So far I think I’ve learned a lot more in this course than I thought I would. Initially, I joined because I thought it would be interesting to discover what it was like to be in a class with a professor who has a perfect score on rate my professor and to see what has changed in the field of communications since I got my first degree. I think my first two posts were weak compared to my more recent posts. I wasn’t quite sure of what to put hyperlinks-wise because I didn’t make a habit of reading blogs back in the day. Even when I was a kid scrolling the internet freely, I wasn’t looking at blogs I was looking for anime and Japanese language tutorials. And even when I started blogging it was on micro blog sites like Tumblr where you post and repost as you like. I’ve never had an intentional blogging practice before.

I feel like this class has trained my eye to look more carefully at things than ever before. Now when I’m scrolling I try to scroll less and really take things in. When I watch things I’m thinking “that might make a cool gif”. Speaking of, I never even knew I could make gifs before. I would be so impressed with gifset makers when I was on Tumblr, thinking they had some crazy, unattainable skill when I could have just taken a tutorial and been amongst their ranks! 

It really challenged the way I saw content creation as well. I won’t go so far as to say it’s easy, but I think that having an established content creation practice where you take the time to put yourself out there and hone your skills as you go is much more manageable than I’ve been thinking. When YouTube first came out I was watching videos already so impressed and now those same people have amazing camera quality and professional editing they probably never imagined being able to afford. 

When you watch something change right before your eyes it can be hard to realize that change is happening at all. But you can’t compare your day one to someone else’s day one thousand. Despite knowing this I’m still anxious about the prospect of setting up my own website. The idea of making a site and having to commit to an idea makes me queasy. I’ve known this was coming the whole semester and yet I’m still torn about what to choose. On one hand I could finally make a photography website and live my best life with my camera and my cellphone. But on the other hand, this could be a low-stakes way for me to start my author website to drum up interest for my debut novel and other writing projects. I could take this time to really commit and dedicate myself to the craft.

I’m still too wishy washy at this point to make a decision but we have time. I know the answer will come to me, even if I just decide on impulse [Note: I did end up deciding on impulse]. I think I still have a lot to learn and improve so far, especially since I fell behind a bit, but I think I’m starting to get what this whole thing is all about. Even if I’m not, I’m still enjoying the process of a collaborative learning environment.

I thought very long and hard about this prompt. I have a lot of half-finished drafts that focus on writing. I say things like “Oh writing is my greatest love”, and “Writing is the one thing I can’t live without” but that’s not quite true. Of course, I love writing. I can’t sleep most nights unless I put at least a few words on paper, but it’s not the act of writing that I love. It’s storytelling.

The writing is just a medium for the soul-deep desire to spin a tale that will rivet and inspire. In the same way that I’m pulled to make art or speak, I’m drawn to create. It feels a little cliche to say in a storytelling class that my passion is storytelling, but I’m not here to be revolutionary. I’m here to be honest. 

I have always loved stories. Reading, writing, watching. I’m in love with every part of our human desire to share all kinds of things with one another. Even just sharing our boring day-to-day thoughts is so exciting to me. I want to hear about your breakfast order, about how the cook at the Bodega lovingly fried the egg and toasted the bread for your baconeggandcheese. I want to hear about how nicely it was folded. How warm it was on the cold, cold new York City day (a commodity now) and how that warmth brought you to life. I’m obsessed with how you take your tea, no cream and two sugars. The smile you shared with the cashier as they wished you “a nice day mami”.

Our lives are all made up of these tiny stories that don’t feel like stories. We all forget how precious the small things are because we don’t speak of them. We save the relaying of our tales for things that seem important. The scholarship we won or the date we went on. The job interview we aced or dinners with our zany families. Something that feels big and meaningful, when it’s all meaningful. 

One of my favorite storytellers is Hayao Miyazaki. He’s most known for his animation, filmmaking, and being one of the founders of Studio Ghibli. Through writing, animation, and a hundred other shared artworks, he, along with his team, creates a story that’s not afraid to linger on the minutiae.

The delightful sweetness of a cup of warm milk and honey on a rainy day.

The heat of a fire in the hearth of a house full of your loved ones.

The solitude of the view from your work desk window as you toil away on some repetitive task.

All of those small things make up the full story. The fantastical elements and high stakes are not more valuable than the small everyday things in this life. Rather, the stakes are so high because you have to protect those things. The journey to slay the dragon has urgency because you want to take walks with your grandmother or enjoy your afternoon tea at your window. You want to have lunch on Wednesdays with your best friend. Don’t you? 

And even if you do, in fact, crave adventure and passion, it is made up of all those small pieces. Every day isn’t a fight to the death. You won’t find yourself battling day in and day out for over fifty years. This is not how the battle is won. You must bathe and eat, and connect with your comrades.

Maybe you will receive a letter from home and return one in kind.

You will wash your clothes and scold your companion for not packing correctly.

You will light a fire at your camp, you will fish in the stream, and, perhaps most importantly, you will dream.

Miyazaki’s work perfectly captures these feelings. The small gives value to the large and vice versa.

His storytelling feels like looking into a mirror of my vision for my work. I love the big conflicts, to portray those titanic battles between good and evil, right and wrong. But it also makes me so happy to show the joy people feel in the in-between moments. Just being with each other. Darning your sock because it has a hole in it and you can’t defeat Thanos unless you patch it. Kissing your aunt on the cheek just because you love her and, well, isn’t that why you’re fighting? To protect the people you love?

I hope that I’ll be able to further share my passion for storytelling with the world one day.

Memes are art.

Thats it. Thats the post. Thanks for reading!

