Vampires b Gay as Hell: an Analysis

Jasper

Humanity has been romanticizing gore and violence for years, some in more symbolic meanings of the word romanticization, and some in literal ways, with examples of cannibalism being used as a metaphor for love. There seems to be this idea floating about that vampires have only started being framed as attractive, mysterious, and romantic since the creation of the ‘Twilight’ series in 2008, but it can easily be traced back centuries earlier to the very start of the vampire genre as a whole. It all goes back to Dracula, written by Bram Stoker. His horror novel permanently altered the way pop culture viewed vampires, brought them so the mainstream, and shaped what they exist as today. There is prominent speculation about Stoker having been a closeted homosexual, and it is believed that he had a secret relationship with Oscar Wilde. This most likely influenced he events of Dracula, reflecting the fear and the isolation Bram Stoker went through while in the closet.

Dracula is swimming with queer themes, most prominent in the character of John Harker. When most vampires are portrayed biting the neck of an innocent woman, Dracula does quite the opposite, with Johnathan taking the role of the damsel in distress. This has spilled over into other iconic vampire films like The Lost Boys (directed by a gay man, Joel Schumacher) and Interview With The Vampire.

In order to dig deeper into the reason as to why so many vampire films end up queercoded, we need to go further than the simple idea of ‘vampires are gay because they bite both women and men’. Queercoding in horror films, whether intentional or not, can be traced back to the Hays Code. This code had an impact on the horror genre as a whole, and collectively made them gayer. The Hays Code was a set of guidelines and rules set in order to make the film industry less ‘degenerate’. It was decency guide, and prohibited subjects like homosexuality, interracial couples, crime, etc. from being portrayed in film unless they were explicitly shown to the audience to not yeild any positive outcomes. This would lead to queer filmmakers queercoding villainous characters, and heavily influenced the horror genre. It’s definitely a contributing reason as to why so many of the golden age Disney villains were queercoded (made to be more effeminate, makeup wearing, drag-esque), and it has also influenced horror films and made them considerably gayer.

Although it was not required by law to get the Hays Code stamp of approval, it often would not be profitable to make a film without it. It would also be much more difficult to advertise if the stamp was not there, and many theatres would refuse to show a film without Hays Code approval. The horror genre was a good outlet through which to create queer characters, since it could easily villainize them or kill them off at the end as a way to sidestep the code. The Hays Code was the main originator of the ‘bury your gays’ trope.

Horror became queer as a result of the demonization of gay people and the Hays Code prohibiting ‘instances of sex perversion’, which included queerness. It’s the reason why so many villainous characters are depicted as effeminate or having of queer traits. Horror films and the history of horror can often tell us what the people of that era were scared of during the time they were made, and the era of the Hays Code clearly shows us that the public was scared of queerness. This has carried over into the more recent vampire/horror films I mentioned earlier.

Some examples of horror films that ended up queercoded during this era include: Dracula’s Daughter (another vampire movie), The Haunting, Frankenstein’s Monster, and Bride of Frankenstein.

Horror films post-Hays-Code that carried on this trend of queercoding horror characters include: Reanimator, Hellraiser, Saw, Jennifer’s Body, Nightmare on Elm Street 2, and yet again, Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys. That movie is so gay I could make a whole second essay on just that.

But, this is an essay on vampires, not the horror genre as a whole. Obviously, the vampire genre is a subgenre of horror, but we need some more specific examples. Why exactly, are vampires specifically, so damn gay?

The answer, in short, is plausible deniability. From the start, vampires have been gay, because when you’re dealing with a vampire and you don’t state it explicitly it’s very easy to cover up the queer subtext in your films or stories. Of course that monster isn’t trying to kiss you, he wants to tear you apart! He views you as nothing more than cattle, or even a sandwich. There is nothing sexy about that scene where he’s murdering a guy before our very eyes…until there is something sexy about it. Until we come back to the idea of humanity romanticizing these metaphors of cannibalism, gore, and blood, consumption of a lover. Until we realize just how sensual and homoerotic the act of a bite, or even the act of turning someone into a vampire, can be. This handsome guy wants to share his youth with you eternally, but oh, no, Mr. Studio-Executive, of course it’s not gay! It’s merely parental, or it’s a brotherhood, or it’s a transaction. Nothing more.

Plausible deniability is what allowed vampires to become so queer. Even way back before the era of the Hays code, it was acknowledged that a vampire’s bite was too sensual or too erotic to show on screen. Didn’t matter if it was opposite or same sex. Now, if we take that idea, and understand that a vampire would obviously be biting both male and female victims, we can understand what makes vampires so inherently gay.

Thank you, and good night.

MPOL ‘25

Jasper

This year I started off with a few simple goals as a learner in three categories, things I wanted to improve upon. I’m going to try to keep this simplistic and focus less on filler, so this MPOL may be a bit different than the ones I’ve done before.

First, I’d like to talk about my vision, and how I think the progress toward it is going. 

