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Week 2 Summary

I started off this week reading an email from Professor Bond about how our writing shouldn’t be academic but instead should be unique and include our voice. I started instantly freaking out because the only thing I’ve been good at all my life is academics and that just got erased from the program. Despite the stress and workload and the very difficult programming classes I’m taking this semester, I managed to do five daily creates this week: Number 4756, Number 4757, Number 4758, Number 4759, and Number 4760.

🐰
🐰
🐰
🌳
🦊
🦊
🚦
🛣
🚶‍♂

Three rabbits play
Two foxes wait
One person in the way

I also frantically wrote a blog post about my character because I thought we were just supposed to fill out the google form. Those assignments are nasty, only telling us what is expected of us on the very last sentence. Thankfully, this is a character that’s been developing as a concept for a few years now, so I shouldn’t have too much to worry about in that regard.

My three assignments of the week, Richmond at Night, You Are Safe, and Cyberpunk Trading Card Game, were completed, and while the assignments themselves didn’t take too long and weren’t exceptionally difficult, I can’t say the same about the writing. I read somewhere that we need two paragraphs alone describing the story behind the art. I’m sorry, but I’m not verbose. I can tell you all of that in five sentences or less and save you ten minutes.

Lastly, I wrote my film review, which was actually supposed to be done last week, but I was unaware that it was even an assignment we were supposed to do. In fact, I think there are potentially two more assignments total that I was supposed to write blog posts about, but one of them got absorbed into my Week 1 Summary. I still do not know if I will get credit for it.

Matrix Film Review

The Matrix is a late 90s movie that still carries some vibes from the 80s about a man who goes by both Neo and Thomas. He’s living a double life, which is an interesting prelude to the dichotomy between the two lives he lives in the matrix, everything he knows and has ever experienced, and the real world, where humans are fighting for survival. As Neo, he is a hacker always on the lookout for police. He breaks the rules and lives outside of the box society wants to put him in. Perhaps this is why he chose the red pill.

The mind and body disconnect between the matrix and the real world is very interesting to me because PTSD can cause a disconnect where you may feel like you have no emotional issue with something, but the moment you experience it, you feel physically sick. In the matrix, the mind is inside the simulation, while the body stays in the real world. Interestingly enough, if something happens to your body in the matrix, it will happen in the real world as well. The brain is very powerful, and it can be very difficult to convince it that stimuli it is experiencing is fake. Another interesting parallel between The Matrix and PTSD are the dreams. Dreams that feel so real, you’re not sure whether or not it actually happened. It is common for PTSD sufferers to experience hyper realistic nightmares that make them question reality, and Neo had trouble distinguishing what had actually happened and what was a dream within the matrix. Perhaps being treated in the real world after escaping the matrix is similar to receiving treatment for PTSD and seeing the world for what it is, and not the dangers that could lie in it.

As for tech noir, this film shows a very dystopian future but also includes hope. Hope that all this ruin, destruction, and harvesting would end if people worked together and believed they could succeed. It has very dark and disturbing scenes that would make some people skip ahead, but the story ends on a high note. Maybe you don’t have to be some superhero, maybe you just have to believe, and the brain will do the rest.

Meet the Main Character

Zer0 (Z-0903) is a sentient robot in a futuristic, cyberpunk society. In this world, robots are used for labor, protection, and all sorts of things that would be dangerous or undesirable for humans. Unfortunately, in this world, we’ve reached a point of advancement where the robots and AI we create are capable of independent thought, though we continue to treat them like objects. Since the robots are legally classified as conscious, they receive salaries for the dangerous jobs they’re assigned to, but they’re paid significantly less than humans. “Why give them extra pay when they don’t need a place to sleep?” some have argued. Ironically, these robots do “sleep” at charging stations. They’re able to fully recharge overnight for free because the government knows how big of a loss it would be if their money-making expendables were to stop working.

Zer0’s job is to be a meat shield for important people like CEOs and presidents. While unable to carry a weapon himself, his reflexes are fast enough that he’s able to stand in the way of an oncoming bullet or push someone away from danger. He’s capable of feeling emotions and expressing them through the blue LEDs on his “face” monitor, though most humans he encounters still refer to robots as the impersonal it/its. He’s not happy with the way he’s treated, but he keeps his head down and doesn’t complain. He only speaks when necessary on the job, and sometimes people take his silence to mean stupidity. One day, it pays off when he overhears information that would be devastating for his kind should it come to pass. He joins an underground resistance and informs them of what he’s heard, kicking off the plot of the story.

