Milliway's Bar:

"a pan-fandom livejournal role playing game." Not quite sure if this is a distributive narrative either, but it's easy to fit almost anything into a category that doesn't seem to have distinct boundaries.

instead of exploding outwards to the world around, this "narrative" takes multiple worlds and implodes them into one...

Dear Shelley,

Pessimism is ubiquitous today. You have the ability to relieve some.

I probably will never be published how and where I want to.

Until I found out you might be willing to publish on me.

I want you to appropriate my skin, and I will appropriate your word, and we will make sweet literary love with needle and ink.

I may be a year to late and 20,000 requests behind, but my skin is young and aching to transcend the limited communication of dimple constellations.
I hope you'll consider me for a word.

Sincerely,
Devin Rapson
Minneapolis/Los Angeles

I was reading in "Writing Machines" about Phillip's art book that was created from Mallock's novel. In one part she writes (I'm looking for the quote now but I can't seem to find it) that Phillips said that if the novel sold well he could do 12 new pages and substitute them in the book so that the nth edition might not include any pieces from the original.

I really enjoyed reading "Kind of Blue." I thought the story itself was compelling and it was nice to have the reading broken up into little pieces (e-mails). E-mail is an interesting platform for a novel because it is virtually all dialogue. We only know what the characters themselves know (either they have written the e-mails or they have received them). Granted, we have acess to the e-mail boxes of many characters, so we have slightly more information, but all of the information we're reading was read by at least two characters.

Reading about the gadgets in the Diamond Age is like experiencing any of the other new mediums through which we've read/experienced literary forms in this class. I always have to understand the gadget by likening it to a form I already know and then branching off from there, in the same way that we can't seem to read new media without thinking of our experiences with the novel. The Primer is of course the most advanced hypertext novel that could exist. Don't know the definition of the word you're reading?

i have found these games really, really frustrating. it's not at all intuitive what you are allowed to do and what you are not allowed to do. it seems like there's a logic to the games that you have to get used to, and it's a very different from how i usually think. i can imagine this sort of game being really, really cool with a better parser, but these early versions make me want to kill the computer. actually a bunch of times i tried to kill random objects out of anger ("kill rainbow," "kill grating,") and the game made some smart-ass remarks. that was probably the most fun part so far.

As I read "As We May Think" I found myself writing a ton in the margins. Everything he predicted or described brought up in me some sort of modern technology. When he wrote about the department store and the ability to combine the information from the object, the seller, and the consumer into one I thought immediately of bar codes and credit cards. The personal library he thought of is our modern day laptop (or even a desktop computer). If you have a laptop and an internet connection you have in your posession much of the printed literature from the last half of the 20th century and on.

Hokay, so: I was just in the middle of posting a comment to gnugnu's last entry, but my internet decided to do what internet does best and mysteriously refreshed itself, thus deleting my comment. So I decided to post it as a blog entry instead, because it does in fact relate to the reading.

I think it's really interesting that so many of us chose to write about the interactivity of new media. That's just one aspect, but obviously one that fascinates us, for whatever reason. Speculate away.

I found an amazingly scintillating plot map of one of those "choose-your-own-adventure" books (and apparently I wasn't the only one to find it :) ) drawn out courtesy of Andrew Stern in a blog post on Grand Text Auto that definitely takes me back to the days of my youth: