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Unit 4: Listening to Audio

In 2004, Radioactivo 98.5, one of Mexico City's most iconic radio stations, went off the air. The following year Olallo Rubio, its most popular radio host, released his podcast.

He recorded it at a professional studio and it had different characters (some voiced by Olallo himself), good stories that sometimes would span for several episodes and great audio effects.

Years later, he produced a film that added visuals to his opinion episodes and I believe that was a motivation for everyone to start producing their own podcasts of which we have too much today.

I don't want to have a podcast and I won't install Audacity (although GarageBand is already installed on my computer) but I'm planing on using Whatsapp audios. I want to improve the experience of everyone who receives them since I have noticed that people send horrible audios.

Here are my daily creates for the week. From now on, I'll be publishing them directly on Twitter as replies to the original challenge.

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Unit 3: What Mean Ye Digital Storytelling?

This week I focused a lot on storytelling. I remembered how my uncle used to tell us stories about Easter and how those stories have had an impact in the way I see religion today.

I also saw the movie Luca and analyzed it using Kurt Vonnegut's shapes of stories while I was at it.

I posted a daily create that made me think of my vinyl collection in Instagram and wondered how my dream life would be.

This week has been my favorite so far precisely because we focused more on storytelling.

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A post shared by Ruben Garcia (@leetmaster)

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The shape of Luca

This week I saw Luca, Pixar's latest movie and their shot at a Studio Ghibli film.

Luca is a story of the boy meets girl type (or rather sea monster meets the outside world) according to Kurt Vonnegut's shapes of stories because after coming up to the surface, he makes friends and gets to experiment the world, although he has to hide his true nature.

After living some adventures and risking exposing himself there is a moment when he loses everything, but after a great effort he wins it back. This time it's permanent, because he no longer needs to hide and everyone is happy in the end.

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First, What is Storytelling?

When I was a I child, I took my first camping trip with my family in Easter. My uncle, who wasn't very religious, told my cousins and me stories about the last days of Jesus Christ.

It was nothing like Sunday School, though. He would sometimes end the story with a joke or with a controversial remark which made my mom upset because she thought we were being disrespectful.

It's because of his stories that I appreciate works like Jesus Christ Super Star or O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo and why I remember the details of the Gospel.

Ever since that time, I have thought that stories help us make sense of the world and to configure our mind. Thus, I like knowing the meaning of several holidays and telling the story of why we celebrate them, specially to the children in my family so that they not only know the story themselves, but so that they remember me the same way I remember my uncle.

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Unit 2: Personal Cyber Infrastructure summary

I have listed my blog on https://ds106.us/tag/openonline/ and every now and then my posts appear on the site.

I haven't gotten around to customizing my blog because I don't like to spend time personalizing things. I don't even change the background of my computer's desktop and I rarely change it on my phone.

I think it would be a good idea to find a plugin or something that changes the layout of the site automatically!

After thinking a lot about it, I wrote a story about how I made my personal cyber infrastructure.

I only posted one daily create this week about a mind map I had made.

I made a gif about my friends enjoying themselves. We were at a park after playing a football game and everybody was having so much fun, like when they were kids.

I'm very happy to report that this couple of weeks, I had written more and created more than in the whole last year.

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My Personal Cyber Infrastructure

I coded my first website in 1999, two years after I got connected to the internet using FrontPage Express and uploading the files to Geocities. I learned HTML by studying the code generated by FrontPage and comparing it to a laminated reference guide that I still have.

I never uploaded anything interesting until one day a teacher recommended we posted the reports he assigned online and introduced my classmates and me to the Industry of Knowledge ran by a fellow teacher Fernando Galindo Soria, who we called "Doc" and had a project of having millions of websites with useful information.

Because of that I got involved in teaching others how to make websites using free tools like the aforementioned FrontPage Express or Netscape Composer. Although Doc tried to secure us a folder within the schools server, he wasn't able to do so and we ended up uploading the websites to free servers.

He recommended we had our own personal cyber infrastructure. He told us to buy a domain name and find some cheap hosting that gave us ftp access, a database and full control over our server. It wasn't until I started charging for making websites a few years later that I got my own domain name and a shared server.

Never have I been able to secure a website space in any of the institutions I have worked for, even as a Teacher, so I have my personal cyber infrastructure implemented and buy domain names when I need them and cancel them when I don't.

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There was a time when I was feeling stuck and didn't really know what to do next. I came upon Bill Burnett's TED Talk about Designing Your Life and that got me going. I learned to reframe my problems, to make decisions and above all, I understood that the future isn't written, is for us to design.

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A couple of weeks ago I watched the movie Midsommar. For today's Daily Create, I remixed a portrait that Dan Misdea made of me with some flowers that remind me of the May Queen.

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Unit 1: Bootcamp summary

All people need to express themselves. Some of them create complex works that elicit a reaction and some of them just throw some things around and put their name on it. I think that art needs to have a transformative purpose.

To the latter I say, keep your art to yourself next time.

I wouldn't think of myself as an artist. I can barely write, I sort of play a musical instrument and I can't draw at all, but still I'd like to be able to tell stories. Good stories. That's why I started DS106. I think that the best piece of advice to doing so is as follows:

In order to do so, I did 3 daily creates this week. I just started writing and looked for a picture that worked with it.

Finally, here's my Twitter introduction.

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In Mexico City there's an ice cream shop that sells popsicles of very interesting flavors. Among them, there's one that has a chocolate bunny inside. My useless superpower would be to make those chocolate bunnies disappear.

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I collect LEGO Star Wars ships and mini-figures. I was mind-blown when I saw the massive Star Destroyer set fully assembled at the LEGO Store in Rockefeller Plaza.