JN201 Week I Questions

Topic 1: About Me

My name is Ian Michael Carlisle, this is my (technically) second year at LBCC and my first Summer term.For the record, I believe doing school stuff during the summer other than summer school is downright heresy. It's one thing if you need it because you fell behind in the actual school year, it's another thing entirely if you have to for the sake of completing graduation requirements. I am supposed to get a break from writing papers and doing homework goddammit. 

But I digress. 

My major is an associated arts transfer so I can knock out all the boring stuff and focus solely on classes that can further my career when I go to a for year collage, presumably either OSU or PSU. What is that career? Writing. I want to be a writer. Getting that associated arts transfer is the main reason I'm at LBCC, not to mention it is more local. 

It is also the only reason I'm taking this class if I'm honest. I need more credits, and in order to not swamp myself during the rest of the year, summer classes were the only option. I suppose learning about the history of some forms of media I'll enjoy, like books or movies or television; but the might be because those are what I want to write. Otherwise, I'm more interested in making those things rather than learning about them; and I'm not looking forward to learning about social media and the news in this.

Don't be surprised if I'm rather bitter and sulky during this term. I'll do my best to keep it to a minimum, but sorry in advance if I don't.

Outside of collage my passions are reading, writing and video games. If it were not for this summer class my summer would be made of off all three. I had everything scheduled out and hopefully this class won't impact the schedule too much. Reading and writing are important since I took Stephen King's advice to heart: "If you want to be a writer, you need to read a lot and write a lot." Which is what I was going to do and still plan to do, I'll just being doing less of it, annoyingly. Video games are just a hobby more than anything professional. Sure, I enjoy the satisfaction of beating the singly player story or winning an online match but I don't play video games for hours on end everyday. I play video games for hours on end on certain days.

Lesser, but no less important, passions include history and movies. I haven't been able to go to a movie in while. Hopefully I can fix that this weekend. History meanwhile is fun because it provides a grab bag of inspiration for writing. It's where "inspired by real events" comes from, unless your talking about a horror movie, then the advertisers are just lying to you. I plan to cover that when we get to it. I've also been toying with creating a YouTube channel for making dramatic readings and audio books of public domain stories and fairy tales. I need a better microphone though... 

Topic 2: The Information I Consume

Hopefully this won't be nearly as long as the above... my fingers are sore. Also this the part I wasn't looking forward too...

My three main sources for information are late night talk shows (think The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show, or Late Night with Seth Meyers), word of mouth from my mother, sister and my friends, and (to a lesser extent) the "breaking news" section of YouTube's homepage that shows up when something worthy happens. I don't actually watch the videos in the third option since I can probably get a more detailed explanation from the other two sources later. Only the first two are my "go-to" sources for information, the other is more something I stumble on purely by circumstance, and they are mostly my "go-to" sources since they are convenient and coherent. 

How reliable do I think these sources are? Well, I don't know. They are technically about as reliable as the places they got their information from. But I'll sooner trust my family and friends than some random person online. As for the late night hosts, I don't know how reliable they are either, but their a lot more entertaining to listen to than the melodrama on CNN or NBC. 

Fake news? Well, considering most of the news I get comes from people I talk to in real life and late night television, I think I'm mostly fine. I say "mostly fine" because no one is infallible. There's obviously more official looking misleading information out there that there was before. 50 years ago it was usually just the tabloids you'd see in the checkout isles (you still do, I saw one recently that claimed Prince William gave up the throne, uh huh... sure... look up Edward VIII for why that's probably not true). Nowadays, with the internet, it's practically everywhere. To make sure what I hear is "true" or "accurate" I take most everything I hear with a grain of salt until I see some intangible proof, unless the said tangible proof is available at the start. Another option is to look at the environment surrounding the story and see if the claim makes sense in context before digging for more information. For example, after Solo under preformed at the box office, it was said that all future Star Wars spin off films were put on hold. It made sense in context give the atmosphere surround Star Wars in the wake of Solo's release. However, not only do you have to take into account that Solo is one of the most expensive films ever made,  but also that putting a film on hold may not be as good a solution as continuing production to conclusion. As it turns out those spin-off films were not put on hold, but Lucasfilm is reassessing them. Only after all this stuff is done and dusted do I usually pass on information to others. More often though, they bring it up first. 

Also, for the more visual/audio learners in this class, you might want to consider: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtM6jSpzb5gMNsx9kdmqBfmY

Your welcome.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go read fan fiction... don't judge me, I like what I like.