Feedback Needed!!
So, for my main uni project this year, I’m creating a site based around a fictional story. Its jolly difficult to write in this style, knowing all the links have to work and the plot has to round off within a set number of options.
This, below, is the bare bones of my story. It won’t look like this in the end… hopefully, but will have a graphic interface, sounds and other interactive elements. You also won’t need to choose numbers, but hopefully will be able to navigate by clicking icons on the page etc.
For now, though, I need to know if the story works. Its like one of those ‘choose your own adventure’ stories from the 90s, but vastly simplified. I’ve read it too many times now to be able to tell if the sections all work, if there are dead ends, if it makes sense… so I thought I’d ask you, my esteemed cyber friends 
Any feedback you can offer would be really appreciated! Thanks in advance! (ps the links don’t actually work at the mo, you have to navigate by reading and scrolling to the correct number!)
1) One day, you notice a small gold tin high on a dusty shelf.
-If you want to pick it up, choose 4,
-If not, go to 2.
2) Next to the tin, near the back of the shelf, shrouded by dust and creeping cobwebs, you find an old bronze key.
- If you want to pick up the key, choose 3,
- If you ignore it and keep looking around, choose 16.
3) Remembering the warnings you were given about trying to leave, you hesitate.
-If you decide to try and escape anyway, choose 17,
-If you are too scared, choose 21.
4) The tin feels strangely heavy, and as you shake it, a strange snuffly clicking sound emanates from it.
-If you want to try and open the tin, go to 5,
-If you choose to put it back, go to 9.
5) The lid comes off, with a shower of silver sparks. Shocked, you drop the tin and what looks like an old, folded tarpaulin rolls out.
-If you want to see what it is, choose 6,
-If you think its best to try and put it back, choose 7.
6) As you touch it, the green object starts to unfurl, and you realise it is a creature, scaly with what look like wings and a long beak.
- If you are terrified and try to squash it back into the tin, go to 7,
- If you are intrigued, and want to explore further, choose 11.
7) You try and squash the green scaly creature back into its tin prison, but the physics don’t make any sense… how could something so large have emerged from such a small space?
-If you decide to try and hide from it, go to 8,
-If you decide to try a different tack, and watch it unfurl, choose 10.
8 Your attempts to hide are fruitless, as the shed is small and square and bare, to see what happens next, go to 10.
9) You put the tin back on the high shelf and sit down, dejectedly. Time passes…
-If curiosity gets the better of you, and you decide to look inside, choose 5,
-If not, choose 21.
10) As you watch, the creature splutters shivers and slowly unfurls a pair of magnificent wings. It blinks at you, confused.
-If you’d like to know his name, choose 12,
-If you don’t care for such trivialities, choose 11.
11) You realise it is some form of dinosaur, and stare at it in numb disbelief.
-If your understanding of reality can expand to include such unforeseen events, choose 12,
-If not, go to 21.
12) The creature is a pterosaur, a winged creature from the cretaceous period. It blinks affectionately at you, and you decide to nickname it Hugo.
Suddenly, you have a great idea…maybe Hugo can help you escape from captivity!
-If you think it will work, choose 13,
-If not, and you decide this is all a rather unfortunate trick played on you
by your imagination, choose 15.
13) Patting Hugo on the top of his head, you look around at your options for escape. Considering your options, you feel worried that the noise it would make would draw attention to your hiding place, but it seems to be the only option.
-to direct Hugo to fly at the window, choose 21,
-to direct Hugo to fly at the door, choose 14.
14) There is a huge crash, and Hugo crumples to the floor, dazed. There is, however, a shard of light illuminating the dank shed – Huzzah!
-If you decide the crash will have attracted too much attention, and that
it would be best to stay put for the time being, choose 15,
-If you decide to try and make an escape now, choose 18.
15) Glumly, you sit on the splintered wooden floor eating a mouldy sandwich, negative thoughts about the seeming hopelessness of your situation flood your mind.
-If you decide to give up, choose 21,
-If you think it is worth searching for another way out, choose 16.
16) High on the wall, above the shelf, you notice a small keypad. There are two codes scratched into the wood, beside it, as well as two small pictures – a skull and crossbones, and a key… it seems to suggest that one code will bring freedom and one disaster, which will you choose?
