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  1. @katiereif6

    Design Blitz

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    I went on a walk around downtown today to take photos for this. I’m going to be honest, I had a hard time finding anything that caught my eye. I had a hard time finding anything that I thought, “Wow, this is a good/bad example of that conc...
  2. @katiereif6

    Speed summary

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    Alright, I gotta make this quick because my internet is doing unkind things to me. First, I tried really hard to do my best with tuning into the radio, and I rearranged everything so I would be able to listen Monday night, but that happened to be the night of the fire drill in my building, and I ended up missing a few minutes, which sucks, I was really invested. Anyway, I did my best to keep up and do the post. I also did the daily creates: I did the audio reflection, and honestly Moon Graffiti about made me cry. My FSEM was about counterfactual history so it was right up my alley. That and the bleak tragedy of it, as you can see in my radio show ideas and music from another room assignment. I also did the fairly straightforward humming assignment, and the required radio bumper and story through sound effects assignments. I also did the similar movie scene through sound effects assignment, which I made way harder than it needed to be. I also commented here, here, here, and here. I know this was fairly brief and abrupt, but I need to get this in before my internet goes out again. Peace!
  3. @katiereif6

    The Radio

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    So tonight was the only night I was going to be able to listen to the radio show, and of course it’s also the day the RAs chose for my building to have a fire drill, so I missed the first five minutes of the show and was fairly lost and confused...
  4. @katiereif6

    Week 4 summary

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    This week was exhausting, mostly because Iā€™m not as comfortable taking pictures as I am writing, so I stressed about it more and had to do some things multiple times because I wasnā€™t happy with the results the first time. At least I had the Daily Creates that were more focused on getting something out there than worrying about what exactly the ā€œsomethingā€ was. I started the week with a reflection on my current photography skills. Safe to say, I didnā€™t know how much I didnā€™t know. Over the course of the week, I tried out some new styles and focused on all the things that make a good photo good. The Photoblitz was actually a lot of fun. I really enjoyed doing it and got some neat shots out of the prompts. The stars were a lot of work. I started with an almost entirely different set of prompts that I switched out one by one because I realized I didnā€™t have a clue how I would answer them. ā€œLarger Than Lifeā€ is the only one that stuck through. (It was also the easiest, I wonder if thereā€™s a correlation?) I also did ā€œThatā€™s Not What I Expected,ā€ ā€œApocalypse Training Camp,ā€ ā€œSwitch Up The Mood,ā€ and ā€œSpot The Difference.ā€ I felt a little limited because it was raining pretty hard while I was trying to do these so I was more or less confined to my dorm, but I made it work and did my best with what I had. I would also like to say that my classmates are better than I am, and I commented here, here, here, here, here, and here. For now, I am exhausted and would like to go to sleep. Toodles!
  5. @katiereif6

    Blitzfoto

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    I actually found this assignment kind of fun. Since itā€™s pouring rain right now, I was limited to what was in my dorm room instead of going outside. In some ways this made it easier, because I had a finite amount of space and resources and didnā€™t waste time traveling to a spot for a photo, but in other ways it made it harder because I had more constraints on what I could do. It definitely made it more challenging, but I think it also made it more fun. For an added challenge, I only looked at the prompt I was on, I didnā€™t look ahead. If I had, I might have made some different choices, but itā€™s what I did. My prompts were: Iā€™m actually fairly proud of this first picture, where I was supposed to take a photo with the camera at floor level. I live in a double dorm room by myself, so I had a little extra space to stretch out. I took this photo from under the other bed, looking toward the window. I turned on my fairy lights for a little extra flair. I think the limited light makes the ā€œwood grainā€ on the dresser have a cool effect. I just think this photo looks cool. Not gonna lie, not quite as proud of this photo. I was prompted to get something ā€œin motion,ā€ which is hard when Iā€™m in a single room and my friends are too busy to help me. I was on my own as photographer and subject. I took my deck of cards and started throwing them up in the air while lying on the floor on my back. I reopened the windows to get more ambient light, but I donā€™t think it could save this train wreck. I had to take five or six photos before I got one where the cards were visible at all. I didnā€™t quite get the effect I was going for, but I was running out of time and spent way too long on this one photo. I wasnā€™t sure what to do for the prompt about straight lines. Iā€™m a soft, squishy type. I donā€™t have a lot of straight lines in my room. I figured this shot, with my bed frame and ladder, had vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines. The next prompt was to make a photo out of clothes. I really had no idea what to do with that, especially since my floor, desk, and dresser were now covered in cards. I kicked a few cards out of the way to form this Invisible Man out of my winter gear. I took the photo standing on a chair looking down. Just like I donā€™t own a lot of perfectly straight things, I donā€™t own a lot of shiny things. This isnā€™t even mine; it was my roommateā€™s before she moved out. It also wasnā€™t particularly shiny, but it was the best I had. I tried to add water on top to get a reflection, but it didnā€™t work and just made a mess. I struggled to get a closeup while keeping in focus so that the shininess could come through. I took this photo with Ball Hall reflecting in it. Can you guess what it is? Itā€™s the lid to a container of bay leaves! This prompt was hard because there wasnā€™t a prompt, it was just a statement. However, I am one of those people that glasses help, so I had a few pairs lying around. I took this photo of my plants but had my glasses be in focus in the foreground because thatā€™s what it looks like to me when Iā€™m not wearing my glasses. The last prompt was challenging because it seems so similar to the first one. Low angles make things look bigger, and ants are already on the floor. I ended up turning on my curtain of fairy lights that I have behind the other desk and sliding my phone underneath the tall part of the desk (whatever itā€™s called, the part that stands up over the flat work surface) and pointed it up. The result was kind of a neat shot of the lights and leaves. I finished just in time! Overall, this was a very messy but fun experience. My room is a disaster but I got some cool shots. I think Iā€™m going to do more of these when I need to get my creative juices flowing. It definitely makes you think on your feet and come up with something fast rather than worry about quality too much, but it gives you enough time to pull something together that looks good. Youā€™re not scrambling too much to just have something that it makes it hard to do anything creative or worthwhile.
  6. @katiereif6

