Today is my last day off before resuming teaching online ethics classes on Outschool tomorrow. I think I mentioned that I’m starting a new class for older kids, ages 13-15, adding that to my existing class for ages 10-12. This means each week I need two new lesson plans instead of just one. I have four weeks of brief outlines ready to go, and by yesterday I’d written the first lesson plan for each age group.
Today I got ahead of the game by writing the second week’s lesson for each of the classes, so now I have one of each up my sleeve. I’m going to try to stay a week ahead, to give me some slack in case of emergencies. This year’s second topic for the 10-12 group is “Buying and Selling 3” – the third in a series on this topic because I had so many ideas and questions that it filled two previous lessons with enough left over for a third one. And the second topic for the 13-15 year olds is “Free Will and Determinism”. That one should be really interesting to discuss with the kids.
Apart from that and going on a big walk with Scully and my wife, I didn’t do much other than some house cleaning. I also took down the Christmas fairy lights that had been strung up in the living room. Here’s Scully on the walk today, in the Greenwich Point bushwalk section:
One piece of news that I came across today was about something that has strongly influenced my projects over the past several years. The comic Darths & Droids wasn’t the first movie screencap webcomic – it owes its existence to the example set by the first one: DM of the Rings. This is a comic created by Shamus Young as a parody of the Lord of the Rings movies, as if they were a Dungeons & Dragons game. It directly inspired me and my friends to create Darths & Droids, which was the second of what has since become an established subgenre of webcomics with dozens of examples.
DM of the Rings was completed at 150 strips. I have long since had a downloaded collection of the comics on my computer, for posterity and reference. One small thing that bothered me about the comics was the fact that Shamus did his screencapping with software that left the frames vertically stretched in the wrong aspect ratio – so all the characters appeared thinner than they should. Also, being a product of the 2006 Internet, the comics are quite low resolution images.
Unfortunately, Shamus Young passed away in June last year. but today I learnt that his children are working on a remastered version of DM of the Rings. They are taking his original comics and recreating them at high resolution, and with screencaps in the correct aspect ratio. You can read the story about the remastering, and enjoy the first high-res remastered strip here: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=55070
Also check out that awesome page banner!
New content today:
Oh, that remaster news is neat. You know, my progression was [DM of the Rings] -> [Darths & Droids] -> [Irregular Webcomic]. (I don’t even remember what came before DMotR, though… maybe I got there from TvTropes?)
I’ve been meaning to reread it, and this would be a good excuse, but I think I want to reread/watch LotR first. I’ll try to get to it sooner than later.