The other week one AI said that the internet was like “diving into a vast digital ocean where you can swim with majestic whales of knowledge or get caught in the undertow of clickbait and cat memes” and I asked another to visualize that metaphor. One of my colleagues was so enamored of the image that she asked it for a few more. This was the first of the collection that I saw:
It looks like there should be a story to go with the image. That might even be a good idea for a daily create. You could probably do that with any of them. Take this one:
I see a whale rapture while the planet bursts at its seams. It’s like an alternate version of Star Trek 4
And then there’s the cat riding the steampunk whale:
I wonder if he’s related to Dr. Ravioli? He looks like he might know everything too.
I thought I’d bring together a few of the class projects. Some interesting things are going on. Mysteries abound.
Dr. Oblivion has some competition: https://cat-on-a-moped.com/uncategorized/final-video/ This was unexpected. Is Aggressive Technologies behind this? Is it connected to their lawyer’s threats? Is Dr. Oblivion the mole? So many questions…
Note the Doctor’s diabolic laughter embedded in the middle of Destiny’s great AI interview video. Is he giving us a warning, or inadvertently showing his hand? The whole video is worth a watch for the way it weaves a variety of viewpoints together.
We can also see Eisenhower, of the military-industrial complex fame, warn about Aggressive Technologies. Or has the president been hacked?
Some people used Gooey.ai to do the lip-syncing, like in this debate between the doctor and Isaiah Beacon. It is good when people note which tools they’re using, and even better when they link to them and explain the ins and outs of the process. I wonder what the competition between Isaiah Beacon University and Oblivion University would be like? Is there a connection between Dr. Forges and Isaiah Beacon? Hmmm….
This video of the hacker getting hacked is another one worth checking out. Note the various techniques used to keep it moving and hold our interest – different voices, the use of titles and clips, and the underlying sound effects. It builds on an earlier story and ends on an ominous note suggesting more to come, while still holding together as a complete story in itself.
For today’s Daily Create, we were to build on the classic “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog” cartoon. I wondered how Dr. Oblivion would respond to the query:
Then, in my infinite laziness curiosity, I asked the same of ChatGPT. It gave me a bland list, so I asked it if it could express the ideas in humorous metaphors. That didn’t turn out much better, but it did suggest that the internet was like “diving into a vast digital ocean where you can swim with majestic whales of knowledge or get caught in the undertow of clickbait and cat memes.” The underwater cat concept had potential, so I asked Copilot to draw me a picture.
They both brought up cats. It occurred to me afterwards that cats are highly correlated with dogs as well as the web, so maybe I should have expected that. Perhaps those cats also represent the digital overlords that the doctor warned us about.
For yesterday’s Daily Create we were to make blackout poetry with content from a certain web site. I looked at it briefly and decided to use the Weird Old Book Finder instead, probably because I found the typography uninspiring. I searched WOBF for eclipse, skimmed a few titles and picked a random page from one. I unfortunately neglected to note the title. I highlighted some phrases that caught my eye and blacked out the rest. I saw the black void in the middle of the image and decided to drop an eclipse shot in there. In hindsight, I should have done something about the line at the top of the eclipse image, so I softened it a bit for the image above.
The TDC was appropriate for Eclipse Day, but even more so for me as I had traveled to the path of totality. I was under complete cloud cover and couldn’t see the event, but that’s okay because I was more interested in the environment and seeing/hearing how wildlife reacted. Here’s a short recording of the sounds of the area about an hour before the light went out:
I wanted to broadcast to ds106radio but my phone has been uncooperative. Maybe that’s okay because technology shouldn’t have been my focus in the moment. I can’t say the animals (deer, squirrels, chipmunks, birds) seemed any different than usual in the lead-in to the eclipse. As it started getting visibly darker, it got very quiet. It wasn’t a very quick process, but every time I blinked it was noticeably darker. I wouldn’t say it got night-time dark, but it was very close to it for a few minutes. There was no moon or stars behind the clouds for that slight dim light that happens at night, but there was dim light on the horizon. I thought heard the hoot of an owl, and definitely heard the howls of some coyotes. Also some cheers and fireworks from the crowd outside the woods. Then it started to get lighter, but not like a sunrise since the sun was mid-afternoon overhead. Quite the amazing experience. As it grew lighter there was a lot of bird chatter, like you might hear over the course of dawn but compressed into a few minutes. I’ve had worse Mondays.
Jim and I have periodic conversations about what we’re doing and where we’re going in de106. I had this idea that the chief legal counsel from Aggressive Technologies would drop in and threaten us with a cease and desist order if we didn’t stop talking about their company. This would create another potential plot point the class might build stories around. We invited ds106 co-founder Martha Burtis to play the part of the lawyer, and her performance left us, me at least, literally dumbfounded.
Jim recorded our meeting and I went through and edited it. I downloaded a bleep sound effect to deal with some of the more aggressive language and imported the components into iMovie. I went through and chopped out extended pauses and “um”s and such, which ended up trimming three minutes off of the run time. At first I tried putting the bleeps in with iMovie, but between the small screen on my MacBook Air and the imprecision of the trackpad, it was getting very difficult. So instead I left the language in and shared the edited piece as a file. I imported the file into Audacity and added the bleeps there on an additional track, and used the Effect=>Amplify function to reduce the volume of the f-bombs.
The bleep track was still a little loud so I used the volume slider to take it down a few dbs. I exported it as an MP3 and then imported that into iMovie. I reduced the video soundtrack to zero and dropped the MP3 in to get the final version. Obviously my bleeping skills leave something to be desired, but it’s the thought that counts, right?
