Its been real. Every good thing does come to an end. Sometimes the best part about a journey doesn’t lie in the destination, but in the reminiscence of the journey. I can never get over my initial reaction to the class. I my now 4 years of attending York, I have never enrolled in a non traditional class. I thought those type of classes didn’t exist.

Then boom, it was this cold afternoon in December where I sat in my room trying to create my schedule for this semester. I searched the course catalog and found a couple courses I found interesting. I narrowed the courses down to 2 course and I ended up picking this course over that one because the class wasn’t too early or too late in the day. Little did I know my creative edge was about to go for a wild ride.

In my honest opinion, this is probably the only course that I actually found enjoyable. There is no traditional homework per se. Instead, we have blog posts that we have to write once we learn something new. The best part about it is that we don’t have to read a textbook, paper or any literature to be able to write a well written blog post. The only limits are our imagination and creativity.  Boy did I love this. Let me quickly fire up my DeLorean time machine so we can take a trip down memory lane to some of my favorite sessions of this semester. Buckle up, time travel activated in 5..4….3…2…1…..WHOOOSH!

 

Week 3, are internet memes art?  My blog post response to this prompt was really what set it off. In the first 2 weeks, we learned how to do basic blogging This includes hyperlinking, creating gifs and images.  This was the first chance to really synthesize that new knowledge and apply it to something. This is kind of how a basketball player would learn a new move in the gym and use it to score extra points in the game.

I really let my creativity loose with this post, since I wrote about meme stocks. Around this time there was a frenzy about meme stocks, such as AMC and Game Stop. I explained the situation and gave my impression on what’s going on.

I think I went above and beyond with this because I put so much writing and effort into it. The goal was to start strong in the semester so I can have more motivation to finish strong.

Professor Seslow’s comment was even more encouraging. It felt great. I was doing good work and It was being recognized. My work wasn’t just an assignment the professor only looks at so he can grade it. No no, my work was more than this. My classmates also gave approving reviews. The accolades don’t stop there…there’s one more!

Turns out Professor Seslow read my post 3 times in total! This was all the motivation I needed. I barged into assignment 3 with newfound energy and motivation. I really got to blog about one of the most comical things on the internet; Memes! Even better, I had a chance to argue whether memes were art or not. In that week I learned how to blog my thoughts in a fashion where I present an argument, and use supplemental images such as memes to support it. This was more interesting than writing a paper and using peer reviewed research articles to support them…..BORING.

 

Making the blog posts on ct101 were a warm up to a bigger picture…..CREATING OUR OWN WEBSITES. This propels us into week 6.  Building a website was always something I’ve dreamed about. I didn’t know what exactly goes in to the process. Turns out, the first step in building a website is creating a domain name. The domain name is a unique address of your website so it can be found on the internet. This is similar to someone trying to build a house from scratch. Before they do this, they must choose a location. Understood? Good. Now moving on.

Initially I was a bit indecisive about my domain name. There were a few subjects I wanted to relate my domain name to. These subjects include cars, financial literacy and a “current events” website. I settled on financial literacy. Thus, my website was born. In a subsequent assignment, I explained my plans for the website. I plan on creating a financial literacy website for all to access and use, The site will fund itself through money generated from ads.  This way, people get to access my content for free and I still make a little money on the side.

Everybody wins here. I plan on maintaining and keeping this website because I’m a person that likes to finish what I’ve started. I learned all these digital oriented skills. I believe it would be a waste if I don’t put them to good use and apply them to the real world. After all, that’s what this class is about. Over the summer I’ll add more content and promote it. The goal is to write about 2 blog posts a day. I don’t expect immediate results. If I do this consistently for a year and do some moderate level of promoting, the website will gain a decent amount of attention soon enough. I’ve already started researching the basic ways to promote a website. The first half of the video below has already been taught to us by professor Seslow. However, the second half has been very useful.

As cliche and sappy as it sounds, I truly enjoyed every aspect of this class. The class started with the basics and gave enough time to learn and develop these basic skills. Once we’ve mastered these, we progressed into creating websites. Creating websites was probably my favorite part. I want to take these skills even further by building my e-commerce site from scratch, element by element.

