JOUR 3100 Final Essay

"Interesting" is a word far too passed around to do my stint in Reporting and Writing II any justice. "Peculiar" would be a better word. The fact that I was also taking Editing II, a class which is supposed to come after Reporting II, was a bit of a conundrum as I was essentially taking two classes for the exact same thing, only in one I was required to generate content on a weekly basis and in the other I only had to do so every three. Needless to say, I put a bit more effort into Editing II.

This isn't to say that I wrote off Reporting II as something below me. I enjoy writing, it's what I do. Every assignment was given just as much thought and attention as any of my other journalistic undertakings this semester. It was all a very simple process really. Recognize an audience, formulate an idea for a story that would interest them, contact whoever needed to be contacted, interview, compile the data, and edit it into a flowing piece of journalistic art. Bing-bang-boom.

Some weeks I questioned why I even came to class. I was either already done with everything I needed to do or knew exactly what I was going to do for my next story. Class seemed to just fill space and time that could have been spent doing something more important. But I've got more honor than that. For one thing, Chris Godsey, the busy, busy man, spends hours of his valuable time to educate us on reporting and writing (although some might say that educate is a relative term when it comes to journalism). For another, I'm paying for the privilege of him to do so. Anyone can get everything I've learned book-wise on journalism for free on the internet, we can call up journalists and talk to them about their careers for free, we can write articles and blogs for free, but we cannot get professionally dictated assignments aimed at assessing our skills and aimed at improving those skills into something useful in the career-world. After four years, I've grown tired of passing people in the hallway who talk about how much they skip classes because they really don't care. This world is lost on false rogues and mental bandits, people who think that they are more devious than they really are.

I had fun this semester. Writing stories. Not giving lessons. Lessons felt like busy work. Lessons felt like time-filling in a class where the majority of the work was done outside of class. And then I was in a group with Mary. The week we presented she came up to me and asked, "Is twenty-five minutes too long for my topic?" She asked this before finding out that the rest of us had around eight minutes of material combined. It really put me in a sort of power struggle as I was the unofficial leader of the group. I'd arranged our meetings outside of class, got ideas on the topic from everyone, and I had something different than enthusiasm. What was it? A sort of assertiveness that the members of the group, save for Mary, kind of submitted to. In the end, I got her to cut down on her topic a bit, but I don't think she was happy about it.

Chris was an awesome teacher. Maybe its that I thought of him more as a mentor than a teacher. He's still in grad-school for crying out loud. And I'm 22 for another thing. It's hard to hold onto the student-teacher mentality when the age gap me and an increasing number of professors in becoming recognizably small. I've got brothers that are his age. People with lives and careers who may not have the most experience but who can iterate that experience so much more clearly because they can remember it so much more clearly than say an elderly professor would. And maybe its the fact that this isn't just another class-lecture-book-study-test-repeat class either. I joined journalism because I got sick of that formula. There's no creativity there and I wasn't very good at it anyway.

I'm pleased with my work this semester. I got to meet a lot of interesting people and reporting on things that not only interest me but the Duluth community as well. Via LakeVoice, I know that my stories were fairly well received, the Left 4 Duluth story and Tiona Marco stories especially.

Going forward, things are a bit unsure. I've had a number of interviews so far where I was told that my writing is very good, but I have no experience. Or at least, I have no marketable experience. Regardless of how good my writing is, businesses want an experienced person to employ. This makes my life a bit of a peculiarity as I am no longer in school to get college-based internships and no job will take me without experience under my belt. It seems like nobody tells you how to get in the door until its closing time. This isn't to say that I've given up. Applications for fall internships at many publications are coming up soon, ones that require degrees, so I'm still hopeful. In the mean time, I'll start a blog. I'll write every day. Because I write, it's what I do.

Whatever happened to Tiona Marco?

Five years ago, a local artist began to generate significant buzz around town for her work. Tiona Marco captured the attention of the community, artists and coloring enthusiasts alike as she created lifelike scenes and portraits using nothing but crayons and paper. But recently, it appears that she has all but disappeared.

