#blog task

[just-the-hiddles]

Tip Tuesday | Tumblr Blog Maintenance

Hey there, cats and kittens!  Another Tip Tuesday.  You are probably looking at the title and thinking, JTH, Tumblr doesn’t do maintenance.  They just let things stay broken.  Very true reader.  Very true.  I am talking about your own Tumblr blog maintenance.  Or admin work.  It is the not fun, not creative part of Tumblr.  Here are some of the things I do (or should do) and how often I do it.  Take it and make it your own.

Weekly | Update Masterlists:  I try, try so hard to update my lists as I post throughout the week but I get busy, I get lazy.  Linking stories on masterlists is boring.  Worst case scenario, I will do my best to update on Sundays, which is my unofficial admin day.  Why is updating them so important?  So people can find my fics easier.  

Weekly | Draft Posts:  Sunday is also the day I use to draft my posts for the coming week.  So my Tip Tuesday, Fic Teasers and my story posts are drafted.  If I really on the ball, I might have Weekend Reading drafted, but that is rare these days.  The only thing I don’t do is tag my taglist, it seems Tumblr hates that. 

Daily | Clean out my Inbox:  I don’t like my inbox to be full.  So I do my best to answer all asks daily.  I know some people keep requests in there until they write them.  So this may change for you depending on what you do.

Monthly | Check Taglists:  I kind of do this each time I do my taglist.  But I do my best to check for those broken tags, duplicate tags, etc.  

Quarterly | Organize Masterlists, etc.: I just finished doing this and I really need to do it more often.  But a few times a year, I check in with how my masterlist, especially my story masterlist, is looking.  Perhaps it is getting long, cluttered, broken links.  Maybe you haven’t updated in like a few weeks.  Or you need to make a sub list.  This is also when I take stock of my bio and links.  And check for any flagged posts. 

As Needed | Followers:   I check to make sure all my new followers are not under 18.  I try and do it as I get the notification but I am often lazy.  

And those are just some of the things I will do to keep my blog running happy and healthy.  You can set aside a day to do this or do a little bit each week.  I generally do these things on a Sunday, which is a low key day for me.  

[jennidc2]

Glossary

Anchorage - Describes the relay between words and images

Arbritrary - No connections to anything else

Codes - Signs that are organised into groups

Connotations - Ideas that stem from a sign

Diachronic - Evolution of linguistic signs through time

Iconic Sign - Where the signifier resembles the referent sign

Indexical - A sound/thing that gains attention and alerts presence to a sign e.g. smoke to a fire

Intermediality -  The emphasis of an image

Langue - The whole system of a language

Metaphor - One signifier seeming similar to a different signified

Metonymy - Replacing one signified with another

Myth - Thinking about things which are structured to send particular messages

Paradigms - Different choices of words when constructing a sentence (vertical lists)

Referents - Actual things that signs refer to 

Syntagm - complete ordered set of signs

[jennidc2]

Dick Hebdige - Subcultures & Style

Hebdige starts off this book by explaining that a main purpose of subcultures is to distract society from their natural order. They are meant to disrupt the way that things are usually done.

He makes it clear that the people making up these subcultures are stronger as a group, and it is harder for them to get their ideas across as individuals. He also comments on how subcultures adopt their own rules and traditions, within those that society expects of them. 

He ends with the point that the success of a few in the punk subculture encouraged an uprising of others wanting to join so they may also get to fly to the USA and partake in other parts of a showbiz lifestyle.

[jennidc2]

Definition of Subculture

A subculture is a group that exists within a larger culture that have interests or beliefs that may be different to those of the larger culture. According to Jenks (2004) subculture does not necessarily lead to the abandonment of all fo society’s rules and beliefs.

[jennidc2]

Greaser Subculture

[jennidc2]

Research - Tom Gauld

My chosen comic book artist is Tom Gauld, who is best known for his Mooncop comic. 

He studied at Edinburgh College of Art and the Royal College of Art. 

[jennidc2]

Semiotic Analysis of Modern Magazine Ad

I will be conducting a semiotic analysis of the above ad for Nike. 

To start with, the lighting is very dark which makes the advert seem ominous. The face that the shoe itself is lit up instantly draws the viewer’s attention to the shoe. The text is also light in colour which makes it stand out against the ad’s dark background.

The figure behind the text is not instantly observable to most viewers, but once seen it cannot be unseen. The figure is unmistakeable the Marvel superhero, Iron Man. The shoe is also coloured in traditional Iron Man colours, which strengthen the subtle connotations - as Iron Man himself isn’t even seen in his trademark red and gold.

Using a ‘hardcore’ superhero to promote a shoe brand provides obvious associations with the shoes being tough, and perhaps giving the wearer some of the special abilities of the Iron Man suit. 

The Nike logo at the bottom of the ad, and the Nike logo on the shoe mean that the brand is still the main focus of the advert.

The text ‘The Sneaker Makes The Man’ signifies that the advert is definitely aimed at men. The associations with the bold, masculine font also support this implication. 

The advert would be run in magazines aimed at men. All of the signifiers combined imply that the shoe will provide the male wearer with superhero abilities, and make them more of a man.

[w1550758]

On Monday my group, if it can be called such, since it was only me and Alice, gave a presentation on the subject of art history; the slides for this presentation will be posted to my blog. Overall, the presentation went well; we pulled in a variety of topics, including socio-economics, psychological studies, and the nature of plagiarism. As well as that, we made an interesting point strongly enough, and defended it well enough, that we had the rest of the class debating for quite a while, which I think indicates a certain success. Areas that I think I could improve on were; the fluidity of my presentation, and a little more forethought as to issues that could be brought up in the post presentation discussion. I think that my presentation was affected by my nerves a little, and that could be aided by more practice, and rehearsing the presentation with my group, as opposed to rehearsing alone. From this project I learnt a few things, primarily the value of peripheral knowledge in defense of an argument, by which I mean that researching around a subject or argument is incredibly important in having a rigorous argument- for example, someone in the group brought up Jackson pollock as an example of true originality ( a concept that our presentation rallied against), and because I did not know enough about pollocks work to dismiss it directly, I had to construct an argument from what I knew of his place in art history, and therefore did not dismiss the criticism succinctly. To counter that, I also came to realize that some people will never be happy with your work. There will always be those who seek to play devils advocate, asking essentially meaningless questions in order to confuse or provoke. Learning to recognize and efficiently dismiss these people is something I’m going to have to work on.