Author Archives: Taylen

Conclusions

A reoccurring conversation that I have with my mom at the start of the holiday season is discussing about how people decorate their homes (if they celebrate Christmas). We talk about how even though there are some who put up crazy variations of lights and matching ornaments around their tree; ours is a simple Christmas tree from Costco that’s about 10 years old with mismatching ornaments all around. Do our ornaments follow a theme? Absolutely not. But what makes it so special is each ornament itself; all having a snapshot of a memory in time with a different story. As we put each ornament on the tree, we take a moment to talk about the particular memory from the past. From decorating our house the past couple of days and in reflecting about this project currently, I think this is also another wonderful method of self-reflection as another year comes to an end in the coming weeks.

A Christmas tree with a bunch of assorted decorations.
Some of the ornaments on my family’s tree.

After taking the time to read over all the interviews from these last couple months, I wanted to use this post to reflect on my journey with this project. Of course I could have just interviewed one more person, but my cat also doesn’t have too much to say despite being near the Christmas tree all the time now.

I think the way I constructed the interviews was just the right amount of questions and the right amount of time. There were 6 questions segments, which were of the following:

  • This or That
  • Five Facts of Fun
  • Drop a Bop
  • Debate Time
  • Some Deeper Small Talk
  • The Final Spotlight

Each interview took about 15 minutes, depending how detailed each interviewee wanted to go with the question. I think this time length kept the interview fun and relaxing, without having the pressure for those to think too hard about the question. I also found that some people wanted to express themselves more than others, but that’s okay! That’s also part of the project and each interview captured who that person was in that moment of time. I realized that these interviews also gave some people a reason to talk about a particular fact about themselves, as I felt that some of the things mentioned in some interviews would just be too out of the ordinary for regular conversation.

I think my favourite part of each interview was hearing about ‘Debate Time’ as everyone had a different perspective on each silly prompt. My favourite interview that I did was probably with my grandfather, as the conversation was completely different than anticipated; I think there was a lot more that I could take away from that interview than if I just followed the structure of a causal conversation.

If I could change anything about the interview, I think I would integrate more questions that would then contain all 5 senses. I don’t think anyone really talked about smell or touch, but I think those would be fun to integrate into ‘This or That’! If there wasn’t a time restriction with posting each interview, I would also get each interviewee to contribute a photo or some other type of media to their post.

Overall, I think the main thing I would to highlight from what each person said is recapping everyone’s ‘Final Spotlight’. I think there’s some really good perspective from what each person said and I think there is a lot to think about further with some of these prompts. I hope that some of you can take away some of these thoughts with reflecting this past year and setting new personal goals for 2023. Perhaps it’s time to disconnect online and start reconnecting offline…

This is PROJECT: Offline and thank you so much for following along on this journey. Happy holidays and all the best for the new year.

The Final Spotlight

If you had the final opportunity to say anything to the world, what would you say?

Things can change very quickly and can happen unexpectedly, so live in the moment, appreciate what you currently have and enjoy it while you can.

Stop focusing so much on the things that don’t matter. Sometimes you need to step out and look at the big picture.

Please, just be kinder to people.

Get out of bed. Don’t take it literally, but get out of bed.

Stop waiting on other people to do it, when you can start doing it yourself. I’m thinking more about the environment; don’t wait for other people to do it cause if everyone thinks like that, then nothing is going to get done. That reminds me of The Lorax quote. “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

Nobody cares, really. Nobody cares, go do your thing. Don’t take yourself too seriously. You probably care more than everybody else.

Cherish the smaller moments because they’re often the most valuable ones in the end. And always show your love to those you care about, as often as you can.

Take more time to reflect on what you have going for you. Because, obviously when you make goals for yourself, especially long term goals, it can seem like they’re really far away. But if you narrow it down to where you are now, you can realize how far you’ve come to get to where you are now…

Climate change is real, can we please do something about it cause I want to live past 2030. If I could shout that off the roof tops I would. Please, COP 27 is happening right now and it just feels like false promises again and I just wanna have a future. Not to end it on a sad note, but that’s what I would scream to everyone and like, bang into everyone’s head, cause please climate change is so, so real. We are feeling the affects of it now everywhere around the world. So, can we please do something about it?!