Some examples of how I am working toward this vision include: applying to the artists for kids program (specifically meant for helping teens build their artistic portfolios), taking part in the ECU Teen Art Group for another year, and experimenting with more mediums like sculpture, watercolour, and charcoal.

Some examples of things I need to improve on to achieve this vision include: working harder on my job search, finding more oppurtunities for volunteering and work experience.

My mission this year focused on bringing my vision to life, and showcased a few specified ways that that could happen. I’m happy to say that many of these strategies and habits have been working well for me since the start of the year, e.g. pomodoro timers and communication with classmates.

I have found myself opening up more and more this year as my confidence grows, and I have started asking and answering more and more questions. My classroom participation has improved, and it’s something I’m pretty proud of. Pomodoro timers are an adhd managing strategy that I learned from my therapist, and I’ve found a brilliant app that works well for me. Building these habits, I have improved on my agency and self regulation, two success behaviours mentioned  in my VMV plan.

Now that we’ve talked about the more general parts of my VMV and how my school year has gone thus far, let’s get into the details.

Agency

I’ve struggled slightly with the “listening to critique” portion of this success behaviour, simply because recently I have been struggling with getting all my assignments in on time which leaves little room for revisions later on. I feel like before winter break happened, I had a really good rhythm going and my habits were doing very well, but the two week break sort of threw me off and now my habits are all out of whack. This is a big issue for me, where if I have a good habit going and it gets interrupted by for example a vacation or my schedule changes, I am almost entirely unable to return to that previous schedule without a ridiculous amount of effort. This makes it pretty challenging to keep up with homework, since having a productive streak can get interrupted by hundreds of little things that I can’t predict and throw me off my balance.

I have been asking more questions in class as previously mentioned, which is something I feel came naturally to me as I found myself in late 2024 and throughout 2025. I’ve really been building my confidence as a learner and as a person. An example of this newfound confidence can be seen in the coffeehouse choir performance I’ve signed up for in April, something the shows how I have evolved and come out of my shell recently. I’ve always had bad stage fright, but I’ve been less scared to do daring things and come out of my shell as of late.

Engagement

As I talked about before, my contributions to class discussion have become far more frequent. I’ve found myself chiming in with new ideas more and more, which is something I want to continue to push and build on throughout the rest of this year. My confidence and self worth have become a pretty huge chunk of the things I want to continue improving as I’ve navigated through 2025, and I’ve decided that my own confidence has become a pretty big theme of the year for me. I want to be proud of myself and what I create, and always push for better.

Self Reg.

The struggle with my self regulation for things like time management, distraction mitigation, ADHD paralysis, and other things that impact my ability to self regulate and keep myself on task has been one of my biggest setbacks for years, having stayed with me since elementary school. At times I find it very difficult and sometimes physically uncomfortable to force myself to do schoolwork, most of the time it takes hours for me to be able to work comfortably, and I forget what I was asked to do the second I switch to a different tab in my browser. Simply exiting out of craft can ruin a good session of work for me, because I might end up forgetting what I needed to do and compulsively clicking on instagram instead, which often sucks up more hours of my time. This is something I know I will need to work with my parents to get through, and their support is vital in this area. Even as I’m writing this paragraph I’m actively resisting the urge to pick up my Apple Pencil and get back to working on my latest drawing, and I’ve been sucked into it multiple times already. It’s very difficult to deal with and very hard to understand when you aren’t someone who deals with it.

The next steps in my learning journey definitely revolve closely around finding a reliable way to help maintain habits in a way that my brain can work with. We’re playing on it’s terms, not the other way around. My biggest issue is the way that one moment, I can have perfect schedule and all the stars will be aligned thanks to my hard work in building up these habits, and then it will all come crashing down because one day my usual schedule had a slight change. Before winter break, all my math homework was getting finished along with most of my PLP stuff, science stuff, and yearbook stuff. After winter break, I don’t think I’ve actually handed in a math assignment since, and it’s just because my rhythm was broken while my brain was still getting used to the whole concept of teams for math assignments after having used Showbie for years and years.

Saying simply “just go do the homework” isn’t good enough, because that’s not how it works. I need to find proper ways to allow myself to be able to work comfortably and complete assignments before deadlines. I think one of my big focuses for the rest of my grade 11 school year should be on finding this solution, because this problem has haunted me for years and will continue to stick around if nothing really changes.

TPOL the 3rd

Jasper

It’s that time of year again, every PLP students most stressful week: TPOLs.

This year has been my first step into OFFICIAL high school. We’re at double digits, and it’s time for a reflection on everything I did great on, and everything that could have gone better.

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The three topics I picked for my TPOL were agency – completing evidence, outside school preparation, and communication and collaboration with peers. I’m going to take an in depth look at each of these subjects individually from the start to end of the year, highlighting what I could have done better and what I did really well, how I improved in certain areas and how I fell off in others. I have compiled some real world as well as in class evidence to share on each topic, and try my best to explain why things happened the way they did or didn’t.

