cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine

Good morning troopers! Who is ready to make art today? This is my second day’s effort for the ds106 July 2013 Daily Create Challenge I issued yesterday. I am 2/2! It’s not about doing them all, its …

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Enokson

In the eating my own dog food department (really not a problem, brown crunchy bits of dried discarded carcasses and grains is yummy), Here goes my first days exercises for the ds106 July 2013 Daily Create Challenge I issued …

Your ds106 sergeants are not pleased. Y’all talk about being creative, about how great ds106 is… what are you doing? We had the geeky privates run some data analytics. Look how active the troops are? An average showing of 2.57142857142857 daily creators per day last week?

It’s time to get …

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine

During a presentation at the 2011 ETUG Spring Workshop, Grant Potter, who initially set up the ds106 radio station said

I wanted to create a web-base radio station; I did not want to manage one

This gets …

This is part 1 of hopefully two posts about ds106 radio, the open microphone internet radio station spawned for ds106 (in case you do not know {how could you not} its the Open Digital Storytelling course) in January 2011. The next post will be some info on how to …

Batman and Robin, so scared of the Dog. They cannot run fast enough.

How could anyone resist the Batman and Robin Running Scared Assignment submitted by Michael Branson Smith

There’s an awesome Tumblr blog created by That Design Bastard filled with animated GIFs of Batman and Robin Running away from …

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Ed

Scottlo! Scottlo!…. SCOTTLOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooo

Silence.

He seems gone. Lucky for him, Rochelle has stepped up in a big way, completely taking over the LoDown show, evolving it so much, that the old pencil head is completely gone from …

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine

At 3:18 am june 14, 2013, the annoying presence of IamTalkyTina, documented previously in my confessed creation story, has disappeared completely. An intense Rim to Rim Grand Canyon hike, 24 miles hiked in 18 hours, 11000 feet …

I thought I could hold out, but because of reasons I am outlining below, I am admitting right here, as the eternal truth.

I invented the character, twtter account, web site named after the Talky Tina doll from the Living Doll Twilight Zone episode. It was all me.…

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Bruce McKay

When the clams and worcestershire get Scottlo too low to do his daily show, well, they can call in the Dog, that is CogDog, to lend a paw (it’s tricky fitting a pencil behind the ears). This …

Last week the third of a 3 week cross country trip by train. I was not planning to be part of a ds106 radio show project for the summer 2013 5 week madcap section Jim is teaching.

But this idea got in my head, in that ds106 way that …

For no real good reason- this is based on a single photo, duplicated in PhotoShop as layers. In each layer, I selected the glass and applied different settings of the Wave Filter, just to make it seem like a strange world inside my glass. Combining two of my interests into one act. For no good reason at all, except to act out “what if…”

Making the Twilight Zone approachable for new readers… This is a slight riff from the I Can Read Movies ds106 design assignment, I did not use the templates, but instead mocked it from Biscuit Goes to School I started with the idea of the Janet Tyler character facing the “beautiful” people maybe putting a mirror in between. Instead I cropped out the back if her head and put it through some palette and poster edge filters in PhotoShop to simplify the colors of the back of her head. I got the mirror and the pig face from the Noun Project (just using the snout of the pig in the mirror). The text was done with the Chalkboard Font, and warped a bit to match the original. I thought it a bit literal, so got the idea to GIF the pig nose in. I switched to the timeline mode of the ...

I dread those meetings with my editor. She is rather harsh. Just the way she looks down on me. I have a new manuscript for her to review. I just cannot predict how she will react. This was our last meeting. This is my go at a new ds106 Sound Effects Story: Tell a story using nothing but sound effects. There can be no verbal communication, only sound effects. Use at least five different sounds that you find online. The story can be no longer than 90 seconds. As a change up, I opted to use sounds from a few Twilight Zone episodes I had downloaded for some other assignment work: A World of His Own Time Enough at Last The Inaders All of which were available (or a portion thereof) on the YouTube. I started by skimming each episode in video, and taking notes of what segments there were ...

For reasons I fail to devise, on my trip I’ve had an eye for making GIFs, maybe it is traveling be train in that motion that is repeated. I’ve been collecting photos that seem like they might work. sometimes I try to adjust the angle to make a pair that might work well as a ds106 Wiggle Spectroscopy. In a few cases I just have snapped photos in succession that end pairing well. This fence on one of the Old Founder’s Row homes on Bever Street in Wooster caught my eye, for the contrast of the heart shape topped by a spike. And what is a fence but something that says “Do not enter”? I did not get an optimum angle (and in fact did a bit of PhotoShop brushing in the upper left corner because one photo had more of a white patch). The two frame repeat, also feels ...

