I am interested in a lot of different things, so a lot of times during my day, the different discourses that I am apart of kind of overlap during my daily interactions. A good example of this happening to me actually happened in our class about a month ago. It was when we were just talking in our groups and we were talking about video games and after that, I started another conversation about sports, and when I did this, one of my groupmates turned to me and said “wait, you like sports AND video games” and all I said was “yeah, I like both of them a lot”. Now, I would not say that this resulted in any kind of conflict, but it has always been something that I have thought about, mostly because, since I have always been interested in so many different, I have always had to make sure that I do not mix my different discourses together into my conversations. When I was in high school, I used to try to hide some of my discourses from my peers, such as the types of music that I listened to, or the fact that I really like video games and learning about the history of them, but as I have gotten older, and especially after I got into college, I started to not feel ashamed about the different things that I was interested in, and instead, I made them a main part of my identity. The biggest example of this is probably with esports. When I was in high school, I used to hide the fact that I love video games from people, but now that I am older, I ended up deciding that I want to work in esports for my future career, and now my love of video games is one of the main parts of my identity. 

My major right now is Media and Cinema Studies and I am currently really interested in video and audio editing, but for my personal career goal, I really want to work in the world of esports. For my whole life, I have always loved sports, but I also have always loved video games, so esports is kind of the best of both worlds. Over the past couple of years, I have started to pay more attention to esports and I just love it, so I decided that I would like to find a career in esports eventually. The world of esports definitely has a discourse community, if not multiple, this is because of all of the different games that are apart of competitive gaming. As far as the media side of esports goes, I would say that my major is doing a good job of teaching me some of the common terms that are used in the media world, but as far as esports goes, I have not really learned any of the common terms that are used in esports from any classes, all of them have been learned from watching esports on my own time. I would say that my major is introducing me to a discourse in a way, but I would say that it is introducing me to multiple discourses rather than one because in the world of media, there are so many career paths that include media that there is not just one discourse to be introduced to. I think that for a career in media, it is more beneficial to become more included in multiple discourses as opposed to just one discourse. This is beneficial for many reasons, one of them being that it makes you look better to potential employers and another one being that it simply just makes you better at your job if you know more about multiple aspects of your field. 

Back in May of 2016, during the summer after I graduated high school, I randomly bought a game called Overwatch and it actually kind of changed the course of my life. Because of this game, I decided that I wanted to work in esports for my future career and to become a media major. The reason that I bring this up is because Overwatch is a game that has a lot of special vocabulary attached to it. There are many terms that players use in the game that would be considered odd to those that are not also players, such as “goats”, “grav”, “blade” and, probably the most infamous, “C9”. Some of these are already common words that people use, but their meanings are very different within the community of the game. 

It is kind of different for me because, since I have been a part of the community for so long that I have seen many of these terms being created and popularized as the game continues to go on and different strategies being played. I would definitely say that this type of language is a secondary Discourse to me but considering the amount of time that I have put into, not just the game, but also the esports league, I would say that it has massively impacted my lifeworld Discourse as well. Even though all of Overwatch is online, the effects of it have had an impact in my daily life, mostly in my language. There many times during my day that I catch myself using different terms that I hear either in game or while I am watching Twitch, it has gotten to the point that even my friends have started to use some of the different words that I use. A specific example of these is with my use of the word “pog”, which, on Twitch, means to get excited about something or to celebrate something cool. I say this word so much that many of my friends do now as well. 

So, for my 2019 New Year’s resolution, my resolution was to be more creative, so my solution for that was to start a YouTube channel and start making videos. I watch a lot of YouTube, like, probably almost an unhealthy amount, so I had a pretty good idea of what kind of videos I wanted to make. The video I submitted is a video that I made over the span of month and is about the game Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. The video probably would not have taken as long to make if I had already been familiar with the software I used, which is Adobe Premiere Pro. I am currently working on my second video for my channel (which is named Davitt), in this video, I attempt to play Fortnite with a Gamecube controller. 

