Admin Note: This assignment is a visual assignment for the week of 1-26 to 2-1, and is worth 1 point of 5 required points involving the character Tom Blair.
Hey, Tom here.
I’m not sure what a ‘post-it’ note is, so I wrote this up on a piece of paper I found in my pocket.
I reckon my greatest wish would be to reverse time, back to when everyone was happy and together.
Back to when dreaming about the future wasn’t a waste of time.
I don’t really wish to say more than that.
Thanks,
Tom
Admin note: This assignment is a ‘Visual Assignment’ for ds106 and is worth 3 out of the required 10 points for the week of 1/26 to 2-1.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how one day I will be dead, but this doctor-ordered journal will live on after me. Suppose some fellow were to pick it up and sort of flip through it? Would he know who I was at all?
I’ve decided to sort of list a few of the things I carry around with me, since you can tell a lot about a guy by what he takes with him every day. Maybe that way my footprints will stick around a bit longer after I’m gone.
So here they are:
This is my Omega shoe polish that was given to me as a Christmas gift from my mother. After all, a gumshoe can’t function unless his shoes are pristine.
This here is my Kaywoodie Drinkless pipe. I can’t quite remember how I picked it up, but I will say that I haven’t known any other pipe to provide a tobacco smoke as sweet as this one does.
A detective is nothing without his spyglass. I picked this one up at a small shop downtown. The owner told me it came all the way from England.
Finally, I am never out without my Trilby hat on. In my line of work, it is imperative to have a hat that can tilt down and hide your face if need be. I chose a brown hat because nothing is less conspicuous than that. Blacks and greys stick out a bit too much for my taste. Best to just keep it neutral.
Well, there you have it. Of course, I didn’t list everything I have on my person daily, but there should be enough there to get a good idea of my personality, and how much time I spend at my job.
I’ll be seeing ya!
Tom
This was definitely one of the most difficult assignments, but I knew I wanted to accomplish it. I was so intrigued by the prompt, and I really wanted to do this as one of my visual assignments this week. It took me a while to figure out how to make the gif itself, but the various tutorials were really helpful.
I am very grateful to my friend for modeling for me and allowing me to take so many photos to capture the right ones. The most challenging part of this was working with Gimp to resize and format the photos in order to create a gif. It took a lot of control z-ing and re-saving in order to get the perfect gif. One of the hardest things was making sure the two photos layered over one another accurately. I had to resize and crop them so that the visuals lined up correctly.
I’m pretty happy with my results, especially because this was the first gif I’ve ever created. I also liked my visual itself. I think it was a cool concept, and I’m really glad that I took the challenge of this prompt. It wasn’t easy, but I really enjoy the finished product.
Admin Note: This assignment is a visual assignment for the week of 1-26 to 2-1, and is worth 1.5 points of 5 required points involving the character Tom Blair.
The search for the car of my dreams was as easy as looking out of the window.
Yes sir, that is my 1936 Golden Crossley. I can’t remember just how old I was when I got it, but it is the only car I’ve ever had, wanted, or needed.
It takes me to work. It takes me home. It takes me every place that I need to go.
In that sense, I owe it my very livelihood.
‘Til next time,
Tom
Growing up in Miami has its pluses… Jota is right on the beach in his Florida home. For this visual assignment, I had to take a photo and use an app to crop me somewhere else. I also decided to make this assignment for my character, Jota.
Jota took a day trip to the beach! I used my iMacs Photo Booth and had a background of a sunset. All you have to do is let the background clear and once that is done, you step in front of the camera and it does its best to see the changes from the empty background to you in the background. Life is good in Miami! Peep the safari hat… Jota is too pasty to go to the beach without it.
3.5 STARS
For this Visual Assignment,you had to take the last three objects you had your last three drinks in and arrange them in a pyramid, then telling a story about the three objects. Here are my three:
Classics, huh? Hahah so let me tell you bout my night last night…
Its a Friday night and its time to loosen up with friends after a long week of hard work. I went to the local ABC store and picked up some Fireball cinnamon whiskey, the stuff that helps college kids dance without caring how dumb they look while doing it… After a night out and drinking responsibly, Im in dire need of water. I chug the bottle violently until its empty. I crash right afterwards, sleeping like a rock until noon the next day. My roommates wake me up from my slumber and invite me to get lunch on campus. I join them on the journey and get a buffalo chicken wrap with an ice cold lemon lime gatorade from the soda fountain. Wish they had blue gatorade… Blue is better.
