You Chose Wrong

I will admit, I have never read a “Choose Your Own Adventure Novel,” as this ds106 assignment describes. However, I love the idea of writing the end of a story, the gruesome ending, not the happy one. So here we go!

The little imp told you the gold was buried here under this tree. You keep digging but soon realize the chattering birds above are more likely laughing Moorfolk, giggling at your misfortune. You swear and turn around, hoping to snatch up the tiny bearded man before he scampers off, but he’s nowhere in sight. In fact, you no longer see the path he took to lead you here. The moor has gone eerily quiet. You peer into the darkening late afternoon light and catch glimpse of a wavering twinkle, like a lantern. You take a few steps toward it, away from the soft soil beneath the trees. You’ve heard that will-o’-the-wisps can lead you to your fate, but to what fate will this glimmering glow guide you? You take another step toward the faint receding wisp and are immediately sucked down into the depths of the bog.
You chose wrong.
One of my favorite books as a kid was called The Moorchild, about a “changeling” named Saaski. “Changelings” are figments of European folklore said to take the place of children stolen away in the night before they were christened by fairies or pixies or elves. The magical creatures (in this book called moorfolk) would replace the child with an enchanted piece of wood or bundle of sticks, or occasionally one of their own that didn’t fit in or do their work. The whole book was ridden with folktales about getting lost on the moor and the dangers that could befall you there – a bit creepy for a children’s book, but still one of my favorites!

Hope you liked it! I’ve creeped myself out so much now I probably won’t sleep!

You’re Doing it Wrong

Sarcasm is at the heart of this ds106 assignment, which speaks to me on a cellular level. Maybe I’m stuck up. Maybe I think I’m better than other people. Or maybe I just don’t know how to handle other people’s stupidity. I blame food service. Regardless, I love the idea of this post, and I will probably start saying, “You’re doing it wrong,” on a daily basis.

Essentially, the point is to find a funny picture of something used improperly, spelled incorrectly, or something generally stupid, and use the caption, “You’re doing it wrong.” The example on the site was using a bike lock to secure a car to a pole. What? Really?

I didn’t go quite as caustic with mine. I searched for funny pictures, stupid pictures, dumb pictures, etc. I found quite a few grammar pictures with restaurant signs and the like that I considered using, but when I found the kitten… I had to.

I present, “Kisses: you’re doing it wrong.”

Illustrating Odd Autocompletes

The example for this ds106 visual assignment was of a cat priest hissing while preaching, which immediately caught my eye. I first input “I love it when…” into the google search bar, and then typed a few random letters after it. I tried to choose letters that were less frequently used to (hopefully) get more interesting results. V yielded “Voldemort” and when filling in the rest of that word, I was supplied with “I love it when Voldemort uses my shampoo.” How could I not? Since I am inept with photoshop, I chose to use MSpaint and Let It Gogh. I have to admit, I was both surprised and impressed with the end result, although I wish I could have thought of a more clever way to do the shampoo suds.

But really. Quit using my shampoo, Voldy.

 

I also made a tutorial that can be found on YouTube or here on the blog.

Tutorial for Illustrating Odd Autocompletes

This is the tutorial I made for Illustrating Odd Autocompletes. Hope it helps!

Shakespearean LOLcat

I love memes, and I love Shakespeare. So of course, I had to do this DS106 assignment. I used imgur’s meme generator, since it’s so simple. I also made a tutorial to help out anyone who hasn’t made a meme before.

 

The assignment details can be found here.

 

PSA Billboard

After a particularly infuriating trip to target, I decided to use the DS106 PSA Billboard assignment to vent my frustrations (Why do people think they can just walk around shopping, playing horrible music LOUDLY on their iphones?!). To accomplish this submission, I messed around with Gimp – a free photo-editing software. Although graphic design isn’t my strong point, I’m still pleased with the results. This project was rather therapeutic.

Directions for the DS106 assignment can be found here.

Historical Selfie

When I saw that DS106 had an Historical Selfie option, I was so excited. I knew I had to use one of my favorite historical figures -Marie Antoinette. To make this project happen, I had to download Gimp (basically, a free and less-user-friendly version of Photoshop). After about an hour of cursing and throwing things at my computer, I finally made a halfway decent post. Note – this project isn’t exactly for the photo-editing novice.

Assignment instructions can be found here.#beheading #goodhairday #atleastilookhot

Phake Tweets Tutorial

In this assignment, you will generate tweets from historical figures in order to create FanFiction.  Before I take you through step-by-step, take a look at the assignment instructions.  If for whatever reason you do not want to check out that link, I’ll copy them for you below:

Use the Twister tool from ClassTools (http://classtools.net/twister/) to generate a series of images representing the voices of past figures if they could express themselves in twitter.  Notch it up, and recast a historical event with a new plot line, and notch it up again, but it a back and forth between two figures (use@person!) . . . 

Here is how I suggest you work on this assignment:

1. Decide what historical event you would like to use for inspiration.  It could be something like the Hamilton-Burr duel, Jackie Robinson’s first game with the Dodgers, whatever you want!  The point is that you will need to decide what event you want to reframe in order to make the next few steps worthwhile.

2.  If you are not already an expert on that historical event, research the event.  This doesn’t have to be complicated.  A quick Google search will probably give you all of the information you need.

3. Take note of the dates, major players involved, any relevant quotes, etc.  These will help you generate your content.

4.  Come up with some clever user names for your major players. In my example, I gave John Wilkes Booth the user name “Wilkes510.”  I’ll admit that’s not terribly clever, but his nickname was Wilkes and 510 represents his birthday (May 10.)

5.  Write your first tweet!  It can be whatever you want.  For my example, I condensed a sentence from John Wilkes Booth’s diary that said how he was feeling.

6. Now that you’ve done all of the creative pre-writing, let’s start fiddling with technology.  Fortunately, Twister is very straightforward.  All you have to do is fill in the blanks.  The site will ask you for the following information:

• User name
• Real name
• Tweet
• Date

7.  When you are finished filling in the blanks, click submit.  You should get something that looks like this:

 

ds106 Tutorial

Here is my tutorial for the Shakespeare LOLcat ds106 assignment, recorded via screencast

Illustrating Odd Autocompletes

For my first blog post I chose to do the 1244 assignment on the DS106 website: the illustrating odd auto-completes. The assignment itself has you illustrate in photo format something that happens when you type in the first couple of words to a Google search and pick the first one that comes up. The words in this one were “since when”.

This one actually came from a meme that has been going around the internet a good bit and on lots of Facebook feeds. On the internet there are a lot of posts where trolls will bash people for their weight, thus to counteract that there have been a lot of pictures and posts going around Facebook in which a picture of a skinny model is shown, and then juxtaposed side by side with a picture of a plus size model. These usually have the caption: “real women have curves” or “real men love curves”. Interstingly enough this ended up creating bashing on skinny women as well, its own form of side-hate in effort to end the hatred on weight issues.

And then on the total opposite end of the spectrum, some people decided to post a male equivalent poking fun at the issue as well. And then a food equivalent…I’ll let the image speak for itself.