-If you decide to try the first code, go to 21,
-If you go for the second code, go to 18.
17) You put the tarnished, heavy key into the door and try to turn it. It makes a lot of noise, and your heart begins to beat faster, perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea.
-To try the key again, choose 18,
-To put the key back and reassess your options, go to 16.
18) With a loud creaking and splintering sound, the door opens slowly. You see out into a dark garden with high brick walls, it looks deserted, but you can’t be sure.
-To make a run for it, choose 19,
-To close the door again and wait for daylight, choose 21.
19) You start running, and hear someone calling your name, plaintively, from behind. You wonder if they need help.
-If you look behind to see who it is, go to 21,
-If you keep running, go to 20.
20) Leaping over a broken piece of wall, you escape from the garden and run into the night, free of your pursuers. Well done!!
21) Sadly, your decision means the end of your story this time, the bad guys win this one! Click to restart and try again.
Mostly Reading…
- Meta-Interpretation and Hypertext Fiction: A Critical Response.
- Hyperread: Children’s Literature, CD-Roms, and the New Literacy.
- Literature in Context: Hypertext and Teaching.
- Signal to Noise: Designing a Digital Edition of The Taming of a Shrew (1594).
- Standing in Rich Place: Electrifying the Multiple-Text Edition Or, Every Text is Multiple.
- The Imaginary Solution.
- Radical Change: Digital Age Literature & Learning.
- ‘Prehistoric Digital Poetry’ and ‘Electronic Literature’ Compared.
- In the Late Age of Print.
- Graphic Design in the Digital Era: The Rhetoric of Hypertext.
Essay planning. Woop and sigh all at the same time. Mixed in with a lot of marvelling at Medieval Literature and avoiding creating websites.
My favourite quote so far is from Virginia Woolf:
“The most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbling and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.” (Orlando)
Illustrative times…
Life is fun at the moment. After a minor ‘freak out’ last week about how much uni work I have to do, things seem to have settled down a bit over the weekend and I’ve been enjoying a productive Monday.
I’ve handed in my first bit of work for the year… a 500 word commentary on a Virginia Woolf text. It was a challenge, mainly because I found sticking within the word limit tricky. I can write 500 words on a shopping list or just doodling, so being concise and brief is always a challenge. I’m definitely in the ‘why use one word when sixteen will do’ camp!! Its not due in till Thursday so I’m feeling a bit smug to have handed it in six days early. (Mainly due to aforementioned freak-out).
This morning I’ve been working on my animation for one of my art modules. I’ve never found drawing particularly pleasurable. It feels like I slept through, or didn’t attend most of my school art lessons, (which makes me sad as I’d like to have given it more of a go). I’ve always believed that I can’t draw, so when the module brief this year talked about drawing a cartoon, I started to worry!! One thing I’ve learnt this week, in the process of attempting to draw out some of the backgrounds etc, is that, I’m not particularly good at drawing things just out of my head… I find it hard to visualise exactly how they would look, and things like perspective go out of the window. If I have an image before me, or even on the screen that I can look at and have as a guide, then its fine and I’m actually not too terrible. I actually enjoyed drawing the scenes.
This is my coffee machine
We’re supposed to be animating a joke, and I struggled with this at first, not finding jokes particularly funny. I decided to do a funny situation, however, and at first was going to do a witty repost on my friends’ hapless guide dog and his encounter with a frozen lake. I found it very funny at the time, but my tutor thought that if something like that really happened, it wouldn’t be funny at all (oooops… what does this say about me!). My latest effort involves a pterodactyl that comes alive in a museum, and attempts to fit in to normal life as a commuter in London. I’m not wholly confident about it, but I’m definitely having fun having a go and learning new skills.
Forking Paths et al.
My mind has been a bit a bit fried today reading up on quotes etc for some of the digital media work I’m doing. My favourites were two from Charles Baudelaire:
”Everything for me becomes allegory”
“Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.”
As well as my delving into Baudelaire’s opium induced ramblings, I find myself particularly inspired by some theory work we’ve been looking at, concerning fractured narratives and interactivity. (Are websites more interactive than books, for example). This afternoon we explored a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, ostensibly about a WW1 spy fighting to pass on a piece of vital information. The Garden of Forking Paths . It’s similar to a text I read in the summer, ‘If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller’ by Calvino.