I thought the tone of her spiel would pair well with our friend Bob, so I had him do the intro and outro, and layered some calming music, Reflected Light from SergePavkinMusic, in the background. I think it’s really a win-win, as the track puts Aggressive Technologies in a positive light, and lets them promote their beloved ds106 at the same time. They’re sure to let bygones be bygones now, right?
We had our first night of ds106radio broadcasts last night, with a possible record crowd. At one point the ds106radio page said we had 23 listeners, although some may have been ghosts and doubles. They were treated to Isaiah Beacon’s Logic Pod show and Ravioli Radio, two excellent shows. I was curious as to why Beacon did a commercial on Ravioli Radio. Coincidence? I suspect there’s a story there, but no one said anything.
I was able to bring a few of the creators on air to talk about their processes. This had been an iffy proposition in the past when I used Ladiocast to broadcast. This time around I used Audio Hijack, which made working with multiple inputs easier. Here’s my setup: I used Quicktime to play the show recordings, a Logitech headset to monitor and speak, and brought people on air through Streamyard on Firefox. There was a slight hiccup in the first on-air conversation in that I had the Logitech input turned off, so ds106radio listeners only heard half the conversation and were a bit confused. They got the important half of the discussion though, and I got it straightened out for the subsequent conversation. Live-futzing is something of a tradition on ds106ardio.
Jim and I were having one of our usual ds106 discussions last week, looking over Aggressive Technologies’ website, when their chief legal counsel dropped in with threats and bluster. She expressed some rather strong opinions. I went through and cleaned them up a little for the recording above, although my bleeping skills leave something to be desired.
This is certainly concerning. The whole episode left me a bit speechless. I asked Dr. Oblivion for his advice:
He further opined:
We’ve dealt with issues before in ds106. We’ve been hacked. We’ve had moles. We’ve dealt with the Russians. And the zombies. But this feels different. And it raises some questions.
What does ds106 think? Do we blow off their threats? Or take them head on? Do they really have eyes and ears within ds106?
Do we have a mole? And if so, what should we do about it? Is her concern really “fiduciary duty?” Or do they have something to hide, and their threats are really just to scare us off their trail? What are they up to? How should we respond?
For the past few months, the local vintage clothing store has been hosting a mostly-weekly vinyl record night, where friends and neighbors are invited to bring records to play, or to just hang out and listen.
Sometimes it even gets on ds106 radio. We’ve heard a bit of a variety of material. Being vinyl, it all tends to be vintage, but perhaps that’s fitting for the location.
The experience reminds me of the distant past, when listening to music was more of a communal experience. It was bonding as well. Has that been lost? Once upon a time I would see people gathered in parks or on porches around boomboxes. Now all I see are people with air pods. It is great that people get to listen to what they want, when they want, rather than what broadcast radio served up. But I also wonder if we haven’t lost some common cultural vocabulary, and become more disconnected.
I thought of this when reading That Mathers Aesthetic. The record store, for some of us, was also a place of community. Parts of the web were as well. There’s a benefit to small and close-knit over massive, one that prioritizes people over profit. Reclaim is a community. Ds106 is a community. But rather than being web-scale communities, they operate at a human scale on the web. I love the way that Bryan captures that, in a way that looks effortless.
With a few exceptions, it sounds like everyone’s ds106 radio groups are running smoothly, and everyone is on track. I look forward to hearing the finished projects this weekend.
Dr. Oblivion’s advice here on sound quality and transitions is very much on point. (And bravo for making use of him.) A common issue is one of sound levels and balancing. When layering voices and background music and sounds, the background needs to be loud enough to be effective, but not so much as to be overpowering. This may require some experimentation. One of the benefits of having a group is you can get an objective opinion from them.
The Isaiah Beacon audio bits make good examples. The second one is interesting because the voice and background music are so familiar, like they’ve been used elsewhere, multiple times, so it feels like exactly what one would expect in a commercial.
One comment that normally comes up repeatedly during audio weeks in ds106 is how much people are bothered by the sounds of their own voices. But this semester, so many people are using artificial voices, so far, that that hasn’t happened. Some of the voices have a computer-generated quality to them, unlike Dr. Oblivion. It will be interesting to hear how that impacts the shows.
Radio listening, part II
The plan is to broadcast the completed radio projects on ds106radio during week 11. I’m hoping to bring Jim into the loop, which would necessitate a different broadcast schedule. My question for everyone is: Who would be available to participate in live listening and discussion at noon on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, April 1-3? I made a Doodle poll for this purpose, which will go out via email.
Depending on people’s availability, we may schedule noontime listening in addition to or instead of 7pm listening. I would like to get as many people as possible listening to as many shows as possible, because I am sure everyone will be impressed with everyone else’s work.
Behind the bot
I also need to share this video from Reclaim Today:
Michael Branson Smith talks a bit about what’s going on behind the scenes with Dr. Oblivion, and explains some of his occasional odd behavior. I would be very interested to hear people’s thoughts on this. In particular I’d like to know how Dr. Oblivion’s voice affects people’s reactions to what he has to say. Personally, I think the voice, cadence, inflection and accent all work together to convey a significant amount of information that is not included in the text of his responses, but familiarity colors my reaction.
About raptnrent: I got the name from my keys - R Apt and R Ent for the back door to my apartment and the back door to the house. I liked that they were also words: Rapt, meaning enthralled, riveted, captivated, and Rent, meaning torn asunder, violently wrenched. I thought it made for an interesting juxtaposition, open to all kinds of interpretations.
After reflecting on our 
I used Quicktime to play the show recordings, a Logitech headset to monitor and speak, and brought people on air through 
