My Comments

These are the people I have commented on:

Victor's Google Street View

Liam's Ads of the Past

John's Social Awareness Contradiction

Francisca's The Changing Face of Video Games

Robert's Photo Manipulation

Kendra's Is Taxing Pop Really a Solution?

Taxing Pop Would Be One Solution

When the government adds tax onto any product will inevitable cause controversy, but in time people will adjust to this extra cost and stop their pointless rants. Without taxes the country would be broke and the benefits like OHIP would not be possible. So taxes have a positive side and a negative side, all we have to do is try to see the positive impact that taxes will have on our futures. As Sir Isaac Newton would say, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Taxing takes away people’s money, which is a negative thing, so the equal and opposite reaction is a more stable country.

The New York Health Department advertisement to raise awareness is very amusing and disgusting at the same time. This scare campaign is very effective because it does not produce and fake statistics. It shows people the truth about drinking too much pop. Nowadays younger kids have a higher obesity rates that leads to several diseases. If these obese kids stopped drinking pop frequently it would have a massive impact on their lifestyles. This disgusting campaign is a very good tool to smack people right in the head and show them the healthier ways for a longer and happier life.

Personally, I drank pop almost daily, but a few years ago something made me decide to stop drinking pop. Since I stopped drinking pop, this campaign did not have a huge effect on me although it made me laugh inside. I find the fact that drinking a can of pop a day will make you 10 pounds fatter in a year, very interesting because I love reading about statistics regarding health. This commercial gave me the feeling to vomit since the half liquid, half solid substance pouring out of the can was putrid. The thought that pop could make you gain 10 pounds of this revolting fat scares me into changing my vices into healthy virtues.

Obesity in our world is massively increasing, especially in America. Obesity is a large factor in several diseases and chronic problems, like hypertension. The percentage of people with obesity is increasing with each generation. This is an ongoing epidemic and the only cure is enforcing a healthy lifestyle. Some factors are fast food and pop. If the world managed to find a way to completely eradicate the consumption of fast food and pop obesity levels would be much lower and everyone would be healthier.

If you are observant, you can tell that I am disgusted by this video. First I was like, ooo unhealthy pop, and then I saw that nasty fat gush out of the can, which took disturbing to a whole another level. If the taxes are applied in the United States, it will probably come to Canada too since we have a huge influence on each other like brothers and sisters, mind you we are the more responsible big brother or sister. If they do add an addition tax on top of the GST and PST, I would not really mind since I am not a huge fan of chips and pop.

I will conclude my opinion by saying this is a clever advertisement. It appeals to human’s natural curiosity of simple yet important statistics. I think this advertisement will at least influence people to drink less pop if not stop completely. Taxing pop is a good idea, since it brings more money to the government while makes everyone healthier bit by bit.

Malignant Photoshop

I have never been a real fan of Photoshop, nor know just more than the basics of this fancy application. Why yes, they do look beautiful in a sense, but they also look fake. What’s the point of trying to look beautiful if you are going to be an illusion? Natural beauty is the most appealing of all the beauties. Seeing people in person is much better than seeing a picture that has been photoshopped so much you don’t even recognize who it is anymore. Anyways, when you photoshop someone it won’t apply to their true form so you are just destroy self-esteem. What’s the point in that?

One photo I found very interesting was this image of Kelly Clarkson. It was obviously airbrushed to epic proportions that you could clearly tell it was a fake. She doesn’t even look like a real person anymore. It seems like it was a plastic formed mannequin of her. They could have at least had the decency to put a few natural blemishes on her to give the picture that real feeling. There is really no positive side to editing a picture this much because when you see the person in actuality you will think they are so much more unsightly due to the fact that people are used to seeing her all “perfect” and stuff. In the end, I think that this picture is a failure and doesn’t do her justice given that it is not her true image.

All the magazines should not be all about the media form of “glamorous”. They should show more real pictures of people young and old; skinny to fat, since this is the true person. When the media builds up all these stereotype of what people should look like, it destroys the majority of people’s self-esteem since it is practically impossible to actually look like them. The images on the media are usually filled with makeup and then photoshopped, so even the models themselves cannot naturally achieve the image of beauty they just created. I really dislike how they break people’s mind through brutal psychological tactics, so I’ll wrap this up by saying; photoshop is more of a curse than a blessing.

Friendly or Antagonizing Video Games?

I am one of those people that are easily addicted to video games, but after a few days or even hours of playing, I usually get bored. In fact, I probably got distracted countless amounts of times by video games while trying to write this blog post. Video games also end up tempting me to play hours on end instead of diligently working. This is one of the awful reasons why I am in behind in some courses. Where there is a negative side, there is always bound to be a positive side, whether it’s minor or significant. It helps me build some self-discipline. Video games may be fun and amusing, but at times they can be purely addicting, sucking you into a void of dependence.