This would be the perfect real world application of my newly learned skills. As you can see, my summer will be very busy! I think that knowledge is meant to be applied to the real world. In a traditional class, hardly is the material learned applied to the real world. If it’s applied, its usually applied when someone is in their field of profession. This class gets rids of that convention and allows newly acquired skills to be applied right away. I can honestly said I learned a lot in this class and I will continue to learn about building websites and creating content. It’s rare that a class inspires you to take things a step further and add on to knowledge learned, long after the class has ended. It’s time to board the DeLorean once again to return to the future. Buckle up, taking off into the present In 5….4…3…2….1….WHOOSH!

Lets talk about grades now. Based on the consistency and in depth nature of all my blog posts, I think I deserve an A in this class. I’m sure everyone says they deserve an A, but hear me out. As aforementioned, I stated I started off the semester strong with my first official blog post. I kept that energy up until this point. Even with this post I’m writing, this is my longest post yet. You can clearly see the progression in my blog posts.  This class has interested me long enough for me to keep posting quality blog posts. Each of my posts capture a piece of my personality, giving the impression  I’m actually engaging in a conversation with you. I stay far away from monotonous sounding text. I reserve my monotonous writing for the more boring traditional courses. LOL.

A major constituent of grading is consistency. Another is progress. If you combine the two, it wont be hard to achieve a more than decent grade. Another constituent is pacing and submitting assignments on time. This doesn’t really apply to this course because we are given ample time to complete our blog posts. In fact, we’re advised to take our time and not rush to submit. Quality is prioritized over punctuality, which is good.  Even then, I still completed blog posts in a reasonable manner where I don’t have to rush to complete multiple blog posts in the week before the semester ends.

Once again, its been a great run. I genuinely enjoyed this class and I would definitely recommend my peers to take it. The semester is over, summer is here, the weather is great, and best of all IM GRADUATING! I hope you all have a great summer. Stay safe, get vaccinated and be well.

JOHN OUT! (Mic drop, champagne glass up).

 

 

 

 

Creative content. The latest list of things capitalism ruins. In this society, the rise of a plethora of creative content has given rise to copyrighting. Copyright is defined as a right provided to an individual or institution, by the owner of intellectual property, through a legal body. In more simpler terms. it means the owner of intellectual property basically says “hey! I give you permission to use my work for whatever reason, under certain conditions.” These certain conditions are usually profit related (*eyeroll; capitalism*).

Now lets talk abut digital content. Things that fall under the category of digital content are music, pictures, blogs, videos or any other type of digital data that can be saved to computer files and/or broadcasted. In most cases, digital content is freely available on the internet. You can save and download digital content, giving you the opportunity to edit original intellectual property. This is usually harmless and includes things such as remixing songs, making song covers, patching and stitching scenes of movie together for content, adding a new spin to videos, etc. The majority of the people online get away with this. Until……..they start making money from it. Once money comes into the equation, things can get complicated pretty fast.

Lets use a classic example. Lets say an artist, like Drake drops new music. You like the song, so you created a remix to it and upload it on Youtube. Turns out your remix sounds very good and its really catching on. Before you know it, millions of people are listening and may even think your version is better than the original. You start gaining publicity and even money from the amount of viewers you’re pulling in. Now Drake is angry, and he wants to come for you.  Things continue to get very complicated and messy form then on, as the copyright “infringement” comes into play. Now all of a sudden you’re facing a very expensive lawsuit, followed by a seize and desist order. Oops.

However if things played out differently and your song didn’t catch significant attention, you wouldn’t be dealing with copyright infringement lawsuits. Now do you see why capitalism ruins everything? Even more importantly, do you see how copyright law can get really complicated especially when a larger audience is involved? To make matters worse, the laws that regulate these kinds of situations are often vague.

This example relates to fair use. lets quickly define such term. Fair use can be defined as access to intellectual property under certain conditions, without explicit consent of copyright owner. These certain conditions are usually non monetary and include research, criticism, teaching and satire purposes. In other words, these fair use conditions are presented to the user, in good faith that they wouldn’t use it for personal gains.

