Transmissions from the front lines
This great evil – where’s it come from?
How’d it steal into the world?
What seed, what root did it grow from?
Who’s doing this?
Who’s killing us, robbing us of life and light?
Mocking us with the sight of what we might of known?
Does our ruin benefit the earth, aid the grass to grow and the sun to shine?
Is this darkness in you, too?
Have you passed through this night?
Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere’s Jimmy!
All,
This is not Jim Groom, it is his wife Antonella Dalla Torre, and I am simply passing this email along that I found open on my husband’s computer. He seems to be under a lot of stress and is nowhere to be found, so I figured I would send this email along in the interest of somehow keeping this class afloat. Wish I could do more, but at this point I am just worried about the health of my husband. If you see him on the internet, tell him to come back home. P.S.–He just happened to have his blog opened as well.
As established in today’s class the O’Blivion’s have officially been banished from the ds106 community. What’s more, the ds106radio radio show theme is a toss-up between Summer Camp and Summer of Oblivion––but given the recent series of events I think Summer of Oblivion is most appropriate—and given this is my class, so it goes. Summer of Oblivion is the official theme. As noted in today’s video, I expect you all to break up into groups of three, ideally, to create a radio show. I want those groups cemented no later than tomorrow morning by 10 AM, at which time you will add your group name and the group members to this wiki page here.
Keep in mind that the shows should be roughly about 5 minutes per person in your group, so if you have three members count on roughly 15 minutes. What’s more, the theme is jumping off point, feel free to interpret and experiment with it as you see fit. The full shows are due no later than midnight on Sunday, July 10th. And they need to be mp3 files and you can add them to the ds106 dropbox here (password “wejamecono” no quotes). Additionally, each group will need to create :30 second and 1 minute long bumpers for their shows no later than 5 PM on Friday, July 8th —which also should be added to the ds106dropbox. In terms of naming conventions, be sure your group name is at the beginning of all your uploaded files, for example “teamgroom_30bumper.mp3”. Let me know if this makes sense.
Below is the video of today’s class, please keep in mind some of the information about the assignment has changed in light of the recent developments, and this email is the official assignment announcement. Remember, you are with or against #ds106. There can be no middle ground.
Update: The transcript from the live chat of this session is now available here.
Your one and only leader,
Jim Groom
Update: The transcript from the live chat of this session is now available here.
Not sure if you have seen today’s live broadcast yet, but it turns out that the O’Blivion family has decided to try and commandeer my course, and as a result I have had to banish them and a series of other ds106 internauts who have chosen to challenge my authority as the captain of this ship in Dr. O’Blivion’s absence. In fact, Dr. O’Blivion himself left me a phone message wherein he left his disapproval, and now he is banished, listen to the audio clip below:
Dr. O’Blivion message and his official banishment
In fact, most of the folks in ds106 in general have forgotten what a source for sweetness and light I have proven during his untimely disappearance. The fickle members of this open, online course have forgotten the blood, sweat, and tears I have poured into this course, and as a result they have been banished and here is the list. I laid out my plea on ds106.tv in this video below—please watch it to learn the score:
Update: Transcript of the live chat from this rant is now available here.
If you are still part of #ds106, and you are wise, you will not cross me lest you find yourself on this list. If you are on the list above, apologies being accepted up and until midnight tonight. The clock is ticking people!!!
The poll on my blog isn’t working so take it on the d106 site here.
Thanks to Shannotate I think we now have more clues about Dr. O’Blivion’s mysterious disappearance and his whereabouts:
Doc Oblivion “Speaks!” by Shannon Nicole Swanson
The Dickie Goodman’s “Break-In” audio assignment is a blast, thanks Laura Blankenship! Here is another great one by Kinzie Brooks featuring an interview with Santa Claus:
Here is the link to today’s broadcast on justin.tv, I am currently waiting on access to upload today’s video to a YouTube that can handle videos longer than 15 minutes—mine can’t for obvious reasons 😉 So, if you want to watch it immediately use the link below—and forgive the 30 second commercial. [The YouTube version has now been included in this post for posterity.] Also, as I mentioned in Thursday’s email, all episodes are on the justin.tv ds106 tv account immediately after the session. So, if you need to watch them sooner than these emails get to you, then you always have justin.tv as an alternative option.
