Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Topic Presentation Idea

     The topic I thought of for the end of the quarter presentations is e-sports or if that is to specific maybe video games in general. I like the idea of researching e-sports because well I play a lot of video games so competitive gaming interests me more than most things. However, another reason is that e-sports is growing at a ridiculously rapid rate. Just in my lifetime I have seen e-sports for certain games go from enthusiasts meet ups to actual organized events.

     One of my favorite games and the one I think I have put the most time into is league of legends and it has one of the biggest multiplayer tournaments in the world. Right now the League of Legends World Championship is going on and I quickly looked up some stats that say at peak viewership there were 149,058,415 viewers. A large portion of that viewership seems to come from China and not the USA though.

     Besides being interested because I play games, I'm more interested because it is a new form of competition bringing in a lot of money and also creating brand new things like professional gamers. There have been people playing games professionally for awhile but now the popular players are on a whole new level with new games, new sponsorship's, and easy ways to watch.

     I watched one professional player streaming and on stream his dad came in and poured champagne on his son cheering for him the whole time; he did that because he was proud of him for winning like 4 tournaments in a game called Fortnite. I just thought that was really cool that parents now days can be proud of their gamer children and that kids have a whole new route to take their lives.

     Another thing that could be researched under this topic is how technology developing further allowed for e-sports to even exist. For example, how crazy it is that for free I can watch a live stream of the League of Legends World Championships in Korea and read live comments people are posting. Thats not even to mention how awesome the technology that supports multiplayer games has become, for example the new craze in multiplayer is battle royale style games. I don't want to describe the whole game type here but game developers were able to create a game where 100 different players are matched up in an online game and they kill each other until one player remains and the maps are huge.

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Trying to create a website

     Creating a HTML website was a good experience overall, mainly because the website is so simple that it took basically nothing to create. It makes me think about how much a person would have to know in order to makes a higher quality website with features and stuff. There were however negative parts too like when I wanted an image to show up and it wasn't but after only a minute or so on stack overflow, I figured it out. I'm not sure really what I learned from this project because mostly what I did was copy code from tutorials online. I think in order for me to get into programming websites I would have to set specific goals or challenges to complete because I found writing the code slightly boring. I am a little inspired to look into how to actually get a domain and put a website up on the world wide web. 

     Another thing this project made me think about is how anyone can make a website for anything and people all over the world can view it. It's pretty crazy to think about, and I always wonder how new websites get popular with so many other websites out there. The only way besides word of mouth for a website to get big must be advertising. Also does google check every single website or are there some websites that no matter what you type in will never be there even in the later pages. It seems crazy that google would be able to access every website and find all the possibilities for the person searching.

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

DerangedDerek's First Ever Blog

DerangedDerek's First Ever Blog


     What I want out of my new class, TINST 207 Living and Working in a Virtual World is to 
engage in discussion about new topics I haven't learned anything about yet. Like in our second class when I learned about Elon Musk's tweet and the ramifications from that tweet. I don't tend to keep up with news at all anymore and I'm not sure why so I am excited to have a class that discusses relevant and current things. As a Millennial  with basically no direction at all I really hope that by exposing myself to new subjects I will find a passion that motivates me instead of just doing random things all the time. 

     I have always wanted to start a blog and it has always remained one of those things I tell people I want to do but I never really do it. I'm not sure what holds me back from doing things I want to do, there isn't a valid excuse I can ever come up with. Anyways I am hoping that being forced to write a blog for points in the class will inspire to to blog for real and maybe if all goes well I will blog past the class about whatever subject I or thing I end up on. 

     Finally, the real thing I hope to get out of this class is obviously a good grade and some credits. Maybe some better design skills too, I can't think of a way to format this blog to look somewhat decent.