Updated it all!

I've been uploading them throughout yesterday and today, keeping the dates sensitive to when they were meant to be posted. Now with more pictures!

This'll be my last entry. Probably gonna delete it soon. Ciao!

The Mediascape: 2015, 2025, 2060

In five years, we can be assured the way knowledge is presented and controlled will be different than it is today. If we can assume China is forward thinking (and indeed, they are), then the future looks dim. Google has been castrated already, while beheadings happen elsewhere when people present knowledge that isn't deemed fruitful to a culture. But the media, specifically. With the downfall of wikileaks, and the recently proposed yet overturned (this year, anyway) COICA bill (which would effectively do to us what China has done to Google) it's a scary sort of reality that we will be hushed. What this means is more advertisements, less freedom of thought, less tolerance for our first amendment, and, frankly, a more archaic outlook (violently?) shoved down the throats' of a population already so stomped on. Five years from now, I envision at the very least Google becoming a bad thing.

In fifteen years, my better guess, assuming control does become more... controlled, I think the thing most subject to change will be the way things are advertised. With the advance of technology, and new ways to view a glowing rectangle, advertisements will be inescapable. An Onion skit said it pretty well with a hypothetical phone that whispers products and businesses into your ear while on the phone. Funny, but not at all ignorable. [link] The military, I believe, will make itself more of a presence, coaxing people to join in newer ways than getting kids and adults alike hooked on Call of Duty and Halo 3. So much money has already been invested in the development of weapons, armor, anything that will give 'us' an advantage over 'them.' The discussion in class today has shown us that if 'they' have any sort of leg up, we just bomb 'them.' New technologies to kill, new technologies to repress and subdue.

Fifty years from now, though I could never really say for sure, I see the world as a wildly different place. I imagine robots and humans existing together, I imagine people finding new ways to stay alive longer through gene manipulation [link] and robotic extensions, and who knows what else. I imagine advertisements being transmitted directly into our brains (or as Futurama postulates, directly into our brains). I think if religion as a whole hasn't collapsed, it will have surely taken over. I see eugenics on the cusp of being normal (or perhaps a fate like in Oryx and Crake, the media and corporations overthrowing society in favor of a 'better world'), I see repression, I see a clearer separation of the haves and the have-nots than ever before. I have no idea where I will be, what I will look like, what I will be doing, any of that. I almost feel like education will be something available to only the few, as with various cultures world-wide today, and I see entertainment being king (Mike Judge seemed to know this with his film Idiocracy, not to mention that it's something that always thrives during repressions, strangely). A best case scenario in fifty years, in my eyes, is that we will have colonized Mars and are given a second start on a planet that doesn't hate us (yet). Or maybe the predictions of the Georgia Guidestones will come to new light. Either way, I'm not too hopeful. But maybe we will find ways to be happy. That's all that is really important.

Bizarro Fiction

I ripped off the art style directly from a panel. This is a piece I don't think I should be allowed to stylize, being so awesome.

Jennie 2.5 is the tragically ironic anti-media, anti-government, anti-everything heroine of the story. She, not too unlike her author Brian Wood, is incredibly sick of the way the world is repressing, controlling, and subduing an otherwise unthinking, uncaring populous. Tagged throughout the book are pages meant to be xeroxed and reprinted, stuck on the sides of buildings, poles, garage doors, cars, anywhere and everywhere with messages that seem to justify an end to a means (usually, if not exclusively, an outcry for violence, as with a gun and suggestive, clever text). This is where Jennie 2.5 seems to differ from her writer in that she is absolutely no holds barred when it comes to being pushed to the edge of what she can take. Her message is timeless, as with every culture in the world having made some advancement through a means of anarchy, and though the ending appears ironic and pointless, Wood really wants you to pay attention to what's happened and what's happening. He must want her message to be taken lightly, or at least appear to be. He may himself be a peaceful person, but he is an angry writer. He knows that anger and a drive to stop being stomped on starts with a spark, and a recognizable image is all you need to put fear into your opponent's heart.

This is made most obvious when he basically compared the revolutionary Che Guevara to Jenny 2.5. He knows the reputation Che has even many years after his death, and I feel like this may be a subtle way at rousing the reader to understand and fight for similar ideologies. Even if all you do is wear a shirt with the man's head, you are at least aware that he was not a man who did not, could not, allow for the government to control him so long as there was breath in his body. So though Jenny does become a media star, which she seems to be okay with even though it's exactly what she was fighting against, she leaves out that there is such a thing as positive attention that can be drawn through the media. If Wood asks you to print his anarchist signs everywhere, than he probably wants someone to see them. He probably wants someone to get angry or afraid. He probably had hopes of seeing these things all around the local streets, people fighting for their rights, as well as a life where what you hear is no longer absolutely controlled. And as much as he wants you to wear a Che shirt, he probably wants you to know exactly what it stands for, and exactly why you should wear it. If nothing else at all, he wants you to at least realize what the world is doing to you, and that you should be fed up.