Response 2, Week 8

David's Free Piece week 8

Funny, I whenever someone says "technology," I usually picture some guy alone in his house with all the lights off watching cat videos and laughing to himself. But what I'm watching is entirely different. Four friends sitting around a table, laughing about new stories about Taylor creeping out college girls that sound a lot like old stories about Taylor and playing games on their phones. Not just any game, Draw Something. A game that isn't about winning or losing in the sense that one person walks away a chin raised and another saying "I'll be back next time," but more like I think the Greek's intended when they established their Olympics. "Competition" meaning "seeking together." Two partners trying to keep each other finding the right answers for as long as they can, one picture at a time. It's crazy, you take out your phone - with it's large touch screen - and caress colors and lines out of the white nothing of cyberspace. After a couple of strokes, you're done. You have eagles, football, or Tina Fey. Then I imagine it changes shape into something like invisible lasers and bounces off a satellite in space to a friend's phone across the country, in a college town 2-and-a-half hours away, or right across the table. When your friend gets it, and they see the creation of yours spark to life, produced stroke by stroke until they finally offer a guess. They can either guess right or wrong. Right keeping the streak going, wrong means you have to start over from "Turn 1." But either way, technology is keeping friends in each other's lives with a "thousand words" a guess.

My Response:

There are some grammar mistakes that interrupt the text and complicate meaning but not in the way that adds to the stories layers in any significant. That out of the way reading this presented some very fresh language. When the text describes the difference between a zero sum game and this cooperative drawing games provides the specificity and visceral explanations that you look for in writing. Also the text’s understanding of technology illuminates a new age: “some guy alone in house with all the lights off watching cat videos.” Things do get muddled with the laser discussion, but that was a mechanics and execution error like I mentioned earlier. For future revisions I would like to see some more dialogue and clean up the sentences, break up the scene.