Slayer Cat Shirt

For the Storytelling Within the Web assignment, I decided to juxtapose two things that you normally wouldn’t think about together.

Slayer is known as one of the most brutal thrash metal bands of all time.  I thought them releasing a shirt for cats would be pretty hilarious.  I decided to find an article on them on the rock and metal news site loudwire.com.  It was easy to find an article on Slayer to edit and their web pages were simple enough to not need to restructure the entire page.

To make this webpage the first thing I did was download the Mozilla X-Ray Goggles.  Then I spent a while thinking about what could be a funny story.  Then I had to find a website that was simple enough to not take hours of time to edit to fit the story.

When I found one, I just google searched “slayer cat” and the first image that popped up was the one of the cat in the Slayer shirt, which was the inspiration for the story.

I figured out how to embed the new image and replace the one currently there by looking at others who had finished the assignment.  They suggested copying the X-Ray code from the image in google and just pasting it over the text used in the webpage.

I did minimal editing to the text already there, since I thought it would be funnier to see the new text over the actual, serious lines.

Here’s the original page for reference.

Man, Etsy really does sell everything! From homemade baby clothes to human skulls, you can find just about everything on Etsy. And look! They’ll even do a custom order for you!

So for our required Storytelling Within the Web assignment, we had to change a site to something that tells a story. I decided to go with the Etsy route (because it’s rather infamous for selling just about anything you could think of). And, based of my recent searches on the site (don’t worry about it), altered the page of a mink skull to be a human skull.

I used the Mozilla X-ray Goggles, which made everything very simple. You really just click on what you want to change, alter it in the little textbox that pops up, and then hit update. Really, changing the web has never seemed so easy.

Here’s the original site (in case you too would like animal skulls to be in your search history forever), and here’s my altered site.

I now know the approximate height and width of an adult human skull!

As you can see, there’s a new page on my blog! This is a purely fictional page, with pretty much no real life basis.

This was for the How It All Began web assignment (3 stars), which asked for a new page that described the forming of a group of people. I decided to make a fictional story about a witch meeting with a group of other witches. That’s just something that happens to be on my mind lately, and it seemed like an appropriate thing to write about, with Halloween just a week away.

Creating the page wasn’t too hard, it just involved making the story, and then using the new page function in wordpress.

The Work Itself

This assignment is titled “BuzzFeed Personality Quiz“. Its instructions are to “sign in with BuzzFeed to create a community account (you can use gmail). Then start making a quiz for people to find out which character they are. Use any characters you like. There must be at least 3 results with descriptions and at least 6 questions. Be sure to include photographs as well. Once you have made the page publish it and share.” Its difficulty rating is 3.5 stars.

In my Quiz, there are five results, and six questions. Each question has five answers, one answer to match with each character. A result will be generated based off a culmination of your answers. Son’s of Anarchy is a Netflix original television show. It is a fictional story of a motorcycle club/gang in Northern California. My quiz is a personality quiz to determine which character of the club an individual best resembles.

The Story Behind The Story 

This past summer I began watching “Sons of Anarchy”, right now I am on season four. I love the show and I enjoy taking the BuzzFeed personality quizzes. I saw this assignment and I knew I wanted to create a  “SOA” character quiz. I only used five characters from the show, specifically the club. There are too many characters to use all of them. The questions relate to the themes of the show. For example it is a motorcycle club so an easy question is to ask “Which bike would you prefer to ride”. Another example to prove my questions connect to themes is the question “What is most important to you”. All the possible answers are driving forces in the show, and each answer surfaces in situations where the club faces a dilemma. My result for the quiz is Jax Teller!

The Process, Narrated 

I created this personality quiz on BuzzFeed.com. This was the first quiz I have created, so it took a few minutes to understand the directions. It is a rather simple process. I created a title, and a description of the quiz. I then uploaded thumbnail images to serve as a cover photo(s) for the quiz. Then I created my five results (five characters). I downloaded an image of each character off of Google and uploaded them individually into the image boxes. I wrote a short description of each character personality in the text box. I created a six questions. For each question I wrote the header or title of the question. I uploaded an image to depict the question and pasted it into the image box. I copied and pasted the url of each image into the “image credit” box. I created five answers to each question. Each question correlates to each character. When approiptate I added pictures to each answer. I added a short text description for each answer to help the participants understand each possible answer. Again, it was a relatively easy process, “BuzzFeed” gives you step by step instructions.

Here are a few photos documenting my process.

Enter the world of Dr. Franklin Stenton, scientist and observer of the mysterious and unknown. He is well-known in in late 18th century New York as being a creator of…unusual, but fascinating inventions. But today, Dr. Stenton has received a package that he did not order, with a variety of objects which baffle him.

[Read]

This is just a quick little short story for the Inklewriter Storytelling Assignment (3.5 stars). I would have continued on, but, knowing me, it would only get more complicated and needlessly lengthy. So we will simply take a look at some of these strange objects which Dr. Stenton has received.

I’ve used Inklewriter briefly before, in Electronic Literature. Funnily enough, it was one of my least favorite methods of storytelling out of the group that we tried (along with Twine and Inform 7 [my absolute fave]). It’s a bit too linear for the way my mind works, and I always worry about forgetting which paths I still need to finish or link to. But for some, it’s super easy and makes tons of sense, so definitely check it out, because it’s really fun to work with.