Update: Here is the live chat transcript from this session. Also, here is the list of links to the assignments discussed as well as previous radio shows, bumpers, etc.
In today’s video we talked about ds106radio with Bryan Jackson, The Followers of the Apocalypse, and Mikhail Gershovich. All of our guests today are practitioners in this distributed radio station that was born out of the energies of the open, online course during the Spring semester version of ds106 (special thanks to Grant Potter—for masterminding the architecture). To find out more about listening and broadcasting on ds106 radio go here: http://bit.ly/radio4life.
The second half of the class was dedicated to review some of the impressive audio assignments a number of folks in the class had created over the long weekend (see the list of featured assignments here). There’s a lot of great stuff, and these assignments are designed to prepare you for what’s to come, the ds106radio show that this class will create. To that end we need to pick a theme. In order to do this I have created a Google form where I am asking each of you to submit a theme for the radio show, the limitations is it has to be somehow related to Summer (this is a way to focus the themes). Martha Burtis’s course already used “Dog Days of Summer” as a theme so that is out, what else do you got? Go here to add a theme, this must be done by midnight tonight (EDT).
Finally, first thing tomorrow morning there will be another email from me asking you to vote on the themes, the one with the most votes will be the organizing theme for our show and I will announce it during the live broadcast tomorrow. Also, I will spend most of tomorrow’s broadcast explaining the details of the radio show, i.e., how it will be organized, deadlines, etc. But I will also throw it out there now, I would like to have two or three people who will be willing to help live broadcast/MC the course radio show early next week.
This is the 90 second sound effects story I made for the sound effects audio assignment for ds106. I followed Shayna Moreland’s and Ben Rimes’s lead and riffed on a Summer time theme, mine being a short story at the beach. The beach tells its own story in terms of sounds, and I love the idea of an envirocast wherein you can experience the sense of place and being through sounds—Shayna’s example did that beautifully with the pool. I grew up on the beaches of Long Island and the sounds bring back for me such a powerful feeling of carelessness and freedom that I can’t help but be transported when I hear them, which for me is the real power of audio—it’s like the heroine of creative mediums, it plays on your sensibilities instantaneously! In fact, the absence of the beach where I live now is one of my greatest problems with Fredericskburg (especially during the Winter). Anyway, all the sounds I used are from freesound.org, and the list of credits are below (thank you awesome people for uploading your sounds, ds106 should encourage more of this):
Oceanwavecrushing by Luftrum
Sea Gulls close-up by justkiddink
Beachfootsteps by acclivity
Footsteps by Hazure
Splash by Patchen
Whale by Stomachache
Underwater by plagasul
Inhale by otherthings
How did I do it? Well, Audacity is getting easier and easier for me to work with. Not that I am getting better, but it is seeming more intuitive. The things you need to know when working on Audacity for a project like this are the following.
So there is my list of pretty simple steps I used to make this 90 second story—anything I am missing that could be useful?
This comes from the not perfect department. I had problems making the background of my minimalist travel poster design assignment cleanly mesh with the text I covered up and the new text I added. The background is not one consistent color, and I couldn’t get a swath big enough to fake it well. I tried playing with the blur tool to no real avail. I would love some advice from folks who know Photoshop how I might make it look better.
The reference in this poster may be a bit obscure, but I couldn’t help but be reminded of Johnny Rambo in the mountains of Hope when I saw the original here. As you can see I simply changed the titles and the context, but this is a work in progress. I’ll hopefully be putting out another, cleaner version soon.
I’m still working on my book cover, but in the meantime I did Michael Branson Smith’s ds106 bumper sticker assignment, which is a blast. I love that it was so dead simple. All I did is take the originalbumper sticker I want to ds106ify and take out the fingers throwing the peace sign and replace them with ds106 dressed in hippie-inspired font I found here. A simple airbrushing out the peace sign and replacing it with the flower powered, bell -bottomed ds106 and that is that.
Find out more about me here.
