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Reading and Writing Electronic Text

class four and five
march 7th

Here is the GitHub link for the nutrition facts generator.

I struggled with relationships with food for a long time in undergraduate and even still a bit at this moment. There was a period when I had to actively look at what and how others are eating to elect my food and pace myself because what seemed so natural to others regarding eating was not simply not registering in my mind. I was able to calculate the calories of a plate-full of food in seconds at glance. I stared at the nutrition facts of packages for hours in guilts and remorse. And the worst part is that I am a really foodie person by nature - I love to cook and learn new recipes, try new flavors and experience novel food, and greatly enjoy eating in general. Therefore, my troubled food relationship took a major part of joy out of my life.

Making this generator, I was able to do the design and calculation without additional research and reference because the layout and "suggested" values were sealed into my brain (I still searched to varified and no correction was needed). It is because of how the piece originated from such intimate personal experience, instead of treating the final result as a piece of work, I hope to emphasize the creation process for this piece. As a result, I used print() instead of a saved value or tracery for this creation. The generated nutrition fact table is directly printed out on the output window and supposedly left no marks after the next run like how I hope I could view a nutrition fact table when I was troubled by my relationship with food.

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class two & three
feb 14th

Here is the link for the assignment GitHub page.

I hope to dig into the idea of data structure and manipulation in this poem. The original input text is a simple line of text - "This is a python poem". By manipulating its order of appending and releasing, the final poem presents a deterministic result of a triadic/stepped line poem. In thinking of stacks and queues for data structure, the FIFO and LIFO order or the two data structures made this poem. For future development, I hope to manipulate the order of the text even further. It took me a lot of time trying to get the poem tidily organized for the first trial. The effort also grants me a stronger understanding of the code, and therefore, I will be able to do more modifications in the future.

This is what the final poem looks like:

poem
python poem
a python poem
is a python poem
This is a python poem
This is a python poem
is a python poem
a python poem
python poem
poem
 

class one

class one
jan 24th

For the first class assignment, we were tasked to read the essay - "Start with Poetry" - by Hartman, Charles. I never knew how 李白‘s 长干行 has such popular western adaptation (not surprised though). Unlike Hartman, I particularly enjoy Bynner's translation. I understand Hartman's idea that: readers fillings the gaps in poems make the texts richer. Hartman's preference in Ezra Pound’s translation came from how Pound left enough space for the reader to interpret and "fill the gaps". Being able to read the original poem, I personally was unsatisfied by the blank spaces because they lead to some misinterpretation. I might be entitled to my opinion since the prioritization in the poem translation is completely valid and sound.

Here are my horrid notes in this reading:
 

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The second reading is a post - "Bots should punch up" - made by Richard, Leonard. Richard asked questions about bots' ethics in social medias. Richard believes that artists are kept accountable by society and the rule itself when they do contents that might be considered a violation of "Terms of rule". The artists could be banned/canceled when the contents are "punching down", otherwise they would be supported by the public "ideally speaking" if they get banned/canceled (the author did not account for the cases where media overlords take over the democracy). Regardless, that kind of punitive system is not necessarily effective to bots. Therefore, it is especially crucial that bots creators can take on the responsibility to keep the bots in tacked when created and always "punching up".

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​Poem generator - I have decided to put all my coding assignments for this class into one Github repository. For assignment 1, I messed around with the dadaist poem generator and love letter generator. The explanation can also be found in the repository README.md.

I made some changes to the Dadaist poem generator and love letter generator. For the Dadaist poem generator, I changed the original text to a recent curatorial release I wrote and did some string cleaning to exclude the symbols in the text. The original instruction by Tristian Tzara did not clarify the cases in symbols in the text. With the original poem generators, the symbols are assumed as words and mixed in the sentences.

For the love letter generator, I manipulated the code into a cover letter generator. It is more limiting and has less variation than the love letter generator that was provided because the formats of a love letter could be more loose and creative than a cover letter. However, the manipulation has a similar concept by making a generator for something that ought to be genuine and expression of the truth. The cover letter generator is communicating the tiresome in applying to positions at multifarious institutes/companies when the original cover letters are supposed to be frank and passionate.

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