Process:

Steve Rechter’s Tutorial is a great beginner’s guide on how to get started, and really shows how simple Inklewriter is to get working. But I’d like to expand on that, in case you’re like me and get lost in your thoughts easily, or are just trying some complicated things.

Alright, you’ve got your passage and your choices set up. Click the arrow next to one of the choices to take you to another passage/page that you can fill out.

Alright, we’re about at the same part as where Steve’s tutorial is. Now, for the story I did for this assignment, I went back to a couple of passages multiple times, creating loops for the readers to go through. To do this, create an option that suggests you’ll go back to a previous passage. In this case, setting the apple down will let you examine all the objects again.

This option will pop up and allow you to link this passage back to a previous passage. Simply click it…

…and a bar will pop up on the side, showing you all your previous passages! Click that first one.

Ta-da! You’ve created a loop!

Now, a helpful hint: You see those little red things sticking out of the sides of the posts? Those are markers. You can name them, and when you pull up the contents to join paragraphs together, they’ll be marked very clearly on the passage. This makes it so much easier when you’ve got tons of passages to look through, and don’t want to get lost looking for the right paragraph to link back to.

The Work Itself 

This assignment is titled “Storytelling Within The Web“. It is a required assignment for this week. Its instructions are to “install the X-Ray Googles in any browser and use it to re-cast the content of any web page. When you blog it, include both a screen capture in your post, but you will also need to upload the web files (HTML and media files) to your own site so it can exist as a stand alone URL. (see our older Firebug Tutorial) Consider using news sites, social media profiles, product pages, movie review pages etc. The simpler the design of the page, the easer it will be (think Craig’s List).” The difficulty of this assignment is four stars.

I used the example “Craigslist (Fredericksburg)“, specifically a “furniture” post of a  “Modern apartment sofa cream white” to alter. I changed the description content, title, and image using X-Ray goggles. Here is my edited version of this post and my “Time Machine” assignment.

The Story Behind The Story

Time Machines have been regarded as mythical by the general population. Government officials have publicly stated that no such invention exists. However this another government conspiracy (again). In the basements of Yale University labs, a team of the most renowned and talented scientists, engineers, and mechanics came together to create a time machine. In 2000, they completed their first successful time machine as proven by documentation and the fact that I now have it. My father was one of the team members and so he came home with it one day in 2005 after the team had been disbanded. He taught me how to use it, and right away I traveled back to the past to the Revolutionary War era. That was incredible to meet George Washington. I also traveled to the future, 50 years from now. What I saw, no one would believe. People were vacationing to the moon, instead of cars there were hovercrafts. It was crazy.

The Process, Narrated

I searched X-Ray Goggles on Google. I clicked the first link, and activated X-Ray Goggles. Then I went to a furniture post on Craig’s List, “Modern apartment sofa cream white“. This is the post I chose to alter. To X-Ray a section, you just scroll over the specific section and click on it. An embedded text caption box will appear, and you can edit the text here. I did this for the description, title, and photo. For the photo instead of changing the text I just changed the image.

On the surface, this assignment seems difficult, but in reality it is pretty easy.

Here are some photo (screenshots) documenting my process.

The Work Itself 

This web assignment is titled “Find a Digital Tool”. Its instructions are simple enough, “Find a cool, easy to use digital tool online! Write up a brief tutorial on how to use it, and what it can be used for. ” It is rated 3.5 stars out of 5 for difficulty.

Tutorial:

Dropbox is a cloud service that can help you save your important files so you can access them anywhere. Dropbox will run on everything; Mac, PC, iPad, Android. It is a folder, anything placed (photos, music, documents, etc.) in this folder is automatically synchronized to the cloud. The cloud is a universal storage center. Whenever you save something onto your computer, another database far away will save it as well. That is the cloud. Whatever may happen to your primary computer, your content will be safe and secure on the “cloud”. It is free up to 2GB, after that the pricing varies depending on the GB.

Google Dropbox.com and click “download”. Once downloaded it ask you to create an account, using your existing email address. For Mac users it will appear in “finder”. For windows users it will appear as an icon called “Dropbox” onto the desktop. Let’s say you create a video and want to save it into dropbox. All you have to do is drag into the dropbox folder and you will automatically have access to it on any computer tablet or smartphone.

The Story Behind The Story

My grandparents have asked me if there is way to save their vacation photos on their laptops, desktop, and phone in a timely manner. Thankfully I know about Dropbox, so yes I told them “there is a way”. I have written up a tutorial and provided content regarding ‘Dropbox” and sent it to my grandfather. He read my instructions and properly set up Dropbox by himself and is now in the lengthy process of going through all the photos and dragging them into the Dropbox folder.

The Process, Narrated

I have not used many digital tools, probably not near as many as my classmates. However I have used Dropbox for academic and work purposes, but just to refresh my memory I leaned on some sources. I watched a few Youtube videos that describe dropbox features and provide a tutorial. The “Dropbox – Full Tutorial” video and the “Everything You Need to Know About Dropbox” video were extremely helpful. I learned a lot about the ins and outs of Dropbox.

After watching both videos I was able to comfortably describe and provide a tutorial for how to use Dropbox. I simply wrote a tutorial (see above in post) in my own words as well as elaborated on the background and what exactly is “Dropbox”.