Author: Christopher Waugh

Sticky post

Youtube Advertisements (SATIRICAL WRITING)

April 26, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Youtube is a company that was started by three PayPal employees in February 2005. The company became so popular that it was bought by Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion. The video-sharing website now operates as one of Google’s subsidiaries. Google itself nets $115,150 of revenue in one minute and converts $23,509 of that into profit (around 20.4% profit). I have done some calculations myself and found out that in a YEAR Google nets $61,683,552,000 Billion. Therefore in total, Google profits approximately $12,336,710,400 (20%) annually.

So Google, a billion-dollar worth company that recently has a new parent company called Alphabet, has made it mandatory for someone using one of their services (Youtube) to constantly flood them with advertisements from their sponsors. The issue is not the fact that there’s advertisements on the website, but that between almost every video you click there is a 30 second ad. There can be 15 second ads which you cannot skip and 30 and 1 minute ads which you usually can skip. Sometimes the ads may not bother you, because honestly a 30 second ad that requires you to watch 3 seconds of it before being able to skip it is not THAT bad. However, I will tell you about some example scenarios that can happen in everyday life that will make you hate advertisements.

You’re on your way to work and you decide to take the train. You manage to connect to the stations platform WI-FI and scuffle to wait for the train. You get onto Youtube and search for your favourite song for the train journey as being in a stuffed train carriage with sweaty people and random chatter can inevitably lead to a headache and cause a bad start to the day. The train is coming soon and the video is loading when all of a sudden…BOOM you’re hit with a 15 second ad that you cannot skip. These 15 seconds seem to be the longest 15 seconds of your life and by the time you manage to get on the train, it has left the platform and you no longer have WI-FI. So you’re stuck with a music video that won’t load and have to listen to the noisy chatter of every other commuter. Bad start to the day.

The second situation would be probably irritate more people than just yourself. This situation is set in the middle of a party where there’s a lot of people enjoying themselves to the party music. The person controlling the music is using Youtube to play the songs and the current track is about to finish. As it finishes, the web page refreshes to go onto the next song when all of a sudden…BOOM a 30 second ads plays and the whole room goes quiet. People become confused, get annoyed and blame the person controlling the music. It also kills the party mood.

The problem with the advertisements is not the message that they are displaying, but the amount of times that they are displaying it too. With the amount of gross profit that Google make, they still let companies advertise their products in exchange for more income. If you were to look at it in the way that a business owner would do, then you may agree that the better income the better. However, the advertisements can bring a negative impact on the website itself as it becomes less desirable. It has gotten to the point were if a video is more than 6 minutes long it might have 2 advertisements. One of which, will interrupt the video halfway through to promote itself!

In conclusion, I think that that Youtube has to fix the the vexatious nuisance that is ‘Youtube Advertisements’. Does it help as a form of income for Google? Yes. Do people enjoy them? No. My solution is to reduce the amount of advertisements there are on the website, as it is obvious that although that Google makes $12 billion, they still need the income. So it would be ‘almost” a win-win situation. I say “almost” as they might lose a bit of income but if they truly care about improving their services as (as they have a spare $12 billion) it should not be a problem.

Then and Now.

January 28, 2016 / / 1 Comment / Sticky

The Earth stood as still as you did. The gentle autumn breeze touched hit your face as the open fields around you brought memories. To your surprise, there were still trees standing and animals still wandering. The thought of there still being life in a place where so much death occurred was amazing. The fields were green but the land was now curved and ridged from the events that had occurred previously. You stared at the scene around you, time had lost it’s meaning and you did not care.

Everything was quiet, you could not see anyone, not even the farmers that were meant to be tending to their crops. There were now less animals around as time had passed vigorously. You made sure to carefully walk across the field, avoiding any small holes on the ground. The feeling of being there was overwhelming and although you were not a strong believer in a faith previously, it was true what they say. War changes people.

