Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere

I remember having a little garbage can full of these M.U.S.C.L.E Men back in the 1980s. They were about an inch tall and there were dozens of different characters, each with a lot of detail. I was becoming a little too old to ‘play’ with them, but I was a bit of a dork and liked to collect them at the time. Sadly they’ve all disappeared, but they were pretty cool.

The above M.U.S.C.L.E Men are Mr. VTR, Canon Baller, and Wounded Ashuraman which I found on a website that sells new and collectable toys. Each of these characters is now three bucks! Also below is a review of M.U.S.C.L.E Men created by a guy who looks at his old toys and gives them some context. The classic commercial that he includes is pretty great, as I love the mixing of old black and white footage with the flesh colored M.U.S.C.L.E Men. There’s a second commercial below as well.

Inspiration for this GIF is thanks to TUJournal’s pop culture GIF Assignment. It wouldn’t feel right to start a semester of ds106 without creating an animated GIF. And these GIFs were created in Photoshop using the puppet warp tool, which I’m madly in love with at this point to create animated GIFs. I will do a tutorial for this one, I promise!

CUNY Week 1 – DS106 is Taking the 7 Train


cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by adaptorplug

The spring semester is finally starting for York College and I’m really excited to get a new group of students into DS106. Here at York DS106 feeds out of the course CT101 whcih is the foundation course for our Communications Technology majors. For students that haven’t heard about it yet, and are registered for CT 101. This course is now taught as a “Digital Storytelling” class, and is a bit of an experimental course. The experimental nature is really two-fold, one in that all of the work you do for this class is conducted on the open-web using tools that you set-up for class, or ones you already are using and bring with you. The majority of the work you do will be posted to your own blog, and it will feed to the website http://ds106.us/.

This brings us to the second unusual part if this class – we are actually conducting the class in concert with three other universities around the world and everyone’s work feeds into the ds106 site. The course was created by the University of Mary Washington, and this particular open-web version was created by Jim Groom. Jim and Alan Levine are both teaching sections out of UMW this semester, while Scott Lockman is teaching a section out Cyberspace and Society course at Temple University Japan. There is also a section coming from Kansas State University (sorry I don’t know who’s running that class yet). And finally there are people that are taking the class, for their own personal fufillment, they are not receiving credit for the class, but are doing assignments which are fed to the ds106 site. These individuals are called open participants.

What’s exciting about this kind of class is that all the work feeds the same way into the same site and the intermingling of students, faculty, and open participants creates a wonderful community of engagement. You will see comments on your work that comes from people that you will never meet. You will also comment on others’ work and you will never meet them either. But that doesn’t mean you will not get to know them, and enjoy the interactions that happen online throughout this semester and hopefully beyond.

We’re starting a couple weeks behind the UMW course being taught by Jim Groom and Alan Levine, but we will be followoing along the main syllabus for the most part. I will be creating a specifically dates for our section of CT101 as DS106, but you will need to start out with the first assignment which involves registering your domain and setting up your web hosting account. Once you’ve done this, please enter your domain information in the form below.

[iframe src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dENoRi1SY09DU3VrM3VVZzlGWVljRVE6MQ" width="580" height="600" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0"]

I’m looking forward to another semester of DS106 at York College, which will be our second semester so far. It’s been a tremendous ride and all that John Rocker says about the 7 Train in Queens he’d likely say about DS106. That’s because ds106 is a proud bunch of degenerates, bringing on the open internet to education, diverse and sometimes nerve-racking, but always awesomely real.

The Dude’s SuperPAC – Ecstatic Whatever Fund

My Rug for President

Platform – Oh, the usual. Bowling. Driving around. The occasional acid flashback.

Candidates we support – My rug.

Candidates we oppose – Look, we all know who is at fault here, what the fuck are you talking about?

War Chest – I’m not handling the money, driving the car and talking on the phone all at the same time.

Principal Donors – Where’s the fucking money Lebowski?

Ecstatic-Whatever-Fund

A new ds106 assignment inspired by WNYC’s It’s a Free Country – “Name a SuperPAC” generator. Now this is a piece of journalism I can get behind, let’s make a commentary on the inanity of the self-important names SuperPACs give themselves, such as Winning Our Future and Restore Our Future (these are real, (vomit) honestly). Oh I know, lets build a digital tool that creates SuperPAC names! These journalists must meet ds106.

You can use the generator below, or go directly to the SuperPAC Name Generator as a prompt to mashup a piece of fiction or reality to start sculpting your message! PSAs, Radio spots, Posters, anything and everything is fair game for this assignment.

[iframe frameborder="0" height="400" scrolling="no" src="http://project.wnyc.org/games/superpac-name-generator/" width="100%"]

Favorites that came from this generator, feel free to use any of them or create your own.