Starting with the beginning of the year, in the competency of my agency in completing evidence, it’s clear that I was quickly falling behind. Specifically in the New Year, New Me project from the very start of the year-I was not doing my best work. Plenty of assignments were missing, and overall handed in late or lacking revisions. I’d like to think this was just a result of not yet readjusting to the school schedule after 2 months of summer break.

My theory is backed up by the fact that you can see in Showbie, I started to pick up a bit on assignments later in projects like “Save Juno Beach” and “Peas in a Podcast”. Despite a lot of the work being late, it is better late then never. I also failed to revise some of my work, which did end up holding me back. A lot of my work didn’t get marked because of it getting handed in late, and even though recently I’ve been handing in late work less often I think the second look feature to remind teachers to check late work and revisions has really helped me. Most recent “late” work I have showing up in Showbie is only marked as late because I revised it or because we were asked to add something new to a Showbie spot post-due, which is something I’m proud of.

Near the start of the year, I also had a major problem with getting my blog posts done. This was a problem that had carried over from grade 9, and luckily recently I’ve actually had a lot of fun doing blog posts. To me now, my blog is a fun little way to express my learning, even if it’s required. I’ve actually posted a couple of fun little personal blogs about my art or random things I enjoy. I’ve found that it’s a nice way to practice writing, which is a hobby of mine. Before grade 10 I think I would’ve thought enjoying writing blog posts to be crazy, but I’ve really started to like it. (I also think I’ve accidentally made blog posts for projects that weren’t supposed to have them, so I guess that’s something for proof that the habit of making blogs is pretty much burned in my brain now). I also really love coming up with the silly creative little titles for each post, even when it’s sometimes a challenge. I like making them funny.

One of my more personal blogs to check out (:

Lately, I have been so much more consistent and committed to getting blogs done, which is very refreshing to me. I even revamped my blog this year, as you can see. I think it looks a lot better and more professional now. One of the reasons why I think I’ve been much more on top of these past couple projects (Chasing the Canadian Dream, Back to the Future) is because I’ve been using things a LOT more. It’s been like my saving grace in all of this, and really helped me to pick myself up and start getting all my work done. I mainly started utilizing it around the start of semester 2, and the improvements are obvious.

–

The second competency I picked was my outside school preparation. We had a project at the start of the year that relates to this (hint hint, I mentioned it earlier) called New Year, New Me. It’s safe to say there wasn’t really a new me, and I very quickly fell back into old habits in a project that was meant to be about gaining new ones. I was falling behind quickly, and my outside school lack of preparation was pretty bad. I’m not talking about minor stuff like charging my ipad, I managed to do that every day. I’m mainly referring to my scheduling habits and abilities, and cleaning my room. It was definitely affecting my learning.

At the start of the second semester, not much changes. My planning outside of school was a mess and needed serious work, and I was getting flooded with work from science, math, and humanities all at once. Later we had a PGP class added onto that as well, and that only added to my stress. I have this problem where after digging myself into a hole and falling behind in school, I avoid it and ignore it since my brain is so scared of the stress of confronting all that missing work. Thus, I end up in a vicious cycle of late and missing homework. Some ways I tried to combat this nearing the end of the year that connects back to the previous competency, is the scheduling I started to do using things. Through this I had a better idea of how I’d plan spending my time, and on top of that I started to make physical lists on paper. It’s helped me quite a bit with managing my time and setting regular deadlines for myself.

For this competency, I’d like to highlight our most recent PGP project Back to the Future. This project required the most outside school prep I think I’ve ever done for anything, with the main piece I made being the big poster I had displayed (my parents can vouch for me on this, they were in the room while I was toiling away…). This poster took a whole and a half, plus a couple days, colouring in with pencil crayon and outlining in sharpie and black pencil crayon (it was very tedious) to finish. Boy were my hands sore afterwords, but I was so proud of the finished product. I think this example alone is proof of how I have developed in this area.

My progress on the poster ^
My poster displayed in it’s full glory at the spring exhibition ^ (I got countless compliments on my work)
fun fact, there are 7 little Jasper’s on that poster.

For a final little conclusion in my second competency, I also deleted TikTok off my phone after finding it to be a massive time waster in my life. I think this is a huge step forward for me in beating the phone addiction that all of us deal with daily, and it’s most definitely contributed to be getting all my homework done for these latest couple projects.

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My third competency that I chose was communication and collaboration with peers. I’m particularly excited to talk about this one, since I’ve been able to actually apply my feedback skills in the real world and make actual money off of it (more on this later).

To start with the beginning of the year, I think I was doing well in the feedback department. I’ve always been pretty good at just letting the words spill from my mouth, saying whatever honest opinion comes to mind first, and following my gut with it. I caught on to the whole kind, helpful, and specific formula pretty quickly. I’d say it was early grade 9 when I really started to understand it and be capable of giving helpful feedback.