Well not really. A hotly debated topic like that can’t be solved with just a single micdrop line and never referenced again. I guess I have to give y’all evidence or whatever 🙄. Now of course memes aren’t typically beautiful or moving but they can be beautiful based on what they mean for us. Memes are community art. Pieces of art or media that we take part in and use together to communicate across the boundaries of time and space. Memes connect our internet culture across time, tying us with people, places, and things that are no longer with us.

They’re topical and relatable, connected to our daily life and the shared human experience in some way, shape or form. We can all relate to being thawrted by the bus driver or procrastinating when we know we shouldn’t but we’ll all express it a different way. For some, Spongebob will be the muse of expression, for other? Bad Luck Brian is just the man for the job, but then there will be others still that we have yet to discover!

More, importantly, in my opinion, Memes are historical content. They are the painstaking work of our generations saved online. The memes of current events, the memes of historical marvels, the memes of TV shows and movies and anime. They bring about the resurrection of age old media, find the lost media, and connect us around the world.

Some of my favorite memes have been collaborative works of fandom. My best examples?

Avengers.

With.

Acrylics.

I can’t explain what it is about Avengers with Acrylic Nails that makes me so happy but it really makes me happy to see these. Is it the super long acrylics? Is it the humor of seeing the unexpected in a reaction image? Is it how naturally it all fits it? I have no idea T-T. But it speaks to me. It speaks to my soul!

The meme that never was

During lockdown there were so many different memes that popped up but one that I thought was really going to blow up was the young lady doing dance aerobics during a coup! The backstory here is that she was dancing because she was filming a video for a competition. She was focused on her task and was used to military activity in the area so she had absolutely no idea of what was happening! Life is happening all around us and we are apart of it all and a part of the preservation of our history through our interactions with media.

When I first entered undergrad it was as an Education and Theatre double major with a goal to become a teaching artist at the local theatre I used to work with in Brooklyn. I was certain that in four years I would be a licensed teacher all while maintaining my passion for the theatre (and dramatics).

And then I took a class with Professor Dr. Precious Yamaguchi. Precious taught most of the New Media courses (what you would call Communications Technology now,  I suppose) and designed her classes in a very accessible and engaging way. She was the first professor that really let me know just how different College was from HS. I learned what it was like to have mutual respect with an educator in her class.

The class was a beginner animation course that piqued my interest and it captured my media-loving heart hook, line, and sinker (the state-of-the-art Mac lab didn’t hurt either). We learned the very, very basics of animation and how to use different software that I had only ever heard of.

I was in heaven 😍

The first day of CT101 I felt a similar sort of giddiness. Rather than being excited about starting my college career, I felt happy to be taking classes for the pure enjoyment of education. I’m someone who genuinely enjoys school, so taking a course so in line with my original major feels like taking a lap in the winner’s circle.

(And, once again, the Mac lab doesn’t hurt 🤭)

After years of doing the kind of soulless logic work I’ve grown used to the creative content in the class is like a breath of fresh air. The program I just finished had me crunching numbers in an accounting class, fumbling with SQL, and creating data tables. So, so many data tables. Taking some time to blog and collect gifs and emojis to express my rich inner thoughts? Priceless🥺

Compared to my other class I think this one is a bit more challenging as I have to be creative rather than just engage in memorization. Well, not quite memorization but right now we’re very, very, veryyyyyy slowly. We’re still working through the very first chapter we started out in , which has its value certainly, but I expected… more.

All in all, I’m looking forward to getting into the guts of blogging and creative design using WordPress. The only blogs I’ve ever engaged with were hosted on Blogger so I’m sure much has changed, but so far so good I’ll say!

This week? Piracy is making me happy. Now am I pirating anything? No way! Piracy is stealing! You wouldn’t steal a car! You wouldn’t swipe a handbag! You wouldn’t shoot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, plunging our world into a war that no one could have dreamed of! (At least I hope you wouldn’t 😰)

In the streaming era piracy is largely considered a thing of the past. Why download something and waste your digital space when you can just go to Netflix, Hulu, or any of the other 20 million streaming services? But, rather than just being a nefarious tool for evil doers to make off with the hard work of others, I see piracy, at times, as a devoted act of media preservation.

Ever since I was a kid I was a huge fan of anime, manga, art, and animation as a whole. I have fond memories of my class mates and I passing around printed scans of the latest Naruto and One Piece chapters, directly translated from Weekly Shonen Jump by the dedicated scanlation team. As a kid I never thought of this as piracy, it was just a chance for my friends and I to read the comic we loved without having to wait for the monthly Shonen Jump to come out.

A property like Naruto is highly unlikely to ever end up becoming lost to time with over 250 million copies sold, it’s unthinkable for all of them to disappear from circulation anytime soon. But any kind of media can easily become lost to time, especially now that we find ourselves fully in the Era of licensing. If you’ve ever “bought” a song or a movie online then you’ve likely just purchased a license, which allows you access to a digital product under a few different terms of service. If the company goes under, your account is banned, or TOS changes in any way, you’re out of luck!

Today with the vast array of streaming platforms, all rich with content, we have become comfortable relying on them to see our favorites year after year. But now shows are quietly disappearing from streaming with no physical copies available. Recent favorites less than a decade old are at risk of becoming lost media in a way that must be maddening for viewers and creators alike.

Now let me be clear: you, me, your mom, and kpop sensation Kim Nam-joon should all be paying for our media. We should be supporting out artists in anyway that we possibly can, but we have to face the facts that media isn’t as safe and protected as we’ve come to think it is. We need to take a more nuanced view on things.

For right now I’m very happy to know that media might be preserved and protected, even inadvertently, so that it can be shared with future generations. It’s impossible to save everything we love or want to see more of but we can do our best to protect our investments, both for our wallets sake and our cultures sake. What will you want to share with your kids or grandkids one day?