Dopest Capitalism Coalition

Unleash The Amber Waves

Raise Glory Cult

Good-looking Internet Legion

Super Chill Capitalism Swarm

Show Us the Purple Mountain Majesty

Rock Astronauts

Ecstatic Whatever Fund

Beatific Drug War Foundation

Sanguine Doing What You Want Collective

TED Renewed

Sandmen Logan 5 and Francis 7 will discover with you the value of ”Carrousel” – your chance at continued immortality through the process of renewal. At the age of thirty, your lifeclock comes to an end and the crystal in the palm of your hand begins to blink red. On your “Last Day” you can choose to renew or run. But if you run, Logan 5 and Francis 7 will not be able to ignore your truancy. An inspiring talk delivered every week under the dome.

Logan’s Run, the sci-fi classic from 1976 is the inspiration for this particular dystopian TED talk. But the real inspiration is of course Ben Rimes for creating this awesome assignment for ds106. And for John Johnson inspiring everyone to add the animated GIF, and finally Giulia Forsythe for creating the Fantasy TED talk animated GIF – Beatrix Kiddo & Five Pointed Palm Exploding Heart Technique – my favorite!

No Peel Required

Phil Yams – No Peel Required

Another ds106 Yam post. They are so silly, so I can’t stay away from them. I decided to move from the yam genre of films and try out the yammy album covers. This one is based on Phil Collins 1985 album No Jacket Required.

In Take Me Home, Phil is definitely a big dorky yam as he lip syncs around the world wearing absolutely yammy outfits.

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Buck’s Revenge


cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Michael Branson Smith

I came across this sign and Cheryl Colan’s re-imagined road signs assignment through a course I’m teaching this semester (more on that in another post). Cheryl also created an awesome tutorial for making silhouettes in Photoshop and Illustrator. I saw that only three people haf done this one so far, and really liked the idea of “showing the rest of the scene outside of the sign you imagine.” This particular image envisions why some deer attack!

The dead doe (and blood) is an Illustrator pen tool drawing based on an image of a colonial times reenactor with flintlock rifle. The weeping doe with sad ears, came from reworking this doe silhouette.  And the car is also an Illustrator pen drawing based on David and Victoria Beckhman’s Bentley (rich bastard deserves to die!)

Color Your Monster Manual – Dragons Edition


cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Michael Branson Smith

So Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual madness continues in my home. We continue to choose monsters to blow up and color from the amazing Advanced D&D Monster Manual. Recently my kids have been more interested in hearing the backstory for each monster, and dragons have become the most interesting.

Every D&D dragon is colored, the ‘evil’ dragons tend to be primary colored and the ‘good’ dragons are of the lustrus metals. But my daughter has decided to make them all pink (ok that’s because it’s the only marker that hasn’t completely dried out, really).

Download this latest Color Your Monster Manual – Dragons Edition, which is a follow-up to the 1st edition of Advanced DS106 Color Your Monster Manual.

The Dragons are presented in the book in the same order of the Monster Manual.

Black Dragon
Blue Dragon
Brass Dragon
Bronze Dragon
Chromatic Dragon
Copper Dragon
Gold Dragon
Green Dragon
Platinum Dragon
Red Dragon
Silver Dragon
White Dragon

American Werewolf in London Animated Movie Poster

Writer, director John Landis is best known for his comedy work in the 80s, particularly the Blues Brothers, Trading Places, and Three Amigos. But the cult classic, An American Werewolf in London was one of two forays he made into the horror genre (I never saw Innocent Blood, but reviews were pretty bad). Admittedly I’m not a huge horror film fan, but  what I loved about American Werewolf was the dry sense of humor that Landis brought to this pretty gory film.

There are a number of subtle things – like a cut away to a little wide-eyed, arms outstretched Mickey Mouse figurine almost looking to hug David as he graphically and wrenchingly transforms into a werewolf. And after having spent the evening slaughtering half a dozen people, there’s classic Shakespearian comic relief the next morning as David wakes naked and confused in a zoo cage with wolves. He spends the next ten minutes streaking London, until he steals a lovely women’s coat which he wears on a bus ride home.

So the original poster blends the droll and the savage sides of the movie quite well, I just gave each of them a little animated accent.

To create the vibrating werewolf head I used two frames from the scene of David’s metamorphosis and replaced them on the poster in Photoshop. The nod to the British lady that catches David covering himself was created by using the puppet warp tool on a selection of him. And in order to have the nod be brief with a long pause between, while the werewolf head kept moving a lot of duplicated frames are needed in the animation (42 in total). I wish I knew how to do this with the fewer frames and keep the file size down, as there are only five unique frames needed to make the animation.

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