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 movie you’re changing. Credit to Tom Woodward for posting an example of this idea in the #ds106 Twitter stream.

The beauty here is in the thinking and decision of what incident might unravel the plot- the storytelling here is in the thinking not the tool tinkering. In this case, if Alien Lady is not in her house, she never encounters the spaceship (maybe they fly on to Jim’s house), and the creatures on the ship get to go home.

I knew I wanted one of the earlier clips she she is cooking in the kitchen, and holding objects in her hand. I got the idea to throw in a twist, what might get her out of the house, but tweet from a friend? So while her house is a shack, has no electricity or running water, she does have an iPhone (solar charger). I clone brushed the knife out of ehr hand in PhotoShip, and made room to insert an image of an iPhone (there must be only 10,000,000,000,000 of them out there). I did paste in a screen cap of a twitter screen rather than an iPhone ome screen, it is so small you canot read the tweet. I placed it over her hand, then copied her hand from the screen layer, returned to the oPhone layer, and deleted the selection to make it look like her hand was on top.

For the tweet, I used a very key site for doing ds106 fake content- LEMMETWEETTHATFORYOU http://lemmetweetthatforyou.com/ lets you type a username in a box, and the twitter message. In this case there really is an @AlienLady, so I inserted a clip of the TZ character for the icon.

And there you go, the power of the MacGuffin is that it can neutralize the Twilight Zone!

We got some really sad news today, a death in the ds106 family.

Motherboard is dead. What am I supposed to do for #ds106 this week!?

— Fairuz Maggio(@fairuzmaggio) February 19, 2013

Yes, a computer has died. While Fairuz is in mourning (or shopping), let’s deal with it in the ds106 way — and make some art! Hence a new design assignment, A Memorial For Fairuz’s PC:

Fairuz is a UMW student for the Spring 2013 ds106 class, and suffered a catastrophic loss of her PC. We should honor its memory by designing something as a memorial- a funeral announcement, an animated GIF headstone, a floral wreath of RAM chips. REMEMBER THE PC!

I made up a bit of graveyard commentary:

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

It must have been ds106′s fault! It is the Raven! The weight of all that media, the taxing of the CPU by the strain of animated GIFs, what kind of machine can take this kind of stress and live!

Let’s bow our heads for a moment of silence…

and go make some art now!

Each go around of ds106, one assignment seems to take off in popularity, with no real explanation why. Previously we have seen bursts around Say It Like Peanut Butter, One Story / Four Icons, Splash the Color, and Messing with the MacGuffin.

I’m guessing, maybe wrongly, we will see a burst around the Six Word Memoir assignment, hot off the press. It mixes the challenge of a SAix Word Story with designing a graphic poster of it, as recently shared in Brainpickings. Our assignment is:

How would you tell your life’s story if you could only use six words? Come up with a six word autobiographical story and then design/illustrate it (more than just a photo). See examples from Illustrated Six-Word Memoirs by Students from Grade School to Grad School.

The idea for the six word memoir is credited to Larry Smith’s Smith Magazine back in 2006, and plays on the legendary idea of Ernest Hemingway writing a novel in six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Maybe not my whole life story, but certainly a pivotal one is illustrated now:

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

In October 1970, for some reason I wanted to stay home from school, unusual because I liked going to school. I am pretty sure I wanted to watch something on TV. I had this big old giant black and white TV in a wooden box in my room. I told my Mom I had a stomach ache and wanted to stay home from school.

She surprised me by saying she would take me to the doctor.

I felt sick then because they would find out I was faking.

I did not know it but she had been observing unusual things, in a Mom’s Instinct kind of way, I had unusual thirst, irrational outbursts (but then again I was 7), excessive bed wetting, lovely stuff.

Off we went to Dr Kramer’s office. I don’t remember if he just asked questions, if he took blood. I sat outside the office while they talked. Wow, I was going to be in so much trouble. Yhen they called me in and he started to explain that I have this thing called diabetes and I would have to go to the hospital and –

I busted out in tears, “I admit it! I was faking sick!”

No it was actually a good thing that this happened. I then spent 10 days at Sinai Hospital as I learned about diet and insulin and not eating candy any more. Can you believe they kept me in for that long? That was how different health care was in 1970.