I would say that life is too short to be stressing about the little things. You need to take one step at a time with anything you do and not be down on yourself on the sense that… I find that a lot of people in life, they mess up something good and search for something better, to only end up with something worse. And to count your blessings, and life is too short to be stressing about the little things, so. My main message is make the best of where you are.

We’re All Human Too

In the discussion about community guidelines for this week’s Process Post, I have not only been reflecting about what this means for those in the public who want to contribute to the project’s content, but what about the people of PROJECT: Offline themselves and what they express with each interview.

From reading “The dark side of Guardian comments” by various writers from The Guardian, after seeing the animated visualization as you scroll through the article, I was pretty shocked to see the ratio of blocked comments when it came to the comparison of articles that were written by men and those that women wrote.

Currently on the PROJECT: Offline site, with each post shared, the commenting feature has been turned off. Initially, this was a design choice when creating the website, as I wanted to direct readers further into looking at other content once they had finished reading. However, after reading through “The Psychology of Online Comments” by Maria Konnikova, when they discuss the idea of the “shared reality” of how those can share their thoughts, feelings and experience after reading or doing a performed action, as they also mentioned in the article, from the removal of comments allowed on my blog posts, I feel that this element is taken away. There is an attribute where I want the public to have the option of being active in the conversation by sharing their story after reading about someone else’s as I think this can build on the conversation from the topic discussed.

However, after reading through “That’s How It Works When You’re a Woman on the Internet” by Aubrey Hirsch and seeing multiple examples of some terrible things written regarding her content, as the content I share is not directly to my own thoughts and opinions, I feel that I also hold the responsibility to protect those that have decided to take part in this project; not only I am human reading these comments, but they are human too and they might react differently towards a particular comment. Since the content of my blog is very open-ended, although I can also regulate what is being published from the interview and what is said by that particular person, there is also an element where I feel that I am restricting ideas of someone’s speech; and I feel that takes away from the intention of this project of having the freedom of expression. Therefore to create balance with what can be shared from either party, a community guidelines page is most likely necessary for the future if I continue this project further.

In creating a community guidelines page, I want to highlight that this project is a place that is respectful and non-judgmental; more importantly, we are a listener first before being a speaker. As this project is focused on learning about other people, we have to be open-minded if there are any sensitive topics discussed. Although people are open to discussing their views and opinions, anything derogatory will not be tolerated.

To allow visitors to view these guidelines, I would implement this as another page onto the side in the navigation bar; since there is no footer in the design of my website, although I could add one, the desktop design of having the navigation static on the page would only make the link to the community guidelines page lost at the bottom of each post. If this is a feature I can also implement within WordPress, I would also get comment contributors to toggle that they have read the community guidelines first before contributing further.

In the implementation of placing community guidelines onto PROJECT: Offline, I think only then I would feel comfortable in turning on the comments again. To further grow this community that I’ve now built, creating community guidelines will help unite myself, the interviewees and the visitors in what we would like to share with the world…

Conversations with the Age Gap and Transmedia Offline

It’s now the end of November; which means the holidays are fast approaching with families beginning to put up their Christmas trees, people going to the mall to get their Christmas shopping done and Mariah Carey beginning to take over pop radio. I was invited to a work Christmas party last week to attend to this past weekend. A part of me just wanted to stay home, but from sitting at my desk for over 3 days and continuously working on schoolwork, I figured that this would be a good time for me to get out of the house and just escape the realities of life for the night.

The party was mostly of guests that were quite older than me and outside of my age demographic. Luckily I already knew the majority of the guests, but sometimes I find the age gap can be a bit awkward as finding topics for discussion that interests both parties can be quite different; most of the guests are married with children and are quite established in their careers, whereas I am still a young adult student still living at home. Instead, I turned this around into an opportunity where I could network and perhaps just get to know people more on a personal level; similar to what I am already doing with this project.