In his TED talk, Larry Lessig states the follow in the context of modern day copyright law. “Common sense here has not revolted yet.” Lessig also says “common sense is rare in the law.” I find these quotes compelling because laws nowadays aren’t really made in common sense. Laws are influenced by bodies for whatever reason, even tough common sense clearly revolts against their reasons. For example, Larry gives an example of the pre-airplane era where land rights for land owners extended indefinitely in the air. Anything flying over this land would be considered trespassing. When airplanes arrived, some congressional bodies as well as land owners wanted to keep this law. Common sense clearly revolts at this because if these laws were kept it would mean airplanes would be violating uncountable trespassing laws. Once a supreme court judge saw a flaw in this law, it was immediately modified, in favor of the technological progress of airplanes.

This can be related to copyright law as well. Digital content is now available online and people are capable of downloading it and modifying it, to create new content. A good majority of people are doing this to explore their creative side of to present a new perspective of original work. This in effect creates more content and creativity to be shared online. Copyright law, however is very restrictive and requires users of intellectual property to obtain explicit content from the owner. It’s clear to see how this sort of thinking is outdated and revolts against common sense.

A fictional example of fair use was presented earlier on. Now lets look at more real life examples. Richard Prince is a artist who was sued by Patrick Cariou for “infringing on his work. The image on the right is the original work and the image on the left is the creatively modified version Prince created.

Andy Baino, another person to get sued for copyright related reasons, is in a similar situation as Prince. Below on the left is the original intellectual property of Miles Davis. On the right is the heavily pixelated created spin Andy Baino created.

Now, in my perfectly honest opinion, there’s not much difference between Baino and Princes’ work from the original. Even though they have some creative additions such as Prince’s photo markups and Baino’s heavy pixelations, the creative works are obviously very similar to the original. In other words, I don’t think they are creative enough.

Both of their creative takes have enough presence of the original work to make it look like a copyright infringement, however good their intentions were.  Does this mean they deserve to get sued? I don’t think so, if their intentions were to purely express themselves. I personally don’t think this wouldn’t have been a problem if both artists weren’t relatively well known. If they were some underground artists that were barely known, I doubt they would be in this predicament. Since they’re well known and have potential to mobilize an entire audience, that’s where fair use really becomes challenging. Its no surprise that intellectual owners become jealous or feel violated when someone else uses their works and it garners a lot of attention, as they should. Even though the modifiers of this intellectual property mean no harm, they easily fall victim to fair use infringement lawsuits. These lawsuits are usually in favor of the intellectual owner and ends up in a settlement.

Fair use laws remain vague and vary from situation to situation. It is about time for a serious change to the laws. I don’t think it’s that hard to distinguish between someone whos using original works for monetary gains vs someone using it for creative expression. This is where the common sense comes into play. Its tie for common sense to revolt on these laws, so a balance can exist between original intellectual owner and creative artists. There is a compromise that exists between the two. Maybe a little pinch of common sense is all it takes to realize it.

I just gave you food for thought, now you do the dishes!

 

Its been quite a journey. It’s like it was yesterday when we started this class and all thought it was going to be a traditional class. I’m happy that we’re all in the process of building our websites.  I enjoyed going through all your websites but Vinika’s was most striking to me due to its potential and my love for food!

 

As aforementioned,  love to eat food and I love trying out new foods. Fortunately, I live in NYC where there are like a bazillion places to eat with even more variety.. This is a both a blessing and a curse because all the good restaurants are just sitting there, waiting to be discovered. For example, If you live in Brooklyn you would know little about an amazing taco spot that’s in queens or a great Mediterranean spot that’s in Astoria. Thanks to Vinika, more places to eat would be readily recommended on her website weekly. I have a feeling this website is going to contain a lot of photographs and I’m here for it. These photographs would help to showcase the menus and atmosphere of the restaurants she decides to post on the website. Here’s a quick snapshot of the website layout.

