Tag Archives: featured-image

Weekly Summary: Thats a wrap on week two

I have to say I was able to really dive into my creative side which I have enjoyed thus far. Between doing the daily crates every day and picking the assignments in the assignment bank I was really able to get the creative juices flowing. Utilizing the Dr. Oblivion tool was definitely interesting and one thing I said in my last post is he doesn’t mince his words that’s for sure. I may not have agreed with the perspective he gave but I was able to appreciate it. When I asked for further themes to look into for rewriting my film review, I did find his points helpful. He pointed out themes that I didn’t even think to include the first time so that was nice. I would have to say my favorite assignments from this week would be completing the course character as well as the fanfic assignment I chose to do which was also creating a character with a back story. I found this enjoyably one because I like to write, and it was also nice pulling elements of things I like and get inspiration from and drawing it into a character. I have also enjoyed being able to view everyone else’s creativity. From the daily crates and the assignment bank assignments its nice being able to see other students’ inspiration and where their creative thoughts lead them. I’m excited for week three!

Check out all my work from the week!

Sol – the Painter of Stories

It’s time for you all to meet my course character, Sol. I’ve sketched a little picture of them, but take it with a grain of salt, because Sol can take on any form imaginable.

Sol is a depiction of the sun and reveals themself as an artist, choosing to tell the stories of every single thing in life, no matter how big, or how small, through the sky. Sol, being the sun, is 4.6 billion years old, and doesn’t have a place of origin outside of space. They are a keeper of memories and a watcher of life, and translate that life into the painting of the sky, through a cascade of yellows, oranges, blues, pinks, etc.

Sol is described to be able to take on any form. Their most common humanoid form is a tall feminine form with dark skin and freckles scattering their round, yet high cheeks. Hair is in the shape of an afro, thick and furrowed in a circular shape around their head, dark with blond highlights, with a few coiled bangs falling over their face. They have large eyes and long eyelashes. They wear a yellow and orange flowy dress with a sun pattern in the torso. All of this can be seen roughly in the sketch, but every detail can change with the appearance Sol takes on.

Despite the fact that Sol’s depicted image in feminine, it’s important to keep in mind that Sol is genderless. Sometimes their humanoid figure can be masculine, other times feminine, sometimes not even a human at all. Everything is situational to Sol. Because of this, it’s important to refer to Sol using they/them pronouns.

Sol does not have a favorite food (although something is telling me they would love Italian food) and Sol does not have a favorite drink (although they would definitely love pina coladas). Sol also does not have a favorite book or movie. The reason for this is because each of these tell stories, and they feel it wouldn’t be fair to choose favorites. They feel as if it would create an unfair bias that they should not have while retelling their stories through the painting of the sky.

Sol paints the sky with a paintbrush typically, but sometimes will choose to fingerpaint or use different forms of tools. Sol intends on allowing the painting to tell multiple stories all over the world, all over the galaxy. Sometimes these stories will blur together with one another, sometimes they will not. Sometimes, the stories will shed light onto the ground below, impacting the lives of others. Sometimes they will not.

Sol’s motto is “tell everyone’s story, no matter how big, or how small.” They live by this motto and will continue to live by this motto forever.

Sol is very excited to hear the stories of everyone here and be able to tell new stories or paint the stories they hear!

eSims for Gaza – Charity Ad

For my final prompt in the Assignment Bank, I chose to make a charity ad. The prompt was, “Create an ad to inform people about a charity and encourage them to donate. It can be a real charity or you can make one up!” Here is my ad.

I chose something that is very important to me right now: ending the genocide of Palestinians. I made this in Canva with the intention of spreading awareness. The watermelon represents the Palestine flag.

I’m not going to apologize for bringing politics into this when 26,083 Palestinians (majority children and women) have been murdered for their existence. Gaza has lost access to phone service and Internet. People’s stories can’t be told, people can’t connect to their families.

I don’t think it matters what side you’re on, if you have the opportunity to donate a few dollars for eSims for those in Gaza to connect with their family and allow journalists to continue to inform the world of what’s going on, please donate.

There is always more we can do. I’m attaching more links to send help:

eSims for Gaza – purchase eSims for Gazans without Internet

GoFundMe – sends money to CareForGaza, which helps displaced Gazan families

Pious Projects – help provide hygine kits for women in Gaza

Click to Help – one daily click helps a donation be sent to Palestine

There’s so much more than what I’ve listed, so I encourage you to go out and find different ways to help.

Thank you for listening.

Week of 1/22/2024- 1/26/2024

This Week’s Work

This week started off to a good start with new assignments to try, the first daily create that I did was a little confusing at first but I soon got the hang of it over the course of the week. For the first daily create, I took a screenshot of my three-word map and then set out to find pictures. My Map’s name was Magma-Shut-Swing… What does that have to do with anything in Richmond… Most cities have swings but I haven’t seen magma back home! I then took the picture and put it into a photoshop editor and added cut out photos of a girl on a swing and magma, with an apple notification of what was going on in the picture. The notification read: Alert! Magma and swings are in Richmond, Virginia.