I think one of my favourite questions that I asked a couple of people during the night was, “what did you decide to do after high school?”, as everyone has a different journey to land the career they did. Some went to post-secondary, some dropped out and some simply chose to pursue something else. In a way, I think their stories will help me gain perspective on how I’m going to direct my life through my 20s and give me direction on what I should do next with my life. As I am approaching the end of my degree within the next few semesters, life is starting to become a question mark once again with another chapter closing and a new one beginning; but I’ve realized that I’m also not alone in feeling this way and some talked about how they felt like they need some change in their life as well as they approach their 50s.

Regarding this week’s process post on transmedia integration, I think the channels that are chosen depend on one’s public and what interests that particular demographic on that platform; quick content or sitting down for a read? I think something such as taking snippets of each of my interviews and making a remix (similar to my video assignment) would work well on a platform such as TikTok/YouTube Shorts/Instagram stories, as this is quick content one can watch and it could transform into sort of like a spin-off to what is already discussed in the interviews; sort of like how YouTuber Thoraya Maronesy does on her social channels:

But to post the entire interview write-up as a post would not be appropriate on Facebook or Instagram. Even though Instagram is visual and media heavy, because my content is more in-depth and not just visuals, I think that viewers on these channels would be quicker at turning away to read the content. These platforms instead could be a place to bait people to read more and re-direct them to the website, in addition to Twitter with a catchy tagline to gain reader interest. On platforms such as Tumblr and Reddit, I’m curious if these platforms would work to share more lengthy transcribed segments, as I find these channels are more text-heavy with posts shared. Perhaps this is something I could integrate in the future…

From an offline perspective, a format such as a book, magazine or zine I think would work well. This could act as more of a coffee table book, where one can pick up and almost be like reading various short stories. As my visuals also add an element to this project, I think that the tactility can also make it more like a photo book. The book “Humans of New York” by Brandon Stanton was a big inspiration for this project. Although I haven’t read the book in the entirety myself, after conducting this project and having done multiple interviews now, I am so much more intrigued to read his work on a medium different from how I’ve done it. Perhaps one day I could transform my project into a book, I think this could also help take out the irony of how “offline” is still being shared online on this website; but perhaps what it this project was offline altogether…

PROJECT: Offline — Declan

It Starts With Hello

Taylen’s point of view on how she met this person.

There was a time when I thought that Declan was the more annoying younger sibling, but perhaps I’m realizing now that I think we were both equally annoying to each other; more now I feel sorry for our parents dealing with our shenanigans and making dumb home videos. Over the past couple years, I’ve been thinking about how interesting it has been to see our relationship change from when we were younger. I think that because we are older now and we have both went through our teenage years to learn more about how to deal with life, not that we didn’t talk to each other in our teen years, but I think having that time “allowing “apart” allowed us to appreciate each other and the time that we have to spend together when we can. Even though we currently still live in the same house hold, these last few years of having different schedules and not really seeing each other, it did feel like that we grew apart. In a way, I think that helped our relationship as now I feel that we have grown closer and have a different understanding for one another; and this makes me excited for our relationship in the future into adulthood together.

This or That

You can only choose one…

  • Salty or Sweet
  • Winter or Summer
  • Air Guitar or Air Drums
  • Coffee or Tea
  • Dogs or Cats
  • Sleeping or Eating // That’s a tough one

Five Facts of Fun

What are 5 facts about yourself?

  1. I am an industrial chef.
  2. I like to workout and go to the gym.
  3. I enjoy finance and investing and stocks.
  4. I like listening to music, rap and R&B.
  5. I really like cars.
A portrait of Declan.

Drop a Bop

Pick a song that is the theme song to your life and discuss why.

