by theriddeller
Well, it’s finally upon us. The stricken lords above us in the administration have placed the burden of Bright Space on an unsuspecting teacher and student body. Such educators and learners are trapped within the corporatized and glossy walls of the Bright Space. Educators and weary freshmen stumble around the mouse-trap-esque landscape of the new assignment submission platform, eagerly waiting for the great and gracious gift of either cheese-like greatness or sharp death. Without any deeper understanding of the new platform, many such educators have been battling with both internal and external frameworks. What I set myself to do was establish a series of hidden pathways and discoveries within Brightspace to allow for an easier flow of information. Boy did I bite off more than I could chew.
Firstly, there exists some secondary, larger, website that exists within the Brightspace platform. If you select the Subscribe function from the calendar a total of 23 different popup ads appear advertising a liturgy of different pills and treatments for strange and possibly fictional illnesses. I’m not sure who needs sermoxivibron but surely it would help with glumbus syndrome. Along with these ads comes the actual redirection that leads to the Bright Space mega platform Ultra Space. Ultra Space is doubly as annoying as Bright Space and provides little information for the common internet user. On the Ultra Space website, there exists a place where different Metaverse property transactions occur, They seem to largely be trading 637 copies of the exactly same designed Wendy’s restaurant. Messaging with Ultra Space trader “buffles3xx8” comes to reveal that the different Wendys all represent physical plots of land in South Arkansas. Soon all the land in southern Arkansas will become traded along the Ultra Space property transfer system.
After that humble and stark darkening of reality for southern Arkansas, I searched for any hint of entertainment within the Bright Space main platform. What I found was that you can access a large selection of different Steam Profiles by bypassing several largely trivial firewalls within the technology assistance section. This allowed me to finally play Team Fortress 2 from within the Howe library without needing to have Steam downloaded on my discarded high school Chromebook. This was a major win for the part of my brain that is forever trapped within 8th grade.
My final jaunt into the world of Brightspace has me struggling to understand its existence. Within the contact information of Brightspace, there is an address for an ice cream stand in western Nebraska. “Sally’s Sugary Sweets” had to be a front for something. Knowing that there’s always money in the banana stand, I dug deeper. This was a mistake because there is actually nothing located underneath “Sally’s Sugary Sweets”, I learned this by connecting to the local Hexbug population and running a scanning script for the ice cream stand’s coordinates. What the Hexbugs did find is that a majority of the ice cream stand is deconstructed and barely functional. In the end, the bugs ran out of batteries and I barely got any important information for the whole endeavor.
Sadly for most Bright Space still remains a hellish mystery, A Punji-trap of a website that seeks to take users by surprise with its Google-Docs-adjacent aesthetic and corpo-futurism. We may never know the full scope of Brightspace’s control and power over the single undergrad, But we know for now we need to be ever vigilant and weary over what Brightspace is choosing to show us. Is that assignment really due at that time? Probably, yes.
Categories: sept. 19, the runoff, theriddeller, Vol 27