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Two New Photography Courses on Demand — The Daily Post

Two New Photography Courses on Demand — The Daily Post

Developing Your Eye I and II are 10-day challenges for bloggers of all levels. via Two New Photography Courses on Demand — The Daily Post Blogging University! How totally crash is that? Considering how badly university costs screw art majors by offering the highest interest rates for degrees that statistically lead to lesser paying jobs (because the world is dumb), where the hell do I sign??? :D  

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I’m officially announcing today to be International Humans are Awesome day which is timed perfectly after the U.S’s Independence Day and curiously around the same time Independence Day: Resurgence hit cinemas and in my personal opinion, it wasn’t bad. It’s not great by all means, I did find myself wondering whether I’d taken the laundry out of the wash during an epic battle when London got smashed to pieces all Brexit-like because hey, seen London be turned to ash and dust due to complacency once, seen it a thousand times, right? But I digress.

Another victory for our bright, blue Earth

Today marks the Juno probe’s arrival to Jupiter after it’s 2011 launch and another step closer to a Star Trek existence I’ll otherwise be too dead to enjoy. We’re colonizing Mars, researching and investigating Jupiter, it’s one of those days I seriously hate the fact that I’m too dumb to understand rocket science but to each’s own I guess; the world needs all kinds of people, even if those people aren’t particularly good at anything and earn money by farting around, doing nothing (I wish I was talking about myself there).

July, 5th, the day Mankind Conquered Jupiter

A signal from 540 million miles away from our bright blue home in the universe, the words ‘Welcome to Jupiter’ flashed on screens at mission control at NASA’s jet propulsion lab in Pasadena, California. And just like that, they’d done it again. First it was the moon, then Mars, now the largest planet in the galaxy is now ours to explore-albeit from an alarming distance but hey, warp technology isn’t impossible, or cryogenics.

For nerdlings such as myself, it’s a sci fi dream come true. One of the most common settings of space age human civilization is the moon Titan after all; from dreadnought U.S.S Vengeance’s hangar in Star Trek Into Darkness, to the space horror setting picked for Dead Space 2 and the human testing labs featured in the Zone of The Enders series.

With our space age obsession with Jupiter in science fiction, I can’t help feel this victory to be a triumph both for space exploration and the space age daydreams and desires of the average cyberspace pirate obsessed with mecha anime and deep space dramas. Although, considering how popular deep space is in sci-fi, I can’t help feel space exploration being a part of our collective unconscious as human beings.

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For me personally, this is a triumph for what it means to be human. It’s a celebration of our desire to keep on moving forward; our boldness and tenacity as a species. It’s a celebration of our innate desire to go the extra mile and then some for collective knowledge and understanding. Space has always been the final frontier of human conquest; the skies have always been the whimsical paradise our imaginations long to be a part of. Finally reaching Jupiter and unlocking its secrets will give us a look into new, fascinating wonders  of the universe. The barriers of science fiction and reality have been quite shaky since the beginning of the information age we currently live in; the 4th Industrial Age as some call it.

This leap wasn’t just a leap for mankind and our future understanding of the majestic black void far above and beyond our reach, it’s another stepping stone in the endless flowing of knowledge and how we perceive ourselves as a species.

At the very most, conquering Jupiter’s made me excited for what we’ll end up achieving next.

What did you think when you heard the news? Were you intrigued? Fascinated?? Not really??

The Day Juno Reached Jupiter – And Mankind Does it Again I'm officially announcing today to be International Humans are Awesome day which is timed perfectly after the U.S's Independence Day and curiously around the same time Independence Day: Resurgence hit cinemas and in my personal opinion, it wasn't bad.

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The Complete List of Movies and TV Shows on the International Space Station — Gizmodo Astronauts on the International Space Station need to relax, just like the rest of us. So it’s no surprise that there are movies and TV shows on board for them to watch.

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Found this pic while thinking of an article to write, so I thought I’d right about the future today :)

  Out of all the various industries technology’s had a hand in perfecting-and the pioneering geniuses of Silicon Valley who’ve paved the way for modern day inventors and innovators alike; the two that remain, by far, the most challenging are showing signs of a boiling chemical mixture waiting to erupt.

The industries of healthcare and education have proven to be the two industries that defy the iron and somewhat brutal law of selective Dawinism that many tragic tech spaces have no choice but to abide by. For example; computing. First there were many boring sounding companies that dominated the world of personal computers throughout the 1900s, from IBM (June 16, 1911) all the way through to the age of Intel (February, 1984) right up until they were all viciously cannibalized by the Microsoft vs. Apple era (still considered to be the world’s most epic nerdy, corporate bare-knuckle cage match in history).

