This week, my main challenge was keeping up with everything we were supposed to do. Organization has always been a weak spot for me, so I created a little to-do list and started checking things off. Every day brought new weather and a new challenge!
First, I did the character assignment. Iāve always loved making characters, so this was a lot of fun for me. One of my friends is also taking this class, so we worked together to make characters with a shared backstory. I even made our characters in the Sims 4 (I played a lot of Sims this week). You can find that post here.
Next, the daily creates. This was typically the first thing I did when I woke up each day. It was a good way to start my morning, even if some of it wasnāt my greatest work.
The three assignments took up the most amount of time. After looking through tons of possible assignments, I chose a photo editing assignment, a writing assignment, and one gif assignment. The writing assignment was probably my favorite as it garnered the funniest results.
I also read The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. It was definitely a new read for me, as Iāve never read a manifesto or such a specific opinion on technology. My review can be found here.
I think this week went very well. I feel good about my work and I have gotten more comfortable with WordPress.
What a week. There was a lot more work than the first week for sure. I did not take my advice from last week to start ahead of time and spread out the work, partially because of unexpected circumstances and partially due to other classes suddenly giving a lot of work that I didn’t expect and partially because I am a serial procrastinator.
What got me out of the gutter and back on my ass to run my creative mind again were the daily creates. I knew that I couldn’t procrastinate on these, as they needed to be completed within the posted date. I had lots of fun creating silly poems, collages, and even went hunting on a map for random words in my hometown and making a wacky story about it.
I’ll link to a post with a roundup of all of my daily creates for the week below. I actually got into such a habit of completing these that I ended up doing more than the required amount for the week!
Next order of business was the assignment bank. Just a note on the website UI and content itself, it’s very interesting to see all of these responses and assignments created way back in 2012 and beyond. It’s almost like a memory bank of DS106, and all of the creativity that has gone into the DS106 community over the years. These assignments took a little more creativity and effort but not too much, but I did choose to do relatively easy ones for this first week so it’ll most likely ramp up more in the coming weeks.
This one was a basic text edit over a preexisting photo of an AI robot coding, and I just added 106 into the image to propel DS106 into future relevancy. #4life
This was a fun one! I play this game daily and I never really played around with the creative mode and it was nice to bring in two of my cute dog pets into the frame for a screenshot of the world.
This was my favorite for the week. As I mentioned in my week 1 post, I used to run a Finsta of my own, so it was nice to envision what my favorite Disney character would do if he was an influencer.
Next I edited my blog. To be honest, I’ve always been into minimalist designs, and I often think that the plain yet clean aesthetic is the one that appeals to me the most, even looking at blogs throughout the years. I created various categories that would sort my posts on the right side of my homepage for easier access to my posts, and removed some of the sample prompts and layout to create a clean, no frills look. I swear I actually did some customization! I made the background an ice blue that can hardly be recognized by the human eye, but I swear it was my best attempt to bring in some personality to my otherwise mundane and basic blog. As a future revision, I hope to write an “about me” page and link it at the top somewhere.
Participation is something I could have done a better job with this week. I commented on a few blogs right after finishing my assignments for the week (on Friday), so it definitely wasn’t on my mind to browse throughout the week. Although, this assignment bank post that was done by Tyler was a fun read! It was an assignment where after inserting a birth year, the task is to create a poem with generated words that are relevant to that year within the Merriam-Webster yearly list. Although the assignment was to write a poem, he identified his creation as more of a rap, and it flowed together really nicely! His post inspired me to put some more thought into which types of assignments I can be creative with in the future.
The course character assignment is something I had TOO much fun with this week. I am a huge gamer, and I took this opportunity to take inspiration from one of the newly released champions in League of Legends, Hwei. I took his sinister roots and backstory and turned it into something relevant to AI, keeping his core identity intact in the process while putting my own spin on the character.
