Category Archives: ds106

Grids and Gestures: A Comic Make

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Gridsgestures1

Nick Sousanis, whose work as a graphic story/artist is always intriguing (see Unflattening) and interesting, is hosting an informal week of Grids and Gestures, his activity that invites you to make a conceptual comic built around time and design. Nick did a Make with Me hangout with CLMOOC this past summer, and we all did the activity. He also wrote a great piece for Digital Writing Month about the art of comics.

The image — done in the Paper app on my iPad — above is my first Grid and Gesture attempt for the week .. tracking my weekend day over time.

Here, Nick explains how Grids and Gestures works:

Give it a try this week. I’ll be doing mine, too, as I think about my days in terms of conceptual design. You don’t need to be an artist or a writer or a comic creator. That’s the beauty of Nick’s activity. Anyone can enter, at any level, and still come out with an understanding of the world.

Comics space time

Peace (inside and beyond the grids),
Kevin

Daily Create: Five Image Story

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Today’s Daily Create at DS106 was a multi-step affair — generate a story starter and then construct a visual story with five images. So, StorySpark gave me this odd story starter:

An anxious storyteller spies on a quick-witted quantum chemist in a diabolical toy store

So I went into Flickr Creative Commons to make this visual of that story:


flickr photo shared by amenclinics_photos under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license


flickr photo shared by Elvert Barnes under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license


flickr photo shared by Simon Greig Photo under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license


flickr photo shared by benchilada under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license


flickr photo shared by Foomandoonian under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license

Phew.

I used the Flickr CC Search Engine, and then Alan Levine’s wonderfully helpful CC citation tool.

Peace (in the story as image),
Kevin

Ambient Audio Reverberations in Story and Poem

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Keystrokes: APoem

Yesterday, thanks to a wintry late start at my school but not at my sons’ schools, I had time before school to work on two sound stories. One of the stories was the third Learning Event for the HearMyHome project, and the other was an assignment for the DS106 Daily Create.

The Learning Event for HearMyHome (which is exploring the ambient audio of our lives as literacy moments) asked participants to find some rhythmic audio that represents their day, in some way. I had already done my morning coffee maker (!) but wondered how I might capture the sounds of my writing morning routine.

Simple. I turned on Audacity, opened up Google Doc, and began writing a poem about capturing the keystrokes of writing a poem. I then posted the sound with the poem, called Keystrokes. It is strange to hear my fingers cranking on the keys as the meta-poem unfolds (some slight editing happened after the recording ended, just to be honest) …. but there it is: a fair aural landscape of my writing mornings.

Second, the Daily Create at DS106 asked us to be inspired by a SoundTransit audio file. At the SoundTransit site, you can pick geographic points and create an “itinerary” and the site will piece together ambient sounds from those places into a single file. Cool. Then, the prompt asks us to write a story, inspired by those sounds. I wrote a story about traveling from Beijing to Boston, with a stop in Kyoto, but then folded it into the soundscape itself, sharing it out as an audio file.

Peace (is what we hear),
Kevin

So Long, Internet Kid — It’s Been Great Writing You (and You, Too, Horse)

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InternetKid23

This post wraps up The Wild West Adventures of the Internet Kid, a daily webcomic that I started in January as part of the #Ds106 offshoot known as #Western106 and 40-plus comics later, I am bringing the adventures to an end (for now). I decided to make this FlipBook of all of the comics in the series, and you can find the collection at The Kid’s tumblr site, too.

Thanks for reading. I hope it made you smile here and there, and maybe got you to think about genres and stereotypes (of Westerns and of Technology), now and then. I had a blast writing them. See you on the open trails!

Read the Collection

Peace (in the flip),
Kevin

PS — Wondering how I made the Internet Kid flipbook? I created a Keynote slideshow (powerpoint or slides would work), imported all of the comic images, and then saved the whole thing as a PDF. That allowed me to use the Fliphtml5 site (which requires PDF uploads) to convert it into the flippable book. Easy. But I like how all of the comics look like they are in a book format.

