Remix: The Legend of Adventure Time

Remix Justification

For some time now, connections have been made between Adventure Time, the Cartoon Network TV series, and the Legend of Zelda, a Nintendo game franchise. Fan art of Adventure Time characters in unmistakable Link (the game's lead character) garb, have been surfacing on various popular art communities and social networks. The show itself seems to take motifs from similar games of it's genre as well. This in tern is a form of remixed media in and of itself. I just decided to take this concept to the next step.

Using a song by Joe Pleiman, titled "The Legend of Zelda" or as popularly known as "Link! He Came to Town" on the internet, I combined various scenes from Adventure Time to form a play on how much parts of the show resemble that of the popular Nintendo franchise. Pleiman's song is also a remix of a memorable Overworld tunes in the Legend of Zelda games, but appropriated with the common base story-line represented in the games themselves. The idea is to draw connections and overlaps between the different mediums to form a playful critique of their similarities and differences and how they influence each other.

When combining these aspects, this project displays how art is built upon the constructs of what has come before it. My video may then also be remixed and appropriated into something else in the future. The use of materials and how I am regulating clips from the show, proves that I am not deteriorating the aspects of any of the given material, but in fact embracing them via Fair Use. I am not merely copying but refitting the story from the Adventure Time with that of The Legend of Zelda to form a new narrative.

Amazon Review: Confessions of an Xnetter.

(3 1/2 Stars)

After the attack on the Bay Bridge I found myself constantly in a state of unease. I wasn't involved in the riots, but was shaken when reports of missing persons started flooding in. Several of my classmates didn't come to class the days fallowing the incident. Men in armored suits and shields started roaming the streets of my local neighborhood block. Sporting DHS logos neatly placed on their helmets. I'd first noticed them installing cameras across the street from the local Turkish coffee shop I frequented. I remember overhearing a fight with the shops manager one night, over something about transaction tracking. I'd always payed with cash, since I like keeping track of my spending, so I hadn't noticed at first.

Over the next next week or so, I became gradually more paranoid as the prevalence of surveillance started to thicken. One night, while confiding in a friend, he passed me a copy of Xnet without even batting an eye. He told me to look for a user named M1k3y. Said that he usually hung around in the Clockwork Plunder game, that he could help me escape the DHS's all seeing eye. It took me a couple of days scouring servers, but sure enough I found him waiting to be wound up in one of the neutral trading posts. We got to talking for a while. He told me about how he had been held captive by the DHS and that he was planning something big to blow their cover wide open. It sounded as if he was talking about a plot to some comic book. How he described his detainers and the methods of interrogation seemed almost paint-by-numbers as far as villains go, especially without any prior conviction. I felt a little skeptical of his story, but decided the consequences were to great to just be disregard.

He started to tell me about how he'd been using apherids for jamming the tracking information held on FastTrack cards. As someone who isn't a super computer savvy individual, who just wanted to protect his privacy online, a lot of the technobabble he preached went strait over my head. Though, he said he was trying to lie low on the jamming front due to recent hikes in surveillance efforts, which was fine by me. I wasn't planning on going to the slammer anytime soon for tampering or identity theft. It did give me a sense of relief however, that such technology existed and that people such as M1k3y were out their protecting our privacy. Even though I found his self-righteousness a bit sickening. He logged off soon after that.

Since that day I haven't heard or talked to M1k3y since. Shortly after my contact with him a huge controversial story about Guantanimo by the Bay hit the news stands. A lot of people were shocked. They would have never guessed how much their new fangled government surveillance and how technology in general had effected their lives in such a profoundly negative way.

It soon became clear amongst fellow Xnetters that this story would be passed down to future generations as a warning. That we should fight to stay free at all costs.

Review Overview

I think that I'm probably going to stick with a positive/multi-fasited position to my review. That or one purely from a creative aspect that toys with ideas from the book. I feel that if I where to create a review that was specifically overly positive or negative it'll just come off cartoony and false. I also feel that it defeats the purpose of creating a good(or creative writing) review that express our feeling of the book.