Fudge, that’s a hard one. I would say “Love Yourz” by J. Cole. It simplifies falling in love with myself, in which that I (in a humble way) want to be able to carry out my everyday life being happy and accepting myself for who I am. But also not pretending to be something else that I’m not; and the song just simplifies that there’s “no such thing as a life that is better than yours”, and using that one main lyric in the chorus, it simplifies that if there was a group of people, no matter their success, I still would probably not trade my life for someone else’s. I find a lot of the time in life, people are upset about where they are, or where they would rather be. But I think, it’s about making the best of where you are and not wishing you were some else, right? So I don’t know, I just think that song “Love Yourz” by J. Cole resembles a lot of my life and how I perceive myself.

Debate Time

What is your perspective on the following question: Is a Hot Dog a sandwich?

Yes, it is a sandwich. My reasoning behind a hot dog being a sandwich is it’s 2 pieces of bread put together with something in the middle. I do not consider a wrap a sandwich, but consider a hot dog a sandwich because I go strictly of what the guidelines say in what a sandwich is. So I bet you if we search up ‘what is a sandwich‘…

“An item item of food consisting of two pieces of bread with meat and cheese…” but the thing is…hmm okay, so the verb sandwich is “[to] squeeze something between 2 things” and the definition of the noun sandwich is “between 2 pieces of bread”.

But the thing is if that the hot dog bun is only 1 piece of bread, it depends. So if you just slide the glizzy in the hot dog at first, it is not a sandwich. But if you had “Chad” handing out the hot dog buns and he rips it apart, then puts it together, then it’s a sandwich. So, it depends. So it’s like the process of production. So if you’re making a smoothie, it’s just fruit, but once you blend it, it’s a smoothie. So it’s a sandwich until Chad breaks the buns apart. So a hot dog can be a sandwich depending on the variables that exist in a certain scenario.

Some Deeper Small Talk

Chosen from a group of questions, the person answered the following question: What’s the most exciting improvement that I’ve been seeing in myself recently?

Probably the biggest improvement that I’ve been seeing in myself is… I’d have to say, my time management skills and my discipline; I’ve been on top of myself about my discipline lately. Simon Fraser University’s wonderful Beedie [business school] program has allowed me to do some really good MANDATORY goal setting on how to improve using my S.M.A.R.T. goals, I don’t know the abbreviation of S.M.A.R.T. cause I forgot, but they made me make one and they really made me implement it into my life. I was just gonna make one up but then I ended up doing it to the best of my ability to help capture the real essence of the improvements in my life. So, yeah I would say I’ve been more disciplined.

The Final Spotlight

If you had the final opportunity to say anything to the world, what would you say?

I would say that life is too short to be stressing about the little things. You need to take one step at a time with anything you do and not be down on yourself on the sense that… I find that a lot of people in life, they mess up something good and search for something better, to only end up with something worse. And to count your blessings, and life is too short to be stressing about the little things, so.

My main message is make the best of where you are.

Four Years Later: A GIF

For Mini-Assignment #6, I decided to create a GIF from a couple of the video clips when I did my personal yearly recap video. I think both of these project cross over with each other in some aspects. I wanted to use that content to show how I’ve change in 4 years with my own self-reflection through a GIF.

A GIF showing Taylen speaking from 2017 in one segment and Taylen speaking in 2021 in the next segment.

Adaptability in a Community of Digital Devices

For this week’s process post, after reading through this week’s reading by data.ai, stating that in 2021, “the average American spends 4.1 hours on their mobile device”, this got me thinking about how content viewed across various devices needs to be adaptable. Since there is such a wide variety in screen sizes and colour output screens, websites and various applications can look completely different across devices.

When I first learned about building a website creating my personal one for my portfolio, I learned about the usage of breakpoints and media queries. In the code for the website, specifically in the stylesheet, this defines where elements can be set or changed on the page, depending on the screen size that the webpage is viewed on. Although a quick solution can be zooming in or out of a website, issues can occur of overlapping elements on screen (such as the navigation buttons overlapping each other) and elements that may not be completely viewable (such as an image). Majority of the time, this can be defined by the horizontal measurement of the screen, though depending on the website’s content, sometimes there are vertical breakpoints that are also defined in the code.