You began to reminisce about the war and how lucky you were to be able to continue your life although you almost let death take you. Right there, where you stood, you began to feel nauseous and blinked hard as if to ‘shake yourself’ from whatever had succumbed to. Suddenly, you felt the ground vibrate and heard the sound of marching boots. You noticed the smell of gunpowder and burning wood. The smell was strong and was coming from all directions. As you opened your eyes slowly you saw that within less than 200 metres from where you stood there were soldiers. Your heart sank in disbelief. The most feared, strongest army was in front of you. Once again. The sky was grey now and upon looking up you saw conflict’s taking place between different aircraft. The land was just dirt, the tree’s were either injected with an array of bullets or missing parts due to explosives ricocheting. The soldiers were now closer and much more visible. They wore a grey uniform, steel helmet and carried MP 40’s or Karabiner 98k’s. The notorious Wehrmacht, Hitler’s unified army, were firing towards my position. The bullets flew by and the sounds of a bullet passing your ear faster than an aircraft made you almost deaf. The dirt field was now rising as explosions were happening and the earth was being opened up. You turned around to run away and see people you knew. Your squadron and reinforcing squadrons. They were calling you over in a frenzy, you immediately run and feel heavier than before. You look down and saw that you were no longer wearing your leather jacket, but instead you were equipped with the suit of a British infantry soldier. The brown uniform was almost grey as there was the light from the sun was blocked by clouds of powder.  Your legs were churning hard and fast through the uneven ground and even stepped on a body from time to time. This did not bother you as death was so common during the war. Bullets kept flying past you and it was if they were purposely missing the target. The ground was soft and you stumbled a little bit, dirt was thrown onto your face but you knew that if you did not get up the next bullet fired towards would certainly hit you.

Your legs pushed even more and began to shake as they were becoming tired. What looked like a short distance between you and the allied soldiers calling you was in fact an unbelievably long run. However you were now much closer to them but suddenly the ground beneath you disappears, you feel the sensation that you’re falling. You become blinded by a bright flash of light and everything to you becomes silent. You feel a sharp pain in your leg but you’re still falling. You suddenly hit the ground landing in a crater caused by an explosion. You see someone run over to you calling your name. He manages to duck under the curtain of bullets that are being exchanged and falls almost on top of you. The crater that you had landed in had water in in, the French soil was soft and did not make a good running surface. As you lay there, almost frozen in time, you see a large object pass by at the speed of a bullet. Suddenly the ground shakes and the soil crumbles. Tank fire. The Panzer (German for amour, referred to a tank) battalions were firing at the allied positions. Your eyes were almost bloodshot red as the exposure to bright, sudden lights and heat was hurting your eyes. “C’mon! We have to go, we’ve been ordered to fall back rather than surrender!” The soldier speaking is wearing the same uniform as you but is dirtier and baggier. As he reaches down to lift your frozen body, you lock eyes and you see the face of a young man with hopes and dreams but instead he is fighting a war and is trying to save your life. A loud explosion rang that stood out of all other shots. A sniper had fired his weapon. Before you even had time to realise what had happened, the soldiers face went pale and his eyes rolled back as a small explosion-like pool of blood flew from the back of his head. His steel helmet had not been enough protection and let his body collapse to his final resting ground, a war-torn field in France. The sound of running men surrounded you and the gun fire had almost stopped completely. You saw a figure peek into your mud-shelter and had hope once again. Yo awaited another soldier to help and the events that had just taken place made you realise that your leg was bleeding profoundly but still had all limbs intact. The soldier began shouting but it was hard to understand what he was saying. His helmet glistened in the sun that was no longer blocked and you saw an object facing you. You slowly put energy into your arms to attempt to get up but your bloodshot eyes fixed and focused on what you realised was not a hand of aid but instead the end of a gun barrel. “Eine Hier! Eine Hier!” The shouts kept going on. The Germans had you surrounded and you knew that your end was near. Expecting for your life to end right there, you closed your eyes and prayed to God to keep your family saved. You kept your eyes closed but felt yourself moving with foreign hands on your back. The German’s pulled you out and threw you onto the bullet-sore ground and your face hit a bullet casing. You had been captured by Hitler’s army as they advanced through France. Your eyes remained closed as you laid there with your hands on your head.

