which is to make a new series of blogs filled with interesting and fun facts. It is kind of educational, interesting and fun at the same time. You can call it a science blog if you want to. But yeah I love to research things like this so I thought why not write about it? But nothing is permanent, if I get a better plan on what to do with my website in the future I will surely switch to it. And that is my current plan!! Until then…

#9 Classmates websites

First off congratz to everyone for owning their own websites. Yayyy!! Each website was so unique and interesting and some were mindblowing. The two websites that mainly caught my eyes were: Bazán and Breanna Rowe.

Bazan’s website Mono Pillowtalk was one of the best and stood out for me. I enjoyed reading her short stories. My favorite story was Wallflowers, Sunflowers & Petals. They were so well written with the perfect titles. I wish I could write like that! Also, loved the way she decorated it, giving it an aesthetic feel. It was a beautiful website overall. Really enjoyed it and had a great time navigating around the site.

The second one was Breanna Rowe’s Brees brunch. I love Brees brunch because I am personally a foodie who also enjoys reading and watching cooking blogs/vlogs. On her website, she posts brunch recipes and I am down for it!  Love her french toast for the most recipe and looking forward to more amazing recipes!

#7 Mid-semester Assessment

I can’t believe how fast the semester is finishing up. But so far this is one of my favorite classes, and I believe I am doing pretty good so far.

I have learned a lot!…and I mean a LOT through this course. This class has made me learn and do things that I never thought I could do myself. CT-101 really brought out the creative self in me. The greatest learned asset in this class is being able to photoshop and edit images.

The skills have I developed, cultivated, and displayed regularly in my posts?

There are quite a few, one is the photo editing skills like I said earlier, which was my favorite part in this class so far. Working on the DS-106 assignment was really exciting and enjoyable. I was able to develop some digital art skills through that assignment working on the movie poster mashup.  Another is the writing skills through these weekly blogs where I got to create GIFs and memes for the first time.

Reflecting through my posts, my first two posts are a bit too bland truth be told because I had no idea what I was doing.  But then in the third post, I did more research and started putting more effort into making it more readable. The topic was Are Memes Art? I had a few ideas in my mind on how to put it, and everything worked together in the end and I was REALLY satisfied with that post for the first time in CT-101. The topic itself gave me chance to stitch both historical pieces of information about memes, with the memes I created myself for the post. I think I was able to keep the blog fun, interactive and informational at the same time. The class had given me a whole new view of blogging where I have only been reading other people’s blogs on the internet before and now I got a chance to learn that for myself here at CT-101. Now I know how to blog! Yayyy! I know how to make GIFs and memes! and most of all I know how to photoshop and edit! which once I thought I could never do it myself. In this class, I take my time to post assignments, one reason is that I often feel insecure about my posts and I cannot post unless I feel a little satisfied, so I often do drafts and work along with time and modify them which had really helped me a lot. And yes, definitely I feel my blogging work had expanded over the semester from zero creativity to a level of 8 maybe if I rate it out of 10 and still gotta long way to go. These are all my CT101 posts so far :

  1. Post 1 
  2. Post 2
  3. Post 3
  4. Post 4
  5. Post 5
  6. Post 6

 

#6 The Internet’s Own Boy

The “Internet’s Own Boy”, Aaron Swartz was far more than just an immensely talented programmer. From the development of the basic internet protocol RSS to co-founding Reddit, his fingerprints are all over the internet. There were a lot of significant moments in the documentary that shows us how fascinating and exceptional Swartz was. One of his quotes that caught my eyes was:

‘If you had magical powers, would you use it for doing good in the world or making piles of money’–Aaron.

Swartz was always full of ideas. Through his talents, he could have had billions if he wanted but instead, he used it towards social justice, to make a difference in this world, something most of us could not do.

“Information is power”reads the first sentence of Guerilla Open Manifesto written by Aron Swartz. “…and just like all powers, there are people who want to keep it for themselves.

Swartz believed that knowledge is power and all knowledge must be free and accessible to every single person in this world irrespective of who they are or where they from. All Aaron wanted to do for the world was to bring about public access to the public domain but in return, it brought him so much trouble which ended up in his suicide. Now the US government can argue that they were simply doing their job by investigating fraud. Like Swartz says everything in this world is blinded by grief and power including our right to knowledge.

#4 Project Flexibility DS106

In this project, I chose two different assignments: one is the Movie Mashup Assignment and the other is cipher typography photo images one of the visual assignments that I found on the DS106 website.

1. Movie Mashup assignment:

So this assignment asks to select two movies that are often compared and combine them to create a new movie poster. The information and link about the assignments are posted below.

Movie Mashup

For this assignment, I chose the Netflix original series Stranger Things as there are many different movies that are often been compared to it. I created two movie posters for this assignment.  The posters were created using a web-based graphic editor Photopea. To create the first movie poster I chose the 1979 film Alien and gave it the movie title: Stranger Things ft. Aliens. In order to create this poster, I combined at least 5 to 6 images from both Stranger Things and Alien movies and edited them with the help of a Photopea editor. This was my first time photoshopping so I had to teach myself various techniques of layering and blending the images for this poster with the help of youtube videos. The end result is shown below.

For the second poster, I chose the combo of Stranger Things with the 1982 movie E.T where I combined the original movie poster of ST season 2 and E.T.  Final result is shown below.

