I played around with the story "Afternoon"--perhaps it should be underlined since it seems like a long story instead of short-- and though it was amusing at the beginning, after awhile it got not only confusing but annoying. When I started pressing return, and or clicking on words, and then going back to the previous page, I realized that some of the clicking--though either clicking of words, or clicking the return key-- still led to the same page. After doing this, and getting over it, I realized that I clicked on the tiger section, and when I was through with it I was taken back to the beginning where I had to choose between the lady and the tiger once more. Going in circles, indeed I was, but why? Another thing that kept on occurring, well, twice, was that one line that said something about seeing one's son dead, that line popped twice, and I wasn't even playing with the return button then. The structure of the story was confusing for me. At some point, the story of what I can only believe to be a woman seemed more plausible if it were Wert's, but then it wasn't so, it was a new woman whose name I did not know, and she referred to Wert and Lolly. CHAOS! If indeed this story has an ending, I would not be able to tell it. I can only say that it did not satisfy me in the least. I'd rather keep on reading regular old books. Especially the ones that are extremely old, and when you open them it feels like they will die as you touch the page to flip it. Maybe I am just biased toward books, I have no real inkling on this one.
A Hypertext Nightmare?
By Classic Kid - Posted on 14 February 2007 - 12:03am.
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What troubled me was the form of the links. We're used to the classic blue underline, or at least some indication of which words "yield." Joyce provides no such indication. To make things worse, when you click on a word that doesn't yield, it advances you to the next page as if you pressed enter, so you never know when you have changed storylines. This frusterated me -- I like to know where in a story I am. This is not a medium for such people.
Given that it is relatively ancient technology, it makes sense that we are a little unused to the program. It's even worse for a PC user like me.
As you guys mentioned before, it was a little confusing as you delved further in because it had a lot of depth issues. There was a maximum of three paragraphs on each page, and those paragraphs were not even sufficiently long enough to be considered paragraphs.
The lack of depth creates the sense of fragmentation inherent in hypertext but like the Oulipo, it doesnt make it good.
Something else that caught my mind was the adult dialogue. Actually, given the way it was written, it sounded very immature. So many cuss words. When I was reading it, I was like, "No wonder non one found this useful."
It is true that they can make a kid's story from the words but given what they showed me yesterday, they better not recycle their old grammar books.