Letter To Malcom Gladwell

Dear Malcom Gladwell,

I fear that you don't seem to understand the way in which people use the internet. Sure, social media networks are not the best way in supporting a cause, but don't get confused that people don't understand the services in which they use. Most people on the internet understand that "friends" on a social media network are not their true friends. It was merely a term that was created for the use of the network when it was in its stage of functioning in a college setting and just stuck. Facebook and twitter were created to form new ways in which individuals communicate with each other. Sure you can post an activist cause, but that's not what the service was meant for. It's for starting conversation and promoting people to look into more focused institutions on and outside the web to learn and contribute to. Also, for those who actually contribute a small portion to a cause through social media may not continue to actively support it, they are still contributing into a micro-sum mass that they alone may have not contributed to in the first place if it'd taken more effort.

You're also comparing social media activism with with activism that occurred in an age without social media. Where the values were different and there was no other option to support a cause. Imagine if there was a sit in of sorts, today. Sure you could put yourself on the line and do it physically, but what about all those who are to scared to voice their opinion or have something they must protect? Instead they would have the option of anonymity over the internet. Not only does this increase the scale and voice of the cause one would be fighting for but gives props to those who otherwise could not.

You claim that Shirky's argument is weak because they helped someone retrieve a phone, but it's that mass communication between the community that builds strength. The amalgam of each of their individual strengths and free time gives an exponential and possibly unlimited amount of resources.

Amazon Review: Drafts

Positive:

Little Brother is a story about four technology minded teens in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco. They are captured by the Department of Homeland Security and find themselves fighting for their rights. Marcus Yallow, a 17-year-old misfit, finds himself in a situation of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Carrying a suspicious collection of electronics, he finds himself being interrogated and tortured. Once released, he and his friends decides to challenging authority by attempting to take down the agency and regain his freedom.

This is a really great book with a lot of great Ideas! (psst, you can also find the pdf online for free, under a creative commons license.) Explaining some of the technical aspects of the real-world software broke up some of the flow of the narrative, but I can see why he did it. I also think that the means to which he uses to express the content of this book comes off as a little bit odd. Without any previous illusion of a corrupt government or reasonable action of detaining the teens for terrorism, the plot ends up feeling very cartoonish. It's almost paint by numbers about how evil they made the villein out to be. You also constantly find yourself hating the main characters decisions, but it keeps you wondering what'll happen to him next.

This is a quick, fun, action packed read that brings to light a lot of eye opening ideas about government surveillance and how technology effects our daily lives.

A good book for parents to suggest to their kids. but found it limiting by the Young Adult fiction realm.


Negative:

I am appalled by that this book is even being recognized as young adult literature! This book is basically teaching our kids how to become terrorist! The author even goes out of his way to mention the fact that a lot of the tech is real. It's maddening to think that a group of kids could be out running around my town, right at this moment, creating such crimes! I can't believe Cory Doctorow is even selling this book. I'd original bought the book only to find that you could get a digital copy, FOR FREE! It's so infuriating knowing that some people are out their only to make a quick buck.

I'm not even going to read the rest of this book. Keep your kids in school! Teach them that they need to follow authority! Don't let dangerous books like these, get to our children. Give them real books to read like the Twilight series!

Digital Profile: Joshua Vera

There is little furniture in Joshua Vera's small studio apartment. Clothes are thrown in a pile at the foot of his bed. No need to hide these, I guess. Stacks of dirty dishes in the sink, which he proclaims as being "Scary." A simple task, he'd rather pay someone else to do. From his cluttered desk you can look out at the Paramount Theater, seeing whatever latest show currently being played. The only distinguishing decorations are four evenly spaced posters on parallel walls. Adorning them is a selection of fairly basic idols, ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Marilyn Monroe. Choices that seem somewhat binary. When Josh isn't at home he works as a coder for Ubermind, a development firm for mobile applications.

