Good Luck on Finals Everyone!!

REAL HOVER BOARD!

Introducing, the hover board known as the Hendo Hover!
It is being called the worlds first hover board. But, it only hovers an inch from the surface, which has to be made of metal.

The surface has to be metal because the engines induce an opposing magnetic field to a metal surface below, which in turns allows the board to hover.

I wonder if this is similar to when you put the same repulsion part of magnetics together, because when this happens, neither magnetic fields are able to touch. Therefore, are the engines just magnetic repulsers that repulses away from the metal surface, to ultimately allow it to hover?

Either way, the design of the board looks sleek and modern, because grey and black colors seem to represent modernity. As for the blue light that is underneath, I wonder if they just copy how repulsers look like from Iron Man and the avengers movie in their space crafts and flying machines.

The seat that you can put in your pocket to take anywhere!

Known as the sitpack, it is a device that can fold up to 6 inches long, in order to fit in pockets, and extend to 34 inches long and capable of supporting up to 286 pounds.
The creator is name Jonas Lind-Bendixen came up with the idea after he got tired of waiting inline for  a concert, and it is suppose to be a way to help those who stand for long periods of time, to have a way to take a break anywhere in a way to ease back pain. 

I personally think it looks a bit weird, but it could be a great thing to have at concerts as well when queuing in a line for something.
So far Jonas kick starter has raised over 100,000 dollars so maybe he can hire a designer for a more appealing look?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/11/26/366800628/weekly-innovation-a-seat-that-fits-in-your-pocket

"Chopped off a cannibals leg and whackked his friends with it!"

Introducing The Forest a survival game!
While the game is basically an interactive software survival simulator, in which you gather supplies, kill animals, and build fires and camp sites, the bugs  and glitches within the game provides for some funny entertainment.
First off, the story begins with you on a plane with, what appears to be your son, when suddenly the plane crashes, you and your son survive, but a naked man come and takes your son away from you. Then the game starts. You would think that the main objective is to go find the naked man who took your son away, but its not. So far the people who played the game have tried locating the kid, but he is nowhere to be found, you are just attacked by the naked natives, who happen to be cannibals. Therefore the only thing you can do is survive.
I personally want to play this game, but I do not own a computer that can handle the graphics! But, the game just seems to be more appealing because of the reviews people have put about the game, as well as the funny commentary game plays, some famous YouTubers do.

The comments that I found funny, are consisted within this post.

Good News!! Killing Sims does not mean you are insane!

I think it is amazing how people have fun torturing sims in The Sims game series. I myself even enjoy killing a few sims in a variety of ways.

But, this topic came to mind because i stumbled upon an article that shows that it has been studied that people seem to torture Sim just out of plain curiosity and not because people are insane. http://www.pcgamer.com/torturing-the-sims/

I personally do not think I am insane, I just get rather bored after creating a dream home. building homes in the games is most exciting because while you insert the sims you created, after a while things need to happen in order to make the game entertaining.

For example, the classic normal ways of killing a sim tend to be from a fire (if your sim sucks at cooking) or drowning in a pool (because you happen to "forget" to put a ladder in... though newer sim games made sims smarter to know how to get out of a pool without a ladder) and also starving to death (when you forget to put a kitchen in your home.)

To spice things up a bit, I make my sims have a house party, then i remove all the doors and insert about 20 fireplaces or rocket launcher stuff and have them all turn on. This kills most of the sims and those who survive tend to just starve to death eventually. 

In a way, doing this also creates a haunted house due to all the newly homed ghosts on your land, therefore I can easily put a new house on the land for a sim to live in and be constantly annoyed and spooked from ghosts.

Basically, after all this, it is mainly for fun and games and not out of curiosity for me. I prefer my sims dying from fire because they are a less messy ghost (sims who drown tend to spray water everywhere when they are a ghost). It is also fun to try to befriend death for that one sim who is allowed to live.

Parents seem to be either killed off, not mentioned, or mentioned dead in animated/cartoon movies.

This conversation about deaths in animated movies, comes from a person on my Facebook page. They were arguing that movies do not need to kill off a parent in order for the movie to be good. (She saw How to Train Your Dragon 2).

This then sparked a conversation about how most animated movies, tend to not really include parents significantly in movies.
To just name a few movie examples of movies in which the one or both parents are killed off:
The Lion King (Mufasa's death still makes me cry)
Nemo
BAMBI!
The Fox and the Hound
Lilo and Stitch
Frozen
Tarzan
The Land Before Time
How to Train your Dragon 2
Shrek 2
Anastasia
etc. 

