Author: Katherine Smith

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Daily Create #tdc2725: Renaming Clusters of Animals

This assignment was pretty fun to do, in my opinion. We were told to come up with a new name for a group of animals. For instance, you’ve heard of a flock of geese or a school of fish. I decided for this create to show the seals some love, since I’ve featured marine animals in some of my past creates. The actual name for a group of seals is a pod or a bob. Those names sounded nice, but I wanted to see if I could come up with something better. It was a bit hard for me to decide, but I came up with something pretty quickly.

In the past few months, I’ve come across a couple of memes showcasing the seal behavior of bouncing around in order to move on land. They do this because their flippers aren’t opposable enough to move well on land, so they bounce to make up for it. Because of this, I decided that I would call a group of seals a bouncing of seals.

After coming up with the group name, I wanted to create a gif to go along with the post. I looked for the original clip that the memes I saw (like the one above) were based on, and I think I came to the closest I could get. I then took the clip and put it onto GIPHY, trimmed the clip, added cute stickers, and posted it.

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Daily Create #tdc2719: Draw With Scissors

This daily create was one of the few ones I did that didn’t involve much technological use. We were tasked with creating a piece of art using only scissors and some paper. I knew I wanted to do something somewhat simple since it’s hard to cut good details with the regular scissors I had. After thinking about what I wanted to do for a while, I eventually decided on doing a scuba diver with fish swimming around them. I figured for the scuba diver that I wanted the flippers and mask to be distinct from the person so it was more clear what was going on, so I decided to use distinct colors and base the mask design off of old scuba masks.

PsBattle: This person in an old fashioned diving suit from photoshopbattles

Thankfully, my parents haven’t taken out the paper recycling yet, so I had plenty of paper to choose from. I decided on a newspaper for the body, since it was a neutral color, and green from a flyer for the mask and flippers. I also drew the mask on to be more realistic. On the same flyer was some blue, so I cut out some bubbles to add detail to the art. I then picked out another flyer and cut out some tiny fish to complete the work. I put them on a piece of printer paper to get the background. For the Twitter caption, I thought it would be interesting to use the double meaning of “swimming with the fishes”, so I did that as well as make a reference to the fact that my art was made with scissors.

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Daily Create #tdc2716: What Have You Learned?

The daily create asked us to reflect on something we’ve recently learned or wondered about. A while ago, I learned that cuttlefish were effectively colorblind since they only have 1 photoreceptor, which isn’t enough to see color. What has confused scientists for the longest is how cuttlefish and other cephalopods are able to change colors despite this disadvantage. A few weeks ago, I came across a video that talks about a recent (at the time) study that says that the w-shaped eyes of cuttlefish can bend light into separate wavelengths and that precise focusing of the eye can filter out some wavelengths and act as another way to detect some colors. Here’s the video, btw.

I decided after coming up with my fact that I would accompany the tweet with a gif of a cuttlefish changing color, just to show how cool it looked. I went through a long process of looking through some videos that had what I wanted since most of the videos I found didn’t have drastic color changes or showcase how they look when camouflaged. After a while, I found the video below that shows a cuttlefish changing into very interesting colors, which I thought would look nice in a GIF.

I put the video into GIPHY, trimmed the GIF to the length I wanted, and added a rainbow onto the GIF. Even though a cuttlefish wouldn’t be able to see a rainbow all at once, I thought it looked nice with the GIF and would emphasize my point on how colorful cuttlefish can be.

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DS 106: Turn a GIF Into a FIG

Reverse GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

While making a regular gif can be easy, making a gif that goes in reverse, or a FIG, is a challenge in and of itself. I rose to that challenge in this assignment and think I pulled it off pretty well. I started off by sorting through my videos to see if there were any I thought would look cool in reverse. That’s where I came across this clip, which is from my study abroad trip to Morocco. Our class had an emersion day in Rabat, where we visited various sites, such as this restaurant where we had traditional tagines and mint tea. Anyone that’s had Moroccan mint tea knows how tasty it is (it helps that they add LOTS and LOTS of sugar), and that there’s a whole process to making and serving it. So when our wait staff came out and gave us this little show, we were all pretty amazed. The only way it could be cooler is if they somehow made the tea pour backwards into the teapot, which is why I decided to do so for this assignment.