How PROJECT: Offline appears on my desktop.

How PROJECT: Offline appears on my phone.

In using WordPress for our blogs, luckily these breakpoints are already pre-defined in the themes that most of us have chosen and are already flexible when it comes to moving elements around the page such as columns, rows, and the website’s navigation. Looking at PROJECT: Offline from my phone, my website reformats nicely with the navigation collapsing into a hamburger menu. I’m curious to see how my website would appear on a bigger screen than my desktop, such as a TV.

In taking consideration how screen sizes can fluctuate, colour output also changes too; such as Apple products with their retina displays and other devices that may have their OLED displays. This has been a common issue of mine recently as I’ve stumbled upon this when editing my photos. 

After making the switch over from using a MacBook Air to a PC desktop, I have an older monitor that I use for my desktop. Recently, I’ve found that after I export my edited photos and when I view them on my phone, the photos appear much darker than I’d expected. I haven’t quite figured out if this is an issue regarding the settings on my monitor or the monitor itself, but it’s been annoying having to continuously transfer my photos onto different devices. And yes, I also miss my Apple computer lately.

I suppose there is a community when it comes to using technological devices. Therefore, it’s important that we keep being adaptable for having content being responsive for various screens and to be frequently checking how our content looks across these devices. Who knows what the next aspect ratio on a device may be, what if a new device came out tomorrow that is 1:1…

Blog Review: Year of Mess

Link to the blog

For the third blog review, I have been assigned to review Mika’s blog, “Year of Mess”.

When first arriving to her website, the first thing that caught my attention was the photo of a little girl, which I assume is a photo of Mika when she was younger. The caption at the bottom reads, “when did messy stop being okay?”. The narrative and thoughts I had when I first visited her blog and seeing this was, “How could someone get mad at this little girl? She is still young and still learning so yes, being messy is okay. So then why is it wrong for us to be ‘messy’, aren’t we still learning too?”.

And I really love how this photo highlights what the blog is about.

Mika uses an asymmetrical layout for her website with her content taking up the left side of the page and a fixed navigation along the top of each page. Along to the right side of each page, she has a blurb with a quick tagline of what her blog is about, as well as a more recent photo of herself. Below, there is a section that highlights the most recent posts on her blog to read.

As most of her blog contains the usage of serif fonts, I’m curious to learn more about the choice of a sans-serif font for her main logo. It does contrast well to be distinctive from the rest of the site, but it seems slightly drastic from the website’s overall cohesiveness; perhaps because this font in particular is stretched more in the horizontal axis. There is some inconsistencies with the usage of capitalization and non-capitalization as a stylistic choice in some of the headers and captions, however, this does not impact the content contained on her blog.

Mika has also added an accessibility tool bar to her site, which is currently in a blue colour. I think if she added some blue accents to her site, this would incorporate a nice splash of colour to her site! However, if she also wants to keep to more minimalistic look to her blog, I think changing this to a pink tone to match her photo would make it more suitable!

From reading the “About” section of Mika’s blog, realizing afterwards that this is a transcription of the provided auto file on the page, Mika’s personality and voice uniquely shines how she transcribed it, and this continues through the way she writes across her blog. She incorporates the usage of italics and bold words to make her writing more dynamic, in addition to incorporating some onomatopoeia. Through her writing, she commonly breaks her paragraphs between each sentence, however it is incorporated well to break up the thoughts and ideas in the post.

As a perfectionist myself and learning how to navigate through learning to let go the anxieties that confront me day to day, I’ve enjoyed reading through some of these “messy” posts and find myself relating to some of the topics and emotion that she discusses. In “I’m Glad My Apartment Flooded (Part 1 of 2)“, I dealt with a similar experience of helping a relative with their house flood and it reminded myself of how incidents like these are common for others too. As her stories are well detailed (like this one!), I think she can take advantage of the widgets provided with WordPress and add these to her posts! Adding a simple photo/visual or another element I think would really add to the narrative!

