Did I grow as a web writer?

I am very tempted to answer this question with a flat “no”, but the truth is that publishing and maintaining a site has always been new to me. I have never written a serious piece for the internet, and while I had experience in navigating and responding to posts that i had interests in, I never really thought about what the creators though about whenever they made their piece. As a fan of the niche community, I usually do not delve too deep into the official blogs and sites because of my lack of interest. Most of the entries that i have read are from informal writers, most which are interested in communicating essential information with little else. This robotic and almost utilitarian approach is very contrary to what is being taught in class because the words did not properly express their enjoyment. On the other hand, said text can also be heavily emotional and expressive, resulting in a great show of interest, but presented in an unappealing fashion. In short, my experience was in people who were dedicated to their cause, but not experienced with finding new followers.

Not surprisingly, the most important skill that I would pick up from this class is not the writing techniques, but the presentation that I would use to frame my writing. Unlike replies and news announcements, blog writing is built around the fact that we are specifically creating our pieces for the audience to read them at their discretion. In order to do that, I needed to be able to present my writing as something that was eye-catching and sustainable for the duration of its length. Although I could not say for myself that I had grown for this subject, I was able to gain a rudimentary understanding of what needed to be done in order for me to gain a level of competence in this area.

Blog writing is a lot like telling a story, with the knowledge that what you are writing about is meant to entertain. As I had learned previously in class, the digital age has come with the unfortunate side effect of limiting our attention span to the immediate area with a high chance of wandering off. Unlike my usual internet activity which involves FAQ writing and advice giving, I had to write for an internet audience using formats that catch their eyes. The difficult part of addressing my level of progress in this department tends to be lacking because I know I have weak beginnings in contrast to my rambling body texts.

For my most successful online piece, “And this is how I live without Facebook”, I was able to achieve a measure of success because at that point, I was able to combine certain factors to make my piece stand out. In that one piece, I can see a tagline that worked, an engaging video and a title that appeals to a broad audience. The beauty of such a setup is that it exemplifies the requirements of criteria 4, “Understand the audience conventions of electronic environments. We will think about the audience expectations particular to electronic environments”. People like to see these articles because it appeals to what they know and frequent. Despite the fact that the article is one that vehemently denounces the value of Facebook, it still is my most read piece because it uses the audience’s preferences to garner a solid number of views.

Carrying this to a successful website or blog is probably what I seem to lack in terms of growth in this class. While I am able to understand the requirements of creating a blog with a strong following, I usually lack the finer points required to give it the starting number of viewers that it so desperately needs. I do not use outside means like Facebook and Twitter to promote my blogs, while I write based on topics that are usually obscure and relevant to a niche following. I am also fairly mundane with the number of tags that I use, which severely limits the amount of views that I could garner for my site. Essentially, I could be writing a world class piece with the best presentation that I could ever create, but it still would not help me with my method of distribution. If could have taken this class again, I would have probably required more help in this area because one way or another, the number of views I have are effectively bottom level.

The final verdict is that the benefits that I gained from this class were largely in terms of writing presentation. Although I did see many new things, the actual substance that I was able to assimilate was largely based on the looks of the site rather than the writing. In the end, the main difficulty I would have with this site is in how much of it I would be able to put to use. This class has greatly improved my ability to manage a blog, but it would probably not change my area of preference, which is still tip and guide writing for gamers. Blog writing may well integrate itself into my preferences, but time will still need to tell if I can combine them into a successful piece of online publication.

Oh the power of internet publishing

The creation of stories like The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam and Underbelly are works of fiction that can only be created over the internet. The unconventional nature of the published material provides us with a level of freedom to what we can do. This form of media comes from the freedom that the tools will be able to provide to you. But the internet also makes the reverse possible. There are modes of internet publishing that intentionally limit themselves to simplicity in order to tell a greater story. While the tools are available to them, the choice to use them is purely in their hands.

Dwarf Fortress, as simple as a complex game.

