THE LAST BLOG POST I'LL EVER WRITE FOR THIS CLASS

It took me a little while to understand what you wanted in terms of analyzing space. Looking back at some of my earliest blog posts, I tended to summarize a lot more than I needed to and my analysis sort of got lost in the jumble. I also focused on analyzing the story rather than the actual space.

In my blog pot about Johnny Cash’s “Beyond Here Lies Nothing” video, I summarized every single thing that happened and talked about the significance of each one of those things rather than concisely discussing the elements we talked about in class and going over them with a few strong points form the video. Going into Inquiry 1 I was still unsure about what you wanted in terms of analysis, summary and time spent going over space and meaning. The conference helped a little bit, but having not received a grade on anything from you at that point, I was unsure of what to expect, so I just did what I knew how to do and hoped for the best. The comments you provided on my Inquiry were helpful and provided a good insight into how you graded.

From there, things started to get clearer, ironically this was around the time we read Foucalt which was an ordeal to say the least. The main thing I took away from Foucalt was his concept of mirror spaces, which are perceived but are not actually real in this plane of existence. I was able to apply that concept to a variety of things, like when we talked about the Stubenville rape case and the big data blog post. I said that the Internet acted as a mirror space for real events and in some cases had an enormous impact on the real spaces that we inhabit.

We then had a blog post about Starbucks, which was probably my favorite blog post not only because it talked about the processes in which companies create customer loyalty, but I was also able to apply concepts from a book I had read earlier to it. The book discussed the formation of a habit loop in our daily lives and how each day is made up of many different cycles of this loop, everything from brushing our teeth, to driving places and eating. I’m sure you’re probably tired of hearing about the habit loop from me, but I find it fascinating and it was amazing to me how many different places I could apply it in my own life.

Inquiry 2a suffered from procrastination and lack of motivation, so I had to make up for it in 2b. A lot of the things I talked about in 2b weren’t originally in my prezi including, believe it or not, the habit loop. Inquiry 2 didn’t do a lot for me in terms of introducing me to new information, but it was a great outlet for me to apply the things I had learned so far in the class and in other classes I have had before this one, especially my social psychology class.

Inquiry 3 seemed to pass by quickly since it was a group project and we all kind of worked on it separately aside from a few short meetings so it really felt more like pooled individual efforts rather than a group project. Because of the apparent disconnect in our group, I don’t think our presentation and subsequent paper flowed very well. This is not to say that the information in our presentation was sub par, our information was all rock solid, each individual contribution was interesting and well thought out, the main problem was that there was little or no segway between ideas.

Seemingly interspersed with Inquiry 3 was our box town project; which I thought would have fit better had it been closer to the map reading seeing as they both deal with urban and suburban layout. I remember from both discussions the topic of roads changing depending on the setting they’re in. If they’re in rural countryside, they’re spread out and most of the time they connect two larger cities or towns. Once roads get into a metropolitan area they become straight and divide the city into square blocks so that space can be fully utilized (Boston being the only exception…). In suburban areas, the layout of the roads is less about efficiency and more about things like making sure houses have enough land, and including bends in the roads to discourage speeding.

Despite a bit of a slow start and apathetic ending, this course has engrained a couple things in my head. I’ll always look at the Internet as a mirror space; I’ll never face the door in an elevator again; and I’ll never know how to use a semicolon; because you said you would teach us; but you never did;

Letter Writer's 3 Inquiry

For our Inquiry 3 we used Andrew's project on Great American Ball Park and the four of us all kinda chose different aspects of the park to analyze and redesign. Andrew chose location because he felt it was a very important aspect of the park and since he goes to games often, it influences him directly. Meghan was set on doing fan experience and interaction so we let her run with that. Bannon decided to focus on the size of the diamond and how it related to home runs and fielding plays. I chose to do seating because it was easy and that was one of my main focuses in Inquiry 2. We started with Andrew's powerpoint and just emailed it around as we all worked on it. We had a couple meetings just so we could kind of get a sense of what our entire powerpoint would look like and what direction we were heading in. Without going really in depth into the layout and pricing of all the seats in GABP, I tried to give an overview of everything they had to offer and some of the unique options like the all you can eat seats that they had. Going off of ticketing and seat prices I noticed that the Reds boast using dynamic pricing, which is a good idea and it is actually very useful to both the consumer and the organization. By being able to change ticket prices based on how popular they predict the game to be, the organizations that utilize this system can charge more for games that they know lots of people will come to while charging less for games that won't be as popular. You have to read the fine print on their website to realize everything they're allowed to do, but if you just read what they tell you in bullet points it sounds like you're getting a great deal. If I had gotten time to talk during our presentation I would have talked about how this not only encourages fans to buy tickets, but it encourages them to do so again and again because they know the prices will fluctuate and this way they get the best deal. Form there I was going to talk about how saving money on tickets leads people to generally spend more on food and souvenirs allowing the company to make up the difference in lost ticket sales. I was going to sum up by talking about how the entire process of going to a baseball game is powered by the habit loop. Lots of little decisions that can be made for us lead us to make those snap decisions again and again, and while we think we're acting under our own volition, there is a very powerful subconscious influence that is swaying our decisions.

Trixtopia

We had a kind of slow start to building our city... I think everyone in our group is pretty much done with school and trying, so we made a beach town slash spring break city. As soon as we decided to make a beach town, we basically figured it would be restaurants, shops, and hotels. As we deliberated more on it, we figured we should add a couple things like residential living, and civil services so that the city would at least have a couple inhabitants year round. We ended up having a couple restaurants, bars, hotels, a shopping center, a dolphin sanctuary, two residential buildings and one very large police/fire station and hospital. The entire experience made me realize a couple of things about city planning. First of all, even small towns are divided up within themselves. Much like Goggin Ice Center tries to differentiate experiences and baseball stadiums do too, so do cities. Our town was basically cut in half, one half for the tourists and the other half for the residents. We put clubs, restaurants, and tourist shops by the hotels that vacationers would stay at and we the grocery store and police fire hospital by the residents. It made me realize how people both don't like change in their lives and at the same time need it. That's why people take vacations, they want a break form their normal daily routines. And when they are on vacation, they do not want anything to remind them of their normal life at home and the stresses that come with it. At the same time, when people reside in a place, they don't want to be bothered by tourists, people who exploit the place that they call home. Furthermore, the project made me realize how coveted nature is and how easily exploitable it can become once people start seeing dollar signs. Additionally, when individuals realize that they have the opportunity to create a "unique" "natural" setting, they can do so and make money off of it. that's exactly what we did, we decided to create an inlet in our coastline and then almost immediately after we did that, we put two enormous hotels on either side of it. It wasn't even like we were going to make money off of our decision, we just did it because we figured that's what would happen if this city were real. All in all the project brought to light a lot of things I had never really given serious thought and it made me realize a little bit of what goes into city planning. Granted our town wasn't really a town at all... more of an imagined space that we all wished was real. Had we made our city bigger, I feel like we would have gotten a better idea of all the details that go into the logistics and economics of city planning, but it was still fun.

Ethnographic research

 This is a floor plan of Goggin Ice Center, which is startling because even though I'm fairly familiar with Goggin, I never realized that 11, 10, 9, or 8 existed or how small the walkway around Steve Cady Arena is compared to everything else.

 This is a CGI representation of the main hockey rink from an opera suite. This is also the section of the ice that the student section is located in, facing the scoreboard. Aside from the general admission seat there are also 102 club level seats, 6 opera suites and 4 private boxes.

