The insanity is not only a belief in THE test, but the premise that ANY test is suitable 2 determine another’s worth. #pineapplegate

— Mary Ann Reilly (@MaryAnnReilly) April 23, 2012

I did some research on this Pineapple Story. Such nonsense.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

In case you’ve been in a cave (or busy living your life) the game is Draw Something and it’s had about 50 million downloads in 50 days. The company was just bought by Zynga for some bazillion dollar number. I love drawing real words. I am less enamoured with drawing pop culture icons. Though sometimes I find a celebrity that I can get behind.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

Drawing Transformers and the recent late night DS106Radio google hangout viewing of the Transformers movie has had those robot vehicles on my brain. So when I heard about the Canadian government’s outrageous spending on the fighter jets I couldn’t help think of the Decepticons.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

So I’ve been so busy drawing and reading news of acquisitions I haven’t even done a Daily Create in yonks. I’ve even missed DRAWING daily creates. Well I resolved to remedy that immediately today and draw something that shows perspective. Which, by the way, I may have submitted, so I definitely should do the assignment!

Fast forward to the fact that CogDog has created teh awesome DS106 REMIX machine! I went and spun the wheel a couple of times and came up with the Free Advertising remixed with Seuss it Up.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

Yep, I’m mashing up the Daily Create with the Remix assignment. Though I am a bit disappointed with myself that I didn’t use the student example assignment. I realize that’s the entire idea of the remix riffing snowball genius. I’ll do another one, I promise.

It’s just that I really could not bring myself to actually advertise for any shoe company. The whole idea made me think of Dr.Seuss’ Sneetches on Beaches book. Where that clever Mr. Sylvester McMonkey McBean shows up with his star machine and creates a whole system of haves and have nots designed around the principle of want.

We try so hard to assert our uniqueness that when something becomes too popular, it then becomes uncool.

Mr. Sylvester McMonkey McBean knew this and so he devised a star off machine for those sneetches who didn’t want to be like everyone else.

For me to use shoes as an example turns a brilliant analogy into a very literal interpretation but sometimes things could be more blunt.

It’s not unlike how I’m feeling about Instagram these days. I am not an avid fan of Facebook and I certainly share concerns about privacy issues as Facebook has screwed me over more than once by resetting my privacy settings.

But I found it fascinating to watch the rising concern that Instagram would lose its cool once the Android folks surged in. Then today wave of shock, horror and dismay worrying that the social network has lost its cool by association to Facebook.

I realize community is a delicate ecosystem but at the end of the day, it’s the people we are connecting to. Let’s not forget that the brand is secondary. I hope. Stars or swooshes.

That’s just my late night perspective.

Session by @Noiseprofessor Tuesday February 28, broadcast on #ds106radio

He’s BIG on propagation and only interested in plants you can eat.

When choosing forest garden plants, consider useful plants; that are useful for food, fibre, dye, medicine, forgagers, soil building.

He likes the book by Fukuoka, One Straw Revolution aka Do Nothing Farming.

Mound Culture involves piling of organic matter. Hugelkultur is the use of woody waste.
I have an archive somewhere of the time @Noiseprofessor burnt up some woody matter in a closed system and successfully created biochar.

All the plants that live in an area and use each other’s resources symbiotically are known as a guild. Food, feed, climbers, supporters, miners, groundcover, protectors. This can be seen in the forest with the canopy, low tree layer, shrubs, herbaceous layer, groundcover and roots.

A productive region of a forest garden is the edge because it has the most biodiversity between ranges. The edge effect is used to maximize the sun’s influence while planning for succession; positive gradual edge.

This is one time where I think the visuals might have helped me because there were many words I had to look up and concepts that I’d like to explore further.

Luckily, he has a whole blog dedicated to learning more: www.foodforestgarden.org/

If I did this assignment perfectly the images wouldn’t be necessary but hey, I brought my camera and the sound matches these pictures…

Out of the elevator

Down the tunnel

Many languages of tourists

Roar of the Falls

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

I cannot begin to tell you how excited I was to see Noiseprofessor detail some of the steps he takes when he does his Photoshop Jams. I used many of his tips, like Render light source and keeping multiple files of Jim’s head.

As usual, when I do anything DS106, there was A LOT of futzing. It is not a science. There are many times I am glad I save often and there is an extensive HISTORY to undo my changes.

I also used the pen tool to do my selecting. There was a lot of use of the Edit-Image Adjustments-Replace Color in order to get the right match of yellow/orange/brown for Jim’s head. I used the gradient tool to do the DS106 and had to make a custom selection to go from red to yellow to white. I would have liked more yellow but I didn’t quite notice until I had already added the drop shadow and outline. By that time I’d already put in waaaaay too much time to go back and fix it.

