My Website

http://users.tricity.wsu.edu/~jesse.nguyen/index.html

So as I was doing research in the 80's I found out Pac-Man was released in 1980 in Japan and also in the U.S. Pac-Man was one of the first video games I have ever played as a kid. I used to love going to Chuck-e-cheese and sitting down at one of their Pac-Man arcade tables and trying to beat as many levels as I can. I was born in 1989 so Pac-Man has been around over a decade before I even got the chance to play it. To this day I will always be terrified of the colorful ghosts.

As I was making my website, I decided I wanted my header to look like the traditional maze they used in the Pac-Man game. It took my forever to design the header since I wanted it to be perfect. Since I already decided that I wanted to sell Pac-Man themed shoes, I wanted the shoes to replace the traditional Pac-Man who is trying to escape the non-escape-able  maze. I then added the tradational ghosts who are always haunting both Pac-Man and me.

Next, I made the menu bar. I wanted to keep it simple and have a home, about, and the product itself. I used a Pac-Man font I found on dafonts.com and liked it since it fitted the theme and went for it. Next I made the footer. I decided to just have more fun buttons like a contact page and a random link that took to Pac-Man eating dots. It is what he is known for.

For the body, I just wanted to have some fun and created text for each page that sounded fun and silly but also still talks about my made-up company.

I used Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver to create everything. Overall fun project.

Chapter 8

In Chapter 8 of Launching the Imagination by Mary Stewart, she talks about constructing meaning. A term that involves this is iconography. Iconography is the study of symbolic visual systems. Deborah Haylor-McDowell, The Serpent Didn't Lie, represents this idea beautifully as it shows off many different iconic history theories/stories. This is basically how history was recorded back in the day and still being recorded today (with pictures and technology). 

My trip to Starbucks today.

Today, I had a wonderful lunch with my girlfriend and then decided to went to Starbucks (our overlords) to grab a nice warm green tea. I don't know when they started this but they usually double cup my warm drinks now (maybe to prevent burning one's hand but I thought that was that cardboard cup hugger thingy was for?) and when I got this double cupped drink, I was at first content but then I started driving. They forgot to put a "stopper" in my drink. No matter how flat the streets can be, the liquid in the cup will always jump out from the lid and spill out, which in my case and the point of this blog post that exactly happened with my green tea. That made me a sad panda. I wished Starbucks just gave us stoppers without asking for them or McDonald's giving ketchup to anyone who orders fries.

Thanksgiving Aftermath

Hello. I survived my first Thanksgiving where I had to attend 2 dinners! The first dinner was with my girlfriend and her family. She has a huge family so a lot of people showed up. It is alright. The next Thanksgiving dinner was at my parent's house. Usually, my family goes big and invites everyone in my family to come over for turkey and egg rolls. This year was kind of sad since most of us had to work/were out of town so she decided to cancel the big get together and just have Thanksgiving with the 5 of us, my parents, brother,my girlfriend, and me. It was alright as well and joyful. After Thanksgiving, my girlfriend and I spent a ton of money shopping. My wallet died.

Captain America Civil War Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVdV-lxRPFo

As someone who loves Marvel, this first trailer for Captain America, The Civil War has me excited. As it appears in the trailer, Bucky, aka the Winter Soldier is trapped in a workshop like room with Falcon and Captain America. As previously seen on the last Captain America movie/Avenger's Age of Ultron, Falcon has been tracking Bucky's whereabouts for quite some time and they finally found him. One may question why Bucky is being hunted down by military officials but if you all can remember, he was brainwashed by Hydra and did things that he can't remember and he is being blamed for new crimes he did not commit, which makes for a great opening for the movie.

I am personally excited to finally seeing the introduction to Black Panther, a lesser known Avenger but a very important key character in the comics. I am sad that the trailer did not show either Vision (as seen in Age of Ultron) and Spider-Man (soon to be the first teenage Avenger) but I get it as they did not want to spoil is grand entrance yet.

My first stop-motion video!

https://youtu.be/-ghGtMxrV58

Here is the Youtube link to my first stop-motion video. I wanted to have fun with this project and feature some Bionicle 2015 Lego toys. When I was just starting out, I did not realize how hard it was to actually move the legs so I just mainly focused on the upper body for the video. In the current Bionicle story, Tahu, the Master of Fire and his team (as seen defeated in the background for some frames in the video) fights the Skull Grinder. The Skull Grinder defeats all of the Toa but Tahu. Tahu squares off against the Skull Grinder by himself and is on the blink of defeat until the Mask Maker comes in and saves the day. The music I used for the video is from the band Linkin Part, and the song was Gulity All The Same. The noises I found were on youtube or final cut pro itself. Overall fun project.

Propaganda Poster

This is my Propaganda poster. When you google search "propaganda poster", you will see some with Captain America but very few Iron Man in it so I wanted to give him some love. At first, I wanted to do a propaganda poster on Marvel's "Civil War" showing off Captain America's team and Iron Man's team fighting each other saying "What side are you on?" but then as recommended picking a actual side and see how that side would recruit for their own avengers team. I used the traditional Uncle Sam figure, the king of propaganda models, and removed his head and replace it with Iron Man's head/helmet. I was recommended to put a American Flag on my poster so I made one. I also changed the hue of the Uncle Ironman to blend it better. The message part of the assignment was hard for me but keeping with the Uncle Sam thing, I went for his message but changing U.S. Army with Avengers and adding Ironman's glowing eyes and helmet to the color of the text.