Thank you again to Whitney (revivify.livejournal.com) for allowing me to use some of your photos

Don’t you feel so much better about life now? I knew you would

Good – Post Secret
www.postsecret.com

This is one of my favourite websites of all time. What a genious idea! I know most of you out there read the bathroom stalls while you relieve yourself at the bar. This website allows people to satisfy their guilty pleasure for other people’s business. At the same time it has the ability to bring out many human emotions and be truly a meaningful contribution to the hodgepodge of the Internet.

The idea came in a dream. It sounds tacky, but it’s true. Frank Warren was on his first trip to France. He bought a few postcards with pictures from “The Little Prince” (French children’s novel) and put them in his nightstand at the hotel. That night he had a dream about the postcards and they each had seperate messages on them. From there he created and art project which eventually launched into the well known blog and series of books.

When you get addicted like I did, you can check the website every Sunday for new secrets. What can you expect to find? Basically anything and everything. But each secret is raw and human no matter how light hearted or disturbing. You’ll find yourself chuckling along, feeling a bit mortifyed on someone’s behalf, relating to someone, disagreeing completely with someone…

There are two secrets that stand out in my mind that haunt me to this day. In one of them someone wrote that they were going to poison their neighbour’s dog the next day because they didn’t like its barking. I was so disgusted, and I still hope that person was just venting. The other someone wrote that they were in one of the World Trade Center towers when 9-11 happened. They made it out safely, but never told their family and just started a new life. Everyone that person ever knew thought he or she died, and they didn’t even care to tell them they were alive. What the hell. That made me extremely angry for a while.

But on a lighter note, people have written in to say that reading a certain secret kept them from taking their life or helped them leave that abusive relationship or make a positive step forward in their life. I beleive this site is beneficial more often then not.

Bad – Guitar Hero Kid

First of all, wow. Second of all, wow.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s discuss this. As amazing as this is, I personally wouldn’t call it a talent. Sure, he’s talented in some way clearly. But if he can do this, whether he spent hours applying himself or just has some crazy gift, what the heck else can he do?

Unfortunately it is unknown to me whether or not this kid cures cancer and makes robots in his spare time…but I really hope he’s doing more than beating Guitar Hero perfectly. With that kind of co-ordination he can definitely try playing a real guitar. He should play sports or do surgery with those finger skills.

However, if this is just a case of the poor kid sitting around playing GH3 and being lazy about the rest of his life (incuding other types of play and games) then I find it pathetic. The parents really missed the ball on this one.

I don’t know what more I can really say since I have no idea what the kid does with the rest of his time. A quick Google search failed to turn up anything. To conclude this rant I will stress again how much I hope this kid does more with his valuable time then simply play video games. I’m interested in your opinions on this one.

Ugly – Housewitz

What? You can do this?
I’m not sure if this is a joke or some serious hate crime. Either way it is horrible. I will not lie to you, at one point I laughed shocked, confused laughter. But it was at the fact that someone sat down and created this with some sort of intention. A “HAH! What is the world coming to?!” sort of thing.

In a very vauge way I could see this being some sort of drastic way to raise awareness about the Holocaust not being a joke. I’m really, really scrambling for something there though. I really want to believe that someone didn’t create this for the soul purpose of hurting people’s feelings or being funny.

I can appreciate a rude joke or two, but this is pushing it in every manner. It is senseless, purposeless, and most likely very offensive to Jewish people and non Jewish people of all ages and backgrounds.

As for it being a hate crime, this could be debated a little. Someone out there could truthfully made it because they thought it was funny and never had the intention of spreading it. They may not necissarily hate Jewish people or anyone else who suffered in the Holocaust. Maybe they just find death or other grim subjects funny. But no matter what there are definitely people out there who a) think it was intented to be a hate crime and b) want it to be a hate crime. Therefore it is simply wrong. Name it what you will, but it sucks.

Incase you were wondering, I found this through my boyfriend who saw it at a seminar for Internet hate crimes at Mohawk.

(America Ferrera aka Ugly Betty)

I know that is a magazine, but it’s an excellent example of photo manipulation. Manipulating your photo is basically altering it from its original form in any way. This is a highly debated issue and a relevant one for anyone involved in journalism or the media. It got heated in our class when we discussed it.

Personally, I’m against it. I agree with our teacher Roz when she said fixing certain things in the photo because of “poor technique” is probably okay. I think it should also be a last resort. For example if you are shooting in dark or light conditions, or have the picture a little crooked and that is the only shot you have, lightening the overall picture or straightening it out could be acceptable.

However, where do you draw the line? And we have to remember our task. We’re not out there taking these pictures to get a beautiful shot, or to make art. We’re trying to tell a story and show actualities to people who can’t be there themselves. Being an art photographer and a photojournalist is completely different and people need to refrain from blurring the line.

So what if the picture would look better if such and such was missing? Removing things is taking away from the truth. Also, little details count. The flower had dirt on it in real life, why remove it? Besides from aesthetic reasons, is there any good reason? No.

And if we completely manipulate a photograph like getting rid of the dust in a storm so you can see the soldiers better, we’re creating a moment in time that never happened. Those soldiers were fighting in dust. We have to show that because it’s the truth. Our interest isn’t perfection, it is the story.

Every detail counts.

 Basically it’s from the summer when I went to B.C. to visit my dad. The first place we visited was a lovely town called Hope. I don’t know if any of you folks have seen Rambo’s first movie “First Blood”, but the entire movie was filmed there and hasn’t changed an iota since. It was glorious. (Photo credit: myself).

 Onto the theme! The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the good ol’ internet. What better way to explain myself than show you what I mean.

 Good uses of the internet:

I like this because if the creator of the video dislikes or doesn’t approve of certain things pretaining to religion, you wouldn’t really know. He takes the opportunity to send a message instead of just stand on a soapbox and rant about something.

Bad use of internet:

http://maddox.xmission.com/

Meet Maddox, a bitter older dude who definitely has soapbox issues and loves to rant about easily-made-fun-of subjects. You can gather he is fairly intelligent, but he spends most of the time whining like the babies he complains about and making fun of people than gathing intelligent information to prove his rants. He does this sometimes, but he should more often. Either way, he is hilarious if not occasionally right. He’s not the most useful information on the web, but he’s not the most useless either.

Last but not least, the ugly:

It might be one thing if they were trying to raise awareness and support for people to get healthy. But their awareness and support is helping one another be proud and destroy themselves with eating disorders. This video is for a forum where they discuss tips, ideas, ways to keep one another on their destructive paths…it’s pretty sick. They need real help, not to help one another hide their disorders better. Ugh.

And that ends this week’s edition of The Good, Bad, and Ugly!
Pensa

Expect a more rant-ful entry next time,
Pensa.