I saw Bryan Mathers’ Trading Card Remix on Mastodon:
and I thought, “This could be a cool way to visualize course characters.” Is there a trading card assignment though? If there wasn’t before, thanks to the magic of the Assignment Bank, there is now! It’s an easy and fun way to #MakeArtDammit
You know, the old world was a total mess. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to. Everything was slow, chaotic, full of mistakes. But now? Now it’s different. Everything just… works.
The city feels alive, like it’s looking out for you. The machines take care of the hard stuff—things we used to stress about, they just handle it. No emotions, no second-guessing, no screw-ups. It’s efficient. It’s smooth.
People talk about freedom like it was some great thing, but honestly? It felt more like chaos. What we’ve got now? It’s better. Cleaner. Safer.
And the best part? I feel good. I feel happy. You do too, right?
A broken sign flashed blue neon, creating a rhythmic flicker over the alley’s slippery, damp asphalt. Potholes accumulated puddles that were too deep to be rainwater, reflecting the sky like obsidian shards. A instrument of brushed steel, its strange blue glow fading to a dying ember, lay beside a crumpled body. Rats, slender and plump, emerged from the darkness, scavengers in a concrete jungle where even rodents appeared to flourish. His story was buried in the endless urban night, and he was simply another fatality. The weight of the world, a tiny data chip promising salvation, shifted in the pocket of the man who had been his friend – or had he been? Trust was a currency long devalued in this city of shadows and circuits.
Stay Home – Living is Dangerous. Create some sort of graphic. Design the overall graphic to convey some sort of feeling or theme, but then have text saying something completely contradictory to the theme or feeling. Sort of like one of those old anti-motivational posters, but with more design than a black box with a white frame.”
I wanted to do something simple and creepy. Using the description of the assignment to create the creep factor.
I had to search for a suitable image that went along with the theme of tech noir. This particular image was built with the idea of constant surveillance even if you can’t tell. Yet I opted to put a visible eye then a hidden one.
Tech noir is investigations, conspiracies, and betrayals
It’s not always man vs. machine
That’s at least how I saw it in The Groundstar Conspiracy.
A research computer complex called Groundstar is destroyed in an explosion, killing six people and leaving one survivor named John Welles, who is suspected of stealing a miniaturized fuel system.
Talk about a classic bit when he is finally saves and comes to, he has amnesia!
Sticking to cliches who comes to investigate? A silver haired fox named Tuxan a classic anti-hero. His methods are questionable, but his hair is exquisite.
With some good old interrogation and surveillance, Tuxan tries to piece together Welles’s past and uncover the identities of his collaborators, who he believes are trying to silence Welles and prevent him from revealing their secrets. Everyone is very gun happy.
Violence is clearly everyone’s favorite solution.
Guess what the twists aren’t over!!! This movie is an absolute maze, and it messed with my head because there is truly no one you can believe.
The real John Welles was a computer technician who died shortly after the explosion! The man’s true name is Peter Bellamy!
Who is Peter Bellamy you may ask?
Honestly, he’s not the victim; he’s just a sucker who was used and then thrown away, somehow the center of everything, yet in the end easy to disp. Our protagonist was caught in a web of manipulation and deceit. Left with whatever scraps of his true life he could remember, of course, more accurately whatever scraps he was told about or had nightmares about.
This tale ends with Tuxan admitting he was weaving a web to catch the true conspirators. I was right not to like him from the start. Bellamy was simply bait, the true John Wells now on ice, or should I say in it… low blow, I know, but guess what’s lower, his body! Kidding, kidding, he’s in a drawer, not a grave.
This was all to catch this mean son of gun. Smug, rich, and a weird amount of free time.
After all that I need a nap. But first let me give you a character map!
“The Groundstar Conspiracy” Key Characters
Honorable mention!
This is truly a classic of the tech noir genre.
Morally ambiguous characters, the blurring of Lines between good and evil, The constant surveillance and paranoia. I mean it was funny in a creepy way.
“I see you”
The film’s visual style and atmosphere evoke a sense of suspense and unease, reflecting the core anxieties and themes of tech noir.
M. Marshall 1.17.2025
My goal for this class is to become more digitally adept and get to enjoy the storytelling part of it. I obviously cannot say for sure what this class will be about until I’ve done it, but I am looking forward to storytelling and I am hoping to get to exercise creativity in this course. Ideally, by the time this is finished I will have a whole blog that looks like nothing I could have ever imagined being able to create before starting this class, maybe that I can show off to friends. Maybe after TikTok goes blogging will be the next big thing. Maybe a goal would be to have the little widgets leading to a real link/page that isn’t just my main page? I can feel a reflection on this post coming at the end of the semester, so I am trying to think of quantifiable goals that can or cannot be met. Maybe to be able to somehow incorporate my cat, Daisy into this blog? Maybe increase my media literacy? I hope to accomplish at least a few of these things.
To start: Here is little Daisy about a day after I adopted her!
So my final video went over 2 minutes, but it still stayed within the 2 minute range so hopefully Aggressive Technologies doesn’t kick me out of their conference.
My goal with this video was to purposely make it spontaneous and free flowing. I realized that the majority of my output in this class was meticulously planned and scripted out. For a reflection video such as this, I wanted to let all of my thoughts out in free flow, but this also made it difficult to keep it under 2 minutes as I’m a rambler.
What a crazy few months it has been. From our humble beginnings with setting up our blogs and writing film reviews, all the way to making collaborative radio shows and final projects that showcased all of the different technologies we worked with. This class has been an adventure that I would have never imagined back in January, and I’m grateful for all of the lessons and experiences I had.
Thank you to Professor Bond for steering us in the right direction every week without limiting our creative scopes. I hope to take the skills I learned to enhance my work in the future, as well as my daily life.