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 Iāve 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 isnāt 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!
Hello, and welcome to my blog. In all honesty, this is the most technologically advanced thing Iāve ever done. When I was younger, I wanted to have a blog, but my mom wouldnāt let me. Similar to Ryan and Creed, from The Office, my mom allowed me to share my thoughts on a Word document. I guess the world was not prepared for whatever I had to say.
(Me, 2007) What would she have had to say?
Beginning this class was definitely anxiety inducing for me, as I have little-to-no experience in terms of anything related to tech. Maybe in my younger years, Iāve changed the color of a Tumblr blog or figured out how to use Minecraft, but those days are not representative of my current skill set.
I was able to guide myself through creating this website; however, pretty much immediately I hit a wall: I realized I had no idea how to edit the website or even access WordPress. I ended up booking an appointment with the Digital Knowledge Center. I met with one of the students working there named Feli. They were very helpful and I was able to give my blog a little theme which was very exciting! This was very helpful for getting started and learning the ropes. I do not have a crystal ball, but I see many DKC appointments for this class in my future.
(The Wizard of Oz, 1939)
I feel much less nervous and much more prepared for the class after that visit. I am now excited and intrigued for what the rest of the class will look like. Iām still waiting for the aha! moment for the name of my blog title, only time will tell, I guess.
I decided to watch Black Mirror (S3E4, San Junipero) for my Tech Noir media choice. I really enjoyed this episode and connected with some of the considerations about eternal life and whether or not to upload oneās consciousness into a cloud (side note: I probably wouldnāt). It was very beautiful and I really appreciated the LGBTQ+ representation.
Iām kind of running out of things to talk about, so this is where I will end it. I feel really good about this so far and hopefully I will continue using my resources and find a sense of confidence within this sphere.
The point of the film review assignment was to get people thinking about the Tech Noir concept, how it has been portrayed in media, and what it means to us. It’s not meant to be a generic or conventional film review as much as a way for you to think about the theme and connect some dots.
It’s also an opportunity to practice some blogging skills like linking and embedding images and other media. If we’re going to discuss video, incorporating clips or screenshots of the points we’re discussing is a good idea. In some cases you can find usable clips on Youtube, which can be easily embedded in a post. You may be able to find images of scenes through Google. My Mac is giving me a hard time about taking screenshots of Netflix and some other services, but it appears that the Windows Print Screen function works. In order to get the shots I used in my post, I found the video on an alternate site and recorded a portion with Quicktime. Then I imported the screen recording into iMovie and saved relevant images. I really need to find a better process.
As evidence of the power of tagging, you can see our group’s film reviews at https://ds106.ai/category/film-review/. Tags are a great way of organizing posts, and allow us to bring them together. We can see how we as a group see the idea of tech noir in various media.
One review found a Black Mirror episode dealing with transhumanism ideas, which may be utopian or dystopian depending on one’s point of view. This review also adds images and links, exercising the power of digital media. The post from My blog (not my blog) discusses a Black Mirror episodeĀ which touches on issues of surveillance, identity rights and terms of service, and the dystopian possibilities of a corporation claiming ownership over one’s life story. Another person looked at a 90s classic, The Matrix, noting its twisted reality and impressive effects. I wonder, if a term made up for the movie makes its way into the dictionary, is that an indication of living in the matrix? These posts show a good start to blogging, but we can push it further – more links, more media, more connections. Keep the reviews rolling!
For my film review project, I decided to watch season 3, episode 4, of the show Black Mirror. I chose it because I had heard good things about it before, and I hoped it would be an interesting watch, it was. I googled āBest Black Mirror episodeā and found this article by William Earl, Meredith Woerner, and Jennifer Maas. It said this episode (San Junipero) was one of two Black Mirror episodes to have a happy ending, which was good enough for me.
As a queer person, I was pleasantly surprised to see LGBTQ+ representation between the two main characters of the episode, Kelly (left) and Yorkie (right).
It was fun to be taken through the 80ās, 90ās, and early 2000ās. Of course, it takes you a bit to understand whatās going on. They reference that there are only a few hours until midnight, Kelly asks Yorkie if her pain (something) is set to low. Evidently, it is revealed that theyāre in a simulation, called San Junipero for elderly people and people who have passed and uploaded their consciousness into this simulation.
Kelly and Yorkie meet at a nightclub, the episode follows the two of them falling in love with each other. Yorkie is only a few months from dying, and wants to stay in San Junipero; however, that requires the sign off of a family member or a spouse. For religious reasons, Yorkieās family did not approve of her being gay, nor her desire to stay in San Junipero. Eventually, in real life, Kelly marries Yorkie so that she can stay, Yorkie dies and her consciousness is uploaded into the cloud. Kelly struggles with whether or not to join Yorkie or her husband in the afterlife, but ultimately decides to join Yorkie in the cloud.
