I’m catching up on my audio reflections, this one is from before I left Arizona. On January 22, the weekend before I left, I drove down to Cottonwood Arizona to visit Todd Conaway. It’s a majestic drive down Highway 260, falling off of the top of the Mogollon Rim down through Campe Verde.

Slices of Life 007

Most of this slice was reflecting on my first class of teaching ds106 for the University of Mary Washington, albeit remotely from Strawberry, via Skyoe with the help of Jim Groom. The first meeting went fairly well, me introducing the class and the students introducing themselves.

I was pretty darn nervous, and felt the combination of that excitement and the drain of energy after being tuned in for that session. It is hardly the best way to teach, and is only a bridge til I get there.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I enjoyed the time chatting with Todd at his home in Cornville, and as a bonus audio (hah, some bonus), I recorded a conversation we had talking about the StoryBox. I appreciate and am doing some later to be schedule reflection on his interest in what comes out of that experience.

Conversation with Todd Conaway

We then drove over to the town of Cottonwood where I got a tour of main street by Todd and some fine local food.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I was a bit frantic at this time to get ready for the upcoming drive to Virginia, but it was well worth taking the afternoon to visit Todd and see a bit of Arizona I’d not been to before.

And all of this being part of the larger slice of embracing the unknown and reflecting on what it might offer.

This photo is somewhere near the Arizona / New Mexico border. It was fitting to see a sign for Grants Road, since I had been listening to @grantpotter playing a set of road tunes for me on ds106radio.

It was epic, and carried me clear from east of Holbrook AZ into Albuquerque NM.

It’s just a small example of how generous a spirit Grant is, he deserves more than a road, even more than a town, heck they name a new Canadian province for him.

Thanks!

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by ?olo

Before class, you should have at least:

• Create Your account on ds106 site http://ds106.us/register (about 1/3 have done so far). Create a gravatar so you get a custom icon. Join the class group.
• Create your social media accounts. Make accounts in twitter, flickr, youtube, soundlcoud. Add these to your ds106 profile. I created a twitter list that includes all tweets from students in my section- you can subscribe to updates too – https://twitter.com/#!/cogdog/umwsp122
• Do at least one Daily Create. get in the practice now. http://tdc.ds106.us. I will do what I can to track; it makes it easier for me to find (and others) if you tweet or write a blog post with your work.
• Get your domain and blog set up. I see 11 have done this so far, well done. be sure to email me your blog url when it is set up- once added to the ds106 site, you can find all blog posts at http://ds106.us/tag/umwsp122/

For Monday we will be doing a lot of hands on work and be helping those who need help with their domains and blog set up. We will go over some of the cpanel tools and ways to work with WordPress. If you have your blog set up, this will be a chance to start or learn how to customize it more, e.g. work with themes, plugins, settings, widgets. I’ll give some tips on shortcuts for using media in your blog.

On Wednesday we will have a discussion on our topic for this week, wich is on framing your personal digital space- to give some reason why we are making you go through these hijinks of making a personal web site. There will be an optional live video stream Thursday with our guest speaker (this will be archived, as are all sessions), and you will have an assignment to write a blog post about your reflections on his ideas.

Are you creating? yes you are or will be.

But I will continue to do my assignments here. My students are charged with doing 3 Daily Create assignments a week, and given this first week’s timing, I am having them do only one before Monday. What is this about? Why do this?

Doesn’t this speak for itself:

1 Take Tongue Twister:
Below is the tongue twister you will recite. Record a video of you reciting it in one take (honor system of course) and upload it to YouTube with the tag tdc011. Remember: BE CREATIVE! Thanks to Noiseprofessor for this assignment.

Luke Luck likes lakes.
Luke’s duck likes lakes.
Luke Luck licks lakes.
Luck’s duck licks lakes.
Duck takes licks in lakes Luke Luck likes.
Luke Luck takes licks in lakes duck likes.

Of course, I rushed out and did mine, using the record from the web cam option in YouTube

Are we serious? Hell yes.

As a low minimum, this activity, which should be done in 15 minutes or left, from record to publish, gets you some proactive in basic video recording/uploading (as well as adding description info and tags).

But there is more. In doing this, you are going to be performing. You are going to want to find some original way to represent yourself. It has those elements of improv I think are important, learning how to be a personality in front of an audience (in this case, the internet is your audience).