I did this really quickly using the Wikipedia photos and basic shapes in Photoshop.

I had a few labs in university working with Drosophilia and I’ll never be the lady of the flies. They all died. No genetic information to report on next generation Diptera for me. Luckily more organized and systematic people like Thomas Hunt Morgan existed to figure all that cool stuff out.

Because we’re in DS106 now.

This is an ANIMATED propaganda poster based on “We’re in the army now” retro poster. I used Photoshop and very crudely selected out the bits I wanted to erase, used the eyedropper to select the background colour and filled in parts. This was not satisfactory in some sections so I had to use the rubber stamp tool to clone and get the right variety of colours. Thanks to @cogdog I was able to use the opacity animation feature to make a layer 100% to 0% visible across the animation timeline. I never knew that was there! There are also animation ability for position which would have made my bread head assignment way easier to do, instead of using nudge, you can just set key frame position and Adobe figures out the tweening for you.

Learning, learning, always learning! (hmm…sounds like another propaganda poster)

For those of you who can’t sit through 7 minutes of video, here’s a quick outline of the talk:

Introduction to me (In B&W, then in living colour!)
Sources of Inspiration: Text

• Timothy Gower’s Blog- Elsevier Boycott

Sources of Inspiration: Listening

• Brian Lamb Toward Open Sustainability
• Jim Groom & DS106
• Unplug’d

I have housed all my Visual Notes resources on a special page but this video was my first time talking through a few of my work. It took far longer to create than I’d like to admit and in hindsight, I forgot a few key points to remember when taking on the fun challenge of live sketchnoting.

Reading from the twitter stream and looking at the Flickr ds106doodles after the fact, I think Jim had them listen to Ken Robinson’s Changing Education Paradigm. I love that talk and I think it’s a testament to the students that I can identify that’s what they were listening to, just by looking at their sketchnotes.

I read some of their comments and they had difficulty keeping up. And this is common. This is where the real focus and fun comes in because knowing that you have to draw something to convey the essential points of a talk makes you pay very close attention. You need to be selective about what you decide to write and draw. Sometimes you’re able to keep the thought in your head and draw a lot of it and other times, you just have to let it pass.

Some presenters are easier to sketchnote than others because they state right up front what main ideas they will be discussing. I tend to enjoy classes that run this way too. I’ve read from other incredible visual notetakers that sometimes they even ask for an outline from a talk beforehand. The big thing is that it takes practice. TED talks are excellent for this because they are a great length, interesting and released under creative commons. You can listen and re-listen and hone in your skill. Of course, as Jim showed, the RSA videos are exemplary.

SIDE NOTE (how I did the movie):

I took a picture of my hand holding a pen on paper with my iPhone.

Imported it into Brushes on my iPad.
Created a new layer.
Drew on the top layer.
Exported the brushstrokes as Actions.
Imported into iMovie.
Recorded Audio using iMovie as I watched the animation.

I have been meaning to do a video of what this looks like since a few of my visual practice friends are not familiar with layers and I cannot live without them. Life without layers is so flat.

I’d like to tell you a story of bread and spandex.

First, there was this tweet…

#ds106 docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B_9l8… I give you this as a present.

— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) February 8, 2012

Then @noiseprofessor up and @JimGroom-ified that breathtaking toe-tapping, spandex spectacle and transformed it into a piece of beauty.

Strangeness ensued with Cat Breading

“Cat Breading” – of course – tinyurl.com/83eqda2

— Andy Rush (@rushaw) February 8, 2012

which led of course to the subsequent DS106 Cat Breading Assignment

OF COURSE the natural progression would be for @cogdog to do some @jimgroom breading

Well, friends, we’re on a roll here, why stop?

Now you’ll notice I added some bread heads, specifically @jimgroom and @twoodwar but I left some blank bread heads. This is mostly because it’s 1:22AM and I’m toast. But also, because maybe YOU would like to add some heads to that bread.

*Bourgeous Closed System Warning*
Photoshop instructions ahead.
(I’m sorry I want to learn GIMP but I’m in love with Photoshop. I can’t leave her. Yet.)

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

When you open an animated GIF in Photoshop, open the animations menu bar. You’ll notice as you click through the frames that it also switches to the corresponding layer visibility (noted by the eye). Select all frames. Insert a new layer. Paste in the head. Meticulously go frame by frame and nudge the head into the right place. I wasn’t so meticulous, hence the bobbing effect.
There are cool ways of using masks when you only need to change movement on a section, but this glorious dancing piece it’s no benefit.

Well that’s how *I* did it. If you know a better way, please tell me!