Of the introductory videos I watched, Intro to ds106 was the most helpful in explaining the general structure and intent of the class.  It’s nerve-wraking though, to think of this class as an airplane being built in the air, though, because flying in airplanes makes me sick already.   I found the Happy Student’s guide to ds106 more encouranging.  Before watching it I was nervous and feeling overwhelmed by my unfamiliarity with setting up social media accounts and starting to interact with the wider internet.

But afterward, I felt empowered by the world of creative opportunities opened by being a participant in the internet.  I’m glad that I can learn how to use the communication tools that are YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and SoundCloud!

I am especially excited to use The Daily Create as drawing practice and experimentation with drawing videos – sharing the creative process (part of how I look at the world) with people who feel that drawing is difficult, frustrating, or foreign.  I’m still learning, and that’s fun!  If anyone has tips on how to add sound I’d greatly appreciate it.  My dream woud be to have Victor Borge Phonetic Punctuation style drawing sound effects in the movies to make them more engaging and funny.

I used SketchBook, a very clean drawing program that rarely lags, and a Wacom Intuos3 graphic tablet to draw.  QuickTime does a good job at screen-capturing, but makes a huge video file, so I have to delete the original once I convert it to a faster, smaller file in iMovie.  That takes a while, but I can work on something else while I wait, and it’s worth it.  I’m making these quick drawing movies for myself as a viewer, It’s fascinating to see my own decisions make an image take shape.

whoo-hoo! I’ve gotten my #ds106 blog looking pretty good ds106.ampersanddragon.net

— &Dragon (@ampersanddragon) January 17, 2013

I was really proud when I’d fiddled with my WordPress theme Suffusion. I’d used WordPress a little bit in another class, and found that Suffusion allows for an incredible amount of design customization.  There’s a confusing amount of menus, though, to allow for that level of manipulation.

My About page isn’t very detailed yet, I’ll be updating it as I learn more about my relationship with ds106.

Since I’ve found out how flexible and self-driven this class is, I’m thrilled to be a part of ds106.  I’m going to use it as an opportunity to hone my creative skills and learn new ones.  I also want to take the time to share some of my discoveries from delving into our textbook this week.  One of my goals is to have less of an impact on the environment.
I’ve always wanted to compost food scraps instead of sending leftovers to the landfill.  Compost heaps or drums are large and smelly, however, and consequently inconvenient.  I learned from watching the No Impact Man documentary that it is possible to compost with no unpleasant odor indoors: VERMICOMPOST! Also known as worm farming, it boils down to having hundreds of cute, squiggly pink pets nibble your leftovers or peelings and poo out clean extra-nutritive dirt. Dirt, it so happens, is a limited natural resource (check out Dirt! the Movie).  Consequently, the realization dawned that I could use the worm casings (poo) to fuel a small-scale garden of herbs and vegetables.  So I also looked into methods of Organic gardening, finding the Organic Gardening Magazine’s guide to saving seeds.  It may or may not work, but I’m going to try saving pepper and tomato seeds so that I can grow free vegetables this summer.  I can’t start the worm farm until after graduating, because I live on-campus and Residence Life forbids non-human animal residents in the dorms.  And sadly, the Animal umbrella definitely includes a plastic tub writhing with rosy trash snackers.