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine You don’t sit still or idle here either. This was a “No Parking Tow Away Zone” spotted at the Depew NY train station. The text was easy to replace with Helvetica Neu font; that’s a crop of Rod Serling sitting on the edge of the eposide “A World of His Own“, distorted a bit and feathered on the margins. I chose the image because hed the cigarette in his hand (I painted in a bit more smoke). It’s not yet a ds106 assignment; I might have to make one up.

A poem made of TZ episod titles? Oh yeah, brought on by Todd Conaway. Mine is called Be Sure The Job Is Done… I Shot An Arrow Into The Air And When The Sky Was Opened The Four Of Us Are Dying Where Is Everybody? You Drive The Fear A Hundred Yards Over The Rim A Nice Place To Visit The Grave The Fear The Lateness Of The Hour The Silence What’s In The Box He’s Alive

A Wiggle Spectroscopy ds106 assignment: Take two photos of the same subject from slightly different angles. Merge the two photos into a single looped, animated gif to create a wiggle stereoscopic image that simulates 3-D. A very good tutorial explaining the full process can be found on Martin Sutherland’s website. I did not even intend to create this, but I took two photos in succession with my iPhone, and there was enough difference of angle (and the motion of my new friend Amyaz moving behind the bottle), to make it work as a wiggler. I used the PhotoShop Script “Load Files into Stack” and then simple GIFfed them out at a 0.2 second frame rate. It almost suggests the frenetic influence of rare rum from India? Perhaps. The back story… It was almost an accidental choice when I booked a room for two nights at the Black Squirrel Inn www.blacksquirrelinn.com/ ...

Playing more with the #ds106zone for the Twilight Zone episode of the Invaders. All of the screaming, banging, and destruction might is averted if Alien Lady checks her iPhone. Instead of getting zapped by laser guns and whopping spaceships with her axe, instead, Alien Lady and Jim Groom laugh at old stories over the best tacos in Virginia, perhaps the entire east coast. Messing with the Macguffin may be one of my all time favorite ds106 assignments, because technically it is pretty simple (superimpose some text on a screen capture of a movie scene): Wikipedia defines the MacGuffin as “a plot element that catches the viewers’ attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction.” For this assignment forever change the plot of a movie, tv show, etc. by changing a single line of dialogue. Put this new line of dialogue below a screen-cap of the moment in the ...

Probably the most well received talk at TED Tea Party City was Alien Woman, who shared her personal and moving story of thwarting the alien invasion. This Fantasy TED Talk assignment is brought to you by the ds10zone: Create a scene from a TED Talk being given by a fictional character. Obscure or well known, feel free to have your fictional character pontificating on their story, and their “essential truth” that has come to be known as TED Talks. Week’s 1 assignment suggested using one of my all time favorite episodes, The Invaders, which in typical TZ fashion, leads you into an assumption of character that gets flipped in the end. A power of this episode is is spareness, one actor (A pitiful “victim” played by Agens Morehead), almost no dialogue, and music that builds the suspense. The woman’s contortions, moans, and screams draws us into seeing her as the ...

New blog post: “ds106zone: You are About to Enter Another Dimension” bavatuesdays.com/ds106zone-you-… #ds106 #ds106 #soitbegins — Jim Groom (@jimgroom) May 13, 2013 When Jim Groom lights up #ds106 you can feel the energy waves transmorgify. I for one am darned excited because I now get to be a humble open participant in ds106, and the 5 week may summer session of the #ds106zone already has that giddy feeling as people are riding the momentum. When jim had first described the idea of re-writing/producing classic twilight Zone episodes with a modern slant, one that jumped out me was the last one from Season 1, A World Of His Own. Writer Gregory West apparently is so good at character creation, he can actually conjure them up in real peace just be describing them into his microphone. His wife, Victoria, is not pleased to see the blonde vixen Gregory creates to talk to, ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Little Wide World During a presentation last month for the TCC World Online Conference a participant noted in the chat with some irony, that despite the unconventional form and function of ds106 I pointed them to a traditional (long) syllabus for my 2013 class. I said that it was a university course at UMW, so it needed a syllabus. Somewhat later (like yesterday while sitting on a beach) it struck me that it’s another case of Korzybski’s line of the map not being the territory – the syllabus is not the class, the experience, but some representation of it. In wrapping up a year’s experience teaching ds106 I was thinking of how the syllabus was like a mode of bread making, following someone else’s recipe, but changing up the ingredients and the process, iteratively, and getting one’s hands in ...

Because Audrey asked… @cogdog @jimgroom I just bought moocthulhu.com… I think #ds106 needs to help me with some visuals — Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) May 10, 2013 Perhaps monstering soon at http://moocthulhu.com/ Look closely into the eye of Cthulhu to see its true intent.