Category Archives: ds106

Talking Tech Noir, part deux

We’re working with a them of Tech Noir in ds106 this semester, and as I mentioned before, we can’t really expect the class to know what we’re talking about, so Jim and I recorded a half-hour discussion which hopefully brings some clarity. We discuss meanings, themes and history, where we are and where we may want to go.

We have a list of Tech Noir/Cyberpunk media to help people get familiar. Is there anything that should be added?

Tech Noir 106

Jim had talked about doing a Tech Noir themed course many years ago, and now we’re looking to revisit the idea. It feels appropriate to the times. I can’t expect everyone to be an aficionado of the genre though, so I’m thinking about ways to be expansive with it, to offer people more ways to connect. Incorporating cyberpunk is an obvious one. I also want to add Technopoly to bring a philosophical lens to the idea.
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“…a story, a tale we missed”

I was intrigued by Bryan Alexander’s book club proposal to read the Project 2025 document. Unfortunately I have too many summer projects competing for time and attention to participate meaningfully. But in the spirit of AI106 I have taken passages from the document and fed them to AI song generator Udio to make death metal tracks.

Restoring Limits

[Verse]
Ruling class, they slash and tear, they take away our rights
Centralize their power, far from American sights
Supra-national treaties bind us, never let us be
In the grip of bureaucrats, we lose our sovereignty

[Chorus]
Restoring limits, bring back the fight
Accountability, let’s make it right

Reclaiming Our Rights

[Verse]
Rulers climbing high, they can’t hear our cries
Treaties bind our hands, as the Constitution dies
Career pawns, unseen, they tighten the chains
Power games they play, and we’re the ones who pay

[Chorus]
Slash through the lies, expose their deceit
Tear down the walls, take back our streets
No backing down, we’ll stand and we’ll fight
United we’ll rise, reclaiming our rights

The prompt for these was:
Properly considered, restoring fiscal limits and constitutional accountability to the federal government is a continuation of restoring national sovereignty to the American people. In foreign affairs, global strategy, federal budgeting and policymaking, the same pattern emerges again and again. Ruling elites slash and tear at restrictions and accountability placed on them. They centralize power up and away from the American people: to supra-national treaties and organizations, to left-wing “experts,” to sight-unseen all-or-nothing legislating, to the unelected career bureaucrats of the Administrative State, heavy metal, death metal,

I’m not actually a death metal aficionado so I can’t give it a proper musical or lyrical critique. My guess is the site is mapping words and phrases to a statistical model of death metal lyrics to come up with the song, so I’m not surprised that “slash and tear” made it through. I think the songs get at a sense of the passage, while perhaps giving it more extreme coloration.

Challenge the Power

[Verse]
Restore our thinking to thrive
Establish truth, let it revive
No more interests’ clash, we’ll drive
Strength in analysis, we’ll arrive

[Chorus]
Challenge the power, break the flood
Independent minds, through the blood
Challenge the power, stand and fight
Free the thought, into the night

Revive the Mind

[Verse]
Restore the mind, eradicate the lie
Build a fortress, let the truth arise
Break the chains that bind, dismantle the guise
Return to the essence, intelligence revived

[Chorus]
Through the fire, through the night
Restore the truth, the guiding light
Break through walls, shatter might
In this battle, wisdom’s flight

This prompt was:
Restore DIE critical thinking. Establish mechanisms to restore analytic integrity and return to true intelligence-driven operations. The next Administration should eliminate the conflict of interest in the current customer-based model (in which the customer is always right) by enforcing time-tested procedures that guarantee independent analysis, even if it means challenging policymakers’ assumptions. The Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security’s leadership role should be expanded to include providing analytic top-line views and improve DIE transparency by highlighting diverging views., heavy metal, death metal,

I was wondering how it would interpret DIE – as an acronym or the word die? But given the context maybe it didn’t know what to do with the word. Or maybe the whole passage just doesn’t compute. It looks like Udio picked up some words and ran off in its own direction.

