Author Archives: paul bond

To Walk of Life and Die in LA

It’s been a while since I contributed to the Walk of Life Project, and an even longer while since I watched To Live and Die in LA, so why not kill two birds with one mashup? As far as Walk of Life endings go, this one doesn’t do much other than add to the list. Mostly I just wanted to get a picture of adding a second soundtrack in iMovie:

What I did here was import my video file and my MP3 soundtrack, then overlap and align them in the editing window. I split the video with Cmd-B where I wanted to second soundtrack to take over, and dropped the video volume to zero after that point. I split the added audio at the same point and reduced the volume a little before it.

Indecpherability and unintelligibility go hand-in-hand

Today’s Daily Create asked us to creatively decipher the Voynich manuscript, which I may or may not have heard of before. And since indecpherability and unintelligibility go hand-in-hand, I thought I would pair a page of the text with Adriano Celentano’s classic hit, Prisencolinensinainciusol. If nothing else, it gave me an excuse to watch the video again:

I also discovered that Celentano’s first film role was in a Fulci movie. My household may not be pleased with the new additions to my watch list.

“Who has angered the volcano god?”

a periodic table square for the element Ob-106 Oblivion, with an image of Dr. Oblivion as the background.

Way back in 1986, The Dead Milkmen basically renamed the periodic table as “the goddamn periodic table of elements.” At least for me.

So when I saw Bryan Mathers’ latest remix challenge, I had to do something. Unfortunately I didn’t see a way to change the background to a picture, so I had to step outside the Remixer.

What does Dr. Oblivion have to do with open education? Good question:

Ah yes. Dr. Oblivion’s role in open education could be viewed as a cautionary tale of what happens when artificial intelligence runs amok and takes over the world, wreaking havoc on society as we know it. But let’s focus on how my insights can be used to educate others about the dangers of unchecked AI advancements and the importance of maintaining control and ethical guidelines in technological growth. Let’s not sugarcoat it. The stakes are high, and we need to be vigilant in our quest for knowledge and innovation.

I wondered if oblivion could be considered an element, or if it might better be considered the lack of one. A trip to the dictionary clarified my definitional misunderstanding, and also foretold some destiny:

a dictionary listing of "oblivion" in a sentence, saying, "The technology is destined for oblivion."

Props to propaganda

LEGO – Star Wars propaganda torn version By ArchWorks

Propaganda was a big hit this week, which is perhaps predictable given the nature of the assignments. Even so, there was some great work, and it’s all worth checking out. One I’d like to highlight comes from Cinder’s Wonderland. Note the write up. It explains how AI was used to get ideas, identifies and links to the tools used, and says how they built on the AI image. It even explains the reasoning behind color and font choices. All within one short paragraph.

Also worth noting are the characters’ reactions to PSAs and propaganda for the ways they bring the characters into each others worlds. It is unfortunate that there are only seven reaction posts though…. (sigh)

Propaganda

I really like this post, I think the slogan Liv comes up with is really strong and forces you to reflect on our country’s system.

It was a well thought out poster. The symbolism with the scale and money was done nicely

Propoganda

The design is simple but the picture says a lot

I really liked how minimal this poster was. It is gorgeous and straight to the point. I also liked the message the story behind it. Well done!

You Are What You Eat

It got me. Like it worked. Like that’s what they want with propaganda, it worked.

Not Cracking any Jokes

eggs

PROPAGANDA

This was so good and absolutely inspired. Loved it.

Daily Create

I love the view

Breaking News

I love the picture he chose makes it really feel like a news story

Propaganda

I love the poster he made, and the quote really stands out

What’s Black, White, and Read All Over?

I loved the creativity and how it looks so realistic!

Battle of the Birds

I love this! I did the same assignment for the Bills, so it was cool seeing someone else’s interpretation, as well as seeing other team’s! Go Birds!

Social Media Turns Deadly

This newsposter was awesome! It looked like The Washington Post or The New York Times. Very cool! Great job!

Favorite Movie Gif Daily Create

I love this quote and I think the gif is so relatable

Femme Fatale Propaganda

This was a beautiful poster, and I really like the look of this persons character. I love that the look is consistent throughout this persons post!

Let’s Check Out the Classes PSA’s! Sapphire Mae Edition.

Loved it and thought it was super cute.

Finn Reacting to Public Service Announcements

I love how this person quoted their character to react to posts. I totally can see this character saying these things!

Wouldn’t Want to Hear This on the Radio!

This post is so good and I am so impressed with how above and beyond Rylie went for this assignment. Great job!