This is a post game ritual after the handshake where the players circle up and hit their sticks against the ice faster and faster, then point them up in the air, and finally come together and congratulate each other

Steve Cady Arena has 2,800 general admission seats which are divided in half at center ice. one half is for students, the other half is for ticketed entry. The student section faces the scoreboard and is located on the side of the ice where the visiting teams goalie spends 2 out of the 3 periods. This allows students to be closest when goals are scored and allows for 40 minutes of heckling. People tend to line up hours before the game starts so they can get seats on the glass and it's usually the same people every time. Other people filter in closer to game time and some people get there right when the game starts. The Band of Brotherhood takes up one entire section of seats and plays a vital role in crowd behavior. They always play Love and Honor at the beginning of the game as well as the national anthem. They are also responsible for various cheers throughout the game, and if the crowd gets too rowdy, they play a certain  song or cheer to distract the crowd from whatever just happened in the game.

Arcade Fire Knows Where You Live

When I go the Pine Point site, I can't help but think of Foucalt's piece when she talked about places reflected in a mirror and how they aren't really places at all, rather they exist in a separate reality. That's what Pine Point is. Sure, it was a real place and it existed in this reality at some point, but that's not how it is represented today. Now, the only surviving representations of Pine Point exist in its' residents memories, and on that blog site. Maybe that's for the better, after all "recollection will always be the most accurate version of that place and time." as the author says. So perhaps it is better for the former residents of Pine Point that their only interaction with their old town resides in their mind, because if it still existed, they may not look upon as fondly as they do now. Every slide has music and graphics that are on a loop, so maybe the authors sense of nostalgia comes from the idea that one day, Pine Point will become a new town for new people to call their own, and he just doesn't want to see that day come... Or maybe he just had nothing better to do with his life than make an interactive website dedicated to a town that doesn't exist anymore, who am I to say?

As for the wilderness downtown site, that was just kinda weird to see aerial views of my neighborhood spliced with a child running and computer generated trees growing on the picture. I feel the same way about this site as I do about the Pine Point one. It's not a real place, it's a representation of a real place and it exists in another reality. It is not a real place because it is displayed on my computer screen, it is merely a compilation of pixels arranged by a series of code. it lacks all of the things that make it the place it is, the feel, the smell of the air, the ambient sounds of the neighborhood etc. all those things contribute to making my street unique from other streets. Instead, it is represented with a soundtrack placed over the images, and all kinds of additional images and forces are added to this foreign representation of the street I knew as a child.

Sixth Graders in India Have Done More for the World Than I EVER Will

These videos always make me depressed because it just reminds me that some child in Bangladesh had an idea and now he has had a more profound affect on the world than I ever will. Big data is making everyone and everything in the world more connected, which is a good thing because as this video shows, with an rapidly growing population, comes a lot of people who are really bored and want to make a video. So some people put GPS trackers on pizza delivery bicyclists and watched them. Some other people actually had good ideas and were able to do many things from reducing medical costs to putting a small village on the map. Big data is making it easier and easier for people to make a difference without having to start a massive movement. In the age of connectivity, an idea doesn't just have to be an idea anymore, it can quickly turn into something tangible.

Who Knew My Geology Class Would Make Me a Douche Bag About Nature?

After falling asleep several times while reading Lopez's article, I realized that he was just a man yearning for simpler times. Lopez makes the distinction between scholarly knowledge of land and "true" historical knowledge of land many times. He says that the "true" knowledge comes from living on the land and experiencing it first hand; whereas the scholarly knowledge consists of things like which fish live in a certain river and specific flower names which can be learned in books. His tone suggests that the former is somehow more important and better than the latter. It could be argued that to truly understand and appreciate the land one inhabits, you must possess some sort of scholarly knowledge of its' characteristics. For how can one truly appreciate the beauty of a certain Mendocino shoreline unless you understand that the layers upon layers of sediment visible in the bluff adjacent to the ocean were deposited there over millions of years. And that the reason the layers are mismatched at a certain point is because of an earthquake that took place millions of years ago. If you do not know the basic history of a place, you cannot fully appreciate it for what it is. You can appreciate it for its' beauty and picturesque qualities (even thought that's a faux paus in Lopez's mind) but without knowing "scholarly" specifics of the flora and fauna that inhabit a certain region, you are missing out on an enormous piece of historical significance.