From there it was summers at Camp Glyndon (a diabetic camp), testing urine for sugar and doing my injections, learning to always carry lifesavers with me for low blood sugars… it became and is pretty much something I face every day. I’ve been fortunate, now into my 43rd year, but it all seems to stem from that day when I tried to fake being sick.

I never tried that again.

Ah the makings of this poster. I found images of an old tv set and insulin syringes in the google. I had to stretch the TV to fit a portrait perspective on Photoshop. I used the magic wand and several clicks to select the screen area, and used the graphic pen filter to make that stippled effect on the TV. The syringe I rotated, resized, and erased out the tail end to make it look like it was coming out of the screen .I then found a few brush shapes that looked liek cracks to paint in behind the syringe layer.

The font is a fun one I have called “billieboldhand”. I use the Layer -> Layer Style -> Stroke to put an outline on the text, and Layer -> Layer Style -> Outer Glow to put a bit of a halo behind the text.

C’mon this is a great design assignment, because it combines the story form of the six word story with some play with graphic desigm. Add your six word memoir at http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/six-word-memoir/

Another element I am using in my story is that Dorothy figure ut that to return to Oz, she would need to go shopping and find a new pair of ruby slippers, since you cannot expect to just fall out of the sky again and land on another witch.

So she has to go shopping somewhere upscale. For this piece of the story, I used the Wait, Where’d That Guy Come From? assignment (fun because I never dis that one before):

Photoshop someone(s) (or something(s)) into a picture that isn’t supposed to be there.

I did some searching on photos of high end shoe stores, but somehow the thought of Dorothy shopping for shoes in the Villaggio (located in Doha, Qatar) worked for me- using this Travelblog photo.

Here is Dorothy (and Toto too) slyly shopping for magic shoes in Doha:

To mix her in the crowd, I would need an image of Dorothy standing or walking, and isolated (no arms around Scarecrow, sorry). The one that worked was for an ad for a life size cardboard cutout.

In Photoshop, I deleted the bit of ground around her feet, and dropped in the main photo. Her layer is on top of the others, but to make it look more real, I position her to overlap with someone standing closer to the camera, and use that person’s shape as a selection to delete a bit from the Dorothy layer, so it looks like she is behind (it is likely better to extract his shape later first and they drop it in.

Dorothon was very tiny. I went to make a blowup of the area after putting a circle around it- I zoomed in the circle to about 400%, and did a screen shot. I then can paste that back to the normal size, so it looks pixelly like it is a real blow up.

Why was Dorothy so set n going back to drab, black and white Kansas? Was Auntie Em that much of the life of the party? If the truth were told, she would have expressed her desire to hang out with those wild Munchkins:

As part of my evolving Dorothy story, this is the ds106 Truthful Movie Poster assignment

Imagine if movie posters told the REAL story about the fillm they’re advertising. Redesign an existing movie poster by changing the text/images to tell us the real story. More examples at http://www.holytaco.com/classic-taco-if-movie-posters-were-honest.

Of course, I am making up what is real (cause that serves the higher concept of my story, meh). There are lots of posters out there to work from- I liked the bold motif of a poster for the Tybee Arts Association:

The bottom text was easy to clone brush out in PhotoShop. I went for a few more details, and clone brushed out “The Musical” to replace the text with “The Psychedelia”. It’s the small things that make a difference right? Right?

For the main text, I gave upo on matching the font and just went with a art style one, Kino MT – the lower text is Helvetica Neue.

And for a crowning touch, I tossed in a spilled Martini glass to lay on the road.

Last night we had an unfortunate outage at umwdomains, the hosting for ds106 students at the University of Mary Washington. With this being finals week, students working feverishly to finish projects and reflections, twitter was never so lit up with activity.

Let’s give some appreciation to people like Tim Owens who was working on this late at night or Zach Davis and Cast Iron Coding who keep the ds106 server from falling over. Like Jim Groom has done before in Behind Every EDUPUNK is a Miserable Sysadmin, it’s time to stop what you are doing, and give these folks some rainbow love.