Cyberpunk Trading Card Game

Trading Card Assignment for Week 2

This is a trading card I made for my character, Zer0. I made the card through a website called Remixer, which was linked in the assignment. I was able to choose colors, edit text, and upload a photo to make the card. The picture is of me cospalying Zer0 in 2023. The photo was originally in front of a green screen, which I edited in Krita with the help of an artist friend for a contest. Krita is a free art program that I downloaded a few years ago in response to Clip Studio Paint, a previously free art program, requiring subscriptions. The green screen and sword were provided by RVA Katana. They were very nice to work with and are located in Richmond, Virginia. The design for Zer0 has changed a little since 2023, but I’m still altering clothing and adding details, so I don’t have any pictures of that yet. The one thing that I wanted to make clear on this card was that Zer0 is a conscious being capable of independent thought. This is not a unique case in my story, yet there is still discrimination and prejudice against robots. The robots are stand-ins for the undesirables of society, such as minorities.

You Are Safe

Graphic with Text Assignment for Week 2

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This is my collage, You Are Safe. All photos were taken from Unsplash, which houses works under creative commons. The photos in order from right to left and top to bottom are by Michael Aleo, Cheng Feng, Alexey Turenkov, Andrea De Santis, Maximalfocus, Bayar Hayder, Niklas Liniger, Michael Dziedzic, and Judeus Samson. I put them into a collage using Picsart and added a background gradient and text. While Picsart let me create a collage for free, it seems like there is a limit to the number of free images you can make. While searching for photos, I ended up creating a red and dark blue color scheme. I thought the dark muted blues would be dreary and set the scene for tech noir, while the reds would indicate danger. I tried searching for technology, surveillance, trash, guns, robots, and cities with a cyberpunk twist. I arranged the photos so that they would point towards the robot in the middle and made the red and black gradient in the background to highlight the danger. The message, “YOU ARE SAFE,” is for the robots. This society does not value them, commanding them to deal with dangerous situations deemed unfit for humans at their own expense. The text is surrounding the robot, almost blocking it out so that all you see is propaganda. Cities are not safe for robots, but they have no other choice than to follow orders. I added the red and blue text under the white to try to indicate that it was coming from a screen, that it was being read by a robot that doesn’t see with organs, but with processors.

Richmond at Night

Subtitle GIF Assignment for Week 2

This is a gif of Richmond, VA as the sun sets, made with drone footage from ALL in 4K’s video, Richmond, Virginia, USA 🇺🇸 | 4K Drone Footage. I thought it would be a nice place to make a gif of, because I’ve lived nearby my whole life. For reasons of legality, I will not confirm or deny whether or not I used a YouTube to MP4 converter in order to get a file to use for the gif. To get the mp4 file down to a reasonable size, I used Clipchamp, a built-in editor on my computer. Although it is free, I do not recommend using Clipchamp. First, it made me create an account or sign in, and because of issues I was having, I had to close the application that had automatically popped up on my screen and open a web browser version just to get it to work. Once I was finally able to access the editor, I was bombarded by advertisements for AI tools instead of a tutorial for how to use the editor. I was able to cut the file down to size, but it was an unpleasant experience. After that mess, I used Ezgif.com to turn my trimmed file into a gif. It has a lot of different useful tools that can do things like speed up or slow down your gif, as well as a tool that lets you add text. The default font for the text editor was impact, which is used in a lot of memes. I decided to be silly and added the text “You’re Getting Doxxed” because my friends and I like to send similar memes to each other. This relates to my story because it revolves around conscious, autonomous robots who mostly live in cities because that’s where the charging stations are. They have built-in GPS trackers and can be located anytime, anywhere. Richmond may not look very cyber, but there aren’t many places that exist in the world that look futuristic to the point of tech noir. I picked it because I was both thinking of home and wondering if there was any footage of the city online. If there was not, I would’ve picked a bigger, well-known city like New York. I’ve been to the very location this gif was filmed at many times before and it’s notable to me for its relatively tall buildings compared to most of the city and the James River, which you can cross using rocks and small islands during certain times of year.

Week 1 Summary

It’s been a week! This is the first class I’ve ever taken that’s been open internet. I can’t even remember any class I’ve taken that’s used social media. Needless to say, I was very lost and very confused until I had a meeting with my professor. Right now, my goals are to simply figure out more about this class and what’s expected of me. I fear whatever I make won’t be one cohesive story, although I’m lucky that I ended up with a cyberpunk/tech noir theme. Hopefully some friends can point me to free software I can use for this course.

Using a lot of tutorial videos and links, I made a website through UMW and named it after myself (linked below). I also made a mastodon account but I’m already having trouble logging back in, so I cannot link my account at this time. I hope this semester goes well and happy creating!

https://ds106.emilyhalferty.com/