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I chose Rotten Tomatoes, because reading film reviews is one of my favorite ways to kill time. The site's homepage emphasizes the featured articles, as they implement the biggest photos and therefore draw the most attention. Under these photos is a white headline amongst a black background, clearly standing out. The search bar is also very accessible, lying front and center toward the top of the page. As we scroll down, the website is mostly white with black wording, but it's very easy to navigate, and it doesn't read as bland thanks to the tiny tomato pictures accompanying the film titles. It all feels like my eye is meant to travel from top to bottom, as everything is presented in a list form with long narrow columns. And the bright, neutral colors evoke a calming feeling, which is ideal because scrolling through film reviews should be a leisurely, rather than intense activity. I would assume the designer chose to feature articles at the top of the page to encourage visitors to click around the site more. There are more articles listed at the bottom, but I assume they're less important or not in dire need of clicks, otherwise they would be more prominently displayed. I had never used the developer tool in browser before, so I was surprised to see what a jumbled mess the wesbite looked like behind the scenes. To be honest, I can't work out yet what the different fonts and colors and ordering mean, but I'm curious to find out.

Reading Bresland's text was already attention-grabbing, but hearing the audio made a much larger impact. First of all, the addition of a non-linguistic, bluesy sound element gave the text is an intriguing atmosphere. But it wasn't so distracting that you couldn't focus; it complimented his words nicely. read more

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Reading the section of fair use and copyright reminded me of this one episode of Nathan For You. Nathan planned to rename a coffee shop "Dumb Starbucks", but was told that he would be sued unless he could establish himself as a well-known parody artist, like Weird Al. After marketing himself as a parody artist, he decided he was technically in the clear to parody Starbucks' name. I was wondering if this was actually enough to help him escape copyright infringement, or if it only worked as a loophole on TV (I get that it's only a comedy show). read more

It's kind of odd that my focus is in digital media, but I know very little of what "digital media" actually is. For instance, I have never heard of a version control center before, and I understand its basic function, but I easily sleep into the aggressive vagueness that comes with discussing "media" topics. That being said, I'm looking forward to getting comfortable with the github platform, because it does sound like a useful tool that you can use for various work. I could see this being used in a role that requires you to enhance a company's website or some other online PR campaign. Overall, the git tutorials seemed to offer a visual representation on Stolley's ideas of "Lo-Fi" (a term I've never heard used outside of music), and it looks easy enough to navigate. I did take a computer science course once, but I was absolutely terrible at it. A passage containing words like "code" and "function" is more difficult for me to comprehend; I tend to get tripped up on the language, and then I forget the overall message of what I'm reading in the first place. So I'm hoping this course will make me more confident around the keyboard.

Legally I'm a Jeff but spiritually I've always felt like more of a Geoff so either one is cool. I like naps, books and all things queer. I graduate in the spring and have a limited idea of what one can do with a communications degree-- so I welcome suggestions. Related to that, my favorite thing is when someone asks my major, and I tell them, and they ask what I'd like to do, and I shrug, and they get nervous and say, "...oh you can do so much with that though!" read more

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