The anticipation to actually view the story Afternoon, more than what we saw in class, had me with greater expectations in the beginning. After I opened up the file, I started flipping through the actual story. In terms of the style, I didn’t see many physical attributes that played up to Hegirascope’s entertainment value. I was relatively bored while reading and I actually think some color would have helped me to read the text. It seemed bland and it made me wonder if pictures or other aspects could have enhanced the story. Maybe Joyce’s intention was to have the reader rely solely on their imagination like a physical novel. In relation to the necessity to click, hit enter or select ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to continue, there are obviously less options, but there is more cohesiveness then Hegirascope. While there is some cohesion, because there are obvious connections to characters and themes, the story still displays much ambiguity across the paths of options. In Afternoon there is only one question that I noticed in the entire story and that was on the first page. The rest of the story heavily depended on the answer to “Do you want to hear about it?” If you click ‘yes’ it leads you on and eventually no matter how you chose to move forward, it always takes you to the same following page. The title bar for that page would say ‘yes 1,’ ‘yes 2,’ etc. no matter if you just hit enter or selected no. So, again, in relation to Hegirascope it gives you a significantly lower number of options, which allows it to be less confusing. If the reader selects ‘no’ for the first question then there is a more complicated stream of pages. Rather than majority of them being ‘no’ titles, there are other pages that contribute. For instance, on the third or fourth page, it says ‘yesterday 2.’ However, there still occurs the issue that you can’t really change the path once it’s started, because it will continue to the following page no matter what is pressed or clicked. Another aspect I noticed was the arbitrary text space next to the ‘Y’ and ‘N’ buttons. I tried to use them, but nothing really seemed to come out of it.
As far as the story context is concerned, I only tried to follow four or five pages to try and simplify a small part. I chose to not ‘hear about it’ or winter and then I just pushed enter to see where it would take me. I followed roughly the same techniques as before and found that when you go back to the previous page and hit enter again, sometimes it would take you to a different page. This was one way I found it to be like Hegirascope, but I think that was the only part in the story it did that. These five pages talk about seeing a son dying, someone driving a Japanese truck and running into beasts like raccoons, and also there was a random page with someone asking the narrator about sleeping with his ex-wife. The story itself seems like it carries the same type of characters and themes, but overall it is hard to tell where or if it ends.