Yet there is more- this is your community already rising to A-Game status:

We are seeing people in their spaces- with pets or kids. We hear the ambient sounds of where you are (laughter in the background). People are already augmenting the format- doing it graphically, or introducing Mt Bag Man as a speaker.

This is the infectious nature of ds106. I would suggest checking out the assignment when tweeted at 10am EST. You might want to rush out and do it, be first. Get it done. If you have that vision. Sometimes it is better to let it percolate, and be in the background as you go about your day. Or you may want to see what others have done as inspiration.

Copying, riffing, remixing- those are all game in the Daily Create- heck you can even do it as an interpretive dance.

And look, those people in my class that recorded a 20 second video and shared it? Consider your Daily Creatr work done for the week (but nothing stops you from doing it daily- I am at it 7 days a week).

Below are some notes and resource, but key todos for students are:

• Register your domain and set up webhosting via the information in Assignment 1. You must email me your blog url to get credit for this assignment. Be sure to add it to your user profile on the ds106 site. This must be done before class on Wednesday, Jan 25.
• Join the class group on the ds106 site. Spring 2012, Section 2
• Write an introductory blog post sharing your interests in the course or storytelling. Or write about your dog/fish/cat- just get in the practice of writing. This is the start of your participation.
• Do at least one Daily Create before Monday.

This was my view of class…

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Despite his bravado of insulting his students (see the first in a series of documentary videos series that Lee and Alan) are doing, Jim Groom has been bending over in triplicate to enable me to teach a class at UMW. Until I can arrive on campus (hopefully February 1), Jim is facilitating the session and bringing me in via Skype, as well as broadcasting the class out via DTLT Today - we have an archive of yesterday’s session.

As a first technical note for students, in WordPress, embedding media from sites such as YouTube, flickr, vimeo and more is easier than copy/pasting a pile of code- using its features for Embeds all I had to do was to put the URL for the vimeo page that holds the video on a separate line, and WordPress does all the work from there.

So it was a bit challenging as the connectivity was not optimal, but we got through. I appreciate the students being willing to walk up to the camera and say hello and talk about why they took the course. Nearly half had said that one of their friends/room-mates had highly recommended it.

In the beginning of the course, it is Jim’s (and now my) strategy to front load the experience witha  warning of how intense the class can be- we do not want students later to be overwhelmed later. Jim fires more ammunition, but I will not mince either- if you are not ready to put a lot into the class, or be ready to struggle, or am not comfortable doing a lot of answer seeking online, there is a graceful exit through the Drop Class shop.

Another problem reared its head in that the first day of class was also the day of the internet protest of the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation. In support of this, many major sites like WikiPedia (and ds106) implemented public displays of support and either with-holding (or requiring a click through) of that sites information. So our materials for class were not quite available.

But this was a great opportunity to raise attention to the important critical role to ds106 that the open internet its creators designed - in every sense, for this class, the internet is your textbook- and it is not just something for you to read and highlight, but students in ds106 are authors. You do have a stake in this, and it is far from over.

But back to class- to get started ASAP on the first assignment, setting up your domain and webhosting it is likely going to be cumbersome and confusing, but will giver you a sense of what you are in for. Just so I have the same experience, I have done this assignment to set up this blog.

• Register your domain. First you need to think about what name you will use to identify yourself, this is not a small decision as it is your online presence. I was driving to an appointment this morning and knew I wanted to include “106″ in mine, and had  flash back to Trix cereal‘s tagline “Trix are for kids” and I felt “106tricks” would eb good. I went to hover.com and saw the options, I could have had .com , .org. us, and many others but felt that .net worked well. I already had an account on hover, bur if you are new you have to make one. This cost me $15 and I managed to do this on my iPhone while shopping at Safeway.

  The domain is simply the reference lookup for your future internet self- on its own, if you went to the site, yuo would end up at Hover.com

• Set up Webhosting account. I set up my site with Cast Iron Coding but like the assignment says, the web hosting can be any that support what WordPress requires (PHP and mySQL databases). You will want one that provides cpanel or some form of one click installs (unles you like ftp-ing code and doing ti yourself). One student asked about http://asmallorange.com/ – I had never seen that one, but it does offer what is needed.
• Point your domain to your webhost. Once your account is set up, you should get a bunch of information, how to log in to the admin site for your account, how to get to the cpanel or place you can install wordpress. The key thing you need is the addresses for the web hosting Domain Servers, in my case it was ns1.castironcoding,com and ns2.castironcoding,com Copy these down or know where you can copy/paste them.

