Author Archives: My Blog

The Revengeful Don

My character, Dante Marispucci, is a Sicilian born male who witnessed his father’s murder at the age nine in America when his father was at the peak of his business empire. Since then, he has known no other purpose in life but to avenge his father. Until then he knows nothing else, focuses on nothing else, and doesn’t care about anything else. He is quiet and paranoid to threats as he doesn’t want to suffer the same fate as his father. He is detailed in speech, impression, and character. He is a leader and is the one people are dependent on, as he has been since tragedy struck many years ago. Now grown up and in the head position, Dante no longer has to be discipline to his patience and can finally begin his process of faithful revenge, which to him is an act of love to his father. He has many plans for this, but his enemies have been expecting this for years, but he expected them to expect because that’s just who Dante is.

Week 1 Summary

My first week was a little rough. Mainly because I did a weeks worth of work in a couple of hours due to me joining the course late. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it, as it is a break from my normal CS assignments! What I enjoyed the most was the Superintelligence movie I watched. What drove me crazy was that I was trying to create a domain, when I had previously had one from another course…

Main thing I have learned so far is to make the best with what you have.

What I want to accomplish in ds106

This course offers a platform for creative expression and I plan to utilize the freedom to my fullest extent. I hope to experiment with various storytelling techniques and various digital media tools as well. Not only that but I am excited to document my process with the experiments as I utilize new things. For example, any challenges that come along the way or even just my thought process for going about an assignment.

Superintelligence: Film Review

AI applications, such as ChatGPT have enhanced storytelling and making art on the web. Just recently there has been a trend on TikTok with users utilizing ChatGPT to create a story or an art masterpiece. For example, one type of story I have seen users create via ChatGPT is a cooking story. It’s like a recipe book, except it’s visuals and similar to a children’s storybook. Another trend I have seen is users asking ChatGPT to create lavish cultural weddings. AI applications have gone above and beyond with the details, traditions, and much more that it depicts on the wedding images it creates. Personally, I feel that we should use AI, but not for everything. It can be utilized and is sometimes beneficial in understanding various topics and explaining subjects more in depth. With that being said, you should take the information provided by AI with a grain of salt. One should not fully trust it to be accurate.

The AI film I chose to watch is called Superintelligence, which was released in the year 2020. First off, I would like to share that overall I enjoyed the movie. The first detail in which I had a reaction to was when the AI utilized the voice of James Corden. Since Carol’s favorite celebrity is James Corden, the AI strategically utilized his voice so she would not freak out as much. This just goes to prove how advanced AI is and how it knows and can process so much information. I liked how super intelligence was able to learn about human interactions based off of how Carol interacted with others. For example, at first the AI had lost faith in humanity when Carol did not ask George to stay. It learned an aspect of humans that oftentimes they do not do what is in their best interest. However, later when Carol goes to help George pack, the AI’s faith in humanity is restored. That is because super intelligence noticed that ultimately Carol cared for George and she let him enjoy his happy moments before leaving instead of informing him of the AI’s plan for the world. The one aspect portrayed that I did not like was how Carol was dressed up fancier, given an expensive car, basically AI was “buying” her happiness. AI did this in a way to ultimately impress George. Which is scary because AI took that over from social media and presented Carol a certain way to achieve a certain audience, which is George in this scenario. AI definitely showed the power that it has on multiple aspects of society through this movie.

Weekly Summary

Personally, I am really enjoying the start of this course. I was very nervous in the beginning, especially with all the technical things we had to learn as I am not very tech-savvy, and with the big to-do list we were given on the first week. I was pleasantly surprised to actually enjoy this class, and the workload is not too much at all it is all very manageable. I absolutely love how creative we get to be and how much freedom we are given. I can not wait for this class to get rolling.

Firstly, I set up my accounts and named my domain www.cat-on-a-moped.com installed mastodon, and joined the Discord server. I got the name from a picture I took of a cat on a moped in Greece that is on my wall next to my desk; it’s one of my favorite memories. I am pretty familiar with Discord, as I use it to message some of my friends and play online games with them. After that, I installed WordPress in my domain, which was super easy, especially with the instructions provided and I am currently learning how to use it as this is my first time and me, it is proving harder than I thought, but I think I can get the hang of it.

Secondly, I registered my Blog at the main ds106 website, which again was super easy with the provided instructions. After that, I chose to write my film review on the film WALL-E, which is one of my favorite childhood movies that includes artificial intelligence and human society. The film review can be seen here. The instructions for this assignment were clear, and it was a very fun movie to write about. When I was scrolling down the list of movies, I was a little nervous I wouldn’t find one I would like, but then I realized that a lot of the movies I enjoy actually do include AI in some form, which I found really cool. I think this project was really easy for me as I found a movie that really spoke to me and has been one of my favorites for years, so I was very happy to watch it again. The only issue I had was learning how to make a new blog and learning how to tag it but I figured it out in the end and so far have not had any trouble.

Finally, I wrote my Goals for Digital Storytelling, which can be accessed here. I wanted to keep it relatively short so I can add to it more in the future as I am still figuring out what I want to achieve from this course, but overall, I know I want to continue learning online tools and more about AI.

Overall, I learned a lot in the first week, from learning what a domain is and how to set it up to using WordPress and customizing my site. I can’t wait for what is to come with this course, and I am excited to be creative and intellectually challenged by the internet world.

Goals for Digital Storytelling

When I first joined the course and saw how different it was from my other courses, I was very nervous, especially with the hefty workload for the first week. However, I have figured out it is more fun than stressful, and I am excited to continue this course. I want to learn about new digital tools, which I have already started to accomplish this week. I have never made a Domain before, and I was very scared to get it wrong, but I see now that it is somewhat easier than I thought. I still have a lot to learn and I need to figure out how to make my Domain look better than how it looks right now. I am also interested in AI and how it works, so I am excited to learn more about it and experiment with it. Overall I am very excited about this course and cannot wait to dive deeper into the internet world.

Weekly Summary: Week One (DS106)

Although I joined this class a few days late I really enjoyed what I have done so far. When I was younger I enjoyed using Shopify and Printify to drop ship a clothing brand I created. The website making from those projects I had as a child really has helped me so far. I have always liked writing down and sharing my thoughts and ideas and this is a great opportunity for that. Since I joined this class late I have crammed in the work for this week as we are quickly approaching the deadline. Something that bothered me about making the websites were the nonstop verification emails sent to me. I know verifying people are real is very important but it prolongs the process by a long shot.

Weekly Summary

I enjoyed this week setting everything up. Absolutely everything was 100% new to me so it was a bit of a challenge and I had to visit the Digital Knowledge Center to set most of it up. Navigating WordPress was probably the most challenging for me to get a hold on, but I’ve got a decent grip on it now after a couple days. I learned how to create a domain, subdomain, and make new posts and pages on WordPress. The easy part of this week for me was being able to watch a movie for schoolwork. This past year I really fell in love with cinema and having this be the first assignment made me look forward to actually having fun doing schoolwork, which is rare. I truly wish all teachers would do more like that. I also enjoyed getting to mess around with WordPress. My posts will surely start off basic but I’m looking forward to advancing my posts as the weeks go on. Nonetheless, I’m not very technological as I’m off social media and stay off my phone as much as I can so setting up this stuff was a burden, but the reward seems like it will be worth it.