It was very freaky to think about existing for forever, and what forever even means. As a child, I was raised going to church, one particular hymn contained the lyrics, āWhen weāve been here ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, weāve no less days to sing Godās praise than when we first begun.ā (John Newton, 1779) I no longer attend church, but when I thought of this prospect then (and now) I was horrified. It was uncomfortable for me to think 10 years into the future, let alone 10,000. Add on uploading my consciousness to a cloud, forever existing in some kind of limbo state? I think I would pass.
I would be very interested to learn about advances made involving uploading oneās data into an online sphere. Iāve heard of advancements in medical technology causing longer life expectancies, or the man with no plan to die. I would also be interested to learn about advancements in virtual reality, it is a curious idea that one day we could fully experience another reality inside of our own rooms. I wonder if the creators may have been hasty having it be a small magnetic coin to go on the forehead, and not a large VR headset.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by my enjoyment of this episode. I could see myself enjoying another episode of Black Mirror if there were more happy endings.
The other day friend of ds106 Grant Potter noted that the tech noir adjacent theme of surveillance is a theme on the Criterion Channel this month. One of the films on their list is The Anderson Tapes, which conveniently happens to be available on tubitv. I was drawn to it because it’s directed by Sidney Lumet (whose book Making Movies is highly recommended to anyone interested in the topic), and finding out that it has Christopher Walken’s first steps sealed the deal.
We noted that there’s a sort of retro-futurism to tech noir. This is definitely retro, dated by the photo of Nixon on the government office wall. Those weird computerish bleeps and bloops in the soundtrack and trailer are supposed give a pseudo sci fi feel, I suppose. It’s a conventional heist film, except that the viewer isn’t the only one watching. From the Wikipedia entry:
Unwittingly, Anderson is under pervasive surveillance almost the entire operation, from the earliest planning to the execution. This includes a private detective hired by Werner to eavesdrop on his mistress Ingrid; the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, checking on a released drug dealer; the FBI, investigating Black activists and the interstate smuggling of antiques; and the IRS, which is after the mob boss who is financing the operation. The various surveilling Federal, state, and municipal agencies all have different missions (and targets), so none is able to “connect the dots” and anticipate the robbery.
Throughout the story we see cameras, screens, wires and recorders. Everything is watched, everything is recorded. A big difference from today is that everything is siloed. I guess they hadn’t figured out the power of data fusion back then. In the end, everything gets erased because most of it wasn’t exactly legal. Oh to live in such innocent times.
One of the underappreciated highlights though has to be Martin Balsam’s toupee.
I am creating a course aggregation site for the current Tech Noir ds106 course, and itās been a while. Thankfully Alan Levine and Tom Woodward have been kind enough to help me hack the old gold TwentyTwelve WordPress theme to get the mother blog to show excerpts (not native to the theme) and now maybe even include photos.
Chopper from Minority Report looks a lot like Slave-1
Turns out getting excerpts to work on the main blog page was pretty easy thanks to Alan, who figured out you just need to change the line in content.php of the TwentyTwelve theme from
<?php if ( is_search() ) :
to
<?php if ( is_search() or is_home() ) :
That worked brilliantly. Now in terms of getting the feed aggregator FeedWordPress to pull images, Tom created the plugin Noir Chopper that not only creates excerpted posts but also pull in image if there is oneā¦so this post is a test.
Update:Ā Tom’s plugin worked a treat! In order to get posts on the homepage to include the first image (category pages had them out-of-the-box) I had to include a clean version of content.php for that theme.
My first week of ds106 was productive! This is my first DI course, so it was a lot of information to take in, for me! On the second day of class I went to the DKC because I overwhelmed myself with information by going down a syllabus-domain-mastodon-discord-cyberpunk-tech noir – RABBIT HOLE, and I freaked myself out. Luckily for me, Feli from the DKC was fantastic and helped relieve me of any worries that I had. Feli gave me a pretty in-depth explanation of how this class works and showed me around on word press, how to create subdomains, and showed me a few different tools that could be helpful to me in the future.
Overall, I would say the first week was a complete success! I carefully followed the syllabus, went to the DKC, and completed my first 2 blog post.
Use new techniques that will make my content engaging.
I want to learn more about my creative side. Most courses that I’ve been taking are business related. Some possible skills I’d like to work on: Selecting imagery and music, feeling more comfortable with recording myself, and familiarizing myself with these new online publishing formats.
I tried to make a ds106 comeback last year with the AI 106 course, but it turns out I wasn’t even up to getting off the couch. It was a long winter, and quite a few of my responsibilities were put on pause while I worked on my mental health. There are those moments we all face, and last Spring was one of them for me. I’m just fortunate I have such amazing folks around me online and off.
