Difference between revisions of "Talk:Ronald Liu"

Revision as of 15:57, 30 November 2011

It is evident that you have done a good amount of research for this assignment. However, the overall flow can be improved. I felt that you had a lot of good ideas, but they were scattered here and there.

In the “Fantasy Avatar” section you made a few statements about color but you did not mention the reason behind making such choices. As a reader, I was expecting you to share your thought process behind choosing a colorful avatar to depict your online identity or the goal behind choosing blue as a vibrant color for your skin. As an addition, you could possibly say that a colorful skin can show a lot of traits, maybe attractiveness or cheerfulness and thus tell the reader about your reasons behind the choices.

On a different note, I loved your idea of choosing a jellyfish for your avatar. You chose a character that is close to your heart and is a reminder of your childhood. However, I could not completely grasp the idea of how your avatar reflected the image of a jellyfish. You could try to explicitly mention how each physical feature represents a specific trait of a jellyfish. You could use some of the following questions. How does the avatar resemble a jellyfish? (maybe the color plays a part) Why is it a female? Why does it have short hair versus long hair? Also, you mention that you’ve used colorful pants for the avatar. It may be a good idea to include a picture of the full body so that the reader can see what you are talking about. You could also use it to extend your argument about other choices related to the lower body.

There were some grammatical issues. For instance, there were a few run on sentences and some words were used repeatedly (e.g. "daily", "etc"). Plus, the citation style needs to be changed.

Overall, it was a good read, and I’m confident that you can make necessary editions to revise the article. I hope my suggestions are helpful.

- C Douglas

Ronald,

Your reflection caught my eye right away as one of the few where you chose the opposite gender for your fantasy avatar. And while your self-portrait avatar creation process seems to reflect the same sense of dissatisfaction that many others have brought up, I'm glad to read that you had fun creating your fantasy avatar. I'm really impressed that you chose to take the step of making the concept of a jellyfish into a humanoid form, very unique. Generally for fantasy avatars, people default to creating either idealized versions of themselves, fictional characters, or just generally very literal beings, but that you chose to communicate the idea of a sea creature with the tools provided by the Evolver medium was a very fresh take on what avatar modeling can be used for, and--to me--says a lot about what an avatar means in general.

Returning to the less satisfactory experience you had with rendering your self-portrait avatar, I was able to find some common threads that I can sympathize with from my own process, especially that of the face shape and the proportions of the body. However, in your discussion of exactly how these components were frustrating, it would benefit you to be more clear. For example, I was confused by this explanation: "Since I had some trouble creating a face structure that resembled mine, I feel like I made it look like how my face to look".

Overall, I feel that your write-up was very thorough and that you were able to put a lot of yourself into the avatar creation process in spite of limitations of the software. I also see that you've responded to reader feedback and included a full-body self-portrait, which is great.