Final portfolio.

Here it is. Enjoy!

http://davecook.weebly.com/

Feature idea #1: Fanediting

Doing stories and papers on happenings in the entertainment industry, be it movie and music reviews and general rants on censorship, writing about said topics has become my "thing" over the past few years.

One activity I take part in, but have never really openly discussed, at least in anything printed, is fanediting - taking a movie that has been released on DVD/Blu-ray, creating a high quality copy on your hard drive, and editing out scenes, bits of dialogue, rearranging components, adding alternate footage, etc to create a new, sometimes better (though that is is entirely subjective) or an alternate version of a film, creating a DVD, and then sharing it with an online community of like-minded cinema-lovers.

The hobby is controversial, not so much among participants or even casual film goers (after all, don't like an edit? The original film is still there, which you should already own), but with the entertainment industry. There has been no large-scale media coverage that I know of, and I feel this would be an interesting topic for even non-cinephiles to get a glimpse into the sometimes obsessive world of film lovers.

The piece, designed for magazine publication, would not only explore the technical aspect of fanediting, but also a brief history, the dynamics of the community, and the thoughts of editors on how legal their hobby of choice is. More details to follow as the piece is formulated in my head. But for now, a pretty picture...

"Killer Horizon," a re-edit of the 1997 film "Event Horizon." Image courtesy of fanedit.org

Midterm portfolio time!

Without further ado...

http://davecook.weebly.com/index.html

I would also like to express my excitement about securing this URL.

Win.

The Forever War, Part 2

Continuing on with Dexer Filkin's The Forever War, the author paints a very different picture of some of the soldiers fighting in Iraq. He interviews an injured Talib fighter who is on his deathbed. The story he tells isn't one of a mad man crying for the fall of America and the rise of Islam, the death of infidels, and whatever other extremist messages the media likes to shove done our throats pretending they are hard facts. No, this particular interview was with a man who regretted his decision to join the Taliban. He only wanted to go home.

This book is perhaps the most unbiased 'reports' of the War on Terror that I've read or listened to in a long time. It is a very nice change of pace, and I look forward to reading more.

Talk of the town idea

A big part of college dorm life is community billings for damages done to a particular building or floor to the members of that community. After a recent strong of vandalism in the men's bathroom on the second floor of Pope Hall, I thought it might be interesting to get the thoughts of residents of not only this recent vandalism, but the thoughts on dorm damage payments in general. Usually, the charges range from $50 to a could hundred dollars, though these charges are divided up among residents, ending up with a bill of only a few dollars. It's not a lot, but enough of a pain to get peple grumbling when the end of the month comes and the e-mails go out.

The Forever War, Part 1 (for real this time)

The Forever War by Pulitzer Prize winner Dexter Filkins offers a different persepctive on the conflict going on the in Middle East. For the parts I've read, Filkins has a mix of both 'action' stories and candid interview pieces.

The parts depicting 'action,' so to speak, while not nonchalant about the acts being depicted, it states them very frankly, almost as if he is used to seeing such acts, like the people who live in the region, and are not overly bothered by it, at least openly. The interviews depict the interviewees in a matter that isn't exactly sympathetic, depending on the person, but showing a more human side to people than the media generally shows.

So far so good, and I can't wait to read more. So I think I'll go do that now.

The Forever War, Part 1

Or, this would be about The Forever War, but the book hasn't arrived in the post yet.

So instead here is a demotivational poster:

doing homework with a busted keyboard. also, paragraphs.

most don't really know how important a certain function of anything really is until it's gone. in this case, i never really realized how much i used the two shift keys on my keyboard until they both just stopped working, so please excuse the lack of capital letters, exclamation points, question marks, and just about anything else that requires a shift to use.

but on to this week's topic - paragraphing. ah, the good old days of the five-paragraph essay or the unreadable WALL OF TEXT. mr zinsser raises a good point in the 'bits and pieces' chapter of on writing well. while many, many, many paragraph breaks may look inviting.

it can also break the flow.

and the reading can become more tedious.

than a giant WALL OF TEXT.

this was often the curse of the five-paragraph essay. sure, you got the correct format the teacher wanted, but often at a terrible price. if only middle and high school teachers taught like college professors when it comes to writing style, fewer people would stress out about writing those big term papers. forming paragraphs is as important, if not moreso, than forming individual sentences. while a sentence must be a complete thought, it must also be a part of the larger thought of the paragraph. you could compare the sentences and paragraphs of a piece of writing to the components of a mechanical device - self contained in their own right, but ultimately a smaller piece of a larger whole that will fall apart if every piece doesn't function perfectly.

food for thought.