A silver colored platter with three glass cups, a sugar bowl, and a teapot. Tea and mint leaves are in the cups. There is blue table cloth underneath the platter.

From the couple of times I’ve used Giphy before, I knew I couldn’t reverse a GIF in their editing feature, so I had to get a bit creative. I opened up Premiere Pro and got to figuring out how to reverse the clip I had. This was my first time using the software, so I had to look up some tutorials on this. I then trimmed the video to my desired length and was ready to export it. This is where I ran into some trouble. I saw that there was
Because of how far away I was when taking the shot, the image quality wasn’t the best and was even worse by the time I exported the file, so I tried exporting it as a video. After a bit of trial, error, and googling, I finally came across a video that was of good quality and would be accepted by Giphy and WordPress. I uploaded the video onto Giphy and finally embedded the GIF onto this post. Despite the frustration, I thought this assignment was pretty fun and definitely made me learn a thing or two.

Photo by LinsFood

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DS 106: What They Might Have Done in Social Media

Social media and the internet have been said to be as influential as the creation of writing and the printing press when it comes to human communication. With social media becoming a recent phenomenon (almost as old as I am!), it’s interesting to look at prominent historical figures and wonder how they would have used it.

For this assignment, I decided to look at Alan Turing and how he might have used social media. Alan Turing was a mathematician who is famous for making the machine used to solve German coded messages during WWII. I know that in reality, if Alan Turing had social media, he wouldn’t have been able to make some of the posts I made for him due to the secrecy of what he was involved in. His achievements weren’t even known by the general public until very recently. Turing was also well known as being openly gay and was prosecuted by British authorities since, at the time, being gay was punishable by the law. I decided to feature both these events and other major achievements in his life in this assignment.

We were specifically asked to use Fakebook and Twister, both of which are educational tools used to teach about historical figures through their hypothetical use of social media. When creating my “tweet”, I found it odd that there was no option to add a photo for the profile picture. After coming up with the username, and entering in my tweet and the correct date, I saw that the picture is automatically put on. This made me kind of sad since I wanted to have the option of putting another picture on the Tweet, but the image I got was good enough. In Fakebook, you could change the images, which I liked a lot better. There were a few times where, when I typed in the name, the default image for the profile and friends were nowhere near correct.

When trying to attach the assignment to this page, I had some trouble embedding, so I resorted to just taking screenshots and adding links to the photos afterward. I had to take two screenshots of the Fakebook, since the posts didn’t all show up, but it seemed to work out.

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Daily Create #tdc2711: Sweet Dreams are Made of These

For today’s Daily Create, they had us recount a dream, which could either be a literal dream or a wish we had for the future. I was immediately brought back to a dream I had around grade school or younger. I don’t remember the exact details of it, but I do remember being inside my house and seeing fish swimming through the air all over the place. I was pretty self-aware that it was a dream at the time and it was weird enough that I remember it to this day.

While looking for an accompanying image for this Create, I found a website for “interpreting” dreams that said, “Seeing fish in the air and out of water also symbolizes the free movement and release of what had previously been kept under the surface, as in an epiphany.” I normally don’t take these websites with more than a grain of salt and I wasn’t going through anything life-changing at the time of the dream, but I did find it intriguing.

While finding inspiration for the image of my Create, I found pictures and videos of kites that look like fish, so I decided to go with that. I found a good video (shown above) and put it onto GIPHY and trimmed the video. I then put some moving fish stickers to be more similar to the dream. I thought this assignment was pretty fun and I reminisced on a lot of memories during it.

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DS 106: Home Video GIF

In this assignment, we were asked to take a home video and turn it into a GIF. My family and I tend to take more pictures than videos, so it was hard to find something for this assignment. Eventually, I found this video from about a year or two ago that was of my friend eating some Harry Potter jelly beans. For those of you who don’t know, this particular brand of jelly beans has a wide variety of flavors, from cotton candy and popcorn to rotten eggs and dirt. There’s also a Russian Roulette version of these that was popular at the time where a good and a bad flavor have the same color and you had to eat it to see if you “won”. This was the version we tried and I took the video to see both me and my friend’s reactions to the different flavors. The particular reaction I wanted to GIF was one where she ate a rotten egg jelly bean, since her reaction was the funniest in that video.

