Everything You Never Wanted To Learn About The Kentucky Derby

My Infographic

The Words We Use To Make Ourselves

Like always, I want to start this blog post off with a story. Once, while I was playing pool in the summer, I found a piece of graffiti in the bathroom of a bar I would never choose to walk into. It read (if you'll pardon my French) "Fuck bitches get money." Now, clearly our inebriated author is slightly confused as to what exactly he is trying to say. And I realized that I had a Sharpie in my purse and a period would correct the sentence into something the original author clearly did not intend. But somehow, "Fuck. Bitches get money." seemed so much nicer on that puke-beige bathroom wall.

The point is, punctuation is the guideline within which we build society. Our communications are ruled by its inclusion, omission, and nuance. And we are painfully aware of this. When I searched typography art for images to add to this blog post, I steeled myself for the deluge of "Keep Calm And ___" memes. But instead I found something moving and profound.

We are intimately aware of the words that make us up, of the way we need language and how we lean on it throughout the day. Typographic are is a visual representation of our conscious and subconscious recognition of the nuances of type and punctuation Solomon introduces. Going back to our earlier studies of sign and signifier even, these pieces blur the lines between those things, making us question in we are sign or signifier ourselves. Certainly, we made words, but in some way are we ourselves not made by words as well?

Bad Science in CSI Miami: Visual Rhetoric Meets Iconography

Pictorial imagery catches us at unawares because, as intellectuals, we are trained to analyze texts and to treat drawings or photographs as trifling adjuncts. - Mishra

If computer simulations are documentary, they are subjunctive documentary. Their subjunctive nature lies not only in their flexibility in the imagining of events, but in their staging as well... - Wolf

Alright, kids, it's time to have a talk... a talk about fake detectives. Detectives of the following variety:

 You're mamas always taught you not to hurt other people, but they never thought to warn you about the dangerous siren-song of police work, did they? Actually, that probably has more to do with our generations increasing exposure to on-demand crime scene investigating that anything esle. We sell our children CSI kits as TOYS.

See, CSI is emblematic of a much larger problem: we, smart animals that we are, process information as it is given to us. And the visual rhetoric of CSI is entirely compelling. You can carry a gun, look like a model and put the bad guys away in a neat. 45-minute episode. But perhaps the most infuriating misconstruction of the franchise is the heavily visually-influences explanations of forensic science. In order to compress the show into its time slot and not overwhelm the readers, the franchise sacrifices authenticity for the Idiots Guide To _______. Obviously, not everyone who watches CSI feels the overwhelming assurance that they are ready to solve crime. But, like any other oversimplification of visual media to compress a complex idea, it introduces the allure of a vocation without acknowledging the work necessary to reach that point. Like selling products with an iconic brand, CSI has built an empire on the assurance that psuedo-science will sell (Big Bang Theory, anyone?). Audiences crave superficial reassurance, and with the compression of elegantly shot, useless machines, they barely need to pay attention to the dialogue to achieve it,

How to sort-of make adulthood work for you: the documentary

So last night, as I finished my other homework and began uploading my last videos, I realized that my flashdrive (and all my work thus far) was locked in a far-distant computer lab. So, at the crack of dawn this morning, I rolled out of bed and began re-creating my video from the ground up. This was slightly less awful than it might have been since, having done this once, I knew what I wanted it to look like. But it took forever to find comparable music and I am somewhat less happy with the final product that I was with the 75% I had before. However, I am quite happy with the addition of my final photos and video and overall the project turned out like how I envisioned it. I also now know more about WindowsMovieMaker (or at least, enough to hate it) which I think was the point of this project.

Enjoy!