Teaching Through Story

   

    Should you teach through your artwork? It depends on what your trying to teach. Do you have authority to teach the thing you are trying to teach. I have considered this thought before, but what could I teach others? When a topic would come to mind, I could think about how I could incorporate this into a story. The resulting story might end up being too peachy, or seemingly trying to force feed information to the audience who is watching. The audience knows this and isn't easily tricked. The best process to consider when wanting to teach through art, is to tell a story that teaches instead of teaching through a story.
    People feel like they are doing something beneficial when they are writing fiction to teach. Maybe to stroke their egos a bit, feeling like they have done something beneficial for society.  I have taught the children many things and they will grow up to be the most intelligent of generations. I have not taught them to follow societal norms, and do not develop their own decision making processes in a way that is beneficial in any way. Somehow I have still taught them something, I'm not sure what it was.

Noah Stinson

To celebrate me finishing my Blogs, please admire this man...

Paper Mario's Perfect Lemons!

                 Paper Mario has always been one of the most creative game series in the Nintendo line-up, but their newest title takes it to a whole new level. With the kingdom having had all its color taken away by bowser, Mario must repaint the world, or something. I honestly haven't played it yet, but one thing I can say for sure is that the animations and art style is the best Nintendo has to offer. With attacks ranging from lemons squeezing juice into the enemies eyes to blind them, to a good fortune cat charm from Japan crushing them, to a giant fan blowing them out of the solar system. Not only are they creative they are simply beautiful. I remember the announce trailer only had the lemon attack and I rewatched it 100 times trying to figure out how they made the lemons look so realistic. I was honestly speechless for some reason. The paper characters in extremely high res 3d modeled rooms also adds to the paper effect in a hard contrast type of way if you know what I mean. Since they have released all the finishing card attacks and they all look just as impressive, some even more so. I'm just trying to say this game is both insanely creative and visually beautiful.

Categories

    Most people tend to enjoy putting things into categories. This goes here, and this goes here. One or the other black or white. Most people I believe aren't necessarily wanting to do these things, its just an automatic response in humans to easier make sense of complex things. It creates limitations within ones own mind, trying to place something in a category where it doesn't belong. Certain people are places into categories as well as stories and types of art. Certain forms a music are seen as cool in one era and them boring in the next. These social cycles tend to move back in forth between generations. This doesn't necessarily only mean music, it could mean fashion, language, or pretty much anything that isn't set and stone. This isn't necessarily a bad thing per say , in fact It can bring people together, find a common conversation topic. It brings generations together, and can separate other generations. This is when conflict can be created through misunderstanding and relationships ruined. Ironically categories seem to have a grey area within theirselves, meaning the effect of categories is exact opposite of what categories end up to be in the first place.

Blog Posts

Well, with three minutes left until the deadline, what better way to wrap up writing the blog posts by writing about the blog posts. I regret not being able to write as much to the required amount, but over the semester I either had trouble with coming up with ideas to write about or how to write about these ideas in general. Of course with this being the last day to write the blog posts I'm suddenly able to figure out what I want to write, but I did what I could do and now I'll just have to deal with the consequences. I have to say that it was fun reading everyone else's blog posts though, about what you all are interested in and what you've learned throughout the semester. Kudos to those that were actually able to write all twenty-five blog posts that were needed.

Nintendo Nostalgia Pt. 2

I left off with my purchase of the beloved silver Nintendo DS Lite, which was not only cool for its wireless connection for multiplayer, but it had a touchscreen! How cool is that? This was obviously pre-iPhone, and the touchscreen was pressure based, not capacitive, like today's touchscreens. But for that time, this was one of the coolest aspects. I don't remember what I first played on the DS, but some of my favorites were Kirby Super Star Ultra, Drawn to Life, and later, Sid Meyer's Civilization Revolution.

Civ Rev was a significant step in my video gaming career because it was one of the first strategic world simulating games I ever put a large amount of time into. I had achieved a new level of gaming, a more serious game with more thinking involved than the typical platform games of my past.

Moving on now from the DS and finishing off the Nintendo saga, enter: the Nintendo Wii. Nearly every household with children had a Wii at some point, probably a Christmas gift, that's where my family got ours, a Christmas gift from Santa a couple years after the console's release. The Wii had huge appeal to families for many reasons; great marketing, family interaction, physical movement, family-friendly game selection (Nintendo has for a long time had a market on having almost exclusively family friendly games), reasonable price, high tech appearance. The list goes on, but the bottom line here is that between the years of 2006 and 2009, Christmas morning included swinging Wii remotes around hitting virtual tennis balls for an enormous percentage of US families, including my own.

For You

In February 2007 my family and I lost a big part of my family. My Grandma passed away on February 18, 2007, and from that day nothing has ever been the same. Throughout my life she was always the one to lean on through adversity in my family. No matter what anyone needed she would always be there. I have never had a closer relationship with anyone besides my grandma, ever. A few weeks before she passed my grandma and I took a little walk to the local market. During that walk I remember my grandma would talk about her grandchildren and how before she could pass she wanted to be able to watch all her grand kids graduate from college. Being her oldest grandchild I knew I was gonna be her first one to see walk. When she passed I was absolutely devastated. Just two weeks before we had that conversation and I thought that her wishes would be granted to see us all walk. I remember at her funeral I gave a speech about how wonderful she was and about the last great walk we had together. That day I made a promise, a promise to finish the job for her. She wanted to see my graduation one day and I promised I would do that for her. I pursue my education with the motivation of her in my head. Everyday I live is with a sole purpose to get it all done for her. This is FOR YOU.