 

Seriously, Vinika I wish I would’ve came up with this idea. Here’s some inspiration/future plans for your website you can consider. You can make the website the unofficial restaurant magazine site for Local restaurants. Who knows, when you get enough traction on the site, you can even start to charge restaurants a small fee for promoting their restaurants, The restaurant benefits from the additional social media exposure and you benefit with more money in your pockets! This website of yours has serious potential. I hope you continue to work on it and grow it, even after the semester is over.

 

I look forward to her recommendations so I can try out these restaurants ASAP.

 

 

 

I did it again. I made another blog post on my website. As aforementioned, my website will contain everything you’ve never learned in school about how to finance. This is in the context of stocks, saving money, crypto, credit, etc. Thus blog post I just created is about cryptocurrency and a little background on it. I’m sure you’ve been hearing a lot about bitcoin as of lately. If you want a quick background about cryptocurrency in a non boring and interesting context, go ahead and click THIS  link. I promise you you’ll be impressed about what you learn. After you’ve read the blog post you’ll be disappointed that I didn’t go into further detail, since you’ll be so intrigued. But don’t worry, there is more to come.

 

 

After much deliberation with myself, I’ve decided what I wanted my blog post to be about. My other 2 choices were for it to be about cars and about current events. Here are the reasons why I didn’t choose those ones. I didn’t choose cars to be the main subject of my blog posts because there are already tins of car blog posts on the internet and in order to take full advantage of the blog post I would have to be reviewing cars in person, which I don’t have the time for. As for a blog post about current events, the blog post will basically be like a newspaper. Although there’s nothing wrong with this, I don’t find it an interesting topic.

Now lets get to the good stuff, I choose to revolve my blog posts on “capitalism.” As terrible as that sounds, hear me out. I mean capitalism in the sense of providing people with tips that will help them to succeed in a capitalist society. This includes tips on increasing credit score, money saving tips, financial apps to use, motivational quotes here and there,  tips to maximize the available income that you have and everything else finance related. I think people of my generation can really benefit from this, as this information would be free and available to anyone. Hopefully I can learn how to add ads to the website to make it fund itself, so the website can remain free for all.

My goal is to create a blog post that doesn’t just end once this class is over. I want to create a blog post that I can keep adding onto and make it of benefit to people.  I’m excited to learn how to utilize word press so I can start building this website from the ground up!

 

Alright so boom. Mama I made it. I successfully created my first website!

From scratch that is. The best part about it is that the entire process was completely free. Who doesn’t like free stuff?

The assignment of registering our domain name was actually more straight forward than I thought. The first process involved using a reclaim hosting site that allows me to register any available domain. This part however, I found most challenging. This is because some of the original domains I had in mind were unavailable. It got to a point where I even googled some of the available domains to see if the sites actually exist. Turns out some of the unavailable domains don’t have a site attached to them. They’re owned by another domain selling site, waiting to be bought. One of the domains that I originally had in mind, which was “thecapitalist.com” had a domain price of $2,300 On one domain selling site.

After about 10 minutes of tryin out different domains I settled on “wokecapitalists.com” which was available. FINALLY!

The process from here on out was very straightforward and I was surprised at how much customization word press offers. I cant want to learn how to take advantage of all the website customization tools offered. As each week passes I will be modifying my website and including new content. Here is a quick preview of my website.

 

Hello all, I still cant get used to the fact that we’re still in a Panasonic. Sorry, I mean a panini. Excuse me, what I really meant was a pandemic. Even with its drawbacks, I think online learning actually makes sense for this particular class. Its a communication’s technology class…..that’s being held strictly online. This does a lot to emphasize the practicality of communications technology and how to use a combination of some new learned skills and creativity to create new content. Anyways, back to the main topic. It’s been six weeks since we’ve been in class. Sheesh, time flies indeed.

So far I think I’m doing pretty well in this class. I put a lot of time and effort into my blog posts and try to add as much personality as I can. I used to rush to complete assignments but now I take my time to make sure I make each blog post “reading worthy.” I don’t want my blog posts to sound like an assignment, or a research paper. I want them to sound like something you would actually read in your free time.  In terms of grading I think I’ll give myself an A-.