 

Play the Kid out of the Video Game Vortex

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InternetKid26

I wanted to add an element in which you can join The Internet Kid on his adventures against the Video Vortex. So, come play the game The Kid is stuck inside of.

Peace (in getting out),
Kevin

(More) Lost Women of the West: Queen Anne Bassett

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Women of the West: Queen Anne Bassett

This is the final poem that I wrote to remember the “lost women of the west” whose stories often get forgotten alongside male notables like Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, and others. I have been aiming to celebrate the women, but not necessarily the lifestyles they led. Some robbed and hurt others, just like some of the men did. The difference is that the men often were celebrated in stories and in history books, while the women were forgotten.

Today’s poem is about Queen Anne Bassett, who was a cattle rancher and who was associated with the Butch Cassidy gang. Bassett, and her sister, resisted the push by larger cattlemen associations to sell off her family land and she became a de facto leader of resistance to small ranch farmers as more and more consolidation happened. (There is also a strong suggestion that Bassett and Etta Place, another woman I wrote about, may have been the same person, with different identities. It is not clear if this is true or not.)

Here are the other poems in my collection:

Women of the West: Belle Star

Women of the West: Cathay Williams

Women of the West: Etta Place

Women of the West: Stagecoach Mary Fields

Peace (dug deep in history books),
Kevin

The Last Pony Ride of the Internet Kid (for now)

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InternetKid23

I am nearing the end of this two-month run of making comics for The Wild West Adventures of the Internet Kid. This has been an ancillary project for the Course with No Course — a Western-themed offshoot of DS106. It has been a ton of fun to make these comics, but I don’t know how daily cartoonist do it, to be frank. The stress of new ideas … ack …. good thing I don’t do my own art or I would have gone mad weeks ago.

Today’s comic begins the last storyline, which will stretch out over a few days and invite you to take part in the story, too. It features The Kid and a Video Game Vortex coming to town.

You can view the Internet Kid Tumblr site, where I have been posting the comics every day (as well as on Twitter, with the #Western106 hashtag). You can also use the “random” option with Tumblr, so that when you click the link below, it will take you to a random comic at the site.

Get a Random Kid

While this is the last storyline, I suspect that this pause in making daily comics is only for now, and not forever. It’s hard to give up a character like The Internet Kid and The Horse with No Name and Anarchist Annie and Question Mark and others after living with them for seven weeks or so. They’re in my head, and in my heart.

Peace (in the frame of story and humor),
Kevin

 

(More) Women of the West: Belle Starr (Bandit Queen)

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Women of the West: Belle Star

This is another in my series of small poems honoring some of the forgotten women of the Wild West. You can see poems about Stagecoach Annie, Etta Place and Cathay Williams, too. The poems are my attempt to capture the voice and story of these women. This one is about Belle Starr, known as the Bandit Queen. She was associated with Jesse James and his gang.

Peace (in remembering the past),
Kevin

 

(More) Lost Women of the West: Cathay Williams

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Women of the West: Cathay Williams

This is my third poetic “discovery” from the historical archives of a famous woman of the “Wild West.” I have been writing a digital poem for each, trying to capture their voice and their story, with the writing superimposed on an image of the woman (I can’t 100 percent vouch for the historical accuracy of each photo).

I have explored the lives of Etta Place and Stagecoach Mary.

Today, I look at Cathay Williams, a former slave who pretended to be man so that she could fight in the Civil War, and then was discovered to be a man, so she went West to continue to make a life for herself in the White Man’s World (my emphasis).

Peace (in the forgotten),
Kevin

A Wild Story from the Wild West, All Folded Up

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Western106 Folded Story Wordcloud

I brought the idea of a Folded Story to my Western106 folks, hoping to create a 25-fold story (one piece at a time, as exquisite corpse) with a Western theme. I had a good handful of folks participate, so I was happy to be collaborating.

Here is what we ended up with. Strange, yes? But centered on a sort of Western theme? Yes. Success! (The word cloud is the text of the story. I guess we like our coffee, and the sheriff made a late but regular appearance.)

Everything is West of Here (A folded story of the West) by KevinHodgson

Funny how it ended on a cliffhanger … Where does it go from here?

Peace (beyond the fold),
Kevin