  Go back to where you registered your domain (in my case Hover.com) and you will have to log into an account you set up there- find the entry for your domain, and look for the place to edit/enter your new Nameserver addresses (they will be set by default to the registrar).  Do not include any http://

Once you do this… you have to wait. It may take a few to hours to a day or 2 (it took mine only 3) for the internet to spread your new domain everywhere so people’s computers can get there.

If you need help, we can take time in class to address your issues, but you will be better off if you can take care of this before Monday- and free yourself to get in practice of doing Daily Create activities (today is an easy one- recite a tongue twister on video and upload to YouTube).

If you need help with getting started on WordPress let us know- see the basic set up instructions at UMW Blogs but note that it is not required to set up a subdomain. I installed wordpress in my main web directory, so my blog is my site.

Some other things you can do to get ahead of the game- set up your social media accounts if you do not have them already. For each one, you should make sure to customize your profile, e.g. add an avatar, link to your blog, explore how to personalize the site.

• Create an account on Twitter. Start following classmates, myself, Jim Groom, the Daily Create. When you share something related to class, include the #ds106 hashtag which makes it easy to find and connect (see https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23ds106. You might want to expore mobile twitter clients and desktop ones like TweetDeck
• Create an account on flickr. Make sure your defaults are set for creative commons licensing (open sharing). You will want to quickly upload at least 5 photos to establish your account- your photos will not appear on the Daily Create site until you have done this.
• Create an account on SoundCloud.
• Create an account on YouTube.

Are you ready? Strap on your helmets, even if you feel like a nutcase…

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Tom & Katrien

Keep me posted on your progress, and get ready for a new Assignment that will be out before Monday’s class.

I do believe in the Six Million Dollar Man, but not Bigfoot…

Now hold on to your comments, kids. I believe in Serendipity, I live and breathe its fumes for all of my online career.. How else might I have gotten to house sit for a month in Iceland, have a German Rock Band use my photo for cover of a CD, or get invited to do a month of workshops/presentations in Australia crammed into two weeks?? I would think “Serendipity” is my middle name.

But Serendipity is not a thing. You do not create it or cause it or make it.. it happens.

This has been rolling around in the part of my brain that carefully organizes drafts for blog posts (hah) after Deen Shareski-d Pursuing Intentional Serendipity. Now, as usual, I agreed, grokked, nodded with all Dean wrote:

I think the phrase I’m looking for is intentional serendipity. I think it’s Peter Skillen’s term but there may be others using a similar concept. In a world where play and wonder should really be considered essential dispositions, our education rarely values learning that isn’t somehow tied to a chosen standard or outcome.

and he goes on to relate the typical, serendipitous type of thing that happens when you participate in open spaces (in this case, a conference thing that was amped up by interactions from the tweet thing).

But it is this phrase “intentional serendipity” that has been nagging at me, in the semantic construct (if I knew what that meant I would explain, but it sounds like PhD stuff). Dean links to the blog post with this title by Peter Skillen, where really he describes the same spirit of allowing for serendipity to happen. In Peter’s case, the phrase in the name he gives his computer; I guess because it is the starting point for his actions that end up in serendipitous acts.

I just do not want to give the impression to anyone that they can go about and do things and expect the serendipity to happen, to make it intentional.

@cogdog As chairman of the Cormier award’s committee i hereby confirm you as a Doctor of Philosophy in the internets.

— dave cormier (@davecormier) January 12, 2012

It cant be serendipity and intentional, because serendipity is accidental (go ahead and take away my honorary Dave Cormier degree for quoting Wikipedia):

Serendipity means a “happy accident” or “pleasant surprise”; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it. The word has been voted one of the ten English words hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company However, due to its sociological use, the word has been exported into many other languages. Julius H. Comroe once described serendipity as “to look for a needle in a haystack and get out of it with the farmer’s daughter”.

