I just won at Facade, but I'm not really sure how. I mean, I guess I won. I got that ending where Grace and Trip kind of make up and then they kick you out so they can really talk things over. I honestly don't have a clue how though. They just kept fighting and every time something was addressed to me I said something like "I like alcohol" or "Paint is fun!" The response was always something like "It really helps me to hear you say that" for some reason too. Then Trip left and Grace was pouting in a corner so I got a little scared and I started calling for Trip. Trip, from somewhere in the back of the apartment, started having a bit of a tantrum because he thought Grace was talking about him. Then he came back and this argument broke out and they completely ignored everything I said. So I went into the corner and tried to ask what the weird cracked egg thing was but they didn't listen to me. I got bored with the egg thing after a while, so I turned back around to look at them. Grace was staring out the window and Trip was standing about three feet away from me and glaring at me as he argued with Grace. I tried to talk to him but he continued talking with Grace and glaring at me.

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I’m not going to lie, I pretty much wrote off the analytical option instantly. When given a creative option, I won’t even consider another route. So I allowed my mind to wander through all the possibilities of what I could do and where I could go with this final project. I couldn’t decide whether to go more humorous or more poetic, more big and crazy or more of a subtle insanity. I thought about this all Thursday night and most of Friday.
Then I promptly forgot about it. (I said I wasn’t going to lie.) Luckily, I decided to check the site tonight and make sure I wasn’t forgetting something vitally important I needed to have done for class tomorrow and oh, hey! Final project proposals! And I still had no idea.

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When I selected my book, I found myself torn between two intriguing-looking books. I eventually selected Escape From Tenopia since it allowed me to start out with aliens rather than having to search for the alien ending since they would all be alien endings. And I was right; they all were. All one of them.

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My book for the Choose Your Own Adventure project is called Escape From Tenopia. It is not necessarily of the Choose Your Own Adventure brand, but it was written by the same guy and it still allows the reader to choose his or her own path. What’s the difference then? My book only has one ending. No matter what you do – walk through a jungle of giant, man-eating spiders, get captured and enslaved fifteen thousand times by the half-human aliens called crogocides, skip carelessly around the base of an active volcano – you cannot die. You cannot fail. In fact, the only injury I managed to sustain was a small nip from a piranha-like fish. You just keep wandering the island until you reach your goal – a hidden village named Zindor. It took me two days to read this book because I kept getting captured and sent back to page seven – the mine on the opposite side of the island from where I was trying to get. Then, once I got captured and I finally got enslaved in the mine almost on the correct side of the island until my captors decided that it was time to send me to the other mine because that one didn’t have enough workers.

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In class last Thursday, we defined a comic as a sequence of images intended to convey information or produce a response in the reader. We also recognized, though, that that meant that the Family Circus cartoons were not comics as many of them are only one image, not a sequence. However, not all the Family Circus cartoons were single-paneled. A few were, in fact, a sequence of images intended to convey information or produce a response in the reader. Is it possible for some of them to be comics, and some not? Is it logical?

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The invisible fourth wall in stories allows the audience to be merely a fly on the wall, watching the drama unfold without taking part in it. Metalepsis is when that wall is broken, as is frequently done on television, in movies, on stage, etc. for comedic effect. The characters may break that barrier momentarily to comment on something supposedly outside the fabula, like in that Family Guy clip we watched in class yesterday of Stewie commenting on the 24 ad at the bottom of the screen. But what happens when there’s a narrator? Does the narrator exist on the characters’ side of the wall or the audience’s? I would guess that since the narrator mainly interacts with the audience, he would be outside the wall with them. If that’s the case though, then what happens when the characters in the story begin to interact with the narrator as well? Into The Woods is a prime example of this when the characters within the story are looking for someone to sacrifice to the giant and suddenly notice the narrator speaking to the audience from the side of the stage.

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In my psychology class last year we had a section devoted to facial expressions and their importance in every day life. We learned that facial expressions are a universal language. They’re instinctive, meaning a smile is the same in every culture, as is a frown, a tear, a laugh. Facial expressions provide us with vital clues that would otherwise leave many thoughts and feelings impossible to communicate. When talking to someone, we may not always understand the point of the story they’re telling us, but we can pick up clues on how to react to their story from their expression. When a friend enters the room with a frown and the middle ends of their eyebrows lifted, we know to go and comfort them. Dr. Paul Ekman, a famous psychologist, has made a science of reading and detecting emotions through facial expressions. He is most well known for his work in discovering how to detect lies from the look on someone’s face. This shows that facial expressions are important enough to us to actually go against what language is saying and tell us the true story.

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