At the suggestion of Jim Groom (the co-professor of this class) I decided to base my character on my cat. It is important to me that readers know art is not a hobby of mine, nor a talent. I felt content enough with how the drawing came out to share it, but it is not anything revolutionary or particularly well drawn.
Drawn by me (2025)
Regrettably, I did not save the information I put into the Google form, so some of the information will not be verbatim and based off memory and it will not cover every single question asked.
Name: D41SY (previously Daisy)
Archetype: Anti-hero
Place and date of birth: Jantra City (It’s a word for industrial in Bengali, I believe) April 27th, 2124.
Occupation: A(n unwilling) member of the government’s military.
Marital status: Single and never married
Bio: The government kidnapped people’s household pets and turned them into part-robots in order to create an army of animals that citizens would not be able to, in good conscious, fight back against or hurt. D41SY is one of these animals. I need to continue to develop this idea.
Favorite food: Rice cakes (this is true to real life too)
Favorite movie: watching a live video of fish swimming around in a tank.
Favorite possession: Her next meal (also true to real life)
I would like to base the story around a dystopian government taking advantage of empathy to control the population. I’m big on sappy, happy endings though, so don’t worry too much.
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.
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.
As an introduction, my dog’s name is Cavi and she is a 6 year old golden doodle with lots of energy. She gets super excited about lots of things, especially going for car rides and seeing new people. I wanted to do this assignment because I wanted to share my dog and I’d actually never made a Tiktok before this assignment. I found a video of my dog and browsed for the perfect sound. I found a sound called the “Jackass theme” which I thought was the best option after hearing it along with the video. Don’t believe me? Look for yourself!
When picking an assignment, I try to pick something feasible that speaks to me. Like my mother, I am long winded. I can talk about anything for any amount of time if I’m allowed to, so this blog thing has really opened up an outlet for me. So, a captive audience is really my thing.
And so is music! It bothers me when people say things like “I feel things deeper than other people” or “I have a really strong connection to music”. Everyone feels things deeply! Everyone has a really strong connection to music! I think assuming that something is more personal to you or that you understand a general human experience on a deeper level than others perpetuates an idea that our uniqueness is what separates us and not what provides a greater ability to diversify human experience. But now I’m rambling about things that no one is looking to read in a blog post about a song.
The song I chose comes from my 7 hour playlist of songs that I feel in my chest when I listen to them, I could really choose any song on this playlist and talk for a long time about the way that it makes me feel, but the song I chose is Pilot with a Fear of Heights by Felicity.
Felicity, for her 2018 single, Pilot with a Fear of Heights
The first verse she sings about trying to leave a former relationship and its memories behind, hoping they’ll turn into ghosts. She is afraid of someone that she can’t stop thinking about, someone she loves. The first verse is very nice, but it’s the clapping indicating that the chorus is beginning (at exactly 00:45, if you’re wondering) that makes me feel like things are really getting good.
I’ve been thinking ’bout you all night Like a pilot with a fear of heights You got me thinking like ooh, ooh
Singing about a pilot with a fear of heights as a metaphor for someone that you’ve been with and can’t stop reliving the memory of? I just remember hearing that and thinking it was so brilliant. To be honest, I hadn’t really heard the saying about a pilot with a fear of heights before this song, which made the saying especially revolutionary. The line you got me thinking like ooh, ooh may not be particularly unique, but it’s the way that she sings it that really hammers in the feeling. It makes me feel understood on a deeper level.
I’ve been thinking ’bout you all night Like a tiger that’s afraid to bite You got me thinking like ooh, ooh
It’s ironic, isn’t it? The tiger can’t survive without catching and killing (or, biting) its prey. The pilot can’t work without flying an airplane in the sky, but it’s terrifying! And she can’t be happy without a relationship which is full of turmoil. Sometimes when I hear this song I feel like a pilot with a fear of heights myself. I myself have a fear of heights, except I just can’t help but look down. It’s the adrenaline rush, I guess. I would definitely say this song gives me an adrenaline rush.