I seriously hope my parents didn’t hear me say “A-.” They’ll kill me if I get anything less than a 105% in any class. The reason I gave myself this grade is because I still have a lot of improvement to do, such as making my posts more engaging and adding more creativity. Creativity has never really been my strong suit, as I’m more of a “logical” and “sciencey” person. I promise you that’s not as boring as it sounds. Speaking of which, I have learned how to unlock the creative side of me. I never was the person to do things such as painting, draw, etc. I though I just didn’t have it in me. However, in this class I get to  build my creativity one week at a time and add on to it. By the end of this semester, I should be completely comfortable with my creativity and maybe even find ways to monetize it. So far my greatest learned asset is learning how to create a blog post. A blog post has several components, which may include hyperlinks, gifs and memes. I’m one to always laugh at memes from the internet, but learning how to make my own memes is even better. I also make sure to develop my expressive skills. I discovered that I don’t like writing in a monotonous voice. I like writing as if I’m writing a conversation, where there’s change in tone and emotion. In my opinion, the closer a blog post is to a casual conversation, the easier it is to read. Ya dig?

Through self reflection I can assess my performance by keeping track of my blog post content. Also, over time my blog posts should get progressively longer. So naturally, I can track my progress in this class based on how long my blog posts are getting, However, quality should also increase, as quantity doesn’t always equate to higher quality. By self reflecting here and there I can see what I need to improve and what I need to keep consistent. In this class I now know that the traditional route of learning isn’t always the best. By traditional I mean the classic “going to class, taking notes, going home to study and taking exams based on the learning material.” Through this class I learned a different approach of learning, where new skills are taught in real time and we get to apply them immediately.

Since the first week or so I’ve been putting a lot of energy into my blog posts. I set the bar really high when I created the meme stocks blog posts. From that point, I made sure to expand my blood posts with m ore creativity and taking more time to curate my content. As this semester progresses I hope to be able to write entire blog post articles. Well, this concludes my reflection. Hopefully you didn’t fall asleep halfway through. Till next time, I’m OUT.

 

 

There are two main topics off the top of my head right now that I would love to revolve a website around. The first of which is about cars  and the second of which is about the stock market.  This would mean that the Domain names I select for either of these two topics must have some kind of faint relation to the topic.  Below are a list of domain names for each of the topicss.

 

The stock market:

“scalethewall”

I choose this topic because typical wall street terminology may be hard to follow. So in a sense, that wall of terminology is hard to scale. However, with this website I will make terminology and analysis easy to understand, hence the term “scaling the wall.”

“wallofstocks”

This is also a play on the term wall street. In this website I hope to include, everyday a list of stocks I believe will be great performers. Sort of like a hall of fame for stocks.

“wallstreetenglish”

Referring back to what i aforementioned, wall street terminology and investor terminology may be hard to follow at times. I hope to paint a clearer picture using everyday language people would be able to understand .

“stocksandstuff”

The name speaks for itself. The website wont just be talking about stocks. I will be talking about ETF’s and forex markets as well.

“tradersarewe”

Remember that toy company that was a distinct figure in our childhood but now is a distant memory? Yes I’m talking about Toys R us. I’m using the same wordplay here. However I’m not making it obvious, so the domain name has some originality.

**********************************************************

Here are some potential car related domain names.

“Wordonthevroom”

“Vengine”

“brakepoint”

“everythingauto”

The 4 domains above were very difficult for me to come up with, mostly because the ones I originally came up with were all taken. The challenging thing about this is it cant be too long of a domain name and it has to be catchy. This is the best I can come up with for now, but the list is subject to future review.

 

One thing I love is interactive assignments in which the only thing that limits me is my creativity.  I love visual and auditory and visual  things, such as music and pictures. Below is an assignment chosen from the class assignment bank.

