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Bucket list

Packing

I. Avoiding Disaster Defining digital identity is a difficult task. So instead of doing that, I’ll start off with two examples of digital identity gone horribly wrong, which I cannot discuss for reasons that will soon become obvious. Click the links or Google (except maybe not in an official setting like an open cubicle). Santorum’s … Continue reading Who is S. Gupta? Exploring Digital Identity

Curse me for having such a common name, because I was not included in any of the first few pages of results for my name when I followed the instructions for this assignment: Google yourself. Try it logged into Google, then logged out and in incognito/private mode. Also try DuckDuckGo. What are the differences? the consistencies? So … Continue reading Trying to Identify Myself Online: Digital Identity

Post a link to the page(s) on your site containing Creative Commons or public domain material in the #activities channel on Slack, with a brief note about how/why you attributed them the way you did. Public Domain #1 Composition in red, yellow, blue and black. 1926. oil on canvas. I chose this piece that I had already pinned on my … Continue reading I Give Up: A Journey to Not Caring About Copyright

If you see this message, I’m waiting for my blog post to be written by collective intelligence. Just kidding of course; that’s not something collective intelligence can accomplish. Which is why everyone needs to learn to express themselves in the long, sometimes tedious format of an essay, perhaps now more than ever, because while collective intelligence has … Continue reading If you read only one thing on my blog…

Looking back, I don’t love my approach to the Ad Profiles activity. Instead of just putting charts of numbers, I decided to do a “word cloud” that accounts for how often certain words appear using my downloaded Twitter archive. I chose Wordsift.org of the many options for free word cloud generators because it offers more … Continue reading Twitter archive analysis

A lot of people seemed to gain insight from the advertiser profiles activity last week. I had already seen how Facebook profiles my interests while poking around my account settings one day, but it didn’t startle me because I associate Facebook with a distinct lack of privacy. I go there to talk to family and … Continue reading Advertiser profiles: by the Numbers

Maybe its because I’m used to reading dry science textbooks, but I was compelled by my time with the textbook Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free by Cory Doctorow. In particular, I thought the second part was especially thought-provoking, probably because its salient to me as someone who enjoys creative work (hence the name of … Continue reading Notes on Doctorow’s Second Law

I have been a big fan of Wikipedia for roughly 10 of my 20 years of life. There’s nothing more amazing than humans collectively banding together to help one another for no reason other than a desire to help others and spread knowledge. So I jumped at the chance to do the Wikipedia activity for … Continue reading Voyaging into Wikivoyage (and Funny Toilet Signs)

The first time my Microsoft Word subscription went out of date felt like a disaster. In the mad rush to find somewhere to type and edit my paper for 7th grade English, I discovered Google Docs. I immediately fell in love with the convenience of it without understanding how it works; I thought it was … Continue reading Cloud Computing is Internet Magic

After doing the Representation activity, I decided to focus my writing for this week on the same subject while my thoughts and feelings are fresh. I found myself eager to read through all the articles so I could try to understand why the Internet seems to be so lacking in minorities and women. Of them, I … Continue reading Thoughts on Representation

The “Representation” Activity required us to do the following: Perform Google image searches for the following terms Teacher: almost exclusively white women Professor: almost exclusively white men Doctor: almost exclusively white men Nurse: almost exclusively white females Baby: almost exclusively white Teenager: almost exclusively white, mainly girls Criminal: Mostly clip art. When I did a … Continue reading Faces of the Internet: Representation Activity

Whenever I need to feel old enough, I remind myself that I lived a significant portion of my life without internet access. For approximately the first 7 years of my life, I had never been on the Internet. Later, we had dial-up, a form of the Internet so useless I don’t remember using it except … Continue reading Realizations about the Internet Age

After a great afternoon of elation about the great possibilities of the Internet, I was appalled after learning that about 1/4th of our Internet’s citizens exist behind China’s Great Firewall. The headline of the article where I read this states China’s scary lesson to the world: Censoring the Internet works. They’re not wrong. It’s hard … Continue reading The Sequel to 1984: Thoughts about Censorship

The Valentine design assignment asks us to Create you very own Valentines Day cards. Go ahead and make a funny spoof valentine that would make people laugh! Use at least one image and modify it in some way to create a cool effect. Afterwards, go ahead and send that baby out to people who would … Continue reading An Unusual Valentine

I was inspired by the Time of Day visual assignment to make this piece for my story. embed To make it, I first took several pictures from my window, just like the protagonist of my story painted. Then I applied a filter to make the photos look like paintings.