The list goes on when you think about parents not being mentioned at all or are mentioned dead as well such as Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin...

Overall, it kind of makes me wonder why movie studios choose to do this. Maybe its because without the parents, the child is forced to grow up and movies in which people grow up and learn who they are suppose to be , tend to be popular. 

Real life Hogwarts School

Hogwarts Larping is now apparently real. Registration opens in a few months for those who wish to travel to an actual location. Your register, get sorted into a house and take actual classes based on the Harry Potter world. You can also play sports such as quiditch. I personally do not know if i would register and pay to travel to a place in order to role play and dress like a wizard, but this seems like it would be the best vacation present ever for a person my age who actually grew up with the books. As well as for kids who are introduced to the movies and books now.

Interstellar

A few days ago, I ventured to the theater to watch the movie Interstellar. I love space movies, because when I was a little kid I wanted to grow up to be an astronaut. Oh by the way...

****************SPOILERS BELOW********************

I really enjoyed this movie even though I have heard that this movie is not one of Christopher Nolan's  

best work (He is the one who directed Inception, and the Batman movies such as Batman begins and The Dark Knight and so on.) The cinematography is amazing because it gave a sense of suspense being in a nothingness of space with the risk of going through worm holes in order to travel to different galaxies. The filming at Earth also shows the depression and survival the humans are trying to endure even though Earths climate was become awful due to frequent dust storms and the inability to grow food besides corn in the soil.

Basically the movie is about finding a new planet for humans to live on because Earth is dying and the climate no longer promotes sufficent vegetation growth for food and has poor air quality to breathe. Therefore the main character is told to pilot a craft through a worm hole/ black hole in order to investigate planets to see what is inhabitable. The problem though is that time is of an essence because the planets are close to a black hole that warps the time movement on the planets. Therefore if they risk spending an hour on one planet, an hour there means that 7 years or more would have passed on Earth so the race for the human survival is running out of time. 

Overall, I highly recommend the movie if you enjoy space and survival movies. 

RAT BURGERS!

Citizen Burger Disorder is yet another online multiplayer game with easy login and sign up for free. The goal of the game is to make burgers, but the game goes on even though you run out of supplies. What makes this game fun are the bugs, and no not real bugs. The game itself could be broken in a lot of ways but it is still fun when others join your restaurant. I discovered that when you run out of hamburger meat, you can always just grab a rat in your infested restaurant and cook them too, but you have to hold on to them or they will just be some fried rat that still runs away.
So far my experiences with the game have been weird and interesting because some people that join in your game will steal all my burgers or just make a mess. Some will try to capture all the rats and place them in the sink, because for some reason... the rats in the game will stay in the sink. Maybe because they are drowned?

POL 337-343

Postmodernism Space, Geography, and Built Environments

As noted in the readings, post-modernism space is mostly related to digital environments. This makes me think of video games, because video games can be built to have its own set of time and space in which the participant interacts with. An example I can think of this is the Sims games . Sims relates to this because, besides the preset homes you can just place your sims into,  you basically can build the whole space as well as your character (sim) from scratch so it can interact with the environment of the game that is available.

Halloween Costumes of the Past

I personally think that the Halloween costumes of the past were better looking and creepier than what they are today. Today you basically have the men wearing anything, but most of the women costumes are pretty much sort of sluttyish. Also the kids are wearing what ever popular movie was on that year or what ever looks cute on them.


For example, here are some picture of the evolution of costumes for girls.

But maybe the costumes of the past were scarier because they were mostly home made , and therefore they were more creative?

Also were Halloween costumes meant to be scary to ward off evil spirits and other monsters? I shall look that up some other time, in the mean time. Here are some vintage Halloween costume pictures.

I Don't Care If a Human Dies in a Movie, I feel worse if an animal dies or is hurt.

This weekend I finally decided to watch The Human Centipede. I been avoiding it for some time because I heard it was very graphic and gross, but honestly I thought it was not that disturbing. Besides the poop scene of when the lead of the centipede had to go which forcefully made the middle person eat the poop, I was not really bothered. I also felt worse for the dogs that were mention in the movie, which were the first experiment to be put into a 3 centipede thing. Overall, this movie is not for everyone, some gore but not much. A bit gross a few times.

