Author: Marie

This week I was working on the last hack of the semester. It was hard for me to decide which hack I was going to make a beta version of because it had to be significantly better or different. I decided to work on Hack 3, UnDesmos because I remembered the comments and feedback I got in class about how I could make it better. I decided to build on the alpha and apply more meaning to the axes, as well as play around more with the affordances of Desmos to further make a claim. Some struggles I ran into while doing this hack was how I could not save my work. Usually, when saving math work in Desmos, it all saves, but with too many images it doesn’t save because of the bigger file size. I lost my progress many times if my page reloaded or the browser closed. Something I also struggled with was how long this project took, as I had to individually look for each photo in my camera roll, send it to my laptop, drag it into Desmos, and then format the picture. This entire process for one year of my camera roll took about an hour, so I wasn’t able to do the same thing for all 4 years. I wish I was able to do it for all years because I think it would have been interesting to see how I have grown, and what images I find important or significant, and which ones I don’t remember as well.

**Side note – I was scrolling through the flog page on the class website and for some reason my Flog 9 is empty there? Even though I have stuff written on that on my WordPress site?

Anyway in this week’s flog I will be talking about Hack #4 and my failed ideas so far. I was initially thinking of doing something similar to class last week where we talked about the Obama remix controversy. I then realized that I wouldn’t be able to add depth to this project because it feels more two dimensional. After steering away from this idea and images, I was thinking of something more video related such as remixing existing music videos, movies, or commercials. Three ideas stand out to me:

1. Remixing music videos of songs that sound similar (inspiration from Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know and Doechii’s Anxiety)
2. Beauty advertising commercials (inspiration from my senior comm studies thesis on beauty brand advertising and diversity and inclusion efforts)
3. Creating something absolutely meaningless (what would I make? I have no idea)

I’m still working through these ideas to see what would best fit the “rules” of the remix and which rules to break. I was thinking of breaking rule #3 about having the remix have some sort of meaning, and instead create something absolutely meaningless. Then I realized, that in itself is creating meaning and is critiquing something. I feel like that could also be something I focus on as well, that juxtaposition of creating something so meaningless that it creates meaning. TBD on what I decide for my project but I guess y’all will see on Tuesday!

This week was a little hard to write my flog, as I feel like there wasn’t exactly something I was working on and was having trouble with. For this flog, I have decided to do a reflection on the things we have learned this week, which is copyrighting in different sorts of media. I found this interesting as I always catch on to similar sounding songs but never thought too deeply into it. I was never sure if that was allowed, they paid to use a similar beat, or was just outright copying it. After the activity in class where we had to compare two similar songs and see the history behind them and potential lawsuits, it got me thinking about other songs. One notable one which I have heard recently is the song “Anxiety” by Doechii (2025). This song has the same exact beat as “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye (2011). I looked into this and apparently Doechii had sampled Gotye’s song and rapped over it, and then self-released to YouTube in 2019. A few years after Doechii released her cover, the rapper Sleepy Hollow used the hook from the chorus to make his own track of the same name in 2023. Doechii officially released “Anxiety” in 2025. What I found more interesting was that this beat is not copyright owned by Gotye. Most of us associate this beat with Gotye and “Somebody That I Used to Know”, but it actually is sampled from “Seville” by Luiz Bonfá, and the copyright for the song is held by Top Dawg Entertainment. It was interesting to look into this myself and see the artistry world and the connections between all of these songs.

9. What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?

The first question I chose to reflect on from Michael Sacasas’ “Do Artifacts Have Ethics?” was this one. I think the past 3 hacks have had a critical component of them that I am trying to address and tie into the bigger picture.

This week I was experimenting with Hack #3. I’m still working through two different ideas, one being on Desmos which is a calculator I used a lot in high school to do math calculations. The second idea is LinkedIn, which I have been using a lot in college for networking and coffee chats. I was having a hard time with figuring out functions for the Desmos idea, as it is a lot of trial and error. I was thinking of using it to draw art through writing functions, or use it to generate poems or something artistic, as Desmos is very calculated and mathematical so it would be a nice juxtaposition. I briefly moved onto the LinkedIn idea to see if that would work better, but since I do not know how to code well it was difficult to get the actual interface of LinkedIn to change. My idea is to turn the networking aspect of it into a dating formula, which is something I was even thinking about before this assignment. I feel like sending invites to connect, then asking for a coffee chat, and so forth has many parallels to online dating, and using such a professional platform for dating would also be an interesting juxtaposition. I think for changing the actual design and software Desmos would be a better fit, but thematically LinkedIn would be better, so now I am debating between these two options. I am still working through both of these ideas to see which one would work better and which one I would be able to successfully put together, but those are just some of my obstacles and thought processes.

So I have been working on my artist statement this week for Hack #2…and I still can’t seem to figure out how to add images into WordPress. I had a couple of images I needed to add onto my artist statement to document my process of my hack, but it still would not let me attach anything. It gives me the option to upload an image and when I do, it seems to go through. I then hit publish or save and go to “view post” and the image, as well as the description I had written for it, doesn’t seem to appear on the published page. I was going to add a screen shot here of this problem…but I don’t think I would even be able to attach that. I tried multiple different formatting methods as well as pressed all sorts of buttons and have even Googled for answers but none seem to be working. SOS!

This week I was working on my Hack #2: Critical Play. I initially had the idea to modify the American Girl Doll Fashion Show Game to make claims about ideal beauty standards that little girls are exposed to at such a young age. I was also thinking of making claims about the stereotype that only girls can play with dolls. I was inspired from class where we modified Passage and SG and I decided to make the characters into two women instead of one man and one woman. We also decided to modify the red heart into a rainbow heart instead. When attempting this, I had a difficult time finding modifiable games online.

I then decided for a more traditional game that would have lot of websites that provided codes to modify. I went with a Pac Man mod, where the more Pac Man eats, the bigger it gets until it explodes. I was thinking of touching on themes of capitalism and greed. I spent many hours on Google and looking at different codes on Github, which made me realize my coding days were long over (sophomore year). I thought this would be an interesting concept to pursue, but coding is very difficult especially for a more intricate game like Pac Man in comparison to Passage. I downloaded different codes online and modifying them in Python, but none of them seemed to create my desired effect.

Lastly, I decided to go for a more classic, physical game, Uno. This one I did not have much trouble with except for figuring out new rules in order for it to make a critical statement i wanted.

In class on Thursday we played the game Passage and then experimented with modifying it. It was interesting to see how such a simple interface and a simple game could hold so much more meaning about one’s life passage and experiences. It was cool to see the characters find, or not find love, pass through obstacles, and age as they continued down the path. When initially playing the game, SG and I realized how it was a male character that was taking initiative of the journey, and decides whether or not to find the female partner. This relates to the DiSalvo reading for class, where it talks about adversial design, which is designed for the purpose of critique, creating discussion, and contributing commentary. For our modification we decided to go off that idea of adversial design and change the characters of the game. Instead of the man finding the woman, we initially decided to make the woman find the man. We then took it a step further to change it to a woman finding a woman, to make a statement about LGBTQIA+ and the current political issues. This part was pretty straight forward as we only had to change the file names. We then decided to modify other parts of Passage such as the heart that appears when a relationship occurs. Instead of the traditional red heart that pops up, we modified it to a rainbow, to again, represent LGBTQIA+. This is where we ran into an issue, however, where we were not able to get the modification to transfer to the actual game. We used both Gimp and Photoshop to see which would work better, and then exported it as the correct file. Even after several attempts we still could not figure out how to get our modification to apply to the actual game.