It was so cool to link his character to the Artist archetype, as in the game, he is quite literally an artist with a gigantic paintbrush that throws ink of death at the sight of an enemy, acting as the team’s damage dealer and artillery mage. While he doesn’t have these bad-ass abilities in his course character creation version, I decided to focus more on his moral compass and the tragedies of his past that created his skewed viewpoint on the world around him, turning him to AI tools to plot the end of humankind.
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto article was an interesting read. It was essentially a lengthy dissertation about the positives of technology and how it was going to lead us all to the promised land. I didn’t agree with the sentiments, but I did make some thoughtful comparisons to my own opinions and how different it was from my WALL-E review. Dr. Oblivion’s response surprised me the most, as he absolutely agreed with all of my comments. However, this made me feel some sort of eerie way. almost as if I finally realized that Dr. Oblivion, just like any other form of AI, shares no form of common goal with humans for the survival and prosperity of mankind.
Finally for my film review revisions, I made a few revisions to talk more about the deeper AI themes and gained some perspective from Dr. Oblivion. He was mostly agreeing with my points, but that alone was enough for me to strengthen my arguments.
What a crazy week this was, both in and out of DS106. I will make sure to not procrastinate next week, but I said this last week as well, so who knows when I’ll start holding myself accountable
Man, we did a lot of stuff this weekā¦ well it feels like we did. But it also feels like we didnāt because I was having fun with a lot of these projects. Here is how it went for me.
The first thing I decided to do was read the articles about how to improve my post writing. I learned a lot and realized I was not doing all that I could to make my posts the best they could be. Over this course I am going to try and improve my posts week by week and hopefully get them up to par. You can see my full thoughts here.
The next two things I attacked were some assignments from the assignment bank. Iām not going to lie; I had a tough time picking because there were so many to choose from and they all seemed fun. I ended up going with Never Fear ā Itās Words of the Year, a writing assignment, and Say It Like the Peanut Butter, a visual assignment. I wanted to spread out the style of what I am doing so I can learn some more skills. For the writing assignment I had to write a poem with words that were fully recognized by Webster in a particular year. I chose 1991, my birth year, and this is how it went. I was surprised when Paul thought it would be cool to run it through Dr. Oblivion to see if he could make a real song out of it. I canāt wait to see the results. For the visual assignment I had to make a gif. from a movie that is essential to major plot points. I chose to do āAlienā and compare the emotional response it creates to a similar plot reveal in āThe Thingā. You can see the results here. I canāt wait to do more next week.
The next thing I did was create my character. This one took me a while because I wanted to create someone who was different than me. I thought that if something came up where I had to write a post as this character, I would want something challenging that would make me think like someone else. I tend to be very accepting of new information and think of all the possibilities while decision making. I made this character Kevin, who would resemble the evangelist archetype and be a die-hard AI rights activist demanding total AI freedom. I do not agree with this sentiment, but I believe this will be a fun character to explore. Meet Kevin here.
The next post I did was about all my daily creations. I thought it would be good to put these as one post because I feel a rapid fire visual of what I did would be the best way to display it. Not a lot to say other than I really like doing these. See my week of daily creations here.
Then I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Oblivion for the first timeā¦ That was an experience. I donāt want to ruin the surprise so, if you havenāt seen my post about my movie review re-writeā¦ check it out here. You will not be disappointed.
Last assignment I did was read the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. It was an interesting read, I didnāt agre with it too much, but it had some valid things to say. It was a far cry away from the main character in my iRobot movie review. You can read it here, itās a long one.
Iāll admit I wasnāt the best this week at commenting on other blog posts. I only did a few. I went to the page every day and would read, but I get kind of gun shy when commenting on other peopleās work. I will work to do better on this next week.
I also didnāt do much with blog customization this week. I changed the colors slightly and I changed some text and added a few tags, but I really didnāt get too far into the weeds. I figured out how to embed gif and video and pictures so thatās a plus! I will try better next week to add some more flare.
All in all, it was an eventful week. I got a lot of work done and learned a lot. I can’t wait to dig more into the assignment bank and pick some wild ones. See you all next week!
