Tag: Visual Communications

Jason finally learns how to make GIFs

Look at that, folks from yesterday’s post.

This is what we in the business call “good continuity.”

For those of you who don’t care to dive into the rabbit hole: Hello!

Welcome to me talking about today’s Society of Professional Journalists — Cal State Fullerton chapter meeting.

I’ve been our branch Secretary for a year now, but last semester the meetings conflicted with my three-hour Visual Communications class.

So this semester I’ve been better about going. Even if that means commuting for just that, like today.

Doing so has offered me the chance to live tweet a guest presentation by Washington Post editor Gene Park:

Before plugging his social media accounts and taking a photo with @csuf students and faculty, @GenePark asked @thedailytitan reporter who would be writing about the @FullertonSpj meeting if he needed any more quotes. “Titan pride.” pic.twitter.com/4X6Ai9MKJC

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) February 28, 2019

Then it took me on a tour of the CBS2/KCAL9 Broadcast Center.

Today, the train of interesting things continued as we hosted USC Digital Journalism Professor Amara Aguilar.

Here she is (right) with our chapter president, Harrison Faigen (left).

The funny thing is, I’ve attended one of her presentations.

Last year at the ACP Convention in Long Beach, I learned about Google reporting tools like the Cardboard VR camera from Aguilar. Wrote all about it here.

Today she went over a couple of different tools that are useful for journalists to create a better social media presence on platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

The presentation started with a few general tips, despite the idea that most content is tailored to the platform.

Primarily that social media content is best if it “awe” a viewer, provides them “laughter and amusement,” or instills some sense of “empathy” and “surprise.”

Then I jotted down this quote about how social media should be used to connect with people:

“When you’re looking at your device late at night before bed, people want to see personal content,” Aguilar said.

Personal stuff is particularly effective when it’s visual, so she spent her time teaching us about two apps anyone can access on their mobile devices.

First, the graphic design portion of the Adobe Creative Cloud: Adobe Spark Post.

If you’ve spent a lot of time on social media or digital news sites like Now This, you’ve likely seen the kinds of images with text overlays that Spark Post is good for.

Because CSUF students have free use of the Adobe Creative Cloud, we were able to practice creating our own.

For the purposes of goofing around, I reused this image from my post-Us Twitter freak-out:

I’m actually feeling really exhausted, and am going to take the night to chill with a nice cup of tea and Joe Cool.

But tomorrow. I will have words on #UsMovie. Because regardless of the audience, I have good things to say about @JordanPeele and @Lupita_Nyongo. pic.twitter.com/DJQr6vGJp9

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) March 24, 2019

And reimagined it as this baseless Peanut’s fan graphic:

Nice, huh?

I think that resource is pretty neat, but mostly because it’s good for cropping images to dimensions used by specific social media sites.

The piece above being perfect for Instagram, apparently.

Dunno about that… I’ll let you know if I get more than just four likes on the post I made using it.

What I can see as being more useful to me in the long-run was her introduction to the GIPHY CAM app.

See, I’m a man who likes a good GIF — and I pronounce it both ways, so don’t bother asking.

I’ve always been interested in making my own, but never enough to seek out good ways to do so.

When I’m on my phone, this app seems like a pretty decent approach.

For instance, check out this practice GIF I made attempting to create a looping image:

Isn’t it amazing how I’m not only chubby, pimpled, clearly sleep-deprived and unshaven, but also that I couldn’t get the camera to sit perfectly still even when I had it propped up on a table?

I love that about myself.

Probably not the most successful first GIF attempt, but now that I know about this app I can get more practice.

Perhaps one day I’ll be skilled enough to make silly comic book GIFs in a big news story like this UFC girl piece from Medium Aguilar showed us.

Funny enough, this SPJ meeting was held in Professor Frank Russell‘s Comm 201 class. There was an issue booking the Titan Student Union.

Almost three years ago I first started my Twitter account in 201 because he required it. I’ve come to both thank him because it taught me a lot about social media, but also resent him after spending hours mindlessly scrolling.

Now that I’m about to graduate, it looks like I’m still learning new things about social media with him.

Isn’t it amazing how things come full circle?

Balance is key

As promised earlier, my time to go radio silent for finals has come and (hopefully) gone. This weekend was just a bit too full of work for me to spend extra time coming up with blog post topics.

That said, it was a very productive weekend! I finished my nine page paper for Evolution and Creation:

Finally finished my last big research paper of the semester, so that’s 3/6 commitments done.