She closed her studio in the DeWitt-Seitz Marketplace. Her blog has been wiped clean. Even the Etsy account from which she once sold her works of crayon art is empty. For someone who seemed so well publicized and known around Duluth, it begs the question: Whatever happened to Tiona Marco?

I was quite a fan of Tiona’s work during the peak of her popularity, talking to her on occasion back when her studio was open. We talked about art and being an artist amidst the thick smell of wax shavings and wood. Tiona would describe the long hours it took to make a single crayon “painting” while I asked about her different techniques. She had mentioned that times were tough, money wasn’t coming in because of the recession. But she also didn’t seem like the person to give up her life’s passion so easily. Going off of an old email address she’d given me, I decided to reach out and try to contact her.

To my surprise, she answered in a few days. From there I was able to contact her by phone to ask about her supposed disappearance. And firstly, she wanted me to make it clear that Tiona Marco was only her artist name. Her real name is Kristina Nelson, and she hasn’t really left.

“I closed my studio back in November of 2011,” Nelson told me. “I was at a crossroads about what to do with my art. I received an opportunity out in Massachusetts so I went out there for a while. When I was out there my health just deteriorated.”

She described to me how her muscles got really weak and she felt tired all of the time. Nelson was seen by a number of doctors, but none of them knew what was really wrong with her.

“I came back to Duluth in August of 2012 and I saw more doctors for about the span of a year,” she said. “It turned out that I had lupus.”

Systemic lupus erythematosus is an autoimmune disease wherein the immune system, responsible for fighting infection and disease, becomes hyperactive and begins to attack healthy tissue and muscles in the body. Essentially meaning, your body starts to fight its own structure as if it were a disease. It is often hard to detect as its symptoms are similar to those of other diseases. Lupus is difficult to live with as it comes with chronic pain and flare ups of inflammation.

“You wake up every day and you don’t know how your body is going to function for the day,” she told me when describing living with the ailment. “I get tired easily so I have to be careful about stress.”

When asked about her art, Nelson told me that she does a little here and there.

“It’s mostly sketching or watercolors, easy stuff I can just pick up and put down.” Nelson said. “Crayon art is a very laborious process and with lupus, I’m not able to do it anymore. It would take a radical shift in my health before I would be able to go back to the way things were.”

From my own observations of her working, it’s understandable that she gave up crayon art due to lupus. Pieces of art take days or even weeks to complete due to the hours of shading and marking with wax. Hundreds of layers could go into one surface shade. One needs to be completely aware of the amount of wax already on the page and what needs to be added in order to achieve the desired look. This is something not reasonably feasible for Kristina.

Most of her work as Tiona Marco was sold off in a final sale before she closed her studio. Yet she kept a few select pieces for herself and donated the rest to charitable organizations around Duluth.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever get back into art professionally,” she said, lamenting the obstacle to her passion, “but I’m still an artist. At the end of the day, an artist has a creative energy; it can go into crayons or painting. As long as it’s creative, I’ll find something.”

Nelson described the cold weather of Duluth as wreaking havoc on her health. She expressed an interest in staying because it’s the place she considers her home, but she said that she will possibly be moving to a warmer climate. With any hope, Kristina will recover and Tiona won’t be gone from our community for good.

Left 4 Duluth: a Northshore tour through the zombie apocalypse

For anyone out there who has ever envisioned fighting hordes of zombies throughout UMD’s campus or on the Aerial Lift Bridge, you now can.
This post-apocalyptic fantasy has been brought to life through a custom campaign for the video game Left 4 Dead 2 titled: Left 4 Duluth.

For the past four years, the project, headed by UMD graduates David Marcaccini and Jozef Conaway, has progressed from simple tinkering through level-editing software to a set of fully realized and recognizable locations in the Duluth area.

Marcaccini and Conaway, both musicians and gaming enthusiasts, first realized their vision of undead mayhem after hosting Kurtfest, a local music festival, during the summer of 2010.

“It came about as Dave and I were living in Duluth after graduating from college at UMD,” said Conaway when asked where the original idea came to them. “We had both been messing around with Left 4 Dead’s developer, Valve’s, tools and crafting our own levels in other games by that company. After hosting Kurtfest we realized that we could have a lot of fun with a large-scale project that could further showcase the inspired work that Duluth’s artists have to offer.”