For my video, I took a lot of inspiration from numerous YouTubers, mostly PeanutButterGamer, AntDude, Caddicarus, brutalmoose, SpaceHamster and ProJared, these are all great channels and if you are interested in video games, you should check them out. I do not normally watch a lot of video essays in my normal YouTube viewing, but a YouTuber I recently found has really caught my attention. His name is Ryan Hollinger, he creates analytical video essays mainly discussing horror movies and the different elements in them and how the movies themselves affected him. His videos are very entertaining and informative, and he gives a lot of detail and demonstrates his knowledge of the topics, but without making it seem condescending in anyway., If you are a fan of horror movies at all, or just like video essays, then you should check him out for sure. I have really enjoyed the past couple of weeks in class and have been having fun creating these mini-projects and am looking forward to whatever we do in the future. 

For my audio project, I decided to create a soundscape. I really like creating things using audio production, so out of the three mini-projects, this one feels the most comfortable to me. The reason I chose to create a soundscape is because sound is one of the most underappreciated aspects of a good movie scene or a good video game, and the soundscapes that are created for them are what drives the unconscious emotions that we feel. For my personal soundscape, I took a lot of inspiration from the movie Saving Private Ryan, more specifically, the scene in the beginning where they storm the beach. I basically wanted to try to recreate that scene by using sound effects I got from freesound.org and from YouTube. 

My mine goal for this soundscape was to create the feeling of being in a warzone for my setting, and to create my soundscape, I used the audio editing software Adobe Audition, which is not a free software to use, but I already had the Adobe Creative Cloud because I am really interested in learning about many of the different applications that it offers. Another reason I chose to use this program is simply because I have never used Garageband and, even though I have used Audacity before, I just kind of hate the way it works. For my sound effects, I chose ones that I knew I would be able to use and most of the, were pretty easy to find, but one of them was more difficult than I expected. Towards the end of the soundscape, there a flash sound that is similar to a flashbang from Call of Duty and I ended up just having to find a clip of the sound on YouTube that was straight from a Call of Duty game and edit it until it was just the sound of the flash that I needed. 

For the two characters that I created, I took inspiration from two actual stuffed penguins that my girlfriend and I own. We have a weird thing that we do where whenever we go to a zoo, we try to see if they have any stuffed penguins in the gift shop that are an odd shape. So far, we have two; a circular penguin that we have named Phillip J. Penguin, or Mr. P, for short, and a cube shaped penguin, that we call Cubert. In my visual that I created, Mr. P is the one with the hat and Cubert is the, well, cube-shaped one. For my project, I used the website Canva, which is usually used for creating logos, flyers, posters, etc. The reason I chose this method is because it’s a website that I am familiar with and because I thought it would be interesting to try to create characters with a limited amount resources provided to me. For my characters, I pretty much only used the library of shapes that are provided to you to create my characters, and for the most part, I think that it worked out pretty well. For the design of my characters, I would say that I probably took the most inspiration from Allie Brosh and her Hyperbole and a Half blog/comic. The simplistic and kind of crude way of that she draws her characters makes it more relatable for her audience because it shows them that that, even if you have no training, or even talent, really, you could also create a comic and also have a chance to become successful with it. I used her as an example for a couple of reasons; the first being that I, myself, am not very talented when it comes to drawing, painting, etc. The second reason I chose her is simply because I enjoy her comics. 

I was homeschooled up until my freshman year of high school, and up until that point, I had never really used a computer to write anything, so when I got into high school, I had to learn how to dos something that everybody else my age had already learned how to do.  Before this past week, I had never thought about writing as a technology, actually, I don’t really know what I considered writing, I guess I just never really thought about what writing should be considered. However, after thinking about writing as a technology, it really does make me look at writing differently. It makes actually knowing how to write feel more like a privilege than it was before because there are some people in the world that do not get the opportunity to learn how to read and write and it makes me feel more appreciative of writing. 

As far as non-traditional writing goes, I am not really sure if I use any non-traditional forms in my everyday life. I spend a lot of time in the internet, so if any kind of writing I do on there would count as a non-traditional form of writing, then I guess that I do use non-traditional forms every day. For my career plans, I am wanting to work in video and audio production, and I would not be surprised if I will have to do some kind of script writing at some point in my future, and I am not really sure if that is considered a traditional form of writing or not, but it is not a normal type of writing that I do daily. As for other forms of writing, I am not 100% sure what kinds of writing I will face. 

The different types of writing that we used in class were interesting and for most people in the U.S, there are forms that we will probably never use regularly, but that does not mean that other people in the world have the same opportunity that we have here, so a crayon might be their best material that they have available, so it makes me feel a little bit more grateful for the materials that we have available to us. 

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton