quietmind on Flickr.

We can find calm in chaos - even on the underground when commuting to work! It is all in the habits of mind we pursue whilst we go through our day, not in the external conditions. 

Demi and Abigail brought up the guillotine in their blogs. It’s an interesting contradiction. It is a horrific and violent form of execution, yet the whole point of it was to be humane and execute people without inflicting unnecessary pain. It’s associated … Continue reading →

Today’s daily create is a story about a key…   I seem to have a key collection. There are way too many keys in my collection to tell a proper story. Maybe it could be a novel; one of those long rambling ones that never seem to end. Why do I save keys, or at […]

Today’s daily create was Create your headless ds106 portrait.. I’ve done a wee bit of this before, but I though I’d have another go, first as a jpeg: And then because gifs seem fashionable:

The dangers of too much reflection…creating something bigger than ourselves!

Well, here we are. Week two. Down With Dull Blog Post Titles! #ds106 means using every opportunity you have to be creative pic.twitter.com/jmpnyuFaqN — ds106 is #4life (@ds106) September 3, 2013 All I am gonna say about this stuff I have seen about the gif fight and the “Down With Dull Blog Post Titles!” follows. […]

Headless portrait, a photo by jesstheobscure on Flickr. Ok, so I’ve done two daily creates now! I’ll give myself a pat on the back for that. I’m not sure I’m […]

As I start to see habits of mind reflected back on the digital echo chamber that is the web - I hit...

They Live was an 80s film about an alien ruling class that controlled the world through subliminal messages until professional wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper messed everything up. He found special sunglasses that let him see through the messages – all … Continue reading →

I am hoping to take part in the DS106 Headless Course that has just gotten underway, although I didn’t realize it had already gotten underway. So, we’ll see how it goes. DS106 is a site designed to get participants learning more about digital storytelling and using it for creative ventures. I am more in tune ...

The Daily Create assignment for Monday, September 2nd is the classic video start-of-course prompt, “Show us your keychain and tell us a story about the keys and/or things you have on it.” It is always such a wonderful way to get to know people! Here is my video. I know you will like it!

A lot of clicks and bumps tonight, I could not keep my feet & fingers still. chicken-bootcamp Jerky Chicken Kevin Mcleod Royalty-Free Music google plus post with some discussion of g+ sharing WordPress backups

DS106 Fall Headless course started on August 26, 2013. Our first week’s assignments were pretty easy for me since I already had my blog up and running, [About Page ] I just needed to tweek it a little. The biggest tasks for me were around building the digital infrastructure for my 3M-DS106 Salon for which I’ll publish a separate […]

A few months back, I decided to join this year’s #ds106 class after hearing about it on the UK higher education blogosphere, which has been awash with Mooc Mania for […]

I started the week by watching the three videos… …embedded in the assignment. Some of what I took from these includes: 1. Great ideas often come from hunches that have time to incubate and collect a cluster of related ideas/concepts – this process requires CONNECTIONS to happen. 2. To be creative, take an everyday phenomenon […]

ds-ina:

DS106 Daily Create for Aug. 31, 2013 (yep, a couple of days late!): “This is TDC 601! That is 106 backwards! Draw something 106ish backwards.”

This one was challenging for me—I could make a video or a gif of something going backwards, but I was struggling with how to make a still image of something backwards. Okay, maybe draw the back of a kitchen monster that people created for TDC595.

But then I thought…what is something ds106ish? well, me! and you! So why not take an image of me backwards? Thus the mirror.

My original idea was to have my camera showing the ds106 logo on the camera itself, and then take a photo of that. Ha! In what universe did I think it would be possible for my phone to be using one application (to show the ds106 logo (on the web) and then also use the camera app at the same time? Not.

So I took the photo using the camera app (of course), and then did a screen shot of the ds106 logo from the ds106 page.

I opened both in GIMP as layers, and made a layer mask for the image of me so that the part inside the phone would be transparent and I could put the ds106 layer under that so it’d show through.

1. First, I drew a selection around the phone display with the “lasso,” or “free select” tool, so I could go around my finger on the camera button.

2. I then did Selection->invert, which makes everything around the camera display selected, which is needed for the next step.

3. Layer->create layer mask, which made the phone display transparent and everything around the phone display in the image show up.

4. Scale the size of, and position the ds106 layer so it’s in the right place, peeking out through the transparent hold in the layer of me above it.

5. Because the dividing line between the two images around the camera display was pretty sharp and harsh, I used the blur/sharpen tool to do a little blurring around the edge of the camera display. I think I did bit much of that, but no time to go back and fix it.

6. I also played a bit with the brightness and contrast and other settings under “color” for the ds106 layer—I wanted it to look a bit like it was glowing, shedding light on my finger and out beyond the display screen. That was a hard effect to get, and it’s not quite what I was hoping for, but upping the brightness did help.

It’s not really a drawing, but I have yet to feel comfortable enough with drawing to do many of those. It’s one of the parts of ds106 I just need to force myself into to get more confident about it. Everything else I love doing; drawing, well, not so much.

On my list to get better at gimping….

Well, I made a new #headless13 Friends Index and it has 62 Friends on it, and maybe there are more who are missing. Speak up, bub!   But for the 62 #headless13 Friends some of them have lost their NAMES and their TWITTER or they didn’t say them yet. So I need all my True […]