Silent Springs (MicroBlog #6)

A spring. But not really. It's more of a cry for help, really.

Me too.

The book brings up many things but mainly focuses on pesticides and why they're so bad.
Back then, things like DDT weren't known to be bad, necessarily and were seen as the good guys, the pest killers. However, Carson's work as a scientist proved that they were actually quite negative for the environment.

The book covers a lot of aspects of nature. It's main thesis is that man’s newfound power to change his environment needs to be wielded with extreme caution if we are to avoid destroying the very systems that support us.

She looks at the cheerful marketing of pesticides and the smiling leave sand plants on the covers, and notes how false this reality is.


 Obviously, this 'organic' bug spray is not really good for the environment as portrayed. The leaves coming off the top seem to signify as much, but this is false and should not be trusted.
This is one of the main things Carson Covers

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Rachel, Son of the Cars (MicroBlog #5)

Ok so we've been talking about the environment for a while and we gotta protect it and stuff!

But before we get into that, let's talk about Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring. Who was she exactly?

Rachel Carson grew up in the river town of Springdale, Pennsylvania. Her mother gave her a life-long love of nature. Rachel expressed this as a writer and a student of marine biology. Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) in 1929, studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932.
She began a long career; fifteen years; as a scientist and editor in 1936 and rose to become Editor-in-Chief of all publications for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
She wrote articles and brochures on natural resources and edited scientific articles. However she also wrote a great many books about the subject, such as Under the Sea-Wind (1941). In 1952 she published her study of the ocean, The Sea Around Us, which was followed by The Edge of the Sea in 1955. These books made her famous as a naturalist and science writer for the public. Carson quit her government service in 1952 to devote herself to her writing. 

She wrote many other articles made to teach people about the wonder of the world, including "Help Your Child to Wonder," (1956) and "Our Ever-Changing Shore" (1957). One of Carson's main points in her writing was that "human beings were but one part of nature distinguished primarily by their power to alter it, in some cases irreversibly."
Angered by the use of faux chemical pesticides after WWII, Carson changed her focus in order to warn the public about the long-term effects of misusing pesticides.
In Silent Spring (1962) she poked at the practices of agricultural scientists and the government and called for a change in the way humankind viewed the natural world.
Carson and her book were attacked by the chemical industry and some in government as a crazy person, but courageously spoke out to remind us that we are anot only causing but also subject to the same carnage as the world around us.
Carson called for new policies to protect human health and the environment.
Rachel Carson died in 1964 after a long battle against breast cancer.

She continues to inspire many young people.

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Uranium ain't the only radioactive thing... (BigBlog #3)

 

Helloooo and welcome back to your regularly scheduled programming! It is I, the 1984 man and I am here to tell you more about

wait no

Nonfiction time I guess

I am reading Silent Spring(tm) by Rachel Carson, environmental biologist extraordinaire. This incredible book is all about why humans suck and how much the world liked it before we Existed. Not exactly, though. The book provides a lot of keen insight on other aspects and possible solutions, (Look in the Mircoblogs for that info!!!!11!1!) and is quite interesting and rightly famous for its apt observations about nature.

For this macroBlog, I decided to make a redesigned book cover, as the current one is just a green background with some yellow lines:

So yeah, I decided to throw in some stuff I found in the book itself to redesign the cover in good ol' Photoshop

Here we go

 

Granted, It does look somewhat like something potentially out of a horror movie, but is destroying the environment a laughing matter? I think not.

Silent Hill who?

ANyway, there are many aspects of this that I wanted to cover in my explanation of it. Firstly, the smoke.
The smoke is not only meant to represent radioactivity of people, but also the discreetness it brings. The rock doused in nearly-translucent white smoke is covered in a radioactive haze that seems to blend in with the background, showing the invisible nature of environmental issues and the dangers they bring. Radioactivity is associated with terrible things, and again, we see this in the slimy green on the rocks.

Sorry

Next: The clock

The clock has a picture of the earth inside of it (look closer) and is meant to say that it has stood past the terrors of time so far. However, the radioactive smoke intersecting with it's bottom corner shows that we're sneaking up on time and burning up the clock,  slowly destroying the world with our insolence.

The Eye/Rain

The eye watches from above, very very low opacity for a good reason. The once vivid nature of mother nature is no longer as established as it was. Slowly, her watchful eye fades out getting faster and faster by the year. The rain // tears of nature, falling in sorrowful amounts with the only pure thing left on earth. Pure, evaporated H2O, left from billions of years ago. The only thing left that remains purified every few days. This cycle shows the true balance of nature, one with the Force if I may.

We must stop all of this madness before the eye fades out; takes its last blink.

~

Raw images used: Rock, Clock, Water - From google

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Welp #4 (Microblog)

Here it is! The last fiction MicroBlog!

