Visual Project(Speak three words)

Pop culture in Own country (China)

Bakcground:
The most popular thing is online game in China. China has a big young community which play online games pretty often. So that, online games have became a mainstream. On the other hand, they usually play the games from Asia.

Chinese government blocks many PC games, even though there is a precident that a few games legally sell in China, and they are very expensive. Onlines games are normally allowed if they don't contain volence references.

Features:
1. Online games are cheap or free for play.
2. you can communicate with anyone in the game and play with them together. So you don't feel lonely.
3. Peole play online games for achievement, and get honor to be the best player in the games. Level of a character and items that players are seeking.
4. you can sell items in the game then get the really money.



World of Warcarft
1. It's the best online game in the world.
2. It has many kinds of occupations and race you can chose.
3. The game focuses on playing as a team and assistance. It's very important that has good teammates.
4. Freedom and extremely wide world view in this game.

Web 2.0

Flickr is a video and image hosting website. People uploads and shares their photos and video on this website. this website is owned by Yahoo!.

There are 8 different languages of official website. Flickr started to launch on February 2004. There are 4 major function on the website.

When you have an account of this website, you need to sign up within 90 days to continues using your account. You can upload photos for post on blog, and it won't delete forever. Regular account can only upload 200 pictures and 2 videos for free. Pro account costs money, but it is unlimited for upload. Pro account is $24.95 for a year.

Pop Star

Taylor Alison Swift is an American country pop singer-song writer, guitarist and actress. She was born in December 13, 1989. When she was 17 years old, she became a country pop singer. Two of her albums and several single songs were awosome.
Swift was born in the city of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. When she was in fourth grade, Swift won a national poetry contest with a poem called "Monster In My Closet". At the age of ten, Swift began writing songs and singing at karaoke contests, festivals, and fairs around her hometown. During one summer, Swift wrote a 350 pages novel which is unpublished. Her mother realized she was good at singing, and suggested her to participate a karaoke performance. Her show was a well-received at a fair. when she became a singer, her self-title ablum sold over 3 million copies and 7.5 million single download. It also spent eight consecutive weeks at the top of the Top Country Albums charts and remained at the top for 24 out of 91 weeks. She is the only one country singer achieved the number-one sales position for 20 weeks this decade. Her new single song "love story" also did great with downloading. Swift learned how to play guitar from a computer repair man. After she handled three chords, she wrote her first song called "Lucky you". She began writing songs regularly and used it to help her with her pain from not fitting in at school. Other kids would react badly to her so she wrote songs about them. I chose her because I like her songs so much, actually she did very well on music, and she has creative to write song for herself.
It's not easy to be a popular country singer, but Swift does. She has high evaluation on her songs, and rank up them to the top ten within 2 monthes. I will buy her entire albums, keep being her fans.

Movie Review Internetional Film Festival

This film called "A Place of One's Own". It was a dramatic and Musical movie from Taiwan that showed in the movie festivial in Chicago. The film Directed by Lou Yi An. The movie had a good storyline but the ending was a mysterious. This movie made you knowing the differences between poor and wealthy people how to get their own place wether they were dead or alife. The plot is about a rock singer Mozi finds his popularity on the decline when he is arrested for taking drugs and at the same time got dumped by also singer girlfriend, Kasey whose popularity is on the rise. Mozi wrote a love song to Kasey to persuade her to come back but it was failed. As his music CD sold going down, he also got debt and had to live alone in an apartment he used to share with her. Master Lin lived with his wife Yue and son Xiao Gang who was a computer genius wanted to try his luck on real estate and tries to sell Mozi’s apartment and lived on a mountain which is close to a cemetery. Master Lin worked as funeral origami maker who built giant origami paper houses for the dead. One day Master Lin was heavily pressurized by the property developers to sell his land but he refused although he needs the money badly to treat his cancer illness. Meanwhile, Yue was a grave keeper and one day she listened to the voices of the dead and knen the secret. Kasey’s career took off, Mo-zi struggled to pay off debts and faced getting out of his appartment. Their relationship strained, Mozi refuses to accept any help from Kasey. He even rejectd the song she wrote for him every year on his birthday. When Mozi finished a song for Kasey on the top of a building, he fell down from it and he has gone. This film was set on the mountain and a poor village. This film is not for the couples to watch. Couples retreat. Mozi refuses to be together with Kasey and he gives up himself. If you are a music fan, especially a rock music fan that you should watch it, it contains lots of background music which is rock genre in every exciting scenes.

Reflection About the Course

Pop culture is an interesting class. We have learned many information about pop culture, such as movies, music, gloster poster...... We did many projects. They were actually fun and not really complicated. A few presentations were done. I could improve my English speaking skill from it and I could listen to many opinions what my classmates had. Reaing was a big challenge for me because there were many vocabulary in each text that i didn't know. I didn't want to look at dictionary to find out the meaning of each word, fortunatelly, i didn't do that because i was lazy though.

One unit reflection

This is the third time to write a reflection essay in this semester. This time and last time only have two weeks between them. This unit that we have learned apparently shorter that other units. Anyway, I keep learning in the pop culture class. In this time, we just have finished movie topic. We have read some articles as we have done before, and we have searched some movie industries on the internet. So, I am going to talk about some contents on the past two weeks.
I found out Reader is a great newspaper. I have never been reading this type of newspaper until the teacher gave us to read as a homework and to fill out a worksheet. If you are a movie or music fan, you should try to read the Reader because it contains many movie reviews and some information about music. Sometimes it has advertisement showing a festival in Chicago on the newspaper.
In addition, we had a discussion with classmates to share what they have known about movies, Different movie genre we talked to increase our knowledge. Movies are not important but our lives would be more simple if we live without movies. It gives many feelings our desire.
I found out a concept in Why We Crave Horror Movies, humen are all having mentally illness. The audience paid money to watch a horror film that they could have fear, panic and nervous feeling, they wanted to have a feel like chirlden to scare of many things. But once they left theater, nothing would be influenced them anymore with our daily.
Last mouth, before our movie topic has begun, we assigned to watch a movie during the time of Chicago Movie Festival. I watched a movie called “a Place of One’s Own”. That was a interesting movie which was from Taiwan. Everything was great excepted there were only a few people watching this movie, I was the one. As I am a student to go to college in Chicago, and I experienced this special cultural event. After we watch a movie we chose, we have to write and record a movie review to finish our objects. I don’t know that if I can go to this event again next year.
Some eletronic assignments we have done on the internet, like movie industry and movie poster. Unfortunately, we couldn’t finish movie record. Movie poster is not a boring course to let students to hear a storyline from everybody even though
The things we did for the movie theme, that was in order to know many as we can study on the basic about movie. I did a movie poster which it was on glogster that I also had a small presentation to descibe what I have done. A glossary worksheet had some words related to movies that people could be used them in many ways. Discussing movie industries which are as many as you could found over thousands around the world. Some of them were established a hundred years ago.
I have not think of this unit could be so short like only two weeks, I like this topic as I like watching movies. I crave movie but not horror movie, I need comedies.