Category Archives: DS106

Assignments, DS106, Images, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments24

Troll Quotes

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There Are Four Lights

The Troll Quotes assignment is another reason I signed up for DS106. We see plenty of motivational posters, demotivational posters, and LOLCATS, but I was just tickled by the idea of a three-way culture hack.

The gloss on this one is a little tortured (heh), but –

  1. The screengrab is from The Muppet Movie. I was watching it with my family, and when this shot comes on at the end, I said the quote…
  2. Which is from one of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. A Cardassian torturer attempts to break Captain Picard’s will by forcing him to say that there are 5 lights in the room, when in fact there are only 4.
    (It’s an amusing coincidence that both the TNG episode and the scene in The Muppet Movie have a lot to do with memories, but it wasn’t intentional.)
  3. So why Mal Reynolds from Firefly? Eh, why not. He’s a captain, like Picard, and he’s kind of Muppety.

As far as the technology, this one is pretty straightforward. I tried doing the screengrab straight from the DVD, but some kind of copy protection got in the way – so I ripped it. I learned that Quicktime will advance roughly a frame at a time with the right and left arrow keys (which iTunes won’t), which helped me sync things up. I used Adobe Photoshop Express to do the video edit; it was a little wonky compared to what I’d expect from local image editing software, but it got the job done, and probably with fewer opportunities to get lost.

Daily Create, DS106, Images

Daily Create: BSOD

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I’d been looking at The Daily Create and one exercise in particular stood out as something I might find fun. There used to be a lot of computer technical support involved in my job, so working on an ASCII art Blue Screen Of Death seemed like a natural. (And it’s Exercise 386 –  how propitious.)

So the idea was fresh in my mind, when it happened that I walked past a Hot Topic, with a Game of Thrones display in the window. Now the truth is I’m not a GoT fan – haven’t read the books, don’t have HBO, just haven’t gotten into it. But something about the bird and the swords and the Season 4 slogan struck me.

So the first thing I had to do was learn a little bit about ASCII art. I’m old enough to remember the days before the Web incorporated graphics, but I never actually learned to make the stuff. Fortunately, there are still good tutorials available online. (I used the one linked; other resources and examples on that site are good too.)

That brought me to tool choice, and after a bit of dinking around I realized that the best thing to produce a landscape-orientation piece of text art was, in fact, PowerPoint. The Wikipedia article on the BSOD was kind enough to give me the font, and so I started to draw.

Trying to draw the raven quickly proved tedious. So I remembered an old joke. There’s just two steps to carving a statue of an elephant. Step one, get a big block of marble. Step 2, cut away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. Since this is a solid design anyway, I made a big block of H’s to represent feathers. The equal signs are designed to evoke the swords, and to open the space up a bit like the original does. Apparently it’s important that it’s a 3-eyed raven, so 3 zeros and a beak, and voila.

From there, on to the slogan. A fan page of High Valyrian vocabulary told me to keep “morghulis” for “must die”; I made up “proscar” for “all processes.”

And then another funny thing happened. I walked to the fridge, came back to my screen, and realized, from far away, that I’d almost made a different iconic flying animal…

DS106, Thoughts and Ideas

Hello DS106!

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After years of hearing about DS106, and telling other people about it, maybe it’s time to actually try it out myself.

I’ve gotten tired of dropping out of big corporate MOOCs because of their inflexible time frames and faceless approach to content delivery. I might like to learn in a community of makers.

With any luck, I’ll also use this site as the repository for other stories I’ve told or will tell. When I get…

a Round Tuit

Once upon a time, I told stories at a blog I called  Hip Deep In Pie. Someday I might move the good ones over here.