FOOD PORN

Did you think dirty?

If you were, this is not what you were thinking...

So, after hearing from friends that a site called food porn and food porn hashtag is sort of a thing, I decided to search  Food Porn on Tumblr and on Google because I have heard that such blogs exist and sites. If you are hungry, the results are some good things to look at because it is basically pictures of food that most likely is not good for you, but looks OH SO YUMMY!

For Example, This picture.

These are fries individually wrapped in bacon, looks like a heart attack,but who would not want to try this, unless you are vegan of course. I also wonder the time it took to do that to each fry, must have been a long preparation time.








They also have dessert pictures.

 A caramel apple snicker cake. I want to try THIS!













Here is the link for the food porn website for your pleasure. http://foodporndaily.com/explore/food/

Global Market in Cinema and Television

In the POL reading, it explains that the meaning of localizing is a matter of location when television shows or movies are made. This is because, while a show such as Big Brother might be of Americans and our life style here in the USA, the same show title in the UK or in Africa will have different society settings and lifestyles that will be shown. The same could be said for movies because when a movie is set in a certain setting, you tend to see the local culture in the setting of the story. Therefore in global entertainment, each entertainment medium is adapted to the specific culture in which the story is set in.

Google controlling piracy?

Readings "Google changes to fight piracy by highlighting legal sites" basically is about trying to get rid of sites that promote piracy and stealing of owned materials and also how companies could bribe to make their business come on top for search results. I honestly think the fight for piracy would not matter because from the movies one I seen and the tv shows websites that exist, the sites are mainly just host sites. Meaning that the site just exists to catalog material and when you find something you want to watch, it will either link you directly to the site to watch or get something, or redirect you in the direction of the material. The sites that Google might fight to get off are probably just the host sites. While sites could be compromised by the government and taken down, new sites could be made easily for the same hosting purposes.

Town of Salem

About a month ago, I started playing an online game called "Town of Salem." It is a online multiplayer game of lying and deception. All you need to do is register on the website and then join a game and it will automatically put you in a game. You just have to pick what game style you want to join into such as a custom game (that unlocks all characters roles) or a classic game (that only select the original roles). You then set a user name for the in game play, and when you join the screen will tell you what role you are. The game is about lying to other players if you end up as a role of a mafia or  serial killer (SK). Because the goal of the game is for either the town to kill all threats for town to win. Or if town looses, then the goal is for the mafia to win and kill off the sk. Also to tell the truth, I did suck at the game at first because I had to get use to the roles because even though the corner tells you what your role can and cannot do, its a little tricky learning the strategy of how to put your role to the best use. But when i did got better at the game, I won as SK (whose goal is to kill off everyone in the town) because I convinced the town and mafia that i was just an average doctor who failed to heal people who got killed at night time. So if you are good at deceiving people, then this is the game for you. If you are not good at deceiving, the game can still be fun, because as you learn more then it can be easier yo learn how to trick people.

Lessig and POL readings week of 10/16

Free Culture 213-234 "Should Information be owned?"

Personally if i was a musician, i would believe that information should be own because you obviously want to get paid for doing something that is your job. A lot of people believe that the music should be free and take the information, such as music, free from the internet through internet sharing websites and also if songs become leaked. But I wonder if anyone ever thing how songs are their job and they need to get paid somehow, while concerts might be the money maker, the albums do help pay artist a bit too. So should information be owned, yes, because everyone has to make a living, even if they just make songs for a living that is the artist job. Everyone would get mad if they took a photograph or video that becomes well known and someone else steals it and make a profit off it while you do not.

Then again, some artists give music away for free, like U2 did recently because they were afraid no one was going to buy their album, it helped opened up new fans and could help their concert revenue.

POL The Global Flow of Visual Culture

This chapter basically is about how brands and other images become known globally around the world through the use of advancing medias. This is because images use to be spread through the use of television and print based mediums, as well as the cinema. But now days, television is now world wide broadcasting as well as the radio, because it is easy to share something from on place in the world to the next in an instant. Some brands in the world even become well known such as Nike and Cocacola and McDonalds through the use of television and the internet. Movies even play a role with brands popping up because if you notice, in some film shots in the screen, a little coca cola product could be visualized in the fridge or counter as a little advertising in important movies that the company know that people will watch. Such as the appearance of Burger King in Iron Man.

