Observe: Small Community

This is someone else’s story but I think its an important one to share:

My friend “J” no longer lives in a town recently visited by a white supremacist rally. He posted from another facebook page a Nazi Watch image which was being distributed at a  university. In his sharing this image the image was intern shared more times than the number of friends he has and it caught the attention of some of the ppl in the image. His facebook page obviously turned into a long screed of arguing between people.

I was struck most by the number of shares of an image exceeding the number of friends he currently has. I was also shocked by his shock. The result was him having some non-violent discussions via private message with some of the ppl on the flyer…mostly pertaining to their denial of being racist or denial of Nazism.

He has also now ended up with his own image on a crudely pasted into an Antifa Watch flyer.

The internet has created a space in which Antifa and Nazi’s are having continuous back and forth. I can’t tell how thankful I am for a platform for discussion but doubtful as to the productivity. The internet seems to have brought some people of diverse backgrounds close and some people with seemingly identical backgrounds closer. The posting of someone else’s picture does read like a hit list. Police departments fabricate similar flyers and private security companies create them with beautiful avatars: The Intercept

Identity listings like these are meant to keep many of these ppl away through social pressure and intimidation. At this point these seem to mostly create an interesting back and forth between Antifa and Nazi’s. In the defense of such images, groups like Antifa are functioning as a loud watch dog against the fascism which escaped many white liberal’s attentions until the election. I have no idea how to do any of this antifascism work any better at this point.

Some of these individuals I can vet myself but I can not vet that all of them are Nazi’s. This is where trusting your source as an activist and internet user gets pretty hairy. At the end of the day. I am thankful for free speech and hope that people know that the desired result of working towards a better world means maintaining the entire bill of rights. 

Observe: CNN on the phone with Students

Over the spring break, I was in Maryland for the school shooing St. Mary’s county. I was alerted to this shooting by a news notice in the live section of YouTube. The video I first watched was a CNN live interview with a student currently inside the school on lockdown. They were on the phone for a few minutes and then the voices of the police came in over the phone. The student said he had to get off the phone bc the officers were about to escort them out of the school.

The media construction of what I was witnessing was not new to me. News television outlets have always scrambled to get victims statements even while an incident is unfolding. The layers through which I was receiving this experience shocked me.

The live news report was being funneled to me via a phone carrier, via CNN, via Youtube, via my iphone. There triangulation getting this information to me was an uncomfortable collaboration of many different corporations. The formulation of this moment is breathtaking. This collaboration has created incredible technological innovations…but in this circumstance being brought to my phone was a voyeuristic window of someone else’s fear. This was a very short clip amongst my other garbage entertainment clips on youtube. It’s not just the internet’s fault that we don’t know how to tell the difference between real news and fiction…News and fiction have been commingling in television entertainment since the 60’s.

I don’t blame the mediums themselves but I very much blame large companies for this confusion of news and entertainment, serious subjects and spurious subjects.

Also facebook seems to know how pissed I am. I wonder what the programers are thinking right now? Do they feel like they’ve been doing the right thing? That they are not to blame? Does each person operate a piece so small that they feel no responsibility nor ability to regulate anything from within?

Project 0 Week 8

I use the website Citation Machine whenever I need to write a bibliography, and I think awhile ago it became a site that could tell when you were using adblock extensions so it would ask you to turn off adblock. I haven’t used Citation Machine in a long time, so when I actually saw ads it was surprising. One thing I think they do is interesting with their ads is that to use the site ad free for 2 days, you have to deal with an interactive ad. Its funny how they don’t give you the option to just deal with the ads and you have to experience the interactive ad as well, because I did not click anything stating that I wanted to remove the ads at all.

Project 5

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/papaya/eckkpifjgdfppbgjdfbkbdkkgjojlkng

For my extension I wanted to play around with Compass.  What started as a joke with changing to text to be in Papyrus actually turned into a real reason to change the font. I had read an article a few weeks ago about how difficult and ugly fonts actually help you retain information a lot better since you have to concentrate harder to read the text.