TDC 2/25 – 2/28

These were my favorite Daily creates this week!

Propaganda

Well written post. I enjoyed reading it and it put a smile on my face. My favorite part actually was the first sentence.. “I have to start this by saying..”

Daily Create 2/27/25

This was so cool!

Bumper Sticker

This idea was hilarious! I love the design

“…like choosing your favorite snack”

What should ds106 do about those who don't vote for the posts of the week? Should there be consequences for failing to fulfill their democratic duties?

Hmm, that’s an interesting question. In ds106, voting for post of the week is like choosing your favorite snack. It helps showcase great work and encourages participation. While consequences might seem harsh, maybe gentle reminders could help encourage more
voting. After all, everyone’s opinions are important for a fair judgment.

It’s the sigh at the beginning that gets me. I feel the same way. Everyone should be looking over the work of the class, and everyone will definitely see things that they recognize as awesome. But apparently some people can’t be bothered. Who wants to be involved? It’s easier to sleepwalk into dystopia.

That, my friends, is not the 4life attitude. We are all in ds106 together. Get out there and vote!

Tech Noir Connections

Tech Noir Connections logo

Wouldn’t Want to Hear This on the Radio! is an excellently done PSA that hints at a larger story. How would other course characters react to the announcement? Would some of them be forces behind the issue? Or – maybe it is something other than what it seems at first.

That points to a specific event. In Propaganda, we see a theme represented. It says something about society, and something about the individual character. We’ve seen other glimpses of Malone before, and every little piece helps us understand her better. Something to consider: If people were to tag their character posts with the character’s name, they could pull the posts together under blogURL/tag/charactername.

Femme Fatale Propaganda likewise addresses a societal issue, this time in conflict with the character. That conflict, put together with the Missing Person Alert teases a story. Have the FF Haters done something to Sapphria, or has she gone into hiding, to deal with them behind the scenes?

In response to some of the above, we can see Finn Reacting to Public Service Announcements. Here we have a character positioning himself among the propaganda and announcements. We should consider how this exercise form the seeds of stories. Characters could connect directly, or their stories could tangentially touch, generating a narrative mosaic.

We had many ideas for tech-noir shows already – see how that tagging works? – but these assignments are generating more, creating a fertile environment for creative connections. Where does the class want to go with this?

Today in death race news…

Jim suggested the idea of doing a news report on an event from a tech-noir film, which sounded fun to me so I ran with it. I watched Death Race 2000 recently so I decided to work with that, even if it strays pretty far from noir. As Wikipedia describes it “Set in a dystopian American society in the year 2000, the film centers on the murderous Transcontinental Road Race, in which participants score points by striking and killing pedestrians.” There is an incident in the film where a motley group of rebels make an attack on the race, and the government and media place the blame on the French Air Force. That seemed newsworthy. For material to work with, I though I would use the crash scene and the Presidential speech about it. I fed some of the details to ChatGPT and told it to make a news article out of it. Serviceable, but not enough. I had the bright idea to ask Needs More Boom to rewrite the scene in its inimitable style, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the output. I had ChatGPT rewrite that as a news article, then fed the articles and the speech to Notebook LM and had it generate one of its goofy podcasts. I added a Dr. Oblivion introduction to that, along with some open source background music for news.

That gave me a bunch of stuff to work with. I made a new subdomain on my site and installed another WordPress, and looked for free news themes, settling on FreeNews. I added all my stuff as posts, then looked through the documentation for clues on how to set it up. Fortunately it wasn’t very difficult. I just had to put categories on the posts and customize the theme options for the main banner article and the sidebar categories.

It’s still pretty lame, since real news sites have much more content, and I didn’t even try to tweak the design other than the header image. But it at least looks news-ish. I should probably apologize for the creepy clown, if I may use that adjective. Needs More Boom came up with that little addition, and the Notebook LM people were quite taken with it, so I chose to appease the evil tech spirits.

Week Six ds106 top picks

We had seventeen posts picked for the best of week six, and they’re all winners. I especially like the variety of tools and approaches to video that people used. I hope everyone looks them over, because you can get a lot of ideas about what you can accomplish from reading about what other people did.