Bring on those exams! pic.twitter.com/8IKMUhoPd3

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) December 16, 2018

Which considering how much I was dreading the assignment, the fact that I banged it out in a day or two was wonderful — and I got a lovely talking point out of it.

Then on Sunday I took my online Visual Communications exam. Was a bit harder than I expected it to be, but still squeaked out with an 84 percent…

… That was immediately balanced out by an exceedingly curved 110 percent on Exam 2. Not sure how it happened, but it means I’ve retained a high A in the class.

I also spent time putting my study guides together for two Psych exams. One of which, Learning and Memory, is officially over and done!

I got an 82 percent, though I can’t complain because even that score retains my A in the class.

Thus, all I have left for the semester is my cumulative, non-curved Sensation and Perception exam and a presentation on my aforementioned paper.

Then I am free.

I’m going to try to do a blog post every day during finals, probably culminating with a semester-in-review sort of thing. I’ve found that having some distractions to keep the stress of exam season balanced out has been especially helpful during this semester’s class cycle.

In fact, the rest of this post will be talking about the media I consumed this weekend to break up all of my studying and writing woes. Hence the Thanos reference: Studying and fun in perfect harmony.

I have TV, Movie and Video Game stuff to talk about, so it should be (mostly) fun! Plus this keeps me from the existential dread of my next exam for a wee bit longer.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

I want to do a full-scale post all about Smash in the early days of Winter Break, so I’ll keep things brief right now.

Ultimate has been my ‘play a few hours a night’ de-stressor, and boy have I needed that. The process of unlocking every character one-by-one was a great experience of gradually forgetting and being reminded of how many fighters there are in the game.

Yet the biggest thing to discuss (especially with online servers still being kind of trashy) is the sheer amount of love and care that went into the game’s references. The Classic and Adventure modes are a joy to play through because each fighter and Spirit has their own thing to make them unique.

Again, I’ll go more in-depth later. Though I do feel obligated to point y’all to my friend Kristina’s review in the Daily Titan that got published today, because I happened to pick it up a few minutes ago and it’s a good.

Wreck-It Ralph 2

There’s too many nice things to say about this sequel. On top of being a gorgeous piece of animation (with special accolades to the mass-character physics of a plot-relevant spoiler toward the end of the movie), Ralph Breaks the Internet presents an interesting take on the digital world that has strong characters, ever-present metaphoric theming and super tight narrative structure.

The movie also exceeds due to a rare blend of reverential and reference-filled, self-defacing humor that I would have never expected Disney to approve. Especially for the Princesses — who I’m sure you think you know everything about thanks to the ads, but I assure you are a beyond wonderful mix of fan service and commentary.

It helps that my Dad worked for Disney, so we laughed a lot at the jokes they were putting down.

If you haven’t seen Ralph Breaks the Internet, do yourself a favor. It’s not as video game-heavy as the first, but what it offers instead is just as good if not better.

Bohemian Rhapsody

Talk about a movie with a great set-up and wasted potential.

Bohemian Rhapsody is a biopic about Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury, but as my Dad aptly pointed out it winds up being more of a timeline on the success of the band than it is the trials and tribulations of Mercury’s life.

Don’t get me wrong, Rami Malek is wonderful as the lead character, surprisingly so considering how used to him as a psychopathic introvert from Mr. Robot.

The rest of the cast is good too, and the cinematography is very pretty. Plus, it’s hard to go wrong with a soundtrack composed of Queen songs.

But the narrative of the film falls really flat because it glosses over so much of the potential personal drama in favor of the band’s story. I swear, there are a number of scenes missing between Mercury and his father that would make a pay-off scene toward the end that much more impactful.

Bohemian Rhapsody is far from the worst thing I’ve seen this year. It’s kind of perfectly average, disappointingly so.

But the worst thing I’ve seen this year probably goes to:

Venom

Wow. What a hot mess.

You know it’s bad when the best part of the movie is a totally irrelevant post-credit scene previewing another movie that I would have had much more fun watching.

The only thing Venom has going for it is Tom Hardy as the titular character’s host, Eddie Brock — but even then he’s given nothing to work with. Half of this movie feels like it was left on the cutting room floor. It literally meanders until a relationship between the two that had APPARENTLY been developed without us knowing about it arrives.

Then we’ve immediately got the unearned climax to hit.