Daily Create #2 was easier and I just needed to take a photo of my ceiling and post it to Mastodon (the links to all my assignments and posts are down at the end!). Daily Create #3 admittedly took a little bit more of time because I was unsure about how to proceed with creating my own version. I decided to just wing it and draw it on my Ipad using procreate. Daily Create #4 was more about how I feel on rainy days because in California on Wednesday January 24th was gloomy on the cameras. I feel as though some people really like rainy days and while for others it can be really overwhelming to deal with along with depression. Daily create #5 entailed creating a emergency sign to safely exit from a toxic internet and I felt as though the safest way to exit a toxic internet is to unplug the internet and go to sleep so I inserted pictures of both and then posted it to mastodon.

Let’s talk about the assignments from the bank! For my storytelling through text mashup assignment, I didn’t have a friend readily available to do this with me so I opted for a third-party app to build my story. I was not familiar with the certain features of the app so some of the timing could have been better in retrospect, but overall that assignment was the easiest to complete. I also decided to connect this assignment to the AI topic that we are on. Next, I completed a guess the story from the web assignments. I was tasked with inserting 5 gifs to give hint to the movie that I was alluding to. I chose an Ai movie and found some pretty cool gifs to add to the post and one gif specifically is more related to pop culture of today. If you reverse search the gif you should be able to get a name for the celebrity and ultimately the name. I thought that adding that hint would help bring everything together as a final haha once you go through the rest of the hints. I will insert the name of the movie below along with the work for the week! These are a few of my favorite things is the only assignment that I did that wasn’t directly related to the topic. I began this assignment by taking a picture of my dorm room. I then had to find a way to highlight certain subjects of my photo and keep the others black and white. So I opted to throw the picture into an app on my Ipad called procreate and hand outline the objects in the photo. If you zoom in close enough you can see my shaky outlines of the objects.

Lastly, let’s talk about the other assignments from this week. The first assignment that I did was the Manifesto assignment. When reading the techno-optimist manifesto I found myself intrigued about certain aspects of the positive view of AI and to me others just seemed blatantly oblivious or too optimistic. I tried to convey these in my response and Dr. oblivion agreed that my argument was valid however, some of the responses that I got from him were very attitude filled. I didn’t take any offense to this however, in order to get a full response I inserted the prompt 3 times and combined them. This also helped with the issue where he gets cut off. In one of my responses he took my argument and the techno optimist perspective and responded separately in the same response, or at least tried to, but ultimately when he went to respond to the second part he got cut off. I also used this same method when asking questions about The Creator and my review to compile my rewrite. Dr. Oblivion too longer than any other program I used this week to get used to but we figured it out by the end. Finally, I introduced my course character Mrs. Marie Pearl, who some have found to be suspicious, however, she is just a regular person who enjoys some weird things at times. Everyone has their quirks! I really enjoyed creating her character, and she was built using a few people I know. I took certain aspects and added them to her character profile. I also found that completing the dossier before writing the character introduction really helped speed up the process. I was able to add more details than I added in the dossier, and overall compiled a good introduction to her.

Daily Creates:

  1. Daily create #1
  2. Daily create #2
  3. Daily Create #3
  4. Daily Create #4
  5. Daily Create #5

Assignments from the assignment bank:

  1. Storytelling through text- Mashup Assignments
  2. Guess the Story- Web Assignments. (Megan)
  3. These are a few of my favorite things- Visual Assignments

Other Assignments from this week:

  1. Read and Respond- Manifesto
  2. Film Review Re-write
  3. Ai106character Introduction

Daily Create 1/26/2024

Here is my answer to today’s Daily Create prompt:

I used Canva again (it’s my go to for easy graphic design things) and I wanted to kind of play around with the tools I hadn’t explored in it. Now that I’m looking at it, I kinda wish I made the books black and white, or the text to follow the books, but I didn’t want to spend too long on it.

There’s no big story here, I was just recreating the original poster with my own interpretation. I chose a graphic that had known books on it so that it could click with someone! But yeah!

Gee… Thanks Dr. Oblivion…

I started the movie review re-write by asking Dr. Oblivion about the movie iRobot. I asked him about theme and hidden meaning and even about easter eggs within the movie. A lot of it was not too far off from what I wrote. I wrote about the themes of ethics of AI and human control and posed questions about AI independence. All of these were identified by Dr. Oblivion as key points being made in the movie. So, I actually don’t know if a re-write is in order. Apparently, I wasn’t really far off the mark. That made me feel pretty good that I had a good understanding of the movie and what it was trying to say.

