The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Posted on by Jay

When I first read this book as a required reading for my multimedia web class, I skimmed through it, and I thought to myself, “this is literally just a book. We are reading a story as an assigned textbook.” I even almost skipped out on buying it because I wasn’t too sure that was the right book for the class. It most definitely was, and after reading through it, I can see why it was required reading. I am very glad that I got the chance to read the book and see how innovative the writing for it is.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2) was a phenomenal read, and a story that was already relatable nearly 50 years early. Douglas Adams told a futuristic story about the future, and did so in a way that no other author probably could at the time that story was published. The elements within the story, and its relation to modern technology, provide us with something phenomenal that makes you wonder how Douglas Adams was able to create a story about technology, back when technology was a thing that many people overlooked when it was first being introduced.

To quote a character from the musical The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals: “Once confined to the world of science fiction, she is now science fact!” (He was referring to Amazon’s Alexa that acted as his virtual maiden). There have been many adaptations of the technology within the world of H2G2 that are used now in everyday lives; things such as Wikipedia websites that have a forum of information that can be accessed at any time they want (such as the in-story H2G2 that was written by Ford Perfect, and many others that came before him). Or an app that can translate words and sentences from a different language (like the Babbel Fish, without the intrusiveness that comes with using the Babbel Fish).

These things help make gathering information, and learning about them, much more accessible than it used to be. They are also constantly improving and becoming faster and smarter, which is both highly impressive and intimidating at the same time. On the other hand, they can also cause confusion, as there are so many things to keep track of and keep up with; sometimes it seems like things are new, but lack the charm of what came before them, and even seem worse. In the same vein, as I have attended my multimedia classes, and begin learning these new programs and try my best to keep up with all of these larger projects, one thing that has been taught to us, and hopefully something that can be taught everywhere else, is: Don’t Panic. Of course, that can be hard to do when the task is daunting and intimidating. But when we learn to path our way through the chaos, or maybe learn to take a step back and reassess ourselves and come back to it later, we’re able to achieve great things, and navigate ourselves better through a world that doesn’t want to wait. And hopefully, you too, can figure out where your towel is (I don’t believe I have yet, but that is a discovery that I must make for myself).

Featured image credit: “Towel Day – Dont Panic – Douglas Adams – The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” by Alan O’Rourke is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Moving Pictures

Posted on by Jay
lego mosaic recreation of van gogh's "starry night"

The world of storytelling is vast with many different genres of stories, as well as the different mediums that they come in. Film, specifically animation, can create impact in the same way that watching a movie with live actors could; or in the same way as reading words on paper, or on a screen, could. Not only is it effective in gaining the attention of the audience, but because of its eye-catching visuals, it gives people the chance to make things educational and inspirational.

Some short films, like “To This Day”, a poem written and performed by Shane Koyczan, showcases the artwork and animation skills of multiple artists that have collaborated with Koyczan to put together a gut-hitting, emotional performance. The impact of using the mind of many other artists to tell a story has created an inspiring film that could, hopefully, motivate us to be a little bit more kind to others, and to help those that are struggling.

“To This Day” by Shane Koyczan

Another example of a video that is impactful in its own way, and educative, is the video that comes from the TED Ed channel, “The unexpected math behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” – Natalya St. Clair”, uses animation (done by Avi Ofer) to emphasize the thesis of the video: how Van Gogh’s famous oil painting Starry Night, which was created during his time at a mental asylum (of which he self-admitted himself to) uses the unexplainable natural occurrence of turbulence. The usage of animation to emphasize the swirls within Van Gogh’s artwork is interesting, and might make some people want to research more about Van Gogh himself, or even about turbulence in nature…or of even turbulence in space, or even space itself (aka, go down a “rabbit hole” of learning about different things as you learn more and more information, and find references to others things that are somehow connected to each other).

“The unexpected math behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” – Natalya St. Clair from TED Ed

Featured image: “Starry Night Lego Mosaic” by s.w.Lepak is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Apple Logo and Copyright

Posted on by Jay
bitten apple against a white background

Apple Logo

Since the creation of the Apple company, its logo—simplistic and easy to understand (and easy enough to even replicate)—is very recognizable. With a logo as simple as its company name and used as things such as a religious symbol in stories and media, it is bound to have some people wonder what exactly it is supposed to represent. Apples have been associated with health and hygiene (“An apple a day keeps the doctor away”), religious themes (the apple from the story of Adam and Eve, also known as the Forbidden Fruit), and even Isaac Newton (the idea of him discovering the concept of gravity when an apple fell from a tree while he was under it). But do any of these have any correlation to the company Apple in some way or another?

Aside from the very first iteration of the Apple logo, which displayed Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree with the words “Apple Computer Co.” written on a banner surrounding the image, I like to think that the logo does incorporate these themes within its very simplistic logo. What comes to my head is the idea of Apple communicating the idea that they want to focus on knowledge and power—advancement in technology.

Copyright

Copyright, as a multimedia creator, is a thing that is very important to me, and to other creators out there who share their work. We have a responsibility to make sure that our work isn’t stolen or used for something bad, and therefore, to protect ourselves, we should be teaching people about intellectual property and copyright (I also think the concept of Creative Commons and derivative works should also be taught so people know the difference between the two).

Wikipedia and H2G2 are both similar in the way that they are both thought of as indexes for practically everything your heart can imagine in this world (or, in this case, the world that is in the world of H2G2). Currently, as I read H2G2, the in-world H2G2 is incomplete, with incomplete entries about different subjects. I imagine that Wikipedia will never be complete, and it will continue to have incomplete entries as the years go on. As said in the beginning of Chapter 8 of H2G2, “[The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] has been compiled and recompiled many times over many years and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travelers and researchers.” Replace H2G2 with Wikipedia, and the sentence written would still be accurate.

Featured image credit: “Bitten Apple” by dlg_images is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Photoshop, Beauty Standards, and Art

Posted on by Jay

Photoshop and Beauty Standards

Women Get Photoshopped Into Cultural Beauty Standards – Ladylike

Rather than using a photo to talk about the affects of what Photoshop can do to people, I decided to use a video that showcases four women who volunteered to have their bodies photoshopped to fit the beauty standard of the culture that they’re a part of (the video itself was six years ago but can still be applied to how beauty standards still affect people to this day). In the video, everyone is talking about how their photoshopped selves, which have all been altered in some way, looked very strange—one of them (Kristen, who was photoshopped to represent Italian beauty standards) even said, “This is like me, with all of the me sucked out of it.” The way that every single person who volunteered was altered in some way tells us that beauty standards are unrealistic, and that not every single person is going to “fit” the standard. It can affect people negatively, thinking that if they don’t fit the standard, then that means that they are not pretty enough for someone; this can make some people develop body image issues, which affects you mentally and physically.

Photoshop and Art

The advancement of technology to create art has brought in a whole new type of art style in art that, while hard to replicate physically on a canvas, is just as creative and amazing as the artworks created on canvas. The creation of Photoshop by John Knoll, who is known for working behind the scenes as a visual effects expertise in many films (Star Wars and Avatar, to name a few), helps with creating, and advancing, the art that we can do and create.1 Practical effects are still a practice within the industry—and still required to use since it’s difficult to accurately put visual effects on every single moving object—but with the digital applications that have been created to create something as illustrative as the things you see on screen, we wouldn’t be able to expand our creativity in the way that we do now.

  1. Mark Telfer. Fantha Tracks. “Star Wars: A Photoshop Story.” 1 Mar. 2018. https://www.fanthatracks.com/news/film-music-tv/star-wars-photoshop-story/ Accessed 29 Oct. 2023 ↩︎

Moore’s Law and the Babel Fish

Posted on by Jay
diagram of fictional fish, the "babel fish"

Amongst all the things that were written in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and have proven to be a scarily accurate prediction of our technological world, the Babel Fish was one that didn’t take me by surprise but was one that I hadn’t thought related to our present world straight away. Now, upon re-reading what a Babel Fish was, and reading about Moore’s Law (and what transistors are…), I can say with confidence that we are living in a time where we have a modern execution of a Babel fish from the mind of Douglas Adams—and is something that is affected by Moore’s Law.

The Babel Fish, according to the H2G2 entry (the in-lore guide) in chapter 6, is a small, yellow fish that processes different languages that are spoken, and allows you to understand what is being said because it translates the language for you in real-time (of course, this is once you have let it wiggle inside your ear…). The in-lore explanation is that it nourishes itself with the brainwaves of others around you, and then excretes a “telepathic matrix” into the user’s mind so that it can decode the languages spoken to you and help you understand what is being said. Thankfully, we don’t have anything that requires wiggling inside your ear to decode and understand other languages. Of course, it’s not as easy as having instantaneous reception, but we do have different apps and websites that allow us to learn a new language without having to take a class in a classroom to do so. We also have translating apps as well to instantly translate something from one language to another; however, from personal experience, those translator apps do not do a very good job at translating it properly, which can create conflict and misunderstandings between people who speak different languages; this also takes away being able to retain the information that comes with leaning a new language by being taught the actual words and sentence structures their meanings in each language. But these are things that we have nowadays that are equivalent to a Bable Fish found in H2G2. As content creators and students learning about multiple ways to communicate through media (hence the name multimedia communications), it’s our job to relay information to others in any form that we can. Of course, it is difficult to write things in other languages, especially if we only speak one language and can’t afford a translator to translate out media for us; but those types of things are wonderful to have, especially if we want to expand who our audience is and what language they are able to understand and speak.

Moore’s Law, which was a theory written by Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore, is the idea that the structure of a chip will get smaller and smaller every two years while transistors (which are semiconductors that are the basic building blocks for electronics) double in size within that same time. This means that they can minimize the cost of making chips, because they are making them smaller, while being able to input more transistors within them to make electronics function more efficiently. Being able to make technology more efficient and making them cost less means that they can produce more of them, which means that more people are able to use them. There has been talk about the “end” of Moore’s Law, saying that, at some point, we will no longer be able to make applications smaller since there will eventually be nothing to build upon that. So far, as of right now, we have many devices that are small and portable, and easy to take around with us if we need to work on something in a different location (aka, smart phones, and laptops). While I do not think that there is a better way to make these types of things smaller and execute well (look at the previous invention Google Glass, and now Apple Vision), I think that there will potentially be new and better ways to make things more portable and efficient to our needs.

Citation:
Bell, L. “What is Moore’s law? wired explains the theory that defined the tech industry.” WIRED UK, August 28, 2016, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wired-explains-moores-law. Accessed 11 Nov. 2023.
“Moore’s law.” Intel. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/resources/moores-law.html. Accessed 11 Nov. 2023.

Featured image: “Lazlar Lyricon 3” by AnnaMaja42 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

User Interface and User Experience

Posted on by Jay

Often when we see color, we associate it with a certain attitude or emotion, or even status (for example: red is associated with anger, and purple and gold is associated with royalty, or an aura of luxury). Some color choices are intentionally used to tell a story, or emote an emotion to someone, or to catch someone’s attention. When creating a website for a business, or for personal use, keeping in mind which colors to use is typically an important aspect of how you want to properly present who you are and what your brand is. It is also important to keep in mind who your audience is and how you want to represent yourself to them. Using color matters—for both you and your audience.

A positive user experience (UX) is one of the most important things to think about when it comes to deciding on what colors you are wanting to use. Whatever colors you choose can affect how you and your brand are perceived, and therefore it is important to keep track of how brands have changed their style guides and how it has been received by the public. It’s important to keep that in mind, especially since picking a color that is “inappropriate” for your brand can bring negative reactions and consequences for your brand. It is also important to make sure that there is an inclusive user interface (UI). If a good portion of people who use the website struggle with where to look for something, that means that there is something wrong, and that there needs to be a change in layout to make it accessible for everyone. It’s good idea to have a palette that is easy to digest—and one that most people can enjoy while looking through the website.

It is also important to make sure that there is an inclusive user interface (UI). If a good portion of people who use the website struggle with where to look for something, that means that there is something wrong, and that there needs to be a change in layout to make it accessible for everyone. It’s good idea to have a palette that is easy to digest—and one that most people can enjoy while looking through the website.

Bauhaus

Posted on by Jay

This was my first time actually learning about the Bauhaus. I found the history of this institution, and its transformation throughout the years that it was open, very fascinating. The ideas and techniques that were taught at this school are still used for today in advertisement (the idea of integrating typography into corporate identity and advertising, for example, traveled over from the Bauhaus to the U.S.). The Bauhaus focused on defining and creating art at its simplest forms, not focusing on trying to make it look more “beautiful”.

Reference:

The Met | The Bauhaus, 1919–1933

Hyperland & H2G2

Posted on by Jay

The comedy sci-fi novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the 1990s documentary “Hyperland”, both stemming from the imagination of late Douglas Adams, predict of creations that have been made, and events that are happening, and have happened, in our world—more than 20 years early, and portrayed accurately. Of course, with the technology that was used back then, visually it’s not the same as it is now; however, the concepts presented are the most important aspects when it comes to what Douglas Adams wrote about in his own media. As I was watching these, I couldn’t help but be surprised and in awe about how these concepts inevitably came to be.

In “Hyperland”, the concept revolves around the idea of a media that allows you to customize an artificial intelligence butler that can show you anything that your heart desires on the world wide web (www). Today, we (unfortunately) don’t have a full-sized butler on our screens that can help navigate us through our browser and our phones. What we do have are faceless assistances (Siri for Apple, and Alexa for Amazon, for example) built into smartphones that can help with menial tasks such as adding an item to a shopping list, or making a call to someone in your contacts. Apple’s Siri also has the ability to customize its voice with different tones and accents, which ties back to the idea of customizing the butler in “Hyperland”.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, while the idea of aliens overtaking the world to create a porting station for ships is predictably less accurate to our present world (although, and I say this positively, the idea of aliens in general being out there is not so far-fetched to its designated crowd of people), the idea of having a hand-held device that lets you summon a million pages is, decidedly, more accurate. A lot of smartphones (and even some of the older designed phones have this option as well!) have the capability to search online and open many, many, many tabs that you can save for later and navigate back to. You can open apps on your phone and keep them open until you decide to close them if you have no use for them at that moment (or until you realize that having many apps open all at once is draining your battery too fast). Both media have predicted the future under the guise of a comedy sci-fi novel and a documentary. I’m sure that many people could have predicted all of this happening at the time these were published and shown, but who could have guessed that we, the ones living in it, would be the ones to be surprised by the predictability of Douglas Adams’ work?

Purchase the book here: Amazon

Watch “Hyperland” here:

“Hyperland” by Douglas Adams