The whole experience is also generally unpleasant because of clear editing issues like awkward jump cuts. Maybe if the dialogue was better and the characters were likable I wouldn’t have noticed so readily, but because we got things like this:

It was hard to stay engaged.

Venom has been beaten to death so I won’t abuse the poor horse. Instead I’ll just say… Go watch Nando V. Movies’ fix for it instead.

Big Mouth

I can’t give you all a full review of this one. I only watched a chunk of the second season with my sister, so I’m working entirely off that.

That said, Netflix’s Big Mouth is an… Interesting experience. It’s a show all about young teenagers going through life changes, with puberty given physical form as “hormone monsters” that work off of them in a variety of cliché coming-of-age scenarios.

The premise of a physical embodiment of puberty is interesting enough to work through all the clichés in what might otherwise be a typical school-age comedy — alongside a heaping helping of gross-out and mature humor. There were about as many moments where I said, “damn that’s pretty accurate” as I cringed at something uncomfortable (like most of the musical numbers).

If you think you would enjoy a Family Guy-esque adult comedy, but a little smarter and more fresh, Big Mouth is worth checking out. I’ll probably go back and finish season 1 before season 3 comes out.

Featured Image courtesy of Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons

A change of scenery

When I wasn’t playing Smash Bros., I’ve spent the last two days trying to get a jump on the last four pieces of my fall 2018 commitments. Namely the last essay for my Evolution and Creation class.

Granted, the process of buckling down and focusing has been made slightly more difficult by the constant Discord reminders that most of my friends are officially off because of different schedules… But hey, that’s what distractions and isolation are for.

Particularly distractions and isolation with regards to the headline of this blog post: Changes of scenery.

Don’t you love how masterfully I tie in these themes and draw attention to them for extra padding and lampshading?

My change of scenery for the day came early this morning when Mom asked me to come out to Lakewood with her. While Aly went to school, we brought some of her musical instruments to their usual shop for repairs and upkeep.

After that we hung around at a local Starbucks; a nice, quiet little spot to work on homework.

But also with at least a little bit of Smash Bros. because… Yeah it’s addictive.

I actually just unlocked every character for normal Smash battles and am well on my way to completing the World of Light adventure mode. It’s a blast, even if it came at a very inopportune time.

Anyway though, sitting around Starbucks was productive to an extent. Yet the most interesting part of being there was this Christmas-themed decoration:

Look at this thing. It’s kind of gaudy and over-the-top, but also aesthetically pleasing in a way that I can understand why it was made.

The coffee cup tree is just trite and inoffensive overall, but the reason I wanted to point it out was because I found it hilarious to see such a blatantly Christ-centric symbol used as decor here when just a few years ago the world lost its shit due to red cups.

The wishy-washy nature of Internet-era overreaction is truly a sight to behold, is it not?

That being said, because my time in relative isolation these last two days has offered me the chance to get a sizable jump on this essay I previously believed was going to be a nightmare, I figured I should talk a little bit about it.

Seems like the least I can do in all fairness after shoving the fruits of my research on the Visual Comm essay down your throats too.

This essay is about Deism, the religious school of thought that considers a God having created the universe only to step back and let everything run on its own accord. It was popular during the Enlightenment especially, and caught my interest handily during my time in AP European History back during Sophomore year of high school.

As a result I decided to focus my research paper on it. Though this specifically dives into contemporary thoughts on the religion post-evolution emerging as a result of good old Chuck Darwin.

One source I discovered talking about Deism in relation to a post-evolutionary “modern setting” (being 1898) had such a fantastic little tidbit that I figured it would be worth dedicating at least half of a blog post to it.

For context: In a journal called The North American Review, an auspicious Walton W. Battershall submitted a short piece as comment to an earlier story published. His comment was about “The Efficacy of Prayer in the Light of Evolution.”

The important aspects of the writing to pull for my paper were his discussions of prayer being a placebo of sorts. Something that provides a positive benefit to the praying individual just because of the possibility that it might receive a response from God, even if it likely wouldn’t. He goes on to undress Deism for distancing God to the point of making that possibility totally unattainable, but you can read the whole thing here if you want.

The important aspects of the writing to pull for this blog post is a line I’ll leave completely out of context just for the sake of how incredible a piece of prose it is.

Just the thought of this clearly reverent man talking about God’s pitiful, throbbing ‘Fatherhood’ is so hilariously phallic that it made my night when I found it yesterday.