1 STAR
My Professor has been hiding his location, not just from me, but the entire ds106 community. Even Jim Groom doesn’t know where he is… Somewhere in the Pennsylvania mountains. We need to find his location to make sure he is wearing pants, (inside joke) right Jim? This is my second go around with professor Bond is a wealth of knowledge and he always seems to have valuable input on every topic of discussion.
2.5 STARS
When scrolling through the assignment bank this week, I didn’t have to look far in order to find one that piqued my interests. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had to read a lot of children’s books, being a father. So I immediately thought of those books, and how my child loves to point out the pictures, almost entirely ignoring the accompanying story or poetry. So, and I thought this would be a great assignment!
I needed to get a bit more acquainted with GIMP, so I decided to visit the Digital Knowledge Center to learn a bit more. I had attempted to try GIMP a few years ago, but failed miserably, so it left a bad taste in my mouth. I had glanced over a few more assignments, and noticed there were some assignments about highlighting certain colors in a photograph while greyscaling the rest, so I focused on that during my meeting, thinking focusing on a more advanced technique would teach me basics as I worked. The meeting was a great success. I’ve become so acquainted to modern paid-for applications (eg Photoshop) would automatically determine what the user was trying to accomplish, and adjust itself accordingly, so GIMP felt very gritty to me (modular may be a bit more appropriate of a term here, actually). After a while, I became much more confident in my abilities to accomplish basic tasks, so I decided the Poetry Art assignment , worth 3 stars, would be a great way for me to try out my new skills.
I decided I wanted to do Carolyn Forché’s “The Lightkeeper” because I’ve found I have a certain fondness for her work, as well as the concept of illumination through literature.
I did a quick search for lighthouse stencils, and uploaded the image into GIMP, and began my work. The image I used was copyrighted, so I included the copyright in the footer of the image, although it is aesthetically unappealing, I’d rather give attribution than face whatever the consequences may be.
It ended up being a relatively simple layering process. I used the lighthouse stencil I found as the background, and added 3 layers of text, one for the title of the poem, one for the poem itself, and one for the author’s name.
I had thought it was a bit tedious having to switch from the Text tool to the move tool just to move my text boxes (I blame Microsoft Word), but that was really my only issue. My text didn’t fit inside the image at first, so I decided to scale the image up 300%, which I knew would affect the resolution, but it was a stencil, so I really didn’t think it would detract from the project as a whole, so I went ahead with it.
Then, I discovered why I couldn’t move the text boxes! I could still alter the text without having to do any kind of double-clicking business like in Microsoft Word, so I started to like GIMP’s design a bit more; demonstrating the modularity of it’s source code. It’s open-source, and free, so, for the unknowing, that means there can be any number of people working on it as a single project, with work often divvied up by function to allow for what could be considered “plug-and-play” code structure.
Alas, I had my stencil layer, and three layers of text, formatted neatly. I was done! So, here I present to you, my finished project, which I’ve hosted on my Flickr profile:
What’s in your bag? – 3 points
Considering Black does not carry a purse or murse everyday in his adult life, I decided to take a picture of what he carry’s with him daily.What you see in the picture is a device that is later called a cell phone, keys, wallet, knife, watch, bracelet and a Glock with a spare mag.
The first and most important item that Black always has on him is his side arm along with a spare mag. The weapon he carry’s is a Glock 23 gen 4 which shoots a 40 caliber bullet. This is not the standard weapon that detectives carry but because Black is a bad ass dude, he basically can get anything he wants.
Black will also always have his keys on him. This is the second most important item that he carries because its the practicality the keys to the town and the majority of the United States of America.
In the picture we also see that Black has his wallet and knife on him. He carries a knife just for little task that he may need it for in everyday obstacles. Inside Blacks wallet is his badge and credentials.
The last thing that Black has with him is that of a device that is later called a cell phone. As I said before, Black is a bad ass dude and gets anything he wants and this is just one of those items that you don’t need too know what i does.
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This assignment mainly had to do with taking a classic piece of Disney memorabilia and looking at it in a different way. Ok, so, I figured that a tea cup is pretty standard for Alice in Wonderland. But, that’s why I wanted to pair it with the book picture, and weave some sort of narrative about how Veronique wants to view herself as Alice in the story, but is more akin to an incredibly vain villain who is jealous of that innocence.