This is so unnatural That we’re on this level ‘Cause my heart’s surrendering For this new beginning
This verse feels so fresh and wild. It’s really important to hear her vocals in this to really capture the feeling the song gives you. Of course, the audience for this song is probably aimed towards young women and teenage girls, so those in a separate demographic from me may not enjoy it as I do, but it effervescently brings you to the feeling of a new relationship.
I’ve been thinking ’bout you all night Like a fire that’s afraid to light
In the second and final chorus Felicity compares herself to that of a fire which is afraid to light. Jumping into a new situation, whether it be a relationship, job, activity, etc. can be very nerve wracking, but it is that very thing that will bring you joy and life. It is the very thing that brings you to your destiny.
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.
Your bank account’s worse nightmare and lady of the Salt Blue clan. Born on 08/20/2060…error…information deleted… Born on ??/??/????. She was raised under her single mother and forever absent father at the age of 5 she was sold to a repair shop to be an apprentice. Under the gang soon worked her way to become the top hacker. Hidden in the dark shadows and slowly hacking away in a broken world.
“Turn it off and let it burn” -Max
She loves eating meat but, in today’s society it’s hard to get the real stuff since most is synthetic meat. Although she isn’t a drinker her favorite is a blue martini from the Gear. A night club down the street from her. Favorite colors are red and blue since they pop up the most often on her screens. 100 ways to fix a computer is her favorite book and one of the first books she ever got. On the other hand, her favorite book in called blue moon romance….error….Information edited…..Her favorite movie is Brookshire murders. Finally, her favorite item is the Cyber Screwdriver, helpful for opening doors and zapping enemies in an emergency.
Your bank account’s worse nightmare and lady of the Salt Blue clan. Born on 08/20/2060…error…information deleted… Born on ??/??/????. She was raised under her single mother and forever absent father at the age of 5 she was sold to a repair shop to be an apprentice. Under the gang soon worked her way to become…
I began with the name Matrix since it’s very noir and ended with the name Max since it’s very gender neutral. I did not have a specific idea in mind so thinking of a good image that suited her took a while. She is inspired by hackers with deep dark circles and no social lives.
I decided to work on the 256 Points Assignment this week. I used Procreate to make a portrait of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Terminator. It was an interesting process as I didn’t have a brush small enough to work pixel-by-pixel, so I instead had to create blobs and then erase them down in order to get the shape I wanted.
Who said what? This quote on this graphic can seem very confusing, as you can see Harrison Ford’s character in Blade Runner, Rick Deckard, saying the iconic line delivered by Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator, with it being quoted by Major Motoko Kusanagi, the main character in the Japanese cyberpunk anime series, Ghost in the Shell. All of these characters share similar characteristics. One being that they are all iconic characters in the cyberpunk, tech-noir genre. Also, they are all lone-wolf, hard-shell main characters of these pieces of media, navigating their own complex, dystopian worlds. Haunted by their traumatic pasts, the lines between right and wrong are blurred, making them question their own actions or motivations. They tend to have a cynical outlook, enforcing their ‘lone-wolf’ persona in order to protect their own feelings and to not relive the trauma that got them to be how they are in the first place. These characters are one of the many archetypes in cyperpunk/tech-noir media.
I have never made a GIF before, so I would count this as a first for this assignment! Although I did not pick my all-time favorite or least-favorite movie, I chose to do one of my favorite movies that are apart of the tech-noir/cyber punk genre, Blade Runner 2049. I made a GIF from Blade Runner 2049 because it perfectly captures the essence of the tech-noir genre, a fusion of futuristic technology and noir-inspired storytelling. There’s something weirdly beautiful about its world, a sprawling dystopia drenched in neon and rain, where every frame feels like a staring at a piece of art. For me, creating a GIF from this film was about more than isolating a visually stunning moment; it was about preserving and sharing the atmosphere that defines the genre. In tech-noir, the technology isn’t just a backdrop, it’s a character, deeply intertwined with the human life. The GIF I chose captures a moment where the main character feels truly isolated, even with his once cherished companion standing in front of him. It’s a way to distill the soul of the film into a loop, reflecting the endless, cyclical nature of the questions it asks about what it means to be alive. Creating this GIF felt like paying homage to a genre that explores dystopian themes and what our advancements in technology could lead us to in the future.
| 4K Drone Footage
