Essay 5

Blogs: Throughout the quarter I read many classmates blogs and found interest in most, so I decided to arbitrarily pick one to compare to my own. I ended up with Dan’s Nano Blog. One of the first things that I noticed when scanning through Dan’s blog is that he is much more computer savvy than me. He integrated several youtube videos into his commentary on class books which added an interesting element of multimedia to his observations and arguments. For the N+7 poem he also highlighted nouns in bright multicolored font that stood out from the dark background. Visually his blog is very eye catching. I’m definitely going to have to figure out how to add videos to my blog, I thought that was a nice touch. Another difference between Dan’s blog and my own is that he posted his weekly attendance poems whereas I left mine on my plurk page. Dan decided to write on The Invention of Morel, The Ticket That Exploded, Ribofunk, Radical Alterity, and The Filth. I wrote on all the same books except for Radical Alterity, though I brought it up on my Ribofunk post, and The Filth. I also posted on Life Extreme-An Illustrated Guide to New Life. Dan and I have very different writing styles, but I found that the way he writes suites a blog well. Everything he says has an element of humor which makes it easy to read, but he throws in good points on serious topics as well. I liked his comparison of The Invention of Morel to Swiss Family Robinson and the Myst, the preface of The Invention of Morel made it sounded like Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares enjoyed adventure stories, I wonder what they would think of some of the videogames that have come out over the last several years. My post for The Invention was an attempt to align the realities of Bioy Casares’ life with that of the fugitive’s and Morel’s as a pataphor and was a little longer. In general Dan had a higher number of posts while mine tended to by lengthier. For The Ticket That Exploded, Ribofunk, and The Filth he did not talk about plot points much, but took a theme and expanded on it with his own thoughts. This style of writing worked well for a class setting because everyone who is likely to read the blog already knows plot points important to the argument he is making. I differed with him in this way too as I usually referenced passages or events from the books to help sift through my thoughts, though I do not think that I simply reiterated the plot in most cases. Overall our blogs were very different from each other not only in style but also in the focus of our topics. These differences are what make me glad I read his blog though, it made me view material I felt I knew already in a new way.