Even if Wikipedia is full of crap, I love tis jumping off point for the word’s source (my emphasis added):

The first noted use of “serendipity” in the English language was by Horace Walpole (1717–1792). In a letter to Horace Mann (dated 28 January 1754) he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of”. The name stems from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon), from Arabic Sarandib, from Sanskrit Suvarnadweepa or golden island (some trace the etymology to Simhaladvipa which literally translates to “Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island”).

And oh where the tangents lead…

William Boyd coined the term zemblanity to mean somewhat the opposite of serendipity: “making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries occurring by design”. A zemblanity is, effectively, an “unpleasant surprise”. It derives from Novaya Zemlya (or Nova Zembla), a cold, barren land with many features opposite to the lush Sri Lanka (Serendip). On this island Willem Barents and his crew were stranded while searching for a new route to the east.

I think many of you work in places where zemblanity is a common practice?

Why am I carrying on about this when I agree with the sentiments? Because I think the distinction of operating in a mode where your actions are aimed not at gaining the results of serendipity (expecting the happy accidents), but by doing things that in general, create a potential energy for happy accidents to happen.

It’s a bit I started talking about the last time I did a talk on Amazing Stories of Openness. If you act in the Open mindset, e.g. start sharing your work openly, connecting and commenting on the work of others, contribute ideas to projects elsewhere that interest you — rhere is absolutely no guarantee that any of these amazing things (invited trips overseas, having your photos appear in published books, getting job offers) will happen to you. I believe it becomes more likely.

BUT… if you do not do any sharing or open activities, I can certainly guarantee you that no Amazing Stories will happen to you.

It is… as Nancy White said the first time I did these “Openness is not just about open resources, it is about open attitudes”.

In my mind, serendipity is not intentional, nor is it a thing we can pursue– it is a force generated as a secondary (or many-ary) results of our actions of sharing, helping, contributing. It is when we create a potential opportunity for the unexpected to happen, when we step out of our status quo or usual circles (one example why twitter matters much more than Facebook/Google+ for the greater opportunity to hear from people I do not know).

It comes about again in this short piece on Structured Serendipity by Jason Zweig for the Edge 2011 Question. Zweig, a financial columnist for the Wall Street Journal, writes here about his technique for being creative in his writing- he reads from sources not normally in hos field AND he physically changes the environment where he does his reading (my emphasis added):

It also suggests, at least to me, that creativity can be enhanced deliberately through environmental variation. Two techniques seem promising: varying what you learn and varying where you learn it. I try each week to read a scientific paper in a field that is new to me — and to read it in a different place.

New associations often leap out of the air at me this way; more intriguingly, others seem to form covertly and then to lie in wait for the opportune moment when they can click into place. I do not try to force these associations out into the open; they are like shrinking mimosa plants that crumple if you touch them but bloom if you leave them alone.

Robert Merton argued that many of the greatest discoveries of science have sprung from serendipity. As a layman and an amateur, all I hope to accomplish by throwing myself in serendipity’s path is to pick up new ideas, and combine old ones, in ways that haven’t quite occurred to other people yet. So I let my curiosity lead me wherever it seems to want to go, like that heart-shaped piece of wood that floats across a Ouija board.

I do this remote-reading exercise on my own time, since it would be hard to justify to newspaper editors during the work day. But my happiest moments this autumn came as I reported an investigative article on how elderly investors are increasingly being scammed by elderly con artists. I later realized, to my secret delight, that the article had been enriched by a series of papers I had been reading on altruistic behavior among fish (Lambroides dimidiatus).

If I do my job right, my regular readers will never realize that I spend a fair amount of my leisure time reading Current Biology, the Journal of Neuroscience, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. If that reading helps me find new ways to understand the financial world, as I suspect it does, my readers will indirectly be smarter for it. If not, the only harm done is my own spare time wasted.

In my view, we should each invest a few hours a week in reading research that ostensibly has nothing to do with our day jobs, in a setting that has nothing in common with our regular workspaces. This kind of structured serendipity just might help us become more creative, and I doubt that it can hurt.

I really connect to this idea of reaching outside of our familiar places/sources of information, and for doing so without a direct purpose, and that the things we come across in doing this might never come up again, but just might, as sort of a sub conscious absorption, become something that makes for a model or a metaphor when we are trying to be creative. To me this goes for any field, and seeding ourselves with ideas from different places cannot but help by a fuel for the work we do, down the road.

