Borderland Gooseberries

For one of our reading assignments this week, we were supposed to analyze the story "Gooseberries" by Anton Checkhov for theme. In the story we encounter a man by the name Nicholai Ivanich, who works his entire life to achieve his goal only to find that it was not as satisfying as he had believed it to be. After reading this I could not help but make plot comparisons to one of my favorite game series Borderlands.

The short version of both of these incredibly long games is that you are in a futuristic society that has come across a baron planet named Pandora. On Pandora there it was rumored that their was a secret vault that would give whoever opened it immense fame, power in wealth. You start the game as one of the four vault hunters on the left (I always choose Siren) and work with the help of an AI named Angel to find and open the vault. At the end, you find and open the vault, but a giant monster that you have to immediately kill comes out and tries to eat you instead of the miles of gold you were imagining. The second game picks up some time after this with the same basic premise, but instead you are preventing the antagonist of the story, Handsome Jack, from opening the vault first. The game once again, takes forever to complete and you are finally able to open this second vault, but Handsome Jack opens it first and you have to deal with yet another monster that appears from the vault. This time the vault yields its riches, but you later discover that there are many more vaults in the galaxy you inhabit and are once again left disappointed with all of the hours you have just spent, and I can only guess that the third game will pick up somewhere from there. And yes, that was the short version.

Just from this description it seems that the two plot lines have very similar features, the character has a goal that no one can stop them from achieving, this passion drives them to devote their entire life to the project, and depending on how much you invest much of yours as well. And after gaining a considerable amount of wealth they are finally gifted with what they have spend the better part of their life chasing, only to find that what they wanted was not actually what they would have. With this plot from Gooseberries, along with a heavy handed statement, we can pull that there are very few people that ever actually achieve happiness and that the life long pursuit of an ideal is a gamble at best. While this same theme can be had for the plot of the entire Borderlands series, I think that it can also be shown that the continuous pursuit of such an ideal will most often lead to more work to be done to reach something that proves to be increasingly unobtainable.

Written By: Evan

               

For homework tonight we were told to read A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor. Upon hearing the title I initially assumed that it would be a story about a woman who is either searching for a husband or dealing with an abusive or possibly emotionally detached husband. I incorrectly thought that it would be a mostly innocent story, if a little sad with it possibly ended in divorce or a breakup. But no, the story went in a completely different direction than expected, with the “Good Man” in the title being someone that is not a criminal, a liar, or a cheat.

 

                While the grandmother was in no way the narrator of the story, I came to see her in a similar light, as she was the most active presence in the story. She had thoughts about everything that occurred and didn’t mind making her opinion know. She also seemed to be the sort that was raised with extremely good manners and liked to see others use them as well. All that being said, I was horrified by what occurred with “The Misfit” and how the family that was involved was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think it affected even more because I was going into it with such innocent assumptions as to what the story would contain.

                It’s usually sad to see anyone die in a story (unless of course it is the antagonist and even then it’s not always so black and white) but seeing the children die is even worse. Especially considering the innocent way they had been acting for the entire story. There is a lot of shock value in this story due innocence being met with cold cruelty. This terrible events never would have happened if the grandmother hadn’t tried to go the house, or if she had remembered correctly where the house was actually located at, or if she hadn’t brought the cat along. I also thought that the fact that the husband and son were clearly just murdered, the wife did not seem to realize this and she just went along with the goons (is that politically correct? Should we call them Henchmen? Henchpeople?) when it was time for her and the daughter to die.

                All in all, this story was very sad and very horrifying just because of the unexpected events and the way the innocence of all the characters meets as abrupt an end as the characters themselves do. We can read or watch all sorts of stories where terrible things happen to people without batting an eye, which is why there are so many different variations on CSI and CSI-like shows. But we go into those stories expecting bad things to happen, but in this story our intentions are not met and therefore, we are horrified.

