TDC 10: Merge two photos of contrasting places.

So, the photos are 1) a snow-covered chair from my backyard (we’ve been getting our first real snows of the year within this past week or so) and 2) a swimming pool from a hotel I stayed at in Saugatuck. I didn’t swim in the pool, because the lake is right there, but I took a picture of it for some reason, and it blended nicely with the snow chair.

I used Gimp’s Soft Light effect, and then just pulled the transparency of the top layer (the pool was on top, and the snow chair was on bottom) down to about 60.

The Soft Light and the Transparency meter are both in the Layers dialogue box in Gimp, if anybody uses that.

I liked how the snow made the pool water seem crunchy, textured. I would have liked to make the chair seem a little more real, but I also didn’t want to spend all day on it, so I accepted what I’d done and moved on.

TDCSOPA: Create an image that reflects SOPA in your eyes.

I took a couple shots at this one, but most of them seemed too didactic or too obvious, not interesting enough. They were all text (I’m a writer, I like text) and I wound up with this one, “The future is coming to eat you/#befood.”

I like the idea that our entire culture needs to accept how big a part of our online life, and our life, remix is, how it has become such a powerful/important/pliant/succinct way to communicate things to other people. Want to wish somebody happy birthday? Send them an animated gif of their favorite actor blowing out the candles. Want to cheer someone up? How about a short movie of yourself walking through the door like Kramer.

Media monetizes our attention, and then tells us–through SOPA, PIPA–that we are not allowed to use anything we have seen, we are not allowed to learn or imitate. This stance is anti-human, it is against human nature, the way we function. We deserve laws that protect us, not that punish us for doing something that feels pretty natural. Not theft, remix.

Whatever the internet is, whatever the future will look like, it will be made up of our pictures, our sounds, our mashed together imaginings. Be food, everybody. Be food.

TDC 11: One take tongue twisters.

The return of Bagman!

The one take tongue twister is at the end of the video, and (sorry, sorry) I make you sit through my joke-y takes, and a couple of asides (is it physically possible to lick a lake? where would you get a duck, like, if you wanted one?).

I took the video on my laptop’s internal webcam and edited it in Windows Live MovieMaker. Pretty short and sweet.