I chose to do the movie barcode visual assignment because it seemed really interesting. I didn’t realize that the 5 star difficulty meant that I would have to ignore the first half of the suggested tools for the assignment, as they 1. required quicktime to be installed so now Apple will never leave me alone 2. didn’t work at all(again, thanks Apple), and figure it out on my own. Which I did. And I think it turned out pretty good. Lets take a look at Star Wars Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back

Now that looks interesting. Seems to me to be a lot bluer than I would have guessed. Looks pretty cool too. Lets take a look at how it was done.

First you have to have the movie you want to convert into barcode format. Easy. I’ve got three different versions of The Empire Strikes Back. And I’m sure if you have a movie in mind to convert, you have a copy of it. Next I had to get screen grabs from the movie ever so many frames. For this I used VLC to playback the movie and take a screen every 100 frames or roughly every 4 seconds. Here’s how you’d set that up in VLC.

Make sure to set a destination folder, the type of image file you want each screen to be, and make sure to save it with the screen filter checked. Then you just sit back and let the movie play. I find that popcorn can help with this step.

Once you have your folder full of screens…

…you take that over to the website by Zach Whalen and select that folder to upload. Adjust the settings to your liking, hit the button to make it happen, and boom.

Instant Movie Barcode.

For this visual assignment I’ve taken an up close picture of an item. My task for you who is reading this is to leave you answer in the comments. Once someone gets it right I’ll update this post and let the rest of you know.

What could it be?!

Visual Assignment #5

The first year of college was quite the experience. It was such a different type of environment that my friends and I were open to almost any idea. It was around the time of our first college midterms, my friends and I were starting to feel the pressure and stress that so many college students talk about. Naturally, we thought with all that studying comes some well deserved study breaks. The only problem was what could we possibly do in Fred.? As freshmen we weren’t allowed to have cars, so we couldn’t go anywhere, but we didn’t want to stay on campus either because it was a ‘cabin fever’ type of situation. After assessing the situation we all decided to Uber to the river and take pictures. This adventure was not supposed to be a photoshoot, but it certainly became one.

Reminising on this experience, as a broke college kid it probably wasn’t the brightest idea to waste seven dollars on an Uber to the river… in the middle of winter. Furthermore, the pictures we took were ridiculous, but the people made it worthwhile.

The production of this photos add-ons involved this website. Below are instructions on how to recreate the text bubbles in the image above.

Step1:Go to the Aviary website and click on ‘edit your photo’

Step 2: Drag your photo into the box

Step 3: Select the icon that says ‘stickers’ on the header

Step 4: Click on the signature option

Step 5; Select any of the four bubbles

Step 6: Once you have resized it and have the sticker where you want it click ‘apply’. Be sure to select ‘apply’ or the bubble will be deleted

Step 7: Go back to the header and scroll over once. Select the ‘text’ icon

Step 8: Once you have the perfect caption make sure to resize the text and place it inside the bubble. After that select ‘apply’.

Step 9: Once you’ve finished, hit ‘save’.

Step 10: After you save your image Aviary will give you the option to download the photo

Link to assignment is tagged above in ‘Visual Assignment #5’

I got my first spam comment from a porn blog today, y’all. I was holding off on making a spubble because I just didn’t know what I would caption, but holy moly, this was nasty. The bot wasn’t even trying to hide it. It literally had “pornblog” in the URL. I got online and saw that Akismet had blocked its first spam comment and I thought, “oh, I’ll check to see what it is, maybe it’s a real person’s comment that got blocked for some reason!” Nope.

My spubble is gonna be under the continue reading link, because the picture is extremely goofy looking.

There are many pictures of me looking disgusted, since I’m a generally grumpy person, but this one from 2015 was the only one that could really get the job done. It’s not a particularly good picture for sure. The flash is on but there was something in front of the light, so it looks hazy. I’m in front of a bunch of family pictures and for some reason I’m wearing a winter coat and scarf indoors. I also just look weird as heck. But you know what’s also weird? Getting a freaking link to a porn blog on my post about pixel art. Come on, man. Bot. Botman! The spubble was 100% made in response to seeing the blocked spam comment. There are NSFW bots that follow me on other social media (I have no idea why or how) but this one really got to me, I guess since this is school-related. It’s like two worlds have collided and one of those worlds is really, really weird.

As for the Spubble itself, I went for more of a Snapchat-style caption with the translucent line for the text. So it’s less of a Spubble and more of a… Spline. A spine. I did crop the original photo, but only to take out some baby pictures of myself on the wall. There’s more than enough of my mug in this picture.

As with most of the stuff I’ve made so far, I did this in paint.net. My first step (as always, since I’m prone to mistakes) was to add a new layer to put the snapchat-esque text onto.

I’m very sorry that you had to see that face again. The next step was adding the translucent black line (which would go into Layer 2, the selected layer).

In the history box you can see that I’ve cropped the photo to its current resolution, then got started on the line. I also covered my dumb face with the color window! Nice!!! For the line, I set the opacity (in the color window, the very bottom right level) to 174. The number was pretty arbitrary, I just wanted something that was dark enough to frame some text but translucent enough to still show the photo beneath it. I knew wanted to make two lines of large text, so I made the line pretty big (175px brush width). Next is the text!