(click to see the full size rainbow room)

Thus a new ds106 design assignment Rainbows And Unicorns In The Server Room:

Give some love and recognition for the folks behind the scenes that keep the web servers and internet tubes running- often the only time we contact our server admins is when something is wrong. Twitter fills up with “OMG I CANNOT FINISH MY #DS106 PROJECTS WHAT AM I GONNA DO?”

Make an animated GIF of a server room that includes both rainbows, unicorns, and a message of thanks. The cheesier the better. Bonus points for elves and pink ponies.

My own was constructed with a fair bit of layer play in Photoshop, starting with the base layer from this flickr image

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by torkildr

I did screen shots of the ds106 site as well as those of two students, Nathan and Lauren‘s blogs that flash on the screens (the latter are pretty tiny, but there). This is done by using the ploygon selection on the screen area, and doing a Edit-> Paste Special -> Paste Into to insert the little screen shots. I use the Edit -> Transform -> Distort to change the shape of the screen shots to fit. I also covered two of the server names from the original with text (“ds106.us” and “umwdomains”), doing some rotate and shear on the text to make them fit.

I used the Make Frames from Layer menu item in the Photoshop animation window to make the layer individual frames I could play with the timing, and activate the screens to blink on and off. I had now a three frame animation sequence.

I got lucky in searching for the unicorn image to find an animated GIF in a discoussion forum. By opening this GIF in Photoshop, in the animation window I was able to copy three of the animation frames (one where the eye was closed), I could use “copy frames” to then go back to my creation and paste frames in, using te option to Paste Over- meaning it overlaid the frames on the 3 I had. To make the wink effective, I kept the unicorn’s eye frame open on all three, duplicated the third frame, and switched that layer to use the closed unicorn eye- by changing the timing I could make it quickly blink.

I found the perfect rainbow on Best Clipart – perfect cause it had little hearts but also because it was a PNG file with background transparent. I made that visible on the last frame.

For the text, to make it stand out, used the Layer Styles – Outer Glow to make the white haze behind, gradient overlay to add a rainbow, and Stroke to put black border around the lettes.

The beauty of working in layers is the small file size you get with the final GIF- the full size one (1024×681) is only 481k.

Okay, even if you do not do this assignment (and I think you should, anyone who has a web site), I ask my #ds106 students to at least write a blog post or send a tweet of thanks to @timmmmyboy and @zdavis

(click for full size mini mooc)

Found among the coffee additives at HB’s, a restaurant in Pine, AZ, this little product that was created for the ds106 Re-brand ‘em Assignment:

The logo is an important part of a company. For this assignment, you are to choose a company and re-brand them. Take their logo and remix it, or start from scratch and make it your own piece of art. Need inspiration? Here’s a cool site (http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/) that blogs about recent changes in company logos, and posts both the new and old versions. It can really highlight what subtle changes can do to a logo.

Once MOOCs get tired of being so massive and unweildy, they will implode and emerge as “mini-moocs” This is the most important dairy product in 200 years.

I suggest grabbing a handful of them.

What do you do when not sure which ds106 Design Assignment to do? Spin the random chooser. Seems like a good thing to do, hence this little bit of design work.

The assignment this is for is Name That Single:

Create a design for a favorite song by using just simple designs and NO WORDS…Basically a design assignment with the rules in charades. IE: for No Doubt’s “I’m Just a Girl” I would just have a symbol of a girl.

Shall I give a clue? The lead singer of this band is female.

Some might quibble that I have violated the instructions for no words with my math symbol. So what? Who cares? the point is not to just stay within the lines, but to experiment with the concept.

To select my song, I also used the randomness of the shuffle in my iTunes to pick this song.

I’m standing in the middle of life with my pains behind me.
But, I got a smile
For everyone I meet.
Long as you don’t try dragging my bay,
Or dropping a bomb on the street.

Got it? Half of the length of the run, puts you.. in the middle? Yes

Gotta dig Chrissie’s shiny telecaster.