The Home of the Only Sport Miami is Actually Good at

For my Inquiry I'm doing Goggin Ice Center, specifically the rink that the varsity team plays on. I go to most of the hockey games anyway, so I'm familiar with the rink. I'm planning on going during hockey games and other times throughout the day to see what else goes on there, what teams practice there, etc. I want to see the difference between the student section, where the band sits, and where the people who pay for tickets sit. For my research, I'm going to try to find out how hockey stadiums are designed and the atmosphere that each architect wanted to convey and see if it worked out how they wanted. I'll take pictures of the ice rink before, during and after games to see what changes and how it affects the atmosphere. I'm planning on talking to the people that go to the hockey games or go to Goggin regularly so I can hear what they think. I'm looking forward to talking to students and non-students to see how their perspectives and interests shift based on age and relation to the university.

Iced Venti Double Shot Soy Scotosis, No Whip.

Advertisers and marketers at Starbucks fully understand the concept on scotosis, and better yet, they know how to get customers to partake in it. "PR and advertising offer myopic visions that magnify the positive attributes of a commodity and disconnect the consuming experience from alternative experiences." When you walk into a Starbucks or see a commercial or Starbucks, there a hundred different things that influence your perception and chances are, not a single one of those things was put there by accident.

They make the espresso machine look overly complicated and inoperable by anyone other than a trained barista. There is a cloud of noise over the counter form the baristas yelling coded drink orders at each other, there's an espresso machine that's so loud it needs a muffler, and all the conversations that other people are having around you makes this place seem unique and popular.

The busy atmosphere and complex process that goes into making your coffe both contribute to the idea that you can't get this cup of coffee anywhere else, only someone trained could make this. And even with trained people, it takes three of them in an assembly line to do it. That idea is only reinforced by the nearly endless drink menu, and a plethora different coffee beans, each with a stamp saying where it's from and how different and unique it is from all the other coffee beans there... Just like you're unique and different from all the people there.

But even with all these forces convincing you that only Starbucks can make your coffee, there is still a portion of the wall dedicated to coffee grounds that you can buy and take home with you to make coffee just like you get it at Starbucks, but in the comfort of your own home.

But wait, it's not exactly the same unless you buy the Starbucks brand espresso maker (which conveniently has about three buttons). It's just like Mathieu said, "New and contradictory needs are created all the time." Starbucks convinces us that we can't make coffee like they do. But if we really want to, we can buy their beans, their espresso maker, their milk steamer, their mugs, and anything else that will make us think the coffee we make is the same as the one we just paid $4.65 for.

Malls and Cathedrals and Heterotopias, Oh my!

Shopping for pleasure makes the argument that the metaphor of malls being like cathedrals is false in that congregations are powerless to their beliefs and fate whereas consumers have complete control over their decisions.

I disagree.

People are manipulated by advertisements every day, and most of the time they're so good, you don't even realize it. This is called introspection and as humans, we suck at it. Nisbett & Wilson did a study in 1977 to test this, so if you don't believe me, take it up with the Ph.D.'s.

Participants were asked to use introspection to answer how they came up with an idea fabricated by the experimenters. All of them failed to report the correct stimuli AND the participants credited their idea to irrelevant and ineffective stimuli.

Good advertisers and marketers know this and they can trigger subconscious stimuli to make people think they thought of something on their own when in reality, you did not, and that's exactly how the companies want it. I could go on with how much I disagree with this passage, but I feel like I'd just be beating a dead horse with a stick so I'll move on...

Foucalt needs to learn how to edit.

Foucalt also presents a juxtaposition of heterotopias (real spaces) and utopias (imagined spaces). Utopias are not real places; they are perfected reflections of heterotopias that exist in a realm separate from our reality. The heterotopias are places that exist in the real world and serve a specific purpose to society, according to when they occur in time. The same heterotopia could have a vastly different function in one time period of a culture than if it occurred at a later time.