“To be specific,” said Marcaccini, “we were sitting around the very table that is in the first floor of the end house of Act I: UMD.”

Drawing from contacts they’d made through music groups they’d met, Marcaccini and Conaway assembled a team of fellow artists and designers to work on the project.
Members include Cody Paulson, their web designer, Laramie “Rage” Carlson, a photographer who helped them scout out locations and design 3D models, Jeremiah Larson, who also helped transition the photos into virtual space, Jess Triska, a render and texture artist, Billy Wagness, one of the writers for the Left 4 Duluth specific dialogue, and Troy Ness, who helped debug the mod.

Through years of dedicated work, the Left 4 Duluth team designed and built levels for their project, which resembled iconic portions of Duluth.

“I preferred to sketch out the entire level first,” said Conway on the level design process, “whereas Dave would make a set piece and build around that. We would both give each other design feedback to get the levels to feel less like a recreation of a real place and more like you are playing Left 4 Dead 2. It just came down to what we thought would be most interesting to design and for people to experience, buildings and locales that could be called landmarks: UMD, Lakewalk, Fitger’s, the Skywalk, and Canal Park. And of course, they had to be places we liked—for instance, I really love the Skywalk System in Duluth. It is so interesting and winding and complex, kind of like the Fitger’s Brewery.”

“Being the engineer that I am, I wanted to bring things to life,” said Marcaccini. “Naturally the first thing I thought to make was a working version of the Aerial Lift Bridge. In the process of making the Canal Park map the two main locations were the bridge finale and the DeWitt Seitz building which is a building who’s architecture I’ve always admired. Since Joe’s Skywalk map ended at the DECC, I included the DECC into Canal Park as a natural continuation. For my UMD map I wanted to capture some of the memorable places around the campus that I’d spend the previous three-and-a-half years as an undergrad.”

On the subject of art, locations in Left 4 Duluth like the Tweed Museum and the Skywalk System are stocked full of art, photographs, and music. The art was provided by both fans of the project and artists in Duluth’s art community through an art submission feature on the project’s website. The music featured in the campaign all comes from local bands, most of whom were connected to Marcaccini and Conaway through their own musical careers. Some of the bands include: The Farsights, Portrait of a Drowned Man, Trampled by Turtles, and You Can’t Hug Your Children with Nuclear Arms.

“I would love to take credit.” Said Conway on whose idea it was to include the music. “And I do. But truly, using the project as an arts and music showcase was our master plan from day one.”
“Don’t listen to Joe,” retorted Marcaccini, “it was all me. I thought of everything. In all seriousness though, when we first thought of making Left 4 Duluth, we were weeks away from putting on Kurtfest 2010, which featured many local bands as well as the legendary host band p-gnewmatikz. Being hot off the heels of another successful K-fest, it was only natural to include all of our friends’ music in the project.”

Even Duluth’s own mayor was included in the game. Don Ness recorded dialogue for Left 4 Duluth, giving emergency addresses, calling in airstrikes on Fitger’s, and even piloting a helicopter over Canal Park. The idea to include him came from Marcaccini, who said that the mayor was a great sport about the whole project and had a lot of fun recording his bits.

The project hasn’t always progressed smoothly though. The design process was fraught with bugs resulting from the programming with Valve’s Source Engine to power the game’s graphics, physics, and general world rules.

“Bug fixing is a friggin’ gauntlet to get through,” said Conaway.

“Yes. Definitely. Debugging and dealing with limitations of Valve’s Source Engine has been a challenge,” remarked Marcaccini. “Since we didn’t write the engine ourselves we often had to learn though experimentation how to get things to work properly, this can be a long and tedious process.”

“Seeing it all come together is by far the most satisfying thing I’ve done to date,” said Conaway toward the end of the interview. “I love the design process, but it is great to have a finished project that everyone has worked so hard on and can be proud of.”

“With Left 4 Duluth, I think I accomplished everything I wanted to artistically with Source Engine mapping,” said Marcaccini. “In the next project we will have much more control over the workings of the game since we’ll be writing all the code ourselves.”

“We’ve got big plans for our next project,” said Conaway. “but I can’t tell you much more than that it will be on our own proprietary game engine, and that we are very excited about it.”

