#30daytdc

This is only the 2nd time I’ve personally been faced with an ethical dilemma in the 4 years I’ve been playing with the #DS106 online community. Today’s daily create “#tdc1995 These Photos Need A Story In Captions” presented us with a set of 4 photos of a frog and beetle with the prompt to provide creative DS106 worthy captions. I happily went about creating a cute, joy-filled interaction between the two critters; Tweeted my response; Something to the effect of everything is great and fun playing with my ds106 friends. (Below is my response with the original images blurred.)

Then.... the realities of the rest of the world I live in hit me square in the face. I read the post by @mdvfunes who wrote a sobering editorial: “Well, who knew?” She quoted:

“…while these photos would be very amusing if the photographer had stumbled across such incidents, the simple fact of the matter is that these animals do not engage in these behaviours naturally; These photos have almost certainly been staged, and have almost certainly resulted in the animal being distressed, injured, or worse.”. The cruel cost of cute

I was aghast. My heart sank. I felt bad, icky inside.  To make it worse, I even had thoughts running around in my head, wanting to justify why it was okay for me to post my work- out of pure ego self-centeredness because I didn’t want all of that work I’d put in go to waste.

Happily, my ethics won out and I deleted my tweet with the newly realized distasteful, offending images.  Sometimes we are simply unaware that our actions (or inactions) are inadvertently harming/taking advantage of/disrespecting others. (See Alan Levine’s post “Lonely Attribution”) When we are enlightened, we have an opportunity to take action. Start over. Do the “right thing”.

I did just that.  I deleted everything. I found a creative, ethically sound alternative. (Thanks to @cogdogblog, Alan Levine’s HUGE Flickr photo collection.)  I made a new 4 panel series of animal photos where I knew for certain no animals were harmed in the taking of the photos. And I was confident in using and remixing the images in exchange for giving attribution to the photographer.

Here’s the new image. Please feel free to use it for today’s daily create if you have been enlightened like I have, and your ethical core is standing up and asking you to do what’s right.

Here’s my new, ethically responsible response to today’s daily create “#tdc1995 These Photos Need A Story In Captions” .  I feel much better now.

A new planet was recently discovered by the crew of the DS106 during their #30dayTDC mission to the outer reaches of the internet. The planet has been named, Mondas106 by captain @Rockylou22.

A description of  Mondas106:

The planet Mondas106, is an earth-like planet in a densely populated solar system with twenty-five other planets.

Mondas106 is about 27.8 times bigger than Earth and its gravity is about 14.24 times that of Earth.

A single day lasts 21.93 hours and a year lasts 481 days. The planet is made up of 12 continents, which make up 74% of the planet's landmass. 3 moon(s) orbit the planet and Mondas106 itself orbits a yellow sun in an elliptic orbit.

The plant-like organisms on this planet are mostly tall shrubs and trees, many of which have a surprising amount of different colors. Some even have strong scents. The small amount of flowers that do exist share these characteristics, but almost all of them are tiny. While there are a good amount of fungi on this planet, most of them have little to no color, but they have the strongest scent of all organisms, most of which are horrible.

In terms of development and specialization the species on this planet aren't very impressive, but their shapes and colors make for astonishing natural works of art and many already show great promise of a highly specialized natural balance for the distant future.

The underwater plants too are not much more than the very basic lifeforms you'd expect on young planets, but their colors are suprisingly varied and bright. A handful of species is already showing the first steps to higher organism forms, but they have still a long way to go.

You will not find any intelligent life forms on this planet, but that doesn't take anything away from the astonishing beauty of the life forms it does have. Insects, reptiles, amphibians, fish and even the first baby steps to mammals can be found on this planet. The insects have evolved the most out of these species, but the amphibians have evolved into the most varied and surprising species.

Moon images CCO Public Domain from Pixabay

Planet description from the Planet Description Generator app.

Space shuttle & planet scape CCO NASA

DS106 Shuttle image created by @Rockylou22 DETAILS HERE. PNG version below for your creating art delight.