Elyse's blog

I don't see anything wrong with an interactive novel.
Personally, I loved Cathy's Book. I thought the pieces of evidence that came with the book only helped to enrich the experience of reading it- instead of imagining the pictures, the notes, the websites, and the voicemails, we were given them to look at for ourselves. We could draw our own conclusions, and then test them out by reading the book.
Even though there was some disappointment- I didn't imagine Victor looked the way he did in the photo we had to piece together- overall, the evidence helped make the story more real for me, and I found myself treating it as more of an experience, more interactive, than other fictional novels I've read, where everything is left to the imagination.  read more »

Doesn't it seem like everything today is "interactive?"
Everyone says that the world is getting smaller- now, instead of sending letters back and forth to families and friends and waiting days for their responses, we just dial them up on a phone, IM, or webcam if we really want to see them. It's a million times easier for us to talk to people on the other side of the world than it used to be- in fact, isn't it remarkable that that's even possible? Anything can happen at the touch of a button, thanks to advances in technology that make these things possible.  read more »

I'm not a huge fan of anime, but sometimes watching a Japanese cartoon in Japanese (with subtitles, of course) can really make you think.
I recently saw the movie Paprika, an anime movie that won some sort of Oscar, and it was amazing. The plot mainly focused around the differences and relationships between the imagination (dreams) and reality.
In the movie, there were several dreams that recurred in the minds of the main characters, with many different conflicts happening in each of them, until finally, the dream took over even the reality of the city in which the main characters were living, leading to a final battle in which dreams and reality are pitted against each other to see which one wins out.
Just in case you haven't seen it and you want to, I won't tell you the end, but the movie definitely made m think, especially in relationship to Photopia and Ryan's discussion of fiction and nonfiction.  read more »

Like a lot of pre-teen kids when AOL was still popular, I had conversations with SmarterChild and some of the other AIMbots (or however you spell that) when I was in middle school. Sometimes I even convinced myself that they were actual people who would actually help me figure out some of the things I was dealing with at the time. And it always fascinated me that they happened to reply almost at the exact moment I sent something to them. But then they'd say something like "I didn't understand that" or something completely out of the context of what I was talking about, that I was jarred back into reality realizing that these were not, in fact, humans, but robots programmed to respond in certain ways to certain keywords.

Even though it is amazing that we've created the technology to actually have somewhat viable conversations with machines, it's a little scary to think that someone as ultra-gullible as I am could actually think that they might be human. The fact that they're so believable and that they seem sympathetic to what we have to say shows not only our need to be heard by someone, but also the increasing coldness of our society.  read more »

It has never really occured to me to think about the impact that video games have had on the world.
Basically, when I think of video games, I think of Guitar Hero. Every once in a while, Rock Band or Dance Dance Revolution occurs to me too. But that's about it.
But when my brother (for example) thinks of video games, it's not just one or two. It's Assassin's Creed, Grand Theft Auto, James Bond, Madden, and most importantly, Halo's 1,2, and 3. There are probably more.
But the effect these games have aren't just to give us an escape from the real world, as much as they help with that. This year, the UF marching band did a show during one of the games that was exclusively video game music- Zelda, Super Mario, Halo, etc, showing that these games not only have an impact on what we do with our free time, but also how we think about pop culture in today's society.  read more »

Since the discovery of the Rosetta Stone that Drucker cites in her article on the evolution of the alphabet, there really hasn't been anything that has influenced the way we interpret language so much as the phenomenon of mass communication, and the typeface.  read more »

I'm such an advertising major.
As I was reading Chapter 3 of Story and Discourse, about existents and Chatman's definitions of characters and what contributes to making them who we think they are in books and movies, I started thinking about advertisements in today's world.
If you think about it, what are ads but little 30 second to a minute- long stories that try to create relationship between consumers and the companies they buy their products for? The campaigns that work, at least, try to associate some characteristic to the brand they're trying to advocate- namely, to create a brand image that people are able to recognize and have an affinity for.

This seems to correlate with one of Chatman's definitions of character- that they are a set of traits that the reader learns to identify with, and ultimately, to associate the name of that character with. He says that by the end of the story, well-created characters are viewed by readers as "old friends or enemies"- you know who they are, but you can't define exactly what they're like in only one or two terms. In other words, you KNOW them.  read more »

A quote by Nietzche.

Recently I've become obsessed with the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. It seriously has to be one of the best movies I've ever seen.
In light of my new obsession, and the effect of the movie as a whole, I thought it might be a good study of Chatman's points on events as they relate to stories, or Chapter 2 of Story and Discourse.  read more »

Isn't it funny how sometimes we understand life through things that may not necessarily be human?
Everything that has a resonance with us, that makes us think- in movies, in books, heck, in video games- stems from some form of symbolism, it seems, and somehow, this non-human entity holds more meaning for us than even things told to us by members of our own race.  read more »