for dropping in on and tumbling by DS106
After finding some old photos I dug around the apartment some more and found a page of an old comic:
Something told me this was no ordinary comic, I sneaked into the General’s room and, with shaking fingers feed it into the machine:
As the paper emerged I grabbed it and turned it over:
Despite the lack of speech bubbles or callouts I claim one credit for daring the General’s rooms. (ds106 Assignments: Comic Book Effect and ds106 Assignments: Multi-Frame GIF Story)
I’ve settled down in my apartment now. Poking around in different corners I found some old photos of the Village, I’ve put them on the corkboard in the kitchen. I suspect they were taken by a previous resident, the photos look quite old, maybe 40 or 50 years I’d guess, quite instagram.
Some information:
If I wanted to fake this sort of thing this is how I’d go about it.
If I was really silly I would not save as I go along and I’d have to do the whole thing again if FireWorks crashes (my old version has a tendency to do that)
If I wanted to earn a couple of credits I submit this to: ds106 Assignments: A Collage Of Your Favorite Vacation Pictures
I suspect I could do a better job with the filters and the rotated rectangles look a little jaggy, maybe these ones are fake too?
I’ll be snapping you
I guess this is ds106 Assignments: Say It Like the Peanut Butter.
I am not going to describe my methods, as I’ve done that before.
Tools: Handbrake, MPEGStreamclip, Fireworks.
I’ve not really touched base with others in the village, I am now 4 episodes in, head in a spin:
Wondering if I am going to be left hanging, or is there a chance of escape?
I am caught in a rut, need a new plan
Be Seeing You.
It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake.
― Pyotr Kropotkin, Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings
This daily create started out with the memory of the common Anarchy graffiti, with the A is a circle.
Anarchy by Jonas B
I presume that I must have had the definition in the back of my mind.
I thought I’d plant a giant A over the Wikipedia screenshot.
On my iPad I took a screenshot and opened in in brushes. At that point I though it might be nicer to use a relevant quotation and of course though of:
If I can’t dance it is not my revolution.
I decoded to do it as a gif and started writing exporting to my photo library as I went.
When I got to ‘dance’ I changed it to gif.
I imported these images into 5seconds, which I find the best ios gif app and made a gif.
Unfortunately the speed slider did not work this time (too many frames?) to I needed to export to Dropbox and open on a mac in fireworks.
Once in fireworks I set the frame rate and did a very quick edit on the colour of gif.
I decided not to post the image to flickr as I really do not like putting gifs there. Given this was throwaway I just posted it to Google+
I’ve been really enjoying the ease of using google plus for ds106 as well as being dissatisfied with it’s locked in nature. I had even been musing about blogging about it and thinking about possible systems that could replace it. Given the amount of conversation in g+ in this round of ds106 compared to blog comments it is pretty obvious that a lot of folk love it.
And my gif got comments, and I got called out:
Quite rightly so. Hopefully the short notes above are enough to cover the daily create. Google plus is another matter.
When I first joined g+ I did not like the experience. To much, to confusing. It was only when I started using it for community activity, first with etmooc, then Mozilla webmakers and now the headless round of ds106 I begin to see how it could be used. The way it can pul different sources together quickly and easily and the simplicity of adding comments makes it an addictive experience.
The first flaw appeared quite quickly, in etmooc I was happily clicking plus one to keep a track of posts I was interested in. In a browser to eg a link to the post you need to pop a menu, choose link to post and then copy the link that shows up. You then need to click ‘done’. Not quick. There is no feed or api for getting information out of G+.
Earlier in the round of ds106 I complained about this, I tried to avoid commenting in google for a week and following the blog flow, but after a while I found that it was the easiest place to follow the action. I still don’t like the fact comments on my posts don’t stick with the post, I am afraid I like comments, conversations and ideas from others. So I end up in g plus, living for the moment, losing my history.
I think one of the reasons that g plus has worked so well for the headless ds106 is that we have a pretty small class size. I do not think it would work so well if more people were posting, but I could be wrong.
The differences between g+ and twitter include a couple of things that are relevant here, the #ds106 tweets are lost in my timeline, I follow too many folk to see much of what passes. I could just run a search or keep one alive in tweet deck but I don’t use tweet deck any more. The other difference is that twitter, despite killing the RSS feeds does have an api, this means something could be built on top of it or it could have been built in.
I really hate the way g+ is designed to keep you locked in, to have such useful facility and not have any easy way to share on another system might be good business for google but it grates against my idea of a fee, open and loosely joined web. Unfortunately for me the people involved in ds106, their activities and generosity keep pulling me back.
What would be great would be something that functioned like g+ but was open and sharable with RSS/APIs etc. If it both posted comments to and displayed comments from the original sources. Of course this would be a can of worms. Some blogs have comment feeds that would work out ok. Then there is youtube, where my comments now seem to be linked to google plus, more problematic, flickr and twitter would need different methods.
A start along these lines might be something like my DS106 Activity Dashboard (very much the beginning of an idea)
After all this thinking I need a couple of quick triple trolls to clear my head:
A new DS106 assignment ds106 Assignments: Illustrating Odd Autocompletes by Tom Woodward.
Google Autocomplete is an oracle with strange powers to bring oddities into your life. This assignment asks you to seek out that randomness. Start with a strong phrase (things like “I hate . . .” or “I love . . . ” seem to work well.) and run through the alphabet looking for really odd autocompletes. When you find a good one, screen capture it and create an illustration that represents the search string
looked like a quick win for a lazy Sunday.
I found a nice CC bear on Flickr (Shipshewana, Indiana | Flickr – Photo Sharing! Creative Commons — Attribution 2.0 Generic — CC BY 2.0) and am afraid I don’t care to much about the copyright of the Colgate ad, parody perhaps.
Merged the bear and add using Superimpose on the ipad and added that to the google screenshot using PS touch.
Superimpose is a great application I posted a screencast of using it on my other blog a while back.
The google auto complete looks like rich pickings for strange serendipity.