Blog 2

The Digital Age Downside:

Humans cannot conduct their entire lives from laptops, so why has that become the expectation?

I was a happy and optimistic person. I count my blessings in a gratitude journal, have impeccable manners, dislike saying swear words, and am not above saying “love you” to my parents before hanging up. 

This pleasantly peachy attitude took her dying breath on September of 2012.

A former friend mercilessly tortured her until she finally met the abyss.

Submitting to Internet dependence murdered my happiness.

When college demanded that I submit my every work to a place as mysterious and unreliable as the World Wide Web I was wary. Now, after experiencing the hell that is D2L, Microsoft Outlook and Online Job applications, the online experience heartlessly mocks every hope I have and kicks the crap out of my good intentions.

The web and I have an abusive relationship, and now am expected to marry this monster. These three stories are my plea for divorce from an internet-drenched existence.

I love many things, but are obsessed with two: Learning everything about every animal ever in existence, and office supplies.





I hope to one day be a zookeeper with a basement full of new notebooks, erasers, glue sticks & Pilot pens. 

I happen to be moving back home next semester and needed one of the many jobs available due to the large number of stores opening in my area.

To get this aspiration’s pedal to the metal, naturally I would apply to Petco and Staples, right?

You should know that both of these companies provide ONLY online applications, and when they aren’t hiring, they don’t let you apply.

When I was a 14 year-old job-virgin and filled out my application for an opening at Petco, this was just dandy. It was a bummer that the position was filled by another applicant, but everything was still dandy. Now I'm experienced, knowledgeable, and am required to with hold all those great new values for an unbeknownst time when they decide is right, if I make it in time to apply at all.

Fast forward to 2 weeks ago on a Thursday night, filling out an application for the new Staples in town. A careful 2 ½ hours in, the internet cuts out for some ridiculously unfortunate random-ass reason. I realized I had hit my wi-fi button, fixed the problem, and scrambled to get signed back in to see if it’d saved anything. Now imagine me drawing a blank on what username and password I used.  

Immediately I started to cry.

To this day, I don't know my beloved Suzy's birthday.

Now I am 19 years old and have three years of experience working with exotic animals at a zoo. The cashiers that check me out at petco still go to my High School and have never had a job before. When I was reduced to asking a question about a guinea pig's estimated age, each employee answered way differently then the last. Staple’s sends me emails entitled “Did you forget about us?” and it hurts like salt in an emotional wound.

 I am a bitter young woman.

While Staples may sarcastically mock me through my Microsoft Outlook inbox, my “Sent Items” folder has the spirit of a prankster and targets contacts that are too important to mess with. Say I send an email from home one day, and the next I connect to Starbuck’s wi-fi. My goofy-little-goose Outlook searches out an email to resend on that second day: but the sneaky bastard resends only to my professors, and only at completely random times. It has provoked responses from 3 of my 4 professors who wonder why I want to hand in the same essay or take the same quiz twice.  The mystery of Internet connection is my least favorite mystery.

My mom was a “non-trad” student for a couple semesters.

In 1995, you printed your essay with your name at the top and the date right below it. The ink dries onto the pearly, creaseless paper, and as you brim with pride, you turn to your little two-year old (who’s features are so cute, you believe she’s so full of heavenly light that any poop or mucus is merely the spillage of her Godliness.) and you say, “Oh, Sara. Life is so wonderful.”

The paper is physically offered and received; proof that your work has been accounted for and your timeliness is noted.

Circa 1995. Glorious Baby Me next to a patriotic pretty llama with my patriotic pregnant Mama.
I guess people loved the country more than they do now, if style is any indication...

In 2012, college essays and tests worth points of unfathomable amounts are submitted to a “drop box” on a website named like an 80’s boy band.  Trying to navigate hell is preferable to navigating D2L. Relying on this website for every grade-determining event I’m paying to be subjected to has made me tear up more than any cruddy ex-boyfriend has. There are so many uncertain variables in submitting assignments online, and I’ve been tripped up by every one of them.

Do you have an internet connection?

Are you sure the drop box closes when you think it does?

Is your internet connection fast enough to submit your assignment before the drop box closes?

Does your essay comply with that rubric that everyone saw? The one in the invisible file under one of the 36 misleading tabs on the courses code-name page?

Did you press submit after successfully uploading?

I abhor D2L. I do. 

Bigfoot's Science Beat Down.

My Essay and Speech posing the possible issues with how the media and technology may compromise  their mother practice, scientific fact/honesty. I chose bigfoot because of its wide-spread, long-lived media prevalence and because it's one of the few biased popular claims pertaining specifically to science.