Left 4 Duluth released its full version on April 4, 2014.

Halo Night keeps old friends connected

About once a year, a certain home hosts an event which draws in friends from all around the Duluth area to play a game. When they play, they go by colorful pseudonyms like “JihadJoe”, “The Big L”, “Reaper”, and “Slutbear” to name a few. With four TVs, four consoles, and sixteen open controllers, the name of the game is four little letters that resonate with gamers and non-gamers alike: Halo.

Released back in 2001 for the original Xbox, Halo put the player in control of a cybernetically-enhanced space marine who battled different species of alien and symbiotic life forms in order to escape from an artificial world in the shape of a ring called Halo. But the biggest draw of the game was not its single-player campaign but the multiplayer experience. Not only could four players play against each other on the same system, but four Xbox systems could be linked together for sixteen-player mayhem. It was a way to play that is held as an annual tradition in the house of Joel Youngbloom, a web developer for the UMD office of External Affairs. But that wasn’t where the event started.

“The year was 2005 at UMD. Xbox was king and so was Halo.” Said James LaFave, an area pharmacist and one of the founding members of the event, “The beginnings started as LAN parties at the dorms and whomever had a controller or knew someone who did.”

            These floor-wide Halo parties were just the spark of an idea for James who brought it with him when he came to UMD to go to pharmacy school and moved into Torrance Hall with tech-junkie, Steven Gorghuber.

“We've played in a few different locations.” Said Youngbloom when asked about the history of the event’s location, “When I started we played in Steve's apartment in Torrence Hall. When James moved across the hall to another apartment, they somehow found a way to snake a network cable between the two apartments. A couple of times we even played in the garages behind Torrence hall. Steve had gotten up in the attic space of the garage and ran network cables between two of the stalls. It was pretty cold out and not that comfortable. After that we have played at my house. I own 7 original Xboxs and 14 controllers. Most of my Xboxs are modded.”

“In order to have a successful night, we would ideally have at least 4 veteran players. Then we try to get as many others as are willing,” said Gorghuber, “The most you can play with is 16 and we've gotten close a few times. There was a time when we played every Friday for months in a row. Now it happens much less frequently.”

The Halo franchise has spawn multiple sequels and has been online since Halo 2, yet these die-hard fans find the experience of getting together to play the original to be so much more rewarding.

            “So much of the fun of playing the way we do is that we're all there at the same house.” said Youngbloom, “Each team has two TVs in the same room. You can easily see what your team members see which helps with communication and teamwork. Switching teams means you actually get up and move to another room. I also enjoy the fact that we're keeping this over ten-year-old game alive on antiquated game consoles. It's something unique that not many people can do anymore.”

            Yet Lafave had more specific reasons to love the game.

            “The Pistol.  Love it or hate it, it was the factor that kept games competitive because of the three-shot-kills a skilled player could pull off with it.” He said. “Also, the Blood Gulch level to play capture-the-flag. Every successor to the pistol or to capture-the-flag or the original Halo engine we just didn't think were improvements or made it more fun.  Also, the frag grenades were very powerful. This made it a more even playing field.  A noob always had a chance throwing one of the two frag grenades at a wounded opponent to hope to finish him off.”

            With this year’s Halo Night already past, the three friends still plan on keeping the spirit of the game alive.

“We have all played with each other so long that we know how each other play and what pisses us off.” Said Youngbloom, “We know that Dave will always go for the rocket launcher and cloak. Ben will sit in the back of a motionless warthog firing off the turret. So I play for the jokes and have fun times with friends that I probably wouldn't otherwise get to see. It's a lot of work to organize, schedule, and set up all of the TVs, controllers, and Xboxs. But it's worth it.”

“I will always remember it positively as a great way we wasted the nights away before we all got married.” Said LaFave, “It was a symbol of our independence. We'd play for hours and hours; sometimes until 4 or 5 in the morning. Slowly, we all moved for jobs or got married or just got old and couldn't sustain late into the night anymore.”

