A photograph I snagged at a TED Talk Conference I went to on February 6, 2012.

Bending over, a man nudges the dark form sprawled out in the mud outside the inn.

Man: “Look at what you’ve become.”

Shaking miserably, the dark form turns away.

Man: “Is this what has happened to the fabled super admin?  Do you think you can just forget?  That you have made your amends with one good deed? I see the blood on your hands, plain for all to see your wretched desires.  You can’t rid yourself of your past nor your transgressions so easily.”

Pausing, the man looks away and out into the distance.

Man: “I will give you one chance, for the deed you have done.  No more.”

Reaching into a brown pack slung around his shoulder, the man pulls out a small Netbook and places it behind the lorn figure.  Standing, the man turns and walks down the muddy road before the inn and out into the distance.  

–

How could I resist?  Fellow ds106 blogger Alan Liddell provided such a nice image of Professor Groom that I found in a cursory glance at seeing what Google Images would bring up.

Ben Rimes’s assignment Fantasy TED Talks jumped out in front of me so quickly in the Visual Assignments section that I went full steam ahead.  Never edited an image? Forget it.  Either start now or fall behind.  Anyways, the first shall be last and the last shall be first so I have nothing to worry about.

Quickly I downloaded GIMP while counting my blessings to make sure I’d be guaranteed my broken graphics card could run some heavy image processing.  I was on and loaded with my TED template compliments of Ben Rime’s great post on the assignment.

Bearing some semblance of my years of growing up on a computer, I picked out the most basic of tools as shown:

Basic as it gets.  The program allowed me to take out the parts I wanted from a few images, copy them onto the template, and move them around.  I didn’t try to do anything advanced, the main aim of choosing this was to familiarize myself with GIMP and some of the basics like figuring out how layers work and how to select and move objects.

I’m a rookie.  I’m afraid.  I don’t know exactly how this stuff works.  If I get advanced as the semester goes on I’ll write a tutorial about it

Why brain slugs?  Inevitability, surely.  Also, I think Brain Slugs, Jim Groom, and TED talk make a nice meshing of ideas some of which I’m unsure of whether I anticipated or not.