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed the authenticity of Mika’s content from the personal examples she’s faces in her own life and learning about what she took away from that experience. I noticed that Mika did not choose to implement ads onto her site. However, I think this was a better decision as I think the implementation of banners would take away from the authenticity her blog showcases.

Mika has done an awesome job curating her blog for her audience. Year of Mess reminds us that we are all human; sometimes things happen and we are not alone in facing bumps in the road like these and we can learn from these experiences, together. It has been a pleasure to look over your blog and I’m excited to see the blog’s final product in the coming weeks! 🙂

PROJECT: Offline — Amena

It Starts With Hello

Taylen’s point of view on how she met this person.

Out of the many places to meet someone, who would have thought you could meet someone in the women’s bathroom. For context, it was the first week of university and upon checking out the campus, there were rumor’s that there is a couch in one of the women’s bathrooms. When entering the bathroom, I stumbled upon Amena heading in the other direction and though we saw each other around in the same cohort earlier in the day, we introduce ourselves right then and there surprisingly. As Amena and I are both science majors, we shared some classes together in our starting years of school and hung out together within the circle of friend groups. In our later years of school, we had the opportunity to do some group projects together and found ourselves growing our friendship through the projects we made together. I’m super excited of what else we can accomplish before we graduate and when we do, we will finally be certified as #WomenInSTEM.

This or That

You can only choose one…

  • Salty or Sweet
  • Winter or Summer
  • Air Guitar or Air Drums
  • Coffee or Tea
  • Dogs or Cats
  • Sleeping or Eating

Five Facts of Fun

What are 5 facts about yourself?

  1. I used to have a pet goat for a summer and then I ended up eating it without my knowledge. *Laughs and Taylen is in shock*. So background, this is in Pakistan and for Eid, we sacrifice goats. I was just attached. I didn’t realize what was going to happen. It was delicious so there’s that… it was a good sacrifice.
  2. I can speak 5 languages. I speak English, French, conversational Korean, Urdu and Hindi (we are pretending that they are not the same language, even though they kind of are, but the writing system is different, so I can’t read or write).
  3. I really like poetry and I write poetry on my free time. I need my sad times.
  4. I love to sing, but I’m tone deaf. But it’s like “ayo, catch me at 9pm at night just screaming ballad songs”, but it sounds like someone is dying.
  5. I was in a sewing competition. I came second out of two people, so I don’t know what that says about my skill but I did come second. But yeah, there’s such things as sewing competition.

Drop a Bop

Pick a song that is the theme song to your life and discuss why.

So there’s Comeback by Carly Rae Jepsen and Bleachers. I think the lyrics are kind of a vibe right now. It goes, *sings* “I’ve been thinking about making a comeback, back to me”. So it’s like about coming back to yourself, I really like that one. And then also, I would say BTBT by B.I, Soulja Boy and DeVita. It’s like a KPop artist that I really like. That’s just been a song I listen too to hype myself up. So Comeback is more of a deep song, BTBT is the vibes. And then The Curse of the Blackened Eye by Orville Peck when I’m really sad. It’s about range *laughs*.

Debate Time

What is your perspective on the following question: Is the Jungle a salad?

Well your not eating the jungle. How does it make it a salad? What’s the debate in this? Who is out here being like, walking through the Amazon forest going *makes munching sounds*. Yeah. That’s it. If you’re forging, yeah I get it. There’s items from the jungle that you can make salad with, but like it’s not a salad cause you can’t eat everything in the jungle.

Some Deeper Small Talk

Chosen from a group of questions, the person answered the following question: What’s the most exciting improvement that I’ve been seeing in myself recently?

