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.

Here is the final result: Reddit as Trekkie Monster sees it.

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.