“Run Papa Run” Review.

Run Papa Run follows the complicated life of Triad Chief Lee Tin-Yun, telling the story of his change from a violent, boisterous teenager to a family orientated man who is determined to become a better man for his daughter. Though the genre is clearly a gangster style, a lot of the typical conventions of this genre are overshadowed by the much more powerful genre that is love and the bond between father and daughter. Yet there is still a sense of comedy that thrives throughout the movie, especially when we see how Tin-Yun is clearly dominated by the female gender through the character of his daughter as we see the massive effect she has on his life-style. Yet other female characters such as his mother, does not have quite the same effect after we see how she attempts to get his life back on track time and time again, but this wild boy refuses to leave his dominant role as the Triad Chief.

Nevertheless, after Tin-Yun captures the heart of career-driven Mabel and soon gets her pregnant, we begin to see 2 very different men, one that yearns to keep his job as a triad chief and the other who focuses only on the welfare of his daughter. However, this loving father soon dominates as we see how he begins the change of his company to more legal acts and even changes his religion so his daughter can attend a better school.

Yet Tin-Yun tried everything to protect his daughter from his true identity and revolves his whole life around her, he does have a cheating and violent side that keeps drawing him back into the mobster world, making death the only option to become free.

Overall, Run Papa Run has a very light-hearted, comical look on gangs that is soon over-powered by the heart-warming and lovable story between a father and his insanely cute daughter.

Task 3: Walkersgreen Rd – Coventry University

For task 3, I have decided to do a journey from my home in Newcastle-Under-Lyme to Coventry University via the train. During this task, I will capture images of any specific places that link to me as well as some videos and then embed them onto my google map. Here are the images I will be using on my google map:

As well as a Video I captured whilst on my journey of simply the beautiful landscapes I saw:

Stone

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Overall I found this task interesting as I have never understood how to create a Google Map so the variation of options on how to create your map intrigued me. However, I feel that I did not give myself enough time to create this task, so if I were to re-do my Google Map, I would include more videos and personalise these videos to suit me. Nonetheless, I have embedded my Google Map onto my blog:

View Larger Map

Ubiquitous Internet.

Ubiquity = Everywhere/Common

Scientist Mark Weiser coined this term ubiquitous computer as he felt that computing should have a calming effect and should be an extension of the human consciousness as a quiet servant. Nonetheless, we see that the Web 2.0 does follow this theory as we as the users are still the producers and editors of the Web, therefore, keeping us in control, yet the Web is a window for the information we send to other users, so still emphasises Weiser’s theory as the quiet servant. Furthermore, through the vastly growing technology of the Web, we also see his theory on the calming effect as many web-based systems now have integrated technology that will do certain things for you, enabling society to sit back and relax. For instance, at the moment we see the basic integrated technology on the web such as remembering your password for you as well as remembering web pages that you have recently looked at. Yet this technology is constantly growing and we begin to see more intelligent technology such as iris scans to allow access into a building and personalized advertising whereby they use your name to grab attention. Even though this is not yet introduced into society, we see that sci-fi movies are constantly using this vast technology to show what our future will be like, shown especially within the following clip from Minority Report:

In terms of our task on the Google Maps, we see how this integrated technology is being used through the Street View that will find the exact location and allow you to see it as if you were there. Furthermore, Google Maps remembers the maps that I have already created along with certain places I often view through creating an account on Google that allows the Web to access and remember my information.

Kevin Kelly and Convergence.

I found this video on the Web very interesting as Kevin Kelly debates about the changing Internet and how it has effected society with this constant improvement on technology. For instance, Kelly stated that new technology is being created now that will give humanity less work to do, such as the bar code on a piece of clothing that can be scanned into your washing machine and it then knows exactly how to wash that certain piece of clothing. Therefore, we see that the convergence media may be growing and becoming more successful, but it is creating a much more lazy society.  Furthermore, this constant growth of the web leads Kelly to believe that at some point, the world will be in it’s own Internet because of these vastly growing technological inventions that all lead to the same place… the web. So if we continue to work at this rate, Kevin Kelly estimated that in a mere 30 years time, the web will exceed human knowledge and be more powerful than the human brain itself. Overall, I found this talk quite capturing and eye-opening to the problems that will occur through our own arrogance at creating these Internet-based inventions.

Google Map Embedding Test.

View Larger Map

Yay it worked!!
So to embed a link into my blog I now know that I must first blog through the HTML link rather than the Visual page so the atefact which I want to embed into my blog will appear in an interactiven style.

More Google Maps Experimentation.

I felt the need to practice my knowledge within Google Maps more before I move  on to attempt the final, finished Google Map. Therefore, within this practice, I drew a line from my house to my shopping centre within Newcastle-Under-Lyme, my home town. I also added a place marker to show where my college was and images of these sites within Newcastle-Under-Lyme. Here is a print screen of my google map showing the route I take to Hanley Shopping Centre:

Furthermore, here is a print screen of the place marker I created to show where the college I attended for 2 years is:

We then moved on to learn how to embed a video onto your google map, for this, I found a video on youtube describing the different areas of Stoke-on-Trent so I then embeded the video onto the placemark I created of Stoke-on-Trent:

Here I have embedded my map into my blog:

View Larger Map

Task 2: Photoshop Montage.

After creating my data visualisations and taking the images of my daily convergence usage, I created this montage as a compilation of these images in a creative way. In terms of the process, I manipulated the exposure of the background image to create the surreal, dark look that I feel is effective. Furthermore, I pasted a number of my data visualisations onto the montage and faded them into the background image, therefore, creating a see through, ghost like image that enabled me to layer these images on top of eachother and create an interesting effect. I also added text as I feel this relates well to the project being on statistics of my convergence use.

In conclusion, this task has helped me gain more skills within Photoshop along with being able to present these skills through my finished montage.