“I am a poor man, I have nothing, I want for nothing.” I first encountered this wonderful round during my B.Ed. year at Queens University, Kingston. As part of the Outdoor and Experiential Education course taught by James Raffan, we met once a week for a five hour experience — rock climbing, historical walk, a ...

Although recent reappearance in The DS106Zone Trading Cards has generated some interest in the community, it wasn’t until yesterday that someone (Jim Groom) asked about the gum that accompanies the cards. Gum from both the original card series release and the re-issue is still in circulation (we’re talking about mint-condition (not mint-flavoured), unchewed sticks here ...

“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its ...

Brian Bennett (@bennettscience) beat me to the punch this evening by posting a ds106zone The Twilight Zone trading card of Mr. Hollis from The Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life.”  While I had started working on GIFs from the episode a couple weeks back (originally thinking of doing a multi-panel GIF, either synchronized or ...

The Inspiration @cogdog (Alan Levine) inspired me this morning with his I Can Read Series: Eye of the Beholder children’s book cover, and upon quick reflection, it seemed to be a just perfect assignment to do for poor Henry Bemis in Time Enough at Last. The labelling of this book as a shared reading book ...

Today is the day that WordPress is celebrating its 10th Anniversary. In honour of this occasion, I have prepared a celebratory birthday card. The 10th Anniversary banner was found on the Manchester WordPress Users Group site, one of over six hundred organizations celebrating today with for-real, face-to-face, with-cake get-togethers. The cake icon was animated from pieces ...

From Movie Trading Cards, to Animated Movie Trading Cards Last night I worked on the Movie Trading Card assignment, creating a Trading Card aesthetic and then placing the Intruder and the Alien Woman within the template I had created. This was part of my attempt to work on some non-GIF assignments and get my 10 ...

I am pleased that dear @JimGroom created the arbitrary constraint of doing 10 stars worth of work from within the context of the season 2 episode, “The Invaders.”  Having to scour the Assignment Bank (scour is too rough a word) for assignments that lend themselves to the episode just puts a nice focus what is ...

I’m doing a little experiment this evening — pushing myself to see if I can reach 10 stars worth of assignments before midnight for this week’s feature The Twilight Zone episode, The Invaders,  – making an attempt to maintain a decent level of quality and also peruse the Assignment Bank for interesting challenges that will fit ...

With all that capacity up there in the braincase, the Katamit is able to both communicate telepathically with the earthlings, but also reserve some bandwidth for his own secure and private thoughts. Would that our intrepid hero Cryptographer Michael Chambers had spent more time trying to decipher the Katamit text before getting on that ship. ...

So Jim is calling for 10 Stars worth of Visual and Design Assignments for “The Invaders” and a total of 30 stars altogether.  Hmmmm. That’s a lotta stars. This started out as an attempt at a poster for the episode-of-the-week, where I envisioned Agnes Moorehead’s character standing flush against the wall holding her ax as ...

“One day, perhaps on a short stroll during your lunch, you take a side street that you’ve not taken before, and come upon a store. Like a lost memory from your childhood, it’s a bookstore of nostalgia, squeezed between a barber shop and a shoe-repair nook, from a time before the big-boxes and Kindles and e-readers ...

The font is called Ringbearer (free on dafont.com). An alternative you might like is called twylite-zone (free on fontspace.com). I used a screen capture of the star field from the opening of The Twilight Zone television program as the background, and fiddled with a combination of upper and lower case (you get caps regardless, but ...

Just not in so many words. Some Thoughts: The actress in this role is none other than Agnes Moorehead, whom I remember from Bewitched where she played Endora, Samantha’s overbearing mother. (Poor Darren!) The Rod Serling walk-into-frame opening is classic. Right out of the theatre. Moorehead’s movements are very stage-like, larger than life — and ...

The opening scenes of Mario Bava‘s 1966 film, “Kill, Baby, Kill” feature several cuts of some pallbearers making their way to the cemetery. First, they work their way through the streets …. Then around a building … And from there, out of town, and backlit across the horizon, towards the cemetery. This next is a ...

So @cogdog is on a train, and he posts a cinegram movie from out his window. I wonder if he saw everything that was captured on the camera? He didn’t mention Fred. The jump in the cinegram loop, together with the seemingly prehistoric colour palette of the desert came together to remind me of the ...

So Brian Bennett (@bennettscience) sought out what Star Pulse ranks as the best episode of all The Twilight Zone series, A Kind of Stopwatch and proceeded to select a great moment from the episode to use as the basis for a GIF. And as I looked at it, and studied it, in my mind’s eye ...

So @dkernohan has been active chatting it up with @jimgroom about #ds106 on the Internet Tubes this morning, and one of the tweets that caught my eye was this RT from David of a cool tweet by @traceymadden. Text-to-speech voices keep getting better and better, and voices with accents are great fun to play with. ...

Okay! So Jim Groom has posted a bit more about the upcoming summer session of #ds106 Digital Storytelling, this incarnation titled #ds106zone  – flavoured with The Twilight Zone. Not that anyone needs an excuse to watch old episodes of the series, but I’ve been looking forward to this all the same.  Who knows, the series ...

This is the Dave Cormier SMART Table-enabled Rhizomatic Pre-Show of Learning as realized by @giuliaforsythe‘s hand and my iPhone and Photoshop. Enjoy. Sorry the GIF is as big as it is, but you know them rhizomes just spread out and take over everything.

Today is Star Wars Day! The large graphic was sourced on the internet — it was there in a gazillion variations (I gather it was designed to promote the full, six-movie DVD release). I adjusted the canvas size to extend the black background to better fit a desktop wallpaper, if you want to use it ...

   

I spent some time this evening watching the first half of Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (this weeks entry in Jim Groom’s BavaFestival) , and I just had to stop watching and make a GIF.  I was moved to start GIFfing by number of wonderful bits in fairly rapid succession, and I wanted to ...

I’m behind in Jim Groom’s Mario Bava Festival — put it down to an intermittent Internet connection, … and other stuff.  In getting caught up, here’s an initial contribution (albeit tardy) for the Week 1: Black Sunday (1960). I did spend quite a bit of time on this GIF, getting rid of some lighting artifacts. ...

This little item doesn’t re-draw as nicely as I’d like within my WordPress theme when you try to view it on a mobile device (the canvas is on a page that is iframed into the WordPress post framework, which then gets morphed by the Responsive coding now present in the theme). If it looks a ...

In anticipation of this summer’s #ds1o6zone (Jim Groom is twiddling the dials on his old TV set in readiness), and in response to Grant Potter’s The Black Leather Jackets post (in which he notes, “Well, there’s one thing we can do, we can make sure they have a license to operate …”), I submit, for ...

A couple days back, Jim Groom tweeted out about Mario Bava films. After a short twitter conversation comparing respective access, I was all set, and shortly thereafter, after deciding to start with “Planet of the Vampires,” the following ensued. If you were ever a fan of Monster Chiller Horror Theatre on SCTV, you will no doubt ...