Category: FLOGs

For this past week, there wasn’t much going on for class since we didn’t have class or any work for Tuesday and we only had two readings for Thursday, which I found pretty interesting seeing as to what has been happening recently. Even on my TikTok page, there has been mention of the Blue Origin ordeal and how rich people try to paint what they do in a positive light when they in fact benefit from destruction, pollution, and extinction. Why are we humans trying to get to space or start fresh anywhere else when we could work on what we have now and not, “concepts of a plan.” We also learned what our next hack would be about, which is about fine-tuning one of our previous hacks to expand it. I’ve been thinking and am pretty sure I want to expand my Spotify recipe book, but with more substance. Whether that is making the playlist length the actual time it would take to make the item or something else, I want to delve deeper into that hack.

Because of the technical difficulty I experienced with Davidson Domains last weekend, I was not able to post my flog.

This flog is going to talk about my failures making the Remix hack. My remix focuses on comparing Luigi Mangione’s (proposed) sentence to the death penalty with the lack of the death penalty in other crimes like school shootings or police brutality.

My first major setback was trying to screen record videos from YouTube on my computer. It was very simple to crop the video into the size I wanted and remove the rest of the site from the screen recording, but the audio didn’t save with the screen recording no matter what I tried. I googled what to do and everyone on Reddit said that if you screen record on an iPhone in the YouTube app, it will capture the audio as well. This proved true, but it was a tedious task to start the screen recording at the right time on a small screen, since many of the videos did not have an ad, so they just started playing. After what felt like hours, I finally had clips with audio that didn’t cut out the beginning.

The second major issue I encountered was the quality of the Adobe video editing software. The college doesn’t pay for subscriptions on student laptops, so I went to the computer lab in the third floor of my building and logged in, except Adobe Premiere Pro would not open. The computer said that the file it was looking for was lost. That makes no sense. Instead, I opened a video editing software called Adobe Rush, which is meant for converting videos into reel or TikTok sizes after editing. I figured I would just choose not to do that when I saved the video and keep it at a regular size. That would have worked perfectly if Adobe Rush didn’t turn the quality of every clip I uploaded into -1080p. I decided to stop using Adobe Rush because when I tried to export what I had so far, the quality was still very bad and the videos were blurry. I then tried to reinstall Premiere Pro but I couldn’t because I didn’t have the administrator password.

Frustrated, but unwilling to walk to the library, I decided to use CapCut on my personal laptop. It ended up creating a much better product in the end because of the platform’s variety of free sound effects that I wouldn’t have thought to add if I used another software. CapCut also has a captioning feature which allowed me to make the video more accessible. I was looking for a way to add a scrolling screen with my statistics and sources, but CapCut didn’t have that native capability. Instead of using iMovie to add those features, I chose to create my informational elements in Google Slides and then add them as PNGs with background music. I chose to do this because I think it looked better than the iMovie scrolling and slideshow features because they wouldn’t format correctly, and they immediately scream “I USED iMOVIE!” with the identifiable style. Maybe that’s just a me thing.

Another big issue I grappled with was how to transition between clips. None of the platforms had appropriate transitions for the subject matter, so I chose to go without and try to move the clips as close together as possible to avoid long black screens.

My fail of the week was struggling to put together my video for the fourth hack because it’s been a busy time of the semester, so I haven’t had much time outside of class to work on assignments. However, I asked for an extensions so I used Wednesday night and Thursday morning to finish my video for class. I think my topic was informative, but I had a feeling it would make some of the class uncomfortable because of the topic, so maybe that is another fail. However, I had already found some video collections to use and thought it would be more difficult to start over from scratch rather than just continue with what I had so far, seeing as I barely had time to finish the one I had already started.

I’m finally up to date on my flogs, I apologize for having some late flogs but life has been crazy and I’ve finally got back on my feet. This week I am still having trouble coming up with ideas for the flog. I decided against doing the commentary on old diet culture vs. today’s diet culture. I found out that watching all of that content was really mentally taxing, and I’d still have hours of it to go if I wanted to put something good together. I also decided that potentially triggering someone else who has body image issues (statistically a lot of people) was not worth making a commentary. I wanted to potentially tie in the normalization of ozempic, but again a lot of people could be hurt by that and personally I already see advertisements for that enough. 

