Task 1

I think that Deborah Lacks, Henrietta's daughter would fit very good in a narrating role in the film. Deborah is the kind of character you can relate to and get familiar with, she is a normal person with an empty space in her life that she strives to fill and this makes for a good narrating character. When they make the film, I don't think it would be appropriate using one of the other characters as narrator because the story and the setting revolves around the feelings and impressions Deborah goes through.

 

Looking at something other than the fact that she is an easily recognizable character, the story will improve on a technical level when ''looking through'' the eyes of Deborah. The feelings will likely be more real, the dialogue more interactive and one will get a more delicate impression of the story itself.

 

In the end Deborah is the one the story revolves around, she is the main protagonist and it is her mother the story originates from, why shouldn't she be the narrator?

 

Task 2

In the extract from the Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi uses several techniques to hold on to the reader, one of these techniques is called time limits.

 

This part of the Ship Breaker is action packed and we get to see what happens first hand, one of the reasons that this is such a good part of the book is the time limit that Paolo makes. When Nailer tries to save Tool, Nita intercepts him telling him that there is no time for heroics, this opens for a dilemma (conflict) whether he should run, or try to save Tool knowing that he might be caught.

 

What makes this particular situation so tense is the fact that Nailer only has a couple of seconds to make his decision, ergo, time limits create tension.

 

This takes us to the second major technique Paolo uses, Conflicts.

 

As I wrote in the section about time limits, conflicts occur when the protagonist are faced with a dilemma, in this extract the first conflict we see is when Nailer is faced with the choice of running away or trying to save Tool, this makes for entertaining and immersed action. I think Bacigalupi use all of the techniques very professional and it suits his writing style, they do also lift the overall impression I got from the text.

 

 

Task 3D – Magazine Article

 

Money, a product of our humanity.

If you read the text about Steve Jobs, his career and his life in the focus magazine, he quotes several times ''Don't settle''. Steve thought that it was important to love your job, and to find something you can work with until the day you die. The fact that people grow bored by working with things they do not enjoy is a good argument for finding a job that you like and not only searching for a well paid job.

 

Money is something we are all familiar with, something we use almost everyday, but is money really essential to us? Do we really need a way to count how much we and other people own? What has happened that have made money such a huge part of our culture? Money is really a thing to discuss as it is a subject that almost never gets any attention in terms of how important it is for our society.

 

Think of a world without money, it is as it was hundred of years ago, no checks, no 50 dollar bills and no pennies to be found on the street.

 

Hundred of years ago the world depended entirely on trading and farming, would this solution work today?

 

Of course not, there would not have been taxes, we could not have paid carpenters, painters, taxi drivers and so on. Today's world would not work without money or some similar value exchange system, that is just how it is.

 

Schools tells the students to pursue whatever dream they may have and forget about parents saying things like ''Of course he will be a lawyer, he is after all the only one that can take care of us when we grow old'', this is one of the smartest things the schools can learn kids in school, pursue your own dream, do not care about money or fame, do what you want. Most people think that money is a way to get fame and power, while this may be right, there is other ways to find happiness and prosperity other than being co-founder of Apple.

 

Today's obsession for money comes from the human demand for social acceptance, this demand is something that the human race has struggled with since the dawn of life, people have been killed, mass murdered, violated etc. because of money.

 

This manhunt for cash still goes on, and it will continue to do so until we eventually succumb to our own greed.

 

Take Henrietta Lacks for an example, her cells were amazing, they could grow with all things, live forever and they even divided infinite in space! Do you know what else was special with Henrietta Lacks' cells? You could make money from them, this is a good example of how money and fame controls the world, now scientists research Lacks' cells to be famous for their discovery and of course to earn money.

 

Money have also always been a way to promote certain groups or people to the masses, take the American dollar bill for an example, on one side you see the face of George Washington, The United States of Americas first president, but on the other side of the bill you can see a strange pyramid with a eye looking thing attached to it.

 

This is the symbol of the freemason group, it is a closed religious/ethnic cult that is said to perform many different, weird rituals with newcomers to the group.

 

George Washington was a freemason, so was Ben Franklin and many of the remaining American founders, and this symbol out of all symbols made it to the dollar bill we see today, this shows both how much power these people had and how much power they knew the dollar had.

 

Money, maybe especially the dollar, is, and will always be powerful, both in practical ways and symbolic ways, and this is maybe something that makes it so essential to our world.

 

Yes, if you ask me then I will say that money is essential to us, it is a thing that we need in our society for it to function properly. Even though money may be full of mysteries in terms of where the idea came from, what the symbols mean, I still think it is good that we have found a way to earn and spend without having to trade away our finest eggs or our fattest pig.