Now, here’s the real world example I was talking about. My mom runs a research and design company called Spatial, and they do a lot of studies and research for bigger companies like Meta (Facebook) or even just for the district. Recently, my mom has started to sign me up for some paid studies she knew about through her company. Believe me, I was shocked to find out that so many kids my age are incompetent at providing detailed and effective feedback.

A critique I made on the work Kadin R. Had done for his book in the project “Chasing The Canadian Dream” ^

I can’t really disclose any of the information from the studies since it’s all confidential, but my sibling took part in the first study along with me and apparently all of their answers were basically just “yeah this is cool”. After the study, I was told that the team loved my feedback and that I was getting invited back for another study. Oh, and I got paid $200 for it.

The second study was a group of kids in my age range. I’m guessing they were from ages 13-16. All throughout the study, I was the only one starting conversations throughout the study. There was one other kid who was talking and giving some decent feedback, but the two others there were totally quiet and only spoke when prompted, and when they did speak they either misunderstood the concepts or just said “yeah this is cool”.

This genuinely shocked me. The ability to give proper and effective feedback is vital in todays society, and somehow I’m feeling lucky to be able to do it. I also got paid another $200 from the second study.

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Now to end off this presentation, time to talk about my plans for September. I’m hoping to keep the habits I’ve developed from this year, and I think that shouldn’t be too hard without tiktok rotting my brain. Honestly, I think tiktok was the #1 thing holding me back. I deleted it late last month and haven’t had time to see the full effects of escaping the dopamine trap, so hopefully I’ll get to see more of that progression into grade 11 and 2025. My main goal is to not let myself slip back into my old grade 9 habits like I did beginning of grade 10, and hopefully we will start to see some serious improvement in my ability to complete evidence on time and do it well, all while being able to leave time for homework from other classes and my hobbies.

I’m excited for what oppurtunities PLP 11 will offer me 🙂 planning on sticking this program out until I graduate!

-🌈☀️🌤️☁️-

LETS GO OILERS

Posted in POL

Delving Into Identity

Jasper

This project was entirely opportunities meant for us to take advantage of, to show off our talents and abilities. I feel I definitely have some room to improve, and wish I had gone the full mile to further my growth as a learner in this project.

Essentially, this project was a way for us to build a resume, reflect on our past experiences that could be applicable to the work world, and eventually pitch ourselves to a board of local respected businessmen and women (my mom being one of them, slight brag) in a sort of Dragons Den. We built up an array of information about ourselves to present, and in return we would receive useful feedback from people who know what they are talking about.

I got a lot of work done for this project, and in the end the thing that held me back was my actual preparation for the Dragons Den event. I was so unprepared despite how prepared I felt.

There are a few major faults that I had in both my preparation for the presentation and the actual presenting of my pitch.

-Not taking the time to fully read through the Basecamp/craft and understand exactly what it would entail

I have no goddamn clue of why I didn’t do this. There was so much I could have changed if I just took the time to really wrap my head around it.

-not reading the Dragons feedback form before the presentation

I think this was mainly a result of the aforementioned lack of understanding on the project

-failing to print out my resume and not having a note card due to being out of class the day prior

My presentation was under time, lacking, and pretty empty. I provided little evidence to support my claims, and because of all these factors I recieved very little feedback just because there was so little for the dragons to even give feedback on. The feedback I got was to be more confident in my capabilities and that my procrastination needed to be actively worked on, which is still helpful, but if I had provided more for the Dragons to give feedback on I would have definitely learned more.

On a more positive note, I did take some pretty stellar notes from the guest speaker, and I think that little presentation from him is really what I learned the most from. I got a lot of cool info on what to put on my resume, how to act and dress during a job interview, and what type of questions an interviewer might ask. This information will all be very useful to me when I have an actual job interview, and I know it would have been helpful if I’d just used it for the Dragons Den, but it’s too late for me to change the past now. The best thing I can do about it is reflect on my experience and use that reflection to better prepare myself when I have an actual job interview scheduled.

Here’s the first resume I created, not really knowing how they were supposed to look. It’s not very straightforward and is formatted poorly, and it focuses more on personality rather than professionalism.

And this is my updated one post feedback. It’s much cleaner, and it has a lot more important information about me as a person and my capabilities professionally. I feel it shows quite an improvement.

as a final note to leave you with, here’s my skills assessment:

In conclusion, I need to focus less on my favourite TV shows and more on figuring out a way to get around my mental blockages.

How to Render a Digital Painting for Idiots (A cheap excuse for me to show off my latest drawings)

Jasper

I while ago, probably back in grade 8, I too was a baby digital artist who had no clue what the word “render” even meant. This blog post will be a short guide giving you, the viewer, a few tips on how to start rendering and levelling up your drawings.

Back when I was in my no line art phase, I had a bit of an epiphany. It all started with this OC sheet of one of my characters that I made a while back.

(I KNOW IT’S CRINGE GRADE 8 WAS A HARD TIME FOR EVERYBODY OKAY..)