I combined the audio assignments Sound Effects and Poetry Reading, which respectively say: This is a short and simple assignment. Most everyone uses freesound for various audio assignments, but sometimes, you cannot find quite what you are looking for. This assignment is to upload your own sound or sound effect to freesound, preferably something which is lacking. and: Poetry … Continue reading Soundtrack of the Mind

The most useful piece of media in my story would have to be the poster I made based on the Design Assignment Vintage-ify A Place. Its pretty interesting to begin with. Richmond Outside and Firefly Design, Inc. teamed up to create vintage-like prints of some favorite spots along the James in Richmond, VA.  Based on the … Continue reading A Slightly Ingenious Way of Exposing the Setting

Using Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting The Starry Night, I did the visual assignment Adapt an Artist’s Work for my final project story. The assignment asks us to: Adapt a famous artist’s work to change or reinforce its possible message. Here’s what I did: I incorporated it partly because I couldn’t photograph the moon in the right phase on such … Continue reading A Little Slice of the Starry Night

I decided to incorporate video into my story by doing the Your Dream As A Movie Trailer video assignment, but from the perspective of my protagonist instead of myself. Once again, it serves an expository purpose in the story, providing background information without adding any more to the word count and what feels like an excess of explaining things. … Continue reading Mermaid-Marine Biologist

So maybe my word count ballooned out-of-control, in part because I wanted to make sure to thoroughly develop a conflict. So I was inspired by the 1 Second Video assignment to finish off my story quick, wordless way that would leave the future vague but the conclusion clear. Its a little longer than one second, but operates … Continue reading A Concise Ending to a Long-Winded Tale

Although its not technically part of my narrative, I added on one more assignment in the design category. Its called Book Artist, and as per the name it asks you to: Re-design your favorite book cover!   In GIMP/Photoshop/any image editor of your choosing, create a new book cover for your favorite story! Imagine that … Continue reading To Read More: My Clever Little Add On

After waiting, and waiting, and waiting, the sun finally started to set. I’d been watching out the window all day, painting the sky as it shifted gently between colors and light. time of day I was waiting for the moon to rise. That day, I knew it would be a small yellow crescent if it … Continue reading Aquatic Nocturne: The Beginning of a Quest

Finally, the part I’ve been waiting for! This week was by far the best of Digital Storytelling: we got to actually tell a digital story. I spent a couple days just brainstorming and evaluating all the ideas I had before I came up with my final story. I entitled it “Aquatic Nocturne” for the Sylvia … Continue reading The Story Behind My Story: Week 5 Weekly Summary

Monday Once again I’m doing the diary-format for the weekly summary. Today I watched the video for the week, did the reading by Ebert, and watched three of the videos–the draft of my post is in the works. Tuesday I tweeted out the Daily Create and made a post about it, then continued writing the … Continue reading Week 4 Weekly Summary

I chose a movie clip entitled “The greatest movie scene ever? – Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus!” on YouTube, hoping I wouldn’t have too much to say (I know my last post was a little long for Professor Polack). Well I was wrong. For one, this video clip did not include an octopus, so that title … Continue reading I looked, I listened, I synthesized.

For 3.5 stars of my Video Assignments, I picked an assignment called What do Pets Think About? Here’s what it says to do: Your pet cat, dog, turtle, snake [fill in name of pet here] spends a lot of time with you, do you imagine what they are thinking about? Create a series of video sequences of them … Continue reading A Day in the Life of a Royal…Dog