Alien Isolation

Alien Isolation was voted as the scariest game at this years E3 gaming convention. And because i wanted to play a horror game, I decided to actually purchase this game this weekend.

SPOILERS
The game is based on the classic horror movie Aliens. You play as the main character Ripley whose mother went missing in space 15 years ago to the time the game is based on. Ripley decided to go to space on a mission just for personal reasons to see what happened to her mother. You start on the ship called the Torrens and you go to a ship Sovastelink  through space walking with 2 other members of your crew and a blast happens which lands yourself alone and without communication on the empty isolated Sovastelink ship. My first hour playing the game was basically trying to find the communications to signal the Torrens to get you the hell out of the ship you were forced to get on to from a blast. This is tricky because something went horribly wrong on the isolated ship causing few survivors to kill you on sight for fear of their lives. This is because there is a monster on the ship killing everyone out one by one, therefore the people that you run into are just trying to survive like you, but will kill you because of a lack of resource.
To amp up the thrill, as a gamer, I decided to wait till midnight with all the lights off, all alone at home to play the game with sound on loud. While I do admit that the game lacks a bit in a sense of directions, or I am just really bad at directions, it does take a while to figure out where to go and find certain objects and puzzles to help you advance. The thing that keeps you on edge is the noises on the ship because it is kind of like how one is home alone and the house creaks scary noises, but in the game its the ship that makes noises.
So far i am enjoying the game but stopped around 3am because i reached the part where you are in the area the Alien resides and you have to try to sneak back out. I also stopped the game because I died... I was trying to sneak across to some chamber for a radio thing, but turns out the Alien crept up behind be and impaled me and covered my face with its hands, and to be honest, this did scare the hell out of me because it was all quiet then BAM i was dead.

I look forward to playing the game again tonight. BUT, WHY LET THE PLAYER FIND A GUN IF THE GUN IS USELESS AGAINST THE ALIEN!! .... it did not die.

POL 265-279 Advertising, Consumer Culture, and Desire

The reading talks about how advertising, in a consumer society, is part of capitalist consumer cultures. This is because, in modern times, advertisements are basically seen everywhere such as as the items you where, the food you eat, the logos and ads on the web and even the ads that are posted on subways or buses. This also all started in the late 19th century when modes of transportation was readily available to easily get around the world. This consumer movement also started the separation of work and home life. The reading also talks about how advertisement shows a promise of transformation, such as "if you buy this, you will look better." Some advertisement will also make it be seen as you will be of a higher class if you buy certain products as well.

Reading "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things"

The reading is basically about how everyone uses a categorization when it comes to talking, understanding and listening within the world. For example we categorize animal species and even people. Humans also categorize everything in order to make sense of any subject. Therefore, if a system of categorization is changed, the understanding of everything else will change like a ripple in a pond, affect one thing and the rest will be affected one way or another.

Porcelain Dolls are SPOOKY

Last night I went to watch the movie Annabelle. If you do not know what Annabelle is, its sort of like a prequel to the big horror movie last year "The Conjuring" because Annabelle is the doll that is seen in the beginning scene of the Conjuring and they just say that the doll is sealed away and blessed twice a month by a catholic priest because a demon inhabits the doll. Also that it is best to just seal the doll away rather than destroy it because destroying the doll will only just allow the evil within to live in another physical object or even a person.

Both movies are based on a true story from the Warren couple cases, but Hollywood changed the look of the real Annabelle to a creepy porcelain doll.  The original doll was actually a raggedy Ann doll. I personally like the choice that Hollywood made because porcelain dolls are, in my opinion, just plain CREEPY, and the raggedy Ann doll just looks like an innocent doll. Obviously the real Ann doll was a scary experience to whoever owned the doll in real life because it moved throughout the apartment and scratched messages everywhere, but when the story gets retold people would probably be wary like "really, that innocent doll is the most dangerous thing ever?" It could also be understood that besides for a creepier look, the raggedy Ann company probably didn't want to loose sales if the movie was made to portray the real doll.
Besides the Hollywood changes of the dolls looks, the movie also amps up the the story to make for a better movie such as a monster at the bottom of a dark gloomy stairwell along with other spooks. I quite enjoyed the movie but I will still keep away from porcelain dolls and never purchase one from an antique store because those dolls at that type of store could be haunted since their owner is probably dead. 