Warmth began to hit your arms and you heard birds chirping. The entire atmosphere had changed. You slowly raised your head to see tree’s and a bright yellow Serin jumping around. The smell of gunpowder and corpses had gone. Where a bullet case once was, was a bright white daffodil. You slowly turned around and saw no one around you. The field which was once the host to several battles was now calm and peaceful. You were wearing your leather jacket once again and sat up in astonishment. You were glad that whatever happened, is over. History repeats itself and you mentally prayed that this dark part of history did not. You were always right. War changes everything.

Bare Vexed

October 7, 2014 / / 2 Comments / Sticky

As a male of this generation’s youth, I vigorously disagree with Isabelle Kerr’s article on how young people talk. Slang is a sub-language to the standard English language, that is more prolific and divergent. It expands the way in which we communicate with each other in many forms rather than using sanitized English.

In order to criticize a language you must understand the language itself. There is evidence that she has little understanding when she says “I’m so gonna unlike that selfie of her twerking.” The first thing that’s wrong with that sentence is that a ‘selfie’ is defined as a self portrait photograph, typically taken from a hand-held digital camera or mobile phone. Twerking, as she says, means dancing to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance. Isabelle Kerr acknowledges what twerking is, but tries to merge a dance with a single image picture, which does not make sense. A selfie of you twerking would simply be an image of you squatting, therefore not twerking but rather posing for a picture.

Isabelle Kerr states “instead of creating words to improve our ability to communicate and express ourselves…”. There are many ‘slang words’ that people have created and have become the lingo for a generation were communication has changed. Not every slang word is sexual or provocative in any way, some such as ‘brb’ which is an acronym for ‘be right back’ has no negative effect on the speaker or person being spoken to, its simply a shortened version of ‘be right back’.

The reason why people are so differentiated in our modern day society is because of the idea that when someone does or says something new, its not taken in a positive way but as an abnormal thing, as if the person that said it was an unknown entity of some kind. Isabelle Kerr, for example, is not agreeing to the way the younger generations are communicating simply because she does not understand it herself, however if you were to ask another person of the youth a question containing slang or speak to them in a certain way, they would understand because they know the slang and its a normal thing.

How she contradicted herself:

Throughout Isabelle Kerr’s “rant” she is going against the use of modern slang, however there is evidence that she does not understand slang itself, as she herself uses idioms. “If they are even to remotely reflect that this is how the young generation speaks, then the dictionary needs a reality check.” The part “…the dictionary needs a reality check” is using the idiom “reality check” to talk about the way she thinks that things are out of order.

Isabelle Kerr also ends the “rant with the line “Shakespeare will be turning in his grave.” This is another piece of evidence that she does not even know the history about her topic, however she still criticizes. Shakespeare is known for having created 1700 words that he used in his own writing, many of which people did not understand at the time. He created words that are commonly used in everyday life such as ‘Addiction’ (Othello, Act 2, Scene 2) and ‘swagger’ (Henry V, Act 2, Scene 4/A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 3, Scene 1) . Therefore, for Isabelle Kerr to be stating “Shakespeare will be turning in his grave” would be contradicting her argument as Shakespeare himself created words that other’s didn’t understand.

 

This is Your Online Domain

May 26, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Hello and welcome to your personal online journal.

Edutronic has been created to enhance and enrich your learning at the London Nautical School. Its purpose is to provide you with an audience for your work (or work-in-progress) and you have the choice (by altering the ‘visibility’ of your posts) of whether your work on here is visible to the world, or only to your teacher.

Anything you post here in the public domain represents you and thus it’s important that you take care with that decision, but don’t be afraid to publish your work – as the feedback you may get from people at home, your peers and people from around the internet is only likely to enhance it.

Remember you can always access your class blog and all manner of resources through the Edutronic main website – and by all means check out the sites of your peers to see what they’re getting up to as well.

If you have any questions for your teacher, an excellent way to get an answer is to create a new private post on this journal. Your teachers are am notified of any new posts and will reply swiftly to any queries.

Make the most of, and enjoy this new freedom in your English learning!

May 25, 2014

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” ― Ernest Hemingway