Wednesday, January 26, 2011

How far would you go?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41277763/ns/world_news-asiapacific/?GT1=43001

This article popped up on my homepage and seemed interesting. My roommate and I read the article aloud and were astonished by the extremes that this went to in order to not be caught by police. I cannot image first, committing the crime that he did and second, doing these horrible things to himself. He later confessed to his crime so I can't seem to understand why he went to such great measures.
Regardless, this is a very interesting article.
Let me know your reactions!

Monday, January 24, 2011

My Wordle!

  <a href="http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/3033354/The_Life_of_Taylor"
          title="Wordle: The Life of Taylor"><img
          src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/3033354/The_Life_of_Taylor"
          alt="Wordle: The Life of Taylor"
          style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd"></a>

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/3033354/The_Life_of_Taylor

Not sure which one of these links works....  Still unsure how to put the actual picture on here

The Social Network Movie Review

Movie Review
Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures
Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network.”

Millions of Friends, but Not Very Popular

    What makes Mark Zuckerberg run? In “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s fleet, weirdly funny, exhilarating, alarming and fictionalized look at the man behind the social-media phenomenon Facebook — 500 million active users, oops, friends, and counting — Mark runs and he runs, sometimes in flip-flops and a hoodie, across Harvard Yard and straight at his first billion. Quick as a rabbit, sly as a fox, he is the geek who would be king or just Bill Gates. He’s also the smartest guy in the room, and don’t you forget it.

     

    Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures
    Defriended: From left, Andrew Garfield, Joseph Mazzello, Jesse Eisenberg and Patrick Mapel in “The Social Network.”
    The first time you see Mark (Jesse Eisenberg, firing on all cylinders), he’s 19 and wearing a hoodie stamped with the word Gap, as in the clothing giant, but, you know, also not. Eyes darting, he is yammering at his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), whose backhand has grown weary. As they swat the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s words at each other, the two partners quickly shift from offline friends to foes, a foreshadowing of the emotional storms to come. Soon Mark is back in his dorm, pounding on his keyboard and inadvertently sowing the seeds of Facebook, first by blogging about Erica and then by taking his anger out on the rest of Harvard’s women, whose photos he downloads for cruel public sport: is she hot or not.
    (“The Social Network” opens the 48th New York Film Festival on Friday and opens in theaters next Friday.)
    Although the names have remained the same, “The Social Network” is less of a biopic of the real Mr. Zuckerberg than a gloss on the boot-up, log-on, plug-in generation. You don’t learn much about him other than the headlines, beginning with Facebook’s less-than-humble start in 2003. Despite its insistently unsexy moving parts (software, algorithms), the movie is paced like a thriller, if one in which ideas, words and bank books blow up rather than cars. It’s a resonant contemporary story about the new power elite and an older, familiar narrative of ambition, except instead of discovering his authentic self, Mark builds a database, turning his life — and ours — into zeroes and ones, which is what makes it also a story about the human soul.
    The price of that ambition, at least as dramatized here, is borne by those around Mark, who remains a strategic cipher throughout: a Facebook page without a profile photo. Charmless and awkward in groups larger than one, he rarely breaks into a smile and, if memory serves, never says thank you. He seems wary at some moments, coolly calculating at others: when his eyes haven’t gone dead, you can see him working all the angles. One of those angles, according to Mr. Sorkin’s script, which follows the outline of “The Accidental Billionaires,” Ben Mezrich’s book about Facebook, was one of the site’s co-founders, Eduardo Saverin (a very good Andrew Garfield), a fellow student of Mark’s as well as his first big check writer and personal chump.
    Eduardo strides in early, his collar turned up against the Cambridge winter, and quickly moves in on our sympathies, which Mr. Eisenberg, guided by his supremely confident director, never does. Mr. Garfield can sometimes wilt on screen as if in surrender, but here his character merely sways, held up by an essential decency that makes Eduardo so appealing and such a contrast to the sometimes appalling Mark. (When Mr. Eisenberg makes Mark’s face go blank, the character seems scarily emptied out: it’s a subtly great, at times unsettling, performance.) Mark might be the brains in this unlikely friendship, but Eduardo is its conscience and slowly bleeding heart. Though he knows better, he hangs on even after he’s been cut loose.
    The plot thickens after Erica dumps Mark, and he meets a pair of near-comically-perfect supermen, the identical twins and future Olympic rowers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. (An amusing Armie Hammer plays both brothers with wit and the aid of different hairstyles, special effects and a body double.) The Winklevosses emerge as unlikely objects of Mark’s interest and, much like Erica, his eventual contempt. The twins and their friend Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), have a Web site idea and need Mark’s programming help. They’ll pay (and how!), but the gig, they grandly explain, will also rehabilitate Mark’s reputation on campus after the hot/not scandal, a patronizing moment that echoes Mark’s breakup with Erica. “You’d do that for me?” he asks the twins flatly, recycling a line Erica once used on him.
    The conspicuous paradox that “The Social Network” plays with is that the world’s most popular social networking Web site was created by a man with excruciatingly, almost pathologically poor, people skills. The benign view of Facebook is that it creates “a community,” a sense of intimacy, which is of course one reason it also creeps out some of its critics. As the virtual-reality visionary Jaron Lanier puts it bluntly in his manifesto “You Are Not a Gadget,” Facebook also reduces life to a database. In “The Social Network,” a character lashes out at both Mark and “the angry” who haunt the Internet, but Mr. Lanier takes the view that it’s fear that drives the idolizers of what he calls the “new strain of gadget fetishism.”
    http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/movies/24nyffsocial.html

    Saturday, January 22, 2011

    Visual Persuasive Rhetoric


    http://www.oregonhypnosis.com/smoking.htm
    The persuasive message is that if you are given cigarettes as a child they can easily become addictive and affect the rest of your life. Once you start smoking, it is unlikely that you will be able to quit reguardless of what it does to you and your body. The intended audience is the people who are giving cigarettes to children day after day. It is tryin to get the attention of people who dont realize how addicting smoking can be. This is ad is aimed to grab the attention of every enabler, every smoker, and every person who has ever thought of smoking.The California Department of Health Services is the author of this ad. Seeing the cigarette in her hand and the smoke blowing out of the hole in her throat is a scary but very surreal image. The look in her eyes screams for help; we can tell from the photo that she wants to desprately quit.

    Friday, January 14, 2011

    First Blog

    Here it is, and  I am already confused. lol
    Time to get some work done before it actually feels like the weekend.