Rap Remix

In order to complete this assignment I’d need to have some type of interest in music, to keep me interested and engaged long enough to create a masterpiece. I clearly possess this interest, as I love listening to all genres of music. I’d also need to know how to put words together in a rhyming fashion, which I believe just about anyone can do. Lastly, I’d need some type of software or application so I can create the remix to my song of choice. I’ve always had a love for music and I’ve always wanted to create my own song, whether it’s a remix or an original. I believe this class will give me some useful skills I can use to create my first song.  In this class I think I should do about 3-5 other assignments like this, so I can explore this. Who knows, maybe I can create the next hit by accident. Creating music needs the skills of knowing how to express one’s self in an effective way, continuously for about 2-5 minutes. Sometimes even longer. There is also a storytelling component so everything flows together. This skill is important because it gives someone freedom to express themselves. In other words, it gives an outle   t where someone can express themselves and their only limit is their imagination.

The assignment below from the assignment repository is more of a visual based assignment. I chose this assignment because it is about traveling.  I love traveling and I have lots of pictures of the places I’ve visited, This assignment is more journalism based.

Journey to Somewhere

In order to complete this assignment I’d need to know how to create a google presentation slideshow. Luckily I grew up with computers around me, so I can definitely do that. Also, I’d need to sequence the pictures in a way that tells a story.  Below is the slide show. Enjoy!

 

VACATION TO TURKEY!

 

 

 

At this point, anyone who has a smartphone knows what a meme is. Memes are a means for instant comic relief. This comic relief can be random or it can relate to current events. Gone are the days where, if you wanted a good laugh you had to watch an entire comedy sketch or fish through Youtube for some funny videos. Nowadays, all you need is a smartphone or laptop, and a social media account. Twitter, preferably.  There’s a saying that all funny memes are born on twitter and if you saw a meme on Facebook, Instagram or other social media platforms, twitter definitely saw it first. Over the years memes have really evolved. Below are a few sample of memes I harvested from twitter.

There’s a meme about possibly every subject now. For example, lets look at the whole of the year 2020. 2020 was a wild year for a variety of reasons. One of the most notable momentf of 2020 was the start of the pandemic. The following months ater the offical shutdown in march, everyone grew restless at home and thus, stormed to the internet to let off steam. During this time, memes were in abundance.  The year 2020 was the perfect recipe for meme creation, as a string of unusual events unfolded, such as the killer hornets, impeachment of donald trump and a possible World War 3, to name a few. The fact that memes can be created from these events shows the versatility of memes. They can be seen as little snapshots of events in this sense.

Now, to answer the question “Is meme Art?” We have to define art first. According to wikipedia, the official definition of ART can be summarized as human expression, which reflects the creator’s imagination, conceptual ideas, etc. Memes are relatively new so it’s understandable why some people dont consider it art. Memes are also severely underrated as they dont get the attention they deserve. Even though theyre a bit unconnventional in what we consider as art, as memes catch on to more people I believe they will be readily accepted as a form of contemporary art with potential to jokingly capture facets of society. Until next time…..

 

 

 

Hello once again to all. Honestly speaking when I signed up for CT101 the purpose was to use it as a class to fill out my schedule. I had no idea what the class was about nor what it entails. Also, the name “communications technology” sounded quite boring to me, from the perspective that I’m  a pre-med biology major.

However, all this quickly changed after the first class. I realized that the class was going to be very interactive and taps into my creativity. At this point I’m thinking “Hmm, wow. Interesting.” This was partly because this isn’t a traditional class, where there’s a PowerPoint lecture, you study and take quizzes and tests. This was a game changer for me, as I’ve never been in a class with this format.

After I made my first post in assignment 1 an d I read it over, I experienced a type of satisfaction I haven’t experienced in a while. I was even more proud of myself when i received a few comments from my classmates stating how much they liked the post. This was precisely how I felt, below.

After the second class I realized that i have the opportunity to learn how to use my computer as a communications tool, using practical hands on experience. It’s like i’m falling into the creative corner of my mind which I didn’t know existed. I plan on fully tapping into it this semester.

By the end of this class I hope to learn how to create a blog, design a website and explore the creativity I never thought I had. The only thing I’m limited by in this class is my imagination. The sky’s the limit.

Until next time. Stay creative my friends.