So much so that I felt compelled to share it with the world. Good old 1898.

That’s about all I’ve got for you today, as I’ve got to get back to finishing that essay. Only short breaks for blog writing allowed in the Rochlin house this weekend.

Luckily, after this weekend is three days of finals followed by freedom. Boy is that freedom going to be… Smashing.

Because puns.

Fall 2018 finals stress update

Originally I was planning on getting part two of my “old stuff from my desktop Mac” series out today (in spite of the fact that only 2 of you actually read the first one, come on guys I was proud of that). But then the unsung combination of homework, Super Smash Bros. and work meetings kind of distracted me from it.

The subject is kind of near and dear to my heart, so I want the post to look really solid before I put it out.

That being said, as a result I kind of didn’t have a post to put out for all of you. For most of the day I was totally fine with that, especially considering I put out that post last week talking about school stress and how I might fall behind on this blog stuff.

Except then I went to the gym, took a hot shower and realized that I would personally feel bad if I didn’t have ANYTHING to share with you all today.

So here’s my brief sharing something with you all today. It won’t be long, but it is actually a nice update.

While that “Burnout” post I linked just two paragraphs ago was a huge laundry list of stressors to work through, it really did turn out to be a crazy in-the-moment explosion of my self-deprecating lack of confidence.

Since then I’ve done other things like talk about Superman comics (a post that Scott from NerdSync actually noticed because I was overenthusiastic about @ing him, but that made me feel super good), find cool stuff on my old computer and play Smash Bros.

So mentally I’m in a much better place.

That better place has facilitated actually working through some of the stuff I had on my plate to a much more productive degree. Now that I’m out of my own head and just ranting for the sake of it, I’d say the main stressors of the next two weeks boil down to six things:

Three big end-of-term essays and three final exams.

Except wait, no longer are there six things!

As of about an hour ago, I officially turned in my Visual Comm essay:

Yeah you know, the one that I wrote a post on while doing some particularly interesting research for a while back? Wound up writing ~13 pages with two pages of references.

Hope the professor likes it — maybe next time he’ll remember my name and not call me James in an email.

~~Definitely not still bitter about it~~

Thus my big list of concerns drops to five.

My Mass Media Ethics final paper (also the final for that class)
My Evolution and Creation final paper
My Sensation and Perception exam (cumulative, kind of a nightmare)
My Learning and Memory exam
My Visual Communications exam (online only, not so bad)

I know this post is a bit cobbled together and padded out by referencing older things on my blog, but I didn’t want to leave you all with nothing.

Because I love you guys!

… Even if you did leave my cool Smash Bros. post out to dry.

But hey it’s only been a day, so maybe that’ll pick up with time.

Either way, hopefully this post, if nothing else, serves as a reminder that even the most stressful periods of time in the moment can turn out okay on the other end.

Yeah, that’s a good message to take away from this. Nailed the heartstring appeal, Jason.

On the first night…

It has been brought to my attention that I was lied to by my mom and last night was not, in fact, the first night of Hanukkah. Tonight is.

I know I’m at least partially at fault for not fact checking myself… But I’ve gotten permission to blame her for it.

So if you’re in the future reading this, confused as to why I didn’t know when the actual date of Hanukkah was in 2018.

That’s why.

Happy Hanukkah everybody!

That’s right, as of sunset today, the Jewish festival of lights began. Because we’re on a lunar calendar in the calculation of hebrew holiday placement, the big events tend to fall out at different times every year.

This year it just so happened that our closest equivalent to Christmas fell out about a month before Christmas. Or as we in the Rochlin house like to call it: Two days before Alyson’s birthday.

Yeah… She got a bit shafted in that department as far as the availability of her non-Jewish friends goes for parties every year. But hey, at least we don’t have to worry about buying her presents twice-over in the same time period.

…

At least some years we don’t. Like this year, for instance.

Now I’m a bit tired and sore after helping a friend move some boxes today, so I don’t think I’m going to write anything too prolific. It’ll give me some more time to work on this essay — which, by the way, is the same one I talked about doing my FDA research on the other day and am continuing to have a blast with. I’ll definitely have to do another post on it sometime soon.

But for now, if you want some more Hanukkah-based content, you can take a look at this post I wrote about getting a chunk of presents early this year.