Before working at Ubermind, Vera did a fair bit of moving around. In high school, he was transplanted to California where he live with his father for a couple of years. During his stay, he was able to attend an educational facility that provided coding classes. Coding came second nature to him, finding beauty in distilling complicated code down to simplified lines of text. In the middle of his senior year he moved back to Washington where he attended Kent Meridian High, but dropped out a month before graduation to avoid having to complete his Culminating Project, which at the time was a state requirement. Instead, making up the rest of his education in a program at Green River Community College. At the time, he had surpassed the level of coding that classes available to him provided and shifted to self teaching. Shortly after, he moved to Seattle, attending a year at University of Washington, only to abandon it for an independent job venture, working remotely overseas.

For six months Vera partnered with an entrepreneur in London, telecommuting across the pond. Most of the work involved creating applications to be sold via Apple's App Store. Josh favors working remotely. "I feel like I can choose my own environment, and that allows me to sort of temper my workplace to my habits." he says. Unfortunately, his employer couldn't create enough revenue and the little startup tanked. This is when he found the offices of Ubermind, where he currently works and further increases his knowledge of coding. He still prefers working off-site, but says, "I loose out on being able to just walk over to someone and ask them a question." This, of course, leads one to believe that there are also positives to working offline and in person, "It's easy to collaborate and the environment is tempered for getting things done and it always feels busy. You always feel like you need to be doing something."

When separated by digital means, Joshua will often communicate with his coworkers through chat rooms, instant messaging, email and voice conversations. He feels, "it does free you up to work at different places and at different times." Social media also plays a large part in the way he communicates within his workplace:

"We use twitter to chat back and forth sometimes outside of work, about industry stuff. Inside of work, we sort of have this social network called Yammer. It's sort of like a Facebook for businesses. There's a feed and people post to it and it can be just staff spam stuff, that is just interesting links and funny videos that people saw or stuff that's important to the news. It always gets people communicating, and you can check it on your own time. It gets people who wouldn't normally interact with each other to interact more because they wouldn't be on the same projects or something like that."

From the book Taken Out of Context, Danah Boyd claims that, "Mediated environments like networked publics formalize and alter the identity processes of self-presentation and impression management." That, when people are put into a position where they have to promote themselves within a profile of a social network, more often then not, they will present themselves as how they ideally see themselves or how they want to be perceived by others. Josh says he also notices this same sort of thing among coworkers in business centric social networks, "You can go on LinkedIn and you can say you know 10 or 20 different (coding) languages you may have barley touched." This can especially be true if someone is trying to use it as leverage for acquiring a job.

Despite being able to work outside of the office, Josh still needs to attend meetings regularly. In general he thinks they're horrible. In most cases they waist time and money, particularly in ones involving more then five people. Though he says, "Every once in a while, you have to because it's hard to coordinate a group of people to do a certain thing if everybody is working 8 hours a day on different things." He believes meetings are largely unnecessary and can break the creative work flow. In PBS's documentary Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, Philip Rosedale asserts that technology, which has socially alienated us in the past, is bring us back together. the documentary also displayed how IBM's tried using Second Life to shift meetings to the virtual world. Josh believes there are still many difficulties and draw backs with such methods:

"Maybe one day we could have real life representations of ourselves interacting as if in a meeting. I don't think, the way we can do that now, that those benefits outweighs the cost. I feel that at the moment, it's a little bit of a gimmick compared to what you can do with collaborative Google docks or video conferencing."

Ubermind has recently expanded with a satellite office in Denver due to the shear amount of people telecommuting from that location. Josh thinks it's going to be interesting communicating with roughly 150 people over different time zones and how they'll be juggled. Currently, he's working with a telecommuter from London and has experienced how differing time zones can work to their advantage. They often find that they'll have new work finish for each other by the time they wake up. "It's like were working 24 hours a day, except him and me trade off."

As well as making apps for their customers, Ubermind will also set up small projects the benefit the company itself. In one such project, Josh built a time tracking system of sorts "to smooth out billing and who's working on what." Originally, people would have to fill out hardcopy timesheet by hand. Making the whole process digital made the process more accessible and easier to manage. "It's supper beneficial," he says, " whoever wants to know gets better data, people aren't nagged about it, and it improves the workflow for everyone." In this way the company can continuously improve and streamline itself over time.