POL Media in Everyday Life

This chapter talks about how media became an important structure for daily life. Especially how now days people wake up to alarm clocks on their phones or tablets to then watching then news or reading about the news on the internet. However, media in everyday life, back in WWII times, use to be used for making people want to be patriotic in order to help win and fund the war. But when the war was won, people more manufacturing began for consumer usage so media was played out to show what people should have or need to have in order to stay up to date in the culture.
The reading also shows that besides marketing products, the media also showed graphic news such as JFK assassination. It is also known that the media could also influence the public to form opinions such as when the Vietnam war became broadcast back home to what was happening making the war unpopular to everyone.  But in present days, the media could be lies or just one point of view and more people are to question what is happening than people did back in wwII times. This is because of social media and shows like the Steven Colbert show that make fun of how normal news is presented to theorized the other side of the story.
All in all, there are some people who follow the media and believe everything, and there are also those who question what is really happening.

POL Copyright

Part one of this weeks reading involved the usage of copyrights. The reading explains how copyright works; such as when you work for a company, all your ideas and inventions will belong to the company you worked for and not actually belong to you. Most companies do this and some companies, through my experience, forbids you to do similar work outside of the company as a personal profit to yourself, such as family portrait studios. You sign a contract stating that you can not take photos outside of work for profit.
The reading also covers a doctrine known as the Fair Use Doctrine. This law basically covers that it is OK to use copyright materials for education purposes without permission as well as a few other things.

Piracy and Tinkering

The beginning of the reading brought about a point that text constructs meaning and that is why kids are taught how to write. If this is true then why was oral literacy proficient to constructing meaning as well, it is also noted that if a person cannot read then they are illiterate but I think that only makes them illiterate for reading only because a person could have profound knowledge in any topic or activity and could probably outperform anyone who learn those activities through reading.  I also think that text is not the only way for construct meaning; this is because with the presence of the radio, video, and TV, any person can construct meaning on what is happening through hearing only, especially when something drastic happens such as 9/11.

I also like how the reader expresses that anyone can be a tinker now days, as in mess and innovate new creations out of anything through the internet as well in real life. But when the topic of piracy comes into play, it represents how there are many laws that protects things such as music and films and how other laws are ignored for things like TV broadcasting and radio plays of music. I also think that while there are laws and because people are “tinkering” more than ever on the internet, there is probably a higher risk of things getting pirated. Especially when the laws only apply mainly for the USA, because places like China are known to take things and create a cheaper and exact same version of our products for use in their country. Also, when movies are released first abroad, it is easier for someone to easily record the film and release it on the internet as well as creating bootlegs. There are even sites that also promote tv series and movies to be free to the public such as projet-free-tv.com.

POL reading 183-200

Photographs modernized the way people saw the world starting in the 19^th century.  The book also says that the photograph emerged along with science and advanced medicine, but maybe photography influenced advance medicine as well as science. I think this could be so because maybe someone photographed a sickness which then influenced a scientist to further develop a treatment for the sicknesses. Photography was also probably used as surveillance and therefore could have also influence the development of other technologies such as the internet to communicate with one another. It would be to no doubt that photography would influence movies. This is because cinema added the elements of movements and sound to photography since film is basically pictures moving at a fast frame rate. As for the reproduction of art section of the reading, I was reminded of the Dada art movement because in Dada, images or things that already existed would be reused to different forms to send messages.

Lets Blog About Horror Games

I personally do not own a computer that would handle any game play so I like to watch YouTube gamers play games to try to make up for the fact that i can not play the games personally.

One game play demo scared me though, the game is called Silent Hill P.T and the demo is played by the YouTube #1 gamer, Pewdiepie. The demo shows how far we are going with gaming graphics and I personally think it is awesome, as a viewer, to watch these things happen. The graphics are not too real and not to fake and really gets you the feel of the creepiness that is happening while you are stuck in the endless loop. It seems like you are also playing the guy who murdered his family and you are reliving what you have done to your family.

While this might not seem scary to others, I watch these videos around night time to midnight with headphones on all alone in the dark to make the experience better.

Here is the video to the demo and it makes me want to invest into a new gaming console to experience the the generation of graphics and interactivity of digital media gaming.

