Category: Flog

1. I think the biggest challenge for me this week was having to leave class on Thursday. Unfortunately, my allergies got the best of me, and I had to go back to my room to take an antihistamine, something I really didn’t want to do since it makes me a bit drowsy.
2. Aside from that, this week hasn’t felt very busy for this class, but I’ve been drowning in work for my other courses. As a result, I haven’t had much time to brainstorm for Hack #3, which worries me a little since it’s due on Tuesday. On the bright side, I’ve really enjoyed all the Hacks we’ve done for this class, so this one won’t feel like a major assignment, especially with everything else I have going on before Spring Break next week!

Flog #5

1. One of the biggest challenges Brett and I faced while working on our card game was encountering multiple roadblocks throughout the process. The first issue was simply getting started—we procrastinated until the last minute, and when we finally began, all we had were the cards. We knew we wanted to create something physical to turn in, but we struggled to define the mechanics and structure of the game. Our second major problem was that we had too many “bad luck” cards and no way for players to regain tokens. As a result, the game would end within the first three rounds, which made it short and unenjoyable. To fix this, we introduced “good luck” cards to extend gameplay and improve balance. We also added a “Lottery” card to add excitement, giving players something to look forward to. 
2. Our last major problem, and I touched on this in my artist statement, was deciding how to determine the winner of our game. This was particularly confusing for Brett and me because we had two competing ideas for winning the game. We debated whether the winner should be the player with the most tokens or the player who paired three matching cards first. After considering both options, we ultimately decided that the winner would be the player with the most paired cards. The reasoning behind this choice was that while having money is important, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re effectively managing your health. If a player accumulated wealth but didn’t actually use it to treat their condition, then what was the point? By prioritizing card pairing, we emphasized the idea that actively addressing and treating a disease is what truly matters.

1. Welp, this is embarrassing—I’m turning in a late flog for the second time. To be honest, my only class on Fridays got canceled, and since I had to run off campus for errands, I didn’t even open my computer that day. I really took advantage of the free time since I don’t usually get days off or have access to a car. Obviously, that’s not an excuse, but the assignment completely slipped my mind. Sorry, Dr. Sample.
2. On another note, I feel like I haven’t been engaging with the readings as actively as I should. I realized this during the two quizzes we had this week—once the answers were revealed, I knew them, which means the issue isn’t comprehension but focus. The readings aren’t difficult, but I think I just have a lot on my plate (though, to be fair, so does everyone else). Looking at the two things I struggled with this week, I see a pattern: I haven’t been prioritizing this class as much as my coding class, which is unfamiliar and more challenging for me.

1. After three years in college, this is the first time I have forgotten to turn in an assignment! Unfortunately, this Flog is three days late, as I am writing this on Monday, and I am extremely frustrated. I guess there’s a first time for everything…
2. One thing that didn’t go well for me this past week was trying to redesign Passage in class on Thursday. In high school, I worked with Photoshop almost every day as the student head of the Yearbook department. When my partner and I had to redesign the characters and other aspects of the game, I felt really frustrated that we weren’t able to change much. I mention Photoshop because Dr. Sample said that the program we downloaded was a similar version of it. This worried me a little, as I was planning to redesign something with Photoshop for the next Hack.

1. I am playing around with WordPress, but I feel like I still need some help. I noticed that there are tutors within the John Crossland Jr. Center for Teaching and Learning, therefore I will definitely schedule a meeting with one of them in the upcoming week!
2. Brett and I initially struggled with understanding how to use the Makey Makey. Coming up with creative ideas was challenging, especially for me, as I tend to have a more fixed mindset. We frequently hit roadblocks, but verbalizing our thought process helped us figure out the next steps and move forward.

This week has been high stress for me as most of my classes have decided to assign larger projects for this week. I also struggled immensely with trying to figure out what to do for my third hack because I found it difficult to think outside of the box and use a software for a different purpose than what it is initially intended for. I think this is because many softwares are created for certain purposes, and since there are so many softwares that could be used in a better manner than the ones I was thinking of, it made it increasingly difficult to remove myself from the mindset of a consumer and instead focus on the A/B list used to design and critique work. I also had to re-read some of the readings from previous weeks in order to add to my artist statement because I had slightly skimmed some of them and forgot what I had read because I hadn’t annotated. This set me back in accomplishing my artist statement because I wanted to make sure I was incorporating the readings more as per my feedback from my last artist statement. I also struggled to do the readings for Thursday because of everything on my plate this week, but I got it out of the way as a means of procrastination from other bigger projects.

This week, we didn’t have anything due as we had presented our last hack the week prior and are currently working on our hack due next class. However, i am kind of in a pickle as I don’t really know what I’m going to do for this next hack. I have started thinking about different apps and their purposes and thinking about it in the opposite direction but I’m having a writer’s block of sorts. I am going to try and hone in on my plan over the weekend so that i can have my hack ready for class on Tuesday. Other than that, I’m feeling and doing good, I did all of the readings for this week and was able to participate in class because of this. I also enjoyed the playing of the Oregon Trail even though we weren’t able to finish the game.