With this career path, Josh has contently found himself sitting at his computer for long periods of time. Tired of being attached to his computer and devoting most of his time to coding, Josh has recently taken up long boarding in his free time.

Digital Profile: Draft

There is little furniture in Joshua Vera's small studio apartment. Clothes are thrown in a heap at the foot of his bed. A stack of dirty dishes in a sink which he proclaims as being, "Scary." From his cluttered desk, you can look out at the Paramount Theater and see what latest shows are currently playing. The only distinguishing decorations are four evenly spaced posters on adorning adjacent walls. Josh is a developer for Ubermind, a mobile application firm.

Needs to be Re-writen:
He works for a mobile application development firm, called Ubermind, as a coder.

After finding that he had surpassed the level of coding classes his school provided for him, he quickly started to self teach himself and dropped out of high school, he finished his degree at an alternative school and attended University of Washington for a short while but soon dropped out of that as well, when a business opportunity came his way. This tanked and now he works and learns coding under supervision at Ubermind.

Questions:

With the growth of technology within the work place, especial in a computer based industry such as yours, more and more people are working less in the the office and more through telecommuting and virtual meetings. I'm interested on, in this day an age, how digital media effects the workplace.

With your field of work you have the option of working outside of the office. Do you favor being able to work non-remotely? Does it improve your work habits? Are you able to focus more?

Is there any positives to working in the office? You've told me that some people like to come in early to work. I personally like to have a workplace that other people are working at so that it keeps me on track.

Are you able to relate to coworkers outside of the office when your separated by digital means? How is communication within the offices? Do you find that your interrupted more in the offices, then if say working in a cafe?

How does social media play a part in your work and how you communicate within the workplace?

Do you find when you use the internet that you try to represent yourself or your idealized self? Do you notice this amongst your peers?

Have you ever had problems or misinterpretations when communicating over the internet

Tell me about how you feel about meetings. Positives, negatives? Do you think that there would be a way to improve them through digital means?

Philip Rosedale wants to use technology, which has socially alienated us in the past, to bring us back together. He thinks that, when you enter a virtual world you interact and depend on each other more then you would with just texts or email. Do you think Tech such as the vertual worlds could reconnect the human aspect? How so?

Rosedale claims that, Second Life offers a totally new reality for humans
and IBM has in the past shifted its meetings to this virtual space. Do you see any validity in this? Why?

IBM's offices are mostly empty due to everyone telecommuting with each other. Do you notice a similar distinction within your own office?

Do you think the internet helps you multi-task more? Do you often find yourself multi-tasking when using the internet? Examples?

So you've said you're workplace is currently expanding. How is telecommuting effecting that? How is the communication between offices or across the pond?

You've mentioned a couple times that your firm sometimes does some smaller projects that are for the company & employees more then anyone else. Can you tell me about some of these and how they change the way that you interact with your office or company? Why you do them?

Any finally thoughts on the subject?

Digital Profile: Interview

With the growth of technology within the work place, especial in a computer based industry such as yours, more and more people are working less in the the office and more through telecommuting and virtual meetings. I'm interested on, in this day an age, how digital media effects the workplace.

Interview: Joshua Vera

Digital Profile: Brainstorming.

Who: Joshua Vera
Why: Application developer for Ubermind
What: Applications in digital medium and how they effect people's use of it.

Who: Raymond Dean
Why: A designer who is constantly in use of digital social networks.
What: How does the digital medium effect his life

Who: Grace Jenson
Why: Creating an online zine
What: Why produce such a zine and why digital?

Day 1.5: From Pencils to Pixels & Writing Culture

In the reading "From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies" Dennis Baron constructs the history of Writing Technologies and the developmental impacts on literacy that they had and the community that used them.