This was the first time I ever rendered something, and I did it totally on accident. I didn’t even realize what I was doing. Obviously it still looks pretty rough, since it was my first time attempting to render something, but it looked so much better and had a real sense of form compared to what I had been doing previously. Here’s an example:

Now, what even is rendering? No one had really thought to make an explicit definition of what the hell it was, and it led to me discovering it WAYY later than I should have even though I’d seen people talking about it all over Tiktok. Rendering, in its purest form, is basically drawing over a sketch to create a much more polished looking drawing than you had before. When I render, I totally skip over the process of line art. I take my sketch, add in base colours, and then I go in and mess around until it looks right. You can choose to do Line art and render over that instead, but I think it’s pretty pointless.

There is a little more of a process than just that. I have a sort of “order of operations” for what I do first and what I save for last. I start by colour picking the character than I’m rendering’s skin tone and saturate it slightly, grabbing a slightly redder colour for a sort of blush. It’s supposed to be subtle, but if the character is actually blushing I usually make it stronger. After I go in on the face with some warm/cool colour variations, I switch to rendering the hair. Next is the clothing, and then I’m pretty much done. You can take the rendering process and make it your own, adding in your unique little steps to achieve whatever style you want.

Now, of course the rendering you do will be different depending on what kind of style you want to replicate. My art is mostly semi-realism with a slight cartoony affect to it, meaning if you want to learn how to render for a more anime art style this probably isn’t the place to do it.

Basic steps so far: Let’s cover them.

1. Create a sketch. It can be anything.
2. Colour it in with the most basic base colours possible. You can go in with details like the whites of the eyes if you want (if you drew a person), but you really don’t need to.
3. Start drawing over your original sketch on a separate layer. You can mess around with colour and saturation to make your piece really pop.
4. Draw over almost every pencil mark you can see. You can draw over lines with a Lineart pencil or any basic procreate brush (for your first time you shouldn’t worry too much about covering every little thing, it doesn’t matter too much. As you progress you should start to get more detailed on your own).
See the difference?
5. Now you have your fully rendered drawing, and you can add stuff like overlays. I use procreate so I wouldn’t really know how to add them or what you call them in other apps.

Hope you learned something. You’re welcome and thank you for reading.

 

Romeo, Juliet, a Gay Stoner Wizard, and the Ethics of AI Image Generation

Jasper

Yes, you read that title right. Before I get into explaining, we obviously need to start off with a brief explanation of what this project was. The final product was to be our very own 4 minute long adaptation of one of the scenes in Shakespeare’s original Romeo and Juliet, but before that we had to prepare. We spent multiple weeks watching 4 different adaptations of based on Romeo and Juliet and simultaneously reading through the original. We used the information gained from the play and the adaptations to make a theme book collecting all the varying themes and ideas introduced throughout the different acts and relating said themes to the adaptations and entirely unrelated bits of media too. Eventually we were paired up into groups of four, and from there we had scenes selected for us to remake and then perform for a camera.

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To start off, here’s my theme book:

I have some gripes with this project, just because acting isn’t really my thing. I’m the type of guy who likes to hide out in the background and stay under the radar, as my teachers are all most likely very aware of. I do commend this project for forcing me out of my comfort zone to try something new, but I assure you I will not be trying acting on my own time any time soon.

My groups adaptation was just as the title says. Juliet was a homeless girl being sold off to Paris so her parents could get their hands on a fat pay check, and Romeo was a closeted gay of the upper class. Friar Laurence, now Fatha Laurence, was a magical drug dealer having a secret affair with Romeo. Juliet meets the Fatha in the woods talking with Paris, and Juliet sits with them. Fatha Laurence gives her a mushroom and Paris leaves, giving them some time to talk alone. From there Juliet and Laurence talk about a plan to get Juliet out of Paris’s clutches and into Romeo’s, and Fatha gives her the poison just like in the original. He secretly is plotting to kill Juliet so he can get his Romeo to himself. In the end, we dropped the wizard detail (against my will), so now he’s just a regular homosexual drug dealer. Unfortunate, I know.

I played Romeo (in the flashback) and the plant that comes to life after they take the drugs. I imagine I felt the same way that the guy from Diary of a Wimpy Kid felt when he had to play the tree in the school play.