There’s more synchronicity here. I’ve been taken a few times to taking photographs of curvy roads, and like those quite country roads where you can just lay right down on the stripe and get the photo- the one I used to make the image above was in Newport Virginia and is the road to Gardner Campbell’s house where I stayed in August:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

To get the more abstract effect I used the Palette Knife filter in photoshop which can make a photo more like a painting, but not as overdone as the watercolor one. The markings where just some paint brush and text for the arrows and math.

But what I thought about was that it was only after doing something similar here in Vermont:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

That it would be fun to do a collection of what I tag now as BellyOnTheRoad photos. There is something just real… real about doing that. I only have four, but as a reminder, if your photos are geotagged (usually automatic for mobile phones or can be done manually in flickr via the map tools) you can assemble a map for a tagged set of photos.

If you go to the “Your Map” link under the flickr You menu you get to the map tool; mine is http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/map/. You can tell it to search everyone’s photos or just your own, and give it a search term, in my case the tag of BellyOnTheRoad. Cool! I get a map for where my four belly on the road photos are from:

(click map for flickr version)

So yet another way flickr can help you organize not only your photos, but any ones you can search on.

Kind of funny where you end up when you start out clicking “random”

Submitted for no one’s approaval, another design example for the ds106 Minimalize Your Philosophy assignment:

Pick your favorite quote OR make up your own phrase which describes a philosophy that you try to live by. It can be about love, friendship, family, education, culture, health, charity, etc. Design a minimalist poster depicting the concept. Extra challenge: Try to include a unique element that makes it YOU. Don’t forget to explain your thought process. :)

Okay, I am not going to claim this one as MY philosophy, but I had this idea, and needed to make a poster, and this was the closest assignment I could find (yeah, I could create a new one, but we have plenty).

Today on our walk around the country roads near their home, friends Barbara and Bill pointed out some innocuous nondescript green plants on the roadside. They had been mowed down, but there were taller stalked nes in the adjacent field. “Have you hear of wild parsnip?” No, I’m kind of a city guy.

Well, as it turns out, wild parsnip creates these bright yellow flower heads

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by wackybadger

but if you contact these plants at all, they will burn your skin and leave scars. It is labeled as a dangerous plant.

Can you think of a more clever evolutionary strategy to be left alone? Create attractive flowers but then easily poison anything that touches it.

SO I decided to make a poster of this.

In PhotoShop I used the image above, and simplified it by using Image=> Adjust-> POsterize which reduces the color set to a smaller number, and turn a photo into something more abstract like a print. I played with the slider and ended up on something like 11 levels.

In landscape orientation it did not look like a poster (nor did it leave room for words), so I rotated in 90 degrees.

The text “Survival Strategy” is Gil Sans Ultra Bold, because, it is big and thick. I used Layer=>Effects=>Stroke to put a 3 pixel outside edge to the letter, a good effect for making text stand out.

The lower text is Mistral, which I liked because it looks kind of hand drawn and more ominous. The black text was not really looking good on its own, so I used Layer=>Effects=>Outer Glow to put that yellowish haze around the letters.

Poster done!

Again, this IS NOT MY PHILOSOPHY! Just had fun with today’s learning moment.

Learn more about Wild Parsnip… I think it gives our Corn Overlords something to worry about

Time after time the road out of a blog funk is sitting down to make some silly ds106 art. So it was later this afternoon, when this tweet form Cathy Finn-Derecki set me in motion:

@cogdog @twoodwar My God. What a load of twaddle! What’s next? Sebastian Thrun on the cover of “Tiger Beat” right next to Justin Bieber?

— Cathy Finn-Derecki (@saracup) July 28, 2012

So challenged to put Sebastian Thrun on the cover of Tiger Beat, I got out the old Photoshop clone brush and went to work.

Now, one thing that gets me growling is when people send out a link via twitter with something like:

This would make a great #ds106 assignment

Which to me is a bit lame- if it would make a good assignment, then go ahead and make it so, damnit. Just tossing a link out there is not #4life to me.

So hence a new ds106 Design Assignment, On The Cover Of A Teen Mag

Take a popular figure from politics, education, that you would not expect to be there, on the cover of a teen fan magazine. Bonus points if the cover includes a heart throb of initials JB and a lot of pink color. Re-edit the text as well to blend them into the style of the magazine.

Now that I’m in motion, time to get some GIFfin going…