For something like Dwarf Fortress succession games, this concept is priceless. In the memetic story of Boatmurdered, we have a crew of players who chronicle the stories of the events to befall the mountain bastion. The practice is simple, each player will download the save file from the previous player and play from their point while speaking from the point of view of one of their simulated dwarves. With luck, they can make it through the year and write their part of the story. The hilarity of it is the fact that without any form of control over what is done and what is written, the game spins out of control with each player creating more and more entertaining chapters. By the time we get to the final chapter, we are bewildered at how insane the campaign had gotten and how climactic it has turned out.

Internet distribution is awesome

Free on the internet. Those are the words that most people like to see. What Radiohead picked up as an experiment in media distribution is only touching upon what many other artists on the internet have done so far. The “pay what you will” format that they have harkens to sites that accept donations or other means of fan support.By making it free, they opened the floodgates to something more than just appeal, but they had also inadvertently given people something that other services deny, the full package.

Looks familiar? Regardless of the services being administered, anything that has a price tag on it will be subject to programs such as these. The inevitability is sad, but regardless of what the implications are, it only points to one problem, which is that the artist remains unaware of how many people have their work. By cutting out the middleman and doing what they did, they not only directed the focus directly on themselves, but also gave them an option. The option to pay provides us with something far friendlier than a buy button with a price tag. Unlike the radio and television, the internet provides us with an ever expanding audience and freedom of distribution. Whether it is music or anything else, onefact is certain, artists can potentially make more money this way than through a distributor in informal sales alone.

And this is how I live without Facebook

Facebook is like Crack. The site carries with it so many cumulative problems that the short period of bliss you have with it will culminate in a lifetime of hatred. Like crack, you Facebook account is time consuming and addictive, eating away at the meager amount of time you have during your waking hours. Like crack, your continued usage of it will dominate your future prospects and opportunities, be they for better or for worse. And still more like crack, every attempt to leave will only beget a backlash that eventually returns you to the fold. The vicious cycle will rotate continuously with no exit,taunting you repeatedly in a masochistic relationship. How do you end it all? CAN you end it all?

The start of the new blog project

Play with Music

For my project, my blog will focus on video game music. Hopefully, this will introduce something new for you to enjoy.

Coincidental stealing?

With the internet being what it is, there should be no surprise to the amount of stuff that can be posted that look as if they have been ripped from the same source. Sometimes, people come up with the idea to do it, other times, we end up with a group that follows the leader. Essentially, what we have in our society today is not an extreme lack of originality, but a misunderstanding that originality is dead. Kleon’s perspective is great because it highlights the fact that one of the greatest ways to creating good pieces of artwork is to borrow from other sources. The logic is sound primarily because, within the pool of knowledge that we have, everything that we can think of has probably been done already.

What does your audience see?

What does your audience see in a site that they are browsing? According to Purdue, what they want to see are an intricate design of something that will catch their eye and give them something interesting to read. The guide goes through many ways for you to practice this concept from giving you tips on how to manage your colors and layouts to selecting a font that will catch their eyes. These techniques are certain to attract viewers who are willing to take a closer look and see what you have to say. For someone who is trying to start up and maintain a website, these tips provide a firm foundation.

Courtesy of MSPaintadventures, I now have your attention.

However, these tips only touch upon the veneer of netting a strong and consistent audience. What you are designing the site for often has the side effect of ostracizing certain audiences in order to appeal to others. The techniques that Purdue gives essentially teaches you how to design an academically appealing webpage or article with methods to attract attention towards it. For more specialized websites, these rules are often disregarded especially considering the nature of the website has to say. For the average person who browses the internet for what they want, they often already have an idea of what they are looking for and what their interests are in. As a result, they often forgo the design in the favor of something they find infinitely more substantial which is the content.

Age of Technical Difficulty.