If I were of the resoluting type, I might state to try this approach more.

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by jef safi (writing)

Maybe this is a series, but today’s rant is a follow-up on How to Be a Social Media Dust Bunny*.

Spam by email is likely now about 15+ years old, and has become such a commonality that many of us take it as a Fact of eLife (I fall in that camp). Over the last few years, a new tactic has emegered that people can harvest your address and dump it into a mass email tool and send you whatever the **** they want if they provide a link to opt out. I am opting out several times a week from crap I never asked for.

So you are some hip startup in eLearning and trying to tap into the biz with some new service. Is this the image you want to project cause it smells like Dust Bunny Poop:

and the text, for your bunny sniffing pleasure (my emphasis added):

eLearning Learning has established partnerships with several leading content and distribution partners. Our partners have asked us to send you our personalized email newsletters that will include their content and content from many other thought leaders in the industry. This is a part of an open content exchange that relies on social signals to identify the best content on a daily and weekly basis.

You can personalize this content by providing us with your Twitter and LinkedIn information. We will see your profile and what you are sharing and that will help us to make your personalized newsletter even better.

Personalize it Now

To get personalized content, Click Here.

You can also follow us on twitter at: @elearningposts

We look forward to getting to know you and providing you with the best content available.

Please let us know if you have thoughts or ideas on how to make this service better.

Sincerely,

The eLearning Learning Curators
editors@aggregage.com

Their business parts want to send me shit? I never asked for it, and in my super basic understanding of the CAN SPAM act, not providing a direct opt-out is a violation of the law, subject of fines up to $16,000, specifically:

Offering a Way to Reject Future Messages – Commercial email senders must provide easily-accessible, legitimate ways for recipients to reject future messages from that sender.

So I replied to the message:

I did not ask for nor sign up for this email and the lack of an opt out in this message puts you in direct violation of the CAN SPAM Act. If you do not confirm my removal from your list in the next 48 hours, I shall file a report with the FCC.

No response yet. Feel free to retweet this:

@elearningposts I did not request your newsletter. Your email to me w/o an immediate opt-out option is a violation of the CAN SPAM act.

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 11, 2012

Fracking Dust Bunnies.

* “Dust Bunny” is a euphemism for another word I dont want your Mom to read in a blog post.

UPDATE: Later the same day: Tony Karrer responded by email and confirmed I was removed from the list and that they would make sure the opt-outs are in all future mailings. Sure, I vented here like a mad cow, but it worked!

Yeah, yeah, yam sharks might be a little scary, but nothing is more terrifying than the Great Orange Tuber, the classic story of all times.

This was a quick PhotoShop cut and layer job, based on a movie poster borrowed from MovieGoods, and using Joan’s tweeted yam photo. I stared at the photo a bit looking for a shape, and it cried WHALE.

I did some cheap substitutes for the fonts on words changed from the poster. My usual approach is to magic brush in background stuff, and then do typography over the top. “Tuber at the top is Arial Black, which is close but not exact. The “YAm” on the bottom was Gil Sans Ultra Bold, again, close enough but not exact. I rendered the type to be bitmapped so O could magic brush in the wave textture over the letters.

The assignment is:

Add a yam to your favorite movie and make a picture.

and the tags are VisualAssignments and VisualAssignments311

It’s simple. Do something every day, and you get better at it. Easier said than done? Well, let’s look at what’s happening at the ds106 DailyCreate and maybe it will take the pressure off. Jim has already written up how it has progressed so far; this is something we talked about last year before the launch of ds106 as a way of being, of doing small amounts of creativity every day as being something helpful for the creative juices.

It is based on Jim’s experiences in previous rounds of ds106 with the now defunct dailyshoot site, aimed at providing small doable challenges in photography. I myself did this more than a year, along side my ongoing daily photography posting.

The DailyShoot provided a subtle but important prompt for creativity. When you are doing your own choices for daily photos, the inspiration, the topic rests on you, so maybe you shoot something familair or try the same usual techniques. What the DailyShoot prtovided was the goal for the day, something like (hey secret top, while the front page of the site is gone with an error message, the assignments are all still there):

Make a photo without composing by looking through the viewfinder: over your head, from the hip, on the ground, etc.
(dailyshoot #681)

The thing this does it that it makes you try things or subjects you would not normally do in photography, and this is a powerful thing for creativity.

So Jim and I have been talking about this in prep for the ds106 course starting in 2 weeks– and rolling through the ways to make it work like the old DailyShoot, but include other types of media types of assignments, e.g. things to do with sound, or video, or perhaps just writing. The whole idea is something that would not take much time (we think 5-30 minutes is plenty), does not take a whole lot of post production.

While I have been mulling over the techniques of harvesting the twitter API and such in wordpress, Tim Owens has gone out and built the sucker without much custom code at all… and I could not be happier not having to do the work on the site (http://tdc.ds106.us/):

And look at that, he just posted a detail blog writeup on how he did it.

Its really exciting; I think the most telling thing was seeing how people took our test video challenge of telling a joke (not reading it). That was my idea, and I totally forgot every joke I heard. But when you watch these, it adds a whole new dimension of connection to the people participating, by seeing them on camera:

Now a few things to keep in mind about this new site:

• IT”S NEW! Like beta baby, we are building (actually Tim is) the plane as we fly it.
• Be sure to follow @ds106TDC on twitter to get the saily assignments, which should come out each day at 10:00 am EST
• The process is different from the Daily Shoot, where the process was to upload photos to one of any several photo sharing sites, and then tweet the link to a specified account. In the DailyCreate, the tweeting is optional, and has nothing to do with content going on the site. The way you submit content in TDC (The Daily Create) is to just upload it to the designating media sharing site, and use the specified tag.

  That said, we have had to be more selective on the sites where your content needs to go, so photos need to go to flickr, audio to SoundCloud, video to YouTube – we will be adding instructions on this soon.

• Keep in mind that some services take longer to update to our site than others, but let us know if you think there is a problem
• Each item uploaded needs the daily assignment tag (no hash) like tdc1, tdc2, etc. It would be nice if you remember to add a secondary optional tag, ds106tdc so we can attempt to aggregate say all stuff posted to flickr for TDC. But that is optional, baby. and maybe 2 tags is a lot to ask.
• If you do tweet it, please send your tweets to @ds106TDC, include the assignment tag as a hash tag, e.g. “#tdc4″, and alink to your contribution. This is totally optional!
• Be creative in your interpretation of the assignment; there are no rules, no grades on your work. I spent some time last year doing the opposite of the assignment
• Get over the obligation to do this daily. Do it as much as possible, but dump the guilt. If you miss one, do the next one. Stop acting guilty.
• The site is now being used by the external participants in ds106- keep ‘em coming! When the classes start in mid January, we will likely weight the first weeks with photo assignments, as thats where students are focused, but look for others to be thrown in the mix.
• We are looking for ideas! The suggestion box for assignments is wide open

This is really going to add an exciting level of participation this time around, so strap on your seat belts, The Daily Creative is locked and loaded. Thanks again Tim for bringing the A-Game to the new site.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

It’s 11PM and I’m photoshopping yams.

— Tim Owens (@timmmmyboy) January 4, 2012

Hah, Timmmmy, I’m photoshopping yams at 12:30 AM, because IT’S A WAR OUT THERE IN YAM SPACE (as well as in the oceans)

This is the classic version, not the Spud Cruise one.

We were hopelessly hemmed in by the Tuber Smoke all that day and the morning of the next. There were signs of people in the next house on Sunday evening–a face at a window and moving lights, and later the slamming of a door. But I do not know who these people were, nor what became of them. We saw nothing of them next day. The Tuber Smoke drifted slowly riverward all through Monday morning, creeping nearer and nearer to us, driving at last along the roadway outside the house that hid us.

A Yammian came across the fields about midday, laying the stuff with a jet of ovenheated steam that hissed against the walls, splattered all the windows it touched, and scalded the curate’s hand as he fled out of the front room. When at last we crept across the sodden rooms and looked out again, the country northward was as though an orange spudstorm had passed over it. Looking towards the river, we were astonished to see an unaccountable maple flavored orangeness mingling with the black of the scorched meadows.

That section was lifted and yammified slightly from the web version of War of the Worlds. In choosing a random passage to parody, I was struck by the references to Black Smoke in Wells’s text, and saw the eyeballs of JJ Abrams on the page.

Maybe we will do a ds106 radio version of the Yamvasion?