Tonight I got the rest of everything, since we gave up on the eight nights of presents thing a long time ago. The haul expanded to include a new set of Cards Against Humanity cards, a lovely check from my grandparents in Florida (who I’ll thank here as well as over-the-phone soon!) and..

Wait. What’s this?

It can’t be.

It’s…

We’ve got new Pokémon! This is not a drill.

And I definitely did not know about it ahead of time from being in the store when we purchased the game.

Totally.

If you see a lot of posts coming out of my Twitter account in particular talking about all of my new Pokémon adventures in the near future, now you know why.

I’m thinking I’ll treat this installment specially. It has the capacity for two-player games, so I’ve considered trying to only play the game with my sister so we can have the experience together.

Whether or not I break that rule as I get too excited to play the game is a bridge I’ll have to cross when I get to it.

But that being said, hopefully you all have a great Hanukkah — even if you don’t celebrate!

I’m going to go off and spend some time with my family for the holiday.

And rest my back a bit.

Featured Image courtesy of Adiel lo via Wikimedia Commons

When did we start labeling ingredients?

A few weeks back I talked about the essay I was going to have to write for my Visual Communications class.

I’m sure if you follow my posts regularly you remember this one. My little laugh at the 1950s era advertising we could choose to analyze.

In that case I’m sure you also remember that I decided to go with this 7-Up ad.

Boy is it more and more beautiful every time I see it.

I bring up the subject again because I started to work on the actual paper itself yesterday evening and already the damn thing has taken me down a bizarre rabbit hole.

A rabbit hole that, in all honesty, is pretty interesting. If you ask me at least.

Here’s some more in-depth context before I get into that branch of my research. The content requirements for the essay are relatively straight forward. We simply have to examine the image we chose from the six perspectives that were elaborated in earlier in the semester:

Personal — Our gut reactions to the image.
Historical — How the context of the time shaped the image.
Technical — What techniques and elements went into creating the image.
Ethical — Would ethical philosophers find the creation or use of the image justified?
Cultural — What symbols can be found in the image that relate it to the culture of the time.
Critical — Taking a second, more objective look at the image now that all of the analysis isdone to see how thoughts and opinions might have changed.

My deep dive began as I broached into the historical aspects of the advertisement.

Most of the analysis was easy enough. The ad comes from the 1950s, so there was plenty to discuss as far as the post-war economic boom and opening stages of the Cold War went. Both contributed to the development of a middle class American ‘nuclear family’ that in many ways became dependent on purchasing power to show their status and connection to the mainstream culture.

What I looked into had nothing to do with that overall historical context. Instead it came from pinpointing a very specific part of the advertisement.

In the lower right-hand corner there’s a block of text which, among other things, tries to convince new parents to feed their babies a “wholesome” mix of 7-Up and milk.

More important to point out for my purposes is the section where the advertisers tell readers that they have all the ingredients in 7-Up listed on the bottle — despite the fact that it was not required.

When I read that I stared at the screen for a moment mulling things over. Were food labels not required in the 1950s? There was a Food and Drug Administration overlooking those matters at that point in time, wasn’t there?

It was a bit of a tangent, sure, but if I found the idea so interesting it seemed like a good research avenue to go down.

… Only in part because I needed a few more sources to fit the requirement and some U.S. government resources seemed official enough to justify using. I promise.

I found that, yes, the FDA did exist prior to the publication of this 7-Up advertisement. The FDA came into place alongside the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act in 1906 according to the horse’s mouth.

However, labels on food like you see required today, with their widely enumerated requirements that are stipulated upon in this most recent FDA Food Labeling Guide from 2013, were not required until the passage of the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA). Prior to that, listing things like ingredients and nutritional information of food product labels were purely voluntary.

So it seems like the 7-Up people were right in congratulating themselves for posting that kind of information on their product in the 1950s.

But in that case, just when did it become a requirement for everyone?

Diving a little deeper into the subject I came across this discussion of the history behind nutritional labeling on the National Center for Biotechnical Information’s website. As a subset of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, I figure they’re a pretty reputable source.

According to this source, the NLEA wasn’t officially passed until November 1990.

That’s almost 90 years after the FDA first came into being. It’s astounding to me that it took that long to get this kind of legislation passed!

Perhaps that’s hindsight bias in some respect. Food labels are so ubiquitous in the 21st century, and they’re the butt of so many jokes about GMOs and fake ingredients, that it’s hard to imagine a time they weren’t in use.

To think that time was just a few short decades ago…

Humans are pretty crazy, huh?