So yea! What a Happy ending for Winston. He gets
- brainwashed
-tortured
-some other

Did he die? Debatable.
Technically, (and what orwell was probably going for) he did die as soon as he succumbed to the party/big brother - he lost himself and became yet another party slave.

The 'bullet' that went into his brain was probably a metaphor and as he snapped out of his thoughts in the ministry of love, he proclaimed his loyalty to Big Brother. Because of this, the bullet was probably him metaphorically dying but not actually.

And so the totalitarian government wins, yet again.

All hail big Bro.

But actually, I really liked this book. It was weird and unsettling and made me think of Mark Zuccccerberg more than I should have but all in all it was really nice to read. The connections I made between that past and right now were pretty crazy. Will we all be under a big brother soon?

Who Knows

Goodbye for now, 1984. See you... soon?

:/

:)

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Information in a Slightly graphical format (BigBlog #2)

Alright! Here we go! Another Macro Dude.

This week (Cycle) (Day 1) (Whatever) I have an infographic to share with all of you wonderful readers (which I'm sure are in the thousands by now). This incredible graphic leads me to discuss an important topic: Saving work!

If you do not Save your Work, certain problems can Arise. These problems include: Losing over 6 hours of work, having to start over, and ending with a rushed product that looks Very bad compared to the original. My apologies, at least 2/3 of these are true for this post (You be the judge?).

Anyway, Here it is!!!



So now that you've looked at the grandeur of a few icons in some circles with a background of a future city that looked Very good before I LOST EVERYTHING,

Let me explain a bit!

Basically, this infographic is meant to show how 1984 not only has the government manipulate their own people, but also demonstrates things that seemed so far off and fake at the time but are very Subtle and Real now. Because of this, I decided to use icons that we could all recognize in today's everyday news and society and connect them with the totalitarian state described in 1984.

Additionally, all are icons sorted by opacity - the most transparent are the least important - you can see right through them.

I centered the Camera because it's the most essential part of it all - Surveillance. Even now, as mentioned before, we've seen many examples of people being afraid of constant stalking, whether it's our friend Mark from FaceBook,



Or the FBI!



Not that I would know anything about that ^^

ANyway, (that got a bit out of hand)

Basically the government monitoring everyone can be put into something as simple as a camera, namely, the one on your computer (:/)

Because of the sleekness of monitoring and how crucial of a role it plays during the book, I made it opaque. The book often refers to the thought police 'vaporizing people' (refer to the last blog), and this surveillance is just a less extreme version of that. I know it doesn't exist, but it very well could, and so it might be a possibility in the (not so?) distant future.

Next Thing!

The Paper: The ministry of truth. In 1984, a place called the ministry of truth is the source of all media and is mostly fake propaganda. Ironically, our media is littered with these things and the internet is a very deceiving place that lets readers be easily scammed and tricked into believing false stories. In fact, there are various sites where a person can make fake headlines and trick others.

For example:



And worse!

Nowadays, many sources are controlling information. Is total control really that far off? hmm... 

Next: The missile

The ministry of peace is a place meant to give peace and relief to citizens. However, it does the opposite and keeps them under control instead.

Right now, even the US is undergoing a 'forever war' in Afghanistan that has resulted in countless lives lost. This is obviously not as extreme as 1984, but still a possibility. The reason that it is 3rd in opacity is because it has a good amount of control over the people. The excuse of war allows the government to waste extra resources and ration out to common folk, gaining total control over them. This has been seen before in history with Stalin and other dictators, and can definitely happen again.

WWI also caused many countries to ration. This was for a good cause to their actual war effort, but if a country manipulated its people it could achieve similar conditions for the working class quite easily.

Next: The lips

The lips are a representation of NewSpeak, or the dumbed down version of English, or 'Oldspeak,' that was used in 1984 by the common people. It is an effective way to control intelligence and critical thinking. The logic behind it is, "if a person can't express themselves intelligently, they most likely will lose the ability to think intelligently as well." It seemed to work.

Funnily enough, emojis seem to be able to do this in today's culture, as well as abbreviations such as 'lol' and 'ttyl,' etc.


Finally - The flame.

The flame is reminiscent of the poor people in 1984. They live in slums and are treated like dirt, often randomly raided or killed and are not recognized as people.

This has very low opacity but is still important - It is meant to show citizens that there are still organisms with worse conditions and motivate them to keep going. By ignoring those second class humans and considering them as useless, they can be manipulated into ignoring their own predicament. It is similar to, in a way, not having an Xbox but thinking about how people on the street don't have one either.
//
So yeah! I hope you guys enjoyed my last fiction post. 1984 was a ride (reflection MB coming soon),
and I'm sorry this infograph looks so rushed, I spent way too much time on the background and not enough on the actual Information.

- P.S

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