Reporting II Week 7 Work Report

As a part of the new story theme, EVENT, I've made contact with a group of UMD alumni who've been playing the video game Halo together once a year since their graduation as a means of keeping in touch and being able to share in their "glory days" of hooking up four Xbox consoles and getting as many as 16 people together on a single game.
I've made contact with the three founding members and some of their friends who have joined them over the years, and I'll be conducting interviews with them over the course of this next week.

On the topic of the PERSON article, I've decided to shift my focus from what I'd initially been thinking to something I find is much more interesting.
Back in 2009, a local artist was being praised for her works of art using only crayons. One would think that with all the publicity she was getting that she'd have done well for herself. Tiona Marco had a shop in  DeWitt-Sites, a blog, and an etsy account. But I've noticed that over the course of the years, she's all but disappeared from the web. Nothing remains on her blog or her etsy and her studio has been closed for a long time now. I want to find her and find out what happened.
     This might seem an impossible task, but I spent a good amount of time talking to her when she had her studio open and I know things about her that aren't common knowledge (like her real name).

Animal Allies Shelters Itself from the Winter

            The 2014 winter in Duluth has been an especially rough one. With over 60 subzero days, it has definitely been a challenging year for businesses in the northland. No more so is this apparent than at the Animal Allies animal shelter out on Airport Road. As an organization that sees most of its support coming from volunteers and the community, it has seen its share of difficulties from the snow and extreme cold.

“We joke here saying: how can things be so hard, it’s just puppies and kittens.” Said John Gustafson, the Director of Development and Communications at Animal Allies. “But our job is not just to provide a place for these animals but to educate and motivate the community to support us and adopt.” The center relies primarily on support from the community and volunteers for their funding and workers. Currently, Animal Allies has help from enough volunteers to staff 17 full-time employees.

Shy shelter resident, Betelgeuse, spends most of his time sleeping in his room. While cats don’t need to get outside, they do interact with volunteers on a daily basis and other cats if they are social.

“Our snow removal is provided to us, free-of-charge, by Billmans Home Center.” Said Gustafson. The home center plows their road and parking lots, allowing them and their patrons access on the worst of the snowy days. A snow blower was also donated to the shelter last year, providing Animal Allies with an easier way to clear their walks and dog trails behind the building.

“January was particularly tough as most of our student volunteers left over the break.” Said Amy Miller, the Marketing and Communications Director for Animal Allies. “Other volunteers couldn’t make it in because of the snow or cold. We’re primarily here for the animals.” She recalled how on the particularly brutal winter days, staff would drop what they were doing in order to walk and feed the animals.

“On the upside, we’ve got a relatively new facility,” said Gustafson. “Some parts of the building are definitely colder than others. For the smaller dogs, we make them sweaters. We have the staff wear sweaters too and tell them to suck it up.”

A volunteer prepares to take a shelter dog out for a walk in the snow. Dogs are only walked for as long as they feel comfortable, sometimes even less on the subzero days. They do, however, get enrichment and behavioral training with volunteers and medical treatment to prepare them for adoption.

 The building, built in 2009, is energy efficient and retains its heat better than older buildings. A tint was recently put on the building’s windows, intended to limit the heat that got into the building during the summer, but also has worked to stop heat loss during the winter.

Winter is generally a slower period for Animal Allies anyway. Fewer strays are brought in and less people make the trip out to adopt.

“Our rates of intake and adoption haven’t really changed this winter either, but we have seen an increase in frostbitten animals being brought in.” said Gustafson.

He shared a story about a poor kitty who was found trying to cross the Blatnik Bridge from Superior with frostbitten feet. After finding out where he was picked up, the shelter lovingly named him Blatnik. He had bandages on a front paw and a back legs for weeks. Luckily, Blatnik found a home after the Animal Allies shared his story on their website.

Animal Allies lays under a layer of snow and ice, but that can’t shut them down. Located out on Airport Road in Duluth, the shelter operates off of volunteer support and donations like free plowing and a snowblower.

“Animal Allies has a ‘zero-euthanasia’ policy.” Said Miller, “Medical treatment is expensive, that is one of our biggest challenges. But we think of it as a worth-while investment to make these pets presentable to the community.” Animal Allies has maintained that policy since 2010 and through continued support, hopes to keep it going strong despite the frigid temperatures.