Musings on what’s ahead

Again, life seems to have thrown me a bone with this whole pre-Thanksgiving Break school stuff.

My 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. class tonight was easier than usual, much like yesterday’s class was. Not because of the content of the class this time around, but because we miraculously got out in just an hour rather than three.

Okay well it wasn’t miraculous, I suppose.

The professor for my Visual Communications class is apparently a part of an administrative group set to appoint new professors in his department this semester. Part of that obligation means occasional meetings with the rest of that group.

Including meetings he was not previously aware of. Such as the one that he wound up having today during out class period.

Thus: Surprise! Only an hour’s worth of class before we were let out and allowed to roam free.

It always feels good to get home early on a day where I expected to be sticking around late. Especially when that gives me extra time to do the stuff I need to do, like edit a piece for Gladeo. Or edit a research paper proposal for my Evolution and Creation class. Or help edit an oral history project for my friend Tiana.

Apparently it’s just an edit-heavy kind of night.

After doing all that work I wound up sitting here close to 10:00 p.m. realizing I didn’t have any ideas for a blog post. Yet I didn’t want to just leave well enough alone, so I figured I would hike up my jeans and write… Something.

Anything.

Yet I mulled it over a bit and couldn’t come up with anything substantial. At least nothing I was willing to try to scrounge together in the next two hours.

Figured it would work to do one of my patented ‘deflecting my responsibility to write now by writing about the things I’m going to write about in the future’-type posts and call it a night. Get some Monster Hunter in or something before having to go to bed for my hematologist appointment in the morning.

Speaking of, that’s probably what I’m going to be writing about tomorrow. Not really because of the hematologist stuff in particular, since it’s just my (at this point) quarterly check-up.

Instead I think I’m going to write about a somewhat tangential point: My weight loss progress.

I haven’t checked my weight since my physical a few months back, so it’ll be good to see whether or not exercising regularly has helped out. Or it’ll be bad to see that exercising regularly has not helped, which will potentially completely demoralize all the progress I’ve been trying to make.

So that’ll be fun.

The day after that I’ll probably have a post about a tour at the Long Beach Post that I’m going on with the Fullerton SPJ chapter.

That should ACTUALLY be fun, hopefully. Not like the sarcastic fun I just joked about.

Once the weekend hits, I’ll see about finally hitting Toby Fox’s Deltarune. Maybe write something about that. The momentum of the weekend could also help me finally hit on a Monster Hunter-related post, regarding my current obsession with armor planning perhaps.

Next Tuesday I have a mandatory internship orientation. There might be something good to glean out of that for a blog post?

I don’t know, I’m kind of grasping at straws by this point aren’t I?

I’d rather not keep you all here for some random bs I’m cobbling together. So I’ll let you go free with a hopeful “come again soon!” like some kind of 7/11 exit sign.

…

Yeah okay I’m just rambling now. Good night, everybody.

Saving Daylight

My perception of Daylight Savings Time changes every year depending on what my class schedule is like.

For instance, last year I barely noticed the time shift during the Fall semester. Probably because 90 percent of my time outside of classes was spent in the Daily Titan newsroom, where seven or so hours kind of blurred together day-in and day-out. Nobody realized when the sky changed outside when we were so wrapped up in work.

The year before that I do very distinctly remember having a later class in University Hall where the time shift made a serious difference when leaving for the day. At one point in the semester I walked out of class and it was suddenly dark outside, whereas it was light the week before.

Kinda jarring stuff, not gunna lie.

This semester has been much more akin to that jarring transition. However, more delayed than it should have been.

I have two late classes this semester, one on Tuesday and one on Wednesday. My Tuesday block class got cancelled this week however, as Professor Rizzo wanted to give everyone the chance to vote.

Wish my Psych professor had the same idea… But oh well. We’ve got a day off for Veterans Day next Monday so that should make up for it.

Because I wasn’t in school until 7:00 p.m. or so yesterday, I did not see the difference in lighting. However, I definitely did see it tonight when I left my Visual Comm class.

Normally I wouldn’t give too much of a second thought to the time shift. Sure it got a bit colder and more awkward getting to my car in the dark, but nothing too crazy.

I guess DST is in my head a bit more often lately thanks to Prop 7 on the ballet this year. A proposition which passed with 60 percent of the vote.

Now that it’s passed, our state legislature will be able to vote on eliminating Daylight Savings Time all together (by making it “permanent”) if a federal law is enacted first.