The advancement of consoles is very interesting. PlayStation 3, commonly abbreviated PS3, is a globally famous console created by Sony. It has several features such as being a blue-ray player, DVD player, and it can play games from the previous versions. I do not know much about this object since I do not own one, neither have I wanted to. I think this is just a waste of money, but I have to admit, this is a very fancy piece of hardware.

Although these games can be entertaining and teach you a variety of lessons, they can also be detrimental and addicting. I have heard several rumours from my parents and other adults that playing too much of these video games will lower your attention span. Maybe this is why I can’t concentrate. When you are playing video games you are brain is not as active as when you are reading a book, doing activities that require mental awareness, or physical actions. This means that your brain is highly inactive, which would lead to a deviated structure compared to a person who does activities that require high amounts of brain use. Well these are just all assumptions I thought of so none of this might be true.

The human mind is a very interesting creation of God’s. We are supposedly the only living organisms on Earth that can produce such things. It is not like we see rabbits creating first person shooters, and butterflies manufacturing PS3s, although that would be very fascinating. Anyhow, the creativity and the magnitude of the graphics in video games are becoming more refined and sophisticated. Primeval games morphed into advanced versions of their counterparts from a few simple pixels with basic movement to almost life like characters with surreal physics. The advancement of games shows the creativity of our psyches.

Video games also can be very beneficial. Several people have made successful careers that revolve around video games. They can be programmers to a weirder profession, professional video game players. Since these things are a huge part in people lives to provide entertainment, people that work around these areas can make a pretty large amount of money from it. There are a lot of advance skills programmers have to learn and apply interesting ideas. Games can be an acceptable career choice in some people’s lives.

Unilever, Hypocryte Much?

I always use Dove body wash to stay squeaky clean. The smell of axe is putrid and I don’t know how people actually enjoy the wicked odor. I have sort of known about the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, but I haven’t gone into deep consideration about it until now. I never would have realized that Dove and Axe were created by the same parent company, Unilever, because both of their views contradict each other. This is like an irresponsible parent company that can’t keep its views straight.

The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is empowering to women that feel self conscious. It shows them that their natural self is more beautiful than using an enormous amount of beauty products, which wastes both money and time. They use a series of advertisements to convince people that the media beauty is unrealistic. I think this is a wonderful campaign and it will help bring self-confidence to the people in need of it. This displays a positive message unlike its counterpart.

The Axe commercials, which are ironically run by the same company, are rather degrading to women. They illustrate that their body spray can attract women instantly and making them go crazy over the user. Men that spray Axe all over their body will supposedly attract all kinds of “sexy” women that will tend to their every whim. This seems ridiculous and extremely sexist. Luckily, probably only one out of ten guys actually believes this tall tale and soon they will realize this falseness. The other nine out of ten guys will probably find this disgusting and frown upon their crude advertisement scheme.

I have seen several Axe advertisements and they are all amusing. The girls are chasing the guy in the emergency exit sign just because he used axe. They take normal signs and add a little bit of humour to them lightening the mood. Also, another entertaining ad is the one where all the sharpeners stand up just for the pencil. I bet a lot of pens and crayons are jealous of that pencil, I would be. Although these advertisements are sexist, they are also comical, which a pretty neat technique.

Unilever should straighten out their views since they are a large corporation. It seems odd why they might decide to contradict their own message, but it might be an advertisement technique that I can’t understand. They should at least change one of their campaigns, preferably the Axe campaign, so that they won’t challenge each other and people will take their company more serious.

Ads of the Past - Are these real?

Most of these ads of the 50’s and 60’s are very stupid. Nowadays, people know that these things that are supposed advertise good are now realized to be actually bad, more like life-threatening. We find that these ads have several discriminative attitudes, but then again we still have discriminatory ads today. In the past they had less moral values and they didn’t know a lot about the dangers the world poses, so these advertisements would seem reasonable in their time. Our society in the 50’s and 60’s were clearly corrupted because who would ever thing of these ridiculous advertisements?

There have been several sexist advertisements, which usually demean women and illustrate that men are the best sex. God teaches us that both women and men are equal so now we know the wrong in our ancestors’ ways. A woman on a typewriter is not a computer since it’s a computer is a thing not a living breathing human being. The company of this advertisement would receive millions of complaints not from only outraged activists, but people with a conscience. You’d think they’d know better, but clearly they don’t. At least we can suffice to say that we have changed giving everyone equal rights that they all deserve.


Blow in her face and she’ll follow anywhere? Ha, this makes me laugh. Most people that don’t smoke find the smell of cigarettes to be putrid and pungent. It also deteriorates your internal organs and not to mention degrade your physical appearance. What kind of a woman would go out with a man that has rotten teeth, bad breath, looks older than he really is, and possibly has cancer along with other life threatening diseases?

