Marco Polo Perez HON 255

      I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and realism behind the state of gaming , where I found Virtual Reality to be quite an enjoyable experience, despite its dystopian nature within the film's universe. VR is the present and the future that will impact many people's lives (people use VR chat and sometimes talk to bots so that they won't feel alone), which I think has its positive and negative aspects in the long run.     For this project, Michael and I decided to play Call of Duty: Warzone and talk to players. It took us about 4-6 hours to finally interact with a good, unselfish player, such as Joseph (alias GrilledCheez923), who is a young streamer based in Florida who wishes to enlist in the military when he graduates from high school. He had told me, through a consensual interview, that he wanted to be what he saw on the screen: a soldier, a man who can take care of his country and defend it. The experience to get an interview was long, since many people eithe...

      The movie overall was a bit corny and bad (for my taste), but Milla Jovocich performance, as well as the design of the  Mondoshawans and the sequence of the opera scene were outstanding in my opinion. Luc Besson's cinéma du look  is very clear with the fashion behind the designs of the characters' outfits, which illustrate a certain hierarchy within the film's universe and character relationships (clerics, mercenaries, politicians, the rich, the underground, etc.).     For this assignment, my group and I had to create a couple of fashion designs (upcycle or through recycled materials) that were influenced for the movie. As soon as this was tasked to us, we came with the idea of seeing what materials people had in order for our outfits to be cohesive and follow a cohesive theme. I knew who my model was going to be, as my professor had already predicted, which was my girlfriend. She had a purple Taylor Swift swimming outfit that glowed, and it remi...

 This class has had amazing movies throughout the semester (one of my personal favorites being Ghost in The Shell ), and I'm so glad I could finally watch Christopher Nolan's Interstellar . Its main theme, composed by the great Hans Zimmer, is one I've heard for years without even getting a single gist of the movie's themes (such as time travel, survival, extinction, space exploration, etc.) For this class's assignment, we had to do a short 3 minutes video about an interaction with someone that came from the future--as long as we're basing our story in a reddit/quora conspiracy/tales about time travel. As soon as I read the instructions, I started to look on reddit, and found many interesting comments. For example, one said that he had come from the ear 2345, and other ones mentioned the urban legend of John Titor. John Titor was a man--who through his many world hypothesis--claimed that there was going to be a five way civil war in America in 2005, which eviden...

AI & Pinocchio; Intertwined            When watching AI and reading the original story of Pinocchio, I mainly took into consideration the first sequence of the film, which focuses on the monologue about a robot being able to love and feel loved by a human. However, when David’s prototype was proposed (a.k.a the robot child), one of the board members asked Professor Allen Hobby if a human can truly love a robot back, in which the latter simply replied with the following statement: “Did God create Adam to love him?”, meaning that the robot is only created to serve the needs of a human, whereas the human isn’t necessarily supposed to pay its service/love back. This statement alone is a recurring factor seen in most sci-fi movies where such creations (ex: David, The Replicants, etc.) strive to get that connection from their human counterparts (fathers/masters, etc.) but due to their nature, humans won’t care to satisfy their own needs. However, this st...

 As an anime enjoyer, I always wanted to watch Ghost in The Shell , and I'm glad we got to watch it in this class (and get it out of m wish list). The Ost for this movie is amazing, since it immerses us into its sci-fi dystopian universe, where it's futuristic concepts aren't too far from reality itself. For this class's paper, I mentioned other sci-fi works--such as Call of Duty: Black Ops III and Cyberpunk 2077-- since they align with the visual narrative design of this exceptional anime. For example, on one hand, in BOIII , the concept of Direct Neural Interface is introduced to us (the player), as a mechanism that would allow us, not only to generate simulations in our minds (like the Matrix), but also interact with technology/chips in seconds (like in Mortal Shell, through their ghosts).  On the other hand, I chose to talk about  Cyberpunk 2077  due to the similarities it has with Ghost in The Shell --both visually and thematically--since both protagonists adapt...

  When reading Harari's Homo Deus , I didn't know what to expect. When reaching to page 29, I feel like a part of me changed, especially when reading about 9/11 and the metaphor of terrorists being like a fly trying to attract a bull to take care and destroy a Chinese shop. It was perhaps one of the best explanations about terrorism, fear, and the war of the Middle East that I've ever read in my entire life. Aside of that small passage, the historical background of how humans have failed against diseases and how we've succumbed to war due to the trickery of others determines why men have failed to become immortal. Harari claims that we should all achieve immortality as to show human superiority, kind of like if men conquered Nature and became Nature (I'm capitalizing the n in Nature because I'm referencing Baruch Spinoza's argument that Nature is God).  As for my personal beliefs, I think that immortality could be a beautiful reality, especially if we're...