Daily Creating at 14… It’s About the Doing

Just noting what seems to me a significant milestone in the era of Everything About The Web is Charred Poop covered Ad Crap that just a few days ago marked the 14th year that DS106 has published a new open ended creative challenge as The Daily Create.

Without missing one single day¹. Without any ads or pleads for money. It just goes on. There are like 5 folks who spotted that milestone.

It seemed like in times past it was almost easy to put out a request on a blog (like asking for video stories) or just yell “who wants to make a silly gif” and a good number of folks would join in. That was really the premise/idea for the series of SPLOTs I pitched for years, build an open site for collecting responses. Maybe it’s just me who is faded and obscure, but it seems like people are too busy or tired or just would rather generate videos of donkeys on skateboards, but I feel like whatever touch I had is gone. I am officially obscure and internet obsolete.

Cue the pity party.

But still, I find a thrill on the days I just say, “Yeah, I have those meeting notes to prepare, but I’d feel so much better after doing something, not just having it done for me. So debate with me about what creativity means, I have my own idea.

And it’s not just the doing, it’s envisioning an idea in my head, digging around to find images or media I can start with, and then destructing/reconstructing them with my own message. It’s satisfying, at least for me.

So I will start with the poster that’s in the middle of the featured image. I ended up making it when I wrote up the post that would be published in Daily Create Day, January 8. There is something only a handful know is that one of the most satisfying things to do is to conjure a challenge, see it come out as a TDC, and then watch what people do with it. And for me, it usually means doing the thing you are asking others to create as an example. I have long believed this in teaching, that eons old lesson I learned from greats like Barbara Ganley who would do the same writing assignments she would ask of her students, alongside them.

So this was done quickly, I did my usual google searching for images with preferences set for creative commons licensed results, thinking of those old propaganda posters that urged people to “sign up” I quite liked the picryl one (public domain) Why Aren’t You in Khaki? – simple colors, it has the old time feel.

It was just some layering in Photoshop to blank out the lower caption, and recreate with new text, and not a perfect but good enough font match (Avenir I recall). Thats the thing, it just needs to be good enough.

Not any great claim to art but I am not sure I can state how fulfilling it is to recast an old or exiting image into a new one, something that only existed first in my mind.

Shrug, no wonder why no one is impressed. But the other part of ds106 lost in the wash of putting on a generated show of click gack is that powerful aprt of writing how you made something, and not just the mechanical/tech steps, but getting at what you were thinking in the process.

That sounds just like old time web boring nostalgia.

I will do one more, since heck, I have the blog microphone and can do whatever the heck I want in this blog that floats on the nether reaches of web obscurity.

In fact it is the Daily Create from te very next day, the first one after its 14th year birthday party, #tdc51010 Frankenstein Poetry:

When you read a ‘Frankenstein poem’ you get the sense that it’s been composed from bits and bobs stitched together, most likely from lines and images the writer has found in their notebook. Lines that seemed too bloody good not to use somewhere.

https://daily.ds106.us/tdc5110/

This is one of the many many MANY spun out by the primary maintainer of the DS106 Daily Create supply, Sarah Honeychurch. She has been key for keeping the flow going.

I almost skipped this one, yes the day was busy, and I had the Long List of Other Things I Should Do, many of them occupying my browser tabs., so many open that the view was just a tab string of site icons. I got this idea that seemed that it would fit- just take a random sentence phrase from every open tab, some text, some design elements or text in message boxes, without much thinking, and boom! Poetry. Maybe.

Amidst the darkness of the modern world
Epiphany
Cars n Trucks
Pizza declines in the US
Funds available
Your order was successful
Try these formats
What are the barriers?
File, edit, view, insert, format, data
Bootstrap
Alternate path systems
Please refresh to keep things working smoothly.
Quality education
It’s twelve
Listen to this article
All fiction pulpwood magazines
Buried treasure can still be found in Chemistry
Key points for determining public domain status.
While interesting, that’s not the point here today.
This includes all active issue renewals
Get the book.
Do we have a map or a model in our head?
Science is Important.
Read about the project here.
Instructions.
GAFAM, FAAMG, or more recently, the broader Magnificent Seven.
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading.
The results from many hours spent reverse engineering
This page contains changes which are not marked for translation.
You instantly become curious and ask ‘what’s this?’

I saved it as a screenshot in my BBEdit text editor and the idea came to have it look like it was occupying an open tab– Oh wait, display it atop an open tab of google image searches on Frankenstein. A little bit of image cleanup, opacity change it was done.

I call it “Frankentab Poetry” and I am going to claim I might be the sole loony person to do this. I think its pretty darned creative.

What I like it its replicable, it could be a future creative prompt, but more likely it will slip away down the memory path of 14 years (plus a few days) of doing this silliness.

All I can say is that while almost no one will ever see my “art” it gives me so much to have a small corner of stuff I have create all from scratch or mixing together found media parts.

I can’t stop and I no longer care if anyone else joins in.

Maybe.

¹ The record is not perfect, I have created an archive of all TDCs that is automagically updated with each new one. On the day TDC5109 was published, my archive counted 5123 existed, so there have been some duplicates or miscounts. Perfection = overrated.

---

Featured Image: Screenshots of TDC1 from January 8 2012 and TDC5109 from January 8 2016 plus the remix image I made for the latter’s post.