Category Archives: Weekly Summary

dr oblivion is part cyborg now

What a Week! x2

Man, we did a lot of stuff this week… well it feels like we did. But it also feels like we didn’t 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. I’m 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 – It’s 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 can’t 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 ā€œAlienā€ and compare the emotional response it creates to a similar plot reveal in ā€œThe Thingā€. You can see the results here. I can’t 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 time… That was an experience. I don’t want to ruin the surprise so, if you haven’t seen my post about my movie review re-write… 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 didn’t 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, it’s a long one.

I’ll admit I wasn’t 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 people’s work. I will work to do better on this next week.

I also didn’t 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 didn’t get too far into the weeds. I figured out how to embed gif and video and pictures so that’s 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!

dr oblivion is part cyborg now

Week One Summary – I Figure Out WordPress and Watch A Movie

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 that’s 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 couldn’t 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!

I’m excited to keep working and figure out what is going on. Wish me luck!

dr oblivion is part cyborg now

Week 1 Summary

I think this week was a pleasant surprise for me. When I saw the initial assignment email and subsequent ā€œsorry forgot to add thisā€ emails I had a small bout of anxiety. I was like ā€œman I just wanted to get back into school and this wacky class is first up… and its due dates are on Friday…and I must set up a web page…and I must link it to this web page…and…. 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 fix… 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 didn’t 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 couldn’t 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 didn’t 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 don’t 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 Paul’s email with a small novel’s worth of to-do’s, 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.

dr oblivion is part cyborg now

Weekly Summary šŸ“…:

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.

https://social.ds106.us/@gretahammen/111768171782009456/embed

1 Too Many on Saturn 3🪐 – My Blog (gretahammen.com)

DS Goals🧠 – My Blog (gretahammen.com)

https://discord.com/channels/864518510947729469/873877653080375306/1197397767509770240

https://discord.com/channels/864518510947729469/873877653080375306/1197038687150678116

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Senorita with a cocktail <a href=”https://twitter.com/ds106dc?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@ds106dc</a> <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/tdc4388?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#tdc4388</a> <a href=”https://t.co/kny1Kjo49m”>pic.twitter.com/kny1Kjo49m</a></p>&mdash; Greta Hammen (@greta_hammen) <a href=”https://twitter.com/greta_hammen/status/1748178720257405056?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>January 19, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>