Works Cited available upon request.

"The most fantastical, far-fetched flamboyantly false legend of our modern era is the proposed existence of Sasquatch. The impossibility of a great ape living in our country’s backwoods is being ignored for the sake of interesting television. This newfound interest has inspired a new generation of believers, although scientific evidence disproving him has never been more valuable and abundant. We, as media consumers, are no strangers to buying half-truths and sensational exaggerations; however, the possibility of an extant, boreal-dwelling primate isn’t a political, spiritual or social matter. These claims disregard science’s sacred law and threaten its honorable reputation. It’s become a worthy battle to inspire critical thought, thus protecting the sanctity of scientific truth: 98% of bio scientists don't believe it's worth the effort dispelling such a silly myth. This means academically competent information from experienced professionals isn’t nearly as publicized - or even compiled - as the cross-platform content argued for by pro-existence people.

Sasquatch skeptic and author John Napier explored the differences between both the believer’s evidence and evidence pertinent to skeptics. His evidence for the former was categorized as “cultural evidence”, and the latter’s he categorized “scientific evidence”. While scientific evidence doesn’t require culture’s approval, cultural evidence is worthless if there are absolutely no comprising aspects able to be scientifically recognized. This means for every thousand of arguments made for Sasquatch’s existence, it takes only one tried and true fact to discredit it.  I will explore and assign value to both scientific and cultural types of evidence by beginning with how the Bigfoot’s myth gained popularity, as well as presenting examples of the poisonous desperation that his believers  (and the TV channels that profit from airing believers) experience because of a lack in tangible evidence,

The media barrage of cleverly organized falsities resulted in Bigfoot’s stardom. He has been spotted in every state on America’s mainland, making him a pervasive and accepted figure because of this accessibility. Kids and adults alike have all experienced their native home’s wilderness, meanwhile inspired by an enchanting hope to catch a glimpse of our nine-foot forest brother. Witness accounts like these were responsible for Bigfoot’s first steps into our consciousness. The collection of reported sightings (the largest belonging to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization of Colorado) remain the core of any Bigfoot advocate’s “cultural evidence”. Belief in Bigfoot has survived brilliantly on this insubstantial web of testimony and a commitment to defending irrelevant detail.

Irrelevant detail, like buttocks muscles, armpit gaps and the inability to see a zipper, is Animal Planet’s current method for assaulting science. I’m referencing the hilariously ironic, yet convincing and honest T.V. show, “Finding Bigfoot”. The use of technology is the key to Bigfoot’s existence, and this program is telling of technology’s ability to perpetuate a myth like this. But, technology’s place in our societies are still very vague, it’s an inconceivable idea to fully consider it’s powerful prevalence culture-wide with its equal importance in our personal lives.

Jankowski 5

Sitting down on a Sunday night to catch the new episode is very, very interesting. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, or “BFRO”, teams up with a spunky, skeptical wildlife biologist named Rene to review sightings and conduct investigations around the U.S. The BFRO’s website, as I’d stated, is used as a the country’s database for all reported evidence for Bigfoot’s existence. They use this information to pinpoint where based on witness’ reports would be the most “Squatchy” (where they’d have the best chancing of seeing a Bigfoot). So, the team packs up and takes every spy gadget money can buy with them on investigation nights: motion detectors, night vision surveillance, and infrared thermal imagers, even renting a baboon from a nearby zoo in hopes it’d pique bigfoot’s curiosity. Yet, the Bigfoot Finder Crew is reduced to digitally enhancing an image to re-examine the only piece of Sasquatch footage on the planet; the1967 Patterson-Gimlin film immortalized by anyone with a television or Internet. How on earth can we use technology to enhance the image quality of a 45-year-old film clip, and consider the babblings of  “experts” who insist on using trivial details to fabricate their certainty of Bigfoot’s existence? A believer will take the time to scrutinize how this purported Bigfoot’s toe bends as it hits the ground, and furthermore, convince himself that this toe bend is too inhuman looking to be human, concluding that an 8 foot bipedal primate is the only logical perpetrator of a toe bend. The reasoning is not only faulty, but also exhausting. Instead, I’d encourage them to take the time to consider all the other technology invented since that old fuzzy clip. Trail Cams blanket America’s woodlands by the hundreds of thousands, and every phone in every pocket is now equipped with a camera of 5 times the Patterson-Gimlins’ film’s image definition.

