Journalism: Thursday, Period 4, Final

[trustshisbarber.livejournal.com]

"It's your final, you know what you're doing. If you don't know what you're doing, I have something picked out just for you. Your deadline is at the end of the class period, write on whatever subject you chose. Claire, you chose photography. Give me your photos and go on your next photo assignment: Students taking their finals. And look at this, we have a room full of people for you to pester with a camera!" Jonah grinned.

"This is your final lesson in this class. When you're on a tight deadline there are going to be all kinds of distractions. Maybe it's your family, maybe you're writing on a train, maybe it's somebody trying to kill you because they didn't like what you wrote, maybe it's a menace who enjoys trying to annoy you for no good reason! In this case it's a photographer taking pictures of you. (Claire, use flash.) Figure out how to deal with it and get to work!"

[OOC: Remember, if I get a couple people who actually write their articles, I'll be putting together a Journalism Class Newspaper. Handwaving is absolutely acceptable, but please give me a headline and the topic of your article.

A couple students have permission to try to disrupt the other students who are working so hard. Beware!]

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Re: Write Your Article [Finals]

[robinthefrog.livejournal.com]

Gremlins: They Bite Because They Care

Fandom Island, with it's diverse, unique, innovative and resourceful population is a wild card in almost any situation. It is unpredictable, at times chaotic, and this is represented best of all by it's indigenous population.

When newcomers arrive on our shores they are given warnings to boggle the mind. Time travel, aliens, random acts of weirdness and of course, kids. But the most prevalent warning they are given is: “Watch out for the Gremlins”.

Gremlins, are small, green, elusive creatures that inhabit the dark, out of the way corners of Fandom. One might go over a year and never see one. But hardly a month goes by that they don't make their presence known. A Gremlin's saliva contains a hallucinatory agent that causes those bitten by a Gremlin to believe they are someone else. Just who or what they think they are varies widely. But the overall effect is that the subject exhibits behavior wildly different than their usual. And are almost always very, very embarrassed by it. The rest of the population is mostly amused.

But who are these Gremlins? Where do they come from? Why do they keep biting us? I spent an evening with the Gremlins in hopes of learning some of the answers.

The following are Robin's interpretations of what the Gremlins allowed him to learn, which may or not be true and should in no way be taken as any kind of final word on the subject.

The hallucinatory effects of the Gremlin's bite was originally a defensive trait, such as the poison sacks on a toad. If a Gremlin found itself cornered by a larger predator, a single bite could make said predator believe it was a mouse, or a fish, allowing the Gremlin to escape.

As Gremlins and their culture evolved however, the effects of their bites became important to their society. They were representatives of entropy, the ever changing world. When other intelligent species entered their environment, the Gremlins noticed that many of them were too stagnant in their thinking. Or simply took themselves too seriously. They saw it as their duty to open these people's eyes to other ways of thinking, other possibilities. And to show them just how much fun it could be to let loose and be someone, or something else for a while.

Or simply take them down a peg.

Oh they also bite people because it's fun.