The real blog. The best blog.

Trying to get an A.

[alexholtiscool-blog]

Language in 1984

One of the things that were interesting to me right off the bat was the new language introduced in the book called Newspeak (clever name, right?). Newspeak was designed so that the Party could make it literally impossible for people to express ideas that the Party didn’t want them to have. The example given at the beginning of the book was that the word for freedom didn’t exist in Newspeak since freedom didn’t exist in Oceania. Newspeak also limits thinking by removing unnecessary words. Everything that has an opposite is able to be expressed with only one word and the use of prefixes. The word bad is unnecessary because ungood has the same meaning. Good and bad can both be expressed with only one word instead of two. 

[alexholtiscool-blog]

Reading 1984

I had heard about this book before I heard of this project, which led me to choose it. I also found it in some of the research I did for Handmaid’s Tale which drew comparisons between the two. Both are set in a dystopian future where a new form of government has made some drastic changes to the everyday life of the people. It is quite obvious that Atwood drew inspiration from Orwell, but she focused more on the female characters whereas Orwell didn’t go much deeper than the surface level for his female characters.

The book opens up by describing the new world in which Winston is living in and the new norms that aren’t normal at all. You as an individual have no freedom and are constantly being surveilled. If you commit ‘thoughtcrime’ by saying the wrong thing or even making the wrong face at the wrong time, you would be ‘vaporized’ or kidnapped and literally erased from history. This is obviously an exaggeration but it is scary to think about and leaves questions in my head about the NSA and what had to happen in the book for this to become reality.

[alexholtiscool-blog]

Secondary 1

http://www.pitlanemagazine.com/morals-values-and-norms/the-importance-of-tolerance-in-society.html

This article add the point of view of the opposition. People who value tolerance say it is an important tool in making changes and becoming accepted. Tolerance is also important because it prevents angry fights about topics that people take personally. I think that tolerance should be used to help people get along as the article says, but not as an excuse as Greg says.

[alexholtiscool-blog]

Secondary 2

“Notice that we can't tolerate someone unless we disagree with him. This is critical. We don't "tolerate" people who share our views. They're on our side. There's nothing to put up with. Tolerance is reserved for those we think are wrong.”

https://www.str.org/articles/the-intolerance-of-tolerance#.WJFNVhsrKUk

This article brings up some interesting points about tolerance that add to Greg’s argument. They define tolerance and say that you can’t tolerate someone that you agree with, as so many people claim to do. They also provide many simple definitions for tolerance like the three elements and three faces of tolerance.

[alexholtiscool-blog]

Limitations of Society 6

Greg writes “I believe I have identified an insidious kind of entitlement born from a false sense of victimhood. If you are identified as an offensive party dripping with intolerance, especially in this modern age, then you’re powerless. You can be accused of anything and you’re guilty.” Greg defines tolerance as a false sense of victimhood, or people getting offended at anything and everything that they don’t agree with. This limits our society today because you have to be so incredibly careful about what you say. For example if you support Trump and the travel ban from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. If I should come out and tweet that I support this since there is no way to know if we are letting terrorists into our country, I would be labeled a RACIST since it just so happens to be that the countries that don’t have or choose not to provide information on incoming visitors happen to be predominately muslim countries. 

[alexholtiscool-blog]

Limitations of Society 5

One example of fake tolerance literally just popped up on my phone. The is a $40K reward for anyone with information on a mutilated dog found in Detroit. Im not saying that mutilating dogs is okay, but how come mutilating a dog is unacceptable, but mutilating a baby in the womb (aka abortion) is? Its because the “tolerati” are tolerant of “a woman’s right to choose” but not tolerant of a pet owner’s right to choose.

[alexholtiscool-blog]

Limitations of Society 4

Some people think that Greg hates tolerance altogether. That isn’t true at all; he hates what tolerance means today and what it allows people to get away with and use tolerance as an excuse. Greg writes, “don't get me wrong. Tolerance is a good thing. It wasn't long ago that a lot of awful things were going on in our country. Blacks were treated as chattel, gays were seen as defective humans, and women couldn’t vote (well, that last one might be worth revisiting--just because suffragettes are so sexy). But unlike a lot of countries, America actually changed, eliminating or reducing forms of nastiness that this very young country inherited from other older, nastier places. Remember, racism has been around since there were races. And someone is still selling slaves right now. (I just rented one off Craigslist. His name is Marco and he's a bodybuilding Capricorn who loves Thai boxing.) Modern slavery can be found in Sudan and Mozambique, so I guess most of America’s civil rights activist don't see the point. If it won’t get you prime real estate in front of cameras chanting about injustice in America, then why bother.

I also realize that because of tolerance there are no repercussions for bad behavior. And bad behavior won’t just continue, but will accelerate, because the tolerati provide the grease for the wheels. Think of the way the stories on teens beating the crap out of adults at movie theaters, fast food restaurants, and subway stops while people look on. No one wants to call them trash because well that's just hurtful. And hurtful often means, “painfully true”.”

Greg doesn’t hate tolerance, he hates people tolerating people who do bad things or don’t contribute to society. He says that these bad people won’t stop doing bad things because if you try to tell them to stop, the “tolerati” will accuse you of being intolerant, which today removes all of your power.

