What a week. There was a lot more work than the first week for sure. I did not take my advice from last week to start ahead of time and spread out the work, partially because of unexpected circumstances and partially due to other classes suddenly giving a lot of work that I didn’t expect and partially because I am a serial procrastinator.
What got me out of the gutter and back on my ass to run my creative mind again were the daily creates. I knew that I couldn’t procrastinate on these, as they needed to be completed within the posted date. I had lots of fun creating silly poems, collages, and even went hunting on a map for random words in my hometown and making a wacky story about it.
I’ll link to a post with a roundup of all of my daily creates for the week below. I actually got into such a habit of completing these that I ended up doing more than the required amount for the week!
Next order of business was the assignment bank. Just a note on the website UI and content itself, it’s very interesting to see all of these responses and assignments created way back in 2012 and beyond. It’s almost like a memory bank of DS106, and all of the creativity that has gone into the DS106 community over the years. These assignments took a little more creativity and effort but not too much, but I did choose to do relatively easy ones for this first week so it’ll most likely ramp up more in the coming weeks.
Next I edited my blog. To be honest, I’ve always been into minimalist designs, and I often think that the plain yet clean aesthetic is the one that appeals to me the most, even looking at blogs throughout the years. I created various categories that would sort my posts on the right side of my homepage for easier access to my posts, and removed some of the sample prompts and layout to create a clean, no frills look. I swear I actually did some customization! I made the background an ice blue that can hardly be recognized by the human eye, but I swear it was my best attempt to bring in some personality to my otherwise mundane and basic blog. As a future revision, I hope to write an “about me” page and link it at the top somewhere.
https://ds106.robinsyu.com/blog/
Participation is something I could have done a better job with this week. I commented on a few blogs right after finishing my assignments for the week (on Friday), so it definitely wasn’t on my mind to browse throughout the week. Although, this assignment bank post that was done by Tyler was a fun read! It was an assignment where after inserting a birth year, the task is to create a poem with generated words that are relevant to that year within the Merriam-Webster yearly list. Although the assignment was to write a poem, he identified his creation as more of a rap, and it flowed together really nicely! His post inspired me to put some more thought into which types of assignments I can be creative with in the future.
The course character assignment is something I had TOO much fun with this week. I am a huge gamer, and I took this opportunity to take inspiration from one of the newly released champions in League of Legends, Hwei. I took his sinister roots and backstory and turned it into something relevant to AI, keeping his core identity intact in the process while putting my own spin on the character.
It was so cool to link his character to the Artist archetype, as in the game, he is quite literally an artist with a gigantic paintbrush that throws ink of death at the sight of an enemy, acting as the team’s damage dealer and artillery mage. While he doesn’t have these bad-ass abilities in his course character creation version, I decided to focus more on his moral compass and the tragedies of his past that created his skewed viewpoint on the world around him, turning him to AI tools to plot the end of humankind.
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto article was an interesting read. It was essentially a lengthy dissertation about the positives of technology and how it was going to lead us all to the promised land. I didn’t agree with the sentiments, but I did make some thoughtful comparisons to my own opinions and how different it was from my WALL-E review. Dr. Oblivion’s response surprised me the most, as he absolutely agreed with all of my comments. However, this made me feel some sort of eerie way. almost as if I finally realized that Dr. Oblivion, just like any other form of AI, shares no form of common goal with humans for the survival and prosperity of mankind.
Finally for my film review revisions, I made a few revisions to talk more about the deeper AI themes and gained some perspective from Dr. Oblivion. He was mostly agreeing with my points, but that alone was enough for me to strengthen my arguments.
What a crazy week this was, both in and out of DS106. I will make sure to not procrastinate next week, but I said this last week as well, so who knows when I’ll start holding myself accountable 😉
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