Now coming back to the actual analysis we did, I would like to bring in some other movies I watched during this project into my reflection on what I learned about themes and their importance. I happened to binge a TON of movies from the 1970s to the 2010s (and wasn’t originally doing it for this project), here’s the list:

-The Breakfast Club

-The Lost Boys

-Buffy the Vampire Slayer

-The Craft

-Brokeback Mountain

-The Rocky Horror Picture Show

-Interview With the Vampire

-Little Shop of Horrors (1986 version)

-Tremors

-Donnie Darko

-Scream (the original)

(Ignore how half of them are vampire themed, I like vampires okay)

These films really got me thinking. I watched all of them in the span of one weekend right in the middle of this project on a mere whim, and it was interesting. I’d like to highlight The Rocky Horror Picture show, as it was the movie that actually made me start questioning the themes in these movies. Half way through it I started to wonder, “this movie can’t possibly have a central theme, it makes zero sense, but it’s still such a good movie and a cornerstone in queer media!” …and then I thought, “wait. This movie does have a theme, even though the story takes you all over the place and doesn’t make any sense.” Part of what makes The Rocky Horror Picture Show hold up so well is literally the fact that it’s themes are so strong. The simple idea of embracing the odd and different. This movie really opened my eyes to how true it is that a movie, or any media for that matter, needs to have a strong and familiar theme to captivate any audience. It does not matter now inconsistent or nonsensical the story/plot is, as long as it has a captivating and consistent theme/number of themes throughout the movie.

Aside from that, I 100% recommend every movie mentioned on that list, ESPECIALLY The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I’m still listening to the soundtrack days after and am planning on forcing my friends to watch it.

Back to my groups video, I’m linking it for you to watch here (please don’t watch it, it’s embarrassing).

Another problem I have with this project is that they had us creating AI GENERATED IMAGES (I am NOT calling that crap art) to make our movie posters… as an artist I have a number of problems with this. It’s entirely unethical, as most AI image generation tools steal human artist’s work to program the AI, effectively throwing that art into a metaphorical blender to spit out some gross amalgamation of an image. Hands, limbs, lighting etc usually looks nonsensical and the AI ends up making errors that a human would never make, and it ends up looking like a cheap alternative to making the movie posters ourselves. I mean come on, just look at this:


Not only does it look bad, but it makes no sense. Every time I think of AI imaging being used for advertisements/posters it just reminds me of the Glasgow Willy Wonka Experience, and I’m sure we all know what that was like. Instead of stealing from real artists via AI we could have used real pictures from our video’s or drawings made by us. I guarantee it would look a thousand times better to just make the posters ourselves instead of cutting corners like this for a final product that looks terrible. I hope the PLP teachers read this blog and take this all into consideration, because oh my god I cannot stress enough how dumb the AI art looks. Even the “good” example that Mr. Harris showed when introducing the AI tool had pointless, ugly errors and lines in places that did not make any sense. I wish I had a picture of what it looked like because it was laughable how bad it looked.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

They Put Me In a Room With Rats

Jasper

Crazy? I was crazy once. Are you crazy? What does it take to be crazy anyways? What does being crazy even mean at all? These are the questions that we answered in our latest project, based off the 1997 apple crazy ones campaign. Our driving question for this project was “why does it take a crazy person to change the world?”. We went all the way to Seattle in order to answer it for our final Pecha Kuchas, and I think my group succeeded in this task.

Our theme for our presentation was “think different”, it was basically all about the Apple crazy ones. I specifically talked about Dale Chihuly for our presentation. I chose to talk about him because as an artist I am very inspired by his work, and seeing it in person was my favourite part of the Seattle trip. The actual Pecha Kucha night was a bit rocky; lots of groups presented their learning effectively, but there were some people who seemed to have forgotten their lines/didn’t know what to say. On top of this we overestimated how much time was needed per presentation, and there was definitely a lack of parents that showed up. There was plenty of empty seats. Despite the slight chaos, I still think it went quite well. We could have improved upon our presentations if we were given maybe a few extra days to practice our scripts and cement them in our brains I do think it would have gone much better.

Despite my complaints (I apologize for how many there are) there were definitely some things that I thought went well too. Plenty of groups did very well in presenting their topics. My personal favourite was Brooke and Logan’s presentation. Props to Logan for overcoming your fear of public speaking – you did great up there!

Something I think my group specifically could have done better was even participation of all group members. Chris was left doing 8 slides while I did 2, and I think this was a bit unfair on him. I think that the organization of our sideshow and sides was well done, with most if not all of them being comprehensive and matching the theme of the topic being spoken on.

I contributed to the group effort by adding the pictures and some of the drawings to the slides. I stayed up late working on them to improve our slideshow overall, and worked with my group to get their feedback on any work I did. I also supplied and took most of the photos used in our slideshow.

The field study helped me learn through the displays we saw that had loads of knowledge I wouldn’t have had access to without the study. For example, almost all the the things I knew about Dale Chihuly I would not have been able to learn about if I was not able to make my notes in the Dale Chihuly Gardens and Glass museum when the video presentation was playing about his life and methods. There was also text next to the art installations that contributed to my script, here’s a few of them:

Honestly the teachers say you’ll learn just as much without going on the trips, but it is definitely untrue. All these things I learned would not have been made possible without the Seattle field study.

Finally, after all that yapping about what I learned and what I didn’t…here are my highlights and lowlights of the Seattle field study.

