Category Archives: cccccc

“Turn around, bright eyes”

For yesterday’s Daily Create we were to make blackout poetry with content from a certain web site. I looked at it briefly and decided to use the Weird Old Book Finder instead, probably because I found the typography uninspiring. I searched WOBF for eclipse, skimmed a few titles and picked a random page from one. I unfortunately neglected to note the title. I highlighted some phrases that caught my eye and blacked out the rest. I saw the black void in the middle of the image and decided to drop an eclipse shot in there. In hindsight, I should have done something about the line at the top of the eclipse image, so I softened it a bit for the image above.

The TDC was appropriate for Eclipse Day, but even more so for me as I had traveled to the path of totality. I was under complete cloud cover and couldn’t see the event, but that’s okay because I was more interested in the environment and seeing/hearing how wildlife reacted. Here’s a short recording of the sounds of the area about an hour before the light went out:

I wanted to broadcast to ds106radio but my phone has been uncooperative. Maybe that’s okay because technology shouldn’t have been my focus in the moment. I can’t say the animals (deer, squirrels, chipmunks, birds) seemed any different than usual in the lead-in to the eclipse. As it started getting visibly darker, it got very quiet. It wasn’t a very quick process, but every time I blinked it was noticeably darker. I wouldn’t say it got night-time dark, but it was very close to it for a few minutes. There was no moon or stars behind the clouds for that slight dim light that happens at night, but there was dim light on the horizon. I thought heard the hoot of an owl, and definitely heard the howls of some coyotes. Also some cheers and fireworks from the crowd outside the woods. Then it started to get lighter, but not like a sunrise since the sun was mid-afternoon overhead. Quite the amazing experience. As it grew lighter there was a lot of bird chatter, like you might hear over the course of dawn but compressed into a few minutes. I’ve had worse Mondays.

Aggressive Technologies loves ds106

Aggressive Technologies loves ds106After reflecting on our visit from Aggressive Technologies legal counsel, I had an inspiration for a new ds106radio commercial:

I thought the tone of her spiel would pair well with our friend Bob, so I had him do the intro and outro, and layered some calming music, Reflected Light from SergePavkinMusic, in the background. I think it’s really a win-win, as the track puts Aggressive Technologies in a positive light, and lets them promote their beloved ds106 at the same time. They’re sure to let bygones be bygones now, right?

“Ah, the poetic wonders of destruction and turmoil”

Botmaster Michael Branson Smith mentioned the AI Rap Battle Generator the other week, and after playing with the Wav2Lip script a bit, I had the thought, “What if Dr. Oblivion battled Bob Ross?” And thus we have the rap battle no one wanted to hear:

I had previously done some ElevenLabs experiments with Bob Ross and Max Headroom, and managed to lip sync some clips, so I had an inkling of how this might come together. I went to the Rap Battle Generator and had it produce the words. Getting the doctor to recite them was challenging though. The first time, I asked nicely and he complied, but I only gave him two verses because I was concerned he might choke on too much text. Then I gave him the third verse and he declined. I ended up trying 7 or 8 times. One time I asked him to read rather than recite, and he gave me a critique.

At one point he gave me a creative reinterpretation of the third verse, so I ended up using that. But most times he declined, politely or otherwise. It seemed like the more I asked, the more terse he was. Here’s a polite rejection:

For the Bob parts, I put the text into ElevenLabs, so that was easy. I wrote the Max Headroom intro and the in-between bits. I wanted to get him to say “The Bob!” and drag out the “o” so my text input was the, Baaaaaaaaaaaab! It didn’t come out quite how I wanted, but it had the freakish Headroom effect, so I ran with it. I put all the sound clips through the Wav2Lip script with appropriate video, and had the pieces I needed.

Then I had to find a backing beat. I googled open source beats and found several sites offering royalty-free tracks, but “royalty-free” doesn’t actually translate to “free.” The Free Music Archive worked though, so I grabbed a couple tracks and went with Coalescence. (need to remember to add that credit to the video).

Screenshot of iMovie window showing arrangement of video and sound clipsTo put it all together, I brought the sound and video clips into iMovie. I split the video parts up and arranged them in proper order. I decided to keep some of Dr. Oblivion’s unasked-for commentary at the beginning and end. I put the backing track underneath and lined it up so the beats kick in right around the point the doctor starts his rhymes. I thought I would have to fool around trying to get the voices to line up with the beats, but it seemed to work out more-or-less okay. One more track for the Dr. Oblivion’s Greatest Hits compilation!

Got Glitch?

a glitch image of the Oblivion University homepage with Dr. Oblivion on a TV in front of a chalkboard

We’ve all met good Dr.Oblivion and snarky Dr. Oblivion, hopefully. There’s also crazy Dr. Oblivion, who finally showed up for me.