Torch of Integrity

[Verse]
The USAGM’s a story, a tale we missed,
Of faith and hope in shadows kissed.
A chance to shine, in world’s eyes wide,
Lost in the dark, where ideals hide.

[Chorus]
Burn the torch of honest days,
Journalistic light must blaze.

Shadows of Promise

[Verse]
The promise was bright as the sun
But shadows darken, and now it’s gone
Unbiased truth we failed to keep
A chance lost deep, in silence we weep

[Chorus]
Lost opportunity, our ideals are torn
In the darkness, will we ever be reborn?

The passage used here was:
The USAGM is a story of a lost opportunity both to help restore the world’s confidence in the promise and ideals of America and to set a high mark for journalistic integrity and unbiased reporting. , heavy metal, gothic metal,

These stayed a little more focused, probably because I only used one sentence as a prompt. So far, my intuitive feeling is that it is molding the inputs on a metal model. How would the character change if I made it dream pop or big band jazz? But I don’t think I want to go for an ironic tone here. A cut-up poetry approach might yield some interesting results. I could extract evocative or provocative phrases and put them together as prompts or use them as lyrics and see what the system does with them.

None of this gives any insight into Project 2025 or its relevance to education, but it is something of a pseudo-creative outlet.

Rustproofing

Yesterday’s Daily Create involved using one of the Photofunia effects to put text in rust. As usual, I did the most obvious thing and made a GIF from a verse of My My, Hey Hey. Maybe that’s only obvious to people of a certain demographic though. But since nothing exceeds like excess, I decided to do the whole song. I’m not sure if it was worth the effort. I like the idea in concept, but in practice it’s probably as tedious to watch as it was to make. A kinetic typography approach might have worked better, but definitely would have been a lot more work.

Photofunia has many interesting effects, some of which have shown up in Daily Creates before. What interests me is not so much the effects in themselves, but how they can be used as building blocks, and contribute to a bigger story. Not unlike our experiments in AI106 – we played with generative applications to make stuff, but where the course really succeeded was in what we made out of that stuff. They give you this but you make it that, to paraphrase a song of the past.

Final Week Summary

I wanted to use my character, Rikaro, for this video, but it made no sense to appeal to Aggressive Technologies since he is against them. I’m glad I took this class, since it made me explore my creative side through video-making, which is a skill I will improve from now on when making YouTube uploads. This has been an amazing class, especially since it is the final one before graduation. Thanks for the amazing semester everyone!

The Final Week of DS106

As DS106 comes to an end I look back at my transformative experience. I learned how to use creative narrative techniques with digital tools to create compelling stories. I also deepened my understanding of narrative structures and audience engagement. The course felt like a collaborative environment where students from diverse backgrounds shared insights and learned from each other’s unique perspectives. This combination of creativity and technology equipped me and other students with valuable skills applicable in various professional and personal contexts, emphasizing the power of AI in storytelling.

To create the video below I used Blabberize.com – Make a Blabber! to make Leo Storm talk. For the audio I used Realistic Text to Speech converter & AI Voice generator (speechgen.io) to write the script of what Leo would say. Once the script was complete, I uploaded the file to Blabberize and let the software do its thing and what you see below is the finished product. In the video Leo responds to the two prompts: What is the best thing you saw in the course? and hat was the best thing you made in the course? He also explains why Aggressive Technologies should support DS106. I hope you enjoy the video! Until Next Time!

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Final Video Assignment + Weekly Summary

This class has been very fun. I have enjoyed being able to do research into the digital world. Going to the Digital Knowledge Center has been fun to do to learn more about the digital world. I will look to continue learning more as I feel there is still so much to learn. I liked how we we able to do an assignment like this as I was able to get more creative opposed to a boring test.

