I recently stumbled across this rather interesting simulation game that really lets you run with your narrative to wherever you want it to. You are born somewhere in the world (based on statistical likelihood, like 1 in 5 times you play you'll be born in China), and from there, you age and make life decisions based on what is available to you in your country and social situation. I've been executed in Iraq, orphaned in Russia, had to go broke to get my middle aged kids to move out in India, risen to the rank of a judge in Malta, and died as a baby several times in Africa. You can also design your own character, which led to times like when I was a doctor in Denmark who forayed into modeling.

That was such dorky fun! I hate to admit it, but I totally had played half the games they talked about in the reading for today. I knew exactly what they were talking about when they were maligning poor April Ryan using a dragon scale and a twig to direct a river in The Longest Journey. And I had no idea that anyone besides my best friend and myself had heard of Titanic - which came out before the movie, thank you, I wasn't that dweeby. That, if anyone's looking for something to occupy their winter break, is a good, good game. It mostly makes sense, too, unlike some games. AND it has mul

I liked how in the First Person book there were opinions and responses aligned along the bottom of the pages to which they corresponded, but if they're trying so hard to make it like a hypertext in this way, why not just publish the book online? I'm starting to feel this way about a lot of the books we've been reading. They all talk about the hypertext as the medium of the future, blah blah blah, do so much to make their text seem as if we're experiencing it digitally - but they're all still on paper! Isn't that sort of undermining their point?

Futhermore, these books are aimed at people who already are immersed in this digital culture, so wouldn't the best way to snag them to read the book be to put it in the forum they already inhabit?

I keep coming back to Talan Memmot in my everyday life. Just last night, I was talking with someone about artistic pretension. What is the point of a piece if the only one who can understand it is the author? If there's a way to interpret it, regardless of the original intent, then fine, but if the reader is so alienated by the text that they feel no connection and no willingness to interpret, then did the author do his job? I guess it works in some cases - see Finnegan's Wake, which pissed me off to no end, but manages to be "Joyce's masterpiece." Maybe I'm just not the type of person wh

I had a fairly long conversation with another member of this class at Oktoberfest in Clark I courtyard today, and I realized probably other people in the class feel the way they do regarding this blog. They (the conversation-mate) treat each blog entry as an assignment, a mini essay to be handed in each week concerning the readings, that they have to sit down and forumlate beforehand. This is nervewracking, and it is in the forefront of their intentions that this blog is part of our grade. This helped clarify for me why so many of the blog postings are lengthy and sound a lot like an academic paper. Unfortunately, though, this person does not seem to view the blog as something "fun" to post on, due to the nature of things they feel they're supposed to post.

I didn't really understand the point of renaming the narrator of the story in "Writing Machines" Kaye. The author makes it fairly unambiguous that these are, indeed, her own experiences, so why is she hiding behind a pseudonym? What does this mean about her attitude towards her work and her own thought process, or even worse, to her life? She gets all offended when Michael Joyce and the other hypertext greats back away from the medium, but isn't that what she's doing herself in not using her real name in the story of her discovery of it (the medium)? While the book was good, this really bothered me.

This book was mentioned in the book "Writing Machines" - does anybody have a copy of it, or perhaps know if it's available in the library? It sounds absolutely fascinating, and yes, I totally Wikipedia'd it.

This is pretty unrelated, but I know someone in this class was involved with the Marx wiki (as well as Professor F, of course), and I was wondering if they could possibly point me in its direction? My 15 year old sister has a big paper to write on Marx and I told her I'd send her the link to it, but then realized I had no idea where to start.

I don't know what it is - maybe it's the much-beloved finale of Project Runway coming up, or maybe it's the article I read in the TSL about Survivor's new season, but I keep coming back to reality television somehow connecting with what we've been talking about. The rise of the two media at about the same time makes me think there HAS to be some sort of correlation, if not causation, then at least a similar niche being filled. I keep going in circles of logic regarding this, however. I posted something about this earlier, pointing out that webcams are kind of like reality tv, but someone saw some logic flaws in that....

A quick thought, as I don't have time for a long one, having a visitor for the week and all:
What's going to happen to the field of literary studies if all the nuances of the text, the allusions, the hidden metaphors, are all hyperlinked to a page that will explain exactly what the author meant there? What will WE write about?