Learning Journal

I have just returned from the Elizabeth Holmes documentary and agree with some of what was discussed in class. It was an interesting movie. The friend I went with had watched Nathan's Youtube content with her family during Covid, so she let me know about his comedic approach. After the movie, she told me about how one of his skits was to say he had gone to Harvard and help people with their businesses. However, he had gone to Harvard College not University and was giving them terrible ideas for the purpose of comedy. I think that intentional misdirection explained why he was fitting for this documentary. I am just going to kind of blurt out my perception of different things as my friend and I were talking about it for the last half hour. I do not think Nathan fell in love with Liz, but I do think he grew protective of her. Billy seemed really manipulative. I do not believe that he did not know who she was when he met her, especially considering he was in a similar field to her and ...

I liked how the presentations were connected this week. It was interesting to see how The Greatest Showman portrayed P. T. Barnum within the lens of the American Dream and almost as a hero for all the people that were in his show. The movie did demonstrate how he twisted reality around the people's backgrounds and conditions to generate more curiosity, but it left out how a lot of those explanations played to racist stereotypes. I enjoyed the activity where we guessed how he advertised the different circus entertainers. It was interesting to see how some were easy to guess and how he strayed from his pattern with others like the really tall woman. About a week ago, I saw this ad for a company named Synthesia that allow you to make training videos but with deepfakes. I found it intriguing, because we had talked about the growing ease of making deepfakes earlier in the semester. I looked up the company and watched a short video about them from a few years ago, and it was weird. You c...