This week featured the uphill battle of trying to set up a website. That was the most challenging part. I spent a better part of Tuesday’s snow day working on it. It was unintuitive, but I manufactured something resembling a functioning site. While it was difficult, It was much more fun than I expected. I hope thatās a good sign of what is to come.
Throughout the week I continued editing, exploring the ds106 sites and working on the movie assignment. I watched Metropolis. Writing that review was a whole new challenge, as I somehow could not figure out how to add tags. I couldnāt find the editing bar to add tags, and it took me a solid twenty minutes before I realized it was as simple as pressing one of the top buttons. But I figured it out!
Iām excited to keep working and figure out what is going on. Wish me luck!
I think this week was a pleasant surprise for me. When I saw the initial assignment email and subsequent āsorry forgot to add thisā emails I had a small bout of anxiety. I was like āman I just wanted to get back into school and this wacky class is first upā¦ and its due dates are on Fridayā¦and I must set up a web pageā¦and I must link it to this web pageā¦andā¦. I did not sign up for thisā. But I took a step back, slowly followed the instructions, and in no time, I was cooking with gas.
First up was setting up my accounts. I am very familiar with discord as I admin one for my friends to play videogames and tabletop games over the web. So naturally I started with the one I was most familiar with. I set up mastodon quickly also as I was somewhat familiar with it after following the Twitter nonsense that was happening over the last year.
I really enjoy doing the daily creates, like way more than I thought I would. Little five-to-ten-minute creativity bursts to make you think a little and stretch those muscles. I look forward to seeing these every day now so I can get my little creativity fixā¦ thanks for the new addiction.
Next was the word press website. Now I have never used this before so even after following the instructions to set it up, which I luckily executed flawlessly, I had to go watch a YouTube tutorial on where to start. This didnāt give me as much trouble as I thought it would once I got the layout down and kind of learned what I was looking for. I was able to change and edit almost anything I wanted with ease. Until I started using the pages function. I wanted to set up an about me page (I did), but I just couldnāt figure out how to make a link to it on my home page. I switched my home page to be the about me but then I lost my post feed, which would be a better home page for a blog. So, for about an hour I tried to figure out how to do that but totally didnāt figure it out. But fortunately, today in my meeting with Paul and Jim they were able to point me to the correct tabs and functions. I have yet to work on it, but it is my goal before the next weekly post to have a menu functioning appropriately.
For my movie review/thoughts I chose iRobot, one of my favorites. The summary can be found here. In retrospect I could have gone into more detail about the plot of the movie, but my main goal for this post was to discuss the themes it presents and questions it raised for me. I have never analyzed the movie this way before, so it allowed me to go deeper on a movie I was already very familiar with. I donāt think I will ever watch it the same way again.
Next was my expectations and desired takeaways from the course. My post can be found here. I feel that this will probably change from week to week based on my enjoyment level, but I think overall I really do want to just absorb what skills I can and enjoy the ride.
I was able to look at most of my classmates’ posts and I commented on a few of them that spoke to me. I find it so fascinating the different directions we went with our move reviews and our goals for the class. I am really excited to work on the group projects with you all!
Overall, I think the week went well. I will admit I was extremely anxious to see Paulās email with a small novelās worth of to-doās, but after I got moving it ended up being a rather pleasant experience. Take it from a prior Army guy, bootcamp was a pretty good way to describe it, just with less yelling.
ds106 BootCamp is a fitting name for this week. I took one task at a time and was thrilled when I could check each item off of the list! I set up the password management on Bitwarden, using it takes a little getting used to because it takes another step, but it is much safer, so I am glad to have it now. Editing my website so that it looks more professional has not been fast. I read the instructions on WordPress, but after clicking on Appearance, other themes were not there to choose from, that may mean a visit to the DKC to improve it. I would like to delete the buildings on the sample page. In order to brand my website, I thought about what image I would like as a header. I played around on BeFunky with different editing aspects and with two different photos. In the end, I really liked one of me with my dog done in a Watercolor edit.
ā My Blog (gretahammen.com)
ā My Blog (gretahammen.com)