Big Crunch Code

var j;
j = jQuery.noConflict();

ready(‘body *’, myShrink);
ready(‘body’, bodyExpand);

function myShrink(e) {
setTimeout(delayedFunction, 3000, e);
function delayedFunction(e) {
j(e).animate({
‘padding-top’ : 0,
‘padding-right’ : 0,
‘padding-left’ : 0,
‘padding-bottom’ : 0,
‘margin-left’ : 0,
‘margin-right’ : 0,
‘margin-bottom’ : 0,
‘margin-top’ : 0,
‘width’ : 0,
‘height’ : 0
}, 900000);
}
}

function bodyExpand(e) {
j(e).animate({
‘padding’ : ‘70%’,
‘margin-left’: ’40’
}, 900000);
}

Project 5: Big Crunch

Update: I updated my extension with a decent quality Youtube video, better than the video uploaded below.

Here is the link to my extension. I’m still so in love with it I just want to figure out how to take it further:

BIG CRUNCH

The Video of Big Crunch in Action is below:

Big Crunch Video

There are many theories as to how the universe will “end.” If you find yourself feeling disconnected from material reality and overwhelmed by stress, then this is the extension for you. Reconnect with matter by remembering from whence we all came and to whence we will all be going. Go about your daily life with a reminder to value letters and images as they will not always matter to matter 🙂 It all goes back to a Big Crunch.

Project 5: Replace

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shh-no-more-talking/bgfcpmpmhkimdfjkdhbmgdgadbimjhkl?utm_source=gmail
This is my Project 4 turned into a extension as well: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/no-more-clickbait/leglelmelehodakligpgbgbfabcinofd?utm_source=gmail

In my project 5 I chose to replace the places of input on a multitude of websites with a link to an image that tells the person to be quiet. On social media there is a tendency to respond to every little thing you see and this extension makes it so that you can’t respond to things that you see online that may trigger you or give you an opportunity to trigger someone else. My extension is made to keep people quiet and just go with the normal flow of information without responding to thing or interacting too much with the other people around the website.
I used the new stuff Ben taught me utilizing the click function thing to make it so when you press inside of the text box it links you to somewhere else

Observe

While playing a game that offers prizes in exchange for watching an ad, I decided that I didn’t care about the 50 extra gems.  The game, however, had another idea and that idea was to threaten me with the lost of the reward.  The most annoying thing was that the resume video option is a clear box you can click on and the close video option vaguely resembles an option you actively click.

Project 0 – lost time

So this first thing is about some kind of life-structuring app that was advertised at me, and I realized that I’m getting more and more sensitive and resistant to attempts at regulating or structuring my time on a minute level. There’s this book “The End of Sleep” by Jonathan Crary that looks at all the ways capitalism is trying to utilize sleep as the last un-tapped human resource, which as someone who loves sleeping, really scared me like 5 years ago. While I agree with the sentiment that we should find ways to suck ourselves out of the rabbit-holes we find ourselves in on the internet, I don’t think intense monitoring/regulation of my daily activity is the right answer. Also “Win The Day” and “GET MORE DONE,” these days all I want to do is lose a day and get nothing done.

 

ANOTHER ONE!

This may be a bit of a stretch, but my friend curates this telephone pole and I really enjoyed this no-fi reinterpretation of how we find information and become aware of things, along with how we use the web to contextualize ourselves within a specific, local space.

Observe: Movie Scoring

So for my observe I wanted to look into how movies are scored on the popular site Rotten Tomatoes.  I believe both the tomatometer and the audience score to be somewhat flawed.  For audience score this is mostly due to it being divided up by “liked it” and “didn’t like it” and the fact that due to it being an audience or the public scoring just about anyone can vote in that category whether they had seen the movie or not.  Though, tomatometer also has its flaws as pretty much any journalist can claim to be a critic, however it does help to divide it up by top critics and those who are not.  Another problem with the meter is that it essentially just takes the average of scores to come up with the rating.  This can be flawed as the average can skew due to outliers, so a few people rating a movie a 5/5 though most are lower can skew the rating closer towards a fresh rating.