This week in class we did a lot of discussions and readings about remixing designs. A common theme was tools having many different purposes than their what their original designs were intended for. We looked at this with the Oregon Trail game that we played in class. This game initially came out on the Apple II E around 40 years ago, but is still something that we can play today, and I do not mean something that we play on the Apple II E. This game is something that each and everyone of us can play on just a regular laptop, computer, and even phones. With an emulator, we were able to play this game on our laptops in class. This emulator made it to where it seemed like we were played on old hardware and experiencing it like we would have 40 years ago. I do not think many people would have thought 40 years ago that we would have newly advanced technology that it essentially going back and time and replicating old, outdated technology. That was the intended purpose for this new technology at all, but yet it is still a thing, and a very popular thing at that. People are so creative, especially with technology, and create so many profound ideas with how to use technology each and every day. This is a process we have to go through for our next hack. This is something that I have really been struggling this week. I keep trying to think of new ways to use various forms of software that we use in our day-to-day lives, but I am struggling. Every time I have come up with a rough idea, it seems like it is a little too simple and does not truly go deep into the creative space that we should be going into for a project like this. I am going to keep researching and continue to think about an idea for this project that will allow me to reach intended goals behind this project.

This week’s reading was a bit obscure, and I often found myself zoning out while reading. However, the discussions in class were very interesting. The content of Hack 3 also confused me. My ideas keep changing, and what’s worse is that for some of them, I need to test them through practice to determine whether I have the technical skills to bring them to life, which undoubtedly increases the time cost. I also encountered the same issue in my previous Digital Art class. I wrote down all my ideas to brainstorm, but I started wondering would the ideas that are easier to execute end up being too simple. I feel that people don’t always have creativity all the time they need. For this Hack, what matters is integrating your understanding of the software you want to use and finding a way to develop its features in a new way. The problem is that we interact with so many different software applications in our daily lives. Examples like Excel and Word might just be a really small part of those software that jump into your mind. This open-ended choice brings a lot of uncertainty because it scatters my focus. As far as I know I’m not someone with highly nonlinear thinking, nor a good artist-stater, so this is quite challenging for me. On top of that, I also have a midterm coming up in another class, which is going to take up even more of my energy.

My biggest struggle this week was definitely the Design reading by Anne Balsamo. I don’t know why I found it so confusing, I think the beginning exploring all the different possible definitions of design followed by the somewhat convoluted description of design as a new liberal art just left me very confused. 

Working on my hack has also been slow going. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to make an animation and I explored doing it in PowerPoint since it has a feature to automatically go to the next slide, but I realized in class that using something like Sheets or Excel would be better since it resists being used as an art program more than PowerPoint. It also doesn’t natively have a function to automatically go between sheets on a timer like PowerPoint, and I plan on using the sheets as frames so I thought that added resistance leaned into the hack more. I need to work on the content of my artist statement as well, especially trying to tie it into some of the readings from in class.

This week was not very eventful. I spent a lot of time thinking about what my next hack would be. I couldn’t come up with many ideas, and it felt like everything I had thought of had either been done before, or was too simple. I thought about making a calendar in Terraria, perhaps building something in Fortnite. Maybe I could build something in Minecraft; I wasn’t sure. Most of my ideas surrounded video games, but I didn’t feel to confident in them.

I took some time to write down all the software that I knew how to use. This consisted of everything, from my note taking apps, to the browser I used (which varied often), to the media player I used on my Macbook. The list was long, yet I took my time writing out all of the uses for these software, and then wrote uses that were similar between them. I wanted to find a common ground between the uses that were different, in order to find a software that may work for my intentions. I finally landed on the Adobe Suite, and the technologies to offer.

That is where I will leave the flog on my Hack 3. I enjoyed the readings this week quite a bit, particularly The Shape of Design. A lot of ideas within the text resonated with me, and I look to read more on my own for enjoyment.

This week, I had a lot of trouble with Hack 3. Unlike my usual experience of having random ideas floating around, I found myself completely stuck.

I explored several failed concepts before landing on something workable:

• Emailing Affirmations to Myself: Email is probably the worst way to get my attention. If I were to schedule task reminders via email, it wouldn’t be effective for me personally, though it might work for others.
• Snapchat for Stop Motion: While interesting, this felt more like an artistic project than the subversive commentary I was aiming for.
• Excel for Choreography Mapping: Dancers need visual representations, but choreography is very embodied and mental. Excel might help with spatial blocking but would require confusing layer toggling. I couldn’t fully convey the meaning without including an actual dance performance alongside it.

What Finally Worked:

I reframed my approach by asking: “If I had a goal, what would be the worst possible way to get there?”This required lowering my standards for what goals I could realistically accomplish. I settled on a simple goal: writing in a journal or diary. And what’s one of the worst ways to journal? Coding it. What’s even worse? Doing the math to encode each letter manually. That’s when I decided to work with Desmos for my journaling.

As you might expect, writing words in Desmos by individually plotting each character has been incredibly time-consuming. My current prototype is far from ready, but the tedious nature of the process perfectly embodies the “worst way” approach I was going for.

Looking forward to having a ‘prettier’ project, going forward.

LF