For my capstone I decided to immerse myself into the process of learning the basics of creating and designing a game without previous education. In my work, I aimed to create all the core elements of an interactive experience, that being an original soundtrack, originally designed sprites, as well as creating the code itself. With no prior background, I was not able to fully complete a finished game within the capstone work time, however I have developed a large collection of personalized artwork, a complete soundtrack, as well as a list of useful sources for others who might be looking to begin their virtual development journey. My process began with a brainstorming phase, just as any other large project would, however instead of doing research prior to my work, I found that it was much more effective to conduct research as I progressed with my capstone. That way I can problem solve and fit my need for personalized issues. As my ideas progressed, code creation became much more time consuming and these obstacles became more complex, resulting in more research. All this has led me to be very knowledgeable in the most efficient learning sources while working in this subject matter.

Link to access work: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Fi5AEzNHVIGTUvFi41Mvz5-vuHoJTTw0?usp=sharing

Welcome all Here Herers! This podcast is one of many deep dives into the lives of the natives in the book “There There”, by Tommy Orange. In this episode, Jackson, Gabe, Henry, Anthony, and Leo Braveman go into our thoughts on the plot of the story, because no, it’s not yet obvious. We also pick apart the first 100 pages, looking for quotes, symbolism, and connections to other books that we may have read in the past. Some of these connections, you would never see coming. They are truly groundbreaking and mind blowing to the average human. The input from Anthony at the end will leave you with chills…So don’t miss it! And of course, come back next time.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A9h-w05oHc7RBCP5zhepc6-5gmrxjXzX/view?usp=sharing

In The Handmaid’s Tale, the author Margaret Atwood uses many subtle literary comparisons between her characters and animals. There could be many different reasons for these animal references, as Offred often compares herself to things such as pigs and rodents. However, the reader could point this out as a piece to a larger puzzle. No section perfectly embodies this more than the second and third paragraphs on page 165, chapter 27.

The author begins this chapter with Offred meeting up with her fellow handmaid Ofgled as they start their routine walk into town. Atwood then writes: “Ofglen and I are more comfortable with one another now, we’re used to each other. Siamese twins. We don’t bother much with the formalities anymore when we greet each other; we smile and move off, in tandem, traveling smoothly along our daily track. Now and again we vary the route; there’s nothing against it, as long as we stay within the barriers. A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze. We’ve been to the stores already, and the church; now we’re at the Wall. Nothing on it today, they don’t leave the bodies hanging as long in summer as they do in winter, because of the flies and the smell. This was once the land of air sprays, pine and floral, and people retain the taste; especially the Commanders, who preach purity in all things” This section contains two important details. To start, the comparison between the handmaids and “rats in a maze” is an example of symbolism as mentioned above. Atwood yet again uses these animal comparisons to emphasize the lack of respect and continuous oppression that these women are facing. This is nothing new for The Handmaid’s Tale, as Offred constantly thinks thoughts of this nature, however why might the author include the sentences that follow?

One reason could be to keep some sort of foundation of humanity for the readers. Looking at examples throughout history, we can see how people have the tendency to dehumanize others. This can be blatantly shown in Gilead, as the handmaids are dehumanized to feel like nothing but tools and machines. When the author continuously makes these references to animals and writes about these people hung on the wall, she may start to allow the reader to dehumanize the characters. Even if they are viewing the story through Offred’s eyes, it may become difficult to understand any of the characters from a realistic perspective. This is possibly why Atwood may have included the sentence, “they don’t leave the bodies hanging as long in summer as they do in winter, because of the flies and the smell.” It allows the characters to be understood even in the most obscene conditions. Even if the commanders are awful and the handmaids are likened to rats, Atwood makes sure to add in human details such as sensitivity towards senses. Even the people in Gilead don’t like the smell. They like things to be neat. By including this just after the rat comparison, Atwood allows viewers to humanize the people within the society, while still noticing the oppression the handmaids have to deal with. The placement appears to be very intentional.

Though this may seem conclusive, other interpretations could of course be made. The concepts of “neatness” and “purity” could play deeper into the themes of fabrication, rather than the aforementioned relatability. This might be due to our modern societies. As cities don’t keep clean in our world, why would they in Gilead? These assumptions create more questions about why Atwood would have this section, as what would be the purpose of further isolating the reader from understanding her writing? When readers interpret this desire for neatness as unrealistic, it further establishes the commanders as villains. The word choice of “purity” could definitely back up this idea, with its naturally negative tone. Atwood most likely allows for readers to draw their own conclusion on how far removed from reality these people are. There’s no question there is evil involved, but how relatable should this hatred towards the government be?

Despite the many different ways of viewing the author’s decisions within this passage, it’s clear that the intentions are to create a sense of isolation or unity between the reader and Offred. These themes can be found throughout the entire novel, as they can be found through close reading and thorough inspection of Atwood’s themes.

My artwork depicts a pigeon poking itself to death as a representation of a handmaid. This is based on writing from Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale, as the main character, Offred, had given inspiration for this drawing in chapter thirteen.

During this section, Offred is speaking about the extensive free time she has now that she is serving her new role in society. She starts to draw comparisons between herself and animals, such as pigs being entertained with balls in which they roll with their snouts. She had learned about this in a Psychology class. However the author decides to include another strange animal fact about pigeons, as Offred remembers more from this very same class. Offred reminisces about this on page seventy, reciting: “And the one on the pigeons, trained to peck a button that made a grain of corn appear. Three groups of them: the first got one grain per peck, the second one grain every other peck, the third was random. When the man in charge cut off the grain, the first group gave up quite soon, the second group a little later. The third group never gave up. They’d peck themselves to death, rather than quit. Who knew what worked?” As a reader this can be recognized as a strange side tangent, but with closer inspection there can be many layers to interpret. This seems to be a reference to the obvious baby and reproduction issue that Offred’s society is dealing with, as the seeds represent the babies, slowly ceasing to be birthed on a frequent basis. However, why would this result in the pigeons killing themselves? This could be Offred seeing herself and the other handmaids as the pigeons, pecking for a brighter future however not knowing the attempts are purposeless. They could be simply killing themselves, which I attempted to show in my drawing.