Harry Potter GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

First, I trimmed down the video to around the time I wanted because GIPHY would only take a certain file amount. In GIPHY, I then trimmed the video down to exactly the time I wanted and added stickers to add style. While looking for relevant stickers, I found an egg that says “eggcellent” when it cracked and flashing text that said, “I’m just a death flavored jelly bean”. I thought the text fit her reaction perfectly, though I could have done without the flashy part of it. Nevertheless, I decided that both stickers were good for the GIF.

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Daily Create #tdc2708: Theme Song

Today’s daily create had us say what our theme song is, which I felt was simple enough. Normally, I would have a lot of difficulty listing off my favorite song when asked, usually because it changes from time to time. Plus, most of the music I like tends to be a mix of different genres. However, when I read the prompt for this, my mind immediately went to this song. I may not relate to everything listed in the song, but I definitely feel for the main message of the song. It’s basically saying that you should be yourself and not worry too much about what others think, which is definitely something I believe and am working hard on doing every day. After I picked the song, I thought I would be a bit more creative and list off some of my own juicy secrets in the same format as the song. This was hard since I came up with lyrics that either didn’t rhyme like in the song, or have the same number of syllables. This part took me longer than was probably worth it for a daily create, but I eventually came up with something somewhat decent.

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DS 106: The Big Caption

A crowd in black graduation caps and gowns holding up blowup globes. The blue and yellow text at the bottom reads "Our defense against Flat Earthers".

In this assignment, we were asked to take a picture from The Big Picture and caption it with something that changes how one views the scenario. Below is the original image I edited from a set of the best photos in May 2019 that involved a college graduation ceremony.
A crowd in black graduation caps and gowns holding up blowup globes.
I originally thought of the idea for the caption because it reminded me of a documentary I saw about a Flat Earther convention a while back. The people attending the convention had globes similar to the ones in the photograph and they were using them to try and debunk why the Earth was flat. To my knowledge, most college graduates would agree that the Earth is in fact round, so I thought the caption was fitting. I put the image onto GIMP and added a text layer with the saying on it.

There was an issue with figuring out what color text would best stand out against all the black robes, so I took to the internet for answers. Through a few websites related to color design, I found the best colors to contrast were either a light blue/turquoise, light green, or yellow. I edited the colors on a segment of the text to see which color looked the best and decided on the blue. Originally, I came up with just the blue text, but there were some parts of the text that were hard to make out. I then thought it would stand out better if I outlined it with another color, which ended up being yellow. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an option in GIMP to do that and any attempt I made to make that effect looked weird, so I settled on making another layer with the yellow and moving it over slightly to emphasize the letters. In the end, I think the caption and picture came out great.

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DS 106: Color Walk Time Line

This assignment was an interesting one. They asked us to choose a color, take a 20 min walk, and take a few pictures with that color included. However, instead of taking a walk through nature, as seen in the example, I thought I’d take a walk through a nearby convention. I choose the color blue, since I love blue, and thought that it would be a unique color for this assignment.

My first photo was of this girl wearing a blue kimono, or traditional Japanese outfit. Next was a set of blue multi-sided dice. They had all sorts of blue dice, so it was hard to pick which I should take a picture of for this assignment. The next one features my friend and me in blue attire and was taken after being captured by Stormtroopers as part of a bounty hunting game. We got caught while I was buying a sword, so it was kind of funny having them stand and wait for me to pay before escorting us to “jail”. The nice thing about this booth was that the people were raising money for people with epilepsy. The “shame” was due to my friend jokingly saying my purchase was the reason for our capture. We also went to a panel, which is where I took a picture of my friend’s new toy fox and the blue screen at the front.

In this particular assignment, we were asked to use a website called TimeLine JS to compile all of our pictures into a “timeline”. I found it interesting that you could turn an Excel Spreadsheet into a nice looking timeline so easily and have some bit of customization involved. I did have some trouble figuring out where to put what information on the Excel sheet, but a quick look at all the spreadsheet helped with my confusion. However, I had some issues with embedding the timeline onto this post itself, even after looking online for the answers. Thankfully, a classmate had the same problem and found a solution that worked for both of us.

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