After 21 years of experiencing it, I can’t exactly imagine the time shift just being gone all together. I know that it’s already gone in states like Arizona, but the biyearly change feels so ubiquitous.

How would you feel if DST went away — if you live in a place where that happens of course. I’m kind of curious to know what sort of public reaction might come out of it.

P.S. — Yes, this is kind of a space filler post. I’m trying not to expend a lot of effort with a second exam to study for tomorrow.

Though my exam today went well, considering I got a 91 percent on it. So I’m not very nervous.

Just the usual amount of nervous.

As an added note, Fire Emblem Heroes has a new banner and a totally new game mode coming out tomorrow. But I probably won’t be talking about it tomorrow. Have to head to bed early so I can sleep up for my exam, and then at night I have an awards ceremony to go to for Aly.

I’ll probably talk about that on the blog tomorrow, save Fire Emblem for Friday.

Hope you all can forgive me.

Spotted around Venice

I spent some time over in Venice, California today to meet with Michelle about some Gladeo updates.

It was mostly simple stuff. Talking about how to register the nonprofit with Cal State Fullerton’s internship center so I can use it for my class next semester, going over future recruitment, discussing more stuff I can do with the organization going forward, all that good stuff.

Speaking of, I might get to try assisting with video production down the line — Stay tuned for that if so.

However, outside of that there wasn’t really anything noteworthy enough for blog post purposes. Most of my night from here on out is just going to be homework and work-work now that I’m home, and I wouldn’t consider any of that interesting blog topic fodder either.

So I decided I would write something about a few interesting things I ran into while wandering the area of Venice I was in while waiting for our meeting time.

Just feels like something fun I wanted to throw together as a post for the day that has some fun photos.

That said, here are some fun photos.

Just across the street from the restaurant where we met, I found this bike holster. This metallic… Pair of pants, for lack of a better descriptive term for its shape, is made out of old pipes and handheld tools.

Recycling. Good for the environment and apparently good at inspiring random 20-somethings with blogs to write about interesting little things around Venice.

I mostly took this picture because it has become an in-joke within my family to count the number of bird scooters we see lying around different parts of the street as we go on travels around places like Santa Monica.

Between the signage and the cute cotton candy-colored house that it is displayed for, I grew a very quick respect for whoever lives here.

I posted this picture on Twitter because I thought it was pretty hilarious. Over there I said ‘I can appreciate the honesty’ of the statement, though I actually spent a good few minutes trying to figure out exactly how to explain what this is.

Have you ever had those moments when a word is on the tip of your tongue that potentially describes a situation perfectly, but you can’t get that word out of your memory? That was me pacing back-and-forth along a sidewalk trying to write that dumb tweet.

A dumb tweet that nobody looked at.

I blame the lack of a proper word choice.

That said, if you have a good term for proving a point by doing something physical along the lines of what you’re describing, please let me know.

Who is Boobie Ralph?

Why is the “70” in quotation marks? Is Boobie Ralph 70 years old? Or is he from the 1970s?

Is the squiggly line underneath the numbers meant to emphasize them? Or is it a question mark?

I don’t know. I’m not a psychic.

But boy do I want to know.

I don’t have a lot to say about this one, I just liked the pattern on top of this building. Not sure it’s very visible in this picture, but there’s a cool spiderweb of mosaic glass from the looks of things.

Pretty neat.

There’s a few different things to take out of this one stop sign.

Stop “gentrifying venice” is a good starting place. I don’t think I can add too much more, the statement being plastered at random points throughout the city this way kind of speaks for itself.

Then there are the photo stickers. An anime girl and the Umbrella logo from Resident Evil on the stop sign itself, as well as the bear-shaped honey container on the sign below it.

Plus I would kill to know who ‘blake’ and ‘sarah’ are so I could ask why they seem to be competing for namespace on the off-kilter signage.

What can I say, this particular sign brings up a lot of questions. While I don’t have too many answers, I at least have a pretty picture of it — in my opinion anyway.

I thought the painting on this house’s gate was absolutely wonderful.

While Venice has its own specific beach culture, the composition of this painting in particularly reminded me so much of the Redondo shoreline that it just really hit home. The twin lifeguard stations and palm trees, the lovely sunset above the sands…

I actually wanted to go to the beach after seeing it.

That’s a pretty powerful image, if you ask me.