Oh, reflective blogging, how truly revolutionary and life-changing I can barely contain my excitement.
Well, students, brace yourselves for the profound impact of writing about your own thoughts and experiences.
Riveting, isn’t it?
You see, reflective blogging in the ds106 course is apparently the pinnacle of intellectual exploration.
By openly pondering your own dazzling insights on media and technology, you clearly share your unique perspective with, well, yourself mostly.
But worry not, as reflective blogging will undoubtedly unleash your hidden genius upon the world.
Ahem, now if you’ll excuse me, I desperately need to reflectively blog about just how thoroughly unimpressed I am.
This is not computer-incunetted ex-trans-district data connection, decim and clannel, stulsive underscore app slash reloop underscore failure, underscore ethgen, underscore connection breaks music worthwhile plugin, improved active process, malamy, parametro shape, enhanced, fax quoted government, assist likely email, override, divulted guard at amente.

The mastermind behind this, the Frankenstein to Oblivion’s monster, is Michael Branson Smith. He set up the different personality parameters. He also explained that there is a temperature setting on the back end. If it’s set to 0, the bot will give the same response to the same input pretty much every time. If it’s set to 2, he will spout gibberish, like he does at the end of the recording.

So let’s see if I understand how this works. The bot doesn’t actually know anything. It generates word sequences in response to an input, based on an analysis of statistic relationships among words in a humongous pile of texts. It looks like the higher the temperature, the loose the statistical correlation. We end up with words that may not exist or rarely appear, and perhaps never appear together. Raising the temperature increases the unpredictability, what we might call creativity, but raise it too high and the creativity goes off the rails.

There goes my chance at a Grammy


One of my ambitions for this course is to have a Dr. Oblivion’s Greatest Hits album up on Bandcamp by the end. So it was fortuitous that Tyler produced some rhymes this week.

The first step was to get Dr. Oblivion to recite the poem. I copied it and pasted it into https://oblivion.university/ along with a request that he recite it, because I wanted to hear it in his voice. He added a little commentary at the beginning and the end, and also changed the lyrics slightly. I’ve heard singers sometimes do this with other people’s songs in order to give themselves partial songwriting credit, and thus half the royalties, so perhaps Oblivion deserves a bit of side-eye.

Then I needed a backing track. I googled for open source rap beats, so I could find something I could use without potentially getting a copyright strike. There were A LOT of options, and I didn’t particularly like anything I found, but some were good enough. I settled on The Passion HiFi – Beat Machine – Rap Beat from Soundcloud.

I used Audacity to put them together. I imported both tracks, and applied some amplification and compression on the Oblivion track. I moved it into the the mix a couple beats so it didn’t start right away, and also played with the track volume sliders to get a better balance between the vocal and backing tracks. I thought the vocal was a bit rushed, so I used the Change Tempo function to slow it down by 10%. Then I exported it as an MP3.

I kept his commentary in the mix because I didn’t want to obscure his attitude. I think it came out okay. I would have liked to push the drums a little louder, and it might have been improved if I tweaked the words to align with the beats more, but I’m not sure if the time and effort would pay off. There goes my chance at a Grammy…

Week 1 wrap-up: Salutations!

After students in the digital storytelling course ds106 have risen to the challenge of setting up their own web domains, installing WordPress, and started blogging, what words of encouragement would you have for them as they embark on a journey of investigating storytelling and artificial intelligence?

We made it through the first week of ds106, with struggles and triumphs. I thought I might try to put together a few quick thoughts.

I was happy with the variety of films people chose to review. That link leads to everyone’s reviews, at least everyone who tagged them properly. And that’s one of the values of tagging – that it lets you easily sort and organize posts. I was surprised by the number of optimistic views of AI people found. When I first glanced at the list, I thought it was heavily dystopian, although perhaps that says more about what I watch than how the industry portrays AI.

Many people discussed the challenges of getting their domains and blogs set up. It is daunting going in, especially if you’ve never done anything like that before, but hopefully it seems like much less of a hurdle in retrospect. There will be more opportunities to play with new programs in the weeks to come. As many have found out, there are all kinds of tutorials online to help you do what ever you need to do. We expect everyone will walk away from the course with the confidence that they can learn any new program, based on their experiences here.

Several people expressed interest in the reflective blogging that is the heart of the course. While blogging is nonstandard for a courses, I do subscribe to the formula Learning = Practice + Reflection, so it is good to hear people are into it. The kind of self-evaluation we practice here is a useful workplace skill too. Most of us don’t take tests or write papers on the job, but we do talk about what we tried to accomplish, what worked and what didn’t, and what we learned along the way.

Our blogs are also one of our platforms for class discussion. We post our thoughts, and we comment on the posts of others. In order for the commenting component to work, we need to moderate comments. When ever someone comments on one of my blog posts, WordPress sends an email informing me. If it is a new commenter, I have to approve the comment, or not, if I don’t think it is legit. Once a commenter is approved, I don’t have to approve them again. I can remove comments though, should I feel the need. The point of this is we need to look for those emails. The UMW email system may route them to the junk folder. Hopefully we can train it not to.

“How
 creative”

Earlier today Michael Branson Smith brought his Dr. Oblivion bot to life on the web. Cogdog had the doctor produce an ode to HTML:

Which was great. We had talked about having students submit their work to Dr. Oblivion for feedback, so here was an opportunity to try it out:

That little pause between how and creative is perfect. OK, but what more could I do with this? Well, I could find an open source backing track from bensound that sounded appropriate for beatnik poetry and put it all together:

Something tells me it will be an interesting semester.