Offred mentions this feeling of hopelessness many times. She wishes for a brighter future beyond her current situation. She likes to assure herself that there is an escape but still recognizes that she might not get that opportunity. Offred most clearly states these ideas on page one hundred thirty four, explaining, “I intend to get out of here. It can’t last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn’t last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.” This quote represents Offred’s knowledge that her situation might be the end of her, that she might be stuck for the rest of “the forever” she has. Though this doesn’t crush her belief in a better life, she still keeps pressing this button of hope, even if it may not ever give her the symbol of a “seed” that she desires. When I was making my drawing this is what I had in mind, the symbolic connection between Offred, the handmaids, and the pigeons. Pecking themselves to death in her Psychology class.

https://www.wevideo.com/view/2608290476

In a previous post I gave an explanation of misinformation on the internet and the dangers that can come with it. I also went over some examples of what it may look like and how it spreads. Since then I have continued to find more research on the subject and figured out more ways false information spreads through the web and especially on social media. This has come up a lot especially with covid and the vaccine becoming a very popular subject with a lot of fallacies on platforms such as facebook and other sites. I think people should be more careful while browsing these sites so they make sure they don’t get tricked into believing something incorrectly presented that is put out online. MIT made an informative article about this problem and solutions with the election back in 2020 that could be helpful for maybe some context on this issue.

For my agent of change project though, I decided to make a video and put it out on youtube, in which I speak about how to recognize and avoid misinformation on the internet. I decided to do this because if I were trying to reach my target audience of people online looking for some insight on this topic, I figured the best way to do this was to post a video online with me giving out some things I learn/advice on the subject. I enjoyed putting the video together and rounding up the information, it was overall a good experience though the results are yet to be seen. This is because I just recently posted my video and the goal of this project is to help people over time as if someone were to search up this topic a year from now, hopefully my video would pop up and then I would know if this project was successful or not.

After completing and uploading everything I feel as if I have learned a lot from my research for this topic. While putting my posts and video together I believe I actually learned some pretty useful tricks for the future as things become more heavily reliant on technology (Zoom and virtual learning is an example of how things could go that direction). If I had to change anything I might have reached out to more people to talk to them and get their opinion on this topic, but I’m not sure how I would have fit that in my final video. As I mentioned before this project has been a helpful thing for myself and I hope that I can see my project become something helpful to others going forward.

The spread of misinformation on the internet has become more and more rapid over recent years and I think it should be recognized as a serious problem. This can be a very dangerous issue as hundreds of millions of people use the internet each day for information and when things that are untrue get shown, posted, or written on the internet, and people believe it, some really bad things can arise from it. This is important to me because I have always used the internet a lot and with online school I have been having to use it even more than I usually do. So when I see something like a harmful post with misinformation on social media, it concerns me that I am not always aware of digital falsities being shown to me.

A chart showing the concern of internet misformation in different countries

There are many ways to avoid and spot out non credible sources though. A New York Times article writes about ways to recognize misinformation especially for older people as a lot of the time the older demographic are the ones who can be targeted through platforms like Facebook. There is also a lot of concern for the future of information on the web, as pew research center interviewed about one thousand technologists, scholars, practitioners, strategic thinkers and more about this issue and stated: “Some 1,116 responded to this nonscientific canvassing: 51% chose the option that the information environment will not improve.” In other words saying that more than half of the people answering believed that this will be a future problem we won’t be able to fix any time soon. The Government has noticed the rize of digital misinformation as well, shown in an article by trendmicro.com that writes: “Governments are starting to recognize that fake news is something that must be actively fought. Various government agencies are now setting up services to debunk stories that they consider to be false. They are also considering imposing regulations and punishing sites that do publish misinformation.” This could be good for the future and might prevent the problem of misinformation on the web from getting worse.

Chart showing that facebook is the worst social media when it comes to misinformation

This isn’t just an indecipherable problem though, they’re many examples of misinformation you can find. In an article written by Paris Martineau, she goes over and cites many occasions where people had made stuff up and faked numbers for differing reasons. She mentions in 2013 when youtube had to deal with people using bots to fake views. This led to the bots views rivaliving the number of real viewers and youtube had to find a way to step in and stop/get rid of these bots. However a more unique example is shown in a story by the Washington Post titled ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’ comes clean. In this story, a 40 year old man was pretending to be a gay girl protesting in the middle east who was writing about it through blog posts. These blog posts and the gay girl he was pretending to be became a big deal in the media until one day a blog post comes out from her “cousin” saying she had been kidnapped. After a while the American man came clean about himself running the account and admitted that the whole story and girl was all fake. This wasn’t the most dangerous case of misinformation obviously, but it goes to show how easily someone can make something like this up on the internet, which can be really threatening in the wrong hands.

Quote from article talking about false information on the web

After researching all this I have concluded that I had good reasoning to be concerned and it’s easy to see I am not the only one. I have definitely picked up a lot of knowledge about misinformation and how to prevent and notice it, which can probably help me in the future. Overall this is something that I am happy to see being dealt with and pushed back on, but a lot of the articles on this topic are from 2016-2017 and I hope people will continue to care and make an effort to check their sources past the peak of this problem’s media popularity, especially with covid and information about the vaccine.

Annotated bibliography