I skipped the last third or so of class last night, so I didn’t finish hearing everything about the Web Storytelling assignment, or what we’re supposed to do for it before Thursday. (I’ll clarify then.) But here’s my idea so far – please tell me if it sounds like I don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing!

I’m going to take the well-known news aggregator, the Drudge Report and, quite simply, screw around with it. This site has a pretty simple layout – it’s basically links of different colors and sizes with various pictures for the many, many news stories on the front page. (Many of the stories are breaking news or sensationalist in some fashion, so they’re not always completely true, but they’ve done some decent reporting on their own, too.) Overall it should be pretty easy to just change the text to tell my own story. The only hard part will be finding appropriate pictures to use with the news stories. (I suppose I could edit some…but since they’re usually photos, overall that wouldn’t work)

I’m currently weighing two very different ideas about the actual content for this assignment. My first thought was a really exaggerated apocalyptic everything-is-going-totally-wrong sort of scenario. My second was to do the absolute opposite, and write about the most mundane things possible, but in an ironic way – say, the really boring news report of a really crappy tiny town somewhere. Both of these would involve a fair amount of mocking of Drudge’s rather sensational “BREAKING NEWS: SOMETHING THAT MAY OR MAY NOT BE TRUE IS POSSIBLY HAPPENING” style. (Hey, I read it too. I’m just aware of how silly it often is.) My third idea, which I just came up with, is to make it about Mary Wash, instead of a small town/apocalypse, which would give me more chances to take cheap shots at my school – which I actually really like, jokes aside. Sound good? Bad? Totally different from what was assigned? Let me know! Or laugh at my ignorance, whichever causes the materialization of more hedons. (I get the urge to use odd words at 1 AM. Bear with me.)