Posts

About Me: A Deeper Introduction

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 Hi again! I wanted to use this post to give readers a deeper introduction to some of my hobbies. First up, Magic: the Gathering: These pictures show a few of my cards. The deckbox, sleeves, and card next to them are my main deck, a commander deck with Rakdos, Lord of Riots as the commander. The deck is themed around the Cult of Rakdos and has a beatdown aggro strategy, using black and red as the colors. My commander is signed by Matt McDougal, lead vocalist of the beatdown band Boundaries, one of my favorite metal bands. The graded card is the only one I (currently) own, that being a ripple foil Azlask, the Welling Scourge from the collectors edition 5-color Eldrazi deck from the set Modern Horizons 3, a deck that is currently worth almost $500. Next, I'll share some of the highlights of my record collection: These pictures depict two of my favorite records in my collection: Burying Brightness by the beatdown band Boundaries, and Seneca by the Appalachian country-folk artist Charl...
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When No Birds Sang: A Day in History (plus Album Review)

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  (Author's note: This article was written on December 2nd, 2024, but the "day in history" being written about is December 1st, I was a day late to write about it but its close enough) One year ago, on December 1st, 2023, an unconventional collaborative musical project was released to the world. When No Birds Sang, a collaborative album between the deathgrind band Full of Hell and the shoegaze band Nothing, is a perfect blend of the two genres that came together to create it, combining the raw aggression of deathgrind with the calm ambience of shoegaze. For those who may not be as well educated in the many genres of music and the many subgenres within each, deathgrind is a subgenre of metal that is predominantly a fusion of death metal and grindcore, and shoegaze is a subgenre of rock that is predominantly a fusion of indie rock and psychedelic rock. Deathgrind is known for its raw distorted guitars, harsh screamed vocals, and fast pace, while shoegaze is known for its he...
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Personal Website Setup Advice

 When setting up a personal website, there are a few different things one must consider, including presentation and appearance of the site, how easy the site is to navigate, content, digital voice, personality, and interaction. In this post I’ll be providing a walkthrough on how to do these things. Say, for example, you want to make a website where you would offer copywriting and editing services to authors. For something like this, there are two main target audiences: authors and prospective readers. In order to make sure your audience stays on your site, it should be easy on the eyes. As the World’s Worst Website has shown, too many distracting colors, both in the text and in the site itself, looks ugly and can drive the audience away. The next step is making sure your site is easy to navigate. Also demonstrated by the World’s Worst Website, dead or broken links make navigation very difficult, and you should always make sure each link can lead back to the home page. Dif...
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Analyzing Brand Interaction: Dr. Squatch

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 The soap brand Dr. Squatch does a very good job of keeping up interaction with customers and consumers, especially on their Instagram page. They tend to respond to comments within the first few hours of each post being made, and when they do, they respond short, energetic, and playful responses. These responses tend to be engaging, with the most common sorts of responses being (half-joking) encouragement on campaigning for new scents, questions to gain feedback on their existing products, and keeping up the inside joke about eating the soap. These types of interactions help portray the brand as easygoing and shows that they care about their consumers. Interacting with followers is important because, while you likely won’t lose followers by not interacting, you can both gain more followers and build a more devoted following if you do interact with them. The article “How to Respond to Instagram Comments” says that responding “shows your followers that you actually care about...
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About Me

Hello! My name is Paul Piorkowski and I am a 21-year-old student at Albertus Magnus College, class of 2026. I’m majoring in Game and Computer Arts, am part of the honors program, and have made dean’s list in three out of the four semesters I’ve completed so far. NSFAQ(Not-So-Frequently Asked Questions): - What made you decide to start this blog? It was a requirement for my Writing for Interactive Media class. - Do you plan to keep this blog going after your class ends? Nope. - What are your hobbies? I’m an active Magic: the Gathering player who also enjoys Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer 40,000, and Call of Cthulhu. I also enjoy music (specifically metal and Americana), and play guitar, banjo, and do vocals. Additionally, I have a passion for 19th century American history and express that through coin collecting.  -What is your future career plan? After college I hope to work as a game designer for Wizards of the Coast.
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Revising a Pre-Internet Opinion Piece for Social Media

 (Original opinion piece: The American Century by Henry R. Luce, for Life Magazine, published in February 1941) We as Americans aren’t satisfied with the current state and future of this country. Despite being in the middle of a world war, and despite having the conflict take place in their country, the British are surprisingly at peace. Compared to other countries, we’re generally better off, but in these times we all are enduring the same things, and yet we’ve been handling it worse. We’ve been lying to ourselves and it has affected our politics, our journalism. While we may not have any soldiers fighting on the frontlines, we are involved in this conflict. We know that the easiest solution is to stay back and just let this war play out, but we know that we want to end Hitler’s reign of terror, and so even though we don’t have troops on the ground, we are part of this war. We got into this war because we want to defend the principles of democracy, not our home. If we ful...
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Favorite Fonts

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  It's hard to really settle on a favorite font, but if I had to choose it would probably be Bleeding Cowboys. This font was created on June 28th, 2007, by Guillaume Seguin of the company Segments Design/Last Soundtrack. It's described as a "tattoo font" because it was originally created as a font reference for tattoo inspiration. The reason I like this font is because of its western-style design, as well as its incorporation of distressed and damaged look which makes it look old and more intense. Additionally, there are extra details, like smears on some letters and some capital letters having swooping details, the former of which adds to the aging effect and the latter of which makes it look fancier. I'm not sure exactly what implications the font has had for writers and writing, but I do know that, thanks to its western styling and distressed effect, this font looks good for use by Americana (country/folk/bluegrass/Indigenous music plus fusion genres) musicians...
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