Film Noir and the dark technology of armored cars with shot from the film Criss Cross.
But this semester is a new day and the bava is back in the ds106 driver seat alongside Paul Bond. Paul gave me a free pass last spring with AI 106 and for that I’m forever grateful. The bummer was I really did want to jump back into the fray, and watching AI106 from the sidelines highlighted how much fun I was missing out on. The mock AI company Aggressive Technologies born from that course experience was absolutely brilliant, and to see that group dig into the ds106 ethos of joy was, well ….a joy.
Tech Noir bar from The Terminator
This week begins yet another chapter of ds106, this time focused on a topic that I have been thinking about doing for at least ten years: Tech Noir. My mind immediately goes to movies from the 40+ years ago like Alien, Blade Runner, Empire Strikes Back, and Terminator, but that’s just my opinion, man. As part of week 1’s intro, Paul and I discussed the broader noir theme in terms of 1940s Hollywood to help frame the qualified tech-focused nature of this genre that emerged in the late 70s and early 80s. In fact, since its inception the themes defining noirĀ quickly transcended film to include literature, design, video games, and much more.
Also, let’s not forget that back in the Spring of 2015 Paul, Martha Burtis, and I taught noir106 during my last full semester at UMW. So exactly ten years later we’re back to noir, but this time with a qualifier most relevant to our moment: technology. Paul did a nice job of locating Tech Noir in terms of the cyberpunk 80s in his “Tech Noir ds106” post::
Tech Noir was a thing of the 80s. The preceding decades had seen the horrors of the Vietnam War, the corruption of Watergate, years of inflation followed by a deep recession, with ah ever-present awareness that WWIII could be right around the corner. On top of that, computers were migrating from the realm of science fiction into peopleās everyday lives and homes. So that bleakness returned, in considering where we might be going as a society.
An interesting thing about Tech Noir and cyberpunk is that they tend to look at a near future, a future that may now be in the past, likeĀ 1984. One could argue the extent to which they were right or wrong in their visions, but I think the point of sci fi is not to be prophetic but to examine the current moment through an imagined setting.
Damn Paul’s good! He’s also very mindful that focusing too much on our interests defeats the purpose of ds106. We want to try and develop a theme and then have the class run with it in directions that interest them. As a result they should be more compelled to write, design, mash-up, and playact a world of media that buoy their creativity—thankfully noir is broad enough to contain multitudes.
A GIF from Richard Siodomak’s The Killers
The other thing I like about ds106 is it always inspires me to blog and comment, which are two of the things I resolved to do more of this year. ds106 is kinda like a gym for bloggers.
Finally, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that Mastodon has been feeling pretty fun these days. I know it has its limits, but I ‘ve been getting help with designing the the new old course site (thank you, Alan and Tom!), the daily creates are still on fire, we’re already streaming ds06radio there. Who knows, the social.ds106.us server could be a way of interfacing the students with the network like we could with Twitter. Hope springs eternal in the ds106 breast.
You know it’s good when you have Grant Potter dropping knowledge about Criterion’s current Surveillance Cinema series or the video game series Watchdogs or even that crazy Japanese contribution to Tech Noir: Tetsuo: the Iron Man. That’s just the kind of in-passing comraderie that made ds106 so amazing back in 2011 and allowed the class to move beyond the limits of our imagination. There’s something about having a loose, open space for sharing that makes the endeavor exciting. What’s more, given we control our own Mastodon server we can control the adverse effects given we control the vertical and the horizontal. I mean wasn’t that what this was all about?
Blah blah blah, it’s all fine and good to blog blog blog but ds106 is about making some art, dammit. All this analyzing is paralyzing, it’s time to play this dang thing….#4life!
Today’s Daily Create instructions were to visualize The Scream, but since I saw Down by Law way back when, “scream” suggests a different image. If I were smart I would have realized that someone must have made this GIF before, but as it is I just dove in and made my own. I used this video clip with Imgflip to make the base GIF, then opened it in Photoshop and deleted 3 of every 4 layers to bring the size down, then inserted the type layers and merged them with the image layers, rather tediously. There’s a better way to do that, I’m sure, and if I did this more often I might know and remember it. In any case, I made a thing, and that’s the whole point, isn’t it? #MakeArtDammit, as they say.
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 Iāve 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 isnāt 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.
Hello, and welcome to my blog. In all honesty, this is the most technologically advanced thing Iāve ever done. When I was younger, I wanted to have a blog, but my mom wouldnāt let me. Similar to Ryan and Creed, from The Office, my mom allowed me to share my thoughts on a Word document. I guess the world was not prepared for whatever I had to say.
I am creating a course aggregation site for the current 
