My apologies it’s a bit late, Prof. Ball!

In this experiment, I was looking to emphasize the banality of the story by highlighting how humorous it can be. I was inspired by Matt Madden’s “Brought to You by…” interpretation of the “boring” story in 99 Ways to Tell a Story. He took a bunch of “ads” and placed them together in comic form to tell the original story in a different way. I thought it was an ironically comedic commentary of just how simple the story is to the point that you could just take ads and combine them to tell the same story. The commercialness of the ad was striking. I wanted to do a similar iteration with my own twist, and that is why I chose to represent my story through a series of memes. Each “panel” or meme, has a hip-hop/rap reference as well to emphasize the ironic humor within the banal story. I also wanted to poke fun at the #firstworldproblems nature of the original story by portraying it through exaggerated ways of modern cultural/social expression (memes and hip-hop lyrics).

You can find my experiment here: http://www.scrollkit.com/s/JkGXew4

Contextual clues arguably play one of the most important roles in human understanding.
In telling a story from another genre, the context of the story is displaced.  Subsequently, our clues on what to feel, how to interpret, and so forth are likewise altered. Using the entirely boring narrative of waiting for the laundry machine, we can magnify the basic emotions of the story — indecision that comes from waiting — through a genre shift. Explaining the same narrative in the form of a man on his wedding day conveys the universality of a certain set of emotions that according to context scale up and scale down.
…So what I’m trying to say is that if you can’t decide whether to go back home or stay to wait for your laundry, you’ll probably end up wondering whether or not to bolt or stay at the altar…

It’s the same feeling…right?

Following our first attempts at adaptation, we’ll try our hands at getting creatively constrained by this (decidedly banal) template. Hat tip (and apologies) to Matt Madden, who will visit our class on Thursday. His 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style is the model for our own efforts here.

Context: apparently laundry machines text you when they’re done at Princeton. I’ve been told this scenario is implausible, because the machines never make mistexts.