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The history of computing, which is in itself a history of modern technology development, survived and thrived in this unforgiving environment, fighting against the blood sucking virus cloud of obsoletion as it’s threat continuously grew bigger and harder to predict with each new lightning fast innovation dropped before us into the market. From the systematic destruction of the multimillion dollar MySpace by a group of Harvard teenagers to the invention of WhatsApp that’s rendered SMS messaging redundant (for all of us with Smartphones at least, and incidentally those without one at this point might as well live on Mars or the moon considering how cheap they’ve become, and how out of touch they probably are without one-no, I’m not pointing fingers!)

The standard for technology development is basically the triad of better, cheaper, faster. If it isn’t a combination of the three, the consumer just isn’t interested. This keeps competition alive, products are made more accessible to low end markets as competitors swell the product ranks. And that in itself is a testimony to the beauty of technology development-where an app can be developed on a shoestring budget and have a profitable business model built around it allowing even the most unskilled programmers (such as myself) the chance to become tech genius millionaires.

Everything in Tech is Better, Cheaper, Faster….

Everything in technology EXCEPT healthcare and education.

These are two of the most important industries in tech that would benefit the most from this paradigm but they don’t.

This isn’t as hard to understand as many may think. Education and healthcare affect people’s lives a lot more than any Facebook or iPhone ever could. These are industries tied directly to the infrastructure of countries and how they’re governed. Government decides what’s taught, what the country needs to focus on in terms of skills development and how best to allocate it’s resources in terms of healthcare provision and services.

Another jarring issue with this problem is that rich or poor, everyone needs access to education AND healthcare. By default, this will always mean that resources available to a country will always outweigh the need for them simply because of the wealth imbalance in the world. So, by economic law, quality will always be a lot lower than it could be because of a lack of a majority of paying customers (in countries with free and/or low cost healthcare and education). The medical aid industry has problems of its own, but that’s an entirely different (and bloody exhausting) subject entirely that is somewhat tied to the whole healthcare system governments employ (though I can’t tell you how so don’t ask ‘:)

Many companies have taken steps towards these markets with an attempt at fixing them and many are brushing along the same boarders-well, at least, those that are any good.

The Sweet Spot – Codecademy.com

Codecademy is a perfect example of a company that’s found the perfect educational sweetspot; it’s cheap and automated. It’s low price means that almost anyone can afford to take coding lessons on the site and it’s automated interface allows these lessons to be done by anyone at anytime, albeit with advisory support. But with a well tuned automated system, advisory support isn’t needed for lessons to be insightful and engaging (put simply, you’ll never have to guess if your answer is right or wrong-if it’s wrong, it’s wrong and nobody has to be there to tell you that). It’s also cheap BECAUSE it’s automated. With automation, to a degree, there’s no need to hire specialized and trained teachers for lesson supervision and without the burden of extra salaries to pay in the company’s books, it’s costs can be kept at a minimal.

As a result, Codecademy.com has over 5 million users worldwide while one of it’s success stories coded a website that made it into Time Magazine! How’s that for an endorsement.

See Codecademy CEO Zach Sims discuss the future of education here

Zach Sims – The Future of Higher Education in the Digital Age: Nov, 14, 2014

What Codecademy can do for a person’s life – a must-see

Proof of the Explosive Need – Theranos

Although Theranos is the ultimate example of ‘HOW NOT TO BE A TECH ENTREPRENEUR’, the controversy around it is something to seriously think about when it comes to the need within healthcare for accessibility and affordability.

Here’s Elizabeth Holmes, 32 year-old inventor and genius who’s done more than just make blood testing painless, she’s lengthened the life expectancy of my loved ones! She’s given us a way to detect cancer in a life-saving heartbeat. And without even seeing the technology, we’ve decided it’s worth $9 billion. Of course it is! It’ll save billions in more than just dollars. But then October 2015 happened and the dream somewhat ended. And we look back on the venture capitalists and investors who bought into her promises with upturned noses at how gullible they all were; men who’re all highly intelligence I don’t doubt, so what happened?

I can’t speak for them, but from observing this, the world of healthcare was given a miracle and we all lapsed it up because it’s what the world and our lives and families needed. We needed a way to save the ones we love without ruining the rest of our lives financially in the process and Elizabeth Holmes answered our cries.