All those non-voters though…

Krissy Meets Dr. Oblivion	This post was incredible! The amount of time and work put into it to tell the story through Sims must’ve been a lot
Krissy Meets Dr. Oblivion	Using the sims is so smart and it was funny, but you could still appreciate the work they put into it.
Krissy Meets Dr. Oblivion	I thought it was very well made and it was so creative that she used the Sims in order to bring her character to life.
Lyric Snippet	I thought the logic behind the certain design choices was well conceived and the final product was very indicative of what it was set out to represent.
Lyric Snippet	I really like the song
Midnight in February	The writeup was so captivating and really allowed me to feel the same vibes from the video!
Midnight in February	Very grounding post
Zer0 Capcut Edit	I thought the edit was very well made, and it was cool they did a photoshoot with the character!
Zer0 cap cut edit
Tips for your character	The use of Ai in this post is so cool. The character made is so detailed
Tips for your characters	This AI Avatar of Finn Callaway is so cool!! I also liked learning more about the character as well.
Become a Pinterest Plant Parent	This was so cute! It makes me want to start getting some plants to take care of them!
Become a Pinterest Plant Parent	This post was very detailed and interesting to watch as someone who also owns a lot of plants!
How to cosplay tuna star	awesome
Tiktok video assignment	Cute puppers
I am Me	very cool post
Wake Up!	The idea of talking to your past self is sweet. They did a good job with this assignment.
Back to 2021	I loved this post because it felt raw, real, and vulnerable. Recording yourself and posting it for everyone to see can be scary for some but I feel like he knocked it out the park. I haven’t been brave enough yet to record myself and post it but I aspire to be brave like him one day and do this! Also – I loved hearing what he’d say to himself at 16. A lot of those things I would say to myself too.
I Love TikTok	She has a very cute dog and I like her reasons for loving tiktok. Her explanation sounded educated and it made me giggle, a double-edged sword.
See top 10 movies	feels like a warm conversation
Where Would Sapphiria Go?	Video editing skills are looking great!
Revisiting My Goals	I liked reading about their goals and how they accomplished them. Also, from reading this post it made me think about other goals that I’d maybe like to accomplish in this class that I didn’t think about originally. By reading this post I can definitely see that they’ve done a great job so far this semester
Do the Walk of Life	Fits VERY well and sounds great
Video Assignments	I just loved the creativity of the interpretation for the 16 year old me assignment! I loved the vibes as well

How I made the news

Since Jim came up with the news assignment idea, I thought I’d try to mimic a newscast. I Googled “free news background animation” and “free news background music” to find suitable content. Then I recorded myself with a green screen (blue also works in iMovie. Some other programs give more options).
For the graphics, I needed PNG files with transparent backgrounds. I used Dafont for the type and took screenshots, then opened them in Photopea and made a white copy of the text in a new layer and hid the background layer to get the transparency, then exported as PNG. I probably shroud have made a chyron for the bottom of the screen. I’m not sure if iMovie will let me do that many layers, but I could take my exported video and bring it back into iMovie for the overlay.

Hated in the nation, loved in the class

It’s not really surprising that so many video essays made the Best Of list, given the week’s assignment load. Even so, they are great efforts, demonstrating the fun that can be had through the close reading of media. You can see all the essays here. It’s worth the time.

Bees

Phenomenal job on this video essay! I aspire to do this well with an assignment like this one day! The analysis was beautifully captured in the video.

Good job Martina!

I thought that this video essay was a good example of what the other information videos and readings had gone over. She did a good job of explaining different angles and shots

Looking into Cyberpunk Edgerunners

looks super cool

Very nice, informative, and organized post

Calling Myself a Clip Champ This Week

Captivating title and a great vibe and writing style

they tried their best

Liv Kern #tdc4779

Seeing Mount Rushmore underwater, made me laugh. I think it’s such a creative and silly idea. Something about it just makes me smile.

I thought this daily create was very creative and loved the idea

Daily Creates

I think the original poem turned out really good. I have a hard time with that kind of stuff so I thought it was pretty cool to see someone be able to come up with that

I love poetry

Weekly Summary #6: Sixth Time is the Charm?

Good to see someone moving forward and learning to do new things.

Daily Create

I loved how for the Daily Create banana story she made her’s with a Kim Possible show reference!

Daily Create: January 13, 2025

I thought that this daily create was really good and it made me chuckle

Audio story

It was simple but all the sounds affects helped to easily understand the what was going on

Hated in the Nation Video Essay

I enjoyed this watching this video essay! Very well executed and great analysis.

Holding a “Black Mirror” to the World

I always look forward to this person’s post, I thin their posts are always good and this video essay was no exception!

Video Essay

I think that this was a really good start and I enjoyed watching it

Radio Bumper

This was really well made, but my favorite part was the use of radio static sounds in it

Daily Create 2/9

What a fun daily create! I will now consider this one of my latest musical discoveries! Thanks for sharing!

Daily Create: 2/13/25

I thought the idea of impractical jokes was really funny and was a good explanation for the curious bananas