Below is a screen capture of what the page looked like pre-X-Ray Goggles:
Once I got my hands on it with the X-Ray Goggles, I changed a few things to create the story for Alice.
I edited the page to be Alice’s post looking for the white rabbit. She had taken a photo of the white rabbit, which she tried to link on the site.
I had originally chosen a r/AskReddit page that had over 2000 comments on it, and then I realized that it would probably be better to find a page that allowed me to change all of the comments to make it more realistic… so, obviously, I decided the best option would be to find a new post that had only one or two comments. I figured, also, that Alice’s post probably wouldn’t have been very popular on the subreddit.
There are only two or three slight hints as to the identities of the people who are in the post. I didn’t want to be all obvious because most people on reddit are anonymous.
For this one, you have to make a fake Facebook page and fake Twitter tweet. Since I’m doing Mulan for my final project, I made the social media pages applicable to her in a hypothetical high school setting.
Here’s the fake Facebook I made for her (click on the picture for the page!):
Anddd here’s the fake tweet I made:
The one problem I had making the social media pages was trying to figure out what date to put for the Facebook posts, the tweet, and Mulan’s birthday… The Disney movie never really stated when Mulan took place, so I had to Google around. I found out that Mulan is based on a Chinese legend! Who knew, right? I was reading the history of Hua Mulan, and apparently nobody really knew when the poem was written. They think it was written before the Tang dynasty (which starts in 618), so I just picked a date that was before then.
But omgosh, I can’t believe I’m done with all the components of my project! Now to put them together into a cohesive story… Look out for my next post for the finished product (:
Nine and a half years ago I was adopted by an adorable, loving yet sometimes aloof puppy, Harper, Mr. Friendly, Harper-Harper-Bo-Barper, my Handsome Boy. Yesterday he died. With him, a piece of my heart and soul feel like they died too.
When I walked into the home of the family that had been fostering Harper, I met a few really nice dogs, but one was so sweet, calm, and confident, even at 12 weeks old, that I knew he was the dog I had been looking for.
Let me tell you something only a few people know. I got a dog (actually 2, but that’s a story for another day) to use as a tool. Yes, a tool.
I was depressed, pretty severely, in counseling, but refusing medication. If I wasn’t working I would stay in bed all day and all night, or just mope around the house; I was a terror for my roommate, making her life a living hell. I didn’t care about anything, my friends, my house, myself. I just wanted it all to end. I wanted to NOT FEEL LIKE CRAP every day. I could see no way out.
I decided that instead of self-medicating, I should figure out a way to change things. After thinking about it, I thought to myself, “What is going to make me get out of bed?” The one and only thing that came to my mind was a dog. A dog? Well this is going to sound strange, but I knew I wouldn’t want a dog peeing on me, my bed or the floors and to combat that, I. WOULD. HAVE. TO. GET. OUT. OF. BED. I got a dog so that I could mentally/emotionally/physically get out of bed. Actually, I brought home two.
The boys (what everyone who knows them, calls them), Harper and his brother, made it okay for me to walk around the neighborhood again, smile at strangers again, make new friends, hold my head high, and laugh again.
I have been lucky to be surrounded by a loving family and have married a wonderfully supportive husband, but sometimes, just sometimes, I can tick them off; that’s expected, we’re all human. What Harper gave me was permission to be me again, nothing I ever did or said could make him upset with me, angry at me, or even cold towards me. While we had dogs growing up, and they were fun, I never experienced that special unconditional love for a dog and from a dog, until Harper.
So, yesterday morning, after a tough surgery the day before, a good nights rest, and fighting the good fight, his body said enough is enough.
Enough will never be enough for me, but I realize that if this life we live is a delicate balance between black and white, yin and yang, birth and death, summer and winter, wanting and needing; the proof of the immense pleasure he and I shared can be found in the heartache I am feeling because of his passing.
For my first assignment for this final project, I chose to do Storytelling within the Web {*****}. I wanted to introduce my character to people who have not seen the show, Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I thought of different ways of doing this but showing y’all her Pinterest board would really let you see who she is and what she likes.
I did this with a program called Hackasaurus. I used this program before and it was very user friendly and fun to use. It was actually kind of crazy…how can someone hack into a website and change things. I even changed pictures! It’s insane! So really, don’t believe everything you see or hear on the internet.
Coming up the pins that she would pin was easy at first but then it got challenging. I wanted to convey that she was just a normal teenage girl – but also a witch. At the same time, I wanted to introduce Libby {who plays a big role in this final story…you’ll see how later ;)}, her aunts, and her boyfriend.
For my third assignment for this final project, I chose to do Storytelling within the Web {*****} again. The reason I chose to do this assignment again was because I wanted to show how Sabrina reacted to Libby’s attempt to blackmail her. She obviously is going to seek revenge…I wanted to show everyone exactly how she was going to do that. And with what she would seek revenge with.
I spent the most time on this assignment than any other assignment I have done for this final project. I wanted to make it realistic and the webpage that I used my Hackasaurus tool on was really long. This tool amazes me every time I use it. You can really change anything!!! I changed everything from the product reviews, summary, price, and even the related objects!!! I chose to hack a Amazon web page. Yes, Sabrina is going to buy something to seek revenge on Libby.
Go to the full Amazon web page to see all of the details – even the minor ones. Just kick back, relax, and read!
Here is the product Sabrina just purchased:
Here is my favorite part about the changes I made to this web page:
Do you have any predictions about what farm animal Libby will turn into???
