Author: vsw227

It was really fun to play around with CSS, mainly because I like to make things look aesthetic. I needed some help with sticking the part at the bottom, but other than that I think I got the classes down and understand everything that I coded.

I’m on a mac with a resolution of 1366 x 768 so the website on my mac may look different on a different computer.

Link:

https://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~vsw227/week02/index.html

After the first chapter, I was immediately immersed in the book. It felt like I was actually reading a comic book and didn’t feel the “pressure” of a typical reading.

From the first chapter, I gained a lot more insight into what a comic is, and what defines a comic to be such. McCloud gives the definition of “sequential art” and argues that the meaning of “comics” will constantly change throughout different generations. I definitely thought of comics as texts being transitioned to pictures and given “life” through a narrator or character within the narrative.

The second chapter is specifically about how a comic tells its story.  I especially liked this chapter because of McCloud’s explanation of the “face”. The concept seems simple enough, our human minds being able to differentiate two dots and a line to be a face, but by just looking at two dots and a line, we are the ones giving it the power to look like that, kind of like the outlet example. It isn’t supposed to look like a face, but it is because of our minds. Page 52-53 is awesome because it gives an example of how different comics and comic faces can be, but still be a comic.

Chapters three and four go in-depth about comics. The theory McCloud gives at the beginning of chapter three is a bit chilling, the idea that whatever your eye sees exists until you look away. There is no literal way to disprove or prove this theory. Chapter three talks specifically about panel transitions. I found the “subject to subject” transition to be the most interesting because our minds complete the story for us. A panel of a axe man running towards a screaming man and a panel of the city with screams in the background can work differently, they are not required to work together, but because our minds tell us “axe man is chasing man, next panel shows screams, axe man must’ve gotten the man”, it’s all an assumption produced by our minds, and we just flow with it.

Chapter four talks about how time works in comics. Through observation of a panel that shows a batter swinging a bat with wind effects, we see it as a man swinging a bat, but in actuality we only see the man holding a bat in a specific position with weird lines around him. Our minds make us see it as the man swinging a bat rather than the other because it would be kind of stupid to think of it as a man holding the bat in a specific position with weird lines around him. Time in comics works with the specific character/characters actions/motions. A long panel with multiple characters and lots of dialogue is one of the most intriguing examples of time-working in comics, we read it left to right but it could be all happening at once, but because we can’t read two things at once it just happens in one direction rather than multiple.

Link to my HTML:

https://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~vsw227/week01/vincentshtml.html

I got inspired by wikipedia, thought it would be interesting to create something similar to their webpage, but because I couldn’t use CSS, I couldn’t format it to identical to wikipedia. I actually had a lot of fun playing around with HTML without CSS as it allowed me to format only in HTML and learned a couple of new styles.

Foerster’s “The Machine Stops” is a great read. I had actually read other stories that are similar to this: society over-relying on technology and then punished by it. The biggest difference between “The Machine Stops” and the other stories is that within TMS, The Machine actually stops itself, and the society is “freed.” While reading the short, Vashti’s “worshiping” of the machine was spine-chilling because in a way I could see it happening to society today. We may not worship technology but we definitely have gotten to a point where we cannot leave the house or even go to the restroom without our phones.

Foerster gives a extreme version of relying on technology, but nonetheless his point of over-reliance on technology is depicted. The conversation between Kuno and Vashti is realistic, showing a kind of laziness to see even your loved ones. I’ve always loved dystopian stories because they show an extreme version of society, but gives you the motivation to try to change even a little bit.