Heterotopias are defined by a list of characteristics: they are ubiquitous across cultures, they can affect the role of other heterotopias in a culture, they can have many meanings, they occur at a specific point in time, and they can be both exclusive and inclusive.

Foucalt said, "These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space" I found this strange because he contrasted useful space to cultural space. Is he saying that a place cannot be both? If a site is deemed cultural is it also deemed useless? Or if it is considered useful, does that mean in cannot be cultural?

If cathedrals are cultural and malls are cathedrals, are malls cultural? Are malls and cathedrals both useless? Or does it just mean that a useful space cannot be occupied by a mall or cathedral?

That's the end of my blog post, if you made it all the way through, congratulations! and here's a reward: go listen to Neon Cathedral by Macklemore.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-gmGiN3Cjk

Beyond Here Lies a Future of Drug Addiction, Domestic Abuse, and Poverty; Most Likely Due to Unresolved Issues With a Certain Woman's Father.

The video opens on a bright but somewhat overcast day, the upbeat tempo conflicts with the man's scowl and his dirty white wife beater (foreshadowing?!?!) he has on under his jacket. The man climbs up the steps to a trashy extended stay motel, unlocks the door and enters the dingy, dimly lit room. All the curtains are drawn and there appears to be a large chain with a padlock hanging by the door. Upon closing the door, he locks it twice from the inside as Bob Dylan's raspy voice sings, "You're the only love I've ever known. Just as long as you stay with me, the whole world is my throne." It seems likely that the man is holding someone captive and does not want her to escape. The synchronization of his actions and these lyrics imply the he is in love with the woman he is holding captive and should she leave him, his life would fall apart.
 The motel room is littered with empty bottles, reinforcing both his drinking problem and the emptiness of his life. The man pours himself a drink, pauses midway through, picks up a knife, and heads to the bedroom. He unlocks the door and slowly opens it to reveal an empty blood stained bed with ropes that have been chewed through. The man enters the room and a woman in ratty blood stained clothes breaks an empty bottle over his head, knocking him down. She leaves the bedroom and tries to open the front door only to find it locked, so she looks for the keys and as the camera follows her into the kitchen, the man hits her in the face, knocking her into the wall. The woman picks up a conveniently located frying pan and hits him across the face with it with such force it should have been accompanied with a cartoon "Kapow". The man, seemingly unfazed from this blow, grabs her and throws her into the TV, which promptly breaks just as a lamp falls on her. The woman appears dazed, but not unconscious, so the man smacks her head against the wall and she passes out. Throughout their entire fight, the camera angle stayed level, not looking up or down at either one, implying an even power dynamic, until of course the man knocks her out, and the camera angle shifts, so that he, again, appears dominant. The camera also jostled and jumped with the couples' movements throughout the fight. That, along with the sounds of the physical debacle help to reinforce how "real" the fight looks as well as emphasize the unsteady nature of their relationship.
He grabs her feet and drags her body into the bedroom, where he sets her down. The camera follows him while he picks up a syringe of some drug, and just as he turns to stick it in her, she sticks a knife in him. The camera shifts so she is now looking down on him, and rightly so seeing as she is in power now.
She leaves the apartment, runs down the stairs, stops, looks back, unlocks the car, gets in and drops the keys as she is trying to start it. Bob Dylan sings "Well my ship is in the harbor and the sails are spread. Listen to me pretty baby, lay your hand upon my head. Beyond here lies nothin', nothin' done and nothin' said." After picking up the keys, the woman realizes that her captor/lover is right outside the car window. Thankfully she starts the car and drives away before he can do anything, but she only makes it about 20 feet before she stops, looks behind her, puts the car in reverse, and runs into the man. She gets out of the car, approaches the man, lays her hand on his head, and with a final hit on the snare drum, she kisses him.
The synchronization of the lyrics and the woman getting in the car to sail away emphasize her escape, but as she stops and comes back, lyrics from earlier in the song become more important. With the repeated chorus of "beyond here lies nothin'", and Dylan's statement "don't know what to do without it. Without this love that we call ours." it becomes clear that this woman loves this man as well. The entire video, the audience assumes she hates him because she is trying to escape, but when she is finally free she realizes that she too, could not survive without their love. Their deep seeded passion for one another is what ends up saving them. If the man truly did not want her to leave, he could have shot her, or severely wounded her, but he uses a knife instead, implying a closer connection and deeper, stronger feelings. And when the woman stabbed him, she just as easily could have stabbed his chest and killed him, I'm relatively certain a court would rule in her favor. But she did not, because she loves him so deeply, and he loves her so passionately. So, they stay in a dysfunctional and abusive relationship because it is the only love they know and neither can live without it. Their fictitious relationship speaks to how intangible and indescribable love really is. Love causes many emotions and convinces many people to do crazy things. Love has many forms and this just happens to be one of them.

