Week 28: 8-14 July 2019

The second semester is coming to an end, but we have one week left. I’ve already successfully registered for the next semester.

My assignment was screened and discussed in our last class of Poetic Framing on Monday. The theme was childhood trauma:

I spontaneously decided to come out to the FU campus for this class, and we had a beer afterwards with the lecturer. Which made it harder to concentrate on the Space and Place unit on “the natural environment” directly afterwards. We also had internet problems due to a technical change in Eduroam.

Tuesday was Media Activism. I wasn’t crazy about the idea I had pitched to the lecturer for a final essay (I just wanted to respect the deadline for the pitch), but later in the week I came up with an idea that I really like. I immediately set to working on it and will pitch it to the lecturer next week, when I’ve browsed some more of the readings I’ve found.

Wednesday was a great session of Qualitative Methods, on narrative interviewing.

In Immersive Technologies on Thursday we had a guest lecture by our programme director in Second Life. After class had ended I was taken privately by the co-lecturer to some Japanese “sims” where we got me a kimono (since proper apparel was required) and walked around in the deserted Edo-style village. It was quite amazing! She even managed to show me (by accident) some adult areas of Second Life. So I changed back from my kimono and danced a bit:

Seriously, I’m quite taken with Second Life. I didn’t even know it still existed. Every time we’ve had class there I’ve been wanting to stay longer. It’s the opposite to all the VR experiences we’ve tried, none of which has left me wanting more.

As for my final project, I feel a resistance every time I’m to write a simple email in Japanese. I finally managed to send off an email with a couple of questions to the person who contacted me about my study, but to be fair he was mainly interested in hearing about the results of my study. Well, that’s a good thing too, that there is interest in the community to learn about themselves. My Japan trip in September will show if, or rather how my idea will be doable.

I’m focusing heavily on Japanese kanji now, and it’s a bit disheartening to not feel that I get better in Japanese as such while doing so. It’s like training only biceps for weeks on end. But maybe that would be a good idea if your biceps were severely underdeveloped. I’m currently about to end grade 5 in Memrise, but it’s so much harder to write a kanji from kana, so in Nextbook I’m struggling with grade 3 and decided to repeat grade 2 first.

I cancelled my subscription to The Economist because at this rate I’m paying about one euro per article I read, which I don’t think it’s worth. The Economist has been my connection to the outside world. It was a conscious choice to not rely on social media for that. But I don’t have time for the outside world right now.

Readings

Poetic Framing

“Finding Your Creative Identity.” (Unknown source.) Read the first pages. Great text.
Film: Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette 2003, 88 min)

Media Activism

Unit 9: Media Activism as Cultural Activism?

Deuze, M. 2006. “Ethnic media, community media and participatory culture.” In Journalism 7(3), 262–80.

Qualitative Methods

Narrative interviewing

Jovchelovitch, S. and M. W. Bauer. 2000. “Narrative Interviewing.” In M. W. Bauer and G. Gaskell: Qualitative researching with text, image and sound: a practical handbook. London, Sage Publications: 1–14.

Japanese

Apps

Memrise: 62,500 (jōyō kanji, 小5)
Nextbook 漢字:
- 小2 level 70–72 (finish)
- 小2 level 1–10 (repeat)
- 小1 level 6–44 (finish)
- 小3 level 1–11

Other

Articles

Film

Tampopo (1985, 114 min)