The text is so amazing because it highlights the notion that, in a normal narrative, we expect a linear beginning, middle and end. Unlike a video game, which could be described as having a greater permeatational complexity, in a book we engage with a characters choice, and follow the trajectory of the consequences of it. Borges says, “in all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others.”
In ‘The Garden’, however, “the character chooses simulatanously all of them, he creates, thereby, ‘several futures’, several times, which themselves proliferate and fork.” This creates, “an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying, web of divegent, convergent and parrallel times.”
I love the thought that a book could try to take on some of the complex layering of choice and possibility and outcome. I love the intertextuality – a story about a story, and it makes me think deeply about my own life and choices. I love it because this is the thin place where my seemingly divergent combined honours topics meet, as Borges work is heralded as being prophetic of networks like the World Wide Web, and of mediums such as hypertext.
I have a great worksheet to keep me busy in my thinking time this week. It asks questions such as:
- What are the respective capabilities of print and web for forking in times and space, representing the ‘several futures’ described by Borges.
- What is the Garden? What are the forking paths?
Next week’s lecture is called ‘A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems’, and from what I can make out, it refers to a set of ten sonnets by a French poet, Raymond Queneau. He wrote these so that each line was on a seperate strip, and could therefore be read in any order, combined in any way. This creates 100,000,000,000,000 poems, and it would take 200,000,000 years to read them all, even reading for twenty-four hours a day. Something tells me I’m going to love learning about those, too!
*edit – found a cool online version of the sonnets, here: http://www.bevrowe.info/Queneau/QueneauRandom_v4.html :-)
I am inspired…
Busy-ness
This week is looking like a manic one, so I’m taking a breather before it starts properly. It feels a bit like the last two weeks of uni etc have been a whirlwind, and I’d quite like a day of nothingness now. I knew that would happen.
Last weekend I went up to London to see the lovely Mumford & Sons:
We hobnobbed with the stars afterwards, well, there weren’t that many stars, but it was still fun. After-show parties really aren’t that showbiz though, and we were tired. A highlight of the evening had to be stopping off at Old Kent Road Asda/Mcdonalds at 1.30am… scary times. I loved the concert though, and it was fun to be with friends.
This week is a brief hiatus before heading to the Midlands this weekend. I’m very excited to be jumping feet first back into some SA stuff, after what feels like an age. It’ll be good to be in and around old stomping grounds too.
I have much uni work to do, I’ve just about scribbled out a rough plan for my website, and am now sourcing Marx and Engels quotes, Good times. I’m loving English too, though its hard when I don’t know what nouns are, let alone accusitive and nominative etc…
Work is great, we’ve started to get lovely Christmas items in now:
So cute!!
In two weeks time we’re off to pray in Paris too!!
CSS Headaches
I am trying to teach myself CSS this summer and, it’s jolly hard. We were meant to have learnt it in seminars this year, and some people get it (or maybe they ‘got’ it before we even started), but I am finding myself getting a bit lost between elements, properties, attributes and tags. I’ve also been on the look out for a book that makes it all beautifully simple, but alas, I can’t seem to find one.
I understand that a CSS document tells the browser how a html page should look – for example properties such as position, sizing, colour and font.
I also think that I understand that, on a web page which has a number of tables (for example), if you wanted all the tables to be formatted the same, you’d use a class. For individual formatting within a particular table though, you’d use an id.
I’ve used ‘divs’ for content in the websites I’ve created up to now, but have stuck with AP ones before now (they don’t move around – so they’re simple to use but kinda clunky and inflexible). The div element is used to define sections in a html doc. CSS means these elements can be formatted independently. I get that much.
Today I followed a youtube tutorial and typed in all the code manually and saved the CSS stylesheet, it actually worked, but its a long way round of doing it, and all that showed me how to do was to change the font colours and sizes etc. I feel like I’m missing a big chunk of something obvious. (Also, the tutorial was narrated by a 13 year old, which made me feel a little digitally-illiterate).
I have a book, but its kinda jargon-y… what I most need to work out is how to format divs using CSS, hmm… maybe I should read the whole book before worrying that I don’t understand it. It’s just frustrating because I’m sure it’s really obvious, and I feel a bit like I’m going two sides round a triangle. I’m just waiting for that eureka moment!
