I did exactly the opposite of what I intended last week. “I’m gonna not wait until Friday to do everything!” I said. And then I did that. Sort of.
I started with just doing the daily creates each day, but I didn’t do anything else until Thursday night, and then didn’t even finish everything because I was exhausted. I’m also confused because, even when I click for it to post immediately, it will end up saying that it posted the day after. So, please take the dates with a grain of salt or at least trust me that I did them on the days that I say I did them. It’s 8:15 pm on Friday 1/26/24, and I’m sure it’s going to say this posted on 1/27 BUT PLEASE TRUST ME!!! It will not be posted 1/27!!!!
Anyways . . . my birthday was on Sunday, so here is the tale of my first week (in ds106) as a 20-year-old.
On Monday, I started with the Daily Create for 1/22/24, where I wrote a Fibonacci poem to vent about my feelings. Here’s what I wrote:
“How
can
I show
you the light
that I see within you,
that you shed delicately to brighten my world,
when you are suffering deep inside a dark maze with seemingly no exits?
You allow the sun to shine, beyond all the troubles of the world. I wish I could help you see it.”
I talked about it on the post if you want to view the full story behind it, but I thought this was able to help me get my feelings out. I was hurting because my friend was hurting, and I needed them to know that they were the light in the dark world, and I wished they could see that.
On Tuesday, I also only did the Daily Create for 1/23/24. I made my own version of the Voynich manuscript. Here’s what I made:
I talked about it in the post as well if you want more details, but I really just tried to be as random as possible. I wanted the letters and drawings to be similar to real letters and letters, so that you would look at it and acknowledge that it was saying something, but you couldn’t translate it. I liked this one because I think everyone gets to imagine it says whatever they want, and there is no real answer on what it says, or what story it tells.
On Wednesday, I only did the Daily Create for 1/24/24. I wrote a poem about the image I saw, which I’ll share here as well:
“Is it smoke or is it mist?
that reaches up like a fist,
that rises from the grass to the sky,
covering the trees that stretch high
In the hills, is it raining heavy
or is it just the clouds that carry
the weight of the world around
silencing the earth to no sound?
Quiet.
Dreary.
Gray.“
I wasn’t sure about this one, it took me a little longer than I wanted it to. The story behind it is that, I don’t know what’s going on, but I can see multiple different stories that it could tell. I explored that thought through asking questions in the poem about it. People seemed to like this one, which boosts my ego, because I definitely don’t think it’s good at all. It ends upruptly because I didn’t want to work on it anymore.
On Thursday, I finally did some work! I started with the Daily Create for 1/25/24 to get my brain working, and here is what I made with to show the exiting of the toxic Internet:
I’m now realizing that it didn’t upload as a gif, but it’s supposed to be a gif, where the pointer clicks the exit button . . . I guess you can just imagine this.
This one was probably my worst Daily Create. I wasn’t super inspired, and I just whipped out Canva and tried to portray the toxicity through factories and green clouds of smoke. I think it would have been cooler if the pointer actually clicked EXIT like I intended.
I also did a Visual Assignment from the Assignment Bank. I chose this photo that I had taken a while back last year:
You can see the full story about it on the actual post I linked, but my favorite thing about this was that it tells an uncertain story. There are a lot of questions about it, yet no answers. I think I’ll reference this a lot this semester, but I just thought that everyone could make up a different story about it, but none of us would ever know the true story about it, not even me.
I did one more assignment from the Assignment Bank, a Writing Assignment where I wrote about the end of the world from AI but from the viewpoint of an AI. This was so hard to write for me because I tried to think really technical and not put emotions into descriptions, because the entire point of what I wrote was that the AI doesn’t feel. It has no feelings, it’s not built to feel. It can describe feelings, read humans’s feelings, but it cannot feel anything. I think the other AI in the story learned how to feel, but this one did not. Maybe it was a faulty AI, but I think it is my preferred version of AI. I’m afraid of AI feeling, it makes them feel more human, so that’s why I wanted to explore one not feeling anything. I wanted readers to feel pity for the AI because it’s just different from the others.
I was kind of proud of that one, so thank you for reading it. 🙂
On Friday, I did everything I hadn’t done, starting with, of course, the Daily Create for 1/26/24. I created this recreation of the infographic/poster about books for everyone:
I’m not entirely pleased with this one. I noticed a lot of things I could have done afterwards, but it was just a simple work in Canva to get my brain working. It was kind of fun, because I hadn’t done graphic design in a long while, so it was fun fiddling with the text and the formatting of things. I talked about what I did in this more in the actual post.