[alexholtiscool-blog]

Limitations of Society 3

Greg describes a time that he and his wife were selling their house and their real estate agent recommended that he remove the poster of himself on the wall for fear of offending potential buyers and therefore driving away business. He also removes anything such as books and newspapers that might suggest that he is a conservative because people will think that he is “an evil, baby-eating fascist Bu$$$Hitler fanatic who probably is secretly gay while bullying gay teens on the way to school.” He writes that he should “fumigate this place before we sell it. It’s got KKKooties.” Greg suggested that people get offended if they see something that falls outside of their worldview and get really mad, but things that are offensive to him and fall outside of his worldview result in him being labeled as intolerant and “facist” and a slew of other hateful adjectives.

[alexholtiscool-blog]

Limitations of Society 2

Greg writes that “hurtful often means, “painfully true.” He describers this as a limitation of society because no one will say things as they are and instead people direct hate at the wrong things. Greg gives an example when he says “Yep, they might yell at you for smoking or joking, but they’d never actually address the guy on the corner selling drugs. (Because then they might die. Or worse, he might be part of an ethnic group, which makes you a racist for even looking at him.)” Greg claims that if you call anyone out for sucking then you’re gonna be forced to apologize and tolerate them, even if they do suck.

[alexholtiscool-blog]

Limitations of Society 1

Greg talks in his book, The Joy of Hate, about tolerance and how it is a bad thing for society. Greg claims that tolerance really means not pissing anyone or anything off. Greg says that our society is filled with people he dubs the “tolerati” who are in Greg’s words, “a group of people who claim to be tolerant, except when they run into someone who disagrees with them. Then the joyous hate comes out and it’s directed almost always at you, but never at anybody else on their side. And the book is designed to kind of expose the phony outrage, make fun of it, and also try to teach you how not to fall into the same trap.” So the limitation on society is that people feel obliged to be politically correct about everything and to not hurt anyone’s feelings for fear of having your own feelings hurt via a hailstorm of hate from the tolerati.

[alexholtiscool-blog]

Why Video Editing is High Art

When people think of art, they think of high art like the Mona Lisa; but they don’t think of video editing as an art. When you watch a movie, most people don’t appreciate the amount of work that went into each and every scene. For every second in a movie, there are 60 frames. For every frame in a movie such as The Avengers, the special effects for all the superpowers and explosions have to be animated for each frame. That’s sixty times every second that these effects have to be animated. This means that you could be spending hours on just a few seconds. Video editing is an even higher form of art than painting since in every second, you are creating 60 individual paintings.

Video editing is similar to sculpting, which is already considered a high art. One example of the similarity is when I made an effect where my friend punched me and I flew down the hallway and splatted on the wall at the end. 

I start by trimming the footage to remove the excess and arrange the clips to make the story, just like how sculptors remove large portions of stone to start. Then at 0:18, I started by making my body fly down the hallway, then added an explosion when I get punched, then at 0:19 add blood splats and sound effects at the end. This is the part of sculpting when you refine the look by removing smaller pieces of stone to get the desired look. Finally, you finish by adding small adjustments like color correction or stabilizing the footage to remove shake, just like how a sculptor polishes and sands their sculpture. Since the process for creating a special effect for a video is so similar to making a sculpture, how can one be high art and the other not?

One category of video editing is special effects, which are an essential part of today’s cinematic experience. Today’s movies wouldn't be the same without them. Laurence Fishburne says that “Special effects are characters. Special effects are essential elements. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.” What he is trying to say is that even if you don’t notice the special effects, they are still present and create the atmosphere of the film. It’s all of the subtle editing choices that may go unnoticed by many viewers, but all add up to an incredible effect.

Another reason special effects are high art is the fact that all high art has a high level of intricacy and complexity, and so does special effects. One example of the level of complexity involved in editing special effects is a scene like a plane explosion. 

[alexholtiscool-blog]

This is high art because it looks like the type of art that you would see in a museum but it is animated which adds another level of complexity and changes my view point about the piece.

[alexholtiscool-blog]

Video editing as seen in the video should be considered high art. Compositing like that with a plane that explodes and dodges missiles and activates a cloaker is extremely difficult to make look realistic and can be very time consuming. When the plane explodes, you have to individually animate each piece of debris to make it look realistic. A mere few seconds of this can take hours to put together. I would argue that video effects editing is an even higher form of art than painting because in every frame (there are 30-60 frames in one second) you are creating individual paintings that when strung together, make your video.

[alexholtiscool-blog]

Video editing is art because it required a lot of skill and artistic ability. The same way that a artist takes a block of marble and makes a sculpture, a vfx artist takes, as seen in the video, a small flying cube with lights on it and turns it into a bunch of glowing, floating, ghost rats coming out of the subway.

[alexholtiscool-blog]

This is low art because it is just a bunch of clipart put together. Anyone could replicate this super easily and it isnt that creative.

[alexholtiscool-blog]

This is high art because it is highly detailed and looks realistic. This is something that most people cant reproduce, so it is high art.

[alexholtiscool-blog]

I think this song is high art. The artist had to work very hard and possibly injure themselves to produce this beautiful piece. This song gave me a good laugh so I think it is valuable to me, hence being high art.