oe Stajkowski

2001 : A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001:A Space Odyssey, is said to be one of the greatest movies ever to be created. People of all different statuses have argued this bold statement for many years. Some say it is quite boring, while others say it is a movie with a deeper meaning that most people simply cannot grasp.

I am one of these people. I cannot seem to understand this movie. I may be biased towards the film from the beginning because I am not a huge fan of science fiction movies.

From the beginning I could already tell I was not going to enjoy this film. The first few scenes depict the evolution of man. There is what seems to be a colony of apes wondering around with no words what so ever. A certain ape soon finds a bone and starts banging it on other bones. He quickly finds out that this bone can be used as a weapon. Kubrick slowly takes us through how apes learn new things and evolve.

Next the movie quickly jumps forward millions of years and is now in a space scene. It is where Dave, the main character is introduced. Dave and his crew are sent on a mission, but there is a catch. They are actually on a mission they don’t even know they are on. They are secretly being sent to explore a moon of Saturn. This part immediately threw me off. I was confused at what the main story line of the film was now. This may be due to the fact that I have previously never heard anything about this movie so I didn’t know what to expect. I do believe if I understood the deeper meaning of this film I would think it was a good movie.

Hal is a super-computer in the film who helps navigate the ship. This is one of the deeper meanings of the film, how technology is evolving so fast. Hal turns evil when he feels the humans are trying to terminate him and turns into a murderer. Hal is eventually shut down and Dave, the main character is sent into a crazy situation. In the very beginning of the movie the apes find a giant black slab, I still don’t understand what it is. Dave is actually sucked into one of these slabs and put into an odd world. He wakes up in a nice hotel looking room. I think this is where they try to depict immortality. The slab is in the room where he wakes up and he is all alone. I think the slab represents God and it shows him what immortality is like.

Joe Stajkowski Funny yet effective ad

We are doing an ad/commercial for our project. It is about the dangers of college students over spending/charging on a credit card. Everything is going smoothly so far and we have only ran into one problem. Our problem was that I couldn't find the cord to transfer our media to the computer. This problem was quickly solved by deciding that we are going to rent a nice camera from the school.
Everyone is working together well on this project and I believe it will be a good one. Our project is aimed to be funny yet effective and I think we have the right ideas to do this well.

Joe Stajkowski: Media and Design

The first couple of pages on media and design was kind of basic knowledge. It talked about things we learned in high school such as headings, font, lists, etc...It did go into depth about these points and made some good points like when a list is better in paragraph form.

The part about photos, graphs, charts, tables and diagrams was helpful because it said which is best to use in certain situations.

The spoken text section was kind of cool to read because I just did my rhetorical analysis on Dr. Martin Luther King's spoken text. The book talked about many of the same things I did like repeating a phrase over and over.

I liked how the book said emails now feel like talking rather than writing. I agree with this statement as our technology is advancing so many people are accustomed to emails they do seem like talking. I also agree with the part about brevity. I like to email but I do not like reading very long emails. Short emails that get to the point are a lot better. I don't know much about web sites and I liked the way the author compared a web site to a writing assignment it helped me understand the creation of websites easier.

Beginnings and Endings

I could relate to the very beginning of this section on writing beginnings and endings. It talks about how your introduction needs to grab the attention of the reader. In my conference today we agreed this is what my paper is lacking. I liked how in the example he uses questions in his introduction it makes the reader want to find the answers to these questions. I also liked the part about connecting your subject to your readers' interests or values. This is a for sure way to get the reader interested that I have never really thought about doing.

The part on endings was interesting to me because I really only knew of one or two ways to end a paper. I thought the part about ending with an anecdote was a pretty cool way to end a paper. Proposing an action is cool too especially when used in the right context like the example about drinking.

More than one way to read?

The reading strategies helps you read many things better. It gives clues how to read for different purposes. The first strategy it talks about is to skim over the text first, looking at pictures, titles, vocabulary. I can relate to this because I have been doing this for years. The first thing I do when I have a reading assignment is skim over the chapter before I read it. The only thing different about what the book says and what I do is the book says to not stop to look up the vocabulary words, just keep going. I usually skim over the chapter and read the vocab also. Another strategy it says you can do is to jot down notes as you go. I believe this would help greatly it's just hard to get motivated to do it because it just seems like more work. Annotating seems like it's more for me. It is just quick notes on the margin or highlighting as you go. Before reading this text I had no idea how to outline a reading assignment. I knew how to make outlines for a speech or writing assignment, but not for a reading. I now understand what it means to outline a reading and it sounds like a pretty effective tool. With our text analysis coming up the ending of this section helps a lot. It gives good questions to consider while analyzing a text. This will be the first place I go when I start my paper.

Text analyzation opening it's doors to me

Chapter seven is all about properly analyzing text. I found the first passage about Hotel California quite interesting because before i read the analyzation of the song I never really thought about what the song actually meant. I always thought of the song as praising California but I now know it says it can be a great place and a bad place at the same time. I didn't really know what was being asked of me when asked to analyze text. The part of this chapter that helped me the most was where it said read, respond, summarize, analyze, and draw conclusions. This gave me a good basis of what to do when asked to analyze a text.

Textual analysis. This section starts off with Denise Noe comparing and contrasting country and rap music. She makes several good points. She talks about how they are similar, which before I read this, I thought there was no way they were. She talks about Hank Williams Jr.'s song where he talks about hunting women. I never realized country subliminally talked about things like this. This is not a good thing to sing about but it does compare the two genres in a way. One of the passages confused me. Peter Stiglin analyzes some paintings and I didn't really get what he was trying to say. I sort of understood that he was saying we do not actually stop and appreciate what nature has to offer in terms of its beauty but sentence by sentence I was lost.

Regardless of understanding these passages or not I think I now have at least a little bit better understanding of how to analyze text.

The latest reading assignment was on assessing your own writing. The first thing I could relate to was when the author said some of a writers best work comes when they are not worrying about the writing being right or wrong. I related this to when we type on this blog or on an instant messenger. One thing the author said I did not personally agree with. She said some of her student's best work comes at the end of their papers. For me, this tends to be the worst part of my papers. I liked how the passage talked said if the audience does not know much about your subject or may not agree you may need to provide more evidence. If they already know about the topic or are likely to agree then you can provide less evidence. This is good advice when trying to decide how much evidence to find.

The next section was on getting response and revising. The first couple of sentences in this section jumped out to me because I can directly relate to them. They talked about when you play guitar or basketball practice makes perfect. I do both of these activities so it got my attention. It went on to talk about how writing is the same way. If you need to re-write then do it. One part of this section talked about revising to sharpen your focus. It says to make sure every paragraph backs up your thesis. This part confused me and I'm not sure if my narrative paper is correct now.