Integrative-dedicated journal entries for the Bridge 1: Memoir module

A lot of my journal entries were how I was dealing with life at the time, especially because, well, I’m in college now. And alot of stuff is expected from me that I have to go through with. I can’t say I wasn’t prepared at all, but, yeah, that was pretty much the case. It’s sort of like an eye-opener too. I can’t just dilly dally around, but I gotta work hard in school! even though it’s super mentally-draining :D. We first-years all gotta pull through.

(wait I handed all my stuff in i’m an idiot, i’ll put in pictures when I get my stuff back, but for now i’ll do my best to fill everything in)

Threk Mash-Up

Reflections/notes on  In the Light of What We Know (Chapter 1, page 15)

On this page, the narrator discusses how he lost passion for his wife and respect for her. It reminds me of some instances where people are quick to marry at a young age (not to be a pessimist) and are too naive to know that people change. Like I can image a scene of two happy newlyweds at their snow-white wedding, and then fast forward to a scene where they’re arguing over bills while the mom is trying to shush the baby. But besides that, I also thought this kind of stuff is what makes people insecure in their relationships, “how will we be in the future?”, “will you still love me like the way you do now?”, and the most scariest thought (well at least to me), “we will change?” And that’s what happened to the narrator and his wife, who lost her idealism to teach little children in Kenyan (this was fifteen years after their love blossomed) and even scorned her past naivete.

Michelle Tu

September 13, 2017

Self Portrait Final

I think I’m Chinese…, I mean I look it?

Let’s start off with simple things. Michelle is Asian, specifically Chinese (and again, specifically Cantonese), but she isn’t sure if she’s worthy even enough to be called that since she can barely speak it. She has round glasses and short hair, and no she doesn’t have a lightning bolt on her forehead. She’s fair-skinned, but she thinks she looks pretty tanned. She has peanut eyes and an almond mouth all on one small plate. She’s oddly shaped (in her opinion) – thin torso with unproportional legs. She’s short (she tells herself it’s okay to be short, but nowadays that isn’t that case). She likes wearing cardigans and anything comfortable. She prefers not anything too comfortable otherwise she’d fall asleep (unless she was going for that). Onto to more complex things, like her personality. Michelle is a pretty stubborn person (she thinks she gets this from her grandma, who is basically the most stubborn, sassy old lady in the world). She likes abnormal amounts of tea instead of abnormal amounts of soda (like most of her friends do). She likes taking thirty minutes or more to get ready. She likes teasing and arguing for no reason (well… Maybe there is one). She loves to eat Korean food and wishes she were Korean, but she is definitely not a koreaboo (oh, and she’s most definitely not a weaboo either). She loves Nutella and corgis (not together, but at the same time maybe). And most importantly, she loves playing games with her squad and relaxing to chill jams. That’s pretty much her life aside from drawing and food.

I’m pretty sure from my self-portrait you can tell I hold games, music, and friends high up in my priorities, which also ties into what I wanted to communicate through my personal “flag”. It was a fun experience because people differed in what their definition of a “flag” was. For example, some people took it literally and made an actually flag, or they took it figuratively and symbolized what their identity was through things like a box of tapes with a mask or a print on a piece of metal displaying classmate’s racist encounters.

These are the songs that influenced my scenes and also the art that is already released (drawn by the great artist, saree/sarlisart) that I used as reference.

Here are my final product pictures:

    The materials I was basically geared to more traditional style art so things like color pencils, sharpies, pencils and pens. What I did was sketch out the panels before taping it on the document. It was a lot work because I cut off the spiky ends of each tape and sometimes the tape would get stuck to other stuff (very stressful stuff). After sketch it out, I’d ink the sketch (somtimes leaving the sketches behind for a visual effect, which goes the same for the panels I colored or didn’t color,) then snip off the panels and write the name of the “jpeg” file for an aesthetic effect. If I had thought to implement the litle chips that played songs when you opened a card, I definetly would have done that! I also wished we had more time to do this project, but I’m aware that we’re required to work quickly and efficiently.

So for my memoir I wanted to do something that reflected what I cherish the most; my friends, music and games. Gaming is actually a huge part because I practically grew up surrounded by games (like card games, board games, then finally, computer games and it went up from there, or down). Games are what I experience with my friends to have a blast. For the summer actually, all we did was go out to eat, hang out or just play games at home (because who wants to go out in the scorching sun? – unless it’s for food). With the aspect of music, I just really love music for how it affects my emotions. I usually just listen to chill jams, because the fact is it gets you in the zone. Seriously, why consume drugs and damage your health when you can just damage your ears instead? I’d say that’s a good trade-off.

Onto the actual topic here, I wanted to incoporate games (specifically story-telling because that’s what we were doing in seminar as well), music and friendship. This was perfect because the song artist, in love with a ghost, created characters from his songs, which are songs that I enjoy listening to when going to bed – random fun fact. I was inspired to write a story with these characters, but still closely following the timeline ghost set up. To be more informative, a lot of story-telling games these days have different options you chose that affect your ending. One game that comes to mind immediately is the Telltale series, The Wolf Among Us. So there’s good endings, bad endings and the “best ending” (in quotations because sometimes this isn’t the case and you end being more confused than settled). The concept I was going for was suppose to match the fun little pathways you can go through when clicking on folders on a computer. There was a bunch of folders on this random desktop that kept enticing me to go on and in the end it was the most anti-climatic ending ever. I was pretty disappointed, but also kind of accomplished that I finally made it to the end (even if it wasn’t a good ending). My flag was done in a more traditional way, not only because I have no idea how to code, but I wanted my memoir to be something people could pick up with their hands like a little comic book. Along with the folders, different music would be played to set atmosphere.

Originally (and the second picture shows this), I was going to do something with tarot cards with a fortune teller origami, so those were little notes that I would write on the flaps of the fortune teller. It’s also why I decided to draw, instead, small character cards as an “introduction”.