VisualAssignments24 – Assignment Bank

Making light of addictive personalities

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I’m a real jerk for poking fun of alcoholism. But here it is all the same.

Troll quote assignment

The woman: Lindsay Lohan. The quote: lyrics from “Plastic Jesus,” an American folk song by (according to Wikipedia) Ed Rush and George Cromarty. The attribution: Reese Witherspoon*. The common thread: alcohol abuse.

“Plastic Jesus” is about one of those dashboard figurines. There are many versus and many versions of this song. It’s especially irreverent, much like this troll quote assignment.

cc licensed Flickr photo by Christy Frink

I didn’t take the hard road when creating this assignment. I found an image of Lindsay Lohan in her heyday. It also happened to have lots of white space for text. I opened the image as a layer in GIMP and then created a text layer. I added in the lyrics, played around with font and size, and there we go.

I’m using this–and probably other similar assignments–as a way to stretch my legs. Kind of like a Daily Create, I guess.

I was thinking about using lyrics from Lydia Loveless’ “Jesus Was a Wino,” but this worked out ok in the end.

* This is a change. I originally attributed the quote to Betty Ford, but that didn’t seem to fit well for one reason or another. Lindsay Lohan and Reese Witherspoon are in more similar leagues.

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Trolling TV SciFi: the truth is out there?

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Above is an instance of one of my all-time favorite ds106 assignments, triple troll quotes. I grabbed this image of Serling with the trippy Twilight Zone background and then added the quote and the author text in GIMP. The one thing that was tricky is getting text to show up against that background, so I added the white text, then selected the image layer and selected around the text and airbrushed it black so it could be easily read. That’s it, and I love it!

Two stars (21 in the bag!)

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Vontorson: A super-ground-breaking-author-extraordinaire!

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For my second contribution to FTR! For the Remix!, I wanted to do a traditional DS106 assignment. And given that Cory Doctorow is a famous science fiction/cyberpunk author, creating a Troll Quote seemed appropriate. I used a quote from Kurt Vonnegut (or rather, an extracted quote for the sake of convenience), this image of Cory Doctorow, and attributed it to William Gibson.

I suppose one reason why I like combining these three authors is that each was ground breaking in his own way. Kurt Vonnegut brought science fiction to the mainstream and experimented a great deal in format, using humor, non-linear narrative, and narrators with personality. William Gibson is often credited as the founder of cyberpunk. And Cory Doctorow was the first author to publish a novel under a creative commons license. Together they make a super-ground-breaking-author-extraordinaire! Or a troll. Your pick.

Note: This contribution falls under a different license from other content on my site. All contributions to the FTR! project are under a non-commercial, share-alike license.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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Assignment Bank | Two Points

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The Assignment:

“For this week, you need to complete 10 stars worth of Visual Assignments — this could be doing 5 assignments rated 2 stars, etc. One of them is required by everyone, so we can all do the same one and compare our ideas, but beyond that, you get to pick the ones you want to do to complete your 10 pack.”

Troll Quotes

All I can say is. HA! I have only seen one of these movies. Can you guess which one?

Can you tell me all three movies?

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Triple Troll Link

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When I saw this one, I just knew I had to do it. As a Redditor, it’s something I often see.

The assignment: Find an image of a well-known figure, add to it a famous quote by someone related in some way to the figure in the image and then attribute the quote to a third, related figure.

I thought long on what to do for this assignment. You just can’t beat Gandalf as Dumbledore quoting Yoda.

Movies and books are too plenty, so I started thinking about video games. Immediately, I thought of The Legend of Zelda.

How many people think that the main character of The Legend of Zelda is named Zelda?

So that’s how I came up with this one:

I tried to do a similar style to the Gandalf one because I think it’s more powerful and “realistic” looking…even with a video game character.

I began with this image. Since I wanted to imitate the Gandalf image, I got the color from the back with the dropper and filled the background of a new image, clean image.

Then I used the Magic Wand to get rid of the background from the Link image. I copied it to the dark background and erased any extra bits of white from him.

Then I used the Fixedsys font that I found from this Daily Create page. I gave Link some drop shadow, 3 distance and black multiply.

But then I realized that I didn’t quite follow the directions of this assignment. I was really supposed to have three different universes of characters.

So I went into Photoshop again and changed it around.

When my roommate dressed up as Peter Pan for Halloween, most people thought she was Robin Hood or Link from Legend of Zelda. So I think this works much better.

I just deleted the text from the other Photoshop file, and then added the new text with Chopin Script for the font. I made this distance 5.

I’m pretty happy with this last one, especially since I think a lot of people can relate to it!

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Who Said That?

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So this assignment was to take 3 pieces–a quote, a picture, and a name–and mix them all together. You can read more about it here.

This was my final product. I couldn’t decide what to do for a while and ended up deciding on a Zoolander quote because it’s my favorite movie and who doesn’t love a good movie quote? Then I narrowed that down to “I’m not an ambi-turner” because it’s one of the most memorable of the movie. Then, for a while, I tried to think of another movie similar to Zoolander. There aren’t any. I thought another Ben Stiller movie would be just fine and then the whole thing ended up being a big Ben Stiller mashup.

As for putting the whole thing together, I used Gimp. I googled White Goodman for the picture. I chose this one because it had lots of space to put words on it. Then I used the text editor and added in the quotes, finally picking Tony Perkis, the counselor from Heavy Weights, as the quoted character. The rest is history.

