Hello, my name is Titan!

I decided to try Dylan Gott’s mashup assignment Twittr at ds106. Instead of two websites, though, I chose two Twitter accounts.

Did you know that in a few days a satellite will zoom past Pluto and take a jillion photos and measurements? NASA launched the New Horizons spacecraft over 9 years ago, and in that time it has traveled about 3 billion miles. On Tuesday the 14th of July it will make its closest pass to Pluto and zoom right past at more than 30,000 mph. NASA created a Twitter account that makes it seem as if the spacecraft is itself doing the tweeting. It’s cute, but not nearly as well done as the European Space Agency (ESA) with their satellite Rosetta orbiting comet 67P. Rosetta’s Twitter stream has been cute in the same way yet engaging and almost endearing. It has provided information, tons of pictures, and a lot of drama. The Rosetta Twitter account and blog are very hip and sophisticated.

NASA on the other hand just can’t seem to help being a little stodgy. They haven’t endowed the New Horizons spacecraft with the same warmth and personality that ESA did with Rosetta. And NASA has a tendency to overuse scientific gee-whiz that comes across as almost corny. The worst part is that the mission is hard to express in human terms. Think of the gee-whiz numbers I used in the paragraph above: 3 billion! 30,000! Impressive but not exactly warm and fuzzy. And the nature of the mission is that there were going to be very few photos of Pluto until the last moment, and then whoosh! it would be all over. I’ve been following the Twitter account, and it has been, frankly, kinda boring. In the last few days, though, the photos have been coming in more frequently, blurry at first but getting more detailed each day. It’s going to be an exciting weekend. The fly-by on Tuesday will result in so much information in so little time that we probably won’t see or understand many of the photos until later, though. This was a tough social-media assignment for NASA.

So I thought I’d help out. Who could be more gee-whiz exciting than Bill Nye? I checked out his Twitter account, and knew right away what I had to do. I mashed up his account with the New Horizons account so that it seemed like he was actually narrating the space flight. Or maybe not narrating, but commenting. Or something. I thought his kookiness and NASA’s gooniness would either work well together or bring the worst out of both – you decide.

I basically Photoshopped this image of a Twitter stream. Microsoft Office has a nice screen-shot capability, so I opened Excel and took screen shots of portions of both Twitter accounts. Then I imported the shots into Photoshop. I started with assembling a page of the New Horizons account as a base image and then added and blended bits from the Bill Nye account. I also added extra text where needed. I tried to understand the grammar, as it were, of Bill Nye’s tweets, and his voice, and apply that to the NASA account in a funny but pointed way.

This week’s Mash up assignment was particularly difficult for me to conceptualize.  I read through every option and was not inspired to do any of them right off the bat.  I found one finally that sounded like something I could relate to my Denver theme.  The directions were to mash up a children’s book based on another cultural reference.  I would have to say the most difficult thing about this assignment was thinking about what people thought about this state.  Aside from legal marijuana South Park immediately came to mind.  I searched Barne’s and Noble and Amazon for books and nothing seemed to tie into South Park (which as I reflect back makes sense).  I made a 7AM I phoned a friend who said why not use Snow White?  Perfection!  The south park characters would seem like dwarfs to her so the tie in was exactly what I was looking for.  No one said the inspiration had to be my own.

I researched various programs to use to accomplish merging several different graphics.  After seeing Kirk’s work in the last screen cast I was hoping to learn how to use Adobe.  No such luck was made as you have to pay for this service or download it as a 30 day free trial.  I was working on this project at home and at work so I was unable to download it.  I found Kirk’s work to be inspiring, although it made me feel a bit like I was lacking in the technical department.

I ended up finding a great back ground picture of South Park and I snipped a picture of Snow White.  I wanted to make it seem like she was much larger than the “dwarfs” from South Park.

I then located a picture I liked of the 4 main characters from South Park which I individually inserted into the picture.

I then googled “Disney font” and found a free websites you could enter text and it converted the font in your chosen color. I threw all the pictures together and used Paint on my computer.  I used the “color matcher” (for lack of a better term) to fill in all of the edges that were left from snipping so many different pictures in one.  All of these instructions may sound simple; let me reassure you this is a very time consuming process.  I am not sure if anyone knows of a better program than this??

I love the results and I think it fits in as best as I could make it, with my theme.