Skip to main content

Politics: Attention Spans, Politics and Populism – Why Does It Work?

Shakespeare’s first performed plays occurred in the late 16th century, the colour television was first demonstrated in 1928, the first YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim) was released approximately 23 years ago, and the modern social media titan, TikTok, was created approximately 10 years ago.  The final marked an important, dangerous and disquieting epoch in entertainment. Though the claim that human attention span has dropped under that of a goldfish remains an incontrovertibly proven fallacy, in the past 20 years alone, the average amount of time a person can spend focused on a task digitally has plummeted from two and a half minutes to just 47 seconds. 47 seconds before we check the time, fiddle with our phones and lose our train of thought. Addiction to short-form content as such has greatly contributed to this collapse.  To put it plainly, attention is a digital drug. It harnesses mass amounts of political, economic and social sway. For...
Post a Comment

Year 7 Budding Artistry: Madhav Makwani

 


The reason that I enjoy comics is because comics and graphic novels are funny, entertaining, suspenseful, full of action and they come in all sorts of genres.
I started to like comics when one day I was at the airport and saw a book on the shelves for sale. With a peculiar look on my face, I looked at it and wondered "This looks like cartoon but on a book with funny looking characters and plenty of action - I shall go and check it out". I then walked to the shelve and saw the cover. It was magnificent! It was called "Dog Man". All the drawings on the inside were drawn in a cartoon-like fashion and so funny that I couldn't take my eyes off them!
A few months later, I had read many of the Dog Man comics over and over. I then went to the store later on and saw another comic book with characters on the front cover drawn in a skilled and yet funny way. I then thought: "What is this superb piece of artwork with such magnificently drawn characters!". I yet again walked up to the shelve took the book and opened the book. The comic was called 'Bunny vs Monkey'. I stood there reading and admiring the book in all its glory thinking: "What legendary person could make this extraordinary piece of work! ", the guy's name is Jamie Smart. New books came pout every six months and I just could not wait until the next issue.
I was inspired by the comic company "The Phoenix" since they made some of the best comics like 'Bunny vs Monkey' by Jamie Smart, 'Mega Robo Bros' by Neill Cameron, 'Looshkin' by Jamie Smart, 'The Donut Squad' by Neill Cameron and many more. My main influence, however, was Jamie Smart. He is so talented and knows how to illustrate so the reader struggles to put down his comics.

I have been making comics since I was 7 years old and started out by making comics on paper basing them on video games like: Super Mario: Odyssey, Kirby and Pokémon. As I continued that, I would then bring them to school and my classmates would ask for them and I would give them out. Two years later, I thought to myself: "I could start a business on these comics, why don't I try selling them for 50p-£1!". People enjoyed the comics and decided to purchase them, some bought 1, some bought 2 and some bought 3- they sold like hotcakes! In the end I made £14 which I thought was pretty good. One year later,
I did the same thing at the same event but with a new variety and comics that I made on my iPad. I sold the comics for again 50p-£1 and in the end I made £21 - What a success!




























Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Complexity for complexity’s sake? The Ars subtilior repertory

MR B. F. EASTLEY, MATHEMATICS TEACHER This essay provides a brief overview of a fascinating period of musical development during the latter half of the fourteenth century, during which some of the most sophisticated music ever written was composed and performed. The ‘Ars subtilior’ or ‘subtler art’ (a 20th century musicologist’s title) is a repertory of several hundred songs by French, Italian, Flemish, and Spanish musicians. This music is quite distinct from other contemporary compositions due to its dazzling complexity in all aspects – particularly rhythmic – but also harmonic, textual, and sometimes visual.
Post a Comment
Read more

The Chomsky Hierarchy and Automata in Computer Science

  This article placed third in the inaugural Fuller Research Prize competition 2021 HAMISH STARLING Even the least technical among us are familiar with programming languages in a loose sense: purposefully invented syntaxes constructed from keywords, symbols and identifiers used to tell a computer what to do. These confections power our modern world. From the operating system on which you are reading this article to the aeroplane which just passed overhead, most things are now controlled by code. So to fully comprehend the scope, characteristics and limitations of computers, it was realised in the 1950s that understanding the computational structures behind language was critical. In this piece I’ll discuss the Chomsky Hierarchy, a mathematical classification of languages into 4 types - regular, context-free, context-sensitive and recursively enumerable - explaining what each means. We’ll also discuss why this concept is relevant in the real world and how it links to “Automata”. Lang...
Post a Comment
Read more

Clair de Lune: The history of the world’s most overplayed piano piece

CHAMOD SAMARASINGHE Classical music is an unusual art. It is dominated by a few pieces which are far more popular than everything else which has been composed within the past few centuries. When compared to Beethoven’s fifth symphony, Bach’s toccata in d minor, Handel’s messiah and fur Elise (and a few others), everything else is a comparative blur to most. Scholars could argue that this is due to their memorable nature and overall simplicity (for the listener, not the composer), but there is one notable exception to this rule: Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy. While the opening melody is certainly ear-catching and repetitive, everything else seems deliberately ambiguous, perfectly melancholy, and at times downright unusual. 
Post a Comment
Read more