The last Assignment Bank assignment I did was a Design Assignment in which I designed an ad/poster for a charity. I created one for donated eSims to Gazans. Here is my design:
I don’t want to sound like a broken record, so I won’t keep repeating myself, but I made this so that I could promote support for Palestine. 26000+ Palestinians have been murdered since October 7th, and that’s not including the innocent Palestinians who were killed all throughout history. I don’t think it matters what side you’re on now, when so many people have died. I wanted to be able to share this in case it meant anything or informed anyone of anything. I hope it did. Please continue to stay informed on what’s happening outside of our country.
It’s occurring to me now that two of the assignments were supposed to be AI based . . . but I’m not too upset that I forgot that because I’m glad I was able to use my blog to share support for Palestine. If I lose points for that, it’s a sacrifice I would be willing to make.
Another thing, please take a look at the bottom of the post for different links to offer support for people in Palestine. Here is a link that is easy: all you do is click one button and it helps a donation be sent. If you bookmark the site or visit it every day, you can click it every day. It’s costless but helpful.
Today I also created my Course Character. It comes at no surprise that they are sun-based. I actually had a lot of fun with this one!! I got to doodle and sketch, something I haven’t done in a long while, and do character design based on my own thoughts. I wanted to incorporate Sol (my character) into something that’s important to me and also what this class is about: storytelling.
Sol’s purpose is to tell people’s stories. Sol is the sun, and the sun paints the sky with new pictures every day, every minute, different all over the globe. The sky are the stories of our lives, Sol is the painter.
It makes me smile and feel warm thinking about the sky being a form of storytelling. Think of cloudwatching. You make a story out of a cloud that looks like a certain shape or animal. You create a story for it.
There’s so many stories to be told, big and small, and that’s what Sol does. They are also the risen sun in the blog title!
I also read the Techno-Optimist Manifesto and made a Reflection on it. This allowed for my first conversation with Dr. Oblivion, who I side eyed carefully. He started out sarcastic and blunt when I explained how the Manifesto failed to address the environmental concerns, but then Dr. Oblivion shared that he agreed with me about my fears of AI harming the environment. I also talked to him about how this kind of technology would enforce people into slave-like work to obtain the material.
It felt like the Manifesto was best case scenario, but that there were too many consequences that it didn’t address. Dr. Oblivion also told me to take it with a grain of salt, understand both the pros and limits of this kind of technology, and I think that’s what I’ll be doing.
Personally, I don’t think the Techno-Optimist Manifesto fits me, but it was eye opening to read from the point of view of those who feel this way and, although it was hard, it was fun going back and forth with Dr. Oblivion on the ideas that the Manifesto brought up.
The final assignment I did today, and for the week, was the rewritten M3GAN film review. I also used Dr. Oblivion to help me with this, who told me that he didn’t think I missed anything important.
One thing that Dr. Oblivion said as I was rewriting my review was that films and media typically tell the worst-case scenario of things, which I hadn’t thought of. Just because AI if overwhelmingly evil in films, doesn’t mean that it will be in reality. The idea is dramatized so that it can create tension and interest, because a normal film with normal AI that isn’t evil would be “boring.”
But that makes me wonder, would it? It’s just another story. Why can’t we tell that story? What’s stopping us from having boring AI seen that doesn’t drastically change the world?
Maybe I should explore more AI in films to see what other kinds of stories they tell.
This is how my week has gone. Sorry to ramble, I’m a talker and love talking.
My participation with commenting on other’s has been poor this week, mostly because I keep forgetting. Next week I plan to comment on a few things every day, see what everyone is up to.
Actually, seeing the few posts that I did comment on was nice. It’s actually really cool seeing how other people interpret the same prompt or idea in a completely different manner than I did. It makes me remember that I’m not the only person in this world and that my thoughts and ideas are not universal. I actually think I want to go through everyone’s Course Characters and see what people have come up with!!
So this week was stressful . . . very stressful, a lot to do, not only here but in all my other classes. With that, next week I will not leave everything until last minute AND I MEAN IT!!! (You can yell at me in the comments if I end up leaving everything until the last minute again . . .) I also want to interact more with others, see these people, see their works, see their stories. I want to connect with the people here, or at least just get a glimpse of what they’re up to.
To conclude, next week . . . will be the one . . . please . . .
Hey there! I was struggling with trying to fix the day of publish as well but if you go into word press and go to like you are editing the page than you can click on the date and time when you want to public to see that you published it on a certain day and time.
thank you so much!!! I’ll look to see if that works for me 🙂