Highlight: the Dale Chihuly Gardens and Glass Museum of course! This was definitely up there with the MoPOP as one of my favourite parts of this whole trip. Nothing went wrong throughout the whole visit (unlike with the MoPOP, but we’ll get there in a moment…), and all the art was absolutely stunning. My favourite part of this whole installation was definitely Dale Chihuly’s chandelier paintings, and next to that as my second favourite it’s definitely his ocean inspired glass sculpture. His art is a just so unique and beautiful, here are some pictures (although they could never do the real thing justice).

Highlight: the MoPOP. The Museum of Pop Culture was absolutely amazing to visit. Seeing the terminator prop in real life was wild, along with all the other things we saw there. I got to play some guitar in the musical exhibits, although I am kind of disappointed that I didn’t get to watch Kadin go absolutely crazy in the private jamming rooms on one of the drum sets. I still have a video of it though, so I can’t say missing that ruined my MoPOP experience. What DID ruin my MoPOP experience was dropping my phone in the toilet (don’t worry, I managed to get it clean and save it). Here are some photos of my favourite things I saw in the MoPOP:

Lowlight: One of my least favourite parts of the Seattle trip was getting across the border. Since Caden (british) didn’t have all the right paperwork, we had to wait an extra 20 minutes for him to sort it all out.

Lowlight: Madame Web.

Links to my group members blogs: Christian Lo, Jupiter noonan, Callum Rees

Who Are You Gonna Be: The Big Question

Jasper

Who are you gonna be? It’s a tough question to answer, especially when you’re only 15 with no real knowledge of what life is like in our capitalistic society. The crazy part about that is “who are you gonna be” is a question that I’ve been getting asked more and more often as I’ve grown, and I feel like it’s been creating this sense of urgency and panic amongst me and my peers whenever this question has been brought up. It’s making us grow up faster and pressured us to decide what we’re going to do for the entire rest of our lives, despite us being so young!

Despite the stress inducing nature of the question, it is still vital at this age to have some semblance of a purpose in your life. It is important to think about options for university and how you’re going to make your mark on the world.

For me, I have known from a very early age exactly what I wanted to pursue in my life, that thing being my art. Art has always held a special place in my heart. As a child I’d dream about having my paintings hung in prestigious galleries and writing incredible music that would win me Grammys. As I grew up, this passion only strengthened and pushed me forward in life. I bought my first “learn to draw” book when I was around 10, and I have been pushing myself to go out of my comfort zone, challenge myself, and create meaningful pieces of art that could impact people and help to express myself and my emotions in a way that words fail to. It has been comforting to always have an idea of where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. While my friends had identity crisis’s over what they were going to do when they got older, I was simply sketching away in a notebook or on my ipad.

I think having this to push me throughout my life has really helped me to have a better mindset when it comes to things like school, jobs, and getting important daily tasks done. My art has served as a tool for self preservation and holding my memories within it, while also staying as a motivator for self improvement and was vital for developing my growth mindset. Being able to witness my art improve over time has been very eye opening, and it is real physical evidence that shows me that as long as do something for long enough I can become very talented at it. I apply this mindset to everything I do now, especially for things like public speaking, playing guitar, and socializing with others.

My art, then vs now:
2022:
  2023-24:

My art and its improvement over time has also allowed me to be able to say “if anyone else can do it, I can.” I strongly believe in this idea that if anyone else on the planet can become good at something, I too (with enough practice) can become very skilled at that thing. I used this way of thinking when I was learning to rollerskate, a hobby my mom had shown me first. I am now better at rollerskating than my mom.

A Whole New World (prePOL)

Jasper

Intro

I have a few personal opinions on this presentation of learning that I am not going to be sharing out of respect for whoever decided this was a good idea. Let us face this whole new world of grade ten and get into this post!

This year we were told to make a “pre-POL”, something to talk about how we are going to be responsible and hard working learners in the coming year (even though that was half of last years tPOL). This is the first blog post for PGP. I’m going to be discussing what we have learned so far in PGP. This includes learning and concentration strategies, how to keep your mental and physical spaces declutterred, and much more.

Skills we were taught

We were introduced to a plethora of different strategies so we could see if they helped us at all, but honestly none of them were able to stick with me. Journaling and writing down things from my day helped for a bit but honestly it all just acted as more things I had to shove into my already overpacked schedule. Between getting a full nights sleep, having a social life, my own personal projects (art, guitar and writing), eating three meals a day, soccer and keeping up with school assignments there was really just no time to do any of that stuff. Every minute is pretty much spent doing something that I value above any of those tasks, plus I was unable to turn them into habits. They just sort of slid off my brain whenever I tried to get them into my schedule or make them into something I do regularly.

Along with that I also had problems with the daily reflection journal. It should have been something to help with my productivity, but you miss one day and suddenly you’re spiraling and falling behind in the writing. Especially since I was sick for most of the days when this was going on. I genuinely believe this journaling activity only set me back. It was an added stressor on top of my regular work. This could have been avoided if I had been paying more attention to Basecamp on my sick days to follow along with the roadmap and do the writing at home to prevent myself from falling behind. Overall I think I should have faced the daily reflections in a different way that would have suited me better.