POL 49-62 Viewers Make Meaning

This week reading focuses on how a viewer interprets meanings. Mainly what I got from the reading is that depending on the viewers upbringings, their codes and conventions will vary how things are interpreted by them. While the producer of images and other work of art might have a specific objective of meaning in mind when they created their master piece, the viewer might not always view what the artist made with the same interpretation in mind. Some might even hate what is being viewed depending on what taste the person has, meaning what they like in film, art, food, and many other things. Tastes vary person to person because depending on their social class the viewer could have been raised to like different things. For example, high class people might be use to high quality food, entertainment, and activities while a low class would be use to average food as well as TV shows and movies and regular sports. An average person cannot afford to do figure skating or horseback riding or even sailing and gliding because that is of expensive taste in activities.

Maybe this is why the value in art may seen outstanding to certain classes since ownership is key to the value of the art. For example the blue painting with white line (by Barnett Newman) was sold for about $44 million and maybe someone of a higher class statues viewed the art as exquisite but to an average joe, like me, would probably say "why the heck would you spend so much on an art that you could draw yourself."

The Painting that was sold for $44 Million

Manga Data Bases, comic style learning.

To be honest, reading the Database descriptions in the manga comic style reminded me of trying to figure out the stupid data book when I worked in retail. This is because the comic tries to simplify the way you make databases through a chart to figure things out fast, and it uses the retail grocery setting as an example. While the data is suppose to help the cashier quickly find the price of items, I got confused on how things are recorded and joined from other data to become one data. This also confused me in a real setting of looking at a book to figure out what a specific type of jacket would cost, because where i worked, you would have to go to the outdoor wear tab then go on the chart to find either adult or kids, then scan the chart to either men or women, then scan again for either workout, heavy, medium, or light wear. Then if the jacket was of brand name, if you even knew the brand names, then you would repeat the process on another page the chart tells you to go to in order to figure out what the brand and style of jacket would cost. Overall it was nice to read a description in manga style, but reading about databases in chart style just made me confused and took me to the time when I worked in retail.

Free Culture 7-30

Free Culture, Lissig 7-30

While reading the preface and introduction of the Free Culture PDF, the overall of what was said, that I understood,  is that when new technology comes forth, laws would be made in order to protect business or the way products are used when something new is made that is meant to be life changing and forthcoming. The example though of the invention of the airplane,  I can relate to the man who found a little annoyance military aircraft flying over their home. this is because where I live the united states naval airplanes make routine practices making rounds and flying really low to land at the airport in repeat for about an hour or so, and each time the plane passes low, the house shakes like a mini earthquake. This also is really annoying when they happen to do the routine around 9pm, but at the same time I am in awe of planes because aircraft is a little fascination of mine, therefore I do not really bother and can think of the house shaking as a sign that the house is really stable. From a computer and society class, I can also understand how some laws are made when new technology are Developed , especially when things are made for the consumer and not military.  For example, there are more laws for books because they are the oldest form of media and there are less laws for computer and internet laws because they are new and when new laws are made, new advances to technology are already made, making the laws no longer fitting to the technology they are protecting.

Meanings of Images

The reading from pages 26-46, in Practices of Looking, generally talked about how the meaning of images are interpreted through conventions. Meaning that meanings of images and symbols have to be taught and learned in order for a person to incorporate some type of meaning. This could defiantly correspond to the knowledge we have on big corporate logos and brands, such as the yellow M for McDonald's, and the Apple for apple products such as macs and iPods. The same goes for signs such as road signs because road signs are universally the same in image therefore if one was to travel to Europe from America. The stop sign will be red and in octagon shape even though the words might be different in language. 
The reading then goes on to explain about icons, symbols, and indexes. Admittedly, I have and still have confusion about the differences between these three contents of signs, even if I have learned the difference from a sociology class last spring, but to try to make it seem more sense to me, I try to use the example of a fast food chain restaurant to help me out.  For example Burger King, when you drive down a road you see a burger sign, the index of the sign is its presence and the icon is that it is a burger therefore you can get something to eat there, the sign is also conventional because, as an American, you were probably taught the meaning that the burger king sign means that burger king is close so you can go get yourself a burger which makes it symbolic because it establishes a meaning to you.
Besides fast food chains, iconic images, as from the reading, can also have a great symbolic meaning. And an example of this that I can think of is the Vietnam war photo Napalm Girl. It shows a little girl naked because a napalm bomb was accidentally dropped on a town of civilians and it shows her and other kids running but she had to take off her clothes to stop the burning sensation. The image then became an icon as a peace message because it shows that innocents were being harmed.