Rawks

Abbey begins by listing the types of rock that can be found in the Southeastern Utah soil. It is a list of observations that led many individuals and many large companies to set up mining companies in Southeastern Utah after a man struck it rich mining for Carnotite. Mr. Graham sold Mr. Husk a share of a promising plot of land and tasked him with finding the precious rock. Mr. Husk notices that his wife is becoming distant, probably because he just mortgaged their entire life and decided to move to Utah so he could dig for rocks... I'd be mad too...
As Husk rides in Grahams airplane for the first time he sees the horizon tilt as Graham avoids a tall rock formation. The land that was once on his left was replaced by an enormous blue sky and the ground on his right seemed to loom closer than ever. Graham experiences a similar shift after killing Husk. He is trying to dump Husks body by driving a truck over a cliff with the body inside, but he gets caught and falls off the cliff as well.
Billy manages to escape from Graham but ends up dying an even more painful death than he would have received had Graham shot him. Doctors try to save him but  his burns are too severe and he is too weak to recover. Mrs. Husk moves back to Texas with her daughters and is confronted by a lawyer who tries to coerce her into selling her 40% share of the Hotrock Mountain Mineral Development company at a fraction of its' total worth. From here I assume she lives a comfortable life with her daughter and the $100,000 she just got from the lawyer.

RTU 101

Hi,
I'm Roger
I'm from Menlo Park, California which I've pretty much stopped telling people because when I tell people here that I'm from Menlo Park the give me the same confused look that I give people when they tell me which tiny town in Ohio they're from. So I just say I'm from San Francisco, which probably gives people a much better idea of who I am thanks to all the stereotypes... Seriously though, I love food, I'm a huge liberal, I support gay marriage and legalizing weed, I have an iPhone and a MacBook Pro, I have pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge on my Facebook, and my Instagram account is all pictures of overpriced food that I so love. About the only stereotype I choose not to conform to is being tan (thanks British heritage).
All my childhood I wanted to be funny more than anything, I read comic books like Calvin and Hobbes and Zits all throughout my childhood and told jokes constantly and did my best to make everyone I talked to laugh... it didn't work out very well... Eventually after about 10 years of no one but my parents laughing at my jokes I became so cynical and mean that people started laughing. Awesome! My high school was conveniently located smack dab between one of the richest and one of the poorest parts of Northern California, which made for a wide spectrum of demographics in classes. That's where I learned how prejudices are formed...
I played Water Polo all four years and swam for three. My Junior year I joined the improv team so I could stand on a stage with 7 other guys and make inappropriate jokes in front of the entire school. That was pretty cool. I decided to come here because I wanted to experience something different than what I had seen for 18 years in the suburbs of Silicon Valley.
Mission Accomplished.
I've spent a lot of time on what I think should be a pretty simple blog post so I'm gonna wrap up in rapid fire mode.
I'm a Psych major, I love my Giants, I love my 49ers, I love my girlfriend, I love food, I love my friends and family, and I love sushi, so much so that it deserves to be praised in a separate category other than food in general. I hate math, I like writing, I love Psychology, and I work at a luggage store.