Journal 16: October 6

I've been having a lot of fun in my WRA 210 class lately. Why? Well, besides the usual learning about how the Internet works, I'm learning about how it's not supposed to work. Considering most of the major lessons I've learned in life have come from doing the wrong thing, this is my kind of topic. So, what kind of poor tactics have you been learning, you ask. Well...

I'm no stranger to bad Web design. As a high school freshman way back in 1999, I entered the absurdist world of Yahoo's Geocities. What a nightmare that was. Of course, I was the most tech-savvy 14-year-old in the school (so I thought). It didn't matter that the Web site featured Smashmouth record reviews (oh man, I just fessed up to owning that), bullshit Superbowl predictions, and, uh, stolen animations of Hamsterdance. But, man, I had my own Web site!

What does this have to do with my current project in WRA 210? Well, this is my grand chance to out-do that atrocity (long-since removed by Geocities). What's worse than dancing hamster GIFs and Smashmouth? Well, this may be debatable, but one could take the stance that pop upstarts The Jonas Brothers offend just enough sensitive tastes to do this. Okay, they aren't as bad as Smashmouth, but I can't just re-make that old site, you know!

As a creative experience, this exercise was somewhat fulfilling. When I create in words, music, whatever, I like to assume other points of view than my own. I like to tell fictional stories, as embodied by the narrator. In this case, the narrator was a Jonas Brothers fangirl, roughly modeled after my sister's youth. As that psyche has, until now, remained entirely untapped, found this a very interesting creative experience. I think the, er, badness of the final product shines.