Victorian, Steampunk, bandwagon...

Really only after researching for our final paper did I see something that interested me, literally EVERYTHING coming out now, that is worth a playthrough anyways, is somehow Victorian or steampunk. Why so popular now? Seriously...

• Heres a list
• Dishonoured
• Alice: Madness Returns
• Bioshock 1,2, and Infinite 
• Diablo 3
• Torchlight 2
• Metro 2033
• ...

The list is long and I really don't understand where this came from. Everyone is all like, oh steampunk! YEAH! Which I get Steampunk is like the coolest thing ever. Just why the sudden infatuation? I really can not figure it out. Perhaps this is just a cycle art is taking? I'm not sure of other art forms, but I know music follows a very nice circular path where every few generations we "recycle" older styles and they become popular again. This is the most reasonable assumption I can make. Unless of course, Professor you are really behind it all.

Kaapow!

Something I just noticed was the lack of verbal cues I usually associate with comic books. This did not have any Kapow's or Fzwash's. I actually almost feel let down, as I havent picked up a comic aside since some old Batmans and the original Thor comics. Is this perhaps an occurance that made comics a less than desirable literary format? Is this why these, the greatest thing to many children, are considered second class to Novels and poetry? I would say it yes, the leaving of the archaic ways of graphic novels past has seemed to be a sort of emancipation for them. Now that they are considered worthy of even an AP essay.

Was I let down? Yes. Is this a step in the right direction? Hell yes. For comics in general, being such a relatively new format they need to evolve to become something great, and in my opinion they are doing just that. Thoughts? Opinions? Wanna talk about shtuff? Get those posts!

Mad Science

What would it take to have a functioning Cavorite?

Well first let’s look at how gravity works, or how we believe it to work. Imagine the universe as a large cloth and on this imaginary cloth set a bowling ball. The cloth has formed a cone shape around the ball. This is what extremely massive things such as our earth, or the sun does to space. It creates this warp in time and space. This warp is what then causes everything to be attracted to large bodies much like a ‘coin whirl’.

So to create gravity all we need is shit tons of mass. So the inverse must be true to create anti-gravity.

Anti-Gravity checklist:

•          Shit tons of negative mass
•          Creepy green glow
•          Mad scientist laugh

Now how much negative mass would be needed to lift the villain in the end of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman? What about that really cool ship‽ Well that ship has some really cool gadgets/ a whole army of henchman so it weighs maybe two jumbo jets? Why not. So then it weighs a total of 800,000 kilograms! Which means our small Cavorite needs to create enough newtons of force opposite of gravity, to lift this beast and to keep it flying, so F = mg or F = (800,000) x 9.8. That means we need 7.84 x 10^6 newtons of force to lift this sucker. Now to find the mass needed I believe and correct me if I’m wrong, we can use F = GmM/r^2. Which leaves us with, 7.84 x 10^6 = (9.8)(m)(5.97219 × 10²⁴)/ 6378^2. Further simplified and solved for ‘m’, m = 7.84 x 10^6 (6378^2)/9.8(5.97 x 10^24) and a little maths… mass = 1.94353619388768e+38 negative kilograms, or one really heavy glass jar! Thus we can conclude that we do indeed need shit tons of negative mass to lift this ship!

This doesn’t however explain why a ship using anti-gravity to fly needs to be aerodynamic though… We’ll just say cause why the heck not!

Linguistic Influence

I wanted to expand on some of the topics we discussed in class on language; I would like to do this by raising this question, is language a reflection of culture, or is culture a reflection of language?

Let us start with some basic linguistic background; there are a finite number of sounds our mouths can produce, phonemes. Every language uses a differing set of these phonemes to create their words, or phones. This is why Chinese sounds vastly different from English. Along with sounding different most languages are also structured differently grammatically and lexically, an example being Spanish having the adjective come after the noun it describes, as in el coche rojo (the red car). Or in many Asian languages theyre will be many different words relating to family, where we would use just “brother” they will use many variations of “brother” to describe a more in depth relation.

Is their family oriented culture affecting the language? Or has their language influenced the culture? Language at its prime is used to communicate an idea, abstraction. With that being true I believe that it then would follow a group of likeminded persons capable of discussing their beliefs will then group to one another. Due to either isolation or just the gradual evolution languages go through, we end up with distinct languages that mimic the ideals of the community at large.

Now here is where I believe this gets interesting, what happens when a people adopt a new language, or morph an existing one into new languages, such as English, Spanish, and French being romance languages have a large relation to Latin? Does the culture that adopted the new language change its ideals to match that of their new language? Do cultures that share related languages, or simply have dialectal splits, share similar belief systems/morals?

 Just curious as to what others may think?

Testing... Testing....

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-- That is all