This was just plain old 46pt Verdana, bold, centered. The emojis I thought lent to the Snapchat feel.

After that I just merged the two layers and saved. The bot is still out there botting, but at least I got to react in a way that was meaningful to me and hopefully a little bit funny.

Looking back on it now I wonder if going so intensely in the Snapchat direction was a good creative choice – I DEFINITELY hope nobody ever uses this picture for anything ever, but this format isn’t as widely understood or beloved as your classic lolcat “top text/bottom text.” Is it relatable, or does it still seem too much like something you’d only send your best friend when they tell you they stepped in dog poop?

Found this picture that was taken of me at an event over the summer. My horse and I were outside the jump ring awaiting our turn. I had looked at the jump course earlier that day and had walked it when the ring was open for walking the course. I am not sure whether or not I remembered this specific course, but I have definitely forgotten where to start a course moments before entering the ring and end up having my trainer remind me quickly.

For my second visual assignment, I chose to do “What a Crappy Font Will Do” not just because the title made me chuckle, but because I do get some sick kicks out of seeing serious companies use comic sans or papyrus. It’s always spas that use papyrus. What’s up with that? Here’s the first of two font-swaps I did:

The font is Heffaklump from dafont.com. The background for the title I scooped right off of Neopets – admittedly, right off of my own login page, because I still log in once a month to put my pets in the Neolodge. Then I selected a color from one of the stars in the background, darkened it, and used it to create a rounded rectangle border. Neopets doesn’t seem to use this design anymore, but I remember it from old layouts and I liked the way it separated the title from empty space.

The actual Neopets logo has little black stars around it, but I’m not really an artist, so I grabbed a transparent PNG of an older logo off google and isolated the stars. In a new layer I pasted the (transparent!) stars in and placed them around the new logo.

For the tagline/hanging sign (which I thought was quintessentially Neopian) again I sampled colors directly from Neopets. In this case, it was the clock in the upper right hand corner of the screen. I kept the base color the same, but darkened the outline color to better match the main title sign.

Now that WaPo is full of whimsy, who will take its place in the world of hard-hitting journalism? No worries. It’s like the prince and the pauper, friends.

The title font is Old London, again from dafont.com. This was a far easier piece to put together, aside from having to figure out what the heck fonts WaPo used for their tagline (Georgia) and date (still couldn’t figure it out). There isn’t much in the way of color and doodles, but I think Neopets now has a quiet dignity.

Check it out!!

View post on imgur.com

For my first visual assignment, I decided to Say it Like the Peanut Butter with Satoshi Kon’s 1997 thriller, Perfect Blue. It also just happens to be one of my favorite movies. This is the pivotal scene in which Mima (a pop idol who quit the music biz to jump into acting) is consumed by her paranoia. It is also the first scene in which the viewer is shown a glimpse of who Mima’s “lookalike” stalker truly is – her own manager, Rumi, who had grown disgusted by Mima’s foray into the more adult world of television acting. Mima’s paranoia is justified, but she remains in grave danger.

This project initially started off being MUCH more ambitious. This gif is only 12 seconds… the one I wanted to make was 45! Kon’s ability to convey a sense of unease in a place as small and cute as a young lady’s apartment is unmatched. My computer certainly could not match it, and I had to continuously trim down the video. Welp.

I began with this video of the scene in its entirety and downloaded it at http://www.save-video.com/. It’s easiest just to put the word “magic” between the “you” and “tube” in the original video’s URL, because you’ll be redirected to the site automatically. Once I had the video downloaded, I used this guide from the DS106 Wiki on how to create animated gifs using MPEG Streamclip and GIMP (both of which I had to download).

The directions on the wiki are fairly straightforward, but darnit if I didn’t nearly lose my mind trying to trim things in Streamclip. That definitely took more trial and error than anyone should ever need.

The roughest part was having to start over a few times after realizing that the gif I was trying to make was just too long and that it would crash Streamclip after 50 or so frames. Very unsatisfying.

Once I finally got the clip trimmed down to a reasonable length, I ended up with 98 JPEG frames. Imagine that. And if you can’t, here’s my Mima frame folder.

Next up was actually making the gif! Still using the wiki guide, I brought up GIMP and imported all 98 Mimas. They were very cooperative.

I never actually knew how gifs worked until now. I suppose it’s pretty obvious and I should be facepalming myself into another dimension… but wow. It’s a flipbook, but INSIDE THE COMPUTER.

Forgive my audacity for categorizing this assignment as my best work. I’m just really proud of it! (/o\ )”

Assignment details at:

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/your-very-own-spubble/

This is photo of me from one my travels. I am not that much of a travelling person and do not enjoy travelling a lot. But in this photo you can see that I am happy and enjoying. Actually I met one of my childhood friend after a long time in Mauritius unexpectedly. I had a great time and believe it was kind of my lucky day. My body language is one of a person who is the happiest person in the whole world. I would love to see more friends unexpectedly on my future travels, if any.

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