An equally amusing cigarette advertisement is the one with the saying, “More Doctors Smokes CAMEL…” This has a sort of an ironic sense since doctors are supposed to know what is healthy for humans, but instead they are destroying their bodies with disgusting cigarettes. People of the 50’s and 60’s had little or no knowledge about the risks of cigarettes, which would lead to these ridiculous ads.

Having tapeworms in your body seems pretty idiotic. Eat eat eat and always stay thin? How about giving a damn about the parasite growing in your intestines? Once they pierce your intestinal lining they will reproduce and feed off every part of your body leading into a painful death. I got this from “1000 ways to die”. At least they have the decency to sanitize the worm before it slowly kills you. If someone in our modern time ever put this as an actual advertisement they would be sent to jail and/or receive a hefty fine.

Indeed we have definitely evolved from our asinine ancestors, but although we may still have faults we are much better off than we were in the 50’s and 60’s. Today we make more indirect sexist advertisements like how thin a girl should be or how buff a guy should be. We should be proud to say we don’t have any of those deadly advertisements that sell sanitize tapeworms, eating lard is a good thing, or smoking cigar is cool. Although we still have some discriminatory factors in our media, we are getting better with baby steps.

All in all advertisement is a double-edged sword. We might be advertising things that pose a future health risk or imply prejudice things that will influence the youth of our society, but at least we can look back at the 50’s and 60’s and laugh at some of the preposterous ads. As I conclude I will say smoking is not a good thing, and definitely do not eat tapeworms or any other parasite intentionally.

Oh yeah? I am watching you right now.

Some of my friends told my about this new function Google decided to create beforehand. Yeah all of us are technological nerd, not really. After I found out about this new application that Google created, I decided to check my own address as others might have done. It can be a double-edged sword, but things with great advantages should have some disadvantages. As Newton stated every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so it depends on who the user is. Some people might be optimistic or pessimistic. In my opinion, I think it is a great opportunity, especially with the growing dependence on technology. We all have to remember, this great new power comes great new responsibilities. Overall, I see buildings, blurred people, cars with blurred license plates, the scenery and much more.

It is kind of obvious the pessimistic people will immediately think it breaks their freedom of privacy, but Google are only capturing the outsides of homes not inside, therefore it is still considered a public area. Google put a button for browsers to report any faces or license plates that aren’t blurred yet to help protect the privacy of concerned patrons. This might not completely solve this problem instantly, but they are at least trying to satisfy those paranoid privacy freaks.

On the other hand I think this new application will help a variety of people. As some people might say, when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. I don’t think this is a privacy issue since it does not record the inside of buildings purposely, which is suppose to be private. This seems to show the innovations technology can create.

I have yet to find a picture of me that is posted online without my permission. Google Street View won’t change that because I think it would be pretty neat to find myself in one of these pictures. It might make you popular among your friends, or create something interesting to talk about. If someone is in a public space, Google would blur their faces so their likeness wouldn’t become public domain. With this in mind, Google is not trying to break any privacy laws so this is legit. I don’t think people would even be able to find their likeness inside these pictures because the quality is not the best and it would be hard to recognize with the blurred faces.

I well appreciate this new application created by Google since it is neat how they are manage to produce these decent panoramic views. I have used this program to make a simple reference picture for my Tech Design SketchUp model for TDJ, which are both coincidentally created by Google. This application could be used to have vague reference pictures like I have used. This could be helpful for people taking art courses or tech courses to use either scenery or buildings of the area as reference or inspiration.

Parkour, which is the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one's path by adapting one's movements to the environment, is becoming an increasing practiced art. Here is a link with some background information (Parkour). Traceurs or traceuses, need to know the urban environment which they want to maneuver through so Google Street View would help them plan out how will they overcome each obstacle.

There are a few types of vehicles that Google uses to capture these pictures. The obvious way is via cars. They have adapted innovated ways to capture areas where cars cannot reach such as the tricycle and snowmobile. It is very amusing how far Google would go to make their applications advance especially with the tricycles and snowmobiles. The camera has a very sci-fi look with all those cameras and censors attached to it.

Google Street View has become so popular that there are websites which show weird, funny, and cool pictures taken by Google. This one seems to have the perfect scenery with the guy at the top of the pole. I would love to be this person standing on one hand on top of a pole. It seems that people love this new application so much they would go hours searching for similar pictures.

All together I think this application is a wonderful thing that people enjoy to browse. Google is probably the only company that could magnify this technology or even create this program. Personally, I believe that this is an astonishing innovation that opens doors and really I don’t find anything wrong with it.