This was part of my story where Mario and Luigi buy the tickets for the festival. I edited everything in X-Ray goggles or whatever that web editor was called. The original assignment was to tell a story within the web and I did that sort of. Changed a lot of stuff. Not really hard, but here it is. Up at the top…
For my fourth assignment for my final project I did storytelling within the web. This assignment is to take a website and edit it completely so that it tells a totally different story than it once did.
I’m going to warn you now IF YOU WANT TO BE SURPRISED BY MY FINAL PROJECT STORY YOU SHOULD STOP READING NOW! So far none of my assignments have given too much away but this one will!! Turn back now if you don’t want to be surprised!
So to do this assignment I first had to decide which website I wanted to modify. I decided to use Taylor’s official fan form. I really wanted to get Taylor’s fans reaction to the situation that I have created (which I still don’t want to spoil for you). To do this assignment I used Hackasaurus. This is an awesome program where once you install it, all you have to do is point and click at the website you want to edit. It’s seriously that easy! The hard part was actually editing the website. Coming up with ideas was much harder than I thought. For the first six or seven I was rolling but when I got to like fifteen I was having a hard time.
After some creative ideas and a lot of editing here is what I came up with…
For my third assignment for my final project (look at me go!) I did google map trip. This assignment is to use Google Maps to tell a story! It can be the story of a trip you took, a trip you would like to take, a strange occurrence, a war, anything you like!
Since my whole project is on Taylor Swift I had to decided what I wanted to map out related to her. After thinking for a few minutes I decided to map out her current tour. I personally went to her tour a about a month ago and it was freaking awesome. Here is a video of the opening of her tour at my concert (not my video, sadly my seats were not this good).
So what I decided to do was to pull up her tour dates. Luckily I was able to easily find these dates on her website. I was planning on putting all these dates on one google map but her tour was too long to fit onto one. For this tour she is out across the United States and Canada for nine months! (and she is about to release worldwide tour dates).
To make my map I used google maps. All I had to do was transfer each city from her website into the next destination slot. This would have been a relatively easy process if she wasn’t going to forty-seven different cities.
Here are my final maps that I made. Please note that there are too because there were so many different cities that google maps made me start a new one half way though.
The task: Build a Pinterest page of at least 20 pins for a character of your choice. Search for pins that relate to your character and things that he or she would want to pin for themselves. Use X-Ray Goggles from Hackasaurus to modify the board further to personalize it for your character. Bonus points if you build a page and have visitors to your blog guess which character you picked!
Since I’m the first person to complete this assignment, I should just tell you which character I chose. If it isn’t already obvious, I chose Dexter Morgan.
Not that he’d ever have a Pinterest page, but I imagine his would look much like this. Interest in knives, removing blood stains, understanding his teenage daughter, etc.
Probably one of the more interesting assignments for web, I think! You get to build on a story of your favorite character.
When I first saw the Telling Stories Within The Web assignment, I thought that I may redo Reddit using html, as seen by various characters from Musical Theatre interacting with each other, but soon abandoned that idea when I found the code to be too tricky to modify. I then decided that I should focus on one specific character and quickly chose Trekkie Monster, the porn obsessed monster from Avenue Q, one of my all time favorite works of Musical Theatre.
To do this, I first turned off the Reddit Enhancement Suite in Google Chrome, one of my favorite extensions, fearing that it would make modification too hard and logged into Reddit using my alternate account, since when using my main account, I am a mod of the ds106 subreddit, which causes some mod stuff to show up in my top navigation bar, something I did not think Trekkie would see if he was just a casual redditor who used reddit mainly to satisfy his love of porn, something he sings about in the show in The Internet Is For Porn. I subscribed temporarily to a handfull of porn subreddits with the account, wanting to get the formatting of the posts from those subreddits (NSFW subreddits are formatted differently on the front page than regular ones), which I thought that Trekkie would be subscribed to, correct and upvoted some posts on the page, so that it looked like Trekkie had been interacting with the site.
This is what Reddit looked like before I modified it. Simple right?
I then used Hackasarus to modify the text of all of the posts and changed all of the photos on the front page posts as well as adding some so they would better be able to fit into Trekkie’s world. I also changed up usernames for all of the posters, making some of them character specific to Avenue Q, (WhatChaTalkinAboutGary, straightasarod, xxxlucyxxx, and sadPrinceston) and others generically related to the world of the show. I did the same with the posts, making some, like the Gary Coleman AMA, the news article about the internet being for porn and the AskReddit post about finding one’s purpose in life, coming directly from the lyrics of the show and others being more general. I changed the titles of some of the subreddits that Trekkie is subscribed to, making up a few like ‘puppetsgonewild’ and ‘worldboobs,’ and made some of the posts imply that the world has both a puppet and human culture.
In hindsight, if I was to change anything about this assignment, I may have done my work in a different browser, as I doubt that Trekkie Monster would use a blue Jonathan Adler theme in Chrome or would have bookmark folders for ‘crafts,’ ‘UMW,’ or ‘ds106′ and a link to pin things to Pintrest in his browser. He instead would most likely have links to things like YouPorn and the like, but that may be just me being picky. Otherwise, I like how Trekkie’s Reddit turned out and wouldn’t mind making reddit front pages from the view of other fictional characters as I really enjoyed doing this assignment.
Once I got my hands on it with the X-Ray Goggles, I changed a few things to create the story for Alice.