Another example of bigfoot-er’s desperation for any evidence that can appear scientific, regardless if it applies to scientific rule or not, in hopes they’d boost belief in bigfoot’s possibility. An explanation of his possible origin occurred when a television network used its generally credible reputation to air a program that violated one of science’s most important rules: if the facts are outdated, they aren’t facts anymore. The clip I investigated from Animal Planet’s “The Lost Tapes Revelations: Bigfoot” episode aired in 2009 and featured one of the only paleoanthropologists ever to believe in Bigfoot, Dr. Grover Krantz of Washington State University. The clip was intended to

legitimize Dr. Krantzs’ theory that the modern Bigfoot descended from Gigantopithicus, a Pleistocene Primate that we only know existed through teeth and fragments of jaw excavated from Korea.

Upon first viewing of the footage, I got the feeling that there wasn’t anything fishy about Dr. Krantz’s information, and his proposition that because it only went extinct 10,000 years ago, it’d have lived with early humans. “It’s a fair presumption that [the gigantopithicus] was an erect, bipedal animal.” Dr. Krantz explained. “It stood perhaps 8 feet tall, weighed about 800 pounds, and was presumably covered with hair.” I could see how believers could buy into the theory and dismiss the video’s content as the scientific, gospel truth. As Gigantopithicus is a critical piece of evidence (and the only evidence bigfoot-related that is tangible enough for scientists to explore) that Bigfoot believers hold dearly to their case for his existence, I sought more information about this creature and did some research on Dr. Krantz.

A blog from Smithsonian’s “Hominid Hunting” website was an updated and more factually substantial illustration of the mysterious Gigantopithicus. We now know that Gigantopithicus was the size of a 12-foot-tall polar bear, and too massive to ever move as a bipedal animal. A lot like the Panda, this ape ate exclusively bamboo making his migration to mainland North America impossible. Perhaps Dr. Krantz would’ve liked to learn about and participate in a revised version of the episode in lieu of our newfound understanding, but unfortunately, he had passed away in 2002. Seven and a half years after Dr. Krantzs’ death, Animal Planet aired his already disproven hypothesis.

Indisputable scientific truths, and violations of those truths like these are being improved upon and exposed every day. The only evidence remaining for Bigfoot believers is witness testimony: about 1500 unreliable and imaginative sightings from California beaches to Maine’s harbors. Not one sighting, nor any other piece of the cultural poppycock I discussed, can be proven in the distinguished name of science. Every scholarly primate and paleoanthropology journal, hundreds of thousands of trail cams & camera phones, and an increased participation in outdoor recreation, when pitted against self-anointed hominid experts attempting to legitimize armpit gaps, flat feet and top-heavy gaits as induplicable evidence, there is no contest for logic.

We live in corruption and are lied to every day of our lives. How comforting to know that for the past 300 years, science has enforced laws to keep facts updated and employed a system of observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion. People living by “scientific evidence” created an impenetrable fortress of knowledge that allowed for new technology to be invented at a rate never experienced by our planet’s history. Our technology’s misuse (the BFRO’s gadgets, Animal Planet, and all misleading journalism) isn’t currently a threat to the big fortress walls protecting resolute fact, but these myths become dangerous when they alter the public’s definition of truth and the amount of proof needed to claim it. "

Blog 1 for Journalism.

Think back to when you were first heard about the social networking website “Twitter”. What’d you think about it when it was described to you? Did you think it’d be more than just another internet phenomenon that’d pass, or did you think the social site had sticking power? Let’s be honest, you probably thought it was a stupid, conceited idea that’d lose steam fast, but you ended up making an account because you needed to see what all the hullabaloo was. Maybe you ended up following the right accounts and got sucked in; but you were most likely pretty unimpressed and would forget about your account only to revisit it in a month.

Twitter has been around for six years and their user-ship has been steadily growing the entire time. Twitter has succeeded to become a staple on most smartphones and bookmark bars despite having the key ingredients of most internet fads; but how? I came up with a list of things that I truly believe are to credit for Twitter’s survival.

However, the reasons would have little meaning of twitter’s longevity if they stood alone. No: beneath each of the site’s characteristics lies something called “great timing”.  Drawn in from every new update, popular international event, or by Twitter’s unintentional prevalence in other media platforms, new users come to the site in precisely calculated waves. This, more than anything, gloriously emancipated this social network from its certain damnation.

Steady amounts of people exposed to and learning ways to use Twitter gave way to a revolutionary new keyword system that would make commentary and conversation much easier across the entire world wide web, and subsequently, would redefine the (#) symbol: I’m talking about hashtags.

