This week I seemed to turn a corner in my medication, and it isn’t a good one. I have yet to go to class this week is the simple way to say that things are going wrong… the more complicated part of it is that I don’t understand why I haven’t gone to class this week.
So on Monday the main issue I was having was that I was extremely antisocial. I didn’t think that was a huge deal, I’d be back in class the next day so I just decided to take the day off and recover from my shot. After all Mondays are usually my hardest days and therefore I should have been raring to go on Tuesday.
Tuesday, I started to really hit the side effects of my medicine. I felt totally sick to my stomach, I was achey and I had diarhea. In addition to this, I was also still feeling extremely anti-social, but now it wasn’t really the reason I wasn’t going to class. I was literally worried that I’d puke or poop in class. This carried over to Wednesday as well where all the classes I actually want to go to, I missed.
Today is totally different. While my stomach is still aching, it isn’t as bad as it has been the last two days. I actually drove to campus and all, I missed my turn to where I park, I started to do a loop around the block to go back, but I just went back home instead, crying the entire way.
I really don’t know what is up, but it seems that I’ve had the gambit of symptoms. Tiredness (yeah I’ve had that all week too), acheyness, nasea, diarhea, depression, and loss of apetite. Even think that I’ve even been a tad cranky during the time and snappin at people for no reason.
It’s too bad, up until this point I had thought I had lucked out with the side-effects.
This week’s response for my Virtual Worlds class largely deals with James Gee’s book “What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy.” If you want to know fully what I’m talking about, you may need to pick the book up.
James Gee essentially defined a “semiotic domain” as a specialized knowledge and a “lifeworld” as a generic type of semiotic domain which everyone has to some degree knowledge in, which allows us to be able to communicate with each other. I find these definitions somewhat lacking, even if I had tried to pin down the definitions better. The basis of this then becomes that all knowledge is either general or specialized, which doesn’t really work in the real world. Gee made a point of several semiotic domains throughout the book including video games, science, and linguistics. And then went on to describe the difference between the domains of sociolinguistics and theoretical linguistics, two very specific specialized domains. What Gee essentially did here though is he created 3 types of domains, each with varying levels of specialization: A general domain (his lifeworld), a categorical domain (Science & Linguistics), and a specialized domain (sociolinguistics & theoretical Linguistics). Now I’m sure that Gee would likely argue that of course this is how it works, every little thing can be its own domain. After all, he explains that “there are many lifeworld domains” (36). However, I think you lose a lot if you don’t distinguish the different levels of domain, so much so that I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that even the three I suggested are largely simplified. Continue reading ‘Weekly Response #2′
I’ve noticed more and more of late something rather unique I think in American culture that has been going on the last 5-6 years. That is the blending of the Japanese and the American Cultures. Now I think this is interesting because I think it is really one of the first times that the east and the west has ever decided to blend in some way. I should say that by blend in this particular case I am talking about the blending of cartoon art style (see almost new saturday morning cartoon show on the WB or Cartoon Network), and technology (we don’t have quite the nifty toys they do, but it gets closer every year).
The latest thing to really catch my eye is a new game that is being put out by Disney. It is coming on the DS this March and I would be shocked if there weren’t Wii versions and cartoons and such already in the works to go along with it. The game is called Spectrobes and is probably going to be the first original game by Disney since Toontown Online. It is very much a new type of Pokemon, but what catches my eye on this game and why this post is that above the title of Spectrobes is what I assume to be the Japanese characters of the same word.
Some cartoons and games have done this before, but most of the time this happens when a game comes from Japan to the United States. This is Disney… an American company… this game is American first. So it is for this reason that I find it interesting that Disney chose to cater to the Japanese people, even here in the U.S. They don’t need to do this, so why are they?
I think this is occurring because Corporate America has come to the realization that the Japanese spend probably about as much money, if not more, on television, gadgets, video games, and movies. So instead of making two seperate shows with different animation styles and titles and such. Companies have begun to merge the two. Therefore, if you do not like the anime style that the Japanese and Korean people like, you better get used to it, because companies want to maximize profit and I think that there have become enough people here in the U.S. that are at least ok enough with the style that they are just doing it in the anime style instead of the american style. It also may very well mean that the money gotten over there on these ventures, does indeed outdo the money that is made here, and therefore, we don’t even matter anymore.
It is all very very interesting stuff going on, and being a fan of Japanese culture, I’m very happy to see it happening.
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