Long story short; Theranos sold the dream of healthcare that was accessible and affordable. Anyone could afford it at anytime. Our natural skepticism evaporated because the need is so universal in the human race. Nobody wants to say goodbye too soon.

Elizabeth Holmes talks about reinventing lab tests at a TEDMED talk

Zach Sims – The Future of Higher Education in the Digital Age: Nov, 14, 2014

  For the aspiring entrepreneur wanting to penetrate these markets, the best bet for you is to focus on accessibility and affordability in both these industries. Government red-tape will make it initially impossible to make immediate changes to established systems (trying to introduce a faster education curriculum, introducing new technology in medicine etc.). Not only are the mentioned innovations lengthy and tiring to bring to the market, they’re also incredibly expensive. Your startup will never truly be your own.

Codecademy delivers a cheaper, accessible way for learners to learn to code

Theranos promised us a world with cheaper and more accessible healthcare

A local South African project SharED shares educational resources between schools with the aim of driving down costs rural schools inquire for basic computer classes and science lab lessons-with the aim of making education affordable and accessible to more learners.

Amazon, more recently, released a web service for teachers (think of it like an iTunes for education if I were to take an uneducated guess) with the aim of improving teacher access to learning resources online-making education more accessible.

Healthcare and education are craving for better systems to deliver what’s already there. A better system will inevitably drive down costs. So don’t think out of the box, that doesn’t work in these industries because they’re centered around governments and governments are slow by nature. Thing systematically; what’s already out there that healthcare and education can use?

An Netflix for the medical industry?

Just saying, you never know ;)

More on Amazon’s online service for teachers here on the New York Times’ website. Check it out

Totes took this from their site :O.

  Education and Healthcare: Think EdCare Out of all the various industries technology's had a hand in perfecting-and the pioneering geniuses of Silicon Valley who've paved the way for modern day inventors and innovators alike; the two that remain, by far, the most challenging are showing signs of a boiling chemical mixture waiting to erupt.

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What the Future Looks Like for Non-Coders

What the Future Looks Like for Non-Coders

George Hotz plans on providing a cheap alternative to Tesla’s expensive autopilot self-driving cars At SXSW  back in March, mad genius extraordinaire George Hotz, a man I now consider to be a modern day Doctor Doom in the making, announced his plans to amass an army of artificial intelligence driven cars into the market with the goal of destabilizing capitalism in the American economy by making…

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Man I’m totally binging on DeviantArt tonight. Can’t get over how CrazyStupidFine these badass Kingdom Hearts originals are!

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Mos def my favorite pretentious artwork for the day :) Original pic by TrollcreaK  on DeviantArt.com, check out their artwork on the link (or better yet, get yourself an account, brave and daring artist!!) Source: http://trollcreak.deviantart.com/art/What-is-is-what-must-be-613494800

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Holy ballz!! This game’s gonna be 200+ hours long??? Are you shitting me???

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Final Fantasy XV: Brotherhood  (I refuse to call it Brotherhood: Final Fantasy XV) Ah, the bromance, the anime cheesiness that goes so well with my nerd crackers, the short, pulse-beating action that got me all tingly only for it to then put on all it’s clothes and slam the door in my face before I could even get my bra undone...

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And thus my powers of clairvoyance have been proven once again; now the only way to learn virtual reality programming is through the understanding of game engine technology. YES!!! VIDEO GAME TECH IS SEEPING INTO OTHER INDUSTRIES *cough*FacebookBoughtOculus*unassumingly obvious cough*

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The Digital Arms Race - Online Presence

The Digital Arms Race – Online Presence

I’m gonna go off my blog topic just a little bit and talk about having an online presence in the digitially nightmarish existence that is the modern age-focusing on the music industry as the subject, and because this is Writers and Coders (note the second word in that name, well, the second word that isn’t a conjunction at least), it’s still in theme even as I break out the steel comb and cleave…

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Your Art’s on Tumblr, DeviantArt and Pinterest… why not have it in someone’s awesome video game too?

I wanna take an article to indulge in another one of my guilty pleasures (which I partake in during insufferable boring meetings when I should be taking notes for my boss); the beauty of video gaming and it’s many flavors of artsiness that appeals to the juvenile little girl in me.