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Written by: Evan  

We recently read Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been in class. This story is a great example for the conflict that can arise between a young adult and their parents during those in between years of teenagism. While this story does not exclusively focus on this topic, it is what I will be referring to in this article.

The story provides an excellent description of how many teenagers can act around their parents. The parent generally doesn't approve of one or many of the activities that the child in question engages in on a regular basis. In this story, it is the repeated action of looking in the mirror. It seems harmless enough, but to the mother it is an act of arrogance and vanity. The daughter just assumes the mother is jealous because she lost the beauty she once had. The two assume the worst of each other and because of that, do not agree with one another.

Another point of conflict between parent and child is authority. In the story, Connie clearly dislikes her mother’s strict attitude. She is allowed to do things only because her older sister does so.  This is also a sort of jealousy, when being compared to the “perfect sibling.” While Connie’s mother is actually being more than fair by allowing her do the same things as her much older sister, Connie doesn't see it that way and feels resentment. You can see a little of this in the title. Where are you Going?, and Where have you Been? are probably common questions Connie hears from her mother, while her sister  can come and go as she pleases. This is probably the reason she relishes her trips into town. They spend the whole day doing whatever they please, and no one asks anything about it. She enjoys this freedom and also views it as a bit of rebellion, which teenagers are traditionally portrayed as relishing in.

Connie also hates being compared to her sister. In her mother’s eyes, the older sister is the perfect child. Connie doesn’t think so. She seems to view her sister in disdain which is mostly based off of her mother’s intense approval of her and Connie’s opinion that her sister and all her friends are much less pretty than she is herself. In this case neither party has it correct. The sister clearly isn’t perfect due to the fact that she is 24 years old and still lives at home, but she clearly isn’t as bad as Connie makes her out to be either. What we get from the two perspectives is a mixture of the viewpoints from both the mother and the daughter.

So, in conclusion, the story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been is a great example of how teenagers can come to odd with their parents due to the many differences between the two generations. While both the parents and the child clearly have some flaws, which they attack each other about, they also have great qualities about them which the other refuses to acknowledge, even to themselves.

The Art of Selling

The Art of Selling

By: James Birchfield

   The topic of this post will focus on the power that singular words can have on the reaction to a statement or even toward another person.

   One of our opening assignments this week was to analyze the effect that an adjective had on the implications to the surrounding sentence. For example "The man sighed hugely." At its face one might say that this man sighed with exaggerated motions to make his sigh huge, or possibly he took a very deep breath so that the duration of the sigh was "huge", it is also a possibility that the man simply opened his mouth very wide and sighed with his mouth open. But now what if we changed the word "hugely", which was the focus of the assignment. If the second possible explanation is taken, then we can safely assume that with his deep breath he was also very loud, so that the sentence becomes "The man sighed loudly." But now what does this imply about the situation? Well, it could still mean that the man was just loud, not necessarily that he took a long time, but just loud. The sentence could also imply that the man was upset and needed to let the surrounding people know without saying it. The point being that our sentence and its meaning has just changed, possibly in ways that are not immediately obvious.

   This same principle applies to selling any product, let it be candy or a program at school. The sales person has a short amount of time to become friends with the customer and to sell them the product. For instance when selling candy one often meets people that don't have money. From past experience I can say that while they may not have the money on them, which they might, they usually have money around them, often in the form of friends. All that needs to be said after they turn you down by saying "I don't have any money." is simply "Yes you do." According to coppyblogger this happens because the word "You" addresses the person directly and builds instant report with them because they now associate the sales person with someone that they know. As opposed to saying "I'm sure he does." which is what you are trying to get them to think about on their own. This second sentence doesn't build that link between the sales person and their customer and instead can come off as pushy and rude by simply telling the target that they have money around them without focusing on them. It is almost the same as going up to a crowd of people, asking each person if they wanted candy, and moving to the next person immediately after you are rejected. Not so say that this would not work with time, but it will not be as successful.