Author: Goldpanner

thoughtsonstrings:

… Okay, Bioshock 2 technically but. 

Deco Devolution: The Art of BioShock 2 – The Citizens of Rapture

The citizens of Rapture make BioShock what it is: They are not nameless, faceless enemies but people that once had dreams that went horribly awry.

Once again, much love for the art direction of the game but even more love for the sheer amount of thought they put into the Splicers. The fact that they thought of Rapture and its inhabitants before the games, and put that thought into the designs is incredibly cool to me. 

Not just the visual designs either; listening to the Splicers audio files tells a lot about how they were before splicing and, while they are incredibly exaggerated, they’re also not just bland archetypal ‘characters’. They took the archetype and just twisted it into little knots. And from that, made legitimately disturbing ‘enemies’.

jtotheizzoe:

View From the ISS at Night

Speechless at 7,700 meters per second

This morning we were treated to some of NASA’s first space images edited as a time-lapse. Now, we get to experience some of their most recent … and how wonderful they are.

Knate Myers has assembled this most recent collection, full of the usual star trails and aurorae that were used to from these great vids. I like how he added a number of interior shots through the windows of the space station, giving us the same view as those lucky astronauts.

Also notable in this video is the yellow and red “atmospheric airglow” that casts a colored shell around our thin atmosphere. We’ve talked about how that works before.

Great way to wind down any Monday. Full screen, HD, relax, enjoy 🙂

(↬ Coudal)

wowwww fullscreen this, for real

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)

for zac!

gaming:

criken | robbaz | pewdiepie | gamer poop

reviewers:

todd in the shadows (pop music!) | (older stuff!) | (one hit wonders!)

film brain (bad movies)

nostalgia critic (nostalgic movies) 

lupa (really really bad movies)

phelous (bad horror movies)

nostalgia chick (nostalgic movies shows and things) 

zero punctuation (video games)

parodies:

naruto abridged parody abridged | supernatural | dragonball z | bad lip reading | the key of awesome 

webisodes:

baman piderman | nuka break

i think that’s all, callan might know more stuff lol

Famous Novelists on Symbolism in Their Work and Whether It Was Intentional

terecita:

moniquill:

dftbawkward:

fishingboatproceeds:

justmargaret:

mentalflossr:

It was 1963, and 16-year-old Bruce McAllister was sick of symbol-hunting in English class. Rather than quarrel with his teacher, he went straight to the source: McAllister mailed a crude, four-question survey to 150 novelists, asking if they intentionally planted symbolism in their work. Seventy-five authors responded. Here’s what they had to say.

IT DOESN’T MATTER IF THE AUTHOR PUT IT THERE INTENTIONALLY OR NOT. That is not the point. Reading is not a game of Clue; books are not a mystery that you have to solve by putting all the pieces together. That’s not the point. Find the meaning you want to find in it. That’s what we do with books because that’s what we do in life.

What Margaret said. If the point of reading is merely to understand precisely what the author intended, then reading is just this miserable one-sided conversation in which an author is droning on to you page after page after page and the reader just sits there receiving a monologue.

That’s not reading. That’s listening.

Reading is the active co-creation of a story, complete with all its symbols and abstractions. 

To read well, you have to understand that sometimes an oligarchic pig is not just an oligarchic pig. Maybe Orwell intended Animal Farm to be about how dangerous pigs can be. Maybe he had a personal vendetta against pigs. It doesn’t matter. Animal Farm happens to say a lot about how humans organize themselves, and how power and social status shape our understanding of justice. It happens to capture the limits of human empathy, and how those limitations can lead to structural inequality.

I don’t see how it matters at all whether Orwell intended his book to be as good as it turned out to be. So when the story above says that a 16-year-old went “straight to the source,” the article is dead wrong, because every story has two sources: writer and reader.

^

Yes this to all of the above, but also: If your students are bored and stressed about finding the symbolism in the reading material, you’re not being an effective teacher. Maybe it’s because you’ve chosen material that’s not relevant to the lives and experiences of your students. Maybe it’s because you’re not presenting it in a way that makes it interesting. Maybe it’s something else entirely.

But teachers could learn a TON from fandom re: how to make deep analysis of media not only fun and interesting, but downright engrossing. If your lesson plan doesn’t include TVTropes for example (presuming of course that you and your students have at least some access to the internet, which I know isn’t true for all school districts) YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.

If you’re not ASKING the students what they get from a reading before you TELL THEM what they’re supposed to be reading from it and what the accepted theories of literary critics are, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.

If your curriculum is entirely made of book by dead white guys (extra points if they’re all from Europe and Colonial America and it’s -not- a really specific college-level course titled ‘English literature at the turn of the 20th century’) YOU ARE DOING IT SO FUCKING WRONG.

only regarding the author’s intentions gives a total one sided power to them and intelligentsia? were they successful? did they convey a point aside from the literal one?

the experience of the reader is just as important. i am for artistic ownership and the author having the right to say how things SHOULD be interpreted and taken, but half of the transformation goes to the person making the effort to read the book itself. if your message is dated or incoherent that is on you. if your students aren’t responding to your teaching style or choice of subject, that is on you too.