An excellent summary of the trend of online shopping, though I wonder what the popularity of this new practice says about the people who are participating in it? What sort of people are willing to sacrifice the experience of "real" physical shopping for online convenience? As you state, there are also dangers involved with the process—does its popularity, then, indicate a certain recklessness on the part of the shopper? Part of writing well about large cultural changes like this one is the ability to not only say what something is, but also what it means… Check.
Your second journal entry shows excellent knowledge of Ebert's method and the common strategies he uses in addressing his subjects: how he presents his subjects equivocally and takes account of his readers' reactions (in the comments). You also point out an excellent oversight in his argument: the fact that blogging doesn't necessarily anticipate a response; it can simply be performed as an exercise for the blogger him (her) self. Check-plus.
These are all valid questions, though perhaps not for the reasons you suggest. By that I mean that the text does offer answers for each of them (Yu Tsun is a German spy, for instance, because he wants to prove to the Germans that people of other races can outdo them), but those answers aren't necessarily satisfying ones. More complex responses will take into account the answers that the text gives, but also state how even those answers leave loose ends; part of our task as readers of literature is to gather those loose ends into cohesive wholes. Check.
An excellent apprehension of the structural elements of Mulan in the context of Proppian analysis. The one quibble that I have is that "recognition" as Propp means it can mean either monetary or social recognition (as in the film) or literal identification; remember that Propp notes that the hero will oftentimes return home in disguise, and at some point they are effectively recognized by their family / the people at home. A very good journal entry nonetheless. Check-plus.
I think that your reaction is exactly what the authors of the website would have hoped for, but perhaps more interesting is how the website grabbed your attention. Elements like sound, music, and images don't just convey information; they create a mood. It's that mood, more than any compelling data that the site presents, that compels you to continue. Thus, your response is a good commentary not only on what the site argues, but how it argues. Check-plus.
Journal entry #6 is all right; you do ask some compelling questions and present some intriguing ideas (particularly as regards the mysterious footage: what is it? Why is everyone so obsessed with it?), but about half of the journal is simply summary of what happens in this reading… what I'd like you to focus on for the remaining Pattern Recognition journals are the difficult and interesting questions and issues that you touch on a little later in this entry—skip the summary and try to address the larger issues. Check.
A good seventh journal that asks some very interesting questions about the reading. Specifically, what are we to make of this seemingly unmotivated hostility on Dorotea's part, and why do these minor characters keep showing up? I think that the answer might lie in some of the details that we discussed in class today: Gibson seems to deliberately repeat certain concepts / reintroduce certain characters to establish patterns. What these patterns mean, and how we recognize them, is the ultimate question. Check-plus.
Good work on 8.2. Asking questions, even if you don't have the answer to those questions, is a good way to reveal your thought process / address some larger issues at stake in the reading. That said, some of what happens in this chapter seems to be deliberately mysterious; perhaps we'll learn more as we go along!! Check-plus.
Again, this is a good journal because it asks some compelling questions, a very good tactic for composing both short and long analytic writing. As to the actual content of those questions, I suppose we'll just have to wait and see what happens! A lot of significance hangs on these next few sections. Check-plus.
Your last journal entry is fine, though it seems to be primarily a repetition of certain aspects of class discussion without the benefit of certain pieces of knowledge that would help to explain what we talked about in class. The words in parentheses, for instance, are designed not for the benefit of the player, but the benefit of Wendy, to whom Alley is telling the story. All of what you say here seems to be technically correct, though paying closer attention to the story itself might have helped you to resolve some of these issues. Check.