This week felt super long me. It dragged on for a while and felt never-ending, but that also helped me keep up with all of my work as I really get back into the swing of school after the long break. The 3 daily creates this week were fun, and I also enjoyed doing the 3 visual/design assignments for the week. This week I ended up choosing the Favorite Movie Quote, Destress & Color, and Shadow of A Doubt assignments. The Photoblitz was another really good way to look at my surrounding in a way I wouldn’t normally, and to also think quickly to fit in the 20 minute window (I got back to my computer after 23 minutes but those extra 3 minutes were traveling time). Furthermore, reviewing, commenting on, and voting for pieces I found well put together and cohesive was a great way to reflect on others’ work while also gaining some inspiration for the weeks ahead. Overall, the week felt a bit sluggish, but completing everything and taking time to reflect was very rewarding.
If I were to be completely honest, at the beginning of the week, I had little to no motivation. But, I saw that some of the tasks was just increasing our participation, as well as voting for our favorite creations in the class so far, so I decided to start working on that. This is one of my favorite things to do, because I like to see what my peers are doing and creating. It is also interesting to see how they interpret the assignments and the daily creates, and how they are all so different and unique. It was hard to pick my favorites for the voting form, since they were so many awesome digital creations to choose from.
Readings
I loved the readings and videos for this week. As mentioned in my blog post about visual design, it was very interesting to hear the thought process behind such iconic movie posters and tv show intros. The color, font, spacing, layout, pretty much everything plays a role in conveying a message that the viewers will engage in. Getting to hear the backstory or reasoning behind movie posters such as Star Wars, as well as the intro for Stranger Things was definitely very cool, and it makes me want to look into more about visual design and how it is used to promote media.
Photoblitz
I found the photoblitz to be fun, as the prompts were pretty random and allowed me to think outside the box a little. The prompts ranged from pretty straight-forward to interpretive, such as “your favorite color” to “what does disappointment look like”. Ideas came to my head quickly, but executing them was the more difficult part, but overall this was a fun, quick activity.
Daily Creates
Daily Create #1
Wednesday’s daily create was to create an Anti-Word-Cloud with a random book, which I chose to do Anna Karenina since I have never read it, but I want to read it!
Daily Create #2
For the second daily create, we had to pick our favorite sandwich, and determine how “woke” it would be. I chose a classic grilled cheese with ham, as it is one of my dad’s favorites to make. If I were to give it a woke rating, it would be a 2 as it is a traditional, American food.
Daily Create #3
For the last daily create for the week, the prompt was to do a photo with bad photoshop. What immediately came to my mind was to badly photoshop two celebrities. So, I decided to do Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, who were the stars of the biggest, pinkest movie of 2023, Barbie!
Assignments
For the first assignment of the week, I decided to do the destress and color assignment, as it was a great way to wind down and take a quick break from all the busy work I have throughout the week. To take a peek at what I colored, as well as my reasoning and thought process behind it, read it here at Destress and Color. For the second assignment, I did a “What’s in my bag?” for my course character, Veronica Malone. This was probably my favorite assignment, as it allowed me to be creative with what Veronica likes or dislikes, as well as what items she would want to have on her at all times. To read more on what Veronica would have in her bag, read What’s in Veronica’s Bag?. Lastly, I wanted to make a graphic for one of my favorite sports teams, the Buffalo Bills. I follow the team page on social media, so it was fun to make my own graphic that looks like it would be on their social media page. To see my beautiful graphic, click here Go Bills! Overall, I enjoyed this round of assignments!
Overall
I enjoyed the lighter workload for this week, as it was easier to manage my time and when to complete each assignment. If I had to pick one of my favorite creations, it would probably be the Bills graphic, as it was so much fun to play with colors and fonts to see what looked good. Overall, this was a good week, and I am ready for next week’s workload as well!
This was probably my least favorite part of this week’s work, why read an article when you can create after all, so it ended up being my last task of the week. Probably should have skipped the money video I was confused and uncomfortable the whole time.
Honestly, I was at work when I was doing this assignment, so I had a lot and only a little to work with. So, they are very tech based in a way but that’s about it. I did it in the 20-minute allotted got confused how time works and took the second picture late or early I still don’t know. What do you mean it stops at 60 ugh, time.
So, most of my assignments were chosen based on existing images I had or ideas. It was done in the first few days since there were so many pages, I took time flipping through only to go back to the beginning in the end.
This weeks daily creates I started much sooner, so I was quite pleased and wasn’t stressing over it daily like last week. My favorite was the Australia day one since mine came out quite cute.
Commenting
I have been making sure to react daily or react to ones that I noticed.
This week was pretty easy regarding the daily creates. Only thing that gave me some trouble was the photoblitz challenge, some of the photo prompts were not common and I had to put extra thought into it to fulfill what the prompt is asking.
I am usually a little bad about procrastination in my schoolwork. I always think it won’t be so bad, I can deal with it the evening of and make it out just fine. I would be lying to say that I didn’t feel a little pressed for evening this time around. Every time I looked at the Week 2 to do list it seemed to get longer somehow? I’ve definitely learned my lesson as I rapidly type out the assignments I’ve simmered on this week and the ones I discovered more recently.
Using Dr. Oblivion was definitely my main savior this week. As an honor council member and someone that is generally concerned about the environment, I have weird and more negative feelings about using AI, but it was very helpful to receive feedback so quickly that I could immediately implement into my work.
Creating two assignments was really fun. In retrospect, I did not really connect the second one to tech noir or cyberpunk. But you live and you learn and you fix those mistakes next time. I feel like I’ve really gotten a better idea of what this class will look like and how I can benefit from it. I think in college most people go through a constant circle of learning curves, I can only hope that I will grow from them.
For time’s sake (a mistake I will fix in the future), I regrettably cannot go into good detail about every assignment I worked on, but I will list the ones I did and share about one or two sentences.
Day 1: Show us your secret spy weapon. I didn’t think taking a picture of my prescription of Zoloft would be something to post on the internet, so you can use your imagination here.
Day 2: Make some kind of art about unexpected coincidences. I drew two people connected by a red line with a bow in the middle.
Day 3: Make bad art. This was difficult. I drew a photo of a house on a hill. As the prompt assigns, it wasn’t very good.
Day 4: Your Longest / Tallest Shadow Selfie. My longest shadow was on Thursday, around 5pm, pretty soon before the sun set, taken as I walked to the UC for dinner.
Day 5: Emoji Poem
Here is the poem:
I really feel that needs no explanation.
In retrospect, I ought to have posted my replies on the Mastodon page, but I got nervous and distracted and did not.
I started off this week reading an email from Professor Bond about how our writing shouldn’t be academic but instead should be unique and include our voice. I started instantly freaking out because the only thing I’ve been good at all my life is academics and that just got erased from the program. Despite the stress and workload and the very difficult programming classes I’m taking this semester, I managed to do five daily creates this week: Number 4756, Number 4757, Number 4758, Number 4759, and Number 4760.
Three rabbits play Two foxes wait One person in the way
I also frantically wrote a blog post about my character because I thought we were just supposed to fill out the google form. Those assignments are nasty, only telling us what is expected of us on the very last sentence. Thankfully, this is a character that’s been developing as a concept for a few years now, so I shouldn’t have too much to worry about in that regard.
My three assignments of the week, Richmond at Night, You Are Safe, and Cyberpunk Trading Card Game, were completed, and while the assignments themselves didn’t take too long and weren’t exceptionally difficult, I can’t say the same about the writing. I read somewhere that we need two paragraphs alone describing the story behind the art. I’m sorry, but I’m not verbose. I can tell you all of that in five sentences or less and save you ten minutes.
Lastly, I wrote my film review, which was actually supposed to be done last week, but I was unaware that it was even an assignment we were supposed to do. In fact, I think there are potentially two more assignments total that I was supposed to write blog posts about, but one of them got absorbed into my Week 1 Summary. I still do not know if I will get credit for it.
This week was a busy week to say the least to be honest I opened the course pretty late into the week and fell behind with the daily creates, now that I understand the flow of the course and see you need to be checking deadlines everyday and being prepared earlier sooner than later I will be prepare for next week, to compensate I will do my remaining daily crates this weekend for the course purpose. For the daily creates I did complete, they were interesting. Thursday’s birthday celebration(happy 14th ds106 radio)brought back good childhood memories of being in the car with my family and hearing that birthday song on the radio. The other create I was able to get done was the one from today which was creating a poem with emojis with and I attempted to be creative with my approach and instead of making a custom poem like everyone else I decided to go with the itzy bitzy spider to see if anyone would make the connection. I did see the shadow daily create on Wednesday but sadly it was too dark by the time I realized.
This week I created my character who is an anti-hero that was born in Atlanta, Ga. DK comes from the inner city and has seen and been through a lot which causes him to engage in some questionable things with flawed reasons and morals which results in the lines between good and bad to often become blurred and hard to tell what is right from what is wrong
The daily creates this week were very interesting with the prompts that were provided. I did have a little trouble with getting the shadow of myself, but I found an alternate to provide the shadow that was needed.
To be completely honest, this week was tough. Trying to find my rhythm and patterns between this class and my others has proved to be a challenge as I was not anticipating quite this much to do in this class alone. I wasn’t able to complete everything for this class on top of all of the other assignments and readings for my other classes. I was able to do some daily creates, my course character, and my three assignment bank assignments, but I had to keep them pretty simple to try and get as much done for this course as I could along with all my Psych and Disability Studies classes. I had the most fun working on my playlist assignment as it was the most emotionally meaningful and I really felt like I was telling a story with it. I also enjoyed writing about non-conformity and how the world we are currently living in is already a cyberpunk dystopia essentially. My noir-style book cover was simple and easy, but I’m not the proudest of how it turned out, but I just unfortunately didn’t have much time to dedicate to it since my time was running out and I had a bunch of other assignments all due tonight at 11:59pm. At the end of the week, I decided it was better to do as much as I could and at least be decently proud of it than to either turn nothing in or turn in very few things. Some points are better than no points. Here’s hoping I’ve found my rhythm and that my time commitments start to level out.
