Live media & self portrait

Live media

The last "live" media I experienced was an attempt at watching TV with my partner who is currently at the other side of the world. We had a Google Meet call going and a couple of episodes of the 5th season of Fargo ready to play. We tried to synchronize the timing of hitting the "play" button as if to mimic watching the episode together at the same physical space. We did it because we like hearing each other's comments whenever we're watching something together as it makes the experience much more engaging — it's not just watching anymore, it's also speculating, making little jokes or even just making audible notes of quirks we notice. Those things make that experience so much more than simply "watching".

It didn't work perfectly. We used headphones so that we wouldn't hear each other's episode playing, but I could still hear it just a tiny bit and noticed we weren't perfectly synchronized. That said, it was still fun and we do intend to do it regularly. We're doing what we can and all that :-)

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Self portrait

The World Wide Web Commonwealth

During the first class Shawn asked us to introduce ourselves by telling everyone about a useless skill we have. I thought it was a really good way of breaking the ice between us all. It's fun, interesting (thus making it easier to remember new faces) and refreshing. I was inspired by this and chose to create a self portrait in the form of some sort of "web-ID". I've looked at images of generic IDs and tried to create a design that is a take on that. I called it "The World Wide Web Commonwealth". The content of my WWWCID consists of esoteric facts about me, things that I thought should be as far as possible from what you'd get on LinkedIn for example, and they're meant to serve as conversation starters.

My original plan was to have a very long ID (same width, but very long height, because it's on a screen and I can), but when I decided to add images it didn't work quite as well, and I also felt like a classic ID shape worked better. I struggled with the JS part mostly. There was a recurring issue with dragging the images. I even asked ChatGPT but it wasn't helpful at all and just created more confusion. Eventually I realized the issue was the fact that these were images, and they have some default property that creates this semi-transparent-dragging-effect that was constantly overriding the JS drag code. A quick google search later I found the css property that shuts it down (-webkit-user-drag: none;) and problem = solved. I added images to create an atmosphere that felt less sterile — and to give the potential viewers a general feeling of what I like. Some of the images are artworks I made, some are photographs I took and some just came from the world wide web...