I found it sobering, that each change in the written medium over time had been met with opposition, just as the digital medium is being opposed by that of the old, and perhaps rightfully so. A constant theme with each of these changes is that there is something to be lost, but with each thing lost there is so much more to be gained. However, I also think that such opposition is healthy for the growth of any medium. In a way it keeps it in check, helping form the new rules and laws surround it so that it can best serve those who it was meant for. As with history, studying our past can inform our futures. If there is anything to be learned, by a popular quote often misattributed to, but inspired by, Socrates:

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

In another reading titled "Writing Culture," Jay Bolter talks about how these technologies of today are shaping or minds and our cultures. I agree with some of his assumptions, but I feel like he views the internet through a Read-Only cultural leans. That although he observes these changes and events in the technology, he views it in a way as just another passive medium.

First off, Bolter Claims that the internet is a medium that will only be available to those of the middle and upper class, which is jut not true. Spaces, such as schools, libraries, and Maker/Hacker Spaces that are open to the general public provide internet, and in most cases usually for free. It then comes down to how someone uses and are willing to search out the medium. Some NGOs have also contributed in making the internet available to third world countries through the installation of permanent and stationary, communal kiosks, which end up promoting an environment needed to innovate and learn new skills.

Secondly, he perceives that the internet is no longer trying to connect the world, but create specialized, focused subcultures. Where I'd agree with him that subcultures are being made, I'd argue that that is what makes it so easy to connect and access their information. If the internet has no structure, if everything was connected, then it would simply become a muddled mess of information. Yes, in general people are only going to be interested in accessing only the information that they are personally interested in. However, with the advent of websites such as tumblr and twitter which are built on an architecture that gives insights into other peoples interests/activities, it thus helps in passively broadening their user's horizons.

Lastly, Bolter submits his concern that such an open medium will eliminate high culture and the intimacy that comes from printed material. What I don't think he understands is that the digital medium is also a flexible one. Depending on what service you use, the content that a person puts out into the world can be made as intimate as one wants, even to the point of being able to forgo comments and detection by search engines. Same goes for it being high culture, written material can be as articulate and well researched as one choses to make it. The internet is not all just dick jokes, porn, and kittens, some people actually have something to say. Besides the internet is never going to kill print material, just give it another avenue from which one can access it.

Day 1: Clay Shirky & Larry Lessing

During the 2007 Ted Talks, Larry Lessig explains how John Philip Sousa predicted the fall of "artistic development" culture or as Lessig dubbed a "Read-Write(RW)" culture In favor of a "Read-Only(RO)" culture through the displacement of creativity by way of radio. Clay Shirky, a speaker at the '08 Web 2.0 Expo, talks about how this culture had been carried into the 20th century via Television. That, the RO culture had created free time, or what he calls a "Cognitive Surplus," that was being waisted on watching TV. Shirky noticed that things were starting to be designed to use this Cognitive Surplus as an asset. The mass use of this surplus, or "Architecture of Participation" as named by professor Vasco Furtado, consists of Consuming, Producing, and Sharing. That, if the general public was offered to Produce and Share content, they would do it. Larry Lessing agrees that digital technology, such as the internet, is helping create user produced content that is reviving RW culture. But, the big downside of this new movement is that it's teaching the next generations to go against the laws currently in place by using copy-written martial, which is corrosive to their interaction with the justice system.

As the Architecture of Participation grows, with companies like Youtube, Facebook, Flickr, DeviantArt, Tumbler, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, really any service that can support user generated content or the control or aggregation of content, has taken control of the digital realm. A realm, in which big corporate companies, have tried to take over with little success. What they don't seem to understand is that they can't put an extra price or limitation on an open source community such as the internet. It is it's limitless potential and availability to everyone that drives people to use it. Once you try to make money off of it, through old business models, it loses its worth. Today, with the advent of services such as Netflix and Hulu, it's starting to spill into the void that old media once fill, except now the content can all be viewed on demand. Sometimes this type of media can even be found on the same box and system as your user generated content.

Now the question is, what is going to happen once(if not already) these small companies become the top dogs of the media world? What choices would they have to make to keep up on making revenue and will it sacrifice certain parts of their user base? Also, what can be done to change the current laws on copyright that can work with innovating and reusing old media to create new media?