I think there’s been 3 that I can think of. One has been, even today actually; so I’ve been working in the service design sector for a little bit now cause of IAT 333 [a SFU course about service design] and then my job right now is service design and I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed it. One of the projects that I’m working on is teaching and building design capacity in other services. And so I’ve been teaching people design. I was looking at service design and I stumbled across the winner of the student category of the service design awards, and I was listening to her give her project and explain it. And it was just so exciting listening to her and what she was talking about and all the things she want to do. I just was like really excited. I feel that unsurety that everyone has growing up of “what am I going to do with my life” and I don’t know if I want to do service design for the rest of my life, but this is definitely something that I want to pursue and I’m super excited about. So that’s one improvement.

Another thing that I’ve been proud of myself for self-improvement, quoting Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridger’s in Nothing New (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault), [a lyric from the song] “How can someone know everything at 18, but nothing at 22”, that’s been something that I’ve been dealing with. I was fairly head strong, and I always have been head strong; so I’ve been very self-assured and know what I’m doing. Even when I don’t really know what I’m doing, I’m okay. But I lost that and I didn’t realize that I lost that sense of, I guess security in self; just that self-assurance that everything is going to be okay and I have everything planned out. But yeah, you’re hitting 22 and like everything is falling apart. And it’s really, insanely scary. What’s comforting is that I’ve gotten okay with the knowing nothingness part of it. I’m a total control freak over the littlest things in my life. And just being okay with knowing that I’m still learning and I don’t really know anything is an exciting improvement.

My last one is definitely going to travel. I’ve always wanted to solo travel, do things on my own and be on my own; and I finally have the opportunity too. I’m excited to see who I’ll become and that improvement when I do it, obviously I don’t have it right now, but I think there’s a sense of independency that’s already growing and that improvement is really exciting to me.

The Final Spotlight

If you had the final opportunity to say anything to the world, what would you say?

Climate change is real, can we please do something about it cause I want to live past 2030. If I could shout that off the roof tops I would. Please, COP 27 is happening right now and it just feels like false promises again and I just wanna have a future. Not to end it on a sad note, but that’s what I would scream to everyone and like, bang into everyone’s head, cause please climate change is so, so real. We are feeling the affects of it now everywhere around the world. So, can we please do something about it?!

The Real-Time Activity Online and Offline

After reading through this week’s reading of Pod Academy’s about Digital Breadcrumbs, I wanted to reflect on how I made the personal challenge this week to avoid social media and spending numerous hours scrolling on my phone as a user. One major point was when I found myself bored of completing (or not completing) the task that I was working on, I realized how I subconsciously unlocked my phone, swiped to the next page of my home screen where my social media apps were, and tapped Instagram. It was that simple and moments later I found myself quickly shutting off my phone and placing it aside me facedown in shock that I did the motions once again.

The line in the article that discusses how our daily actions are monitored and that “we willingly tag ourselves in specific locations through social media platform[s]” (Pod Academy, 2016), this reminded me of how my friends and I use the new social media app, BeReal. BeReal is a social media app that sends a notification once a day for those to stop what they are doing at the moment and take an image. Not only does this image get taken from the front-facing camera, but also the back-facing camera. The image is timestamped, then users can choose whether or not they would like to tag their location. Before publishing, users can choose to post only to their friends or on the community page where it can be shared publicly. If one does not share within 2 minutes of the sent notification, then the posting will have a timestamp stating how late they were.

Timestamp and location to share with your friends?! This easily shows where one is at a given moment in time. What I find even creepier is that if the person decided to share the location where they took the image, it tells you how far away that person is from you. Unless you would want to meet up with a particular friend, I’d think sharing this information on the community page with the public can be quite dangerous. Now think even further that on Snapchat, if the user chooses to share their location, this updates in real-time when the person is on the app. Have I been found cyberstalking my friends to see if they are hanging out without me, possibly, and I’m pretty sure many others have as well; what are the positives that this kind of feature really has? Overall, I’m starting to think that maybe it is time that I step away from social media for a while; not only for it being a distraction but for the time it wastes away from me focusing on myself.