    Week 3 Summary (Plus Some Title Flair)

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    This week was writing week, and writing is my jam. This week was also a hard week for me with my other classes, work, and trying to get my anxiety under control, so this was a good week to be something Iā€™m already familiar with. My writing wasnā€™t anything groundbreaking this week, I donā€™t think. It wasnā€™t some masterpiece, it wasnā€™t dripping with creativity. Still, I think I did fairly well given the circumstances. ā€œStressed Outā€ was definitely a good release, more for me than for any audience. ā€œCaptain Never-Itchyā€ was a parody poking fun at some of my favorite tropes of one of my favorite ways to tell stories, but it wasnā€™t anything unique that no one else could have come up with, you know? ā€œIā€™m Just So Tiredā€ was way overdramatic. I meant it to be silly, poking fun at the dramatic ā€œwoe is meā€ type monologues you see in theater every so often, but I donā€™t know how well that came across in the piece itself, and it may seem more like I was serious. (If I was serious, it was not so good. But I wasnā€™t. It was a joke. I know it was cliche.) ā€œLove, Hookā€ was a diary entry by Captain Hook. It was also fairly silly, painting Captain Hook as the good guy. I could have/would have/should have written something on the more serious side, but I didnā€™t. Itā€™s not what I was feeling or needed this week. I found it was more difficult to bring in Bob Ross and The Joy of Painting, this week, but I explained how I did in my write-up post. I also wrote an analysis of the story of The Marinerā€™s Revenge Song. I love the song and the tragic story it tells. I feel like itā€™s a good example of telling a story from the point of view of a bad character who believes theyā€™re justified in their actions, believes theyā€™re doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, that sort of thing. I struggle to write those sorts of characters because I always either make them justified in their actions or make them so evil itā€™s hard to believe they donā€™t realize how bad their actions are. There was also the outline for the long-form story. In the GroupMe chat with other students in the class, it seemed to throw people for a loop. I just used a story Iā€™ve been meaning to do something with for a while, so I just wrote down what Iā€™ve been formulating in my head. Since what I have is individual scenes rather than a full plot, outlining really helped me put it together in a way that made sense and connect it to the song that shares a name with the setting and the story. I did four daily creates this week. I felt like some of them were harder because I felt like I needed things (like clothes from half a century ago) that I didnā€™t have access to in my dorm room, but I did my best with the resources I had. Finally, I wasnā€™t able to comment as much as I could last week, but I still did here, here, and here. I clicked on things from the class website that had titles that caught my eye, not for any particular reason about the work itself. Iā€™m realizing that the titles matter more than Iā€™ve been giving them credit for, so Iā€™ll have to put more effort into my future titles.
  7. @katiereif6

    Week 2 Summary (And Hereā€™s Some Flair For The Title)

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    The biggest things I did this week were the daily creates and the assignments from the assignment bank. The daily creates threw me at first, but as I started doing them and getting into the swing of it I got more comfortable with them. The queen one with the eels was hard because I had this whole fairy tale I wanted to tell but got cut short. I feel like the one with the really big book didnā€™t make a lot of sense, but I committed to it anyway (the joke was the author wrote down every accomplishment that has ever been attributed to ā€œAnonymousā€ but I feel like it wasnā€™t clear). Because of the format of a tweet, it lends itself to comedy rather than drama or horror or other genres. Itā€™s the perfect length for the punchline of a joke, since the setup was already done for you. There was also the works from the assignment bank. I do a lot of writing in my spare time, so I picked a fanfic assignment and a writing assignment. That made the writeups a little more difficult because there wasnā€™t much to explain. There wasnā€™t much of a process because I do this all the time, itā€™s just second nature. I donā€™t know how to explain it any better than a professional musician would be able to explain how they play their instrument. It justā€¦ happens. I get a vibe, I write the vibe, and the vibe exists. Not to say Iā€™m some great writer, Iā€™m not, but itā€™s the same idea in that itā€™s second nature. I donā€™t think about what Iā€™m writing or how Iā€™m doing it, so I couldnā€™t begin to explain it. When you write about a thousand words for fun on a more or less daily basis, you just do it. You donā€™t overthink the process. The audio assignment wasnā€™t hard, but it was more work and I had to troubleshoot things like my noisy neighbors or the white noise from my heater. I also donā€™t think the final product was as good as the other two, but that may be because I donā€™t produce that kind of thing like I do writing. It made the write up easier though. The writeup was the hardest part of all of this because I donā€™t think about how or why or what Iā€™m making as Iā€™m making it, and once itā€™s done and I come out of the creativity trance, I have no memory of why I made the decisions I made. Itā€™s like asking someone to explain why some article is the way it is after theyā€™ve read it a few times. I can speculate what I was thinking, but really, I have no idea. I had to write down what I was thinking while I was doing it so I had something to refer back to later, but the interruptions meant that I feel like the final products suffered. I also tried interacting with the class more. Iā€™m naturally a very shy and reserved person, so writing things like comments with a defined audience is anxiety-inducing, more than something like this where itā€™s vanishing off into the void. I did try to comment on someoneā€™s creative work for every day here here here here and here. I viewed/listened to/watched/etc. more peopleā€™s stuff, but I had too much anxiety to say anything. I also contributed once to the Discord but that one felt weird because I donā€™t think too many people are on there and those that are donā€™t seem to say much. Iā€™m not very experienced with Discord, though, so I might just be missing something.

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