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Secret Agent Men

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Sometimes the ds106 assignment just falls into your lap. Such was the case when I noticed that Cogdog tweeted to Jim Groom about a gentleman named Conrad that I’d mentioned in the latest installment of scottlo calling. Seems that Groom wanted to use one Conrad as an inspirational reference point for the ds106 ethos. Cogdog replied that the second Conrad might be a better fit. And for the sake of being contraire, I jumped in with a tweet telling them that they were both barking up the wrong tree and that the third Conrad is the pure embodiment of the ds106 mindset.

That’s when I decided to return to one of my favorite ds106 Visual Assignments: The Triple Troll Quote. For those not familiar with the TTQ, here’s the deceptively simple premise:

Find an image of a well known figure, add to it a famous quote by someone related in some way to the figure in the image and then attribute the quote to a third, related figure.

In this iteration, it seems to me that there are two points connecting the three would-be ds106 moral exemplars. The first is that they shared the same surname (one one of the three was born a Conrad). The second point of connection is referred to in the title of the post and will be left for the curious to pursue.

In doing this assignment, once I’d found a suitable image and quote via the internet, I turned to Photoshop. I find that working with text with the latest version of the GIMP is so frustrating that it’s not worth the effort. The canvas size for the image was extended 100 pixels downward and a black layer was placed under the Conrad image. The text for the quote uses the Oriya MN font which seems is a built-in font in OS X that I’d never noticed before.

Personally, the curious thing in this process is that all three Conrads have been on my mind in recent weeks:

Falsely Attributed Troll: I’d recently read Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and had been toying with the idea of reading parts of it aloud for an audio project.
Pictured Troll: Just this past week, while listening to Frank Edward Nora’s Macho Condor#1, I noticed audio excerpts from Robert Conrad going ballistic in an immortal telecast of Battle of the Network Stars from 1976. It was only in researching for this post that I realized that he’d been the star of most favorite TV show as a kid: James West in The Wild Wild West.
Unattributed Troll: I did indeed mention William Conrad on a recent podcast. The quote above was actually spoken by the character he played in another of my favorite shows from the early 70′s: Cannon.

So as this post comes to a close, I find myself realizing that I’m carrying too much pop-culture dead wood in my memory. The chain of connections and recollections that ensued after reading the tweet conversation between Jim and Cogdog mentioned above led me to do this ds106 assignment. I’d like to think that others spend as much time thinking about these three Conrads as I have of late. But the grim harsh reality is the majority of people living today probably don’t give a rip. And that’s too bad.

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ds106: Visual Assignment 24 – Troll quotes

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Visual Assignment 24 – Troll quotes brief

Find an image of a well known figure, add to it a famous quote by someone related in some way to the figure in the image and then attribute the quote to a third, related figure. From the official site: How It Works.

Get a picture of someone people idolise. Obi Wan Kenobi, Barack Obama, Captain Kirk — any beloved public figure will do.
Slap on a famous quotation from a similar character from a different book or movie. Pick something close enough that a non-fan might legitimately confuse them. If you’re using Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, you’ll probably want to grab a quote from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica.
Attribute the quotation to a third character, from yet a third universe. This way, nothing about your image is correct, and you’re trolling fans of all three characters at once.

I call this troll Total Kindergarten Alien Cop.

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Growth Growth

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(click to see a wee bit larger)

It was time tonight to do some ds106 design assignment, this time a Triple Troll Quote. the classic ds106 assignment game of mixup and mis-attribution:

Find an image of a well known figure, add to it a famous quote by someone related in some way to the figure in the image and then attribute the quote to a third, related figure. From the official site: How It Works 1) Get a picture of someone people idolize. Obi Wan Kenobi, Barack Obama, Captain Kirk — any beloved public figure will do. 2) Slap on a famous quotation from a similar character from a different book or movie. Pick something close enough that a non-fan might legitimately confuse them. If you’re using Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, you’ll probably want to grab a quote from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica. 3) Attribute the quotation to a third character, from yet a third universe. This way, nothing about your image is correct, and you’re trolling fans of all three characters at once.

So what the bleep is my image? I snuck in a Quadruple! This all started with a tweet by Audrey Watters following some twitter banter about Mitt Romney’s debate remark about pawning of Sesame Street to China:

.@kinlane and I are now debating if I can attribute Ed Abbey quotes to Oscar the Grouch. He’s right… Oscar is more urban

— Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) October 4, 2012

The mention of Edward Abbey got me thinking about one of my favorite quotes of the irascible desert rat urban curmudgeon (I miss the words he wrote so much):

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

or a later iteration

They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquerque will not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. They would never understand that an economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

And this lead me to thinking about the hysteria of Massive Online Open Courses and it all came together.

So for anyone who actually might still be reading here, the mixups are:

The quote is from Edward Abbey, who would have given a rats fart about MOOCs
The photo is of Coursera founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng
The quote is mis-attributed to the guy who got like 300,000,000 gazillion people to sign up for an A1 course, and for all major newspapers, magazines, is the founder of MOOCs much to the chagrin of our friends in Canada.
And just for a fourth leg to this troll, I put an edX logo on Ng’s laptop.

Cause as we all know, massive has nothing to do with growth.

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Troll Quotes

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For my troll quotes I first chose to use the famous picture from the movie 300. After that I followed up with a quote from “The Gladiator” when Russell Crowe said “What we do in life echoes an eternity”. Then to finish up the assignment I attributed the quote and image to Prince Dakkar or most know him as Captain Nemo from Twenty Thousand Leages Under the Sea.