And, finally, below are the various images I used for the two posters:

       

       

 

2. Cipher Typography Visual assignment:

This assignment asks to use the concepts of typography and silhouetted images to create a coded message. It is another assignment that I would be willing to try because I love cryptology and deciphering stuff. This project was really interesting to me as I loved the concept but at the same time,  I wasn’t sure of the right tools to use for the assignment.

Cipher Typography Photo Images

 

#5 Domain Name

Never have I thought of starting and owning a website of my own if not for CT101 class.  Talking about things that interest me, there is actually quite a lot. Besides being a science student and a math tutor, my other interests include traveling, playing video games (currently I play PUBG a lot),  listening to music/songs of various languages and genres, I am also a foodie who loves cooking.  There are a lot of things in my head that I could use my website for, so for time being, I prefer to keep my domain name choices to be broad at the same time simple and easily accessible. I would love to start as a personal blog/vlog and work along with time. Therefore, my possible choices of domain names are:

  1. itsmeaj.com
  2. ajcorner.com
  3. thisisaj.com
  4. itsajtime.com
  5. iamanju.com
  6. anjuachu.com

AJ is my nickname, a short form for Anju. Some of the cool and interesting websites that I love are:

  1. HowStuffWorks – Their blog posts are super cool and informative. It is a website that explains thousands of topics. As the name suggests it also shows videos and illustrations of how things work.
  2. SuperCook –  This website helps us cook food with whatever ingredients we have at our home. All we do is enter the ingredients onto the website and based on that they find thousand’s of online food recipes.
  3. Kara and Nate -It is a travel blog/vlog of a couple that includes travel hacks, and other tips and information on how to travel budget-friendly. They also have a youtube channel which I really enjoy watching.

#3 Are Internet memes art?

When we think of the word “MEME” we think of funny reactions images/videos/text of someone or something with hilarious captions that circulate through social media creating a trend. According to the Wikipedia definition: “A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem)is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture” So what exactly is a meme?  How did it all start? In fact, did you know that the word “meme” is actually older than the internet?

Well…… technically yeah. The birth of the internet was in the 1980s (January 1, 1983, to be precise) while the word meme was found in the 1970s. The term “meme” was first coined by the British biologist/ethologist named Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his book called “The Selfish Gene” mused about how ideas influence human evolutions.

In this book, Dawkins took the greek word mimeme meaning  ‘something which is imitated’ and shortened it to “meme”, a monosyllable that can rhyme with “gene”;  as an attempt of expressing the way cultural information spreads within a cultural environment. Therefore, he used the term meme as a cultural equivalent of a gene. He even used a virus as an analogy to describe and define the word meme. To him, memes are a product of culture.

Here is an extract from the book  The Selfish Gene:

oops…not this one…. the extract is below.

“The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate ‘mimeme’ to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word meme. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.”

What does it all meme?…..

In simple words, we all know “genes” are replicators that carry information about our traits as hereditary. Dawkins wanted to get away from people thinking about genes all the time. So he brings in the idea of a second replicator. Now if we look around, we carry various cultures along with us which is a form of information that we copy from person to person by imitation, by language, by talking, by telling stories, by doing things, so on and so forth. This is information copied with a varied selection, this is a design process going on similar to genes. He wanted a name for this new replicator and ended up with the name “meme”.

Later on, people started incorporating images into internet memes. Remember the Dancing Baby, that 3D rendering of a baby boogieing to a Swedish rock song? That’s one of the first image-based internet memes, which spread primarily through email chains and it came out in the year 1996.

Now back to our main question ‘Are memes art?’. If we look at the definition of art: Art is an application of human creativity that expresses one’s imaginations and ideas visually or orally. Well now if we compare it with meme we see that memes do the same exact thing that art has been doing for ages: bringing bright colorful images that expresses an idea and makes people think.  All definitions of art point towards the direction of human creativity. Art is about showing people how you see the world and so are memes. So why shouldn’t memes be considered art? Memes are universally relatable and trigger human emotions on various levels. They connect people, invoke emotions, make people laugh.  To be more specific it can fall under the category of Pop art culture which means using popular media styles to create art and simple comedy.

Finally, I just want to share the meme I created about CT101.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

#2 First GIF post

Hi all, for those of you who don’t know, my name is Anju. I am a Chemistry major and this is my final semester here.

To be honest, I took this class because I wanted to fill in my credits and had no idea what this class was about except that my friend told me that it is fun and interesting.

So my first day of CT class, I felt more relaxed and clueless compared to my other science classes; and then professor Seslow said that we are going to learn to create GIFs!!!! YAY!!!

I love GIFs and sticker reactions. I use them almost all the time and have always wanted to create my own reaction GIFs. So far I am enjoying this class and the fun, new creative stuff that I get to learn and I am looking forward to more.

 

 

 

#1 Internet happiness

 

Hello everyone, so I love the internet and everything about it. Even though I am not very active I use almost every social media platform like Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok, Discord, Twitter. Youtube is something that makes me really happy on the internet. Be it funny, educational, facts, dumb or motivational, there is always something that everyone can enjoy in whatever mood they are in.

Just wanted to share a funny animal voice-over video I found recently. Hope it brings some laugh:)

I also enjoy reading and posting interesting memes on social media

“Bernie Sanders inauguration” meme that recently broke the internet. During the 2021 inauguration week, the whole social media was going crazy with the meme.