Reflecting on the content-creator side for this week, I decided that I wanted to keep my website ad-free and unmonetized. The content of my website is about people telling their authentic stories about themselves and with placed advertisements. I feel that this would take away from the realness I want to convey with my content if there are banners on my site creating a distraction away from the actual content. If I decide that I would like to place monetization on my website in the future, one aspect I would take advantage of is some of the discussions that take place in some of the articles written; this could be about a brand, company, music artist or a location of a specific restaurant. This way, advertisements would not seem as jarring and can seamlessly fit into the content itself. PROJECT: Offline is not intended to be a place for product placement or branding opportunity unless the person spoken to is building their brand themselves. To keep my PROJECT: Offline genuine, my focus needs to remain on showcasing real people and their real stories…

PROJECT: Offline — Meghan

It Starts With Hello

Taylen’s point of view on how she met this person.

It was Fall of 2006 when my family decided to move to a new town. The change didn’t seem super major in my life at the time as I was still quite young, but I do remember the feeling of being the new kid in school. At the time, it was kind of cool; walking around and being like, “Hey, I’m new here!”, but I remember it also feeling quite lonely; being an introverted kid, I didn’t like being in the spotlight too much, so having to learn new things was also quite scary. I only went to school a couple of times a week before we finally moved into our new house, but then when we did, things started to feel more normal again. Meghan was one of the very first friends I made in my new class and though I don’t remember much from that exact year, what became after would be a life-long friendship that is now 16 years and counting. Although we don’t talk to each other every day, we’ve always managed to stay connected in each other’s lives all these years. It’s been such an amazing journey so far with the memories we’ve made and I’m super fortunate she’s been in my life with me every step of the way.

This or That

You can only choose one…

  • Salty or Sweet
  • Winter or Summer
  • Air Guitar or Air Drums
  • Coffee or Tea
  • Dogs or Cats
  • Sleeping or Eating // Those are like my two favourite things

Five Facts of Fun

What are 5 facts about yourself?

  1. I don’t like raw cheese.
  2. My car’s name is Bertha.
  3. I like ramen.
  4. I know how to scuba dive.
  5. I love the hot tub. I am a hot tub connoisseur; 103 degrees (Fahrenheit).
A portrait of Meghan and Taylen embracing in each others arms. The girls are wearing graduation attire.
Processed with VSCO with c1 preset

Drop a Bop

Pick a song that is the theme song to your life and discuss why.

You that song that’s like, *singing* “Everyday is Saturday night, but I can’t wait for Sunday morning”, I like Sunday mornings, so I think we’ll go with that cause it’s my day off. Sunday is like the start of my week. I plan to do nothing and I look super forward to it. Cause every other day I work, go to school; the typical life stuff that takes more time than you think it would.

Debate Time

What is your perspective on the following question: Is the ocean soup?

No. Because there’s living things in it. I think soup is full of dead things *laughs*.

Chris (Meghan’s partner who is also in the room): Well that’s not explicitly true, I’m sure there’s lots of little bacteria and stuff.

Okay… there’s a lot “visibly” living things in the ocean. You don’t like look into your soup and your like “damn, look at that fish swimming around in there, woahhh”. Or a crab or something. I also think that soup is made with intention. There is no recipe for the ocean, not that you need a recipe to make soup, but like you know. You make it with the intent of eating it. Or to enjoy cooking it, you don’t do anything to the ocean other than pollute it so.

Some Deeper Small Talk

Chosen from a group of questions, the person answered the following question: What’s become more important to you than ever before?

Living expenses. I moved out a few months ago, so I need to pay rent and buy all of my goods; which is fine, but you are definitely more money conscious when you have more to spend. That is the current I think, definitely more aware of how much money goes in and out. Even though I don’t see my parents and brother as much anymore, we still maintain good contact a couple times a week. I think it’s better because we have our own space which is nice, so I think it’s a positive thing; not that it was bad before, but it’s better because then the time that we spend together is more intentional.

The Final Spotlight

If you had the final opportunity to say anything to the world, what would you say?

Nobody cares, really. Nobody cares, go do your thing. Don’t take yourself too seriously. You probably care more than everybody else.