Observe 3/12

I didn’t have any specific or intentional observation for this week, so here’s a selection of “weird things I noticed on Facebook”:

  1. Why is my concert event automatically flagged as a job application? What is Facebook parsing from my event to come up with this flag? Can other people see this or is it just because I’m an admin?
  2. Apparently you can save pictures from someone’s profile, just not their cover photo. Good thing I can tell someone I don’t like their abstract image though.
  3. Liking a page gave me a weird red error a couple times one day. What’s that about? Facebook get it together.
  4. I’m very glad I can turn off this feature (and also, what a weirdly specific feature to be able to turn off). The less I interact with ads on Facebook the better.

Observe

I play a lot of hearthstone, and whenever they announce the release of a new expansion the always advertise the ability to pre purchase packs, not even at a reduced cost. It just amazes me that although I couldn’t capture it in a still screenshot, it is the only thing animated on the page is that little present next to the pre-purchase now button jiggles a bit, a ploy obviously used to try and capture your eye movement. I think it’s hilarious that people buy into paying for something they don’t even know anything about yet, but they obviously are targeting bandwagoners and people who are willing to sink in a cost with just a sliver of knowledge of what they’re getting.

Project 5

For my project, I decided to swap the Titles of articles with the Authors name. So the title would be small and underneath the Authors name instead of the other way around. I thought this concept was interesting for several reasons, first I think this is a good way of drawing the readers attention to the authors name because most often people don’t even look at the author. Also, if the title isn’t easily visible then maybe people will read the article based on the author or just randomly pick an article to read without knowing the main premise.

I named the project “Give Credit” but couldn’t get the logo to load or download to the link to the extension. I did take screenshots which are attached below. 

Project 0 – Mubert

This week’s observe is based off a cool app I saw on the App store. Mubert is trying to expand and find new music for us to listen to using AI technology. The app is supposed to help increase productivity in work and studying. It is such a brilliant cool little app, that has immense potential. I am not the person that downloads many apps or downloads trending apps. But when the icon looked so simple, clean, and the app is music category; I had no choice but to read the description. The interface is just as beautiful as the icon. Seriously, their isn’t much to click or get distracted by. Of course this could be expanded upon, but I really dig the simplicity and genuineness of the app. The three categories that are set are work, studying, and creating. So depending in the mood you are in you choose yours, and the AI starts generating some decent beats to help and enlighten. I mean, it’s definitely not for everyone, the music genre is very limited. If you listen to country for some odd reason as you study, and want some new country fused beats to help you, this ain’t the app for you. Most of the tunes stick to electronic, synth, chill, house-like beats. I really do enjoy the app, I don’t use it all the time but it is definitely something I open whenever I want to get a random playlist of chill songs. It really competes with SoundCloud for me when it comes to finding music in this field.

 

 

Project 5: Hide Youtube Thumbnails

My initial idea was to hide certain key words in youtube titles, however I was having difficulty being able to select the titles in youtube so instead I decided to focus on hiding the thumbnails instead.  The only major problem I came across with hiding youtube thumbnails was that it does not hide every thumbnail on the page.  I believe this is because when you scroll down Youtube refreshes to add more videos but so far it is only the first couple lines of videos that are hidden.  These videos are also hidden in a way that if you put your mouse over it you can see what the content actually is.  I thought it was a fun way to sort of experiment with Youtube and make video content based solely off the title instead of the image, while my original idea was the exact opposite of that.  Here is the link to the extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-youtube-thumbnail/hlfmemncaopfjkenjjkelmimnpemfpck

Project 5

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/replace/oemabmglnanjhfchmiojnjhofdgjckcf

I had a lot of trouble getting my extension to work. After having trouble with another idea I wanted to do, I decided to go with the changing thumbnails on Youtube idea. Originally I wanted it to cycle through 4 different click-baity pictures, but I could barely get 1 to work on it’s own. I also would have really liked to work on the comment section and the icons, but when I was scrolling through them I couldn’t find any particular phrases I wanted to track and I had trouble finding words in my other idea. What I currently have is a picture on most YouTube videos saying Click Me! but I don’t know why it doesn’t show up on all of the videos and it only seems to work sometimes. I thought it might be my computer because my computer was just bugging out a lot but I sent it to my friend and the same thing happened for him as well.