Instead, I might do something that compares political “scandals” from the early 2010s to the crap politicians can get away with 10 years later. For example, comparing the outrage from when Barack Obama wore a tan suit to the pretend outrage about Zelensky not wearing a suit to the white house and getting berated by the president and vice president on international television. And then we just… moved onto the next horrible thing. I’m also considering a project that compares the sentence Luigi Mangione is facing (death penalty) to the sentences faced by mass shooters to comment upon the value of life in America. For my video, I am going to try and use Adobe Rush or Adobe Final Cut Pro on one of the desktop Macs on campus.

I’m having a really hard time coming up with an idea for my next hack after it was released. I was thinking of doing a video comparing diet culture from the past to the more acceptable forms of diet culture today. Or, instead of diet culture, weight loss methods more broadly. There are plenty of old diet horrors and things we can all agree are outrageous, like when women used to eat boiled eggs and have wine for every meal. But today, I think the same attitude of starving yourself has been socialized and more accepted. I’m not sure if anyone else remembers, but Kim Kardashian released appetite suppressant lollipops probably like 10 or so years ago, and I remember seeing that as a kid and wondering if I should have those. They’re lollipops after all… right? I would like to possibly transform this idea into my hack, but I’m concerned I can’t do it in a way that wouldn’t be extremely triggering to some people. I’m going to think about ways where I can mitigate any potential harm from watching it and see if it is still a feasible idea I can feel good about putting into the world. I’m also concerned about making something like that without a clear message because things can quickly be taken out of their intended context on the internet. 

I have no other ideas right now so I’m going to keep thinking about alternatives if I don’t feel right about this one.

For this week, I’ve been working on my fourth hack is it’s due next week. I have been super busy outside of class because of work, my sorority roles, focusing on what I will do over the Summer (applying to jobs & internships), as well as working on other projects for other courses. I was finally able to grasp an idea for my fourth hack after talking with my group during our work day on Thursday, so that was helpful. I decided to do a piece focusing on the way food has started to cause an epidemic of obesity and other health issues, and putting this side by side with advertisements directed towards children for certain unhealthy foods to showcase how media has allowed these issues to flare up and how companies tend to lie or focus their ads towards children to sell more product without focusing on how this will affect the child’s health.

This week was not very eventful. I have been bad about staying up to date with the flogs, so that is my main failure. I am catching up with them now, and I should only have two more until I am fully caught up. The subject matter this week was interesting and engaging, and I had no problem reading the comic or the other readings. I will admit that I initially did not get that Lethem was plagiarizing other authors until I got to the end where he admitted it. Ever since our classes this week, I have been thinking a lot about music that sounds like other music. Each time I listen to a song I can’t stop thinking, “what do I know that sounds just like this?” I wouldn’t call this a fail, but I’m having a hard time completely agreeing that you can steal music. The comic really puts it into perspective that initially, music was not seen as property. I completely understand that stealing things is wrong, but who are we to own music? If nothing is original, how can anyone own anything? Kind of like how I can’t believe Radiohead sued Lana Del Ray over a melody they ALSO stole. It seems disingenuous to do something like that. Is anything ever yours and only yours?

Unfortunately I think attendance was my biggest fail this past week. I missed class on Tuesday for personal reasons, but this is when Hack #4 was introduced so not being there kind of screwed me over because after reading the instructions, I am still lost. For this reason, I will be asking for help this week about the hack or else I will have nothing to present next week. Another continuous fail is that I am submitting this FLOG past its due date because I keep forgetting the deadline and I apologize, my sorority has been stealing my attention and I have struggled to find a balance between the two, but I am working on it.

So… I think my biggest fail of the week was forgetting to submit my FLOG by the end of the day last Friday. I always manage to forget doing this assignment until after the due date, approximately around 1 am on Friday nights, but this time takes the cake because the next FLOG is due tomorrow. Anyways, reflecting on last week, I think my biggest fail was not fully doing the readings because I was super busy with other things outside of class and had little time to do the readings since most of my classes are reading intense. However, better late than never, so I am going to try to set an alarm or reminder about submitting my FLOGs from now on.