AT Conference – The Finale

Let’s get started with the finale and then I’ll head into the details and process of this afterwards. I also wanted to start off saying that I have been having some connection issues and I have been trying but am unable to download my video from Canva and upload it to YouTube since it’s not making it past the processing stage. Therefore, I have attached the shareable link to my video from Canva and if that does not work for some reason either, I have screen recorded my video and will upload that here. The downside to the screen recording is the audio becomes slightly lower. My apologies but I’ve been trying my best and included a backup!

In this video, you can find my character Chuckles discussing the two prompts and why Aggressive Technologies should support DS106. My thought process behind this was to have a last moment with my character. I portrayed this through a radio talk journey of Chuckles heading out, similar to us students leaving for summer break/graduating!

For the first prompt – What is the best thing you saw in the course? The best thing in this course is Dr. Oblivion, he perfectly tied in this AI theme and fit perfectly with the course in general in how he would answer all our questions about AI and more. I also enjoyed how it was interactive and social while being a fully online course. For the second prompt – What was the best thing you made in the course? The best thing I made in this course I would say is my coffee video for one of the assignment banks. I got a potential business opportunity out of it. I am thinking of selling coffee in my neighborhood! Then I went in and discussed why Aggressive Technologies should support DS106.

My Process:

The very first thing I did was write up my script so that everything is organized. I then used Canva to make my video, a text-to-speech generator to get my character’s voice, Pexels for the car ride video, and lastly, Pixabay for the background music playing in the video.

That wraps up this final week as it was our only assignment! I absolutely loved this course once I got a hang of it, it was so refreshing to interact with students and their work every week. I hope you guys have a great summer break and if you are graduating, congratulations!

Passion, Young, Fever

The time has come where we wrap it all up and conclude this season. The finale, the end, or even the beginning?

I titled this last post “passion, young, fever” as it comes from my one of my favorite songs from my favorite band, ATEEZ, which I will embed here:

The lyrics talk about being thankful for your youth that prepared you for your future, and using your experiences and what you’ve learned to move forward and to let go of the pressures of life. It’s very special to me, and I bring it all together here because I think that is what ds106 has taught me: the passion of my peers and myself, the work we put into this, and how it’ll lead to a new chapter for me outside of my youth. I’m 20 years old taking this course and writing this, I still have so many years ahead of me, and I’ll use what I’ve learned here further on.

I talked about this in my video, which I will embed here,

but this is why Aggressive Technologies could use ds106! This is why the world could use ds106! Ds106 taught me passion, ds106 taught me creativity, ds106 taught me time management and gave me stress that made me want to rip my hair out and explode . . . but it helped me push forward.

I saw and read so many experiences throughout this class about people’s stress, but how they overcame it, and it is so heartwarming. I’m really proud of everyone in this class for what they have done, what they have created, and how they have succeeded.

I’m an optimist, but I think everyone in this class is going to go far. There are so many ideas that were brewed within this class, and often times, I really felt like I was one of the least creative people in this class, because everyone was just coming up with stuff that were beautiful and amazing and that I could have never thought of!

There is so much individuality within us all. We all are coming from different places, different lives, different stories, and maybe that’s the story we tell without needing to directly speak our experiences. We speak our stories through our ideas, through our creativity, through these projects. We speak our stories through our passion.

It goes beyond Aggressive Technologies, beyond AI, beyond our course characters, beyond ds106. Past this class, we will be living our lives and still be telling our stories. Each text we send is a digital story, each post we make is a digital story, and it goes beyond digitally, too!

Humans are just . . . really, really cool. Maybe this is coming from being a psychology major, but it is just so beautiful seeing how different our brains are, how individual everyone is. It makes me feel a lot better.

So, to finally stop rambling, I just want to thank everyone in this class for their hard work. I’m proud of you, if that means anything, and I wish you well in your lives. Additional thanks to anyone who commented on my works, you motivated me to continue instead of slamming my head into my desk or exploding. Many, many thanks to my groupmates through the group projects, for helping me with time management and producing beautiful ideas from within, and hearing me out on my own crazy ideas.

You all are great and amazing!!

So, this is Destiny and Sol signing out, but everyone take care of yourselves! <3