In this epic tale, we meet a brave yet simple gentleman on a mission to fix wifis and program Tivos. It comes as no surprise that our world is now swimming in machines like this and will continue to do so in the future. But in the present, we are constantly bombarded with a relentless tirade of questions from the people we hold so dear. “How do these godforsaken contraptions work?” Such experiences are particularly trying when considered over a long period, it seems elementary to us but for many the task is not the same. Is it the language? Is it the buttons? Is it stream of graphics with hidden values that makes this task so extreme? All we can understand is that every facet of modern machines is undecipherable to them.

Remember, without the modem, this machine's productivity goes down by 100%.

Carrying this idea, there are many tales of people who have attempted to face these machines and failing with particularly humorous results. It should be asked by many, how this is possible on any level at all? Logically, this would of course carry over to the use of the internet. Despite the relative ease of managing internet use (ignoring of course the difficulty in mastering the meaning the behind the complex codes that raise their ugly heads during programming), it still manages to fly over their heads. While we can laugh at stories like this now, we still have to consider the fact that eventually, these machines are going to be used everywhere in our everyday lives (if they are not already) so why is it not being taught at this point?

Attempt to maintain concentration!

Most regrettable are the fears of the walls of text, but as unfortunate as the affliction is, it nevertheless plagues many of our beleaguered comrades and fellow human beings. As time has gone by, many of us have found ourselves predictably unnerved at many works of academia including but not limited to journals, textbooks, novels and even newspapers. To our sense of perception, some of these works of literature are truly of said nature, even the most learned of people would opt to skim rather than to read. But something is missing here. Despite the satirical nature of this article, it has provoked a thought that is common among the nation today and is steadily growing more and more prevalent. Americans as we know them are by the majority, poorly literate. It is a sad assumption and one that is stated with deep regret but one that may be true nonetheless. Said wall of text can be intimidating to normal readers, but to the average American, this can translate to something past intimidation and closer to fear. Do you believe Americans fear the text? Or are they simply too lazy to cope?

The first post

My name Jake Leung and I come from New York. In a nutshell, I would describe myself as an odd man considering that I am among  the very few Asian people that somehow stuck with English as a major. There is not much to say from the physical perspective, I walk, I breath and I do things that everyone else do every single day. I would not say much of anything for myself because what I do is not very different from what they can do. All I can say for myself is that I can try and as far as that is concerned, that is what makes all the difference. Who knows, maybe if I try hard enough I can actually do something no one else has ever accomplished before.

But all that aside I would have to say that i would be a gamer. But not the gamers that you would normally see being portrayed in media, the farcical portrayals of young men chasing after points, levels and nonsensical bloodshed. The very thought itself is sickening. As a self proclaimed connoisseur of modern gaming, I would liken gaming to the fine canvases of film and literature. Many games were made to tell stories using their own format, providing us with a means to not only relate to the characters but also to see the story unfold from a different perspective. Like films, I consider video games an attempt to create works of art on multiple levels. On one hand, you can tell a story, but it simultaneously tries to envelope you in its world, enamor you with its visual effects, strike your interests with the gameplay and mellow out your heart with its music. Most of the time, I find many people who would often brush this off as impossible, but with technology as it is these days, why is it not possible? After all, it clearly does exist.

I do not know what to look at; the dinosaur being fought, or the gorgeous scenery. Ecology recreation at its finest.

(Sit back, pause the game and leave it on for half an hour. The percussion is just so invigorating!)

On the internet, I would say that I would be a troper where I read to explore the aspects and the recurring themes in most pieces from short stories to shows. For that reason, I would never find a story enjoyable at face value, rather I would compare it to other work and hope to find something new. As a result of this, it would be inevitable to say that one of the best and most important sites that I frequent would be TV tropes which is a haven for people who wish to explore the cliches and recurring elements of any form of media.However, the site has proven useful in expanding awareness because anyone who is a frequenter of the site will often be linked into something that they will find an interest in and start watching immediately.

This is probably how I got into this show.

Other sites include LP Archives where people will spin their exploits in games into a compelling monologue, turning what could have been boring descriptions into something that you could spend all afternoon reading. With all that said, once one were to get into the world of tropes, it usually is difficult to take many pieces of writing seriously again. As they say, once you become a troper, there is no going back.