I only picked this pic because it’s super pretentious… :p

And I actually got this one from DeviantArt!!! :D

  One of the many (many, MANY) reasons video games, and a career in them, kicks so much ass is because games have so much space for freedom of expression when it comes to individual artistry. That’s also why it’s incredibly easy to talk one of your pretentious arty friends into joining your game dev crew (and that’s not only mere researched fact, but a bug-eyed idiotic drooling opinion). Games, and gamers, are incredibly accepting of a lot more when it comes to a game’s expressive elements is primarily because the only criteria a game needs to meet to be played is that, overall, it needs to be FUN (a challenging concept EA DICE hadn’t ever considered working on improving before but then again seeing as Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is a sequel, perhaps they have but practice isn’t helping). For a completely unrelated example, take Mirror’s Edge Catalyst  (no, I’m not gonna let it go! I’m still pretty damn upset about that letdown!), it’s simply gorgeous almost for grandeur’s sake. It’s a pristine white city with law enforcement uniform designed by Dolce and Gabana (yes, I know that’s far from an accurate description, but I have blue hair and no fashion sense), a gameplay element that touches on the minimalist detail with having no weapons and little gameplay variety in terms of combat and running missions (or at least, I assume that’s what DICE intended that trainwreck of gameplay to mean because there’s simply no fucking way it was by accident unless the entire dev team are a collection of retarded chimps face deep in mounds of cocaine day in and day out) but I digress…

Moving on to illustrating my point I guess….

1. For Lovers of Anime!!

Love coloring  and sketching manga and anime??? Why stop in animation??? Get your artistic career going by joining a really cool dev team working on a game with some anime flair to it.

Okay, fair enough, Overwatch isn’t really strictly speaking anime, but Persona 5 is pretty dope, but either way, dope, right???

2. Perhaps You Love Digital Art Instead?

Why not put your talents to rendering beautiful 3-D landscapes for an Open World game or an incredibly realistic graphic adventure (like Life is Strange perhaps-Okay, okay, I couldn’t help myself)

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Why not use your architecture skills to render impossibly beautiful, explorable landscapes that couldn’t possibly exist in reality?? (Kinda like Inception without the ‘dead wife apparition’ plot).

3. Or Perhaps Your Art Has a Dash of Dreary Realism?

Maybe you don’t want something cartoony and prefer gritty noir drenched in apocolyptic melancholy that makes you revel in the futility of life and the pointless meaning around existence and existential hell (kinda just stringin’ words together right now)

Look at all those realistic features in each and every detailed freckle on their face and hot bods!!! It’s practically art mimicking life itself!! Why??? Because…

Life is Strange!!

Christ, my life’s weirdly empty without that game in it :'(

Put Simply

Whatever your flavor of art style, there’s something for every artist in the games industry.And even if it’s not your ultimate career goal, it’s a brilliant starting point to add to your portfolio. There’s plenty of devs out there looking for skilled artists and being a great visual artist is incredibly hard work that’s, quite frankly, underappreciated to an alarming degree. So why not give it a go?? Breathe life into a story you can truly say you love!! (I’d normally say; good luck finding those in the ocean of garbage that many a video game scriptwriter churns out, but hey, that’s what I’m here for–helping you find good writing to contribute to, not as a writer, although I’m a great writer, at least I am as long as I’m clutching this broken bottle)

              Video Gaming and Artistry Your Art's on Tumblr, DeviantArt and Pinterest... why not have it in someone's awesome video game too?

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Just had a crack at Overwatch and will be happy to announce that, yes, the world isn’t ending quite just yet because I’m as shit at FPSs as I’ve always been and no amount of love and affection for said game will change that.

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I can’t believe how unbelievably twisted this kid is...

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A Dummy's Guide to Online Social Vandalism

Here’s Alyson’s very own guide on how to social network like a pro! (In a bunch of easy steps).

1. Pick a Network Before anything else, you wanna pick a network that’ll work best for you, be it blogging, scribbling garbage on people’s walls or just spreading your very own misinformed ideas across the net; there’s a site for everything these days!

1.1 Facebook Before signing up, make sure you have friends!! (And, most importantly, friends you actually like!)

1.2 Twitter Make sure you have an endless train of thought that’s always dangerous overloaded with unsecured verbal explosives and volatile ideas. The train wreck that inevitably spews all over your wall is likely to attract a crowd of fans (sorta like being Kanye West but with a working brain)

1.3 MySpace Delete your MySpace account

1.4 Google+ Who?

1.5 Tumblr Use it! (And no! I’m not getting paid for that free product placement either)

1.6 Snack break If you’re gonna go to McDonald’s, make sure to buy more food than you think you need because it’s likely that tonight’s study session is gonna be longer than you think

Conclusion My boss is crapping on me for using my phone on shift so I’m out!😄✌️