However, when I asked Dr. Oblivion to write his own review, this is where things got interesting. He absolutely ROASTED the film. Please listen to this absolute masterpiece of a slam session.

Call the burn unit! I was not expecting this at all. I was anticipating a technical review that spoke about the themes and questions I was asking him before, but no, he just roasted it. Now I am re-thinking if this is even a good movie. Did I just fall prey to the classic tropes. Is this movie too safe? Does it really even make me think? Or does it just display these themes in such an easy-to-digest story that I believed I was insightful… In my first review, I mentioned it made me think more about the “deeper meaning” in iRobot. Is there even one? According to Dr. Oblivion, it has been done over and over and there is nothing new here to learn. I know it has been done before but surely it had to bring something new to the table… Nope. I have now been thrashed by an AI and now I feel like a buffoon. Thanks Dr. Oblivion.

That’s a Wrap on Week 2

Despite being undoubtedly busier than the previous week, I found most of this week to be straightforward.  This week gave me a lot of freedom to express my creativity in my daily creations, assignment bank, and course character design. I began this week’s proceedings on Monday by meeting with Professors Bond and Groom. It was a pleasure to meet them and hear their thoughts on their course.  Regarding the assignments, I began by reading Alan Levine’s essay on how we should be completing our writing assignments. This will be incredibly helpful for the remainder of the semester because I will always have something to refer back to. The first Daily Create of the week, which is available at https://social.ds106.us/@leese27/111801892015318316, is what I went and finished next. The assignment for my first Daily Create (Monday) was to compose our own fibonacci poem. Since ice cream was the first thing that came to me, I chose to write about that.  Tuesday’s Daily Create prompted us to construct our own version of the Voynich manuscript, which you can find here: https://social.ds106.us/@leese27/111808413863558161.  The Wednesday Daily Create, which can be accessed at https://social.ds106.us/@leese27/111813892625066418, instructed us to visit the California weather cams and compose a poem based on what we observed. Then, Thursday’s Daily Create instructed us to create our own internet-based emergency exit sign, which may be found at https://social.ds106.us/@leese27/111819235152635127.Lastly, we were asked to make a “Books For Everyone” design for Friday’s Daily Create, which can be found here: https://social.ds106.us/@leese27/111823029960853269. Every Daily Create was a short, simple task that helped me think creatively and got my mind going. I also had the opportunity to view other class members’ interpretations of the assignment by browsing through other DS106 posts on Mastodon. I next proceeded exploring the assignment bank, browsing all the various categories and discovering a plethora of interesting assignments. I began with a writing assignment that led me to complete a Wellness Check (you can find it at https://peterleese.net/ds106/wellness-check-101/) about myself.  The graphic design of ice cream with the contradictory phrase “Eat Healthy” was my second assignment bank task, which you can find here: https://peterleese.net/ds106/eat-healthy-or-dont/. My most recent assignment, which you can view here: https://peterleese.net/ds106/reality-of-philadelphia-sports/, was another design of Philadelphia Eagles fans in which I discussed the realities of being a Philadelphia sports fan. Following this portion of the week, I continued to update my blog, renaming it “Mastering the Art of Storytelling” because it sounds so much nicer than “Peter Leese’s Domain.” Along with adding a photo to the backdrop and slightly altering the colors, I believe the final product looks much better than it did initially. To increase my involvement, I left comments on several of my classmates’ blogs. It was a great chance to connect with classmates and learn about their work from week two. Creating the course character was the next project for this week, and it was a lot of fun.I created Julius Lawrence, a Monroe, Louisiana-based investment banker. This semester, I hope to write a lot about Julius since it’s wonderful to have a character that I completely created. After that, I read The Techno-Optimist and made comparisons and contrasts with Iron Man. Dr. Oblivion agreed with most of my comments when I questioned him about my response to The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. With Dr. Oblivion’s assistance, I completed rewriting my movie review following that assignment. 

I had no issue completing the assignments this week. I did, however, find it a little difficult to generate ideas when working on the Daily Creates. Making the Course Character was my favorite part of the process. It was a lot of fun to create my own character because I could give him traits that I wish I possessed. Hopefully, this semester will allow me to interact with Julius Lawrence more. 

To be honest, I wouldn’t change a thing. I believe that I fulfilled each task to the best of my ability and in a unique way. What will we do with our course character in the future is the one question I have. Other than that, I have no questions. Right now, there aren’t any significant problems with my work; everything was completed correctly.

Daily Create Sunday

In general, ceilings are typically boring. Not many people look at someones ceiling. However, it makes a difference on how the mood feels in the room. When someone has a dark ceiling it will make the room feel depressing and dark, but when the ceiling is white it makes people feel happier and optimistic. Similar how the weather changes peoples mood, the ceiling can as well.