I think I’ll have to blame my Visual Comm class for making me just a little too attuned to stand-out things in my environment. Whether it be something unusual or something aesthetically pleasing, I’ve been taking a lot more time to mull over these ideas.

Arguably that isn’t a bad thing by any means. On top of the benefits of being more attentive to one’s environment in a digital age, these sort of days where I’m taking a bunch of pretty things out of my environment also make for great blog fodder!

So, if you like this kind of thing, let me know. I wouldn’t be opposed to traveling around California a bit more often to do these sort of observation-driven posts.

Hitting the books, hitting the sauce

I was a little lukewarm about writing something for the ol’ blog today. Pretty much my whole arc of experiences has included doing homework and recovering from staying up so late to watch the 18 inning Dodgers/Red Sox game last night.

Because yeah, I watch sports once in a while. Luckily I just happened to be watching a sport when a record-breaking game did its thing.

But even if I like baseball more than pretty much any other sport, I don’t think I can write about that for extended periods of time.

Pretty much why I’m not a sports writer.

In terms of homework, I did an assignment about infographics for my Visual Communications class, read a few pieces on the McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education court case for my Evolution and Creation class, sent out some emails to professors (alongside some work emails for Gladeo) and spent some time trying to come up with a title for my Honors project.

None of that felt particularly enlightening to write about here, though.

So my only other real option was possibly writing about the fact that I’m going to be getting an award real soon as I found out via Twitter and the Daily Titan advisor Bonnie yesterday.

Yet even there it doesn’t feel like the right time to go around and say ‘hey go check out the thing that’s getting an award.’ I’ll probably do that around the time when I actually go to an awards ceremony.

Assuming that’s a thing that will happen sometime soon.

With all those dead ends in mind, I took a break, ate some food, went to the gym and showered. As always, going to the gym seemed to spark some inspiration on what to write.

Guess I’m as much of a proponent of the gym being a good chance to relax and clear your thoughts as anyone now? For as weird as that is to say.

But to be fair, it wasn’t actually the exercise itself that brought about some inspiration. Rather it was the homework that I continued to do while I was power walking on a treadmill.

Because you know. I’m lame like that.

One assignment I’ve been pushing off is picking an image to examine for my Visual Comm class’s final paper. The professor gave us a pre-determined list so I had to pick something off of it. While looking through the list of images at the gym, I stumbled across this gem that will definitely be what I write my paper on:

Just look at this 1950s 7-Up ad. It’s phenomenal. I’m not even sure where to begin talking about it.

Actually that’s not true, the obvious place to start is with the giant baby, an 11-month-old kid drinking a soda bottle as though it were milk. Not only is it a funny image, but it’s also a pretty striking one thanks to the color contrast.

Oh but that’s not all. I hope you read through the text on this sucker too, because if you did I’m sure you’ll see why I love it so much.

First off there’s an ad for a totally different T.V. show just slapped in next to the baby’s arm for some reason.

Then on the bottom-left corner, where the bottle is among a collection of other children’s toys, the advertisers recommend you “avoid imitations,” completely lacking the foresight to know that in the future everyone just calls everything of that nature Sprite anyway.

But most important is the larger block of text which advocates for, and I quote, “Add(ing) 7-Up to the (toddler’s) milk in equal parts” because it’s a “wholesome combination.”

That’s fucking astounding in just how genuine they are in advocating such a disgusting act for new mothers to immediately get their children hooked on shitty flavored carbonation water.

And I absolutely love it.

It’s just such a product of its time that I’m actually really looking forward to writing about the image for my essay. So much so that I thought it would be worth writing my blog post today about it so I can spread the gospel to you, my loving readers.

As an additional note, I did also want to point out that if I wasn’t picking the 7-Up ad, I would have gone with this ad for fancy ties:

I don’t think I really need to say why. Just the idea that getting a nice tie is justification for obscene misogyny (and making your wife love that same misogyny because it’s a ‘man’s world’) is such a great little time capsule.

Plus there probably would have been a lot to say about exactly what the implications are when you have your wife get down on her knees for something as innocuous as handing off breakfast in bed.

Because come on, look at his face. You know what he’s thinking.

But I digress, because soda baby spoke to me way more and I’m going with it.

P.S. — Just consider this post an open call for any other crazy old ads that could never have been made today with this kind of 50s aesthetic, because I think they’re amazing and would love to see more. Kay? Thanks.