On the other hand, something that helped was the learning we did for strategies to keep our physical, mental and digital spaces tidy. For me my digital space has always been very organized (yay for me) but I struggle with keeping my physical spaces clean, e.g. my bedroom. Through PGP I was able to set routines that now help me with keeping my space neat and declutterred. It really helped me with my focus and also works to effectively relieve some stress. When everything isn’t all over the place I feel calmer and have minimum distractions so that I can start my work and keep it up until I finish it. Along with this being introduced to the app Things and Craft by this project have SAVED MY LIFE. They are so helpful and straightforward to use and they have proven to be very beneficial to me in order to keep track of time and write things (no pun intended) down.

Some Work We Did

A couple of my daily notes

Before learning how to use things:

After:

The Driving Question: What Strategies Can I Use to Maintain Balance For My Learning and Wellbeing?

In the end I think I was able to learn some interesting methods to improve my Learning and wellbeing. I have found that list making (specifically with Things) is one of the best ways for me to keep on track with my learning. It also helps with my wellbeing by allowing me to get done with schoolwork faster and leaving me more free time to do things that make me happy.

Tpol grade 9

Jasper

This year, we did so many new things, one of highlight being the Alberta trip on which we learned so much about Canadian history. Before then I’d never been on a school trip that long, and the longest one I’d gone on had only been for 2 days (outdoor school). This is a summary and reflection on everything I have done and learned about this year, and also how I could have done better.

One of the projects I struggled with this year was the building a nation project. I felt it just wasn’t a topic I was that interested in, and for that reason it was a lot harder for me to focus on the things we were doing in class. I think a lot of the work I produced during this project was mediocre and I want to be able to put out high quality work in all the things I do, whether the idea of it is captivating to me or not. I think next year I should try to find interesting things in everything I do, that way it will be easier to focus on the topic we are learning about in class.

I think the most interesting thing I learned about this year was all the things I researched during the WW1 project that we did in humanities this year. I got to present some very (in my opinion) captivating work for the exhibition, and I did some research on human psychology and trauma during war. My least favourite/least interesting project from this year was the Frankenstuffies project. I thought the book was boring and I had a hard time staying on top of reading deadline because of this. I thought I would like it more because of the creation aspect, but overall I found this project unfulfilling.

An instance where my goals for my work changed as I worked on it was during the prep for the spring exhibition. When I was working on my art for the exhibition, I originally had a much different idea then what it ended up as, but the more I worked on the original sketch the more I disliked it, so I did a 180 with it and decided to use a completely different style for the art. These are the drawings I ended up with, I’m very proud of how they turned out.

here are the art pieces:

Something I struggled with this year in PLP was the blog posts. I had a hard time committing to them, more specifically when nearing the end of the year. Next year I want to put in an effort to stay on time with blog posts, and with that staying on top of assignments.

This year, not all of the work I did met my standards. A lot of it was rushed or incomplete, and I wish I had thought about putting more time into my work so that I could create and learn with much higher output quality.

During my mpol, I set some goals for myself for the rest of the year. The main one that I think I completed to it’s most potential is the one in which I talked about how I wanted to explore my own interests more. This goal was mostly about wanting to learn how to express emotion through art and also make my art look more pleasing, and I think I was able to accomplish this goal with evidence for it from the spring exhibition. The drawings I made were able to effectively and clearly tell a story about the progression of trauma throughout war, which is definitely something I wanted to accomplish with this goal.

Now let’s look back at my learning plan. My statement of learning intent was “I will improve my time management and work on task management. In order to do these things, I will aim to police myself when it comes to staying focused in class. I will strive to listen and learn, and be open to new concepts and ideas. When I don’t know or don’t understand something, I won’t be afraid to ask for help from my peers or a teacher.”

I think I really fell off on my statement of learning intent nearing the end of the year, and I’m not sure whether this was something that came out of burnout or just lack of motivation in the final stretch of the school year. It was most likely a mix of both, but I do know that once the middle of may hit I was feeling unfulfilled and bored when it came to school. I feel like I could’ve learned a lot more if I had just spent a bit more time thinking about my statement of learning intent whenever I was feeling less motivated.

Despite this, I think that overall I was able to commit to a lot of the goals behaviours I had listed in my learning plan, for example:

-I feel like I achieved my maker goal of being the most creative version of myself possible through some of the art I made this year in and outside of school

-I was able to set reminders for assignments and regularly checked basecamp like I said I would in the habits section of my learning plan

-I was able to implicate the system I talked about in my learning plan for after school and weekends

This year was filled with plenty of different successes and F.A.I.Ls, all of which I hope to be able to learn from in the future. To answer the driving question, I think I am ready to move on to the next grade level because I am looking forward to extending my learning capabilities and using the things I have learned this year to make higher quality, more captivating work that I can use to express topics, feelings and emotions.