We consume many different categories of media, with TV and internet being the platforms with the most diverse and specialized channels. Recently, television programs have embraced the hashtag as a means of communicating with viewers, but more importantly, to have you advertise for them by means of your followers.

TV Shows and other televised events that use hashtags will usually involve the title or other applicable witty phrase. There are no spaces and the words are preceded by the pound symbol. (#Debate2012, #MythBusters.)

Twitter’s hashtag system has a funny, more personal side as well. Out of the ten top trending keywords and hash tags, typically there are a few that aren’t ad related.

For example, the top two trending hashtags in the Minneapolis area right now are “#ToMyFutureSon” and “#IWishMyCarHad”. Hashtags like these act as quirky writing prompts for those that want to post, and offer solid entertainment value for the followers of that writer.

Though followers seek entertainment, they can also choose to be informed by following national and local news stations and often participate in the station’s gathering of news. Twitter’s journalist users use the site like a vertical news marquee, posting headlines to articles or clips of newscasts along with a corresponding link. They can also pose questions to their followers and almost effortlessly attain quotable material from the public.

There are many reasons, but these three have contributed to the longevity of the site as well as change how we use other social networking. The accommodations made by Twitter for advertisers, coupled with the no-pressure nature of the “Tweeters” that use the predisposed hashtags are one aspect of it’s success as a marketing tool.

The hashtags written from the heart, however, make up a big part of why Tweeters will stay engaged and interested in the site because these prompts serve as the important bond of entertainment between the Tweeter & their followers.

Twitter has provided news outlets with a way to break stories on a huge scale as well as compose stories easily.

It’s not the Britney Spears or Justin Beiber that keeps tweeters tweeting, but the participation level, the entertainment value, and the efficiently posted information that will keep Twitter on top of the social networking game.

Plan of Attack to Prevent Another Failed Project.

I spent about 6 hours on a hat was supposed to look like this. The time lost on other projects have been greater, sure... 

...but I'd never been so pumped about a homemade hat.

(photo credit 'Belinda' http://claresaddictedtoyarn.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/pattern-testers-needed.html)

...So, So Excited...

...For that chunky woolen Hat.

In hindsight, I probably deserved for that hat to fail. I convince myself that making the same stupid novice mistakes is actually the smart thing to do. 
When I'm feeling like a sassy know-it-all, I tend to do these things:

I laugh in the face of recommended yarn. I wanted a bulky hat. Screw your class 3 weight economy sized acrylic, I'm using bulky yarn.

I got 9 hooks in 6 different sizes but I'll be damned if you convince me to use them. My favorite red hook will always trump your "correct" hook.

^A typical bystander^
My rebel attitude about crocheting
intimidates people sometimes.

I don't practice stitches before I commit them to a project. I'd never crocheted a clamshell before, but no biggie. It's in my craftswoman blood. 

I never mastered my counting, and I LOVE to rely on 'eyeballing' it. (even though it's ruined many a project.) I can follow along to a tutorial, loop by loop and yarn over by yarn over, and it'll look totally stupid and not the same at all. 

I try to obey your patterns, I really do, but I want to finish at least one project during my lifetime, and between unraveling the product of your poor teaching job and rewinding your video so I can retry your goofy knots, I AM GROWING A GRANDMA FACE.

So, I did a lot wrong...

I hope a raccoon enjoys his sleeping bag.

I ran out of my good wool yarn, and saw nothing wrong with the size at that point. Most logical move according to me? "I'll trim the chunky wool with my least favorite color of  super thin yarn." YEAH. No.

The hat is so much bigger in person. 

It looked like a lampshade when I took this picture.

but before you judge it, you oughta know that the magic ring on the crown of this one is my personal best!

mergerc rangs!

Success Achieved on the Quest for the Purl!

♪♫ Guess who did a purllll             stitch?♬                               ♫♬Guess who did a purllll stitch?♪

                                                       ♪♫ I DID, I DID!♫♬

                                                    ♫♬Nanner, nanner boo-boo! ♪♫

After coms class I sat down with an open mind, Leisure Arts' Knit Stitches DVD my parents gifted me for my birthday, and my new pack of acrylic needles I gifted to myself. :] 

I began to lose patience around the fourth time I needed to recast, and I decided I kind of hate knitting. 

I made a mental list of the many reasons knitting sucks while I worked on my knit stitch row, and wouldn't you know it, just as I started the next row I was stricken with the power of the purl!

(I still think crocheting is way better than knitting though. 

It's just at this point, anything made by me that isn't

a knotty or oversized disaster is worth celebrating.)