Preamble

I wasn’t thinking ds106 assignment when I found this panel in an ancient comic on Ethan Persoff’s amazing Comics With Problems election edition. All I knew was that I wanted to to something with the image of the dude with the pipe. Since this is being submitted as an entry for the ds106 What’s the Meme? assignment, it’s only fitting to say a word or two about the process.

Process

Skitch was used to select and capture the panel from the previously mentioned “If Your Kids Could Vote” comic that was published during the 1960 election cycle. When the image was opened in the Gimp, the inside of the speech bubble was selected with the rectangle tool and the selection was filled with a beige color on a new layer (the color was chosen with the eye dropper tool by picking an area of the text-free area of bubble).

A bit of noise (HSV & gaussian, if memory serves) was applied to the painted selection on the new layer to hopefully blur the edge of the overlay. Then the text was added with the text tool. I just realized that I’ve installed a new version of GIMP and it turns out that working with text in this 2.8 version is a far more troublesome task than it should be. I might have to resort to Photoshop next time.

Story

Unable to think of a way to get this image on the blog with any sort of meaningful context or back story, I decided to head back to the ever ready source of inspiration: ds106. One of the things I dig most about the ds106 assignment bank is that there is a fair bit of leeway in interpreting any given task. The What’s the Meme? assignment description says:

Take any picture and caption it with a meme, whether common or uncommon. Or come up with a personalized meme.

At some point this past week, I read that there are fewer open online participants in the ds106 thing this semester than before. I haven’t yet dug deep enough in to that discussion to know exactly what it means or if it cause for concern. All I know is that I am glad I discovered ds106. Without it, so many things would be different now.