The next stop on The Fandom Princess’ journey to find Harold a maiden was to stop by the Hunger Games fandom hide-out. Ironically, they were located beneath the village’s largest bakery.

The Princess walked in the bakery, thriving with people looking to buy goods and the smell of fresh bread in the air. She found the shopkeeper, gave her a special hand signal, and disappeared behind a curtain towards the back of the bakery.

“Why so many secrets, Princess?” Harold asked as the two stumbled upon a door behind the curtain. The Princess opened the door to reveal a dark stairwell that led down deep into the ground. She whistled, and magically the walls of the stairwell began to give off a slight glow. She closed the door behind her and began walking down.

“Well, being invited to join a fandom is a thing of honor, of pride,” the Princess began. “It’s a sort of exclusive thing that must be earned. And if everyone knew about the meeting locations, what would stop them from coming in and possibly wrecking our hard work? We are open to new peers who want to join a fandom, but extensive knowledge of the fandom is necessary first.”

Harold croaked. “Ah, I see. That makes sense, your majesty.”

They continued to walk down deeper into the earth, the stairwell feeling everlasting to the tiny frog. Finally, they reached another door at the end of a landing. The Princess knocked twice, then once, then twice again, and instantly the door opened.

She was met with a group of members of a fandom that admired a book about a dystopian future. They had a training arena in which they tested their physical strength for fun, a library area filled with books on survival methods, and most impressively, large tables that were laden with food every day.

The Princess’ stomach began to growl as she spotted the table of food. “What say we stay here and grab a bite to eat, dearest Harold, before we move on?”

Harold croaked happily. “Do you think they have beatlejuice?”

For this week, we had to try to nifty thing where we remix a ds106 assignment. What this entails, for those who don’t know, is that we basically take an assignment, given to us randomly, pair it with another random prompt, and combine to create practically a whole new assignment! Trippy, huh? And tricky, yeah. I tell you, some of the ones that the random generator gave me I got a headache just looking at.

Anyway, after visiting the Remix Generator, I clicked the refresh button, oh, about ten times (I promise no more than that) until I landed on a pairing that seemed not only doable, but interesting. Ironically, I’d like to point out, while I was working on this assignment, I was listening to the Indie Rock station on my Pandora, and a remixed version of M.I.A’s Paper Planes came on. I forgot to write the version down, but it was kind of neat. Sorry! I digress.

So, after clicking through the generator, I landed on one where it gave me the design assignment Design The Cover of Your Autobiography and the remix card of Uncle Bob, where you add an unexpected or strange character into the assignment.

The first thing I did was use Microsoft Powerpoint to do the actual creating of my autobiography cover. I knew that I wanted it to reflect my writing personality, something low-key, yet elegant. But with the twist, which instantly came to me, I needed something kind of eerie and desolate. So I went onto Flickr’s creative commons, searched for library (since I’m a writer and love reading) and found this picture:

IT seemed to give off a sort of emptiness, yet the light coming in the window and the colors in the room were contradicting it in a way. I made the background of the Powerpoint slide black so that the mood would be set even more, and then put the library picture in the middle. Next was coming up with a title. Well, maybe I should introduce the twist first. Since the remix card told me to introduce an unexpected character into the assignment, I decided, what’s more unexpected then to have a section of forwards in your intro written by loved ones who you have lost? It’s crazy unexpected, in my opinion. And it’s subtle enough that it’s not too telling about who the loved ones are, because that could be a little personal for this class, but it fit the assignment request.

Thus, I made the title something unique and different as well. We normally hear past, present, and future, in that order. I decided to reverse the order, starting with the future, then present, and then past. I figured that my actual autobiography would actually go in that order too, if I ever wrote it.

From there, I went to Pixlr, cropped the slide to make it a little more rectangular like an actual book cover, and then uploaded it to flickr. And the finished remixed product is such:

So, the remixed assignment was interesting and I really enjoyed doing it and seeing all the possibilities that I had a choice in doing. I do love my options. Oh, my remixed assignment prompt can be found here by the way! I hope other people give it a try. It really gave me a chance to think of an interesting way to add in an unusual character. I could have done this a number of ways, but I think this reflects a bit of my personality as well as something that I would actually do. Hope y’all enjoyed!